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Swedenborg Hidden Influence Johnny Appleseed Helen Keller and Ideas Everyone Uses

Swedenborg's Hidden Influence: Johnny Appleseed, Helen Keller and Ideas Everyone Uses traces how the Swedish scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) reached people who never met him, and how many ideas people now take for common sense about heaven, angels, love and the mind passed through his books. It is the study behind the Swedenborgian songs of Hathor Sandalphon. Where a link is only likely, this page says so. Alpha.

1. Who he was

A mining engineer on the Swedish Board of Mines, and an anatomist, astronomer and inventor. His Principia (1734) set out an early form of the nebular hypothesis, the idea that the planets formed from matter thrown off by the Sun, before Kant (1755) and Laplace (1796).
As an anatomist he placed the higher functions of the mind in the cerebral cortex and wrote on the cerebrospinal fluid, decades before this was accepted. He also sketched a flying machine (1714).
From 1743–45 he kept a dream diary (the Journal of Dreams), then turned to visions. He spent the rest of his life writing about heaven, hell, the spirit world and the inner sense of the Bible: Arcana Coelestia (1749–56), Heaven and Hell (1758), Earths in the Universe (1758), Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), Conjugial Love (1768) and True Christian Religion (1771).
He founded no church. The New Church (the New Jerusalem Church, or Swedenborgian Church) was formed by readers in London after his death, first meeting as a General Conference in 1789.

2. What people talked about in his lifetime

The Stockholm fire (July 1759). At a dinner in Gothenburg, Swedenborg is said to have described a fire burning in Stockholm, about 400 km away, as it happened, and its stopping three doors from his house. Messengers confirmed it days later.
The queen's secret and the lost receipt. He is said to have told Queen Louisa Ulrika a private matter from her dead brother, and to have found a widow's missing receipt by asking her late husband.
Immanuel Kant investigated these stories, bought the Arcana, and wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). It mocks Swedenborg, yet shaped Kant's own thinking on the limits of what can be known.

3. Johnny Appleseed

John Chapman (1774–1845) was born two years after Swedenborg died, so they never met. He was a New Church missionary on the Ohio and Indiana frontier as well as a planter of apple nurseries.
He carried Swedenborg's books and tracts, many of them supplied by the Philadelphia New Church merchant William Schlatter. Accounts say he divided a book into parts, left a section with one family and swapped it on his next visit, so one book served a whole valley.
A widely repeated account has him lying on a cabin floor reading aloud what he called "news right fresh from heaven".
What spoke to him (from accounts of his life; he wrote almost nothing himself):

** gentleness to all living things, which his friends tied to the teaching that everything in nature corresponds to something spiritual;

** a simple life;

** the promise of a heaven of loving use;

** the belief that marriage partners are reunited in heaven. He is said to have told friends he would have a spirit wife there.

4. Helen Keller

Helen Keller (1880–1968) was introduced to Swedenborg around 1896 by John Hitz, superintendent of Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Bureau. He gave her Heaven and Hell in raised print and later wrote out more passages for her.
Her book My Religion (1927), revised as Light in My Darkness, says what spoke to her:

** that the inner senses of the spirit are real and complete. A person blind and deaf to this world is not shut out of the spiritual one;

** that God is Love itself and punishes no one;

** that usefulness (Swedenborg's "uses") is the purpose of life;

** that the world of the spirit is as real as the world of the body.

She lent her name to the Swedenborg Foundation's work for the rest of her life.

5. Other readers

William Blake attended the New Church's first General Conference in 1789, then satirised it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Ralph Waldo Emerson made him one of six Representative Men (1850), as "Swedenborg; or, the Mystic".
Henry James Sr., father of William and Henry James, was a Swedenborgian theologian.
Honoré de Balzac wrote Séraphîta.
Charles Baudelaire wrote Correspondances from Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences. It became a founding poem of Symbolism.
D. T. Suzuki translated four of his books into Japanese and called him "the Buddha of the North".
Also: Goethe, Coleridge, Yeats, August Strindberg, Carl Jung (who read him while young) and Jorge Luis Borges.
In the arts: the sculptor Hiram Powers and the painter George Inness were Swedenborgians. The poet Robert Frost was raised in the New Church by his mother.
In medicine: many of the first American homeopaths (Hans Burch Gram, Constantine Hering) were Swedenborgians.

6. Common ideas that passed through Swedenborg

Many of these have older roots. Swedenborg put them into widely read print, and they spread from there, often without his name.

Angels were once people. Every angel was once a human being, and nobody was created an angel. The modern comfort that "Grandma is an angel now" is this idea.
Heaven as a real, social, active place. People keep their personalities and live in communities, with homes, work and conversation. Heaven is not clouds and harps. Victorian consolation books such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1868) made this popular.
You go where your love leads. No one is sent to hell. After death each person drifts, freely, to the company that matches their "ruling love". Modern ideas of a self-chosen afterlife echo this, as does C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce (an echo; Lewis credited George MacDonald).
Soulmates and marriage in heaven. True partners become "one angel" in heaven (Conjugial Love). The modern romantic "soulmate" draws on this among other sources.
A world of spirits after death, between heaven and hell: a place where the newly dead are met, wake up and are sorted gently. This fed 19th-century Spiritualism (Andrew Jackson Davis cited him). Raymond Moody discussed Swedenborg in Life After Life (1975), the book that named the "near-death experience".
Children who die are raised in heaven by angels.
Good people of every religion can be saved. A life of love and charity counts, not only right belief, and non-Christians who live well go to heaven. This was radical in the 1700s and is widely held now.
Life on other worlds, and spirits from other planets (Earths in the Universe, 1758).
Correspondences. Everything natural mirrors something spiritual: light is truth, warmth is love, a garden is wisdom. This came into poetry as Symbolism and into psychology as the reading of symbols.
The mind shapes reality (the "mind cure" and New Thought line). Warren Felt Evans, an early writer of the American New Thought / mind-cure movement, was a Swedenborgian. That movement leads on to "positive thinking" and the "law of attraction".
Usefulness as the meaning of life. Heaven is a "kingdom of uses", and to be happy is to be of use.

7. Where to read

His works are in the public domain. The Swedenborg Foundation publishes modern translations, and many older translations are free online.

Sources

Swedenborg E., Heaven and Hell (1758), Earths in the Universe (1758), Conjugial Love (1768), True Christian Religion (1771); Principia (1734).
Kant I., Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766). Emerson R. W., Representative Men (1850).
Keller H., My Religion (1927; rev. as Light in My Darkness).
Price R., Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth (1954). Means H., Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story (2011).
Lachman G., Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (2012). Moody R., Life After Life (1975).
McDannell C. and Lang B., Heaven: A History (1988), on the modern, social heaven.

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