 This is a film about Emmanuel Swedenborg, Messiah to some, Madmen to others, the story of kings and queens, angels and devils, science and religion, heaven and hell. Swedenborg spent the first 55 years of his life as a polymath scientist, a man who excelled at any discipline in which he turned his hand. But, at the age of 55, Swedenborg turned his back on all he had achieved. He claimed he was visited by God, who charged him with a task of explaining the spiritual content of the scriptures to mankind. He would sleep for three or four days at a time in self-induced states of his negotiation, lucid dreaming, during which he would traverse the spirit world, visiting heaven and hell, conversing with angels and devils. Swedenborg outlined the new moral consciousness, a brand of esoteric Christianity that, through the practical wisdom of its message, earned him the title, the Buddha of the North. His vision for a heaven on earth sufficiently stirred the poet William Blake to write the words that became the well-known hymn, Jerusalem. Emmanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688 as Emmanuel's Swedenborg, the young Emmanuel displayed signs of genius, constantly amazing his tutor and parents with his insights far beyond his years. Even as a very young man he showed his intelligence and his fantastic faculty of learning. He had a direct education from his learned father, who was a bishop. He was taught Latin, as people were at that time, already when he was about seven, eight years old. Language studies took a great part. The father also taught him Greek and Hebrew. So things which are both of enormous importance for him during his quotation mark religious period. But Swedenborg was a highly ambitious young man, as he wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law Benzellius. In every generation there are certainly those who follow the beaten track, sticking with what is old. But in a whole century perhaps six to ten come up with new things founded on sound reasons. In 1714 he sketched the design of a flying machine that was, in effect, the first published paper on aviation. Although he was aware it would not fly, Swedenborg's design is nevertheless widely acknowledged as an important stage in the evolution of the aeroplane. His other inventions include a prototype for a hovercraft, a submarine, a machine gun, an air pump for mines and even a self-playing piano. As well as his numerous scientific works, Swedenborg also had an active political career after his ennoblement when his name changed from Svedberg to Swedenborg. Here at the House of Nobles and Stockholm he contributed on a wide variety of topics including fiscal reform, finance, international trade and the development of the mining industry. Swedenborg's scientific aptitude was not limited to engineering and design. He had papers, essays or entire volumes published in the fields of chemistry, geology, metallurgy, crystallography, cosmology, biology, physiology and zoology. Although Swedenborg's knowledge of human anatomy was extensive, he didn't actually perform dissections himself. He would have come to witness them in theatres such as this one in the Gustavianen in Uppsala. Later in his career Swedenborg would put this knowledge to good use when he took up the battle from the French philosopher Descartes and began his quest to find the seat of the soul of the human body. And now it was the soul in man and mankind and its role. Where is the soul? Can we anatomically find out how the soul works in our brain, for example? He stayed in Italy and studied that question and the result was a very heavy book on the cerebrum, on the brain. This is something that people at the time thought they could find somewhere in the body. Descartes famously believed the soul was in the pineal gland which is this bit that the Hindus knew about quite a bit earlier than Descartes because they talked about the third eye. In Swedenborg I don't think he knew quite about that in that sense but he was following Descartes' lead in the notion that the soul somehow resided in the pineal gland. Strangely enough the pineal gland is important for other reasons too because it produces melatonin which is something that's involved in the production of serotonin which is one of the neural transmitters. So it's a very important gland that is key to how consciousness operates. So I think you could see Swedenborg as someone like perhaps Goethe a little bit later on as someone who was able to combine spiritual pursuits with scientific ones and not feel that they were diametrically opposed. This was an idea he explored in his later scientific works starting with what is regarded as his great philosophical labour, a magnum opus called the Prinkipia. The Prinkipia was no less than Swedenborg's attempt to explain the universe. It was the summation of his life's work thus far. It was an attempt to explain how the finite world was created from the infinite. It was philosophy but not in a metaphysical sense of the word as we understand it today. More and more his thoughts were elsewhere. Swedenborg had begun to question his ambitions. They appeared arrogant to him, a repulsive form of self-love. He was showing signs of cracking under the weight of his own immense intellect. His final scientific work, which he was never to complete, was his most ambitious yet. Entitled The Animal Kingdom, it was planned as a kind of encyclopedia of the relationship of human reason to the divine, a summation of his religious, philosophical, medical and psychological knowledge. He wanted to show how God was present in the way our bodies function, how the intake of breath mirrors the inflow of the divine, the foundations of his future labours were laid here and his divine calling was just around the corner. The first signs of Swedenborg's impending religious crisis came in 1743 when he was already 55 years old. He left Stockholm on the 21st of July and as was his habit, began keeping a journal of his travels. It soon becomes evident that all was not well with the great scientist. He began to wonder what there was left for him to do and noted that he began to feel a wakeful ecstasy almost continually, describing himself as inwardly content but outwardly distressed. His changing state of mind was documented in this journal, which quickly metamorphosed from an ordinary travel log into his dream diary, one of the most remarkable accounts of spiritual crisis and enlightenment ever. The turning point came when Swedenborg was eating a meal when the lights grew dim and the floor appeared to be covered with snakes, frogs and other reptiles. Suddenly all these creatures vanished and a man appeared in the corner of the room. He then said that he was the Lord God and that he had chosen me to explain to men the spiritual sense of the scripture. Afterwards, the Lord daily opened my soul's eyes so that in the middle of the day I could see into the other world and in a state of perfect wakefulness or converse with angels and spirits. Swedenborg had finally broken with his old self and threw himself wholeheartedly into his new calling. He was to spend the rest of his life commuting between these two worlds, recording his experiences with meticulous detail. What he wanted to do in science, I think that's what led him to what he did in his spiritual or religious or mystical pursuits. I think the same thing drove him. What he realized is that he would not be able to achieve what he wanted to achieve to get where he wanted to get if he continued practicing the science that he did and he needed to make the next step, he needed to cross over into the next thing. I don't think suddenly he thought, oh, that's all rubbish and I have to do something completely different now because I think there's a gradient. Clearly what he did was different. He was no longer trying to understand the brain or trying to understand the cosmology or the structure of the universe or how it began and all that, but that in a way prepared him for what he considered these deeper, deeper pursuits. This is quite a claim to have unfettered access to the spiritual world, but what makes Swedenborg so fascinating is what resulted from his claims. He either reported or constructed, depending on your view, an entirely new theosophy, a version of Christianity that is quite radically different to what came before it. Crucial to the understanding of Swedenborg's teachings is his theory of correspondences. He believed that everything in the material world, down to the smallest particular, corresponds to its counterpart in the spiritual world. It is a kind of cause and effect where the material world is the effect and the spiritual world is cause. Swedenborg teaches that the entire universe derives from a single source, a divine love that flows through all. Since everything is composed of this love, it follows too that humankind is made of it. He tells us that we are all made of love which comes from the divine source and the distinction between good and evil is how we deal with that love. If we turn that love on our self, self-love, that is evil, but if we engage our wisdom or our understanding to turn that love or that will outwards through acts of kindness and charity to others, then that is good. The theory of the correspondence is the idea that everything on earth to be understood must be related to a scale of similar phenomenon. Everything is within you. So that became his rather platonic way of looking upon spiritual things. Platonic in the sense that you have within you possibilities of seeing everything you have around you as problems or people or things, as signs, tokens. If you are a person who is dominated by a love to your neighbor, then you understand more and more because everything is mirroring everything. And that is a very platonic idea. The ideas of love and wisdom are a core dualism running through Swedenborg's teachings, one that is manifested in any number of correspondences, such as, for example, the sun. The sun gives us life through heat and light, which correspond respectively to love and wisdom, but one is no good without the other. As Swedenborg wrote, the life of faith devoid of love is like sunlight without warmth. The world is always under influx in Swedenborg's system. It's always being infused by this creative power and potential of love, love that wants to replicate itself, that wants to reproduce, that wants to return to its source. This is sort of one of the main messages in divine love and wisdom. And because of this desire, nature is a vast pattern of interconnected uses. Everything is useful for itself. He describes the creative power of nature as a force that's flowing and the stone's desire to be plants, the plant's desire to move and approach the animal, and all along there's a thrust towards the human. I think his theology marks a shift, a break, with this kind of mechanistic view of the world and is a deliberate, organic view of mind and matter. Dualism is the first way which Swedenborg's teachings broke from conventional Christianity, where it is advocated that salvation is found through faith alone. Such a position obviously condemns unbelievers to damnation. For Swedenborg, it was enough that we all come from the same source and that as long as our actions are good, then our souls will be saved. This little summer house is the last remnant of Swedenborg's beautiful garden. He really loved this place. It provided him with a great deal of inspiration. It is easy to see why. In his doctrine, flowers correspond to wisdom and fruit to love brought to practice. There's also a common foundation of influx behind nature that's constantly flowing, this constant source of love that is always emphasized again and again in Swedenborg's work as being from one source, from one thing. The higher up you go, the ladder of appearances, the closer and more interconnected things are with each other, which of course has an interesting environmental implication. In many ways, the idea of correspondences make the scriptures more palatable to a modern audience. During the Enlightenment, progress made in the fields of astronomy, geology and physics made it impossible for any man of science to believe in the literal version of the creation. Swedenborg saw it not in the literal sense, but as an allegorical tale. An allegorical tale describing man's spiritual regeneration. Swedenborg was a religious radical. First of all, Swedenborg starts from the premise that God is love, God is love and his wisdom. A God whose love can't condemn anyone. According to Swedenborg, you're not sent to heaven or hell by God. You choose your own destiny. It's up to human beings. Swedenborg says that a God whose love wants people of all kinds, everyone, whatever their outward religion or lack of it, to be part of heaven. You only go to hell if you want to. That was a revolutionary doctrine at the time. He's talking about an internal person. When he talks about, when he uses words like church, we tend to think of a church. Well, if we don't mean a building, we mean an organisation, something with doctrines and priests and ministers and people who belong to it. Swedenborg often uses this term to mean a person is a church, a man or a woman. It's the spirit within one. Many of Swedenborg's visions came to him when he was in the state between wakefulness and sleep, known as hypnagogia or lucid dreaming, which he was able to self-induce through controlled breathing. And apparently Swedenborg was able to maintain these states for a considerable period of time. There's a few of his accounts of it. It seems like he was in it for about 12 hours, which sounds remarkable and sounds rather like a trance state as well. I think it differs from trance in the sense that he was paradoxically wide awake and sort of dreaming at the same time. And it was during these states that he took his journeys to heaven, hell, and the other world. He had been practising a variety of different sort of mystical exercises based on the ideas of the Moravians. These had to do with breath control, long periods of meditation. There was elements of auto eroticism in them as well. So if you read these sorts of things, it wouldn't be surprising that at some point someone doing them for long periods of time day after day would perhaps go off their rocker for a minute. With any objective discussion of Swedenborg, there is a question that cannot be avoided, namely, was he mad? It is certainly a question that has been asked before. Madness in visionary states is quite a conundrum and it turns up with several other people as well. But I think the thing when you consider Swedenborg in madness is that they're taking into account that all the time subsequent to his sort of visitation by Christ, he maintained rather demanding and rigorous social responsibilities along with his scientific pursuits. He was a statesman. He had been the assessor of minds and a variety of other things. So if he was mad, he was able to control it to some degree because he was able to get on with all these other things that would have been demanding to a perfectly sane person. Swedenborg wore quite a few hats and he wore them all rather well. And also I think if you read Swedenborg's accounts of his visionary states, they don't come across in any way as mad ridings. Of course, in his day, one of the things Swedenborg was famous for was his ability to communicate with the spirit world. He could contact them as easily as we might pick up the phone and call one of our friends, leading Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, to call him the greatest medium we've ever lived. People know about Swedenborg. They usually know about him through histories of the paranormal or accounts of clairvoyance or precognition. One account of his clairvoyant abilities was recorded in a letter written by German philosopher Emmanuel Kant. In 1759, Swedenborg was at a dinner party in Gothenburg. Appearing suddenly distressed, he told the company that a fire had broken out in Stockholm. He said it was spreading fast and that his own house was in danger. After a few hours, he calmed down and informed everyone that the fire had stopped, just three houses away from his own. When news of the event finally arrived in Stockholm, people were astonished to learn that everything had happened just as Swedenborg had said. Other examples of Swedenborg's sort of paranormal abilities have to do with him being able to communicate with the dead. Swedenborg spoke to someone, well, he himself tells you he spoke with the dead because the angels took him to heaven, took him to hell and other places and that's his explanation of it. Swedenborg's teachings were regarded as highly controversial. He was accused of heresy in the Royal Council of Sweden, in their own words, totally condemned, rejected and forbade the theological doctrines contained in Swedenborg's writings. Despite this, Swedenborgianism began to catch on, especially in England. As Swedenborg read everything in Latin, his readers initially were largely educated males in Western Europe. So the purpose of a society devoted to translating these books into English would mean they would be opened up to anyone who knew how to read. The Swedenborg Society dates back to 1810 and it was founded by a group of men in London to translate, publish, print and sell mainly the theological works of the men of Swedenborg. This was not the first attempt to publish Swedenborg's works in English that had been going on certainly in Manchester since 1782. In 1787, 15 years after his death, the new church was founded in London and grew fast. Missionaries were sent to America and Africa to spread the word. It's certainly true that people who read Swedenborg or some people who read Swedenborg did form organised denominations. There's no evidence that Swedenborg ever advocated the founding of a church or a denomination. He certainly didn't attract followers. What he advocated was private spirituality coupled with an active life in the world. He's a bit early for the social movements concerning the poverty resulting from the Industrial Revolution. He comes a bit before that. He's also a little before the great movement against slavery which came at the end of the 18th century. But I think it's significant that some of his early followers were involved in these movements. Equally important was Swedenborg's impact on the worlds of art and literature. I think when you think about Swedenborg's influence in the 19th century and you begin to pay attention to the different romantic moments that unfolded in France and Germany and England and then later on in the US it quickly becomes apparent that Swedenborg was read for very different reasons at very different times and locations. And what happens with Swedenborg and German romanticism is very different from the story of Swedenborg in Paris with Baudelaire and the symbolists and is very, very different from what happens in the United States. Swedenborg in the US I think takes sort of two different directions that happen simultaneously. On the one hand he becomes popularised at a very sort of democratic level of influence where his works were excerpted and reproduced in different kinds of pseudoscientific contexts, phrenology, mesmerism, early forms of hypnotism. And this had a very broad impact on ideas about nature in the body in the 19th century. Swedenborg becomes central for a philosophic conversation that happens especially in Concord, Massachusetts with Emerson and the circle of the transcendentalists that gathered around him. Emerson makes a remark that the age belongs to Swedenborg which is often quoted by scholars interested in this problem. And I think it's a reflection on his presence everywhere, both as a serious thinker who had important things to say about religion, about language, but also his popularisation as a figure. It's interesting when you look at Emerson and why he first started reading Swedenborg, it's not at all because Swedenborg is a mystic seer who communicates with angels and devils and has sort of this sexy combination of ghosts and sex behind him. It's more because of his philosophical ideas about the mind and the way the mind perceives reality. One of the ways that I found into Swedenborg was through recognising, becoming aware of his influence on symbolism, which was one of the major art movements of the late, well the second half into the late 19th century. Baudelaire read Swedenborg. Baudelaire took this notion of these links between things and included things like synesthesia, which is this phenomena of you taste colour, where the senses combine or the senses sort of switch roles. And this was something that was very key to sort of the proto-symbolist painters and musicians especially. Swedenborg read the world, so when he looked at a tree it was like reading a book. And this is something like the symbolist poets did as well. They looked at something and they interpreted it. It was a code. There was some secret behind things. Another key field here of course is the visual and visual aesthetics. And specifically the evolution of landscape painting in the US is really interesting when you start looking at how Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence becomes almost a manifesto for painting in the middle of the 19th century. The idea that nature should reflect spirit, that nature embodies states of the mind and what it has within becomes an important tenet. More and more there's an interest not just in painting a subjective interior experience of nature, but also a certain understanding of time and a desire for the canvas to show a process of time. The list of poets and writers influenced by Swedenborg to a greater or lesser extent reads like a veritable who's who of letters. William Blake was perhaps most clearly influenced by Swedenborg. His works are full of Swedenborgian overtones and ideas. Where Swedenborg declared, man is both a heaven and an earth in microcosm. Blake proclaimed, in your bosom you bear your heaven and earth and all you behold, though it appears without, it is within. Throughout the 19th century the name Swedenborg crops up. Emerson and Blake both said that Swedenborg was a poet. Not meaning that he wrote verse in the formal sense, although he did in some of his early work, but because of the poetic nature of his writing. He's so much part of an old culture. Here he is, he's a man with a rather old-fashioned full bottom wig. He's part of the sort of late Baroque age writing in Latin. So there are all kinds of barriers to him. Yeah, writers, artists, some musicians have got through to him. They've seen something with some of his principles, particularly the idea of a correspondence between the natural world and if you call it a spiritual world, that you're looking for a key there. That's something that, I don't know how we would exploit it, because it's got to come from within. One's got to see something oneself. He was one of the great explorers of the inner world. And it's something we all should spend our time trying to get better acquainted with. And people like Swedenborg and Steiner and Jung and others devoted their lives to it. And by trying to understand what they did and trying to assimilate the insights that they had, I think it can enrich our own lives and understandings of ourselves. Where is heaven? Where is love? Where, how shall I find love? It's not here, it's not there. It's you who formulates the necessary conditions for happiness and for love. That's something which people today understand very easily.