Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/168

152 what ought to be written on this topic. To convince Swedenborg, the story went on, the world of spirits was opened up to him that night and he recognized many acquaintances there of every class. From that day, he said, he gave up all worldly intellectual work and devoted himself to spiritual matters, according to what the Lord commanded him to write.

This picturesque story has probably done more to cause Swedenborg to be deemed plain mad than anything else. Does he himself tell it as Robsahm said he did in any records left by him from the time the incident is reported to have happened, or even within a few years of it? No such records have been traced, but there are contemporary references by Swedenborg to some of the ingredients of the Robsahm story, references that are complete in themselves yet leave out the main features of the "Lord" and the "commission."

In his "spiritual diary" for 1747 there is a note dated "April, 1745," that is, the date of the Robsahm story. Swedenborg, as was his custom, gave the entry a title: A vision by day concerning those who are devoted to the table and who thus indulge the flesh.34

Then follows, "In the middle of the day an angel who was with me conversed, saying that I should not indulge the belly so much at table. While he was with me there clearly appeared to me, as it were [note visionary quality] a vapor, exuding from the pores of the body, like a watery vapor, extremely visible, which fell towards the earth where the carpet was, upon which the vapor being collected, was changed into various little worms," which, he says, seemed to burn up in a noisy Hash. From this Swedenborg deduced very calmly that it was a kind of purification of immoderate appetite, going to show "what luxuries and similar things carry in their bosom." (Amateurs of modern "ectoplasm" theories would say it was a case of "ectoplasm" being molded by his mind into the shapes that for him symbolized his self-indulgence.) 35

About a year later, probably less, he again referred to this vision as being symbolic of those unclean spirits which "correspond" to overeating, mentioning the "smoke" that came out of his pores in "April, 1745," but he speaks of this merely as an aside to explain that the "worms" were the same as the "frogs" spoken of as one of the Egyptian plagues.36