Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg: What He Actually Experienced

Who Was Emanuel Swedenborg?

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688, the son of a Lutheran bishop. He studied at Uppsala University, travelled across Europe, and by his thirties had established himself as one of the most accomplished scientists in Sweden. He held a seat on the Swedish Board of Mines, published original work on metallurgy, algebra, and navigation, and produced an ambitious three-volume study of the brain and nervous system (Oeconomia Regni Animalis, 1740-1741) that anticipated several later neurological findings.

He was not a mystic in his early career. He was an engineer, an anatomist, a practical man of the Swedish Enlightenment. He designed a dry dock, proposed plans for a submarine and an airplane, and worked on the problem of determining longitude at sea. His contemporaries regarded him as brilliant but conventional in his intellectual orientation.

Then, between 1743 and 1744, something broke open. Swedenborg began experiencing vivid dreams, trances, and what he described as direct encounters with the spiritual world. By 1745, he claimed that his spiritual sight had been permanently opened and that he could visit heaven and hell at will, while fully awake, conversing with angels and spirits as naturally as he conversed with his colleagues at the Board of Mines.

This visionary period lasted 27 years, from 1745 until his death in London in 1772. During those decades, he produced approximately 25 volumes of theological and visionary writing, including Heaven and Hell (1758), his most widely read work.

The Crisis of 1743-1744

Swedenborg kept a private journal during his spiritual crisis, later published as the Journal of Dreams (Drommar). The entries record a period of intense psychological turbulence: nightmares, episodes of trembling, visions of Christ, experiences of spiritual assault, and moments of overwhelming bliss. Modern commentators have variously diagnosed this crisis as a psychotic break, a kundalini awakening, a midlife conversion experience, or a genuine opening of spiritual perception. Swedenborg himself interpreted it as a divine commission.

What makes the crisis difficult to dismiss is what came after it. Swedenborg did not collapse into incoherence. He became, if anything, more productive. His visionary writings are systematic, internally consistent, and logically structured. He continued to manage his financial affairs, attend sessions of the Swedish parliament (he held a hereditary seat in the House of Nobles), and correspond with scientists and theologians across Europe. Whatever happened to him in 1743-1744, it did not disable his rational faculties. It redirected them.

There are also the verified clairvoyant incidents. The most famous is the Gothenburg fire of 1759. Swedenborg, dining at a party in Gothenburg (300 miles from Stockholm), suddenly became agitated and described a fire breaking out in Stockholm, naming the streets affected and the time it was extinguished. News arriving days later confirmed his account in detail. The philosopher Immanuel Kant investigated this incident and, while remaining sceptical about Swedenborg's theological claims, conceded that the facts of the Gothenburg episode were difficult to explain away.

Heaven and Hell: What the Book Contains

The full Latin title is De Caelo et Ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno, ex Auditis et Visis: "Concerning Heaven and Its Wonders and Concerning Hell, from Things Heard and Seen." The title itself makes a claim: this is not theology derived from scripture or reason. It is a report from direct observation.

The book, published anonymously in London in 1758, is divided into three major sections. The first describes heaven: its organization, its inhabitants (angels), their activities, their environment, their mode of communication, and their relationship to the divine. The second describes the world of spirits, the intermediate state between death and final destination. The third describes hell: its organization, its inhabitants (evil spirits), and the nature of their suffering.

Swedenborg insists throughout the book that he is not speculating. He writes in the first person, describes specific conversations with specific spirits, and offers precise observations about the geography, architecture, and social organization of the worlds he claims to have visited. Whether one accepts these claims or not, the text reads as reportage, not as allegory or philosophy.

The Structure of Heaven

Swedenborg's heaven is not a single place. It is composed of innumerable "societies," each consisting of angels who share a particular form of love and wisdom. Angels who share a love of truth in its intellectual aspect live together; angels who share a love of service to children live together; angels who share a love of the natural world in its spiritual significance live together. Like attracts like, and the grouping is organic rather than imposed.

These societies are arranged in a vast structure that Swedenborg calls the Grand Man (Maximus Homo). Taken together, all the societies of heaven form a single human shape, with each society corresponding to an organ or part of the body. Societies devoted to love and compassion are in the region of the heart. Societies devoted to wisdom and truth are in the region of the head. This is not metaphor for Swedenborg; it is literal spiritual anatomy, visible to anyone whose inner sight has been opened.

Heaven has three levels: the celestial (inmost), the spiritual (middle), and the natural (outermost). The celestial heaven is closest to the divine and is inhabited by angels whose primary orientation is love. The spiritual heaven is inhabited by angels whose primary orientation is wisdom. The natural heaven is inhabited by angels whose orientation is obedience and service. Each level is complete in itself, but the three together form the full Grand Man.

Angels, in Swedenborg's account, are not a separate species. They are human beings who have lived on earth, died, passed through the world of spirits, and entered heaven. There are no beings who were created as angels from the beginning. Every angel was once a person. This means that heaven is not a static creation but a growing community, continuously receiving new members from the human race.

The environment of heaven is not fixed. It changes to reflect the inner states of its inhabitants. When an angelic society is in a state of particular love and wisdom, their surroundings become more vivid, more beautiful, more luminous. When their state dims, the environment dims with it. This is correspondence in action: the outer world is a projection of the inner state.

The Structure of Hell

Hell, in Swedenborg's account, is the mirror image of heaven. It too is composed of societies, but these are organized around selfish, destructive, and predatory loves rather than generous and truth-seeking ones. There are societies of those who loved domination over others, societies of those who loved cruelty for its own sake, societies of those who loved deception and manipulation.

The inhabitants of hell are not imprisoned there by God. They are there because they want to be. Their ruling love draws them to the company of others who share it, just as the ruling love of heavenly beings draws them upward. Swedenborg describes spirits in the world of spirits being offered heaven and recoiling from it in pain and revulsion, because the atmosphere of heaven (which is the atmosphere of selfless love) is intolerable to those whose deepest desire is to dominate or exploit.

Hell has its own inverted Grand Man, a monstrous human form composed of all the hellish societies. Swedenborg calls this the Grand Monster (though translators vary in their rendering). It mirrors the Grand Man of heaven point by point, but in a distorted and degraded form.

The suffering in hell is real, but it is not punishment inflicted by an external judge. It arises from the nature of the inhabitants themselves. Beings whose ruling love is domination are surrounded by others who also love domination. The result is constant conflict, mutual tyranny, and an environment of ugliness and filth that corresponds to the spiritual ugliness of its residents. They could leave at any time if they changed their ruling love. They do not, because their ruling love is who they are.

The World of Spirits

Between heaven and hell lies the world of spirits. This is not purgatory in the Catholic sense (Swedenborg was a Lutheran who rejected the doctrine of purgatory). It is a sorting ground, an intermediate state where the newly dead arrive and undergo a process of self-revelation.

When a person first enters the world of spirits, they appear much as they did in life. They retain their memories, their personality, their social manners. They may not even realize they have died. They are met by spirits who have been assigned to attend them, and they begin a process that Swedenborg describes in remarkable psychological detail.

First, the person lives in their "exteriors," their social persona, the face they presented to the world during life. A person who was outwardly kind but inwardly selfish continues to appear kind. A person who was outwardly rough but inwardly compassionate continues to appear rough. This phase can last days, weeks, or longer (time in the spiritual world does not correspond directly to earthly time).

Then, gradually, the exteriors fall away. The person begins to live in their "interiors," their true thoughts and desires, the things they thought and wanted when no one was watching. The socially performed kindness dissolves, revealing the selfishness beneath it. The rough exterior dissolves, revealing the compassion beneath it. This process is not imposed by an outside force. It happens naturally, like water finding its level.

Once the true inner nature is fully revealed, the person gravitates freely to the society that matches it. Those whose ruling love is good rise to heaven. Those whose ruling love is evil descend to hell. There is no trial, no judge, no sentence. The person goes where their deepest self belongs.

The Process of Dying

Swedenborg describes the physical process of dying with the precision of the anatomist he once was. He reports that the first thing a dying person experiences is a withdrawal of sensation from the extremities toward the centre of the body. The heart continues beating for a time after breathing stops. Then the spiritual body separates from the physical body.

The newly dead person is received by two angels who position themselves near the head. These angels communicate not in words but in thought, and their presence provides a sense of peace and safety. The person then opens their spiritual eyes and sees the world of spirits for the first time.

What is notable about this account is its psychological sophistication. Swedenborg is not describing a courtroom scene with God on a throne pronouncing verdicts. He is describing a process of self-disclosure, in which the truth about a person emerges gradually, inevitably, and from within. The concept anticipates certain features of modern psychology: the idea that we present a social self that differs from our actual self, and that genuine self-knowledge requires stripping away the performance.

The Ruling Love

The concept of the ruling love (amor regnans) is the hinge of Swedenborg's entire system. It is the single most important idea in Heaven and Hell, because it determines everything else: where you go after death, what kind of society you belong to, what your spiritual environment looks like, and ultimately who you are.

The ruling love is not what you say you love. It is not what you think you love. It is what you actually love most deeply, beneath all self-deception and social performance. A person may profess to love God and neighbour but actually love power and status. In the world of spirits, the profession falls away and the actual love becomes visible.

Swedenborg argues that every person has a single ruling love that organizes all their other loves, thoughts, and actions into a coherent whole. This ruling love is not fixed at birth (he rejects predestination), but it becomes increasingly set over the course of a lifetime as a person repeatedly chooses certain goods over others. By the time of death, the ruling love is essentially permanent. It is who the person has become through a lifetime of choices.

This teaching has a hard edge to it. Swedenborg does not believe that a deathbed repentance can overturn a lifetime of selfish action. The ruling love is the cumulative result of thousands of daily choices, not a single dramatic moment. A person who has spent decades cultivating cruelty, greed, or manipulation has shaped their ruling love accordingly, and no last-minute reversal can undo that shaping. Equally, a person who has lived with genuine love and honesty cannot be dragged to hell by a few failures or doubts.

The Doctrine of Correspondences

The Doctrine of Correspondences is Swedenborg's framework for understanding the relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds. In this doctrine, every object, phenomenon, and process in the physical world corresponds to a specific reality in the spiritual world. The correspondence is not arbitrary or metaphorical. It is structural: the physical thing exists because the spiritual thing causes it.

Swedenborg applied this doctrine to biblical interpretation. He argued that the Bible, in its literal sense, is a collection of historical narratives and moral laws, but in its internal, spiritual sense (accessible through correspondence), it is a continuous account of the soul's relationship to the divine. Every detail in a biblical narrative, down to the specific animals, colours, and numbers mentioned, carries a precise spiritual meaning that can be decoded through the science of correspondences.

This is where Swedenborg's scientific training shows. He treats correspondences not as poetic associations but as a systematic code, as rigorous in its way as the laws of physics. His multi-volume work Arcana Coelestia (1749-1756) applies the doctrine verse by verse through Genesis and Exodus, producing a spiritual commentary that runs to thousands of pages.

The Hermetic Connection

Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondences bears a striking resemblance to the Hermetic axiom "as above, so below," attributed to Hermes Trismegistus in the Emerald Tablet. Both teach that the visible world is a reflection of an invisible spiritual order, and that the relationship between the two is lawful, consistent, and knowable.

The Corpus Hermeticum describes a cosmos in which the divine mind (Nous) generates a chain of being from the highest spiritual realities down to the densest physical matter, with each level reflecting the one above it. Swedenborg's system operates on the same principle: the natural world is a terminal effect of spiritual causes, and every natural phenomenon is a correspondence of a spiritual reality.

Whether Swedenborg read the Hermetic texts directly is debated by scholars. He was widely read and would certainly have been aware of the Hermetic tradition through the scientific and philosophical circles of his time. But whether the influence was direct or convergent, the structural parallel between Swedenborg's correspondences and Hermetic cosmology is unmistakable. Both systems rest on the conviction that the universe is a single ordered whole in which every part reflects every other part, and that genuine knowledge consists in perceiving these reflections accurately. Those interested in the broader Hermetic framework may wish to read about the full meaning of "as above, so below."

The Hermetic Synthesis Course traces this line of correspondence thinking from its ancient sources through its modern expressions, including Swedenborg's contribution.

William Blake's Response

No account of Swedenborg's influence is complete without William Blake. Blake's relationship with Swedenborg was intimate, combative, and productive. It is one of the most important literary and philosophical confrontations of the eighteenth century.

Blake read Swedenborg seriously. He and his wife Catherine attended the founding conference of the New Jerusalem Church in London in April 1789. His annotated copies of Swedenborg's works survive, and the early annotations are respectful and engaged. Blake was drawn to Swedenborg's visionary method, his insistence on direct spiritual perception rather than abstract theology, and his detailed accounts of the spiritual world.

Then Blake turned. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793) is a direct, satirical, and brilliantly inventive response to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. Blake's central argument is that Swedenborg, despite his visionary gifts, remained trapped in conventional morality. Swedenborg's heaven, in Blake's reading, is passive, obedient, and dull. Swedenborg's hell, where Blake locates "Energy" and "Eternal Delight," is where the real creative force of the universe resides.

Blake's famous "Proverbs of Hell" ("The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," "Energy is Eternal Delight," "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction") are written against Swedenborg's framework. Blake is arguing that Swedenborg correctly perceived the structure of the spiritual world but misidentified which side was which. The "devils" in Swedenborg's hell, Blake suggests, are the artists, the prophets, the creators, the agents of energy and change, and they are the true angels. For a full reading of Blake's response, see The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.

The irony is that Blake's critique depends on Swedenborg's system. Without Swedenborg's detailed map of heaven and hell, Blake would not have had the structure to invert. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is unthinkable without Heaven and Hell. Blake is Swedenborg's greatest reader precisely because he is Swedenborg's most aggressive opponent.

Wider Influence: Emerson, Balzac, Borges, and Beyond

Swedenborg's influence on Western intellectual life has been wider than is commonly recognized. Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted an entire chapter to Swedenborg in Representative Men (1850), placing him alongside Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe, and Montaigne as one of the representative figures of human achievement. Emerson called Swedenborg a "mastodon of literature" and praised his systematic imagination, though he also criticized what he saw as Swedenborg's theological narrowness.

Honore de Balzac drew extensively on Swedenborg in his novel Seraphita (1835), which depicts an androgynous angelic being living in Norway who embodies Swedenborgian theology. Louis Lambert (1832), another Balzac novel, features a protagonist whose intellectual development parallels Swedenborg's. Balzac appears to have found in Swedenborg a cosmological framework capacious enough to contain his own vision of human society as a spiritual organism.

Jorge Luis Borges returned to Swedenborg repeatedly in his essays and fiction. In the prologue to his personal library series, Borges ranked Swedenborg's writings among the most important books he had read. Borges was drawn to Swedenborg's concept of heaven as a library of correspondences, a system in which every physical object is a word in a divine language, an idea that resonates with Borges's own obsessions with labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite books.

The Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century, though Swedenborg would likely have disapproved of much of it, adopted many Swedenborgian ideas about the afterlife: that spirits retain their personalities after death, that they continue to grow and develop, that communication between the living and the dead is possible. Helen Keller was a committed Swedenborgian who published a book, My Religion (1927), explaining how Swedenborg's theology shaped her understanding of life, death, and meaning.

Other notable figures influenced by Swedenborg include Fyodor Dostoevsky (who alludes to Swedenborg in several works), August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, and the founders of homeopathic medicine. The breadth of this influence suggests that Swedenborg touched something that conventional theology and philosophy had left unaddressed: the question of what, exactly, the spiritual world looks like when you actually go there.

The Swedenborgian Church

Swedenborg himself did not found a church. He wrote his theological works, published them (mostly at his own expense), and left their interpretation to others. He continued to attend Lutheran services throughout his life and never formally separated from the Church of Sweden.

After his death in 1772, his followers organized the Church of the New Jerusalem (also called the New Church), first in London (1787) and then in other cities. The church is based on Swedenborg's theological writings, which its members regard as divinely inspired revelation on the same level as the Bible. Central doctrines include the unity of God (Swedenborg rejected the Trinity as three persons, teaching instead that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three aspects of a single divine person), the spiritual sense of scripture (accessible through correspondence), and the afterlife as Swedenborg described it.

The Swedenborgian Church remains small. Global membership is estimated at a few tens of thousands. But its cultural influence has been disproportionate to its size. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) was a devoted Swedenborgian missionary who distributed Swedenborg's writings alongside apple seeds across the American frontier. The Swedenborgian Chapel in San Francisco, designed by architect A. Page Brown in 1894, is a designated National Historic Landmark.

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