Yn Ysgrifgen, Moon
I'm Alex
I'm Alex Mary
I'm the Assistant Librarian and Archivist
at the III
I was Forgieck the exact day
Fennodd oen i meddwl ei chocr perkswyr yn cleans ond mae'n llwys nhw'n de beans ond monitoredd.
Bydd ydy..
Ond regiwn eich publishing start?
wisegydd, mae'r Archwayfiblying에is yn Y gallu siwetair angoeddai argyffidlaeth y 18th maes Walk Feilaser
a Christian Mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg,
yng Nghymru'r Ysgol Llywodraeth yng Nghymru,
William Blake was very influenced by him.
John Flaxman was one of the original members of the society
and also quite influenced by Swedenborg.
Coventry Pat Mall, who famously wrote that fairy tale,
fairly sexist per me angel in the house,
the Virginia Woolf claimed to wish to kill.
He was also a member of the Swedenborg Society
in the Victorian period.
We tend to stop the collection of Swedenborg's original
sort of scientific works and his theological works
and also a collection of people who are influenced by him
and secondary texts on Swedenborg as well.
So what's in this cabinet here?
These are sort of earlier editions and Latin editions,
I think, on that side.
This is actually, this particular cabinet is a sort of overspill
from the library at the moment and some of our sort of books
that we have in Duplico.
But again, recently we discovered some stuff
that was actually not in our library proper.
So there's been a mix up somewhere down the line
and we need to actually properly go through all of this.
And what are these books? How old are they?
Well, some of these will be dating back to late 19th century,
but it's the Spines 20th century as well.
What have we got here?
I think these are meant to all be Swedenborg's texts,
but this looks like a James John Garth Wilkinson one.
Yeah, James John Garth Wilkinson Revelation,
Mythology and Correspondences 1887.
Most of this stock is probably late 19th century, to be honest.
Yeah.
And what's the purpose of this shop and the society?
Well, we also have other facets.
We're a library and a big event space and publishers
and several other things as well.
Largely, we're sort of a non-partisanal,
she would say, sort of academic centre for the study
of Emanuel Swedenborg and also for people who want to engage
in that subject or any of the sort of histories
that surround him basically.
We have quite a healthy archive here with things like
simultaneous colleges, sort of stuff in it
and some of the Emanuel Swedenborg stuff of self
and other such things and other many 18th and 19th century thinkers
who are interested in Emanuel Swedenborg
and so we sort of encourage engagement with that.
Can anybody enter the archive?
Yeah, just through appointments basically.
But you sort of would need to come with some idea
of what you wanted to look at otherwise it's...
If you're just asking to see stuff about Swedenborg,
then it's quite a difficult place to start.
Is this Emanuel himself?
That is indeed Emanuel Swedenborg.
There's also a smaller one of him just there,
one in that cupboard as well,
which is a bus-line in Swedenborg.
So just take us through his life briefly.
OK, well, Swedenborg was born in 17...
It's our 1680s, yeah.
Basically, he was the son of a bishop,
Jesper Stepper,
and then got quite interested in the sciences
and spent a lot of time touring Europe,
meeting with various people.
He attended Isaac Newton's lectures.
Linnaeus was related to him by family, I think,
and was a sort of mentor in his life.
But he met most sort of popular sort of 18th century scientists
and natural philosophers and early astrophysics and so on and so forth.
And then he went back to Sweden
and tried to become part of the university life there.
He originally wanted to start up a science department, I believe,
and then was denied several times
and instead became Sweden's royal assessor of minds.
So he worked a lot in mining
and did a lot to develop mining technology for a while.
He also did various things such as military planning with Charles XII.
He famously moved a whole fleet of boats over land
to cut off some sort of military naval action
that was happening on the other side of Sweden.
And then, through his scientific works,
became more and more interested in the question of...
Well, it's sort of the final course,
the kind of general sort of thing
that a lot of natural philosophers in the 18th century were following.
And then, round about that time,
started having quite strange dreams,
which were all documented in his dream diary, which has been published.
Is that here, the diary?
Yeah, I think we have some copies.
We don't have a single slightly own published one,
but we've got some from the Swedenborg Foundation.
Let me have a look.
That's OK.
It should be somewhere around here.
That's OK, you should have a few copies kicking about.
So, the dream diary...
Yeah, I'd say he started having a series of strange dreams,
basically, and sort of semi-visionary experience
of sort of hypnagogic moments of being thrown out of bed
and feeling that he was in the presence of Jesus Christ and stuff.
And then, this eventually all culminated in a inn in London,
just down the road from here, actually, not too far,
where he was eating dinner, basically,
and then he saw this vision of the floor writhing
with snakes and scorpions and insects,
and a man who was sitting in the corner who turned to him
and said he'd not so much,
and then turned away from him in all of this vanish.
And then, the Swedenborg went back into his room
and discovered the same person there,
and started having this sort of...
Basically, what he believed was this sort of Bible being revealed to him,
like this sort of spiritual code of it,
the man who was sort of neglected to mention,
the man who was meant to have met, who told him not to eat,
so much was meant to be Jesus Christ.
And then after that, he spent his life sort of daily
having visionary experience, basically.
Sometimes that would involve sort of out-of-body stuff.
Sometimes it would involve just him feeling that the spirits were sort of moving on him,
or he was being moved towards thoughts in certain ways
by various angelic and godly presences around him.
Sometimes there would be sort of half visions he would see
through light in his room and stuff.
But he started writing theology about what he believed, his experiences were basically,
and what he believed was the sort of message that was being transmitted to him,
and he sort of spent the rest of his life writing theology.
But it was all sort of tied into his previous scientific beliefs anyway,
so there was this kind of meeting of Swedenborg the scientist
and Swedenborg the mystic as this sort of meshing together, basically.
And the central tenets of his doctrines are sort of the same as most Christian mystics really,
sort of like kind of unremarkable in that sense,
but a lot of Christian mysticism is, which is written right here actually.
The central tenet of Swedenborgianism, the love of self is hell,
and the love of others is heaven.
Swedenborg believed that all seemed derived from the love of the self,
and that the only way to be truly heavenly
was to love others and be as terrible as possible
and to make connections with them as love, basically.
And that's sort of the central point,
so you can see a lot of what we need,
and the other sort of spires are for more.
So, thank you.
So, just, who are you again?
I'm Alex Murray, I'm the Llywodraethan Archifist at Swedenborg House.
And where are we?
We're on Bloomsbury Way, just near the British Museum.
And what time do you open?
We open from half-night in the morning till five, I think, yeah.
Monday to Friday?
Yeah.
Thanks very much.
No worries, it's okay.
I'm right at it.
