Swedenborg

Spiritual Diary, by Emanuel Swedenborg: 1901-1950

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*Spiritual Diary* is an 18th-century mystical journal in which the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg records his ongoing, first-person experiences of direct communication with spirits and angels, presented as empirical observation rather than allegory or metaphor. The entries selected here address several interconnected claims: that spirits who speak are fundamentally unreliable narrators of truth, since they confidently assert things they do not actually know; that souls after death cannot recognize their own transition to the afterlife without a special "reflection" granted by God; and that human thought itself—whether good or evil—does not originate with the individual but is either injected by spirits or flows from the Lord alone. Swedenborg also describes the mechanics of spiritual perception, including how angels represent morally corrupt spirits visually as grotesque insects or wild creatures, and how spirits can literally "see through" a living human medium when granted reflective access. A distinctive feature of the text is its tone of clinical reportage: Swedenborg logs dates, records experiments, and insists on lived verification, treating encounters with demonic insects or states of celestial peace as testable, repeatable phenomena rather than purely subjective visions. Readers drawn to the history of Christian mysticism, the theology of the afterlife, or the 18th-century roots of spiritualism will find this a dense, strange, and doctrinally specific primary source.

Spiritual Diary, by Emanuel Swedenborg: 1901-1950

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