Enough of this. Let me try if it be possible to make his mythology intelligible, and to draw out a map of his extra-mundane discoveries.
Omnia quæ in cœlis, sunt in terris, terrestri modo; omnia quæ in terris, sunt in cœlis, cœlesti modo. All things which are in heaven are upon earth, after an earthly manner; all things which are upon earth are in heaven, after a heavenly manner.[11] So says Trismegistos, and who will dispute the authority of the thrice-greatest Hermes?—The Scriptures therefore cannot be understood without the science of correspondences; a knowledge which the patriarchs possessed intuitively in the golden age, which was preserved only scientifically in the silver age, became merely speculative in the copper age, and in our iron generation has been wholly lost. The Egyptian hieroglyphics are to be explained by this key, which opens also all the mysteries of the ritual law. Job was the last writer who possessed it, till it was revealed to the Swedish teacher.
There is nothing new in this, you tell me; it is the old notion of a double meaning, the external and the internal, the literal and the allegorical, the letter and the spirit. Not so, my good Father! "Correspondence is the appearance of the internal in the external, and its representation therein; there is a correspondence between all things in heaven and all things in man; without correspondence with the spiritual world nothing whatever could exist or subsist." You are growing impatient!—I must give you a specimen of common language interpreted by this science. Two legs stand for the will of God; by a small piece of the ear we are to understand the will of truth; the son of a she-ass denotes rational truth; and an ass, without any mention of his pedigree, signifies the scientific principle—certainly no ill-chosen emblem of such principles and such science as this. This is stark nonsense, you say! My good father Antonio; "No distinct idea can be had of correspondence without a previous knowledge concerning heaven as the Great Man," or Maximus Homo, as we must call him, in the Master's own words.
In sober serious explanation, Swedenborg seems to have thought upon one text and dreamt upon it, till he mistook his dreams and his delirium for revelation. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.—So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." His system is a wild comment upon this passage, as monstrous as any of the Rabinical reveries. Accordingly he lays it down as an axiom, that the whole of divine order was imaged in man at the creation, insomuch that he was divine order itself in a human form, and so Heaven in epitome. Upon this he has built up a creed of the strangest anthropomorphism, teaching that the divinity of the deity constitutes heaven, and that heaven itself is in a human form, Deity and heaven thus identified being the Maximus Homo, the Grand or Divine Man.
It has been one of the many fancies of hypothetical philosophers, that all bodies are aggregates of living atoms. Admit this notion, and it explains all the mysterious operations of life with perfect facility; the little inhabitants of the secretory organs take each what they like best, and thus manufacture all the animal materials. This is analogous to the celestial system of Swedenborg, but with this difference, that each constituent part and particle of his Maximus Homo resembles the whole in form, every society in this body corporate, and every individual of each society being in the human shape divine.
Heaven is to be considered under the threefold distinction of general, special, and particular—for Swedenborg had learnt to classify in his earthly studies. Generally it is divided into two kingdoms, celestial and spiritual; but I am sorry to add that, though I have studied the anatomy of the Grand Man with some attention, I cannot discover where or how these regions are separated. The specific division into three heavens is more intelligible; the first is in the extremities, the second or middle in the trunk, the third and highest in the head. The particular division is into the societies of angels, who form the constituent monads of this divine aggregate.
Every part, however, of the Maximus Homo is not Heaven; at least the inhabitants of every part are neither possessed of celestial goodness, nor in that state of celestial enjoyment which seems essential to our ideas of paradise. For instance, the parishioners of the kidneys, the ureters, and the bladder, consist of such persons as in their mortal state took a cruel delight in bringing others to justice; these people speak with a harsh chattering voice, like magpies whose tongues have been slit. They who have despised virtue and religion are in the gall-bladder, a bitter destination no doubt! They also who dwell about the sphincter vesicæ, amuse themselves by tormenting the evil spirits. Whether they are purged of this malignant disposition by the secretions and excretions which are going on in their vicinity, this new Emanuel sayeth not. A purgatory indeed there is, and a truly curious one! They who are still unclean in thoughts and affections are stationed in the colon; not as component parts of the Grand Man—of that honour they are not yet worthy; they are there as his aliment, to be concocted and digested, and after the gross fæces have been cast out, filtered through lacteals and arteries into chyle and blood, till they are taken up into the system and embodied. They who are defiled with earthly dregs are in the small-guts; the most impure of all in the neck of the bladder and in the rectum, both which have below them a most dreadful and filthy hell, ready to receive their contents,
E recolher o mais sobejo e impuro
Da immundicia de toda a obra lançada.[12]
This Ουρανος, or Maximus Homo, seems to be the body of Deity; and the Divine Life or Spirit, like the gifted spirit of Swedenborg himself, can be in or out, separate from, or identified with it, at pleasure. Accordingly, though the angels are in him, and actually are he, yet they visibly behold him, as the sun of their world. Now the Lord in person being the sun, the light and heat which proceed from him must necessarily partake of divinity; accordingly light in Heaven is divine truth, and heat is divine love: a thin and transparent vapour, which surrounds the angels like an atmosphere, enables them to sustain this influx of Deity. An atmosphere of this kind, which is called the Sphere of Life, exhales from every man, spirit and angel; it is the emanation of the vital affections and thoughts. In Heaven, of course, it is volatile essence of love, and each angel is sensibly affected when he gets within the sphere of another. We on earth feel the same influence, though unconscious of the cause, for this hypothesis physically accounts for the sympathies of dislike and of affection.—The Deity is also the celestial moon, and this sun and moon are seen at the same time, one before the right eye, and the other before the left. Let an angel turn his face which way he will, this sun is always before him, and he always fronts the east; yet at the same time he can see the other quarters by an inward kind of vision, like that of thought. A precious olla podrida this of allegorical riddles and downright nonsense!