Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/305

XXII ] Similarly gentle animals "correspond to gentle affections; fierce animals to fierce passions; light to truth; heat to love," etc.6

Of course he did not believe that this key to the Bible was entirely self-made, but that the theory had been confirmed by the angels who dictated to him or who even moved his hands to write the words. Here, as wherever in Swedenborg's later period he stubbornly maintained theories that seem completely at variance with the level-headed author of financial memorials, the explanation of the mystery can be found in that other mystery of automatic writing. It could not, at that time, seem an uprush from his needs and from the stores of reading in his unconscious mind; it joined forces with other inexplicable things that had happened to him, seeming to become a communication from higher powers and therefore to be believed.

Nowhere is this so apparent as when he extends the "doctrine of correspondence" to that great stumbling block to an understanding of Swedenborg—the "Grand Man" (Maximus Homo).

On March 3, 1748, he noted in his diary, writing at least semi-automatically, that heaven had the form of a Grand Man. He had been having a little discussion with angels about various things in the human body "and they wonder that they do not fall into the understanding of everyone, as they now dictate, for they guide my thoughts to write these things. Moreover, the states of spirits and angels, together with all their varieties, can in no wise be understood without a knowledge of the human body; for the Lord's Kingdom is like a man; and without such a kingdom, which is like a true man (for the Lord is the only Man, and his Kingdom resembles him) no man could possibly live, since all things in heaven conspire to the conservation of the minutest things in the body, as may be manifestly demonstrated, and if thou art willing thou shalt hear still greater arcana." 7

Here it seems, we get the "angel's" very words, and we can even make a guess as to the "society" for which he was spokesman, for although Swedenborg seemed now to believe that the doctrine of the Grand Man was an "arcanum," a secret, it was one which had been freely passed around for many centuries among those pseudoscientific occultists whom Swedenborg used to denounce. It was a popular doctrine of the Kabbalists, vigorous during the