Читать книгу The Secret Source - Maja D'Aoust - Страница 14

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist, and was another in the line of Hermetic prophets who claimed to receive information from angels. According to Swedenborg, he had developed a technique which allowed him to converse with angles clairvoyantly, whenever he wished. This method, which he called “Testicular Breathing”²⁸ was performed during intercourse.

According to Swedenborg, after a theophanous vision (during sex), he was allowed to enter freely into Heaven and Hell, and communicate with angels, demons, or any other spirit he should happen across. The narratives in Conversations With Angels have been ably translated by Swedenborg scholars David Gladish and Jonathan Rose, and have been selected from three of Swedenborg’s works, Conjugal Love, Apocalypse Revealed, and True Christian Religion. The Hermetic inspirations and nature of Swedenborg’s writings have been examined by many scholars, but are best made plain in Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s Swedenborg, a Hermetic Philosopher: Being a Sequel to Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists. This work shows that Swedenborg writings may be interpreted from the point of view of Hermetic philosophy.

Along with the New Thought movement, the works of Swedenborg inspired a church of worshippers (The New Jerusalem Church), the Spiritualist movement in America, and such literary figures as William Blake, August Strindberg, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, Waldo Ralph Emerson (and the Transcendentalist movement), William Butler Yeats and Carl Jung.