The Heart Is A Hyperdrive: How Emanuel Swedenborg Talked To Aliens In 1758

And shaped the modern spiritual imagination

Emanuel Swedenborg had his first great spiritual vision on Easter weekend in 1741 at the age of 53, when the Son of God appeared to him.

He was already known as a psychic, demonstrating his powers on public occasions. Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote about his displays of clairvoyance, such as his vision of a great fire that was really burning in faraway Stockholm. Swedenborg developed these skills as a form of espionage. Remote viewing, a la The Men Who Stare At Goats, was considered a legitimate form of intelligence-gathering at the time. Much else of his working life is rumor. Historians of his life report “vague but persistent claims that he participated in secret political, diplomatic, and Masonic affairs,” Swedenborg historian Marsha Keith Schuchard writes.¹ Swedenborg was a member of the Hat Party, a supporter of Jacobites and French policy and Louis XV, who personally funded the anonymous publication of Swedenborg’s Arcana Celestia in London.

The capital of England is also where Swedenborg got recruited to diplomatic service, navigating “complex and often dangerous political byways,” and London is also where he died in 1772. “That he wrote in Latin was both an impediment and an aid to the spread of his work: it restricted his audience to the educated and it relieved official anxiety that his writings would corrupt ‘simple folk,’” Jonathan Rose and Ollie Hjern write.² Publication in London ensured that Swedenborg’s ideas crossed the Atlantic to North America in time for a newly-independent nation to adopt them.

A spiritual biography of Swedenborg begins with Swedish Protestantism. He was a Mason of the Franco-Scottish school, Schuchard notes. Established by the exiled Stuarts, this branch of Masonry was distinct from the English Masons by drawing “upon older traditions of Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian symbolism” to “maintain mystical morale” among the “dispersed brethren” of the Jacobite rebellions. So-called “second-sight” was one of their spiritual practices. Through “his erudite brother-in-law and intellectual mentor,” Swedenborg “also gained unusual access to heterodox Jewish mystical lore.” These studies made Swedenborg “familiar with the Kabbalistic meditation techniques which produce trance states, spirit communication, and clairvoyance.” His knowledge of letter-number transpositions in Kabbala was also useful for diplomatic codes and ciphers. Swedenborg was talented at “physiognomical analysis of facial expressions and body postures,” Schuchard writes. In one passage, Swedenborg observes that the “protruding lips” of aliens are proof of their honesty. At the time, that passed for scientific observation.

His impact was far-reaching. At the end of his life, Swedenborg “contributed to the efforts of a group of radical Rosicrucians in Hamburg and Kabbalistic Jews in Amsterdam and London to develop a new syncretic religion, which would merge Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystical themes,” Rose and Hjern write. “This rather bizarre and secretive project had significant political ramifications in Sweden, Denmark, and Europe.” Swedenborg’s writings exerted a profound influence on the formation of esoteric “Illuminist” Freemasonry. They also shaped the popular literary and religious imaginarium of the cosmos in the United States during the 19th century. That is, Americans learned how to imagine the physical universe as a spiritual domain from Emanuel Swedenborg.

He “maintains that there is life on every planetlike body, including the moon that orbits our earth,” Rose and Hjern explain, for “to believe anything else would be to underestimate the divine love. Given the Lord’s primary goal of a heaven from the human race, why else, he argues, would planets exist except to support human beings and ultimately populate heaven?” For heaven was a physical place, Swedenborg reported. Why, it was right up there in the physical heavens! In fact, every world in the universe had its own heaven in heaven, all of them teeming with souls. He knew because he had talked to them, Swedenborg wrote. The souls of aliens had shared mental images of their worlds, and he had also traveled to visit their worlds, been allowed glimpses of their lives and afterlives, both heavens and hells.

“In all of his discussion of other planets, Swedenborg’s central point is clear: he aims to show that the worship of the Lord is not simply an Earth-centered religion. Jesus Christ is God of the entire universe.” Swedenborg intended his ecumenical and theosophical ideas to revive religion in the early modern world. Despite his far-seeing powers, however, Swedenborg could not foretell that the aliens would show up one day in flying saucers, or that it would happen in the New World.