Emanuel Swedenborg

Summary

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish scientist and theologian who began his career as a serious natural philosopher and anatomist, then underwent a dramatic spiritual conversion in his mid-fifties that produced thirty additional volumes of theological writing. His doctrine of correspondences, the claim that everything in the physical world mirrors a corresponding reality in the spiritual world, became one of the most consequential ideas in nineteenth-century American culture. According to historian John S. Haller Jr., almost every major American alternative healing tradition traces back, directly or indirectly, to either Swedenborgianism or mesmerism. His writings shaped homeopathy, mind cure, Christian Science, Spiritualism, communitarian utopianism, New Thought, and ultimately the New Age movement, making Swedenborg one of the most influential figures most Americans have never heard of.

Background and Formation

Between 1718 and 1745 he produced nineteen volumes on civic, scientific, and philosophical topics.(Haller, 2010) His early chemistry postulated that all matter was motion arranged in geometric forms; an early version of crystallography, a deterministic model in which energy was not added to matter but was intrinsic to it, anticipating atomic theory by two centuries.(Haller, 2010)

His 1717 paper on tremulations proposed that the vital force of a living organism consisted of small vibrations in the finest nerves and most delicate membranes, and that sensation was transmitted through “threads and sinews” to the membrane of the brain.(Haller, 2010) More strikingly, this same paper contained what Haller reads as the first theoretical sketch of thought transference: Swedenborg postulated that one person could perceive what another was thinking if their cerebral membranes trembled in resonance, “just as one string is affected by another, if they are tuned to the same key.”(Haller, 2010)

His Principia (1734) laid out a cosmology in which everything in the material world depended on a corresponding cause in the spiritual world (a concept also prominent in Neoplatonic and Kabbalist thought) with creation deriving from “centers or points of energy” and nature being “a chain of uses and forms” emitted from the Divine.(Haller, 2010) He hypothesized that the human soul was of the same substance as the magnetic element of the universe, and that ideas were vibrations in the soul; when vibrations were strong enough, they reached the senses.(Haller, 2010)

In his Oeconomia Regni Animalis (1740–41), Swedenborg showed that specific parts of the brain controlled muscles in various parts of the body, that gray matter in the center controlled involuntary acts, and that the function of nervous control was given to oval particles (later called neurons).(Haller, 2010) He also suggested the role of the lungs in purifying the blood and proposed the idea of a “spirituous fluid” originating in the brain.(Haller, 2010) He correctly located the motor areas of the brain, placed intellectual faculties in the frontal region, and discounted Descartes’s theory that the soul resided in the pineal gland.(Haller, 2010) These ideas anticipated later discoveries, but his writings had no impact on neuroscience until Max Neuburger introduced them in 1901.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborg, as Haller puts it, was a scientist “directed by religious enthusiasm and bent on discovering the soul,” seeking to make body and mind whole again.(Haller, 2010) He introduced the concept of “series and degrees” (influx) by which the soul flowed into the body through intermediaries, a progression in steps by which the material world developed from immaterial forces.(Haller, 2010) In this framework, every external event had an interior component reachable through what he called the doctrine of correspondences: everything in the physical universe represented some aspect of the spiritual, and all natural phenomena had causes that were spiritual.(Haller, 2010)

The Spiritual Crisis (1743–1745)

Swedenborg’s transition from philosopher to theologian was completed through a dramatic spiritual crisis. In the spring of 1745, while traveling in London, he reported hearing a male voice telling him not to eat too much, followed by a vision in which a vapor was expelled from his body and turned to tiny worms, which burned before his eyes. Following this event, he claimed that his senses had been opened directly into the spirit world, allowing him to converse with angels and devils, from whom he received a new understanding of Scripture. This privilege, recorded in Spiritual Experiences (published posthumously), lasted more than twenty-seven years until his death in 1772.(Haller, 2010)

His method for reaching these states involved closing his eyes, relaxing, slowing his breathing, diminishing his awareness of bodily sensations, and concentrating entirely on the problem at hand.(Haller, 2010) He traced this form of meditative inquiry back to his childhood prayers.(Haller, 2010) Various commentators have diagnosed his switch from science to mysticism as temporal lobe epilepsy; however, his experiences differed from typical TLE in that his visions lasted hours rather than seconds, he showed no associated memory problems, and the experiences coincided with decades of continued productive work.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborg’s reported clairvoyant knowledge made him famous during his lifetime.(Haller, 2010) In 1759, while dining in Gothenburg some 250 miles from Stockholm, he reported on the progress of a fire in the capital.(Haller, 2010) In 1761, he contacted the spirit of Madame de Marteville’s dead husband.(Haller, 2010) Later that same year, he was involved in an event with Queen Louisa Ulrika.(Haller, 2010)

The Doctrine of Correspondences

The doctrine of correspondences held that every natural thing had a spiritual counterpart, which in turn became a representation of the Divine.(Haller, 2010) He had originally insisted that correspondences were arrived at through reason and logic, but increasingly confirmed through his waking visions and angelic communications.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences built on Hermetic and Kabbalist thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Jakob Boehme.(Haller, 2010)

The doctrine carried a cosmological dimension. As he wrote in Heaven and Hell: “The whole natural world is responsive to the spiritual world; the natural world not just in general, but in detail.”(Haller, 2010) From this followed the Universal Human (Grand Man): a vision in which the entire angelic society appeared collectively in human form, with angelic communities arranged to correspond to the anatomy of a human being. Those in the head were “supremely involved in everything good,” those in the breast in “thoughtfulness and faith,” and those in the generative organs in “marriage love.”(Haller, 2010)

His Heaven and Hell (1758) also offered the first systematic account of angels not as a separately created spiritual species but as deceased humans who, after death, had passed from the natural world into the spiritual world, there taking on their true essence and drifting toward the spiritual realm that best matched their inner character.(Haller, 2010)

Haller argues that Swedenborg’s thought appealed widely because it soothed orthodox Christianity, gave substance to the spiritual world and angels, revealed hidden scriptural meanings, and promoted inward illumination and harmony with God.(Haller, 2010) Gregory R. Johnson argued that Swedenborg influenced Kant by anticipating Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal dualism and by conforming to Kant’s argument that space and time are transcendental forms enabling paranormal intuition.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborg and his intellectual progeny were critics of the Enlightenment’s Baconian method not because of its accomplishments but because it ushered in a strictly materialistic view of the universe that excluded topics humanists had debated for centuries: wisdom, love, the soul, death, spiritual existence, morality, truth, and aesthetics.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborgianism and Homeopathy

The relationship between Swedenborgianism and American homeopathy was so close as to be nearly structural. Haller reports that homeopathic manufacturers Boericke & Tafel of Philadelphia and Otis Clapp of Boston became the principal publishing houses of New Church literature in the nineteenth century; the homeopathic theories on potentization and vitalism were especially compatible with the Swedenborgian concept of divine energy pervading the body.(Haller, 2010)

The intellectual scaffolding was supplied by several thinkers. Garth Wilkinson’s translations of Swedenborg introduced Swedenborgian doctrines into homeopathic discourse through the law of correspondences, providing a teleological framework that linked Hahnemann’s similia similibus curantur to the connection between soul, brain, body, and the spiritual universe.(Haller, John S. Jr., 2009) Swedenborg himself had taught that all diseases have correspondence with the spiritual world: every disease corresponded to a spiritual evil, so that as the spiritual life sickened, evil entered the natural life and became physical disease. As he wrote in Secrets of Heaven: “All diseases in man have correspondence with the spiritual world; for whatever in universal nature has not correspondence with the spiritual world cannot exist, having no cause from which to exist.”(Haller, 2010)

Hans Burch Gram of Boston, the earliest American homeopath, was a devout Swedenborgian who colored the young American homeopathic community’s discussions with Swedenborgian ideas. Haller argues that for Gram, Swedenborgian ideas “substituted for the more materialistic mesmerism” and formed the basis of what became known as classical homeopathy, giving American homeopathy “a lasting set of characteristics and a direction substantively different from the pattern in most other countries.”(Haller, 2010)

Charles Julius Hempel, a homeopathic Swedenborgian, went further, proposing to replace Hahnemann’s similia similibus curantur with correspondentia correspondentibus curantur; arguing that a perfect correspondence must exist between the drug-disease and the natural pathological disturbance, and that the key to curing the physical was to address the spiritual aspect of the disease.(Haller, 2010)

The fusion reached its fullest expression in James Tyler Kent, who combined Hahnemannian and Swedenborgian thought into a hierarchy of symptoms “from innermost to the outermost” and a scale of potencies that became the dominant framework of American classical homeopathy.(Haller, John S. Jr., 2009) Kent moved homeopathy away from the eclectic and experimental medicine of the late nineteenth century toward a more metaphysical and dogmatic approach that connected man’s “innermost spiritual to his outermost natural.”(Haller, unknown) As Haller’s Shadow Medicine notes, Kent stressed the correlation between miasm and vitalism, rejected modern pathological knowledge as a guide to diagnosis, and emphasized psychological symptoms in prescribing high potencies, so that he and his followers “looked to mental healing and the correspondence between man’s affections and the vital force of the soul.”(Haller, 2014)

Swedenborgianism and Mind Cure

The mind-cure or mental-science movement that arose in the mid-nineteenth century drew from several sources, including Mesmer’s discoveries, American Protestant perfectionism, and the writings of Swedenborg.(Haller, 2010) The movement’s most consequential early figure was Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866), who evolved from practicing mesmerism to developing a form of spiritual healing grounded in the power of suggestion; and who paralleled Swedenborg in several notable respects.

Like Swedenborg, Quimby had little tolerance for Christian dogma while believing in a “Christ within.” Where Swedenborg called the hidden content of Scripture the “Word,” to be understood only through a system of spiritual correspondences, Quimby called it the “science of health.” Both men were convinced they were revealing biblical truths unencumbered by theologians.(Haller, 2010) Quimby also developed a theory of soul, mind, and body that drew explicitly on Swedenborg’s concept of the “limbus”; the unconscious or subconscious mind that received impressions of good and bad. As divine influx flowed into every soul, it lodged in the mind to the extent that the mind contained corresponding impressions; perverted impressions severed the correspondence and caused illness.(Haller, 2010)

Quimby’s lineage extended into a remarkable range of American spiritual institutions. Mary Baker Eddy, who consulted Quimby from 1862 to 1865 and whose terms “Science,” “Science of Health,” “Christ Principle,” and “Science of Life” derived from his healing conversations, founded Christian Science after his death in 1866.(Haller, 2010) Julius Dresser and Annetta Seabury organized New Thought; Warren Felt Evans established a mind-cure practice; Emma Curtis Hopkins founded the Hopkins College of Metaphysical Science; Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded the Unity Church; Ernest Holmes founded the Church of Religious Science.(Haller, 2010)

Ralph Waldo Trine, one of the most widely read New Thought figures and a dedicated admirer of Swedenborg, articulated a “law of correspondences” by which individual existence rose through successive gradations from the physical to an “ethereal planet, or soul world.” His In Tune with the Infinite sold over two million copies and served as an intergenerational carrier of Swedenborgian ideas into the twentieth century.(Haller, 2010)

Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, and Utopian Communities

Swedenborg’s descriptions of harmonious communities of angels proved readily translatable into a template for creating heaven on earth. Haller traces how enthusiastic converts to Spiritualism saw no meaningful difference between Swedenborg’s claims to have conversed with spirits and mediums’ claims during séances; they reasoned that if the spirit world was real, then his angelic communities could serve as a model for communal reconstruction.(Haller, 2010)

John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida community and unofficial historian of American communitarianism, argued that Swedenborgianism was the unofficial religion of the American socialist movements, and that Spiritualism was “Swedenborgianism Americanized” (identical in essence.(Haller, 2010) Historian Whitney R. Cross’s analysis of the “Burned-Over District” of upstate New York showed that mesmerism had led to Swedenborgianism, and Swedenborgianism to Spiritualism) not because of any intrinsic relationship between the three propositions but because of the assumptions with which American adherents, shaped by romantic idealism, understood all three as demonstrating the superiority of ideal over physical or material force.(Haller, 2010)

Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Seer of Poughkeepsie,” became what R. Laurence Moore called “the most direct link between the teachings of Swedenborg and those of Spiritualism.” In 1844, Davis reportedly entered a mesmeric trance and met both Swedenborg and the ancient physician Galen, from whom he received a magnetic staff. Davis’s harmonial philosophy closely mimicked Swedenborg’s Oeconomia Regni Animalis, and his eight-hundred-page Principles of Nature (1847) became one of the most widely circulated texts of early American Spiritualism.(Haller, 2010) (Haller, 2010)

George Bush, Swedenborgian professor of Hebrew at New York University, made the intellectual case explicit in Mesmer and Swedenborg (1847), arguing that mesmerism demonstrated the ability to uncover the spirit in the body and thus provided verification for those who doubted the divine origin of Swedenborg’s revelations.(Haller, 2010)

R. Laurence Moore’s observation that Swedenborg had laid the groundwork for American Spiritualism was premised on a specific historical mechanism: the ability to contact the spirits of dead humans, which had been “one of the special divine powers imparted to Swedenborg, became a widespread gift among the common folk.”(Haller, 2010) In other words, Swedenborg’s science-to-mysticism arc had, in the American context, democratized spirit-communication.

Wider Significance

Haller’s central thesis in Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection is stated directly: almost without exception, American holistic healing systems are grounded in the metaphysical framework of either mesmerism or Swedenborgianism.(Haller, 2010) Wilder, situating Swedenborg’s influence in American medical reform history, notes that while Rademacher was organizing his Reformed Practice in Germany, a kindred movement was simultaneously taking shape in America — evidence of the same vitalist currents expressing themselves independently across national boundaries (Wilder, 1901). From these two inheritances grew eclecticism, homeopathy, mind cure, Christian Science, Theosophy, New Thought, chiropractic, osteopathy, psychic healing, crystal healing, therapeutic touch, channeling, and New Age medicine.

The term “New Age” itself appeared in Swedenborgian literature long before its modern appropriation. At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religion, whose president, Charles Carroll Bonney, was a Swedenborgian, the expression “New Christian Age” was used. Swedenborg’s theology differed substantially from what later became known as New Age, but Haller argues he served as “godfather” to its key principles.(Haller, 2010) When the New Age movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, its constellation of beliefs derived partly from Swedenborgianism, alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, mesmerism, and vitalism.(Haller, 2010)

Both Swedenborg and Mesmer affirmed the existence of unseen dimensions and subtle energies; Swedenborg called this “divine influx” flowing from God and pervading all creation, while Mesmer called similar forces “invisible tides” whose free flow or blockage determined health.(Haller, 2010) The idea of an aura or subtle energy field surrounding the body (central to New Age healing) can be traced through Paracelsus, Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Swedenborg’s divine influx, Hahnemann’s vital principle, and Baron Reichenbach’s Odic force.(Haller, 2010)

Haller also notes that when physicist Max Planck’s quantum theory explained ultimate matter as energy pulsating in quantum jumps, commentators were forced to reconsider “the tremulations of Swedenborg” alongside the claims of earlier mystics, suggesting that modern physics seemed more at home with Eastern metaphysics than with Western rational science.(Haller, 2010)

In Shadow Medicine (2014), Haller corroborates his own earlier argument from a different angle: for those attuned to the spiritual and angelic aspects of Christianity, Swedenborg’s mystical worldview “served as a metaphor for the primacy of spirit over matter” in the emergence of unconventional healing.(Haller, 2014)

Scholarly Assessment

The evidence base for this page is almost entirely John S. Haller Jr., whose three books (Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection (2010), The History of American Homeopathy (multiple editions), and Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative Therapeutics (2014)) form the primary secondary literature. Haller is a careful intellectual historian with a gift for tracing transmission chains, and his central thesis about Swedenborg’s foundational role in American alternative medicine is well documented in primary sources. Readers should be aware, however, that Haller’s framework favors the sweep of intellectual genealogy over the fine-grained reception history that might reveal local variation, resistance, or heterodox readings.

Henry Lindlahr, writing in Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics (1918), cited Swedenborg’s description of spiritual regeneration as a series of “temptations” or spiritual crises directly parallel to his own naturopathic “healing crisis” framework; offering independent evidence that Swedenborg’s language permeated natural healing discourse beyond the homeopathic tradition.(Lindlahr, Henry, 1918) Lindlahr also employed a vitalistic framework, treating vital force as “an expression of divine intelligence and will, the ‘logos,’ the ‘word’ of the great Creative Intelligence” that animated the entire universe.(Lindlahr, Henry, 1918)

A persistent interpretive question is how much Swedenborg himself would have recognized in what was done in his name. His followers differed substantially from each other: the homeopaths extracted the doctrine of correspondences as a theory of drug action; the mind-cure practitioners took the concept of influx as a theory of mental causation; the Spiritualists treated his accounts of heaven and hell as empirical reports. Haller observes that Swedenborgians were bound to their founder’s inspired writings in a way that mesmerists, who drew on multiple sources and were more secular in tone, were not.(Haller, 2010) The rigidity this imposed sometimes worked against the tradition’s longevity. When Kentian homeopathy came under pressure from scientific medicine in the early twentieth century, it was the explicitly Swedenborgian metaphysics that critics targeted as an impediment to homeopathy’s development as legitimate medicine.

Human Notes

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