Татьяна Толстая - Aetherial Worlds

All of the aforementioned eccentricities, excluding the sartorial, are of course well attested in the medical literature.

The hallucinatory form of paranoid schizophrenia results in delusions, in isolated auditory hallucinations such as hollers and cursing addressed to the patient with the subsequent development of full-blown auditory verbal hallucinosis with “running commentary.” “Sudden insight,” anxiety, fear, hearing voices—commanding or prohibiting…. Patients begin reporting unusual abilities to read other people’s thoughts and to affect their well-being…. Delusions of fantastical grandeur, typical of paraphrenia, emerge, their substance absurd: patients insist that they are extraordinary beings, tasked with extraordinary missions, that they can change the fate of others and of the universe; they may experience olfactory and gustatory hallucinations. The patient is convinced that he is in two places at once…

Reading Swedenborg’s biography as well as his own writings is akin to leafing through a psychiatry textbook. Visiting any Internet forum devoted to paranoid schizophrenia, one reads of the same feelings and experiences.

No pseudo-theories can convince me that these are my own thoughts. This was an intrusion from the outside, a possession. Call them whatever you want—demons, aliens, spirits. But I guarantee that this type of being flees from a strong concentration of grace. Two days ago I decided to get anointed, and I don’t know if this is the right medical term, but right away it was as if I fell into sleep paralysis that same night. Some scum must have grabbed me by the throat. But I’ve already gotten the hang of chasing them away in my sleep with prayer.

Swedenborg’s maidservant told this story: “One time, when I walked into his room, I noticed that his eyes were burning like a flame. I got scared and said:

“‘For God’s sake, what is the matter, why are you looking like that?’

“‘What’s so unusual about the way I’m looking?’

“I told him.

“‘I see, all right. Don’t be frightened. God has fashioned my eyes in such a way so the spirits can see everything that is happening in this world.’”

This was the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the police would beam electricity at patients; in the twentieth century, patients could feel themselves being irradiated with lasers; and now, in the twenty-first century, it’s the KGB or the CIA implanting chips in their heads for the purpose of using their eyes to scan secret documents as well as sending them lecherous thoughts and compelling them to shoplift. Swedenborg felt similar urges: he noted with regret that he felt a compulsion to steal whenever inside a shop, that there was no refuge from his lecherous thoughts about “the Sirens.”

All this would have been a local historical curiosity, or just another medical case, were it not for Swedenborg’s remarkable visions. Angels and spirits informed him of things he couldn’t otherwise have known; those incidents that could be verified are still inexplicable.

The most famous happened in 1759, during a merchant dinner party that Swedenborg attended in the company of several witnesses. It was in Göttborg, about two hundred and fifty miles from Stockholm. Swedenborg excused himself from the table and walked out into the garden, as he often did, to speak to his angel. He came back extremely agitated: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a fire raging in Stockholm! It’s moving toward the port warehouses!” The merchants became alarmed: they all had property there, but they didn’t know what they could do, or whether they should even believe him. Throughout the evening, Swedenborg continued going into the garden, each time returning to announce the latest building engulfed by the fire, and which ones were still standing. Finally he returned in a calmer state: “Praise the Lord! The fire has been extinguished; it stopped three doors away from my house.”

When, two days later, messengers rode in from Stockholm, they confirmed everything: it was exactly as Swedenborg had described. This inexplicable knowledge caused quite a stir in Swedish society. There couldn’t have been any trickery here. Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Swedenborg’s and his near-namesake, was rather intrigued and asked around about him.

Another surprise involved Madame de Marteville, widow of the Dutch ambassador to Sweden. Shortly before his passing, the ambassador ordered a large and expensive silver service. After the ambassador’s death, the goldsmith came to the widow and claimed that the bill had never been paid. The widow knew for sure that it had been settled, but she could not find the receipt. The swindler was demanding payment or the return of the silver set—forsooth, only the Italians and the Russians are worse than the Swedes!—and so Madame de Marteville came to Swedenborg with a plea: Since you can speak to the spirits, would you inquire of my deceased husband where the receipt might be?

After a few days, the medium informed the widow that he had spoken to her husband, who said he’d “take care of it personally.” A week later, the deceased appeared in the widow’s dreams and, by her account, said the following: “My child, I have heard of your troubles. Don’t fret, go to the bureau upstairs and pull out the top drawer. You will find the receipt behind it.” The widow woke up, ran to the dresser, and—miracle of miracles!—she found the receipt, as well as a hairpin set with diamonds, which she had also thought to be lost.

The third episode involved Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden. At a social gathering, she jokingly asked Swedenborg whether he had come across her brother, the Prussian prince, in the afterworld. No, he hadn’t. Well, if you do, tell him I said hi. A week later, Swedenborg came to the queen as she was playing cards with her ladies-in-waiting and asked to speak to her privately. You may speak freely, the queen said; but the clairvoyant insisted that the matter was personal. So they repaired to an adjoining hall, a count by the name of Schwerin standing guard at the door and observing everything. Nobody knows exactly what message the deceased had conveyed to Swedenborg for the queen, but upon hearing it she “grew pale and exclaimed: Only he could have known that!” Schwerin immediately told anyone who would listen. This story was nothing to sneeze at, and, once again, it generated a lot of buzz in Swedish society, for the queen was already mistrusted and suspected of plotting for the benefit of Prussia. Specifically, while her brother was alive, she and he were believed to be exchanging letters hatching a plan to undermine the Swedish parliamentary system.

These three occurrences were well documented and confirmed, but there were countless other reports, varying in credibility, of Swedenborg’s clairvoyance. For instance, somebody claimed that during a dinner they shared, the seer suddenly shuddered and said: “At this moment in Russia, Peter III has just been strangled; mark the day and time, you will be reading about it in the papers!” It’s hard to know how reliable this account is, since nobody else confirmed it.

Another time, during a walk in the park, Swedenborg supposedly informed some count that the recently deceased Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia, had married the grandfather of this count in the afterworld, and that they were very happy together. How could you verify something like that? Notice, he only soothsaid about nobles, kings, tsars, and celebrities. Such was his quirk. He didn’t soothsay about just anyone.

By the end of the winter of 1772, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had received an invitation from Swedenborg. Up in the heavens, wrote the clairvoyant, I was told that you very much want to meet me. Wesley, who indeed wished to meet Swedenborg, wrote back that he was very busy for the moment, but that he would love to pay a visit in six months’ time, to which Swedenborg replied: “No, in six months’ time I’ll be dead. I will die on the 29th of March.”