The Earths in the Universe

The Earths in the Universe

OF ALL THE MYSTICAL COSMOLOGISTS Emanuel Swedenborg wrote the longest scroll of correspondences between Man, Earth, and Heaven. His whole cosmology was founded on the Grand Man, who contained within himself the universe, and testified to the mystics's truth that "all things are created double, one against another"; that "there is no herb on earth to which a star does not correspond in heaven." But, unlike Hildegard, Swedenborg did not leave behind him his pictured conceptions of the cosmos, of the Grand Man, or of the multiplied Earths of the heavens. There is a little book of his, The Earths in the Universe, which reads like a fairy story, and should have had at least its frontispiece. His "Earths in the Universe" are the planets. He begins with the "Earth or planet" Mercury, following it with the Earth or planet Jupiter, and after these, in their order, come the Earths or planets Mars, Saturn, and Venus. Then he discourses on the spirits and inhabitants of the Moon, and the "five Earths of the starry heavens."

"That the universal heaven resembles one man," he says, "who is therefore called the GRAND MAN, and that all and singular the things appertaining to man, both his exteriors and interiors, correspond to that man or heaven, is an arcanum not as yet known to the world, but that it is so, has been abundantly proved. To constitute that Grand

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[paragraph continues] Man, there is need of spirits from several earths, those who come from our earth not being sufficient for this purpose, being respectively few; and it is provided of the Lord, that whensoever there is a deficiency in any place as to the quality or quantity of correspondence, a supply must be instantly made from another earth, to fill up the deficiency, so that the proportion may be preserved, and thus heaven be kept in due consistence."

The inhabitants of the Earth or planet Mercury, he says, have a relation, not to terrestrial objects, but to the memory of things abstracted from these objects. The spirits or angels who are from the Earth Jupiter, "in the GRAND MAN have relation to the IMAGINATIVE PART OF THOUGHT, and consequently to an active state of the interior parts; but die spirits of our earth have relation to the various functions of the exterior parts of the body, and when these are desirous to have dominion, the active or imaginative part of thought from the interior cannot flow in; hence come the oppositions between the spheres of the life of each." The beings of the Earth Mars have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the longitudinal sinus, which lies in the brain between the two hemispheres thereof, and is there in a quiet state, howsoever the brain be disturbed on each side." The inhabitants and spirits of the Earth Saturn have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the middle sense between the spiritual man and the natural man, but to that which recedes from the natural and accedes to the spiritual." The spirits of Venus have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the memory of things material, agreeing with the memory of things immaterial." The

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spirits and inhabitants of our Earth have relation, in the Grand Man, to "natural and external sense, which sense is the ultimate wherein the exteriors of life close, and rest as in their common basis."