familiar of a trance medium or automatic writer, by Allen Cardec,
or by some American, or by myself, or arranged the fragments into
some pattern, till I believed myself the discoverer of a vast
generalization. I lived in excitement, amused to make Holloway
interpret Aran, and constantly comparing my discoveries with what I
have learned of mediæval tradition among fellow students, with the
reveries of a Neo-platonist, of a seventeenth-century Platonist, of
Paracelsus or a Japanese poet. Then one day I opened _The Spiritual
Diary_ of Swedenborg, which I had not taken down for twenty years,
and found all there, even certain thoughts I had not set on paper
because they had seemed fantastic from the lack of some traditional
foundation. It was strange I should have forgotten so completely a
writer I had read with some care before the fascination of Blake and
Boehme had led me away.
II
It was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as
against the abstract reasoning of the learned, the doctrine and
practice of the desolate places, of shepherds and of midwives, and
discovered a world of spirits where there was a scenery like that of
earth, human forms, grotesque or beautiful, senses that knew pleasure
and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted upon canvas,
or put into stories to make one's hair stand up. He had mastered the
science of his time, he had written innumerable scientific works in
Latin, had been the first to formulate the nebular hypothesis and
wrote a cold abstract style, the result it may be of preoccupation
with stones and metals, for he had been assessor of mines to the
Swedish Government, and of continual composition in a dead language.
In his fifty-eighth year he was sitting in an inn in London, where
he had gone about the publication of a book, when a spirit appeared
before him who was, he believed, Christ himself, and told him that
henceforth he could commune with spirits and angels. From that moment
he was a mysterious man describing distant events as if they were
before his eyes, and knowing dead men's secrets, if we are to accept
testimony that seemed convincing to Emmanuel Kant. The sailors who
carried him upon his many voyages spoke of the charming of the waves
and of favouring winds that brought them sooner than ever before
to their journey's end, and an ambassador described how a queen, he
himself looking on, fainted when Swedenborg whispered in her ear
some secret known only to her and to her dead brother. And all this
happened to a man without egotism, without drama, without a sense
of the picturesque, and who wrote a dry language, lacking fire and
emotion, and who to William Blake seemed but an arranger and putter
away of the old Church, a Samson shorn by the churches, an author not
of a book, but of an index. He considered heaven and hell and God,
the angels, the whole destiny of man, as if he were sitting before a
large table in a Government office putting little pieces of mineral
ore into small square boxes for an assistant to pack away in drawers.
All angels were once men, he says, and it is therefore men who have
entered into what he calls the Celestial State and become angels,
who attend us immediately after death, and communicate to us their
thoughts, not by speaking, but by looking us in the face as they
sit beside the head of our body. When they find their thoughts are
communicated they know the time has come to separate the spiritual
from the physical body. If a man begins to feel that he can endure
them no longer, as he doubtless will, for in their presence he can
think and feel but sees nothing, lesser angels who belong to truth
more than to love take their place and he is in the light again, but
in all likelihood these angels also will be too high and he will
slip from state to state until he finds himself after a few days
"with those who are in accord with his life in the world; with them
he finds his life, and, wonderful to relate, he then leads a life
similar to that he led in the world." This first state of shifting and
readjustment seems to correspond with a state of sleep more modern
seers discover to follow upon death. It is characteristic of his whole
religious system, the slow drifting of like to like. Then follows a
period which may last but a short time or many years, while the soul
lives a life so like that of the world that it may not even believe
that it has died, for "when what is spiritual touches and sees what
is spiritual the effect is the same as when what is natural touches
what is natural." It is the other world of the early races, of those
whose dead are in the rath or the faery hill, of all who see no place
of reward and punishment but a continuance of this life, with cattle
and sheep, markets and war. He describes what he has seen, and only
partly explains it, for, unlike science which is founded upon past
experience, his work, by the very nature of his gift, looks for the
clearing away of obscurities to unrecorded experience. He is revealing
something and that which is revealed, so long as it remains modest
and simple, has the same right with the child in the cradle to put
off to the future the testimony of its worth. This earth-resembling
life is the creation of the image-making power of the mind, plucked
naked from the body, and mainly of the images in the memory. All our
work has gone with us, the books we have written can be opened and
read or put away for later use, even though their print and paper have
been sold to the buttermen; and reading his description one notices,
a discovery one had thought peculiar to the last generation, that the
"most minute particulars which enter the memory remain there and are
never obliterated," and there as here we do not always know all that
is in our memory, but at need angelic spirits who act upon us there as
here, widening and deepening the consciousness at will, can draw forth
all the past, and make us live again all our transgressions and see our
victims "as if they were present, together with the place, words, and
motives"; and that suddenly, "as when a scene bursts upon the sight"
and yet continues "for hours together," and like the transgressions,
all the pleasure and pain of sensible life awaken again and again, all
our passionate events rush up about us and not as seeming imagination,
for imagination is now the world. And yet another impulse comes and
goes, flitting through all, a preparation for the spiritual abyss,
for out of the celestial world, immediately beyond the world of form,
fall certain seeds as it were that exfoliate through us into forms,
elaborate scenes, buildings, alterations of form that are related
by "correspondence" or "signature" to celestial incomprehensible
realities. Meanwhile those who have loved or fought see one another
in the unfolding of a dream, believing it may be that they wound one
another or kill one another, severing arms or hands, or that their lips
are joined in a kiss, and the countryman has need but of Swedenborg's
keen ears and eagle sight to hear a noise of swords in the empty
valley, or to meet the old master hunting with all his hounds upon the
stroke of midnight among the moonlit fields. But gradually we begin to
change and possess only those memories we have related to our emotion
or our thought; all that was accidental or habitual dies away and we
begin an active present life, for apart from that calling up of the
past we are not punished or rewarded for our actions when in the world
but only for what we do when out of it. Up till now we have disguised
our real selves and those who have lived well for fear or favour have
walked with holy men and women, and the wise man and the dunce have
been associated in common learning, but now the ruling love has begun
to remake circumstance and our body.
Swedenborg had spoken with shades that had been learned Latinists, or
notable Hebrew scholars, and found, because they had done everything
from the memory and nothing from thought and emotion, they had become
but simple men. We have already met our friends, but if we were to meet
them now for the first time we should not recognize them, for all has
been kneaded up anew, arrayed in order and made one piece. "Every man
has many loves, but still they all have reference to his ruling love
and make one with it or together compose it," and our surrender to that
love, as to supreme good, is no new thought, for Villiers de l'Isle
Adam quotes Thomas Aquinas as having said, "Eternity is the possession
of one's self, as in a single moment." During the fusing and rending
man flits, as it were, from one flock of the dead to another, seeking
always those who are like himself, for as he puts off disguise he
becomes unable to endure what is unrelated to his love, even becoming
insane among things that are too fine for him.
So heaven and hell are built always anew and in hell or heaven all do
what they please and all are surrounded by scenes and circumstance
which are the expression of their natures and the creation of their
thought. Swedenborg because he belongs to an eighteenth century not yet
touched by the romantic revival feels horror amid rocky uninhabited
places, and so believes that the evil are in such places while the good
are amid smooth grass and garden walks and the clear sunlight of Claude
Lorraine. He describes all in matter-of-fact words, his meeting with
this or that dead man, and the place where he found him, and yet we
are not to understand him literally, for space as we know it has come
to an end and a difference of state has begun to take its place, and
wherever a spirit's thought is, the spirit cannot help but be. Nor
should we think of spirit as divided from spirit, as men are from each
other, for they share each other's thoughts and life, and those whom he
has called celestial angels, while themselves mediums to those above,
commune with men and lower spirits, through orders of mediatorial
spirits, not by a conveyance of messages, but as though a hand were
thrust within a hundred gloves,[1] one glove outside another, and so
there is a continual influx from God to man. It flows to us through the
evil angels as through the good, for the dark fire is the perversion
of God's life and the evil angels have their office in the equilibrium
that is our freedom, in the building of that fabulous bridge made out
of the edge of a sword.
To the eyes of those that are in the high heaven "all things laugh,
sport, and live," and not merely because they are beautiful things but
because they arouse by a minute correspondence of form and emotion
the heart's activity, and being founded, as it were, in this changing
heart, all things continually change and shimmer. The garments of all
befit minutely their affections, those that have most wisdom and most
love being the most nobly garmented, in ascending order from shimmering
white, through garments of many colours and garments that are like
flame, to the angels of the highest heaven that are naked.
In the west of Ireland the country people say that after death every
man grows upward or downward to the likeness of thirty years, perhaps
because at that age Christ began his ministry, and stays always in
that likeness; and these angels move always towards "the springtime
of their life" and grow more and more beautiful, "the more thousand
years they live," and women who have died infirm with age, and yet
lived in faith and charity, and true love towards husband or lover,
come "after a succession of years" to an adolescence that was not in
Helen's Mirror, "for to grow old in heaven is to grow young."
There went on about Swedenborg an intermittent "Battle of the
Friends" and on certain occasions had not the good fought upon his
side, the evil troop, by some carriage accident or the like, would
have caused his death, for all associations of good spirits have an
answering mob, whose members grow more hateful to look on through the
centuries. "Their faces in general are horrible, and empty of life
like corpses, those of some are black, of some fiery like torches,
of some hideous with pimples, boils, and ulcers; with many no face
appears, but in its place a something hairy or bony, and in some one
can but see the teeth." And yet among themselves they are seeming men
and but show their right appearance when the light of heaven, which
of all things they most dread, beats upon them; and seem to live in a
malignant gaiety, and they burn always in a fire that is God's love
and wisdom, changed into their own hunger and misbelief.
III
In Lady Gregory's stories there is a man who heard the newly dropped
lambs of faery crying in November, and much evidence to show a
topsy-turvydom of seasons, our spring being their autumn, our winter
their summer, and Mary Battle, my Uncle George Pollexfen's old
servant, was accustomed to say that no dream had a true meaning after
the rise of the sap; and Lady Gregory learned somewhere on Sleive
Ochta that if one told one's dreams to the trees fasting the trees
would wither. Swedenborg saw some like opposition of the worlds, for
what hides the spirits from our sight and touch, as he explains,
is that their light and heat are darkness and cold to us and our
light and heat darkness and cold to them, but they can see the
world through our eyes and so make our light their light. He seems
however to warn us against a movement whose philosophy he announced
or created, when he tells us to seek no conscious intercourse with
any that fall short of the celestial rank. At ordinary times they do
not see us or know that we are near, but when we speak to them we
are in danger of their deceits. "They have a passion for inventing,"
and do not always know that they invent. "It has been shown me many
times that the spirits speaking with me did not know but that they
were the men and women I was thinking of; neither did other spirits
know the contrary. Thus yesterday and today one known of me in life
was personated. The personation was so like him in all respects, so
far as known to me, that nothing could be more like. For there are
genera and species of spirits of similar faculty (? as the dead whom
we seek), and when like things are called up in the memory of men and
so are represented to them they think they are the same persons. At
other times they enter into the fantasy of other spirits and think
that they are them, and sometimes they will even believe themselves
to be the Holy Spirit," and as they identify themselves with a man's
affection or enthusiasm they may drive him to ruin, and even an angel
will join himself so completely to a man that he scarcely knows "that
he does not know of himself what the man knows," and when they speak
with a man they can but speak in that man's mother tongue, and this
they can do without taking thought, for "it is almost as when a man
is speaking and thinks nothing about his words." Yet when they leave
the man "they are in their own angelical or spiritual language and
know nothing of the language of the man." They are not even permitted
to talk to a man from their own memory for did they do so the man
would not know "but that the things he would then think were his when
yet they would belong to the spirit," and it is these sudden memories
occurring sometimes by accident, and without God's permission that
gave the Greeks the idea they had lived before. They have bodies
as plastic as their minds that flow so readily into the mould of
ours and he remembers having seen the face of a spirit change
continuously and yet keep always a certain generic likeness. It had
but run through the features of the individual ghosts of the fleet it
belonged to, of those bound into the one mediatorial communion.
He speaks too, again and again, of seeing palaces and mountain ranges
and all manner of scenery built up in a moment, and even believes
in imponderable troops of magicians that build the like out of some
deceit or in malicious sport.
IV
There is in Swedenborg's manner of expression a seeming
superficiality. We follow an easy narrative, sometimes incredulous,
but always, as we think, understanding, for his moral conceptions are
simple, his technical terms continually repeated, and for the most
part we need but turn for his "correspondence," his symbolism as we
would say, to the index of his _Arcana Celestia_. Presently, however,
we discover that he treads upon this surface by an achievement of
power almost as full of astonishment as if he should walk upon
water charmed to stillness by some halcyon; while his disciple and
antagonist Blake is like a man swimming in a tumbling sea, surface
giving way to surface and deep showing under broken deep. A later
mystic has said of Swedenborg that he but half felt, half saw, half
tasted the kingdom of heaven, and his abstraction, his dryness, his
habit of seeing but one element in everything, his lack of moral
speculation have made him the founder of a church, while William
Blake, who grows always more exciting with every year of life, grows
also more obscure. An impulse towards what is definite and sensuous,
and an indifference towards the abstract and the general, are the
lineaments, as I understand the world, of all that comes not from the
learned, but out of common antiquity, out of the "folk" as we say,
and in certain languages, Irish for instance--and these languages are
all poetry--it is not possible to speak an abstract thought. This
impulse went out of Swedenborg when he turned from vision. It was
inseparable from this primitive faculty, but was not a part of his
daily bread, whereas Blake carried it to a passion and made it the
foundation of his thought. Blake was put into a rage by all painting
where detail is generalized away, and complained that Englishmen
after the French Revolution became as like one another as the dots
and lozenges in the mechanical engraving of his time, and he hated
histories that gave us reasoning and deduction in place of the
events, and St. Paul's Cathedral because it came from a mathematical
mind, and told Crabb Robinson that he preferred to any others a
happy, thoughtless person. Unlike Swedenborg he believed that the
antiquities of all peoples were as sacred as those of the Jews, and
so rejecting authority and claiming that the same law for the lion
and the ox was oppression, he could believe "all that lives is holy,"
and say that a man if he but cultivated the power of vision would
see the truth in a way suited "to his imaginative energy," and with
only so much resemblance to the way it showed in for other men, as
there is between different human forms. Born when Swedenborg was a
new excitement, growing up with a Swedenborgian brother, who annoyed
him "with bread and cheese advice," and having, it may be, for
nearest friend the Swedenborgian Flaxman with whom he would presently
quarrel, he answered the just translated _Heaven and Hell_ with the
paradoxical violence of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. Swedenborg
was but "the linen clothes folded up" or the angel sitting by the
tomb, after Christ, the human imagination, had arisen. His own memory
being full of images from painting and from poetry he discovered more
profound "correspondences," yet always in his boys and girls walking
or dancing on smooth grass and in golden light, as in pastoral scenes
cut upon wood or copper by his disciples Palmer and Calvert one
notices the peaceful Swedenborgian heaven. We come there, however, by
no obedience but by the energy that "is eternal delight," for "the
treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but realities of
intellect from which the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal
glory." He would have us talk no more "of the good man and the bad,"
but only of "the wise man and the foolish," and he cries, "Go put off
holiness and put on intellect."
Higher than all souls that seem to theology to have found a final
state, above good and evil, neither accused, nor yet accusing, live
those, who have come to freedom, their senses sharpened by eternity,
piping or dancing or "like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew." Merlin, who in the verses of Chrétien de Troyes
was laid in the one tomb with dead lovers, is very near and the
saints are far away. Believing too that crucifixion and resurrection
were the soul's diary and no mere historical events, which had been
transacted in vain should a man come again from the womb and forget
his salvation, he could cleave to the heroic doctrine the angel in
the crystal made Sir Thomas Kelly renounce and have a "vague memory"
of having been "with Christ and Socrates"; and stirred as deeply
by hill and tree as by human beauty, he saw all Merlin's people,
spirits "of vegetable nature" and fairies whom we "call accident and
chance." He made possible a religious life to those who had seen the
painters and poets of the romantic movement succeed to theology, but
the shepherd and the midwife had they known him would have celebrated
him in stories, and turned away from his thought, understanding that
he was upon an errand to their masters. Like Swedenborg he believed
that heaven came from "an improvement of sensual enjoyment," for
sight and hearing, taste and touch grow with the angelic years, but
unlike him he could convey to others "enlarged and numerous senses,"
and the mass of men know instinctively they are safer with an
abstract and an index.
V
It was, I believe, the Frenchman Allen Cardec and an American
shoemaker's clerk called Jackson Davis, who first adapted to the séance
room the philosophy of Swedenborg. I find Davis whose style is vague,
voluble, and pretentious, almost unreadable, and yet his books have
gone to many editions and are full of stories that had been charming or
exciting had he lived in Connaught or any place else, where the general
mass of the people has an imaginative tongue. His mother was learned
in country superstition, and had called in a knowledgeable man when
she believed a neighbour had bewitched a cow, but it was not till his
fifteenth year that he discovered his faculty, when his native village,
Poughkeepsie, was visited by a travelling mesmerist. He was fascinated
by the new marvel, and mesmerized by a neighbour he became clairvoyant,
describing the diseases of those present and reading watches he could
not see with his eyes. One night the neighbour failed to awake him
completely from the trance and he stumbled out into the street and
went to his bed ill and stupefied. In the middle of the night he heard
a voice telling him to get up and dress himself and follow. He wandered
for miles, now wondering at what seemed the unusual brightness of the
stars and once passing a visionary shepherd and his flock of sheep, and
then again stumbling in cold and darkness. He crossed the frozen Hudson
and became unconscious. He awoke in a mountain valley to see once more
the visionary shepherd and his flock, and a very little, handsome, old
man who showed him a scroll and told him to write his name upon it.
A little later he passed, as he believed, from this mesmeric condition
and found that he was among the Catskill Mountains and more than forty
miles from home. Having crossed the Hudson again he felt the trance
coming upon him and began to run. He ran, as he thought, many miles
and as he ran became unconscious. When he awoke he was sitting upon a
gravestone in a graveyard surrounded by a wood and a high wall. Many
of the gravestones were old and broken. After much conversation with
two stately phantoms, he went stumbling on his way. Presently he found
himself at home again. It was evening and the mesmerist was questioning
him as to where he had been since they lost him the night before.
He was very hungry and had a vague memory of his return, of country
roads passing before his eyes in brief moments of wakefulness. He now
seemed to know that one of the phantoms with whom he had spoken in the
graveyard was the physician Galen, and the other, Swedenborg.
From that hour the two phantoms came to him again and again, the
one advising him in the diagnosis of disease, and the other in
philosophy. He quoted a passage from Swedenborg, and it seemed
impossible that any copy of the newly translated book that contained
it could have come into his hands, for a Swedenborgian minister in
New York traced every copy which had reached America.
Swedenborg himself had gone upon more than one somnambulistic
journey, and they occur a number of times in Lady Gregory's stories,
one woman saying that when she was among the faeries she was often
glad to eat the food from the pigs' troughs.