Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) is the most unusual case in the entire pre-1906 series. Born as the son of a Lutheran bishop in Stockholm, he had a regular scientific career until the age of 56 – as Royal Swedish mining counsellor, anatomist, mathematician and cosmologist – and published around twenty scientific volumes that were taken seriously in the European academies. In 1744, in London, he had a series of visions, after which he claimed to be in regular contact with the "spiritual world". For the following 27 years he documented this experience in over 30 partly enormous Latin folios – and in the same period produced three publicly verifiable incidents which still today make him one of the best-documented figures in the pre-spiritualism history. Immanuel Kant had the first of these incidents personally investigated and wrote his own book about Swedenborg; more in our follow-up article on Kant and the "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer".
The first half: Swedish natural scientist (1688–1744)
Emanuel Swedberg (the family name until the elevation to the nobility in 1719) was born on 29 January 1688 in Stockholm. His father Jesper Swedberg was court preacher of Charles XII, later Bishop of Skara and one of the most prominent Lutheran theologians of Sweden. Emanuel studied at Uppsala (1699–1709) philosophy, mathematics and classical languages, then went on a five-year study tour through England, Holland, France and Germany, where he met the leading scientists and mathematicians of his time – including Edmond Halley, John Flamsteed and Isaac Newton (whom he did not meet personally in London but whose works he studied thoroughly).
Back in Sweden he made a career in the Royal Board of Mines, one of the most important administrative bodies of the then Swedish state. From 1716 he was assessor extraordinarius, from 1724 full mining counsellor – a position with substantial political power in the most important industry of Sweden (iron and copper mining). He held this position for three decades, voluntarily resigning only in 1747.
Alongside his professional life, Swedenborg published substantial scientific works. The most important:
- Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (1734, three folio volumes): standard work on European iron and copper mining. Includes a cosmological outline with an early nebular hypothesis (long before Kant and Laplace).
- Oeconomia Regni Animalis (1740–1741) and Regnum Animale (1744–1745): large-scale anatomical works that, among other things, try empirically to locate the seat of the soul. Swedenborg postulated functions that modern brain research confirmed only much later – the importance of the cerebral cortex for consciousness, the role of the corpus callosum, the function of cerebral localisation. Several modern neuroscientists (Charles Sherrington, Wilder Penfield) have explicitly acknowledged Swedenborg's anatomical groundwork.
- Further works on algebra, on the construction of a flying machine (sketch 1714), on acoustics and astronomy.
In 1719 the family was elevated to the Swedish nobility by Queen Ulrika Eleonora; Swedberg became Swedenborg. With that Emanuel also became a member of the Swedish noble estate council and was politically active in the Swedish Diet – until his death.
The turning point: Easter 1744 in London
In the spring of 1744 Swedenborg was on a research trip in London. He kept a private journal, later known as the Drömboken (Dream Book), which was published only posthumously. In this journal he documented a series of unusually intense dreams and visions, the climax of which was an appearance described as a vision of Christ on the night of Easter 1744. In the following days Swedenborg described a sense of "calling": he was destined to disclose the true meaning of the biblical writings and to convey reports from the spiritual world.
Within the next two years he discontinued his scientific publishing activity. In the ongoing printing of Regnum Animale (volume 2 appeared in 1745) he broke off the anatomical work; the additional volume planned for 1747 was no longer written. In 1747 he resigned from his mining counsellor's position, but continued to receive half his pension – with explicit approval by the Swedish crown, which is remarkable: his theological work was at no point actively suppressed by any organ of the Swedish state but was structurally accepted.
The theological work (1747–1771)
What emerged between 1747 and his death in 1772 is one of the most unusual intellectual–historical bodies of work of the 18th century. Swedenborg wrote in Latin (still the international scholarly language at the time), published mainly in the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and in London, and financed most of his volumes out of his own pocket. The most important:
- Arcana Coelestia ("Heavenly Secrets"), eight folio volumes, 1749–1756: a complete spiritual–allegorical exegesis of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, interspersed with reports about the world of angels and spirits.
- De Caelo et Inferno ("Heaven and Hell"), 1758: the most widely distributed and still most read of his works; a systematic, almost handbook-style description of the afterlife.
- Several shorter works in the same period, including The Last Judgement (1758), Apocalypsis Revelata (1766) and the late work Vera Christiana Religio (1771).
The tone is striking. Swedenborg's afterlife descriptions are not ecstatic, but written in the manner of an experienced mining counsellor: enumerations, classifications, strata of the heavenly and infernal spheres, social structures, forms of association, occupations of the angels. He claims to have spoken in past years with numerous historically known deceased persons – including Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and an unnamed "Voltaire". Some of these passages are, by today's standards, unintentionally comic. But the overall work is methodologically consistent, systematically structured and in that consistency unparalleled.
Three documented incidents
What historically separates Swedenborg from purely theological-mystical figures are three incidents confirmed by contemporary witnesses and independently verifiable.
1. The Stockholm fire, 19 July 1759
On Sunday afternoon, 19 July 1759, Swedenborg was at a dinner party at the merchant William Castel's in Gothenburg – about 400 kilometres as the crow flies from Stockholm. Between six and seven in the evening he left the company, came back pale and agitated and announced that a great fire had broken out in Stockholm, in the Södermalm district. He described the progress of the fire, the addresses of the houses that would burn down, and named a friend's house as already destroyed. Around eight in the evening he then said that the fire had come to a standstill, three houses away from his own home.
These statements were immediately written down by the guests. On Monday they were presented to the Governor of Gothenburg, who likewise recorded them. Only on Tuesday did the first courier from Stockholm arrive with news of the fire: it had raged on Sunday evening, broken out in Södermalm and come to a standstill around eight in the evening three houses away from Swedenborg's home. All Swedenborg's detail statements from Sunday matched exactly.
The main source of this reporting is Immanuel Kant's letter to Charlotte von Knobloch of 10 August 1763, in which Kant explicitly mentions that he had "sent an English merchant" to Stockholm to verify the facts on site – and that he had returned with the confirmation that all the details had occurred exactly as the Gothenburg witnesses had recorded them. More on Kant's investigation in the follow-up article.
2. Queen Louisa Ulrika and the secret of the deceased brother, 1761
Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden – sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia and wife of King Adolf Frederick – asked Swedenborg in October 1761 for audiences at court in Stockholm. She wanted to test whether his claim of being able to speak with the deceased was true. Concretely, she asked him to convey a message to her brother, Prince Augustus William of Prussia, who had died the year before (in June 1758).
Swedenborg returned a few days later, spoke alone with the queen and repeated to her a statement which – according to all surviving accounts – visibly shook the queen. She is said to have turned pale and said: "No one but my brother could have known that." What exactly Swedenborg said to her remained private; she never made the content public during her lifetime. The incident is documented through several contemporary court witnesses, including Count Höpken, a confidant of the queen. Frederick the Great himself later mentioned the report mockingly in correspondence with his sister – but did not dispute the fact that the queen had ever received Swedenborg.
3. Madame de Marteville and the lost receipt, 1761
In the same year the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm, Lodewijk de Marteville, died. A few months after his death his widow received a demand to pay for a valuable silver service. She was certain that her husband had already settled the bill in his lifetime – but could not find the receipt. She asked Swedenborg to ask her deceased husband.
Swedenborg returned a few days later and told her that her husband had said to him the receipt was in a secret drawer of a particular writing bureau, in a place that only he had known. Madame de Marteville went with Swedenborg to the piece of furniture; after pressing a hidden mechanism, a drawer opened in which the receipt lay – together with a hairpin whose existence too only her husband had known. The incident is repeatedly attested through correspondence around the de Marteville family and through contemporary accounts.
How Swedenborg describes his own experience
Unlike later spiritualist practitioners, Swedenborg describes his perception of the "spiritual world" not as trance, not as a medium's setting in the sense of 19th-century séances, and not as occasional vision. He claims a permanent double perception: he is at the same time present in his normal waking body, can transact mining-counsellor business and speak in the noble estate chamber of the Diet – and in parallel sees the spiritual world around him. This doubling, after 1744, never fully disappears. That such a continuous double perception exists as a form of mediumistic capacity is also reported by many present-day mediums – Swedenborg is no special case here, but one of the earliest well-documented accounts.
Influence and reception
Swedenborg died on 29 March 1772 in London, eighty-four years old. His effect over the following two hundred and fifty years is enormous and broad:
- Allan Kardec (1804–1869), the codifier of French Spiritism, explicitly cited Swedenborg in Le Livre des Esprits (1857).
- The American Transcendentalists – Ralph Waldo Emerson (with the essay Swedenborg, or the Mystic in Representative Men 1850) and Henry James Sr. – named him as a central inspiration.
- William Blake (1757–1827) read Swedenborg intensively as a young man and criticised him later in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) – but the criticism itself was not intelligible without Swedenborg.
- The Society for Psychical Research in London (founded 1882) treated Swedenborg in its first volumes extensively as a historical precursor case; in particular William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) discussed Swedenborg as an example of a "healthy-minded mystic".
- The New Church (also Swedenborgian Church), a separate religious tradition, emerged at the end of the 18th century in London and exists to this day with congregations in the US, the UK, Scandinavia and the German-speaking world.
The most unusual point of the reception is the serious philosophical engagement. The most important book on Swedenborg in the 18th century is not written by a disciple but by the man who, at that very time, would become the greatest philosophical authority in Europe: Immanuel Kant. That is the point at which our follow-up article on Kant and the "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" begins.
What remains – source picture and research today
The fullest German-language academic treatment of Swedenborg has been provided by Friedemann Stengel (University of Halle-Wittenberg) in his standard work Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Mohr Siebeck 2011) – with extensive discussion of the three incidents, the source picture and the Kant reception. In English the critical biographies by Lars Bergquist (Swedenborg's Secret, Swedenborg Society 2005) and Inge Jonsson (Visionary Scientist, Swedenborg Foundation 1999) are the main works.
Swedenborg's own writings are today largely available online in modern English translations (Swedenborg Foundation, New Century Edition). His diary Drömboken has been edited in Swedish since 1859; German and English translations followed. The correspondence too – including Kant's Knobloch letter – has been critically edited several times.
What remains is a figure that presents a problem for every mainstream naturalist model of explanation: a productive, academically acknowledged natural scientist who at the age of 56 enters a perceptual state that he maintains for 27 years until his death, in this period writes a systematic theological work, and produces at least three externally verifiable precognitive or mediumistic incidents.
Sources: Friedemann Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011 (the German-language standard work). Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg's Secret, Swedenborg Society, London 2005. Inge Jonsson, Visionary Scientist: The Effects of Science and Philosophy on Swedenborg's Cosmology, Swedenborg Foundation, West Chester PA 1999. Immanuel Kant, letter to Charlotte von Knobloch, 10 August 1763 (Akademie-Ausgabe vol. 10, pp. 43–48). Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia, 8 vols., Amsterdam/London 1749–1756; De Caelo et Inferno, London 1758; Drömboken, edited posthumously 1859. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans 1902. Robert Hindmarsh, Rise and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church in England, America, and Other Parts, London 1861 (main source for the Queen and Marteville incidents).