Swedenborg

Spiritual Diary, by Emanuel Swedenborg: 1539-1550

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This is an excerpt from Emanuel Swedenborg's *Spiritual Diary* (1758), a visionary journal in the tradition of Christian mysticism and Swedenborgian theosophy, in which Swedenborg records direct spiritual communications with beings from other worlds. The passage describes the inhabitants of Mars as Swedenborg claims to have encountered them through spiritual perception: they live in leaderless societies organized by mutual recognition of character through facial expression and speech, feel no hatred or aversion toward one another, and exile those who develop sinful thoughts by simply withdrawing from their company. Most distinctively, Swedenborg claims Martians communicate not through audible sound but through a subtle, tacit speech transmitted via the lips and Eustachian tube — a mode he describes as conveying more ideas simultaneously than ordinary language. He also provides physical details, asserting their faces are black below the nose and yellowish above, that they eat pulses and round ground-fruits, and that they represent the faculty of "thought" in the cosmic-angelic body. The excerpt is representative of Swedenborg's broader cosmological system, in which every planet's inhabitants correspond to a specific spiritual function within a universal divine-human form, and should interest readers drawn to 18th-century visionary literature, heterodox Christianity, or the history of imagined extraterrestrial life.

Spiritual Diary, by Emanuel Swedenborg: 1539-1550

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