Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/312

295 It is to be doubted—unless Swedenborg had "helpers" in the other world—whether his visions of the downfall of "Babylon," etc., were seen by anyone else. He explained very reasonably that by Babylon he meant all those who desire to dominate by means of religion, and some of his descriptions of priest-ridden communities on high mountains being toppled over into chaos have a curious atom-bomb reality, but one is grateful that he seems to have ceased having those visions. At any rate they also served the purpose of being sufficiently startling to draw attention to his seemingly more objective reports of the other world, which he sandwiched in the little book of The Last Judgment.

Swedenborg repeated his accounts of the other world in all the theological and semi-theological books he wrote, under whatever name they appeared, with, on the whole, enough consistency and not too much. But it is in the day-by-day entries in his diaries of other-world experiences that his "reports" have the most factual air, blended though many of them are with obvious projections from his unconscious and with sheer dream-stuff, which he did not bother always to label dream-stuff. But he did not publish it.

In the later diaries names of actual personages appear. The one who appears most frequently was the King whom he had met in his youth, the man who had had his fate in his hands, King Charles XII. In the 1730's, Swedenborg had written a public appreciation25 of the King's keen mind, his encouragement of and love for science—from which no one would guess how Swedenborg saw the King in the other world!

Pithily commenting on the King's nature, as it seemed revealed, Swedenborg said that Charles "made royalty consist in obstinacy even to death," and that the spirits who aided him in such an attitude were from another universe, "for such obstinacy does not exist within the limits of this planet." Charles, he said, had been "pitiless and cruel, caring nothing for human life." And though he had lost his country believing this to be for its glory, "he ought to be considered insane." 26

Swedenborg acknowledged Charles's ability to take in a hundred things at a single glance, and to draw correct deductions, "in relation to his end which was dominion"; he acknowledged that Charles thought himself a good man, but, after about a year in the