Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)

Swedish mystic and scientist. In Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), he concluded that the Last Judgement had taken place in 1757, and that the New Church, of which he was the prophet, had now been inaugurated. His writings are the scriptures of the sect popularly known as Swedenborgians, and his works are kept in circulation by the Swedenborg Society, London.

As assessor to the Swedish Royal College of Mines, Swedenborg carried out research that anticipated many later discoveries in the fields of engineering, navigation, and astronomy. In Opera Philosophica et Mineralia/Philosophical and Logical Works 1734, he attempted to explain the natural world as having a spiritual foundation. From 1744 he devoted himself exclusively to religious speculation, claiming access to God via the angels, and formulating a ‘doctrine of correspondence’ whereby all things in the material world have spiritual counterparts. This doctrine resembled neo-Platonism and influenced the Romantics, notably William Blake, and the French theorists of Symbolism.