CALLING ALL ANGELS:
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)
Taller than the others, this man
Walked among them, at a distance,
Now and then calling the angels
By their secret names. He would see
That which earthly eyes do not see:
The fierce geometry, the crystal
Labyrinth of God and the sordid
Milling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hell too
Are in your soul, with all their myths;
He knew, like the Greek, that the days
Of time are Eternity's mirrors.
In dry Latin he went on listing
The unconditional Last things.
-a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges on Swedenborg
When we look at Swedenborg’s life it’s tempting to divide it into two phases, which for convenience we’ll call the Normal and Oddball. According to this storyline, the Normal Phase spanned the first 57 years of his life, then around 1745 came to a relatively abrupt end. The problem with our two-phase model is that it’s misleading, because it suggests a sharp break in Swedenborg’s life, that one day he was a scientist, the next a mystic. But the Oddball had been brewing in Swedenborg for virtually his entire life, though he kept it pretty well hidden from public view until after the visit from God. He probably inherited the Oddball “gene” from his father, a Lutheran bishop named Jesper, who not only had Oddball tendencies but a rebellious streak to boot. During the 17th century one of the basic tenets of the Lutheran church was something called “faith alone” (sola fide), which held that the believer’s “faith alone” in God was enough to earn forgiveness of sins. Jesper, who was an outspoken critic of the church’s doctrinal rigidity, expressed sympathy for a group of dissenters that favored heart-felt communion with God over “faith alone.” This got him denounced as a heretic, the same label stuck on his son for other reasons a few decades down the road by the same Lutheran church. Of course independent thinking and deviation from the party line doesn’t an Oddball make. What was odd about Jesper was that, from a very early age, he believed our world was inhabited by angels, and that he could talk with them and solicit their guidance.
There’s no doubt that Jesper’s beliefs had a profound effect on Emanuel. We can say that initially Swedenborg was a scientist with a mystical agenda: even while probing the structure of matter (he intuited that matter consisted of infinitely small “natural points,” very much like modern atoms), or speculating on the creation of the universe (he was first to propose a nebular theory for the origin of galaxies), he was looking to “trace out the nature of the human soul” and for evidence of God’s handiwork in the world. Then, at a certain stage in his life, he simply flip-flopped the roles and became a mystic with a scientist’s eye for detail and penchant for formal organization and
HEAVENLY SECRETS: Swedenborg’s Writings, 1747 to 1772
Over the 260 or so years since Emanuel’s 1745 encounter, many commentators’ have tried explain what actually happened to him. Supporters naturally maintain he had a genuine experience of the divine, and was to some degree as a result, enlightened and graced with spiritual “X-ray vision.” Squinty-eyed skeptics though see nothing but an eruption of some pre-existing mental imbalance, or maybe a delayed reaction to his father’s death, or particularly virulent attack of epilepsy (from which there’s some evidence he suffered).
Swedenborg himself was convinced he had received a God-given “calling.” Within a couple of years he retreated from his worldly responsibilities to devote himself solely to “unfolding” a new version of life in the universe, which in his estimation had quite a few more dimensions and a much larger, if disembodied population, than commonly thought. He wrote voluminously about what he “saw” and “heard” as he traveled to other worlds and spoke with their inhabitants. In the last 27 years of his life, he produced 19 books, though several titles included two or more volumes. The Mother of all was his first (post-1745, he’d written other books before). Titled Heavenly Secrets (Arcana Coelestia, 1747-1756), it’s considered his magnum opus, if only because of its word count, three million approximately, on 7,000 pages spread over eight volumes. The book does just what God asked him to do, provide detailed commentary on the symbolism of the “Holy Scriptures,” or to be more precise, the first two books of the Pentateuch, Genesis and Exodus. In between commentaries, he made forays into a variety of areas, most significantly the correspondences between the mundane and spiritual worlds. His most widely read book was the three-volume Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen (De Coelo et Ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno, ex Auditis et Visis, 1758), a kind of travelogue to these ultimate destinations, infrequently if at all toured by the living. His goal in writing the book was to counter the “infecting and corrupting” influence of “worldly people” who question or, even worse, deny the existence of these post-life venues. So he was granted the opportunity “to be with angels and to talk with them person to person. ... to see what is in heaven and in hell ... [and] allowed therefore to describe what I have heard and seen, in the hopes of shedding light where there is ignorance, and of dispelling skepticism.”
You might wonder: What is heaven like? Full of light and singing and rejoicing and stuff like that? Actually, if we take Swedenborg’s word for it, heaven is very much like Earth “except everything is more perfect,” sort of like Martha Stewart’s home. Angels wear clothes like ours, live in houses like ours, participate in angel governments like ... well, they have governments, go to church, write and read books, and so on. And Hell? The surprise is that souls newly arrived in the afterlife are never assigned there by God, who Swedenborg says is the essence of goodness, love, and mercy itself, and wouldn’t hurt a fly’s soul. When we come knock, knock, knockin’ on Heaven’s door, the angels offer to coach us on what is “good and true,” something like those courses that help high school kids prepare for the SAT. However, Swedenborg continues
... if we as spirits are the kind of people who have been familiar with things like this in the world but have denied or rejected them at heart, then after some conversation we want to get away from them and try to leave. When the angels notice this, they leave us. After spending some time with various other people, we eventually take up with people who are devloted to similar evils ... When this happens, we are turning away from the Lord and turning our faces toward the hell we were united to in the world, where people live who are engaged in a similar love of evil.
According to Swedenborg then, old habits are really hard to break, and some souls actually choose to literally “go to Hell.”
The rest of his books pretty much cover all the theological bases: God, the Holy Spirit and Creation, Man, Free Will, Repentance, and the Fall, the Spirit World, Faith and Charity, the Second Coming, Baptism, and Death. There are also accounts of his journeys to other “Earths”–the six other planets known at the time and the Moon–and his talks with their inhabitants. It’s reasonable to assume, with all of this first-hand information on heretofore uncharted worlds that his books would have sold like hot cakes. But no, during his lifetime nobody much read any of his books–they were written in Latin for goodness sake, which right away narrowed his popular audience, and it’s widely agreed, except by Swedenborgians, that while his visions might have been in glorious technicolor, his prose was strictly niger-et-albus. His books were mostly sold below cost, with Swedenborg absorbing the loss, or given away.
Plainly many of Swedenborg’s visions and resulting conclusions weren’t exactly kosher, and he rightly foresaw that they would rub the orthodox clergy the wrong way. So he wisely published his early books under that popular old pen name, Anonymous. Maddeningly for the Thought Police of the time, they had no one to persecute until, after a few years, somebody let the cat out of the bag. Swedenborg was right. Officials of the Lutheran church, though like everybody else hardly cracked open one of his books, intuited from what little they read that the rest of the material would probably be heretical, and went ballistic. The controversy labored on for a few years, snagged a couple of devotees who were charged with heresy for promulgating Swedenborgian ideas, but finally the whole mess was dropped.
FOR AS MAN THINKS SO HE BREATHES: Swedenborg’s Internal Respiration (respiratio interna)
What’s most intriguing about Swedenborg for us as Yoga enthusiasts is his lifelong experiments with breathing, and his later experiments in what can only be called Tantric sexuality. Given his family environment and his father’s beliefs, it’s not surprising that, by our standards, Emanuel was an unusual child. He mentions that from his fourth to his tenth years his thoughts were continually on God and salvation, and that his greatest delight was to “converse with the Clergy concerning Faith.” And he recounts how, in order to intensify his bedtime prayers, he spontaneously held his breath for an inordinate length of time. This is of course exactly what Yogis do to stabilize their consciousness in meditation.
While living in London he fell in with followers of Sabbatai Zevi, a notorious Kabbalist who a hundred years earlier had promoted himself as the Jewish Messiah. Some members of this circle clandestinely indulged in “holy sinning,” which involved what was for the time–and maybe still is–some unequivocally forbidden sexual practices. Swedenborg began to study the extremely risky technique of “mystical marriage,” a discipline that involved X-rated visualizations combined with a subtle form of breathing called “genital breathing.” If successful, the process is supposed to result in the sublimation of sexual energy–precisely the Tantrika’s goal–and the consequent re-integration of the alienated self. But there were no guarantees: one false step and the hapless practitioner could potentially drive himself to madness. It appears that Swedenborg’s process had a few rough patches: one report has him wandering the streets of London naked and raving about being the Messiah, though defenders hotly denied the story as an attempted character assassination. In the end, Swedenborg seems to have pushed all the right buttons, and entered a state he describes as one of “indescribable bliss.”
Was Swedenborg a Tantric Yogi? Evidence is inconclusive, much of what he practiced he discovered on his own or learned from his Kabbalist connections. But there’s also some evidence that he knew about certain East Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan Yogic practices.
What would a Swedenborgian pranayama practice be like? For humans Swedenborg proposes two kinds of breathing. By far the more familiar to us is “natural” or “external” respiration (ER), which is the effortful way most of us breathe most of the time. The other kind of breathing, “spiritual” or “internal” respiration (IR), is very rare and has been for centuries. In contrast to ER, IR is effortless (since God is directly regulating the breath), imperceptible to most humans but always to some degree feeding ER, since if “man were deprived of this influx, he would instantly fall down dead.”
These two breaths though aren’t clear-cut, either/or categories; instead they’re extremes on a breathing “spectrum” that, like the light spectrum, has countless “colors” in between. Your position on the spectrum–where you are on this spectrum–depends on how close you are to God through the “marriage” of love (heart) and wisdom (brain). Once upon a time, in Swedenborg’s version of the Golden Age, all humans breathed internally because we all were still straight arrows. People then communicated with one another “angelically,” as the angels do, or “tacitly” in Swedenborg’s terminology. Our hearing is the result of air waves beating against our ear drums, creating what Swedenborg calls external sound. With IR, the pure exhale itself carries the message, wordlessly, and the recipient soundlessly inhales the it through her nostrils! The breath-message then passes along the Eustachian tube (which connects the nasal pharynx to middle ear) to the inside of the ear drum, where it’s “heard.”
His rules of conduct
Often to read and meditate on the Word of God
To submit everything to the will of Divine Providence.
To observe in everything a propriety of behavior, and to keep the conscience clear.
To discharge with fidelity the functions of my employments, and to make myself in all things useful to society.
In his Spiritual Diary he even writes about a vision he had of a band of “Chinese, sitting there, as the Indians are wont to do with the feet crossed; and I was told that angels spoke wisely to them about God and about His marvelous [attributes], and that they were so delighted at this, that the were in the tranquillity of peace.”
Whatever influences he absorbed from the East, Vivekananda would have felt right at home in Swedenborg’s breathing universe. In traditional Yoga the universe is created in the outbreath of the Absolute, brahman. This means we’re essentially an exhalation, waiting patiently for the next inhalation, when we’ll all be reabsorbed back into the Source ... don’t worry though, another exhale will soon follow. Similarly in Swedenborg all breath–whether human or angelic–emanates from God, so that breath is the thread that unifies every living creature. Though all creatures participate in this Great Breath, each population retains its own breathing identity, as does each individual in those populations.
A MACHINE TO FLY IN THE AIR: Swedenborg’s Inventions
Any of these proposals seem familiar? Even in his Normal Phase in the early 18th century, Swedenborg was thinking way outside the box:
The construction of a sort of ship, in which a man can go below the surface of the sea, and do great damage to the fleet of an enemy.
A machine, driven by fire, for pumping water.
A bridge which can be opened and shut.
A new construction of air-guns, by which a thousand balls may be discharged through one tube, in one moment.
A universal musical instrument, by means of which the most inexperienced musician can execute all the kinds of modulations, which are found in notation.
A flying chariot, or the possibility of floating in the air and moving through it. (He later wrote an article on this idea, published anonymously, where he called it a Machine to Fly in the Air. In 1910 the Royal Aeronautical Society deemed it the “first reasonable suggestion to build a heavier-than-air flying machine.”).
A method of discovering the desires and affections of the minds of men by analysis.
WE ARE NOT ALONE: Swedenborg on the Inhabitants and Spirits of Other Earths
MERCURY
There are spirits whose sole study is to acquire to themselves knowledges, because they are delighted only with knowledges. Therefore these spirits are permitted to wander about, and even to pass out of this solar system into others, and to procure for themselves knowledges. They have declared that there are earths inhabited by men, not only in this solar system, but also out of it in the starry heaven, to an immense number. These spirits are from the planet Mercury.
JUPITER
... no one ever covets the goods of another; and that it never enters into their minds to desire the possessions of another, still less to obtain them fraudulently, and least of all to break in and plunder. This they consider as a crime against human nature, and regard it as horrible. When I would have told them that on this earth there are wars, depredations, and murders, they then turned away, and were unwilling to hear.
SATURN
They are little solicitous about food and raiment, they feed on the fruits and legumes their earth produces; and they are clothed slightly, being encompassed with a coarse skin or coat ... Moreover, all on that earth know that they will live after death; and that on this account also they make light of their bodies, only so far as regards that life, which they say is to remain and serve the Lord. It is for this reason likewise that they do not bury the bodies of the dead, but cast them forth, and cover them with branches of forest trees.
VENUS
... there are two kinds of men, of dispositions opposite to each other; the first mild and humane, the second savage and almost like wild beasts.
Taller than the others, this man
Walked among them, at a distance,
Now and then calling the angels
By their secret names. He would see
That which earthly eyes do not see:
The fierce geometry, the crystal
Labyrinth of God and the sordid
Milling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hell too
Are in your soul, with all their myths;
He knew, like the Greek, that the days
Of time are Eternity's mirrors.
In dry Latin he went on listing
The unconditional Last things.
-a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges on Swedenborg
When we look at Swedenborg’s life it’s tempting to divide it into two phases, which for convenience we’ll call the Normal and Oddball. According to this storyline, the Normal Phase spanned the first 57 years of his life, then around 1745 came to a relatively abrupt end. The problem with our two-phase model is that it’s misleading, because it suggests a sharp break in Swedenborg’s life, that one day he was a scientist, the next a mystic. But the Oddball had been brewing in Swedenborg for virtually his entire life, though he kept it pretty well hidden from public view until after the visit from God. He probably inherited the Oddball “gene” from his father, a Lutheran bishop named Jesper, who not only had Oddball tendencies but a rebellious streak to boot. During the 17th century one of the basic tenets of the Lutheran church was something called “faith alone” (sola fide), which held that the believer’s “faith alone” in God was enough to earn forgiveness of sins. Jesper, who was an outspoken critic of the church’s doctrinal rigidity, expressed sympathy for a group of dissenters that favored heart-felt communion with God over “faith alone.” This got him denounced as a heretic, the same label stuck on his son for other reasons a few decades down the road by the same Lutheran church. Of course independent thinking and deviation from the party line doesn’t an Oddball make. What was odd about Jesper was that, from a very early age, he believed our world was inhabited by angels, and that he could talk with them and solicit their guidance.
There’s no doubt that Jesper’s beliefs had a profound effect on Emanuel. We can say that initially Swedenborg was a scientist with a mystical agenda: even while probing the structure of matter (he intuited that matter consisted of infinitely small “natural points,” very much like modern atoms), or speculating on the creation of the universe (he was first to propose a nebular theory for the origin of galaxies), he was looking to “trace out the nature of the human soul” and for evidence of God’s handiwork in the world. Then, at a certain stage in his life, he simply flip-flopped the roles and became a mystic with a scientist’s eye for detail and penchant for formal organization and
HEAVENLY SECRETS: Swedenborg’s Writings, 1747 to 1772
Over the 260 or so years since Emanuel’s 1745 encounter, many commentators’ have tried explain what actually happened to him. Supporters naturally maintain he had a genuine experience of the divine, and was to some degree as a result, enlightened and graced with spiritual “X-ray vision.” Squinty-eyed skeptics though see nothing but an eruption of some pre-existing mental imbalance, or maybe a delayed reaction to his father’s death, or particularly virulent attack of epilepsy (from which there’s some evidence he suffered).
Swedenborg himself was convinced he had received a God-given “calling.” Within a couple of years he retreated from his worldly responsibilities to devote himself solely to “unfolding” a new version of life in the universe, which in his estimation had quite a few more dimensions and a much larger, if disembodied population, than commonly thought. He wrote voluminously about what he “saw” and “heard” as he traveled to other worlds and spoke with their inhabitants. In the last 27 years of his life, he produced 19 books, though several titles included two or more volumes. The Mother of all was his first (post-1745, he’d written other books before). Titled Heavenly Secrets (Arcana Coelestia, 1747-1756), it’s considered his magnum opus, if only because of its word count, three million approximately, on 7,000 pages spread over eight volumes. The book does just what God asked him to do, provide detailed commentary on the symbolism of the “Holy Scriptures,” or to be more precise, the first two books of the Pentateuch, Genesis and Exodus. In between commentaries, he made forays into a variety of areas, most significantly the correspondences between the mundane and spiritual worlds. His most widely read book was the three-volume Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen (De Coelo et Ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno, ex Auditis et Visis, 1758), a kind of travelogue to these ultimate destinations, infrequently if at all toured by the living. His goal in writing the book was to counter the “infecting and corrupting” influence of “worldly people” who question or, even worse, deny the existence of these post-life venues. So he was granted the opportunity “to be with angels and to talk with them person to person. ... to see what is in heaven and in hell ... [and] allowed therefore to describe what I have heard and seen, in the hopes of shedding light where there is ignorance, and of dispelling skepticism.”
You might wonder: What is heaven like? Full of light and singing and rejoicing and stuff like that? Actually, if we take Swedenborg’s word for it, heaven is very much like Earth “except everything is more perfect,” sort of like Martha Stewart’s home. Angels wear clothes like ours, live in houses like ours, participate in angel governments like ... well, they have governments, go to church, write and read books, and so on. And Hell? The surprise is that souls newly arrived in the afterlife are never assigned there by God, who Swedenborg says is the essence of goodness, love, and mercy itself, and wouldn’t hurt a fly’s soul. When we come knock, knock, knockin’ on Heaven’s door, the angels offer to coach us on what is “good and true,” something like those courses that help high school kids prepare for the SAT. However, Swedenborg continues
... if we as spirits are the kind of people who have been familiar with things like this in the world but have denied or rejected them at heart, then after some conversation we want to get away from them and try to leave. When the angels notice this, they leave us. After spending some time with various other people, we eventually take up with people who are devloted to similar evils ... When this happens, we are turning away from the Lord and turning our faces toward the hell we were united to in the world, where people live who are engaged in a similar love of evil.
According to Swedenborg then, old habits are really hard to break, and some souls actually choose to literally “go to Hell.”
The rest of his books pretty much cover all the theological bases: God, the Holy Spirit and Creation, Man, Free Will, Repentance, and the Fall, the Spirit World, Faith and Charity, the Second Coming, Baptism, and Death. There are also accounts of his journeys to other “Earths”–the six other planets known at the time and the Moon–and his talks with their inhabitants. It’s reasonable to assume, with all of this first-hand information on heretofore uncharted worlds that his books would have sold like hot cakes. But no, during his lifetime nobody much read any of his books–they were written in Latin for goodness sake, which right away narrowed his popular audience, and it’s widely agreed, except by Swedenborgians, that while his visions might have been in glorious technicolor, his prose was strictly niger-et-albus. His books were mostly sold below cost, with Swedenborg absorbing the loss, or given away.
Plainly many of Swedenborg’s visions and resulting conclusions weren’t exactly kosher, and he rightly foresaw that they would rub the orthodox clergy the wrong way. So he wisely published his early books under that popular old pen name, Anonymous. Maddeningly for the Thought Police of the time, they had no one to persecute until, after a few years, somebody let the cat out of the bag. Swedenborg was right. Officials of the Lutheran church, though like everybody else hardly cracked open one of his books, intuited from what little they read that the rest of the material would probably be heretical, and went ballistic. The controversy labored on for a few years, snagged a couple of devotees who were charged with heresy for promulgating Swedenborgian ideas, but finally the whole mess was dropped.
FOR AS MAN THINKS SO HE BREATHES: Swedenborg’s Internal Respiration (respiratio interna)
What’s most intriguing about Swedenborg for us as Yoga enthusiasts is his lifelong experiments with breathing, and his later experiments in what can only be called Tantric sexuality. Given his family environment and his father’s beliefs, it’s not surprising that, by our standards, Emanuel was an unusual child. He mentions that from his fourth to his tenth years his thoughts were continually on God and salvation, and that his greatest delight was to “converse with the Clergy concerning Faith.” And he recounts how, in order to intensify his bedtime prayers, he spontaneously held his breath for an inordinate length of time. This is of course exactly what Yogis do to stabilize their consciousness in meditation.
While living in London he fell in with followers of Sabbatai Zevi, a notorious Kabbalist who a hundred years earlier had promoted himself as the Jewish Messiah. Some members of this circle clandestinely indulged in “holy sinning,” which involved what was for the time–and maybe still is–some unequivocally forbidden sexual practices. Swedenborg began to study the extremely risky technique of “mystical marriage,” a discipline that involved X-rated visualizations combined with a subtle form of breathing called “genital breathing.” If successful, the process is supposed to result in the sublimation of sexual energy–precisely the Tantrika’s goal–and the consequent re-integration of the alienated self. But there were no guarantees: one false step and the hapless practitioner could potentially drive himself to madness. It appears that Swedenborg’s process had a few rough patches: one report has him wandering the streets of London naked and raving about being the Messiah, though defenders hotly denied the story as an attempted character assassination. In the end, Swedenborg seems to have pushed all the right buttons, and entered a state he describes as one of “indescribable bliss.”
Was Swedenborg a Tantric Yogi? Evidence is inconclusive, much of what he practiced he discovered on his own or learned from his Kabbalist connections. But there’s also some evidence that he knew about certain East Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan Yogic practices.
What would a Swedenborgian pranayama practice be like? For humans Swedenborg proposes two kinds of breathing. By far the more familiar to us is “natural” or “external” respiration (ER), which is the effortful way most of us breathe most of the time. The other kind of breathing, “spiritual” or “internal” respiration (IR), is very rare and has been for centuries. In contrast to ER, IR is effortless (since God is directly regulating the breath), imperceptible to most humans but always to some degree feeding ER, since if “man were deprived of this influx, he would instantly fall down dead.”
These two breaths though aren’t clear-cut, either/or categories; instead they’re extremes on a breathing “spectrum” that, like the light spectrum, has countless “colors” in between. Your position on the spectrum–where you are on this spectrum–depends on how close you are to God through the “marriage” of love (heart) and wisdom (brain). Once upon a time, in Swedenborg’s version of the Golden Age, all humans breathed internally because we all were still straight arrows. People then communicated with one another “angelically,” as the angels do, or “tacitly” in Swedenborg’s terminology. Our hearing is the result of air waves beating against our ear drums, creating what Swedenborg calls external sound. With IR, the pure exhale itself carries the message, wordlessly, and the recipient soundlessly inhales the it through her nostrils! The breath-message then passes along the Eustachian tube (which connects the nasal pharynx to middle ear) to the inside of the ear drum, where it’s “heard.”
His rules of conduct
Often to read and meditate on the Word of God
To submit everything to the will of Divine Providence.
To observe in everything a propriety of behavior, and to keep the conscience clear.
To discharge with fidelity the functions of my employments, and to make myself in all things useful to society.
In his Spiritual Diary he even writes about a vision he had of a band of “Chinese, sitting there, as the Indians are wont to do with the feet crossed; and I was told that angels spoke wisely to them about God and about His marvelous [attributes], and that they were so delighted at this, that the were in the tranquillity of peace.”
Whatever influences he absorbed from the East, Vivekananda would have felt right at home in Swedenborg’s breathing universe. In traditional Yoga the universe is created in the outbreath of the Absolute, brahman. This means we’re essentially an exhalation, waiting patiently for the next inhalation, when we’ll all be reabsorbed back into the Source ... don’t worry though, another exhale will soon follow. Similarly in Swedenborg all breath–whether human or angelic–emanates from God, so that breath is the thread that unifies every living creature. Though all creatures participate in this Great Breath, each population retains its own breathing identity, as does each individual in those populations.
A MACHINE TO FLY IN THE AIR: Swedenborg’s Inventions
Any of these proposals seem familiar? Even in his Normal Phase in the early 18th century, Swedenborg was thinking way outside the box:
The construction of a sort of ship, in which a man can go below the surface of the sea, and do great damage to the fleet of an enemy.
A machine, driven by fire, for pumping water.
A bridge which can be opened and shut.
A new construction of air-guns, by which a thousand balls may be discharged through one tube, in one moment.
A universal musical instrument, by means of which the most inexperienced musician can execute all the kinds of modulations, which are found in notation.
A flying chariot, or the possibility of floating in the air and moving through it. (He later wrote an article on this idea, published anonymously, where he called it a Machine to Fly in the Air. In 1910 the Royal Aeronautical Society deemed it the “first reasonable suggestion to build a heavier-than-air flying machine.”).
A method of discovering the desires and affections of the minds of men by analysis.
WE ARE NOT ALONE: Swedenborg on the Inhabitants and Spirits of Other Earths
MERCURY
There are spirits whose sole study is to acquire to themselves knowledges, because they are delighted only with knowledges. Therefore these spirits are permitted to wander about, and even to pass out of this solar system into others, and to procure for themselves knowledges. They have declared that there are earths inhabited by men, not only in this solar system, but also out of it in the starry heaven, to an immense number. These spirits are from the planet Mercury.
JUPITER
... no one ever covets the goods of another; and that it never enters into their minds to desire the possessions of another, still less to obtain them fraudulently, and least of all to break in and plunder. This they consider as a crime against human nature, and regard it as horrible. When I would have told them that on this earth there are wars, depredations, and murders, they then turned away, and were unwilling to hear.
SATURN
They are little solicitous about food and raiment, they feed on the fruits and legumes their earth produces; and they are clothed slightly, being encompassed with a coarse skin or coat ... Moreover, all on that earth know that they will live after death; and that on this account also they make light of their bodies, only so far as regards that life, which they say is to remain and serve the Lord. It is for this reason likewise that they do not bury the bodies of the dead, but cast them forth, and cover them with branches of forest trees.
VENUS
... there are two kinds of men, of dispositions opposite to each other; the first mild and humane, the second savage and almost like wild beasts.
