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Speaker 1: Hey, Happy Saturday listeners. January is going to be the

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Speaker 1: three anniversary of the birth of Emmanuel Swedenborg, so we

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Speaker 1: thought we'd revisit the episode on him from our archive.

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Speaker 1: So there are some challenges that can come along with

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Speaker 1: trying to do a podcast about a person who either

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Speaker 1: established a religion that people still follow today or whose

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Speaker 1: work informed and influenced to religion that people still follow today.

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Speaker 1: Uh and Katie and Sarah worked with these challenges by

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Speaker 1: inviting a guest onto the show, so at the end

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Speaker 1: there are some clips from an interview they conducted with

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Speaker 1: Lisa Oz, who was raised as the Swedenborgian. Past host.

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Speaker 1: Katie and Sarah released this episode in and they make

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Speaker 1: reference to their Medici Super series, and we're gonna link

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Speaker 1: to that series, which includes other Medici related topics as

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Speaker 1: well from this episode's page on our website for folks

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Speaker 1: who are interested. So let's go. Welcome to Stuff you

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Speaker 1: missed in History Class from hot works dot com. Hello,

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Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm

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Speaker 1: Sarah Downy and we have been spending an awful lot

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Speaker 1: of time in Italy lately because of our Medici Super

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Speaker 1: series so today we thought we'd move a little further

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Speaker 1: north to Sweden, and our subject for today is going

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Speaker 1: to be Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was famously called by the

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Speaker 1: philosopher D. T. Suzuki the Buddha of the North, and

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Speaker 1: he was a mechanical genius who began his whole body

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Speaker 1: of work by looking for mechanical explanations for nature, so

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Speaker 1: a mechanical explanation for the physical world. And from there

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Speaker 1: he began to study the soul as it related to

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Speaker 1: the human body. And he was quite advanced for his

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Speaker 1: time as far as science goes. He had anatomical theories

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Speaker 1: that weren't proven until the late nineteenth century. And we're

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Speaker 1: talking about a seventeenth century guy. Yeah, But what makes

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Speaker 1: him truly interesting is that while in the midst of

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Speaker 1: all these studies about the soul, he has a crisis

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Speaker 1: of faith and abandons his scientific pursuits altogether, and he

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Speaker 1: spends the rest of his life trying to explicate the scriptures,

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Speaker 1: and his followers end up founding a church in his name.

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Speaker 1: So this is our our subject for today, so let's

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Speaker 1: go back to his roots. He was born January twenty nine,

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Speaker 1: six eighty eight, in Stockholm as Emmanuel Swedburgh. His father,

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Speaker 1: Jasper was a Swedish clergyman at court chaplain and also

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Speaker 1: a professor of theology who later became the Bishop of Skara,

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Speaker 1: and their family was ennobled, which is my current favorite

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Speaker 1: word in seventeen nineteen, and that's when they took the

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Speaker 1: name sweden Borg and the young Emmanuel studied philosophy at

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Speaker 1: the University of Uppsala and spent five years abroad he

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Speaker 1: was This becomes a common theme in his life, going

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Speaker 1: a odd and uh learning lots of new things. But

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Speaker 1: for this first trip he becomes interested in mathematics and

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Speaker 1: natural sciences and pursues study in England and Holland, France

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Speaker 1: and Germany, learning mechanical skills. Even when he's in England,

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Speaker 1: he moves in um Newton's circles. And he was a

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Speaker 1: bit of a da Vinci esque genius. He's a real

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Speaker 1: mechanical hot shot. He thought up new ways to make docs,

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Speaker 1: had some vague ideas about submarines in the airplane, which

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Speaker 1: Sarah mentioned. It was a good thing he didn't stick

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Speaker 1: to this. If you remember our bungled flight attempts episodes,

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Speaker 1: it was a high point for bungle flight attempts, and

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Speaker 1: he even had some ideas about a machine gun. But

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Speaker 1: when he returns to Sweden in seventeen fifteen, he starts

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Speaker 1: to publish the Dadalus Hyperboreous, which is Sweden's first scientific journal,

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Speaker 1: and there he's able to write about mechanical inventions and discoveries,

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Speaker 1: and all of his work in the mechanical sciences really

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Speaker 1: starts to impress King Charles the twelfth, who makes him

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Speaker 1: an assistant to one of the biggest names in Swedish

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Speaker 1: mechanical science at the time, and he gets a position

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Speaker 1: at the Royal Board of Minds and he later becomes

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Speaker 1: an assessor there. But this is his day job, so

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Speaker 1: imagine through almost all of the writings we're gonna be

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Speaker 1: talking about later in the podcast, this is what he's

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Speaker 1: doing for most of his time working at the Minds

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Speaker 1: improving the country's mining industry, and mining was a huge

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Speaker 1: pursuit in Sweden at the time. So he goes home

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Speaker 1: from his day of mining science and works on the

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Speaker 1: other sciences and philosophy, everything from cosmology and corpuscular philosophy

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Speaker 1: to math and human sensory perceptions. He does the first

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Speaker 1: work on algebra in the Swedish language, lots of stuff

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Speaker 1: on chemistry and physics, and he's a bit of a

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Speaker 1: jack of all trades. He even spends some of his

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Speaker 1: time composing poems in Latin, so he apparently did more

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Speaker 1: in his downtime than I do. We're going to catch

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Speaker 1: up with him at his second major trip abroad. So

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Speaker 1: a few years after he's in No Bold, in seventeen nineteen,

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Speaker 1: he goes abroad again and he publishes some works on

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Speaker 1: natural philosophy and chemistry. But then he doesn't write much

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Speaker 1: for about ten years, and it's clear that when he

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Speaker 1: starts again in seventeen thirty three he's been reading a

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Speaker 1: lot and thinking a lot. He goes on his third

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Speaker 1: European tour and just goes crazy with the publishing. And

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Speaker 1: this is when he switches from thinking about inventions and

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Speaker 1: starts thinking about the mechanical ways to explain nature that

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Speaker 1: we've mentioned before. He publishes philosophical and logical works. The

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Speaker 1: first folio is called Principle of Natural Things, and in

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Speaker 1: this work he comes pretty close to things that modern

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Speaker 1: science comes up with much later. For instance, he has

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Speaker 1: a theory that is very close to what we know

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Speaker 1: about the atom with a nucleus and electrons, and also

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Speaker 1: an idea that's very close to the Conte Laplace nebular

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Speaker 1: theory that the suns and planets form a common nebulas

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Speaker 1: so a man ahead of his time. But then his

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Speaker 1: course of study changes again and he starts to switch

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Speaker 1: towards studying the soul as related to the body. He

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Speaker 1: goes home in seventeen thirty four, and his father dies

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Speaker 1: in seventeen thirty five, and he takes a leave of

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Speaker 1: absence from his assessor job at the Minds and starts

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Speaker 1: to travel again. This time he goes to France and

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Speaker 1: Italy and Holland and he writes the Economy Regney an Amale's,

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Speaker 1: which is translated as the Economy of the Animal Kingdom,

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Speaker 1: and returns to Stockholm. Although I read one thing that

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Speaker 1: was interesting, that's not the best translation for that title.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of misleading. He means the kingdom of the

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Speaker 1: animal or soul when he says Regney an Amali, not

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Speaker 1: the animal kingdom, which is what he might think when

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Speaker 1: you first read that. Um So another translation you could

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Speaker 1: kind of think of as the biological bases of the soul, right,

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Speaker 1: the less literal translation, and this work draws Swedenborg closer

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Speaker 1: to the study of the body. He studies human anatomy

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Speaker 1: and physiology, but he's also beginning to think about the

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Speaker 1: study of the soul, specifically trying to prove the immortality

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Speaker 1: of the soul to the senses themselves. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,

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Speaker 1: and he has a really excellent understanding of the cerebral

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Speaker 1: cortex is role, it's sensory, motor, and cognitive functions. Um,

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Speaker 1: most people thought it didn't really have a purpose. It

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Speaker 1: was just kind of a leftover. Even cortex means rind,

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Speaker 1: so people really thought it was the brain rind, which

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Speaker 1: gives you an idea of of the common thought at

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Speaker 1: the time. He realizes this is something important and it's

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Speaker 1: where he's going to start in his search for the soul.

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Speaker 1: He also considered the pituitary gland to be the crown

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Speaker 1: of the brain, which is a pretty revolutionary thought for

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Speaker 1: the time. And he figured all of this out by

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Speaker 1: basically reading and studying the work of other scientists. He

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Speaker 1: didn't report much on his own experiments, um, but he

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Speaker 1: didn't just read their analysis of their own work. He

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Speaker 1: looked at their experiments and looked at all of the

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Speaker 1: stuff that they found and drew his own conclusions. And

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Speaker 1: that's how he was able to come up with these

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Speaker 1: ideas that were, um so different from what everybody else

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Speaker 1: was thinking at the time. And you might think that

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Speaker 1: these ideas would be very exciting to the medical and

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Speaker 1: scientific community, but you would be wrong. His anatomical studies

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Speaker 1: weren't given much heed, and according to an article by

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Speaker 1: Charles G. Gross in The Neuroscientist, this is because these

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Speaker 1: little nuggets of scientific brilliance were embedded in these huge

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Speaker 1: books he wrote about the soul, and you know, by

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Speaker 1: the point they were available, he had the reputation of

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Speaker 1: a mystic, so you might be less inclined to listen. Yeah. Well,

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Speaker 1: and also he's not a professor. He's not working with

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Speaker 1: people who are going to read and review his work.

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Speaker 1: Um there, there wouldn't be a strong reason for a

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Speaker 1: contemporary scientists to even read what he was writing. By

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Speaker 1: the time that all these works kind of really came

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Speaker 1: out there in the late nineteenth century, scholars started looking

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Speaker 1: at these ideas, especially these ideas about the brain, and realizing,

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Speaker 1: oh my gosh, we just figured this stuff out. Recently

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Speaker 1: and he had he had ideas for this back in

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Speaker 1: the seventeen hundreds, but after the economy he got to

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Speaker 1: work on more studies of anatomy and the soul. But Um,

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Speaker 1: these things were brought to a halt by a religious crisis.

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Speaker 1: So he started a new travel journal in July of

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Speaker 1: seventeen forty three. It's basic, you know, kind of banal,

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Speaker 1: everyday kind of entries, and then suddenly it turns into

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Speaker 1: this dream journal that's known as the Journal of Dreams Um,

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Speaker 1: detailing recall dreams and nighttime spiritual experiences from March to

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Speaker 1: October seventeen forty four, and some of these are surprisingly

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Speaker 1: most pornographic and embarrassed later more prudish Victorian readers. In

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Speaker 1: April seventh, seventeen forty four, he has this first vision

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Speaker 1: of Christ, which makes him feel a little better about

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Speaker 1: the temptation of intellectual pride, which was just getting him down,

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Speaker 1: I guess. And by April seventeen forty five he had

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Speaker 1: received a definitive call to abandon worldly learning. Um. So

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Speaker 1: that's the end of his work in the natural sciences.

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Speaker 1: So that brings us to his theological work, which is

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Speaker 1: a bit dense. Basically God called him, according to him,

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Speaker 1: to explain the spiritual meaning of Scripture. So Swedenborg started

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Speaker 1: writing about angels, Paradise and the Last Judgment as well

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Speaker 1: as the New Jerusalem. He was kind of like an

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Speaker 1: old school prophet, is what Sarah and I compared him to.

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Speaker 1: And from then on he he gets into Bible interpretation

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Speaker 1: and relating the world of spirits and angels, and he

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Speaker 1: writes thirty volumes in Latin. Most of his works are anonymous,

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Speaker 1: and he does them from seventeen forty nine to seventeen

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Speaker 1: seventy one UM. His best known theological work is on

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Speaker 1: Heaven and Its Wonders and on Hell, and his final

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Speaker 1: work is True Christian Religion Um. But he says he's

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Speaker 1: gotten into this, you know, new vocation because of a

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Speaker 1: divine vision and call, and Encyclopedia Britannica again says that

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Speaker 1: his spiritual senses were opened so that he might be

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Speaker 1: in the spiritual world as consciously as in the material world.

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Speaker 1: And the thirty volumes he really writes them as God's revelations.

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Speaker 1: He wanted to enter um a new age of truth

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Speaker 1: and reason to religion, and he thought that these new

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Speaker 1: revelations of his that he was putting down were the

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Speaker 1: second Coming, and anything that's as broad as a religion

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Speaker 1: is difficult to get a grasp on and and distill

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Speaker 1: into something as short as a podcast. So we thought

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Speaker 1: it would be a good idea to talk with someone

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Speaker 1: who's well versed in the Swedenborgian religion, and so we

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Speaker 1: talked to Lisa Oz, who was raised as a Swedenborgian

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Speaker 1: and introduced her husband, doctor Oz, to the religion as well.

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Speaker 1: And we wanted to start by better understanding Swedenborg's epiphany

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Speaker 1: since clearly this was the defining experience in his life.

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Speaker 1: So that's where we started. Hello, I am Lisa Oz,

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Speaker 1: author of us Transforming Ourselves and the relationships that matter most.

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Speaker 1: From my understanding of his epiphany, it seemed like it

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Speaker 1: was something overnight, but it was a while in coming

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Speaker 1: in terms of the preparation for this what we as

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Speaker 1: Swedenborgians UM like to see as a spiritual opening of

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Speaker 1: his of his of his eyes, opening of spiritual eyes,

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Speaker 1: and being able to see into the spiritual dimension. He

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Speaker 1: had studied. Um obviously studied religion very UM closely from

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Speaker 1: very very early age, and UM also practiced breathing techniques

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Speaker 1: he had started journaling his dreams um of the year

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Speaker 1: before his spiritual awakening. UM, So it wasn't that it

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Speaker 1: was just out of the blue. One day he was

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Speaker 1: a scientist and the next day he was at theologian.

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Speaker 1: He had wrote written extensively on religion and philosophy and

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Speaker 1: tried to find a connection to the spiritual in the

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Speaker 1: human brain. He was looking for the seat of the soul.

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Speaker 1: So there was a lot of preparation leading up to

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Speaker 1: his epiphany. And UM, what I find particularly entertaining for

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Speaker 1: me was that the first, um, the first communication he

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Speaker 1: had with the spiritual world directly was someone telling him

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Speaker 1: not to eat so much, which I think is really

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Speaker 1: relevant in my own life. Lisa went on to explain

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Speaker 1: and that this epiphany didn't stifle sweden Worg's traditional life.

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Speaker 1: He still carried out his duties as a member of

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Speaker 1: the aristocracy, Mr ennobled Man, and he didn't become a

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Speaker 1: recluse as you might imagine a mystic. Would you know,

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Speaker 1: when I think of a mystic, I usually think of

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Speaker 1: someone who's kind of hidden away from the world, say

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Speaker 1: at a convent, yeah, or a dude living in a cave.

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Speaker 1: But he wasn't a recluse. Um. He was a mystic, however,

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Speaker 1: and since the definition of mystic can be a bit

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Speaker 1: of a controversial one when talking about sweden Worg, we

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Speaker 1: are we asked a sweden Borgian to explain what she

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Speaker 1: thought he was mystical. Um. I think that mystical experience

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Speaker 1: is one where you have a direct experience of the Numenus.

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Speaker 1: And that was exactly what sweden Worg was describing. It

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Speaker 1: was for most of us who do not have mystical experiences,

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Speaker 1: we have to take it on someone else's word that

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Speaker 1: this other realm makes sense. So Emmanuel Swedenborg spent the

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Speaker 1: rest of his life working on uh these theological writings,

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Speaker 1: and he dies in London in seventeen seventy two, but

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Speaker 1: despite never preaching, he stuck solely to writing, mostly in Latin.

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Speaker 1: The first sweden Borgian Society start popping up in the

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Speaker 1: seventeen eighties, and the Church of the New Jerusalem is

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Speaker 1: founded in London later in that decade. And one of

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Speaker 1: the most interesting things about this guy is how his

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Speaker 1: ideas inspired writers like ball Back, Beaudelaire, Emerson Yates, the Brownings,

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Speaker 1: Blake Coleridge, Henry James Sr. The philosopher, even Helen Keller.

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Speaker 1: We're not talking about some obscure historical figure. He was

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Speaker 1: actually a very influential person. And that led us to

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Speaker 1: question ourselves as to why we had never heard of

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Speaker 1: this man and didn't know who he was. So we

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Speaker 1: asked Lisa a little bit about how he's influenced contemporary thought. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and she's that some of the impact of Swedenborg on

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Speaker 1: contemporary spiritual thought is indirect, and it comes through all

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Speaker 1: of those writers that we can be reading almost a

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Speaker 1: distilled version of his ideas in some of their works. Um.

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Speaker 1: But while he was influential in indirect ways, we were

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Speaker 1: also curious about why his church doesn't have a bigger

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Speaker 1: presence today. I think mostly there's not a large sweden

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Speaker 1: Worn in church today because there's no impetus to to

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Speaker 1: convert or proselytize, because we just don't care. It doesn't

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Speaker 1: matter if people are other religions. As long as they're

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Speaker 1: living a life of love and compassion and connection and relationship,

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Speaker 1: that's great. And so I think that there's not that

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Speaker 1: movement to spread the church. The other thing is that

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Speaker 1: sweden Work's writings are not easy there. It is thousands

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Speaker 1: and thousands of pages. I think it's thirtiesome volumes of

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Speaker 1: very dent translated from the latin um heavy material. And

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Speaker 1: it's not the kind of thing you can just pick

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Speaker 1: up and say, wow, this makes sense. And if you're

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Speaker 1: looking for a good place to start with some of

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Speaker 1: Swedenborg's works, because again it is dense. We tried to

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Speaker 1: read some of it and had a difficult time. Lisa

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Speaker 1: told us her favorite of his many works was Arcana Celestia,

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Speaker 1: and you know, he does write like a scientist. It's

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Speaker 1: it's dry and it's to the point. But he also

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Speaker 1: sees some of Scripture as I guess we'd say, parables

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Speaker 1: for your spiritual journey. She also gave us a word

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Speaker 1: to the wise about Swedenborg. He's a man of his time,

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Speaker 1: and for example, his views towards women wouldn't seem particularly enlightened,

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Speaker 1: and certainly not as enlightened as the rest of his

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Speaker 1: scientific work. Um, but you know, just to consider his

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Speaker 1: historical context when reading his works, and we were saying,

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Speaker 1: it's just so interesting. It's always interesting to see someone

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Speaker 1: who's so fully engaged in both science and religion. It

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Speaker 1: was equal interest in both, although it's also interesting that

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Speaker 1: he felt he couldn't do them at the same time, because,

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Speaker 1: after all, he did drop science as an ego driven pursuit,

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Speaker 1: at least for him. But it's also so interesting that

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Speaker 1: science he couldn't drop it completely. He may have stopped

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Speaker 1: his scientific writings, but science is clearly influencing his theological

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Speaker 1: work right. It reminded me of a book I was reading,

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Speaker 1: John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which tries to impose a sort

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Speaker 1: of rational scientific framework on top of the idea of mysticism,

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Speaker 1: which is guess something that Sweden work also did. Thank

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Speaker 1: you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.

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Speaker 1: Since this is out of the archive, if you heard

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Speaker 1: an email address or Facebook U r L or something

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Speaker 1: similar during the course of the show, that may be

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Speaker 1: obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We

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Speaker 1: are at history Podcasts, at how stuff Works dot com,

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Speaker 1: and then we're at Missed in the History all over

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Speaker 1: social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,

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Speaker 1: and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this

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Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Isn't how stuff Works dot

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