The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [6]
TO SCIENTISTS, from the very first, the 1840s sang of achievement—the spreading success of the telegraph, the development of surgical anesthesia, the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the HMS Beagle. From that perspective, Emmanuel Swedenborg was an anachronism, dead since 1772, and a failure, since he was in fact a scientist turned seer.
Born in Stockholm in 1688, the son of a Lutheran bishop, Swedenborg had trained as an engineer with a specialty in metals. As a student, he’d traveled to England in his early twenties to learn from such renowned scientists as Isaac Newton and astronomer Edmund Halley. By 1744 he was comfortably set as an administrator of mining ventures for the Swedish government.
That year, though, while traveling on business, Swedenborg experienced a life-altering vision. He was relaxing at the tavern of his London hotel when, he said, a mist formed before his eyes and then separated into a silvery mass of snakes. As the reptiles coiled around the floor, he caught the outline of a man cloaked by shadows in the corner of the room. The following night, when he returned to the tavern, the mist and the snakes again swathed the room. The figure stepped out of the corner, Swedenborg said, and identified himself as the Lord God. The Swedish scientist left London with a new mission—to explain the real meaning of the Scriptures to the world. God would tell him what to write and give him the gift of far sight.
Swedenborg abandoned his scientific career. He became a wraith of a man with a thin, sharply lined face and sunken eyes. He lived on sugared coffee and cakes, which he believed aided a newly fragile digestion. He spent hours in a trancelike state, dream-writing his books on heaven and hell, the spirit world that inhabited our planet and others. For the rest of his life, he spread his version of the gospel, invoking the spirits, which were hidden to all else, by demonstrating his newfound powers.
In his most famous demonstration—investigated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant—Swedenborg disrupted a garden party by suddenly announcing a firestorm in Stockholm, some three hundred miles away. Staring at a clear evening sky, Swedenborg described the fire’s progress, street by street and building by building, to the disbelieving company. Two days later, a messenger from Stockholm confirmed every detail. Kant concluded that the case showed “beyond all possibility of doubt” that Swedenborg did indeed possess an extraordinary visionary gift.
There were other tales, rumors of mysterious insights into lost letters, revelations about dead relatives. But Swedenborg didn’t specialize in showy clairvoyance. His major teaching, the one that would so catch the imagination of Henry James Sr., was called a “theory of correspondence.” It proposed a tangible connection between the material life of this world and the spirit world, unseen cords that bound inhabitants on both planes together.
Life here, Swedenborg said, is paralleled there, so that our decisions can influence spirits, their desires influence ours. Everything we touch resonates in that alternate world. Every action is an interaction with those on the other side. To be aware of that connection with all God’s other realms, people needed only to let go their earthbound egos. Self-love, self-hate, self-reneciion—all of that creates a kind of blindness, an opaque wall of self through which we cannot see. And evil spirits can encourage that, Swedenborg said. They can prod us into looking obsessively inward instead of out into the Lord God’s miraculous world. There is no real sin in this universe, except for perhaps a willful refusal to see the wonders spread before us.
To his followers, science offered nothing to equal Swedenborg’s visionary powers—or his ability to offer comfort in difficult times. Not long after his death from a stroke, English adherents established the New Church, dedicated to Swedenborgian theology. American followers