Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell is Swedenborg's detailed account of the afterlife, drawn from what he claimed was ongoing waking access to the spiritual worlds. Its central claim is that mind and spirit are primary and matter their outward correspondence, so that after death each person gravitates to the inner state they have cultivated in life.

The work elaborates his doctrine of correspondences, in which every natural thing expresses a spiritual reality, rendering the material world a symbolic theater of the divine. Swedenborg describes the structure of heaven, hell, and the intermediate realm of spirits, arguing that thought and love shape the soul's enduring condition.

The book became a deep foundational influence on the Western esoteric and mind-power stream, shaping Emerson and Transcendentalism and, through them, New Thought's conviction that inner states produce outer conditions. Its inner-state cosmology fed Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the wider occult revival.