Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a distinguished Swedish scientist, engineer, and anatomist who, in midlife, underwent a profound spiritual crisis and claimed to be granted ongoing waking access to the spiritual worlds — heaven, hell, and the realm of spirits.

In voluminous works such as Heaven and Hell (1758) and Arcana Coelestia, he described a fully structured afterlife and articulated his famous doctrine of correspondences: every natural thing corresponds to and expresses a spiritual reality, so the material world is a symbolic “theater” of the divine.

Mind and spirit are primary; matter is their outward correspondence. He held that we are spirits even now, that thought and love shape the soul’s reality, and that after death we gravitate to the inner state we have cultivated.

Swedenborg is a deep foundational influence on the entire Western esoteric and mind-power stream. His correspondences directly shaped Emerson and Transcendentalism, and through them New Thought’s conviction that inner mental states produce outer conditions (“as within, so without”).

His detailed spiritual cosmology fed Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the broader 19th-century occult revival; his “you go to the heaven or hell you have made within” prefigures both New Thought’s “states of consciousness” and the after-death teachings of later channeled and survival literature.

The honest framing: Swedenborg’s reports are visionary religious claims, not empirical findings, but his influence as a source of mind-power’s symbolic, correspondence-based worldview is enormous and well-documented.