Fig. 3.1: Interior of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka, Stockholm. Courtesy of Swedenborgs Minneskyrka.
Photo:
Thomas Xavier Floyd, 2015.
Open Access. © 2021 Devin Zuber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639476-004
Devin Zuber
Chapter 3
An Apocalypse of Mind: Cracking
the Jerusalem Code in Emanuel
Swedenborg’s Theosophy
The Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) came to
believe that the ideas contained in his mystical writings constituted the coming of
the New Jerusalem, the dawning of a new age as foretold in the book of the
Apocalypse. Both allegorical and yet tied to a specific historical claim – that a spiritual
apocalypse, a “last judgement,” began unfolding in the year 1757 – Swedenborg cata-
lysed a later generation of Romantic thinkers and writers (such as William Blake) who
gravitated towards his millennial combination of Enlightenment empiricism with vi-
sionary accounts of things “seen and heard” in heaven and hell. This chapter surveys
Swedenborg’s conceptualisation of Jerusalem within his eschatological contexts, before
considering how his delineations of alternative spiritualities, flourishing outside
Christendom, galvanised later Swedenborgian and New Age imaginaries. Attention
will also be given to how Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem led to distinctive artistic and
ecclesiastical iconographies within the Swedenborgian church tradition.
In 1743, the Stockholm-born natural scientist Emanuel Swedenborg was undergoing
a serious spiritual crisis. He was in the midst of an ambitious project to locate the
seat of the soul in the human body, applying years of his training in the various natu-
ral sciences now to the labyrinths of brain and blood. His research, he was con-
vinced, would prove to the growing scepticism and materialism of his age, once and
for all, that spiritual causation existed in nature, and that the human was more than
just matter, the mind not merely a Lockean tabula rasa: his project would grandly dem-
onstrate “the mode in which the soul flows into its mind, and the mind into its body.”1
1 Swedenborg, 1955 no. 640. Following standard practice in scholarship on Swedenborg, all citations
of his work refer to passage (and not page) numbers, in both his scientific and theological works, ex-
cept where noted.
Note: For comments and suggestions on this chapter, I am indebted to Jim Lawrence and Rebecca
Esterson, my colleagues at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at the Graduate Theological Union,
as well as the Rev. Göran Appelgren, pastor of the Swedenborgs Minneskyrka in Stockholm. Any re-
maining errors are wholly my own.
Devin Zuber, Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature, The Graduate
Theological Union, Berkeley, California
76 Devin Zuber
But Swedenborg quickly hit a metaphorical wall, having pushed his Enlightenment ra-
tionalist empiricism to its utter limits, and the epistemological framework undergirding
his scientific thought began to crack and fragment under the duress of his transcenden-
talist predilections. After a sequence of terrifying dreams, waking hallucinations, and
visions that culminated with an epiphany of Christ when he was traveling through
Holland during Easter in 1744, Swedenborg began to abandon his scientific search for
the soul, feeling called towards a different kind of writing and task.2 A second vision of
Christ a year later in London confirmed his sense that he was to undertake a new theo-
logical vocation: “from that day I left all worldly scholarly endeavour and worked in
spiritualibis from what the Lord commissioned me to write. Daily the Lord then often
opened my bodily eyes, so that right in the middle of the day I could look into the
other life and in the most joyful alertness talk with angels and spirits.”3
Over the next twenty-seven years, up until his death in 1772, Swedenborg em-
barked on an ambitious theological project devoted to explicating the “inner” spiritual
sense of Christian scriptures, bolstered by Swedenborg’s clinical accounts of his experi-
ences “seen and heard” – ex visa et audita – of heaven, hell, and other places. While
the ensuing eighteen separate theological works (several of which appeared in multiple
volumes, like the massive Arcana Caelestia, or “Secrets of Heaven”) seem to have been
geared towards attracting the attention of contemporaries in the church and the natu-
ral sciences, Swedenborg’s work was largely ignored or discredited by established the-
ologians; it would take a later generation of Romantic figures, such as William Blake
or, in Scandinavia, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, for Swedenborg’s heterodox views on
spirituality to find a home in the visionary aftermath of the Enlightenment.4
Due to the hostility articulated towards his doctrines by the Swedish Lutheran
church, the reception of Swedenborg in his own country was more or less driven under-
ground. Even during Swedenborg’s lifetime, his doctrines had infamously came under
scrutiny in 1770 during a much publicized heresy trial in Gothenburg; the Royal Council,
2 See the entries in Swedenborg’s “drömboken,” or journal of dreams, published only posthumously.
Emanuel Swedenborg Swedenborg’s Dream Diary, trans. Lars Bergquist (West Chester: Swedenborg
Foundation, 2001), 124–137.
3 Carl Robsahm, Memoirs of Swedenborg and Other Documents, trans. Anders Hallengren,
ed. Stephen McNeilly (London: Swedenborg Society, 2011), 7.
4 See Chapter 18 (Anna Bohlin), 360–89. Swedenborg did have a measurable impact on Lutheran theo-
logical circles in Germany, particularly in the work of the Schwabian theosophist Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger, who had published the first book about Swedenborg’s theology in 1765; see Friedmann
Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel. Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des
18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). Written in Neolatin, Swedenborg’s theological work
was readily translated into English and German within his lifetime. The authoritative modern schol-
arly editions of the Arcana Caelestia are the volumes being released as Secrets of Heaven by the
Swedenborg Foundation; see Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven I, trans. Lisa Hyatt Cooper
(West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2008); Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven II, trans.
Lisa Hyatt Cooper (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2013).
Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 77
on advice from the Lutheran Consistory, decreed that they would totally “condemn, re-
ject, and forbid” teaching the theological content of Swedenborg’s doctrines.5 It was not
until much later, in 1873, that Swedish laws would ultimately permit the establishment
of non-Lutheran churches, and separatist Swedenborgian congregations were finally
allowed to openly form, worship, and operate in Sweden – long after similar “churches
of the New Jerusalem” had sprung up in England, America, and even Germany.6
Swedenborg’s somewhat contraband status in Scandinavia, however, rendered him
quite attractive for later writers like Almqvist and Fredrika Bremer who themselves grav-
itated towards various theological heterodoxies. Nevertheless, Swedenborg’s highly idi-
osyncratic interpretation of the “New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,
made ready like a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2), as an allegorical
code for the advent of a new spiritual age that his own writings were the harbingers
of, ended up catalysing the religious-utopian imaginaries of a wide number of
Romantic and post-Romantic painters, poets, and artists – other Scandinavians
distinctly influenced by Swedenborg in this regard would include Thomas Thorild
(1759–1808), P.D.A. Atterbom (1790–1855), Bernhard von Beskow (1796–1868),
and the Finnish writer Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877).7 This chapter is a
brief attempt to crack Swedenborg’s own “Jerusalem code,” unravelling its em-
beddedness within the discourses of both eighteenth-century theologies of history
and allegorical hermeneutics, as well as its migration and transferability to a wide
variety of other aesthetic projects, both in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Swedenborg’s
glosses on the Apocalypse and the “new” Jerusalem were both synchronic and dia-
chronic, tied to the specificity of a historical moment (through his claim that an es-
chatological “last judgment” had already taken place in the spiritual world, in 1757),
but also to a transcendent dimension of what Walter Benjamin would term the Jetztzeit
[“now-time”] of a messianic (and anti-modern) sort of temporality: there wasn’t just one
single last judgment or apocalypse at a particular historical juncture, Swedenborg ar-
gued, but the imminent possibility for all individuals (present and future) to experience
within themselves last judgments, and to carry a model of the new Jerusalem within the
spiritual architecture of their regenerated souls.8
5 Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Secret: The Meaning and Significance of the Word of God, the Life of
the Angels and Service to God (London: Swedenborg Society, 2005), 403–12.
6 Olle Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” in Scribe of Heaven:
Swedenborg’s Life, Work, and Impact, eds. Jonathan Rose, Stuart Shotwell and Mary Lou
Bertucci (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005), 156; Feodor Goerwitz, “The New
Church on the Continent of Europe,” in The New Jerusalem in the World’s Religious Congresses
of 1893, ed. L. P. Mercer (Chicago: Western New-Church Union, 1894), 88–9.
7 Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” passim; Olle Hjern, “Carl Jonas
Love Almqvist – Great Poet and Swedenborgian Heretic,” in Swedenborg and His Influence, eds.
Erland J. Brock and E. Bruce Glenn (Bryn Athyn, PA: Academy of the New Church, 1988), 88
8 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Last Judgment and Babylon Destroyed, trans. George F. Dole, in The
Shorter Works of 1758 (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2018), nos. 28–32. On Benjamin’s
78 Devin Zuber
Finally, as the other chapters in this volume have drawn out, the Scandinavian
Jerusalem code often became entangled in actual relationships to the “real” city of
Jerusalem, be it through the routes of Protestant pilgrimage or reverberations of the
medieval crusades. While Swedenborg’s (new) Jerusalem, on the one hand, as an alle-
gory of individual spiritual regeneration and symbol for a rejuvenated Christianity
would seem to obviate any such terrestrial correlations, on the other hand, his peculiar
insistence on forms of divine revelation manifesting outside the Judeo-Christian fold,
and part of a broader horizon of his unfolding millennial theosophy, has periodically
instigated groups of Swedenborgians (both in the eighteenth-century and in more re-
cent times) to embark on orientalist projects in non-western spaces, seeking to find or
recover these alternative spiritualties that Swedenborg hinted could be located in
Mongolia or Africa. Thus, even though Swedenborg’s Jerusalem code would seem to be
neatly contained as an allegory of a Christian doctrine (or at least as revealed by
Swedenborg’s theological illuminations), its open gates to the four cardinal direc-
tions might be read as registering traces of the religious other, beyond the pale of
Christendom. Swedenborg’s Jerusalem code, in other words, its millennial armatures,
must be reckoned as part of the foundational symbolic typologies of what would later
become the New Age, directly anticipating (and in some cases influencing) the oriental-
ist inflections of both Theosophy and Beatnik Buddhism.9
Theologies of History: Swedenborg’s Five Churches
Between 1748 and 1756, Swedenborg laboured over what was to be his theological mag-
num opus (and official debut as visionary seer): the eight folio volumes of the Arcana
Caelestia which aimed to explicate the inner spiritual sense of Genesis and Exodus, inter-
spersed with visionary accounts of things “seen and heard” by Swedenborg in the
spiritual world. But the Arcana did more than allegorize Genesis as a drama of our con-
sciousness and its spiritual evolution; it robustly engaged with the established dis-
course of what Hans Urs von Balthazar and others have called the “theology of
history”: an attempt to read human (and cosmic) history as one of an unfolding divine
telos, at work in the world.10 Swedenborg built on classical tropes that had viewed the
history of humanity as one of four (sometimes five) successive ages that usually
Jetztzeit, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1968), 261, and Devin Zuber, “Flanerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic Countermemories in Lower
Manhattan,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006), 273.
9 Devin Zuber, “Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen,” Swedenborg and the Arts
14, no. 1–2 (2010), 1–33.
10 Hans Urs von Balthazar, A Theology of History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).
Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 79
followed declensionist narrative, of moving further away from some purer, earlier
“golden” age.11 For the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, these were the ages of metal: first,
the ideal Golden Age, which was succeeded by an inferior Silver Age, and then a
Bronze Age, and so on. To these epochs Swedenborg affixed the Latin phrase “eccle-
sia” – perhaps as a misnomer, too easily translated as a “church” – to read the re-
spective ages as markedly different eras of spiritual dispensation and means of
communication between humanity and the Divine: it became a way, in other words,
for Swedenborg to make the history of revelation and scripture, of spiritual communi-
cation itself, the heart of the story of scripture. As Swedenborg puts it in his later New
Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings (1758): “in the earliest church, revelation was
direct; in the ancient church it came through correspondences; in the Jewish church
it came by audible speech; and in the Christian church it came through the Word.”12
Already within his theological debut in the Arcana Caelestia, Swedenborg begins
to self-reflexively conceive of his own spiritual illuminations and exegeses as constitut-
ing a new kind of spiritual epoch or dispensation.13 In the notebooks and journals he
kept during this period to record his private spiritual experiences – published only
posthumously as either the “Spiritual Diary” or “Spiritual Experiences” – Swedenborg
begins to describe vast upheavals and changes to the spiritual geography of heaven,
hell, and the world of spirits. He became convinced he was witnessing interiorly, in the
psychic space of the spiritual world, the unfolding of the Last Judgment as foretold in
John’s book of Revelations. But Swedenborg was not only personal witness to this
spiritual Apocalypse that was reordering the “influx” of heaven into this natural world;
the revelation of the heavenly “arcana” in his books were construed to be the doc-
trinal foundations for a new era or church, signified by the New Jerusalem in John’s
Revelations. At the centre of this New Jerusalem were a set of ideas about caring for
others, loving the Lord, and an understanding of the religious matters of faith through
enlightened reason – doctrines which would identify those Christians who were part of a
“new church.” Swedenborg would subsequently go on to publish five distinctive works
related to this Apocalyptic eschatology, including a substantial exegetical commentary
11 E. J. Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012).
12 Emanuel Swedenborg, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings: Drawn from Things Heard in
Heaven, trans. George F. Dole, in The Shorter Works of 1758 (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation,
2018), no. 247.
13 “The Lord in his divine mercy has given me the opportunity to learn the inner meaning of the
Word, which contains deeply hidden secrets that no one has been aware of before. No one can be-
come aware of them without learning how things stand in the other life . . . for these reasons, I have
been granted the privilege of disclosing what I have heard and seen over the past several years of
interaction with spirits and angels.” Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, trans. George
F. Dole (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2010), no. 67.
80 Devin Zuber
on the book of Revelations itself – Revelation Unveiled (1766) (a related sixth work,
Revelation Explained, was abruptly abandoned, and never published).14
Even as Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem would seem to completely dematerial-
ize into doctrinal allegory, a kind of cartographic sense of space nevertheless per-
sists in the journal pages that detailed his spiritual experiences. He occasionally
sketched small, simple maps with letter coded-keys to diagram his observations of
the Apocalypse and the attendant rearrangement of the heavens and hells. In entry
no. 5471 of Spiritual Experiences, for example, he places the New Jerusalem (“A”) at the
centre, a four-fold block comprised of “those who are truly Christian,” surrounded by
lateral angling lines that indicate gloomy caverns and sulfurous lakes where groups of
hypocritical priests and profaning harlots (amongst other unsavoury characters) were
being cast and thrown down into (Fig. 3.2).15 This veritable “psychogeography”(Guy
Debord) traced by Swedenborg’s own flânerie through the dynamic spiritual world
anticipates William Blake’s later use of Jerusalem as a kind of cartographic grid that
overlays the streets of London in his great poem Jerusalem: Emanation of the Giant
Albion (1804–1820): a peripatetic poetics to “build Jerusalem, in England’s green and
pleasant land.”16 It is, moreover, entirely possible that Blake would have seen this
particular manuscript of Swedenborg’s with its sketches of spiritual space, as the
bound volume was in the hands of the Swede Carl Bernhard Wadström in the 1780s
and 90s, when Blake was heavily associating with the London Swedenborgian coteries
that Wadström was integrally part of.17
14 These others include New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine (1758), Last Judgment and Babylon
Destroyed (1758), The White Horse (1758), and Supplements to the Last Judgment (1763). I am grateful to
Jim Lawrence for sharing with me an advanced draft of his forthcoming critical introduction to the New
Century Edition translation of Revelation Unveiled, to be published by the Swedenborg Foundation
in 2020 or 2021.
15 Emanuel Swedenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Diary: Recounting Spiritual Experiences During the
Years 1745 to 1765, trans. Durban Odhner (Bryn Athyn, Pa: General Church of the New Jerusalem,
1998), no. 5471.
16 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 96. On Blake, Swedenborg, and the psychogeography of London, see
Iain Sinclair, Blake’s London: the Topographical Sublime (London: Swedenborg Society, 2010), passim.
17 According to Tafel, Wadström brought this – and other – Swedenborg manuscripts to London in
1788. The manuscripts were not “repatriated” to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences until 1845.
Rudolf L. Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg II (London:
Swedenborg Society, 1877), 837. On Blake and the London Swedenborgians, see Morton Paley, “‘A New
Heaven Is Begun’: Blake and Swedenborgianism,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1979). Of all
the volumes that comprise Spiritual Experiences, this one (RSAS MS Swedenborg 128: 3, Codex 3B; The
Emanuel Swedenborg Collection, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm) bears the heavi-
est marks of being much-handled and read, with significant page-wearing in the sections that have the
sketches.
Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 81
Fig. 3.2: Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary Vol. 3. (RSAS MS Swedenborg 128:3,
Cod. 3B). Courtesy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.
Photo: Devin Zuber.
Nunc Licet: the New Jerusalem Church
Seventeen years after Swedenborg had died in London, a group of his readers and fol-
lowers met to formally establish a separatist Christian group in 1789. Attendees and
signatories to the ensuing manifesto included William Blake and his wife Catherine, as
well as Wadström and his compatriot, the alchemist Augustus Nordenskjöld. This First
General Conference of the New Jerusalem Church would be indicative of future
Swedenborgian church efforts that glommed onto Swedenborg’s (new) Jerusalem code,
affixing the name of the city to their fledgling churches in England and America, and
much later, as noted, in Sweden. As Swedenborg had made the concept of a rational
understanding of scripture and spirituality central to his vision of a new kind of
Christianity, the early Swedenborgian churches also gravitated towards a moment re-
corded by Swedenborg in his final summa theologica, the True Christian Religion (1771).
There, Swedenborg details a beautiful heavenly “temple of wisdom” that redeploys
much of the same descriptive material found in John’s heavenly city: “it was square in
form,” Swedenborg writes, “and its roof was in the shape of a crown, with its lofty
arches rising on high all round. Its walls were continuous windows of crystal and its
82 Devin Zuber
gate of pearly substance.”18 Above the gate to the temple, Swedenborg sees an inscrip-
tion: nunc licet intellectualiter intrare in arcana fidei – “now it is permitted to enter in-
tellectually into the secrets of faith” – which Swedenborg interprets as a sign that now,
in the era of the new church and the dawning new Jerusalem, “one may enter with
understanding into the mysteries of faith.” The first Swedenborgian churches accord-
ingly often featured the shorthand phrase “Nunc Licet” somewhere in their architec-
tural program – a fitting conflation of the ecclesiastical Jerusalem onto the temple
space of learning that the academically-trained Swedenborg had originally described.
Swedenborg’s new Jerusalem was, fundamentally, an almost pedagogical transforma-
tion of spiritual consciousness, a new entering into “interior truths” with a rational un-
derstanding that would not conflict with science or religion: such a project appears
precisely at the schismatic disjuncture between science and religion that was to
become a hallmark of modernity, and Swedenborg’s theosophy must be seen as
an ambitious attempt to suture the widening gap, redeeming the Jerusalem code
for an increasingly secular age.
The Swedenborgian church movements have never been numerically very large, at
least when compared with the other Protestant and New Religious Movements that ap-
peared parallel to Swedenborg’s reception, such as Methodism or Mormonism. And yet,
the Swedenborgian’s ecclesiastical architecture – perhaps due, in-part, to the spacial
specificities of Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem, the lingering after-effects of a kind of theo-
logical psychogeography – would come to develop unique symbolic and artistic pro-
grams; several Swedenborgian churches have accordingly been given the highest legal
landmark status for their distinctive forms.19 In Stockholm, the Swedenborg Memorial
Church [Swedenborgs Minneskyrka], built on the Tegnérlunden park in Norrmalm, con-
tinues this departure from Protestant architectural norms. Designed by Nils Erland
Heurlin (1865–1947) and constructed in 1927, the interior features striking murals and
iconography of the New Jerusalem in the nave and sanctuary, all designed and executed
by the artist Erik Stenholm (1901–1976) (Fig. 3.1). Where a crucifixion would normally
be located, one finds instead a complex visual program showing the seven trumpet-
blowing angels of the Apocalypse – here rendered by Stenholm as graceful Art-Deco
maidens, stylized and flattened by the application of gold leaf to their halos. A brilliant
golden sun is in their midst, a representation of Swedenborg’s preferred description of
the Divine as a spiritual sun in heaven, radiating out love and wisdom.20
18 Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christian Religion: Containing the Universal Theology of the New
Church, trans. John C. Ager (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2009), no. 508.
19 In the United States, this includes the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, built in 1895, and
the Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (1913–1919): both are strong examples of how
Swedenborg’s theology could readily integrate with the anti-modernist ideologies of the Arts and
Crafts movement. See Paul Eli Ivey, “From New Church Architecture to City Beautiful,” in
Swedenborg and the Arts (Bryn Athyn College, Pennsylvania, 2017).
20 “The sun of heaven, in which is the Lord, is the common center of the universe.” Swedenborg,
Divine Love and Wisdom, nos. 152–3.
Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 83
Across three linked arches at the angels’ feet, Stenholm has painted the New
Jerusalem with its gates open, and inscribed across the archways one finds not the
usual invocation of “Nunc Licet,” but (in Swedish) Christ’s injunction from the
Sermon on the Mount to “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will
be added unto you” (Matt 6:33) (Fig. 3.3). This textual choice almost certainly mirrors
Swedenborg’s own little monograph, the New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Teachings,
which opens with an epigraph from this very section in the Gospel of Matthew.21 The
church, thus, mirrors a book that echoes, in turn, an allegorical Jerusalem code which
transformed the Holy City into symbol for a type of reading, a hermeneutic key to the
inner truths of Scripture. The building becomes a book. On the altar, prominently in
front of the Jerusalem program, is a large Word (or Bible), only ritually opened during
church services – another iconographic indication of the central importance that read-
ing scripture for its inner “spiritual” sense has played in Swedenborgian traditions
around the globe.
Jerusalem in Tartary and Africa
Slightly skewing, however, the one-to-one correlation between the inner sense of
Biblical scripture and Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem are his additional comments on
forms of Divine revelation that lay outside of Judeo-Christianity: things beyond the
four walls, if you will, of the Holy City that presuppose a form of Christian excep-
tionalism (or at the very least, a narrative of supercessionism). There is not enough
space here to go fully into Swedenborg’s rich and intriguing remarks about either
the contemporary Africans who were receiving oracular Divine revelations in the
interior of the continent, or his suggestions that a different lost “Ancient Word” –
equally as holy and filled with scriptural correspondences as the Judeo-Christian
bible – lay hidden somewhere in “Greater Tartary,” or present-day Mongolia.22
“Search for it in China,” he challenged his readers in an Indiana Jones-like gesture,
signalling Swedenborg’s proximity to an orientalist Zeitgeist that would soon see
Charles Wilkin’s first translations of the Bhagavad Gita, in 1785: “and peradventure
you will find it among the Tartars.”23
21 Swedenborg, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings: Drawn from Things Heard in Heaven.
22 For some of these statements on Africans, see Spiritual Experiences no. 4777 (Swedenborg, Emanuel
Swedenborg’s Diary: Recounting Spiritual Experiences During the Years 1745 to 1765), Secrets of Heaven
no. 2604, Heaven and Hell no. 326 (Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: Drawn
from Things Seen and Heard, trans. George Dole (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2000), and
True Christian Religion, no. 837–9.
23 Swedenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Diary: Recounting Spiritual Experiences During the Years
1745 to 1765, no. 11.
84 Devin Zuber
Fig. 3.3: New Jerusalem, Sanctuary Mural, Erik Stenholm, Swedenborgs Minneskyrka. Courtesy of
Swedenborgs Minneskyrka, Stockholm. Photo: Thomas Xavier Floyd, 2015.
Over the centuries, these enigmatic – if brief – remarks have catalysed various
Swedenborgians to seek proof of these alternative spiritual currents that pulsed
in some adjacent way to the advent of the New Jerusalem. Nordenskjöld and
Wadström, perhaps the two most significant early receivers of Swedenborg’s doc-
trines in Scandinavia, not only went onto establish the very first Abolitionist
Society in Sweden; infused with Swedenborg’s millennialism about the dawning
of a new age, an expectation that fuelled various eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century utopian imaginaries, they further embarked on a somewhat quixotic proj-
ect to establish anti-slavery colonies in West Africa where, ostensibly, one could
potentially discover this new African revelation.24 Wadström also published very in-
fluential anti-slavery manifestoes which brought him into contact with radical British
abolitionists, including William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. Although these coloni-
zation efforts failed spectacularly – Nordenskjöld and the other abolitionists were tragi-
cally slaughtered by French privateers at their colony in Sierra Leone, in 1795 – they
had a literary afterlife of sorts, and at least one prominent Blake scholar has argued that
the anti-slavery colonization efforts by the Scandinavian Swedenborgians are a crucial
context for understanding William Blake’s Book of Thel (1788–1790).25 For some
Swedenborgians, the new age heralded by the New Jerusalem, thus, could have a foot-
ing in non-western, non-Christian spaces.
24 Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Secret, 429.
25 On Nordenskjöld’s unfortunate end, see Marguerite Beck Block, The New Church in the New World:
A Study of Swedenborgianism in America (New York: Swedenborg Publishing Association, 1984), 54–5;
Thel has been read as a “post-colonial, post-Swedenborgian” text by David Worrall, “Thel in Africa:
William Blake and the Post-Colonial, Post-Swedenborgian Female Subject,” in The Reception of William
Blake in the Orient, ed. Stephen Clark (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006),
17–28. Thel is found in Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 3–6.
Chapter 3 An Apocalypse of Mind 85
Similarly, Swedenborg’s statements about the lost “Ancient Word” in Asia
have led several modern Swedenborgians to follow through with his injunction,
and to “seek it there, among the Tartars.” Dr. James Brush (now deceased) and
the Reverend Christopher Bown, an ordained minister with the American-based
General Church of the New Jerusalem, spent many months, from the early 1990’s
onwards, looking for remnants of this “Word” in various parts of Mongolia and
China – ultimately concluding, according to Brush, that it was entangled in a
form of Mongolian shamanism.26 Whatever one makes of the pair’s unresolved
findings, their orienting east mirrors some scholarly speculation on how Swedenborg’s
Ancient Word might refract a rudimentary cognisance of forms of Tibetan Buddhism
that Swedenborg may have acquired an awareness of through his cousin Peter
Schönström, a Swedish diplomat in Russia who had collected manuscripts and cu-
rios from that region in Asia.27 These exotic loci, at any rate, allowed non-western
religions to augment the circuitry of Swedenborg’s Jerusalem code, opening to a
flow of alternative spiritualities and modes of time that chafed against the secular
(or even nominally Christian) presumptions of modern Europe. The most celestially an-
gelic people in the world, Swedenborg wrote, who were welcomed immediately into
heaven, were not the white Christians of the west, but unknown African tribes who
lived far from the pernicious influence of Christian missionaries, who were more spiri-
tually “interior” than any other peoples living.28 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the
Swedish artist Ivan Aguéli (1869–1917), Sweden’s first significant convert to Islam and
a critical progenitor of modernist avant-garde aesthetics in Scandinavia, went through
a deeply Swedenborgian phase before becoming a Sufi, in 1902. Aguéli’s immersion in
Arabic in Cairo was critically preceded by his study of Sanskrit and Tibetan languages
through the scrim of his deep interest in Swedenborg’s lost Ancient Word and the the-
ory of correspondences.29 Via Swedenborg, it would seem, there were many different
avenues for approaching the Holy City.
26 James Brush and Christopher Bown, “In Search of the Ancient Word,” New Church Life 122, no. 3
(2002), 107–114; Tayana Arakchaa, email correspondences with author, 2010–2011; a Tuvan doc-
toral candidate who was Brush’s assistant and translator in Mongolia and who, by sheer coinci-
dence, ended up participating in a 2010 summer workshop that I had organized on law and culture
at the University of Osnabrück, Germany.
27 Anders Hallengren, Gallery of Mirrors: Reflections of Swedenborgian Thought (West Chester:
Swedenborg Foundation, 1998), 40–1.
28 Swedenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Diary: Recounting Spiritual Experiences During the Years
1745 to 1765, no. 4777; Swedenborg, True Christian Religion: Containing the Universal Theology of the
New Church, nos. 835–40.
29 Marianne Westerlund, “Ivan Aguéli–språket och språken,” in Ivan Aguéli, ed. Hans Henrik Brummer
(Stockholm: Atlantis, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, 2006), 95–111; see also Sorgenfrei’s important new
monograph, Simon Sorgenfrei, Det monoteistiska landskapet. Ivan Aguéli och Emanuel Swedenborg
(Stockholm: Ellerströms forlag AB, 2018), passim.
