The Occult Book by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub

Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish, by Per Krafft the Elder, c. 1766. The seventy-five-year-old Swedenborg holds the manuscript of his upcoming book, Apocalypsis revelata (Apocalypse Revealed).

1744

THE VISIONS OF EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was not a typical visionary. The son of a Lutheran bishop from a family with close ties to the Swedish throne, he received a first-rate scientific education at Uppsala University in Sweden and followed it with visits to universities and learned societies in England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Thereafter he took a government job as an inspector of mines, launched Sweden’s first scientific journal, and wrote no fewer than 154 books on the sciences and mathematics.

Swedenborg was in his fifties when his interests turned to occultism, and he began keeping a journal of his dreams and practicing meditation. Those practices bore unexpected fruit in 1744 with an intense visionary experience in which Jesus and the spirit of Swedenborg’s dead father appeared to him. This was the first of many visions that convinced Swedenborg that he had a special spiritual mission and set him to work on the first of many books.

He approached his visionary experiences in the same spirit in which he had classified ores for the department of mines: patiently and systematically, comparing the testimony of one set of angels with that of another. His first book on occult subjects, the massive twelve-volume Arcana coelestia (Celestial Secrets), appeared anonymously in 1749; his authorship soon leaked out, launching a controversy among European intellectuals that endured long after Swedenborg died.

Despite criticism from scientists and condemnation from religious authorities, Swedenborg labored on. By the end of his life he had written more than two hundred books on occult and religious subjects. His writings helped keep interest in occultism alive straight through the Age of Reason and encouraged the growth of the underground occult counterculture from which the great occult revival of the late nineteenth century would burgeon.

SEE ALSO: The Visions of Andrew Jackson Davis (1844)

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