Jacobite and Visionary: the Masonic Journey of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)

Marsha Keith Schuchard

Dr Marsha Schuchard (PhD in English, University of Texas at Austin; thesis 'Freemasonry, Secret Societies and the Influence of the Occult Traditions on British Literature', 1975). A former university teacher, medical writer and drug abuse consultant, she is now an independent scholar. Her 800-page book: Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabbalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden, Brill Academic Press) was due out in June 2002. She is currently writing Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London, Random House, in progress).

This paper briefly summarizes material from her ongoing research into Swedenborg's political, mystical, and masonic activities, which she plans to publish as a full-scale biography. The new information comes mainly from the Swedish diplomatic archives (Riksarkiv, Stockholm); Stuart Papers, Windsor Castle; Royal Society, London; masonic libraries in London, Edinburgh, and The Hague; and the diaries, correspondence, and library catalogues of Swedenborg, his family, and colleagues.

'[Cagliostro] dit beaucoup de bien de Swedenborg et le plaint d'avoir été persecuté. En vain les Suédois veulent a present quasi resusiter sa cendre, ils ne decouvriront rien. Le plus grand homme en Europe, c'est le célébre Falke a Londres.'

Cagliostro to Frederick Rodolph Saltzmann (1780).

'M. Cagliostro est arrive dans un moment trés favorable pour lui, dans un moment ou plusieurs loges de francs-maçons, engouées des principes de Swedenborg, voulaient a tout force voir des esprits; ils on donc couru a Cagliostro, qui se disait en possession de tous les secrets du docteur Falk...'

Catherine the Great to Baron Grimm (1781).

'Cagliostro perceived that their [Freemasons'] ceremonies were disfigured and disgraced by magic and superstition; the principles of Swedenborg, a Swedish preacher; and those of M. Falc, a Jew rabbi, are regarded as chiefs by the illuminated.'

Report of the Vatican Inquisition (1791).

'Swedenborg haunts French literature as a founder or associate of secret societies; but when we require the evidence we get nothing but rumour.'

William White, Swedenborg: His Life and Writings (1868).

As a literary historian mainly interested in Blake, Yeats, and Joyce, I never intended to write a biography of Emanuel Swedenborg, much less a study of eighteenth-century Jacobite and masonic politics. But, as I attempted to trace the Cabbalistic and Rosicrucian allusions in those writers, I kept coming up against the problem of Swedenborg, whom contemporaries of Blake and Yeats placed in a shadowy tradition of 'illuminist' or Écossais Freemasonry. Though the standard biographies of Swedenborg and English-language histories of Freemasonry shed little light on the problem, a very different picture emerged from European historians — who did not share the Anglocentric biases and Whig-Protestant preconceptions of their British counterparts. These authors — especially Le Forestier, Faivre, Chevallier, Kervella, Nordmann, Frick, Robelin, etc., — revealed an alternative history, in which an international Stuart-masonic culture was created and sustained by Jacobite exiles and their sympathizers abroad. Moreover, it was a culture that deliberately fused esoteric studies with exoteric politics.

By examining Swedenborg's multi-levelled career from a multi-national perspective — which takes into account the Swedish, British, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Jewish affairs that influenced him — one can begin to piece together the biography of this scientific visionary, who operated clandestinely as an earthly and heavenly 'intelligencer' in the murky underworld of Jacobite and masonic political intrigue.

In the limited time available, I will describe some of the political and diplomatic contexts which suggest Swedenborg's involvement with Freemasonry — especially in its Jacobite or Écossais forms — and, more briefly, his use of 'extrasensory perception' for intelligence work.

In 1688 in Stockholm, Swedenborg was born into a family with royalist-Jacobite sympathies, mystical-millenarian interests, and mechanical-masonic ambitions (I mean masonic with a small 'm' — that is, the scientific and technological concerns of operative masonry). [1] In 1684 his father Jesper Swedberg, a royalist military chaplain, visited England, where he admired the virtuoso scientific culture and religious toleration advocated by Charles II but worried about the emerging Whig-Tory factionalism in political life. After the Williamite revolution of 1688, Swedberg remained a Jacobite sympathizer and worked to link the Swedish Lutheran church with the High Anglican Church. Swedenborg's most important mentor was his brother-in-law, Eric Benzelius, a brilliant Hebraist, who amassed an enormous library of Cabbalistic, Rosicrucian, and Hermetic books and manuscripts. [2] While visiting England in 1699, Benzelius developed enduring contacts with Jacobite scholars and members of the neo-Rosicrucian Philadelphian Brotherhood. Through his friendships with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Francis Mercurius Van Helmont, Gilbert Bumet, Francis Lee, John Woodward, and Hans Sloane, he could have learned of early Rosicrucian and masonic influences on the English Royal Society, and he hoped — with young Swedenborg's help — to develop a similar scientific society in Sweden. Thus, from 1710 to 1713, he encouraged Emanuel's scientific and theosophical studies in London, where the first claim for Swedenborg's masonic initiation was centred.

In 1869, one year after William White publicly cited the French tradition of Swedenborg's association with secret societies, Mr L. P. Regnell, a freemason and Swedenborgian in Lund, Sweden, gave a document in Swedish to Rudolph Tafel, the New Church historian, who published a condensed English translation (see Appendix A Swedenborg):

'In the archives of the [masonic] Chapter at Christianstad, there is an old book of records, containing the minutes of a convention or lodge held in Wittshöfle, June 5th, 1787. King Gustavus III, and his brother, the Duke Charles of Södermanland (later Charles XIII) were present, and the latter presided at the lodge. Many brethren from the southern part of Sweden, Stockholm, from Pomerania, Greifswalde, and Stralsund, were present; the names of the officers that assisted at the meeting are also given. Among other things, the minutes state that the first brother of the watch, Lieutenant Colonel and Knight Baltzar Wedemar, upon this occasion delivered a lecture on Masonry, which was listened to by all with great attention and interest. In this lecture he mentioned the writings of Assessor Emanuel Swedenborg, and spoke of his career as a Freemason; that he visited Charles XII at Altenstedt, in order to have the high order of Masonry introduced into Sweden; that Mr. Wedemar himself had visited the lodge in London, which Swedenborg had joined in the beginning of the year 1706 and that the signature of his name is in the register of the lodge, etc. The minutes state further, that the king and duke were both aware of the fact that Swedenborg had been a member of the order, and the same was known to the other brethren who were present. The lodge which Swedenborg joined, and which bears his name, is L. No. 6 in London. In a German work entitled 'Latona', which appeared in Leipzig, in the department of news, there is an article relating to all the particulars of Swedenborg's reception in the order.' [3]

Tafel did not include all of Regnell's material in his translation, which he enclosed in quotation marks, and he appended a brief summary, without quotation marks, of an important claim — that is: 'That he joined an English lodge, Emanuel, says Mr. R., is known to every masonic brother in England.' According to the Revd Olle Hjern, current pastor of the New Church in Stockholm and a mason, Regnell was a reliable historian, and his claim deserves serious consideration. [4] Regnell's original text has not been found, which is unfortunate because Tafel made several errors in transcribing the names and dates. Dr David Dunér, recent author of a dissertation on Swedenborg's scientific theories, examined Tafel's transcription and relevant Swedish masonic materials. [5] He notes that the speaker was Baltzar Weduwar (not Wedumar), who held the second highest degree in the lodge. The location was Vittskövle Castle (not Wittshofle), in the neighbourhood of Kristianstad, where Gustaf III and his brother attended a large lodge meeting in June 1778 (not 1787).

Tafel noted that the Swedish account mistakenly cites 1706 rather than 1710 for Swedenborg's initiation in London. Significantly, he did not question Swedenborg's masonic affiliation. The New Church scholars Alfred Stroh and Sigrid Sigstedt also accepted Regnell's account, with the corrected date. [6] While in London, Swedenborg lodged in 'the houses of artificers in order to learn their crafts', which suggests a practical motive for joining a mason's lodge, for their operative training included many of the skills in architecture, mathematics, mechanics, and optics that interested him. [7] Russian historians cite a similar motivation for Czar Peter I's initiation in a London lodge in 1698, when he hoped to study naval architecture under Christopher Wren. [8]

In 1870, a year after Tafel's article appeared, the Anglo-American Swedenborgian Samuel Beswick drew on Regnell's account in his book, The Swedenborgian Rite and the Great Masonic Leaders of the Eighteenth Century, Beswick, S., in which he further elaborated Swedenborg's masonic career — unfortunately with little documentation. Beswick tried to explain away the 1706 initiation date by saying that an 18 year-old Swedenborg was initiated in Lund (often spelled 'Lunden'), Sweden in that year. Though Robert Gilbert has gleefully exposed many of Beswick's mendacities about a 19th-century 'Rite of Swedenborg', he did not examine Beswick's specific claims about Swedish contemporaries of Swedenborg, claims which reveal an unusual awareness of obscure but actual political affairs in Sweden and the Baltic provinces. Beswick was born into a Swedenborgian family in Manchester, where important Swedenborgian freemasons lived in the 1790s, and he was allegedly initiated by Swedish masons resident in England. Thus, he may have become privy to oral traditions about Swedenborg and Swedish Freemasonry in the Baltic provinces. [9] Regrettably, his book is a perplexing mixture of verifiable fact and credulous fancy.

Tafel, who initially accepted Regnell's claim about the London initiation, disavowed it six years later, when he published Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (1875), Tafel. He had received a reply from the Grand Lodge in London that 'the accounts of the first part of the last century were destroyed', and another report from the German masonic journal Latona [sic] that Freemasonry was not introduced into Sweden until 1736. [10] Once again mistranscribing his source, which pointed to the well-known masonic journal Latomia, Tafel did not check out Regnell's assertion about Swedenborg's initiation. Latomia contained articles not only on Swedenborg's affiliation with Freemasonry but also on King Carl XI's extension of privileges to a Scottish-affiliated lodge in Gothenburg in the seventeenth century. [11] After Tafel's dismissal of Swedenborg's masonic affiliation, no future biographer referred to Regnell, and his Swedish report subsequently fell into oblivion. However, a further examination of the masonic milieu in London and of Swedenborg's known acquaintances in the city will give more credibility to Regnell's claim.

In Swedenborg's first letter from London to Benzelius (13 October 1710), he reported not only the Sacheverell riots, with their serious Jacobite ramifications, but also his attendance at a public masonic ceremony, which was fraught with Jacobite connotations. [12] From the time of his arrival in July, he followed the final construction work on St. Paul's Cathedral, and he carefully inspected the interior and exterior design. Overseeing the project were its great architect Christopher Wren, a known Jacobite sympathizer, and his son; both Wrens were freemasons, and an important lodge met on the premises of the cathedral. [13] Swedenborg wrote that he had watched the completion of the 'temple' of St. Paul's, when (according to press reports) Christopher Wren fils placed the capstone, while his proud father and 'other Free and Accepted Masons chiefly employed in the Execution of the Work' performed the appropriate masonic ceremonies. [14] During Swedenborg's lifetime, initiates of the Swedish Rite would claim that in 1710 Wren was 'elected for the second time Grand Master of the Society' and held office until 1716 — that is, until the formation of the 'modern' Hanoverian Grand Lodge in 1717. [15] This claim was never mentioned in official British masonic histories; was Swedenborg the source of the secretive Swedish tradition?

Swedenborg may even have met Wren, who attended Royal Society meetings with the Swedish ambassador Count Carl Gyllenborg, a close family friend, who assisted Swedenborg during his London residence. [16] Swedenborg was also grateful to Dr John Woodward, an eccentric scientist and heterodox freemason, who introduced him to other Fellows of the Society, such as Sir Hans Sloane, a freemason who had recently deposited an important seventeenth century masonic MS in the society's archives. [17] Moving on to Oxford, Swedenborg almost certainly attended the mathematical lectures of J.T. Desaguliers, for he cited his works and later made a secret visit to London to see him. [18] From a purely technological and mathematical standpoint, Swedenborg's association with freemasons in London made practical sense; from a political standpoint, it made increasing tactical sense.

During this period, relations between England and Sweden deteriorated badly, for the prospective successor to Queen Anne — Georg Ludvig, Elector of Hanover — mounted an aggressive policy aimed at seizing Sweden's North Sea provinces, in violation of English-Swedish treaty agreements. [19] The current imprisonment of the Swedish king, Carl XII, in Turkey meant that Sweden was increasingly vulnerable to Hanoverian and Russian threats. The Swedish ambassador Gyllenborg was desperate to gain assistance from travelling Swedish students and merchants to carry his diplomatic correspondence in order to avoid confiscation by Hanoverian agents. In March 1712 Swedenborg's father, Bishop Swedberg, was aware of Gyllenborg's plight and wrote to Carl XII recommending his son Emanuel Swedberg to the king's service. [20] I argue that Swedenborg — like several of his friends — entered the service of Gyllenborg and his diplomatic colleagues on the Continent, where he acted as an intelligence gatherer and financial courier. [21]

In so doing, Swedenborg entered a shadowy, clandestine underground of Jacobite-masonic intrigues, that still frustrates scholars who try to penetrate its multiple layers of secrecy. Despite John Hamill's lucid argument against Jacobite-masonic political activity, shreds of evidence continue to emerge of such activity before 1717 — for example, the recent discovery of a Jacobite-masonic song that circulated in Paris in 1705; the crypto-Jacobite Duke of Hamilton's praise of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, as an 'honest Mason' in 1706; the Jacobite political coding deciphered in a masonic poem of 1713; and the publication of a masonic letter to the Earl of Mar from the Jacobite physician to Czar Peter in 1714. [22] This becomes relevant to Swedenborg because Gyllenborg had married into an English Jacobite family, and he now worked to link up Swedish supporters of Carl XII with Jacobite and multi-national sympathizers abroad. Gyllenborg was friendly with various 'British' masons (such as Harley, Mar, Ormonde, Sloane, Steele, and, especially, Swift), but it is unknown whether he joined a lodge in London. He and his family would later play important roles in Écossais freemasonry in Sweden.

In 1713, probably at Gyllenborg's urging, Swedenborg studied French and prepared to move to the Continent, though he had initially planned to spend two more years in England. In February he travelled to Utrecht, where he assisted the Swedish diplomats Palmquist and Preis, who struggled to defend Carl XII's cause during the international negotiations aimed at ending the Great Northern War. Swedenborg noted his daily discussions of mathematics with Palmquist, but he did not mention the relevance of these discourses to Palmquist's determined effort to develop new mathematical codes, for Swedish correspondence was being intercepted and deciphered by Hanoverian agents. [23] In unpublished allegorical poems, Swedenborg hinted at his own access to diplomatic secrets. [24]

After the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in May 1713, Palmquist sent Swedenborg on to Paris, where he lived largely incognito for a year. At this time, Benzelius's old friend Charles Leslie, an exiled Anglican minister and Jacobite agent, was trying to persuade the Stuart Pretender to marry the Swedish king's sister; in the process, Leslie planted the seeds for the Swedish-Jacobite plot that emerged in 1715–18. [25] From an allegorical poem, that Swedenborg started in Paris and finished in Rostock, it is clear that he performed intelligence work at Versailles and other sites, and that he drew on John Dee's ciphering technique to record his experiences. Having carefully studied Robert Hooke's argument that Dee's spirit conversations contained ingenious diplomatic codes developed from his 'Cabbalistical Learning', Swedenborg wrote his own spiritual allegories of the hard-nosed world of political and military affairs. [26]

In Camena Borea (1715), Swedenborg made a coded reference to a statement in Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (De rore caeli, et pingvedine terrae, det tibi Deus), which was repeated in various Rosicrucian manifestos. Perhaps it was a signal to 'initiated' readers, for he determined that 'the hidden messages underlying the sensus externus would be difficult to decipher. [27] Stressing the necessity of discretion, he chose allegorical prose, 'a literary form that is almost comparable to being silent'. However, in the final fable, he verged dangerously on an explicit description of his role as a spy. Describing himself as a vatis or seer, he recounted the role of his vatis factus infans or little dog transformed into a child, who worked as a secret spy for his master among the ladies of a court:

'The little dog...understood various expressions of people's will, their signs and speech, and it could tell its Master what it understood. Its owner, however, kept this skill of the dog secret, saying that it was a dog without the ability to speak, and he taught him pleasant frolics, with which he could win the favour of the girls.... But the band of virgins did not as yet know that it could report their talk and their secret actions to its Master, that it could be the informer and spy of its seer and, sitting in their embraces, kiss their ears in order that it might catch as closely as possible what they said between them. It was even sent to the feet of Heroes and military commanders, and was seen to bite their heels and to withdraw at once, so that it might not perchance be violently pushed back and get a wound that would deprive it of its life?' [28]

While awaiting the arrival of Carl XII, who made a thrilling horseback ride from Turkey to the Baltic port of Stralsund, Swedenborg wrote Benzelius that he was working on 'secret methods of communication' and military projects. [29] He especially prided himself on 'a method of conjecturing the wills and affections of men's minds by analysis', and in the Camena he referred to 'the representation of the mind in the face'. [30] This kind of physiognomic intelligence — which drew on Cabbalistic methods of assigning Hebrew numbers and letters to different parts of the face and body — was considered valuable by many diplomats and their secret agents, and Swedenborg would study and practice it for decades.

Swedenborg returned to Stockholm, just before the siege of Stralsund, in which George I's fleet aided Carl XII's enemies. After the king's hazardous escape and flight to Sweden in December 1715, the Carolinian party planned a joint Swedish-Jacobite invasion of Britain, subsidized earlier by the late Louis XIV, which would replace the Elector of Hanover with a more sympathetic Stuart king, James 'III'. The Jacobites sent a large sum of money to Baron Georg Heinrich von Görtz, a Holstein official who had become Carl XII's most trusted diplomatic agent. Swedenborg was aware of this 'debt of Görtz', which would play a significant role in Swedish-Jacobite negotiations over the next decades. In London Gyllenborg collaborated with Harley and Mar (both freemasons) to link up supporters in France, Holland, Russia, and Sweden. Claude Nordmann, the pre-eminent historian of Swedish diplomacy in this period, argues that they used a masonic network to facilitate communication and maintain security. [31] This was especially important in gaining the support of Czar Peter, who carried out his secret negotiations through his Scottish-Jacobite-masonic officials. [32] The arrest of Gyllenborg and exposure of the Swedish-Jacobite plot in January 1717 increased the British government's suspicion about Jacobite-masonic plotting, and some historians argue that this was the main motivator for the formation in June 1717 of the London Grand Lodge, whose Whig members were determined to render Freemasonry loyal to the Hanoverian government. [33]

In the meantime, Swedenborg and his scientific mentor Christopher Polhem had entered Carl XII's service, and they undertook various military and financial projects. At his encampment in Lund, the king secretly worked on plans for future building projects, which he confided to Nicodemus Tessin, the brilliant architect, whose services had earlier been sought by the Stuart king Charles II and Christopher Wren. [34] Nicodemus's kinsman, the military architect Hans Ewald Tessin, had joined an Edinburgh lodge in 1652, thus becoming the first documented foreign freemason. [35] After serving General Monk in Scotland, Hans Ewald and his son worked for the restored Charles II on architectural projects in Dunkirk and Tangier. Like Hans Ewald, Nicodemus Tessin may have been initiated into 'British' Freemasonry, for his son Carl Gustaf Tessin — a close friend of the Swedenborg family — reported that his father was proud to call himself a 'master mason'. [36] Carl Gustaf would later become the leader of Écossais Freemasonry in Sweden.

Swedenborg knew Nicodemus Tessin, and he was familiar with the architect's designs for a great pansophic Temple of Apollo at Versailles. He was also invited to discuss mathematics with the king, whom he considered a mathematical genius. It was perhaps through Tessin's influence that the king ordered Swedenborg to assist Polhem 'in the direction of buildings, and mechanical works'. [37] Swedenborg accordingly undertook an investigation of the craft guilds, including the masons' guilds whose recorded history in Lund dated back to the 14th century. He and Polhem wanted to infuse the guilds with higher intellectual and spiritual aims, so that they could contribute to the reinvigoration of the kingdom in economic, military, and religious affairs. If Swedenborg was initiated in London, he would have observed the collaboration of educated gentlemen with mechanics and artisans in the masonic lodges, a collaboration subsequently strengthened by Desaguliers. [38]

In Swedenborg's report on the guilds, he discussed the first three degrees of training — apprentice, journeyman, and master — which corresponded to those in English masonic guilds. [39] He advocated many practical reforms as well as greater openness and mobility for craftsmen of merit. In order to make the 'royal arts' of masonry — geometry and algebra — more available to Swedish workers, Swedenborg and Polhem wrote basic textbooks of applied mathematics, and they collaborated in drafting a dialogue between 'Lady Theoria' and 'Master Builder Practicus'. [40] The Master Builder, wearing his black leather apron, pays court to the aristocratic Theoria, who is 'not used to receiving social calls' from such lowly craftsmen. As a practitioner of mechanics and architecture, Practicus proposes marriage to her in order to achieve greater 'public utility'. At this time, there was a wide social gap between a Fröken (woman of noble family) and a Master Builder (master mason), which Polhem and Swedenborg hoped to eliminate. In so doing, they would emulate the British practice of gentlemen joining operative masons in their lodges and architectural enterprises. Moreover, the brothers would wear white, not black, leather aprons as a sign of the enhanced prestige of their craft fraternity. It is perhaps relevant that Swedenborg referred to Robert Fludd, whom later Swedish masons credited with infusing Rosicrucian ideals into Stuart Freemasonry. [41]

At this time in London, Gyllenborg was also approaching craftsmen and guild members in an effort to gain their sympathy for Sweden's cause. After the ambassador's arrest in January 1717, Daniel Defoe would accuse him of recruiting artisans to the Swedish-Jacobite plot. [42] Given Gyllenborg's collaboration with Harley, Mar, Ormonde, James Keith, and other Jacobite freemasons, it is certainly possible that his outreach to artisans had a masonic component. [43] Moreover, many operative masons were embittered by George I's removal of Wren from the position of Royal Surveyor, which they attributed to Wren's Stuart sympathies. After Gyllenborg's release from prison, he returned to Sweden and determined to pursue the Jacobite plot even further, now directed mainly by Carl XII's Holstein officials Görtz and Georg Henning Eckleff, who were currently acting as Swedenborg's employers. [44]

Five decades later, Elis Schröderheim — a freemason and secretary to the masonic king, Gustaf III — recorded that Eckleff brought masonic documents to Sweden and that his son Carl later used them to establish an Écossais lodge in Stockholm. [45] According to Lindman, when Carl Eckleff founded a Scottish St. Andrew's Lodge in 1756, he produced an old warrant that was pronounced authentic and legal. [46] Schroderheim added that Görtz 'wanted to profit also from Freemasonry in those plans he intended to carry through'. Nordmann argues that military lodges were introduced into Franco-Swedish regiments in 1716–18. [47] These claims make Beswick's odd remarks about masonic encampments in Carl XII's army take on some plausibility.

However, the optimistic Jacobite dream was soon shattered. After the death of Carl XII in November 1718 and the execution of Görtz in March 1719, the assumption of the Swedish crown by Frederick of Hesse led to a long period of persecution and disenfranchisement for the Swedenborg, Benzelius, Gyllenborg, and Tessin families, who supported the rival Holstein candidate for the throne and resented Chancellor Horn's repressive policies. [48] When Beswick asserted that the masonic military encampments were broken up by Frederick's 'Hessians', he may have drawn on oral traditions maintained by Carolinian-Holstein loyalists. [49] Over the next decade, while Hanoverians and Jacobites struggled for control of Freemasonry in Britain, the disaffected Holsteiners linked their cause even more strongly with the Jacobites.

Disgusted with the political repression in Sweden, Swedenborg travelled on the Continent, where he attempted to gain a position with some Holstein diplomats. Perhaps he thought his continuing studies in psychic phenomena would help, for he recorded his experiments in 'thought-transfer': 'It also frequently happens that a person falls into the thought of another person, that he perceives what another is doing or thinking, that is, that his membrane trembles from the other person's cerebral membranes'. [50] From this and later comments, it is clear that Swedenborg believed he could read people's minds — by using physiognomic analysis as well as mental telepathy. After his death, many of his masonic disciples found the roots of Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism in his theories. However, the attempted Holstein revival was suppressed, and he returned to his post as assessor for the Board of Mines. He now sought solace in alchemical research, studies he shared with Count Gustaf Bonde, head of the Board, a practising alchemist who collected a great library of Cabbalistic and Rosicrucian literature. He also became involved in the mystical reform movement of Johan Conrad Dippel and the Moravian Brethren, who attracted many alienated Swedes to their millenarian vision.

In 1728 Swedenborg's political allies were encouraged by Jacobite-masonic developments in Paris, where Carl Gustaf Tessin consulted with Daniel O'Brien, a mason and the Pretender's chief agent, about the 'debt of Görtz', and with Madame de Mézières, an activist member of the Jacobite Oglethorpe family. [51] In winter 1729, according to recently discovered documents in Finnish masonic archives, the Jacobite freemason Charles Radcliffe (later soi-disant 4th Earl of Derwentwater) [52] initiated the Swedish nobles Nils Bielke, Johan Sack, and Gustaf Horn, followed in May 1731 by Axel Wrede-Sparre. [53] The latter was the son of the late Eric Sparre, who as Swedish ambassador in Paris had played a key role in the Swedish-Jacobite plot of 1717. The Finnish scholar Ekman claims that Bielke and Sack then returned to Sweden and began clandestine masonic activities, 'first in the form of irregular lodges'. Bielke and Sack were brothers-in-law of Tessin, as well as friends and political allies of Swedenborg and Benzelius.

This Jacobite-Swedish context gives a new perspective on the December 1729 election in London of Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk, as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge, for he was a crypto-Jacobite who regularly sent funds to the Pretender. [54] In March 1730, when the Scottish Jacobite Andrew Michael Ramsay, former tutor to the Stuart princes, joined the Horn lodge in London, he was aware that his fellow lodge-member Norfolk was a Stuart supporter. After Ramsay and Norfolk left for France in July, the Norwich Gazette, a Jacobite newspaper which had steadily covered Norfolk's rise within Freemasonry, reported a startling story:

'We hear that some Gentlemen lately returned from France amongst other things say, That His Most Christian Majesty had been made a FREE-MASON, in the usual Forms, by the Duke of Norfolk Grand Master of the Society; and that his Majesty hardly ever appeared more merry, than he did at that Ceremony.' [55]

If this claim is true, then Ramsay's later plan (1737) to go 'to the merite to harangue the King of France, as head of the confraternity and to have initiated his Majesty into our

Sacred mysterys' perhaps referred to the chivalric higher degrees, rather than the preliminary 'entered apprentice'. But, like much else about the obsessively secretive Louis XV, the truth about his masonic affiliation remains elusive. On 29 December, when the Norwich Gazette also reported that Norfolk 'presented to the Brotherhood' a 'Gustavus Adolphus handsome sword of state' once used by the great Swedish warrior king Gustavus Adolphus, the Jacobite journalist may have been aware of the new Franco-Jacobite-Swedish masonic initiatives. [56]

In 1733, as the uncomfortable Hanoverian Alliance between George I, Louis XV, and Frederick I seemed to be unravelling, the war of the Polish Succession broke out. With a majority of Swedes enthusiastically backing Stanislaus Leszczynski's claim to the throne, Swedenborg was sent on an intelligence mission to Eastern Europe, which — according to the Swedish New Church historian Franz Lindh — earned him a secret diplomatic subsidy from Louis XV, son-in-law of Stanislaus. [57] After Swedenborg returned in 1734, he made an intelligence report on the Polish situation to the Secret Committee, and he learned from Benzelius about new political developments in Sweden. [58] Carl Gyllenborg now led an opposition faction who called themselves the 'Hats', based on the French tricorn symbolizing martial vigour and gallantry, and who labelled Horn's party the 'Caps', based on the nightcap worn by senile and timid old men. The Swedenborg and Benzelius families were staunch supporters of the Hats, who would soon develop a masonic network to push for changes in domestic and foreign policy. [59]

Since 1732, Count Johan Sack led a quasi-masonic fraternity called the Awazu och Wallasis, which was influenced by the Scottish Jacobite 'Order of Tobosco', organized by the exiled Keith brothers to link partisans in Spain, Italy, and Russia. [60] The Grand Master of Tobosco initiated the young Stuart princes into the rituals of mystical chivalry. In Sweden the Awazu operated clandestinely under the hostile regime of King Frederick and Chancellor Horn, while its initiated knights worked for the political agenda of Tessin, Gyllenborg, Benzelius, and other dissidents determined to break the Hanoverian alliance and renew Franco-Swedish collaboration with the Jacobites. In 1734 Wrede—Sparre returned from Italy and France and immediately joined the Awazu. But he soon sensed the need for a stronger organization, especially one with international ties. In January 1735 he urged Tessin to help him organize a St. John's lodge aprés le modèle français, and they recruited members from the knights of Awazu and foreign diplomats sympathetic to their political agenda. [61] Though Swedenborg's name does not appear in surviving records, he may have been affiliated, for he attended 'private' meetings at Tessin's estate and was close to many initiates. [62] According to one member, Carl Frederick Scheffer, for many years Swedish freemasons had been dispersés sur la face de la Terre and had to operate avec une extrême circonspection; he then credited Wrede Sparre for being le premier qui réunit nos Frères dispersés. [63]

In later years, when Swedenborg was defending Scheffer — current Grand Master — and other pro-French senators threatened with impeachment, he clearly stated his anti-Hanoverian sentiments:

'Ever since this our fine Government had its beginning, the Most Worshipful Estates of the Realm
have considered the bond of alliance with France as most closely agreeing with the interests of the Kingdom and its defence. This cannot be expected of England, since that Kingdom and the Electorate of Hanover have become united under one lord and king. This has turned his interest against us, and ours against him
 so long as the Kingdom of England and the Electorate of Hanover are united under one lord, no such alliance can be entered into and concluded with that Kingdom as with the Kingdom of France.' [64]

This political belief, rooted in Swedenborg's first experience in England and reinforced by his seven further residencies in London, explains his willingness to engage in dangerous political and espionage work which served the French-Jacobite cause. Moreover, like other intelligence agents, he utilized his studies in extra-sensory perception to serve his patriotic cause. That Scottish Freemasonry had long traditions of 'second sight' was relevant, and some Swedish freemasons would later claim that Swedenborg possessed that peculiar gift of clairvoyance. [65]

In summer 1736, while Swedenborg was in Holland, he recorded his experiments in ritualized breathing and intense meditation, which could produce visionary trance and dream states. [66] Unfortunately, his heirs — concerned about maintaining his 'respectable' image — later tore out these pages from his journal. By August Swedenborg had moved on to Paris, where he spent the next 19 months, during a period of critical Jacobite and masonic developments. He allegedly participated in masonic affairs in the city and, despite the posthumous censorship of his journal, there is enough surviving evidence of his contacts in Paris to lend credibility to the allegation. [67] On 3 September he recorded that he moved into the Hôtel d'Hamburg which — according to Pierre Chevallier — was on the Rue du Four, site of Écossais lodge meetings which drew visitors from Sweden, Scotland, Poland, and Italy. [68] Moreover, the two lodges that Swedenborg probably visited met right around the corner on the Rue de Bussy and the Rue des Boucheries. Thus, Beswick's claim that Swedenborg visited Derwentwater's lodge on the Rue des Boucheries is plausible. [69]

On 15 September Swedenborg noted that 'General Stenflycht came and lodged in the same house where I stayed' (the Hôtel d'Hamburg). [70] Stenycht, a friend of Swedenborg and a Hat partisan, had just escorted the defeated Stanislaus Leszczynski from Poland to a secret meeting with Louis XV. The two men were determined to persuade the king to compensate the many Swedish soldiers who had fought for the Polish 'Pretender'. [71] That Stanislaus definitely and Stenycht probably were freemasons may explain why Swedenborg then made two visits to the bankers Fleury Tourton and Jean-Christophe Baur, who were both active in Écossais Freemasonry. [72] Heads of the Protestant bank, Tourton and Baur gained the confidence of Louis XV, who often entrusted them with private financial dealings in support of Jacobite-Swedish-Polish affairs, especially those he kept secret from his ultra-conservative foreign minister, Cardinal Fleury. [73] Baur had handled the clandestine funding of Stanislaus's campaign, which Fleury had undermined because of his fear of the British fleet and 'criminal truckling' to pressure from Robert Walpole, the Whig Prime Minister. Swedenborg possibly knew Jean-Claude Tourton (Fleury Tourton's uncle) during his earlier residence in Paris, for Gyllenborg and Mar used the banker as a financial agent during the Swedish-Jacobite plot. During Swedenborg's residence in Paris, Baur often initiated international Masons who supported Louis XV's private diplomatic agenda, and he would develop close ties with Hat politicians in Sweden.

It is unknown whether Swedenborg attended the lodge meeting on 26 December, when the Chevalier Ramsay delivered his famous Ramsay's oration, which described Freemasonry as an originally Jewish fraternity, whose secrets were discovered by the crusading knights of the Temple and then transmitted to operative masons in France and the British Isles. [74] That some Swedes attended the meeting is suggested by a document preserved in Swedish archives, which was endorsed by Derwentwater on 27 December 1736, one day after Ramsay's oration. [75] Ramsay's mystical and chivalric themes would have an enormous influence on Swedish Freemasonry, and it was perhaps no coincidence that Swedenborg recorded his visit to 'the ancient ruins of the Temple', where he visited the chapel and residence of the Grand Prior. [76] Rather than 'ruins', the Enclos des Templiers was actually a thriving community of 4,000 residents and, as Kervella notes, 'the Enclos still resonated with its ancestral spirit and remained a place of intrigue'. [77] The next Grand Prior, the Prince de Conti, would soon become involved in Jacobite-Swedish-Polish-masonic plotting, and he often met Tessin in his Temple residence. Swedenborg's reference to Conti suggests his awareness of his secretive role. his Ramsay's honorary degree at Oxford in 1729 and who hosted Scheffer in 1736.

In Paris Scheffer immediately moved into the Swedish embassy, where he worked to displace Ambassador Carl Gedda, who was close to Fleury and who received a secret pension from Walpole for his spy reports on the Jacobites. Swedenborg had earlier visited Gedda and probably discussed his impressions with Scheffer — perhaps based on physiognomic analysis and thought-transfer. Moreover, Scheffer's emphasis on the need for secrecy may have influenced Swedenborg to cease writing in his journal and to send no more letters; except for a brief note on 30 July, he left no record of his next 14 months in Paris. In May Scheffer joined the 'Villeroy' lodge, which was led by Louis XV's favourites. However, the lodge was currently split between a pro-English minority led by John Coustos and a Jacobite majority led by the new Grand Master Derwentwater and the king's banker Baur. One new member — proposed by Baur — was Baron von Görtz, son of Swedenborg's former employer and leader of the Swedish- Jacobite plot of 1717. [78]

Rumours circulated that the Écossais masons became 'new knights', who aimed to turn the fraternity into an 'Order of Templars', which caused Fleury to vow 'to suffocate this Order of Chivalry at its birth'. [79] Fleury especially feared that supporters of his arch rival Chauvelin gathered in Écossais lodges. In July he ordered the police to confiscate the 'Villeroy' lodge registers, and in August a disappointed Ramsay wrote that Fleury's action prevented him from initiating Louis XV, as he had planned. [80] Nevertheless, Ramsay took the risky step of asking George Kelly, recently escaped from the Tower of London where he was held on treason charges, to translate his discourse into English and to distribute it to the Jacobite faithful. He had already sent a French version to the Duke of Ormonde, earlier participant in the Swedish-Jacobite plot.

In September Scheffer, who had joined Derwentwater's lodge, received from him a patent to found Écossais lodges in Sweden, which — in order to avoid Chancellor Horn's anti-Jewish ordinances — would be exclusively Christian. At this time, Carl Johan Cronstedt, a Swedish friend of Swedenborg and Benzelius, arrived in Paris from Rome, where he had participated in the Jacobite lodge maintained by Stuart exiles. A brilliant military and domestic architect, Cronstedt had been welcomed by the Jacobites, who plied him with questions about his uncle's military innovations for Carl XII, who was the current role-model for the sixteen year-old prince Charles Edward Stuart. Through his masonic contacts and perhaps through conversations with the prince, Cronstedt may have learned about Charles Edward's interest in Freemasonry and his expressed desire to be initiated when he came of age. However, according to Beswick, in December 1737 Swedenborg was arrested while attending a masonic meeting on the Rue des Deux Eçus. [81] As a visitor and foreigner, he was subsequently released but placed under police surveillance. Beswick's source for Swedenborg's arrest is plausible, for he claimed that J.P. Parraud (a freemason and French translator of Swedenborg's True Christian Religion) sought information in 1802 from the censor Chevreuil, who had definitely known Swedenborg in Paris in 1769. [82] Chevreuil replied that Swedenborg's enemies in 1769 learned of his earlier arrest in 1737 and used the information to force him out of Paris in June 1769.

Despite Fleury's suppression which seemed to 'silence' the lodges, his great rival Chauvelin and his masonic allies were still determined to change the Cardinal's pacifist and cautious foreign policy. Like Chauvelin, the Jacobites continued to act like 'moles', as they utilized their underground communication networks. In December 1737 Daniel O'Brien wrote to James Murray, member of the Roman lodge, about masonic affairs in Paris and referred to Ramsay's oration. [83] In January 1738 Murray responded with a request for a copy of the oration on 'l'histoire secret des freemassons', because 'our young princes are in a great curiosity to learn the secret'. Moreover, Murray knew that the more militant masons were pushing Charles Edward to defy his cautious father and launch a more aggressive foreign policy.

It was in this context that Swedenborg left Paris for Italy in March 1738. He was accompanied by a French freemason, 'Firnkranz', who was a banking partner (and either brother-in-law or nephew) of Baur. [84] Swedenborg then spent four months in Venice, where he lodged with Firnkranz until he completed some undefined 'work'. From his later writings, it is clear that he read widely in chemical and alchemical literature, but his 'work' was probably of a political nature. At this time, Tessin and Benzelius were labouring to develop a Franco-Swedish-Turkish alliance that would support the Jacobites against England and the Hats against Russia. [85] Tessin secretly visited Venice in August 1736, where he recruited various agents to handle the secret correspondence, but he now feared that Russian and Hanoverian spies had penetrated the system. Even worse, in April 1738 Pope Clement XII issued the Bull In Eminenti against the freemasons, for he feared the seditious 'free-thinking' of many Italian intellectuals. Swedenborg evidently met Cardinal Lambertini, who was reportedly a freemason, and who opposed the Papal ban. [86] When Lambertini became Pope Benedict XIV in 1740, he observed that his predecessor's ban on Freemasonry was his 'worst political error'. [87] The Pope's ban and Tessin's concern about postal espionage may have influenced Swedenborg's lack of correspondence and increasingly laconic journal entries.

In August Swedenborg moved to Florence, during a period of turbulent controversy about the masonic lodge in the city. Though allegedly founded by Jacobites, the lodge now included various Hanoverians who sent spy reports to Prime Minister Walpole. However, the Pope's main concern was the participation of various Italian savants whose liberal ideas seemed threatening to Vatican orthodoxy. Swedenborg met at least one of these Italian members, Dr Antonio Cocchi, who later nominated him to the Italian Academy of Sciences. As rumours floated about this heretical and seditious sect, the Jacobite agent Tyrrell wrote from Florence to the Pretender to assure him that the 'new sect' was merely a lodge of freemasons and nothing to be alarmed about. [88] Many members of the lodge pursued studies in hermetic alchemy and Cabbalistic theosophy, and it is possible that Swedenborg (or Cronstedt) was the source of the mysterious Rosicrucian hieroglyphs sent from Florence to Stockholm in 1737–39. [89] According to the masonic historian Gould, R. F. staunch defender of the Hanoverian Grand Lodge system, it was 'from this suppositious lodge' in Florence that 'both the Swedish system and Strict Observance have professed to receive that light, denied to England in 1717'. [90]

From Florence Swedenborg moved on to Rome, where he stayed five months (September 1738–February 1739). He spent much time with Count Nils Bielke, who was keeping his brother-in-law Tessin informed about affairs in Italy. [91] Since Bielke's 1729 initiation by Derwentwater, he had left Sweden, become a French citizen, a convert to Catholicism, and a friend of Ramsay. Moving to Rome, he was made a Senator, while he received a secret pension from Louis XV for his intelligence work. [92] Swedenborg stayed in the Hotel of Three Kings, where the Jacobite lodge met until a recent raid by the Papal police. Through Bielke, who was on good terms with The Pretender, Swedenborg evidently gained access to the Stuart court. [93] He had recently listed 'James III' as a legitimate heir, and he now noted, 'I saw the palace where the Pretender lives, which is almost opposite to that occupied by the French embassy'. [94] A peculiar dream-memory, which he recorded in July 1744, seemed to refer to his visit to the Stuart king and princes. [95]

While in Rome, Swedenborg and Bielke probably learned that the Swedish king Frederick I issued a ban on Freemasonry on 21 October 1738, in what was a last ditch effort to prevent a Hat takeover of the government. [96] After the Hats won majorities in the Diet, no written records of the ban were ever found, leading most scholars to believe that it was never implemented or subsequently rescinded. The Hat victory convinced Louis XV and the Jacobites that the time was ripe for a new, serious attempt at Swedish-Jacobite co-operation. They even convinced Fleury, who was desperate to regain the king's confidence. When John Drummond of Balhaldy, a Scottish freemason, urged Fleury to launch an invasion of Britain, the Cardinal responded positively but argued that Swedish-Protestant rather than French-Catholic troops be used. [97] Fleury proposed that Spain pay for 10,000 Swedish troops and that some Swedish nobleman who was independent of King Frederick be sent to Spain to negotiate the agreement. [98] Hector Maclean, the former Jacobite Grand Master, and his frère O'Brien informed their Hat-masonic colleagues that the supply of Swedish troops and arms would also absolve the 'debt of Görtz'. In Sweden Tessin, Scheffer, and Palmstierna would arrange the affair, while Baur in Paris would manage the financial transactions. [99] I argue that in April 1739 they sent Swedenborg from Genoa to Spain, for he later referred to his visit to Spain (a journey never mentioned by his biographers) and to the treasures collected in certain monasteries in Spain, where he perhaps carried out the negotiations. [100]

By mid-May 1739 Swedenborg was back in Paris, where he checked in with the new Swedish diplomats, both active Hats and freemasons, and arranged to send a batch of letters in the diplomatic bag to his political allies in Sweden. [101] Regrettably, those letters are lost, for they must have included his reports from Italy and Spain. That summer Tessin and Scheffer arrived in Paris, where they took over the embassy and began strenuous lobbying to implement new Franco-Swedish-Jacobite projects. [102] According to Lindh's study of Swedenborg's banking records, he now received a secret subsidy from Louis XV to publish a scientific work, Economia Regni Animale, Lindh. [103] Though Swedenborg was serious about his scientific writing, he also seemed to use it as a cover for his intelligence work. Moreover, according to Chevallier, Louis XV had secretly defied Fleury, become a freemason, and established a private 'Loge du Roi' at Versailles. [104] While gaining the confidence of Louis XV, Ambassador Tessin spent much time with Chevalier Ramsay, who informed him that General Monk had secretly utilized Scottish Freemasonry to organize the restoration of Charles II in 1660. [105] Ramsay said he had not revealed this in his lodge orations because the statutes forbade discussion of politics, and he wanted to avoid suspicion that the brotherhood participated in 'matters of state'.

Tessin and Scheffer worked with O'Brien and other Jacobite freemasons to build support in France and to woo disaffected Whigs and Tories in England, where Walpole's corrupt regime alienated many former Hanoverians. Swedenborg had moved on to Holland, where he collaborated with the Swedish ambassador Preis, whose diplomatic journals are full of information on these clandestine overtures. It was perhaps Preis who thought that Desaguliers might be ripe for recruitment, for he had met him earlier at The Hague and kept up with his troubles under the hostile government of Walpole and George II. Swedenborg was currently using Pierre Changuion, a masonic publisher, to print the Economy in Amsterdam, and he knew that Changuion earlier published volume I of Desaguliers' A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734). From Preis, he probably learned that volume II had still not come out because of Desaguliers's political and financial problems in England. [106] This context sheds some light on Swedenborg's secret journey to London in March 1740, a journey never mentioned by his biographers. In a surviving letter from Preis to Desaguliers, he writes that Swedenborg, who is known to Desaguliers, is in England and will bring money to pay for the stalled but planned volume II. [107] Did that money come from Louis XV's secret diplomatic fund? Preis was aware that the Swedish ambassador Carl Wasenberg was a masonic friend of Desaguliers, and Wasenberg would later accompany Desaguliers in a public procession of anti-Walpole freemasons through the streets of London. [108]

At this time, Louis XV was receiving encouraging reports from Jacobites in England. In spring 1740 General James Keith, as an officer of the Russian Czarina, was allowed to visit London; while there he tried to persuade various Scottish freemasons — including his cousin John Keith, Earl of Kintore, the new Grand Master — to support the Jacobite project. [109] Ramsay was privy to Keith's plan, and he wrote the Pretender about it. [110] In June, while Keith prepared to leave with his new patent as Provincial Grand Master for Russia, the Comte de Clermont arrived in London, with secret orders from Fleury to evaluate Keith's report and the extent of Stuart sympathy. [111] On Clermont's return in September he reported that conditions 'were favourable to the Jacobites' designs'. It was probably no coincidence that soon after the missions of Keith and Clermont a secretive chapter of the Royal Order of Scotland, with a Rose Cross degree derived from Ramsay, began to meet in London in 1741. [112] Among the more startling claims about the Order is that it had a Swedish origin — a claim that continues to puzzle masonic historians. [113] Could Swedenborg have collaborated with Keith and Clermont in bringing Ramsay's chivalric degrees to London? Keith would later establish a crypto-Jacobite lodge in Stockholm, and Clermont would establish a private Écossais rite which maintained clandestine ties with the Young Pretender (nôtre cher F… Le Prince Edouart), with the Royal Order in London, and with Hat Freemasonry in Sweden? [114] Baron von Starck, a later initiate of the Clermont and Swedish Rites,

claimed that they were established long before Baron von Hund's Templar system (1744–5), which emerged in 1744–45. [115]

While in London, Swedenborg contacted Fellows of the Royal Society, and he gave his manuscript 'De Cerebro' (Swedenborg) to the vice-president Martin Folkes, FRS a disaffected Whig freemason, who asked Dr Alexander Stuart, a Scottish freemason, to translate and report on it. [116] He also arranged for Changuion to publish an anonymous edition of the Economy in London. According to Lindh, the anonymity was necessary because of Louis XV's secret subsidy. [117] Did Swedenborg carry other diplomatic messages to London? Preis and Tessin received alarming news from Wasenberg, who warned them that the son of Peter Aulaeville, Swedenborg's old friend, had been stopped by English customs officers, who confiscated his papers but fortunately did not tear open the specially constructed book which contained a diplomatic code hidden within its double covers. This confiscated correspondence, which is now in the Bodleian library, resembles strikingly Swedenborg's own notebooks, which looked like ledger books and which, after his death in London, were sent under diplomatic seal to his confidential agent and high-ranking freemason in Sweden. [118]

In the Economy, Swedenborg hinted again at his use of physiognomic analysis as an intelligence tool:

'…from observing the face it is possible to make conjectures concerning the animal mind; but especially if we judge by a man's actions, which are mere executions of the will, the actual representations of the inner mind.' [119]

When he finally reported to Preis (in September) about his meeting with Desaguliers, did he also reveal 'the actual representation' of the scientist's 'inner mind'? [120] Despite Preis's desire to help (or recruit) him, Desaguliers' affairs did not improve. In 1741 the poet James Cawthorne would lament the fate of Desaguliers in 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' (Cawthorne, James):

'And still permit the weeping Muse to tell
How poor neglected Desaguliers fell?
How he, who taught two gracious kings to view
All Boyle ennobled, and all Bacon knew,
Died in a cell, without a friend to save,
Without a guinea, and without a grave?
Posterity, perhaps, may pay the debt
That senates cancel, and that courts forget.' [121]

The scientist's last portrait, painted just before his death in 1744, shows a man 'tortured by gout and disappointment'. [122] Over the next three years, as the Hats led Sweden into an ill-fated war against Russia, Swedenborg played an active political role in the Diet, while Hat politicians such as Carl Johan von Höpken sought his and Carl Linnaeus's advice in evaluating various dreams, prophecies, and supernatural revelations about the war. Swedenborg immersed himself in Hermetic and Rosicrucian readings, as he struggled to interpret the calamities besetting Sweden. [123] He made notes on his experiments in trance-induction and hieroglyphic interpretation, which — in the portent-ridden atmosphere of the disastrous war — took on a military and political significance. [124] Certainly, Höpken — a leading freemason and recipient of a secret subsidy from Louis XV — considered Swedenborg a valued consultant on practical as well as spiritual affairs.

Despite the Hats' defeat by Russia, they continued to dream of a Jacobite restoration which would help them reclaim Sweden's lost North Sea provinces. Encouraged by the death of Cardinal Fleury in January 1743, these hopes were reinforced by the secret support of the Prussian king Frederick II, a fellow freemason. In July Swedenborg joined a party of Hat politicians and military officers (nearly all freemasons) who travelled to Hamburg to inform the Holstein candidate Adolph Frederick that he was chosen successor to the crown of Sweden. The heir apparent was initiated into Freemasonry, and at his succession in 1751, he became royal protector of the Swedish Rite. After Swedenborg arrived in Holland in August, his journal stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, with no more entries until March 1744. It is unknown whether his heirs tore out the pages or whether Swedenborg deliberately kept no written records.

Preis must have informed him that Ambassador Wasenberg died suddenly in August, that his diplomatic papers had not yet arrived, and that his secretary was worried about penetration of les affaires secrètes. [125] Moreover, the British government refused to accept Carl Otto Hamilton as new Swedish ambassador because he was a known Jacobite. [126] In October there was better news, for General James Keith arrived in Stockholm, where he used a charter from Edinburgh to establish a masonic lodge. [127] Though all the members were Hats, Keith managed to deceive the British ambassador Guy Dickens that he sympathized with George II's government. In reality, he kept his 12,000 Russian troops in a state of readiness to sail from Sweden to Scotland when orders came from his brother Marischal Keith, now organizing troops in France. [128] In December the Hats and Jacobites were delighted when the Comte de Clermont became Grand Master in France and, especially, that he chose the banker Baur — Swedenborg's friend and Hat financier — as his Deputy. [129] This context lends credibility to Lindh's argument, based on Swedenborg's banking records and contacts in Holland, that he served as a financial courier for the Hats' international network of diplomats and bankers. [130]

During these 'silent' months, Swedenborg underwent a religious and political crisis, in which he yearned for spiritual illumination and feared that he was incapable (at age 56) of carrying out his dangerous secret mission. His Journal of Dreams, Swedenborg which resumed in March 1744, makes clear that he intensified his experiments in trance-induction and dream-interpretation, while he participated in gatherings of the Moravian Brethren. [131] At this time, the Moravians implemented the Judenmission, an outreach programme to Jews based on mutual study of Hebrew texts and Cabbalistic meditation. [132] Swedish opponents of the Moravians published attacks which linked them with the freemasons, and many contemporaries considered the Brotherhood to be a special form of Freemasonry. [133] In his diary, Swedenborg drew on Anders Odel's Sions Sanger (1743), in which the Hat poet merged masonic and Moravian themes. [134] Using a peculiar allegorical language, Swedenborg mixed descriptions of psycho-erotic visions and dream-memories with specific political references — in a manner reminiscent of John Dee.

The acceleration of Jacobite plotting, triggered by the surprise arrival of Prince Charles Edward Stuart in Paris in February 1744 and Louis XV's declaration of war against England in March, was reflected in Swedenborg's notes revealing his fear of indiscretion and exposure, his sense of pressure to maintain secrecy, and his fear of betrayal by certain Swedish acquaintances (especially Johan Archenholtz, a Cap politician recently driven out of Sweden). [135] Swedenborg sensed that he was being sucked into dangerous political affairs beyond his competence. From the surviving accounts in Preis's diplomatic journals, which detail the Hats' participation in dangerous plotting, it is clear that Swedenborg had good reason to worry. Then, on 5 April 1744, while staying with Preis at The Hague, he recorded a provocative dream:

'Afterwards I slept, and it seemed to me that the whole night I was first brought into association with others, through the sinfulness that existed. Afterwards, that I was bandaged and wrapped in wonderful and indescribable courses of circles; showing that during the whole night I was inaugurated in a wonderful manner. And then it was said, "Can any Jacobite be more than honest?" ["Is there any Jacobite superior in honesty?"]. So at last I was received with an embrace. Afterwards it was said that he ought by no means to be called so, or in the way just named; but in some way which I have no recollection of, if it were not Jacobite. This I can by no means explain; it was a mystical series.' [136]

This singular account, which both revealed too much and concealed significant details, seems to describe Swedenborg's initiation into the Écossais high degrees, which had been developed by Ramsay into a mystical system ('series'?) of regeneration — in the service of the Stuart cause. Moreover, the use of 'honest', a cant word among Jacobites to denote faithful and discreet supporters, suggests the pressure of the oath of loyalty and secrecy that disturbed Swedenborg in his dreams. [137] His initiators ('inaugurators') worried that they had been too explicit in their use of the word 'Jacobite', for secrecy was more critical than ever at this point in their plot. Swedenborg was also given a new order name, 'Nicolaiter' or 'Nicolaus Nicolai', which was standard practice in the high degrees. [138]

On 4 April Swedenborg recorded the arrival of a courier, but his note was later heavily inked out, and on 21 April he recorded another Swedish visitor, for whom some strange ceremony involving a ladder was arranged. [139] Again, he seemed to describe the masonic ritual when the candidate climbs a ladder in a darkened room, plunges into the abyss, is caught by his brothers, and saved by a sudden illumination of lights. I argue that the Swedish courier was sent by his Hat colleagues, for at this time Preis, Scheffer, Baur, and Swedenborg's banking colleagues in Holland were arranging the shipment of Swedish cannons and artillery to Dunkirk for shipment to the Jacobite forces. [140] The courier evidently gave Swedenborg orders to travel to London, which provoked frightened dreams about his earlier arrest in 1710, when he broke British quarantine and immigration laws, and about an executioner who cuts off heads (the penalty paid by Jacobite plotters in England). [141] Then, on 18 April he referred obliquely to a secret military operation:

'It seemed to me that we worked long to bring in a chest, in which were contained precious things which had long lain there; just as it was a long work with Troy; at last, one went in underneath and eased it onwards; it was thus gotten as conquered; and we sawed and sawed…' [142]

The editor Van Dusen observes that Swedenborg's reference to Troy is most curious, for the Trojan horse contained soldiers who opened the enemy gates and enabled the town to be conquered: 'It is the same here. The chest contains something precious that will enable the "town" to be conquered'. [143] At this time, many Swedish soldiers in French regiments volunteered to join the projected Jacobite invasion force. While British spies combed the coasts of Holland and France searching for Jacobite agents and weapons, somehow the Swedish cannons made it all the way to Scotland.

In May 1744 a troubled and fearful Swedenborg sailed to London, accompanied by Moravian friends. He dreamed about being caught with incriminating papers, and he worried about 'the condition of the people in England, which is part honest, part dishonest'. [144] Did he use 'honest' in the Jacobite sense of loyalty and discretion? He soon learned that the Moravians, who included many German and Swedish members, were under surveillance as suspected Jacobites. Swedenborg was joined by a Swedish Hat, Niklas von Oelreich, who had recently participated in Rosicrucian and masonic affairs in Paris. [145]

His descriptions of various psycho-erotic visionary experiences with Oelreich suggest their mutual Cabbalistic meditation experiments. [146] He and Oelreich contacted various Fellows of the Royal Society, who shared their interest in Rosicrucian and Hermetic theosophy. [147] One of them, Dr Johan Hampe, was a practising alchemist and became a lifelong friend of Swedenborg. [148] Frustrated in his efforts to join the Moravian Pilgrim Congregation, which was extremely selective in accepting new members, Swedenborg joined some other kind of society, which he called the 'society of immortals'. [149]

This society may have been associated with the Moravian Judenmission, whose leaders were working in the London Jewish community. Swedenborg's access came through his physician, Dr William Smith, who treated him for a hallucinatory fever and illness in summer 1744. [150] Smith also treated various Moravians, and he was the confidential friend of the Jewish Cabalist, Dr Samuel Jacob Falk, the Baal Shem, who lived near Swedenborg in the Wellclose Square neighbourhood. [151] Smith was interested in Falk's Cabbalistic techniques of psychosomatic healing, which were especially effective in cases of epilepsy and mental derangement. According to a later Swedenborgian freemason, Swedenborg was in the company of some unnamed Jews when he went into a trance or ecstasis, and they allegedly stole his watch. [152] But Swedenborg defended 'these good Israelites', and he developed messianic fantasies of preaching in their synagogue about the return of regenerated Jews and Christians to Jerusalem. [153]

According to Cecil Adams, the William Smith, MD, who founded the Order of Harodim in northern England, was the same man who published The Student's Vade Mecum Smith, William, MD (London, 177O). [154] Adams was not aware that the latter Smith was Swedenborg's physician and Falk's student. From later evidence, it is clear that Falk was associated with the Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning, which allegedly developed out of Smith's Harodim. [155] The Royal Order recognized the Comte de Clermont as its Grand Master in France, but its operative chief was Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Georg Kloss argues that Dr Smith became le plus ardent propagateur de l'opinion de Ramsay. [156] Given the murky tradition of a Swedish origin for the Royal Order, it is suggestive that Lindner sees a Swedenborgian influence on its symbolism. [157]

On 21 October 1744, in one of the last entries in his diary, Swedenborg paid tribute to Louis XV in his dream-memory of 'a great king, who was the king of France, who went without a retinue and
was polite to all without distinction'. [158] According to Bergquist, Swedenborg now accepted Louis XV as God's instrument (Guds redskap). [159] From Swedenborg's clandestine service to the king over the next decades, scraps of evidence emerge suggesting his participation in the Secret du Roi, Louis's private council that often directed a foreign policy opposite to that of his public ministers. [160] Though the names of several colleagues of Swedenborg appear in the surviving records of the Secret, he may be one of the 'most secret' agents for whom only a number is given. In Dr Falk's commonplace book, a later copyist found a curious note: 'My letter that I sent today to the nobleman (sar) Emanuel, the servant of the King of France, that he should wear [some sort of ritual clothing] and he should write his name in square letters'. [161] The copyist wrote that he did not understand what the note meant. Could Falk have referred to Emanuel Swedenborg, who was indeed a servant of the king of France? Over the next decades, Falk himself would get funds from Louis XV, receive visits from French diplomats and freemasons, and attend a masonic lodge in Paris. [162]

From November 1744 to July 1745, as the Jacobite plot stalled, Swedenborg immersed himself in Cabbalistic meditation and interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Then, as the plot picked up momentum and the Stuart prince planned to sail to Scotland, he wrote a strange manuscript called 'The Messiah About to Come', Swedenborg, in which he copied scriptural passages with references to Jacobites:

'Hear, O Isles, and ye people from afar off; Jova hath called me from the womb...a servant, to bring again to him the Jacobites, and to gather to him the Israelites.... I will use thee for making a covenant with men, that thou mayest occupy possessions that lie waste; that thou mayest command the prisoners to come out…' [163]

Given the context of the times, in which suspected Jacobites were being rounded up and imprisoned without trial, Swedenborg's allusions to delivering the Jacobite prisoners would certainly have gotten him in trouble with the British authorities. Moreover, the Jacobites' usage of scriptural codes had recently been discovered by Hanoverian spies.

One of Swedenborg's quotations would certainly be interpreted as a Jacobite message by the anxious Hanoverian spies:

'That he hath redeemed the Jacobite, and will deliver him from prison; for thou wast precious unto me. I will gather thee from the west and the east. I will command the north, that it give up; and the south, that it refuse not to bring my sons from afar.' [164]

It would not be beyond the paranoia (now justified) of the government decipherers to read these Biblical lines as referring to Jacobite forces coming from Ireland (west) and Sweden (east), with the Stuart prince landing in Scotland (north) and the invasion coming from France (south). That the main Jacobite prisoner in London was Sir Hector Maclean, former Écossais Grand Master and current planner for Sweden's participation in the projected invasion, makes his words even more risky. [165]

Swedenborg also included masonic-sounding passages about rebuilding the Temple:

They shall build a temple, not like the former, but one that shall endure as long as the world shall endure. And afterward, returning from the places of exile, they shall build up Jerusalem gloriously; and therein shall be built a temple. [166]

An anti-Jacobite exposé, entitled Les Francs-Maçons écrasés (1746) would soon reveal that a new, elite grade of Écossais Masonry included 'un tapis ou l'image d'un temple en ruines représente la Maçonnerie déchue que les Maîtres Écossaises vont régenerer'. [167] Swedenborg's emphasis on the role of the architect seemed to echo a new masonic degree of Architecte, which was the parfaite synonyme of the reformed degree of Serpents Pacifiques ou de Silence. In an especially provocative passage, the architect envisions the new temple on a high mountain where:

'The splendour of Jova came into the temple by way of the gate looking to the east — he showed the place of the throne.... The prince he shall settle in the sanctuary. — The northern gate. [168]

The New Church editor Acton notes that Swedenborg identified the temple with the society of immortals. [169]

By July 1745 Swedenborg sensed that he was 'on thin ice' in London, and he left for Sweden just before the Stuart Prince's sensational arrival in Scotland. Not only the Hats but also the Swedish populace cheered him on, seeing in his impulsive valour a reincarnation of Carl XII. A contingent of Swedish soldiers joined the prince at Prestonpans, including Magnus Vilhelm Armfelt, who marched with him until the terrible defeat at Culloden. [170] One of the enduring controversies in masonic history concerns the alleged initiation of the prince into the Order of the Temple in a ceremony at Holyrood Palace. [171] This tradition was believed and maintained by Swedish freemasons, who may have learned about it from the many Scots and Swedes who escaped to Gothenburg (including Lord Ogilvy, who received a description of the Templar ceremony). [172] An important source was apparently Magnus Armfelt, for his son Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt accompanied Gustaf III on his visit to Charles Edward Stuart in Italy in 1783, when the Young Pretender gave the Swedish king a patent naming him his successor Gustaf III as Grand Master of the Templar Masons. [173]

In 1746, as 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' skulked in the heather, Scheffer and Tessin worked with various Scottish and French freemasons on a plan to rescue him. [174] However, the Caps strenuously opposed their efforts and argued that the English navy would bombard Swedish ports. That Swedenborg was aware of the rescue effort is revealed by his description of James Maule in the oblique language of his spiritual diary. A Scottish ship captain, Maule was employed by the Swedish East India Company, which was a Hat-Jacobite enterprise much resented by the English. In October 1742 Maule was initiated in the Lodge Canongate Kilwinning in Edinburgh, which made him seem trustworthy to the Scottish and French freemasons gathered in Gothenburg. [175] They instructed Maule publicly to sail for Hamburg but then to change course and secretly sail to Scotland. However, Maule suddenly backed out of the plot, and the freemasons feared that the secret rescue mission had been betrayed. In his diary, Swedenborg claimed to receive information from the spirit world that revealed Maule's deception and betrayal:

'Concerning Those Who Are Magicians in the Other Life, by Reason of Evil Practices in the World. (Maul). A certain Englishman (Maul) had, in the world, cheated his associates, and fraudulently taken away their property. These frauds were turned into magic. First, he was able to take away the cap and to put it on others, yea, many and various kinds; and, according to the various sorts put on, were produced the perceptions and credulities of those on whom they were put; for a cap signifies such things. Second, he was also able to bring it to pass that they understood a thing just as he declared it; for to give drink is to instruct and persuade. Third, he is not allowed to touch others with a hand, or the fingers; for in this way he almost destroyed them — which corresponded to his life in the world. [176]

Despite the weird language of his spiritual memorabilia, Swedenborg always used the words cap and hat with full recognition of their political connotations. He implied that Maule played a double political game, deceived his colleagues, misused finger signs, and betrayed a certain handgrip — probably a masonic grip.

The crushing of the Stuart rebellion in 1746 did not mean the cessation of Swedish-Jacobite projects to oust the hated Hanoverians. Swedenborg would return to London in 1749, when he anonymously published volume I of Arcana Caelestia, Swedenborg, again subsidized by Louis XVI. [177] In compliance with the French king's policy that all his agents maintain absolute secrecy and anonymity while leaving no paper trail, Swedenborg destroyed the manuscript and gave his printer strict orders that the name of the author should not be revealed. Referring to this period, the German masonic historian Findel notes the influence of the rituals of Heredom on Swedish Freemasonry and suggested that Swedenborg 'used his influence in bringing about the new system' or, at least, 'smoothed the way for it'. [178] Thus, his London visit may be connected with the puzzling case of the Young Pretender's proposed visit to Sweden — a visit Swedenborg possibly helped to arrange.

In October 1749, after consulting with Ambassador Preis in Holland, Swedenborg moved to Aix-la-Chapelle, where he wrote volume II of Arcana Caelestia and recorded his bizarre experiences with Jewish magicians and Cabbalists. [179] According to General Charles Rainsford, a later Swedenborgian freemason and member of the Royal Order, the word 'Heredom' referred exoterically to a mountain of Scotland but esoterically to the Hebrew phrase mons domini or malchuth, the tenth sephira of the Cabbala. [180]

Rainsford, who knew Falk, said the Hebrew word was introduced by certain Jewish brethren. Swedenborg had earlier made a note on the Cabbalistic sense of malchuth, and before he left London, his neighbour Falk meditated on the Hebrew phrase 'mountain of God' and etched the related Cabbalistic names and interpretations on a parchment crown. [181] In Aix, as Swedenborg wrote volume II of Arcana, he described seven stages of initiation and regeneration, which seem to correspond to the Rite of Seven Degrees developed by members of the Royal Order of Heredom. [182]

At this time, Aix-la-Chapelle was the centre of rumours about the whereabouts of Charles Edward Stuart, who had suddenly disappeared in February 1749 and then wandered incognito from city to city and, allegedly, lodge to lodge. From the Swedish embassy in Paris, Scheffer wrote concerned letters about the Prince's situation, and most diplomats believed he would travel to Sweden. [183] According to the Marquis d'Argenson:

'He has a large sum of money in Sweden, more than 15,000 florins, which his father ceded to him. They come from a purpose Charles XII had, shortly before his death, of succouring the Pretender; he obtained that sum from the Jacobite party for the purpose of sending 10,000 men into England...Prince Edward will recover his debt on making himself known.' [184]

Meanwhile in Aix, Swedenborg was asked by Chancellor Tessin to carry out some kind of secret mission. After accomplishing it, Swedenborg referred to his earlier services for Tessin, and it is quite possible that he referred to previous negotiations with the Jacobites over the 'debt of Görtz'. [185] Moreover, Swedenborg may have helped to arrange Charles Edward's Swedish passport, for the surviving document in the unpublished Stuart Papers suggests that Count Nils Bielke, Ambassador Preis, and an unnamed Swede, now living in the neighbourhood of Liege (a city near Aix) will accompany a traveller identified as Soleil d'Or, Milete de Bretagne, which was the ritual title (Eques a Sole Aureo) used for Charles Edward in the Royal Order and in the Strict Observance. [186] [see Appendix B]. The tradition of the Prince's visit to his masonic supporters in Sweden would endure, with increasing elaboration, into the nineteenth-century. [187]

If Swedenborg were operating at such a high level of diplomatic intrigue, it would explain his more famous and sensational exploits of clairvoyance and angelic communication over the next decades. Though there is not time here to discuss these spirit revelations, I will briefly suggest the new political explications that can place them very much in the real world. During the Seven Years' War, when Sweden joined France in a hopeless struggle against Frederick the Great, the Chancellor von Höpken consulted Swedenborg daily — and, according to various witnesses — exploited his visionary gifts to support his policies. Encouraged by the Hats, Swedenborg revealed their opponents' secret intrigues and bribes which were communicated to him from the spirit world. Thus, the confession of the executed Count Brahe, a Cap conspirator; the location of the lost papers of Ambassador de Marteville, a Hanoverian spy; the revelation of the Swedish Queen's treasonous correspondence with her brother, Frederick the Great; the clairvoyant revelation of the Stockholm fire, possibly set by enemy agents; the prediction of the assassination of Czar Peter III, who undermined the Swedish war effort; and the warning to Carl Springer, English-paid spy, that Swedenborg knew about his secret bribes — all of these were based on knowledge of actual but clandestine historical events. It is unclear whether Swedenborg was manipulated by Hopken, Tessin, and other politicians, or whether he was a willing contributor to their political and military campaigns. [188] That question puzzled his contemporaries and continues to puzzle historians today.

During the last seven years of his life, Swedenborg continued his dangerous intelligence work; as an octogenarian mystic, he did not provoke much attention or suspicion among Europe's proliferating international spies. However, in summer 1769 in Paris, he allegedly met various French freemasons (Jerome Lalande, Court de Gebelin, Cardinal Rohan, the Marquis de Thomé and, more problematically, Antoine Jacques Pernety and Martines de Pasqually). [189] From this visit, the tradition of his participation in French Freemasonry gradually developed. In 1785, Charles Le Normand informed the Philalèthes convention that Schwedenborg en Suède était M ∴', while Edouard Maubach advised the frères that they should study Swedenborg's works '...qui indique le vrai culte et les mystères divins du premier ordre.' [190] In 1815, Claude Thory called Swedenborg an illuminé visionaire, who contributed to French Freemasonry, a tradition reinforced by his inclusion in a 19th century painting of Les dignitaires du Grand Orient de France. [191] Though rumours circulated that his indiscretions led to an order to leave Paris in 1769, he retained the trust and respect of the Swedish crown prince, who utilized Louis XV's Secret du Roi and the Écossais lodges to implement his political revolution. [192] In fact, Starck claimed that Gustaf III's royalist coup in 1772 was planned in a Stockholm lodge. [193]

Swedenborg supported Gustaf's plans, for he believed that Sweden was headed for partition and disaster without stronger royal leadership. After his death in London in March 1772, Swedenborg's political colleagues sealed his financial ledgers and papers and sent them under strict security to Carl Seele, his personal agent and a high-ranking freemason. [194] While his heirs removed manuscripts and books that would compromise his 'respectable' and non-political image, rumours and questions about his theosophical system and visionary exploits circulated all over Europe. But the Swedish King and freemasons considered him an honoured patriot, and a masonic medal was struck in his honour. [195] Over the next decades, as Swedenborgianism spread among freemasons in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, a disaffected Swedish courtier would complain about the Gustafan 'golden age':

'Freemasonry...became the surest way to good luck and success. It was holier than religion; they now discussed the visions of Swedenborg; in the Masonic lodges there was a Highest Priest and ceremonies at the altar.' [196]

Despite the many claims in European literature that Swedenborg was a freemason, absolute proof is still elusive. As another 19th-century biographer, J.J. Garth Wilkinson, remarked about his reported masonic activity in Paris:

'Rumour has been busy with Swedenborg upon this journey. The French 'Universal Biography' connects him with an artist — Elie — who, it is alleged, supplied him with money, and furthered his presumed designs. Indeed, he has been accused of a league with the illuminés, and with a certain politico-theological freemasonry, centuries old, but always invisible, which was to overturn society, and foster revolutions all over the world. We can only say that our researches have not elicited these particulars, and that every authentic document shows that Swedenborg always stood upon his own basis, accepted money from no one, and was just what he appeared — a theological missionary, and nothing more.' [197]

Ironically, Wilkinson saw 'revolution' only in Jacobin terms, not in Jacobite terms. Swedenborg and his Hat-masonic colleagues certainly strove for a diplomatic revolution that would 'overturn' Cap and Hanoverian society and re-arrange relations and territories between nations. Moreover, recent research proves that 'Elie Artiste' was a real person, Johan Daniel Müller, a German Rosicrucian who indeed financed Swedenborg. [198] By 1780 some of Muller's masonic friends would claim that Swedenborg was 'the source' of 'all the new Rosicrucian writings'. [199] Given the solidifying case for his role as a subsidized intelligence agent, it seems that the modern adage — 'follow the money' — may eventually solve the masonic mystery of this unusual secret agent, who operated on earth and in heaven.

Notes

1. In my book, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabbalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2002), I discuss the seventeenth-century Scottish and Stuart links with Sweden, including shared traditions of Cabbalistic, Rosicrucian, and masonic studies. These formed an important background for Swedenborg's development. I am grateful to Richard Sagar, Curator of the recently expanded Atlanta Masonic Library, for assistance in checking the following references. ↩
2. For background information on Swedberg and Benzelius, see my article 'Leibniz, Benzelius, and Swedenborg: the Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism', in Coudert, A.P., Popkin, R.H. and Weiner, G.M. (eds), Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Press, 1998), pp. 84–106. ↩
3. Rudolph L. Tafel, 'Swedenborg and Freemasonry', New Jerusalem Messenger (1869), pp. 267–8. ↩
4. Personal communication from the Revd Olle Hiern (August 2000). ↩
5. Personal communication (1 April 1999) from Dr David Dunér, University of Lund, author of 'Swedenborgs Spiral', Lychnos (1999). ↩
6. Alfred Stroh and Sigrid Sigstedt, 'A Chronological List of the Swedenborg Documents. Appendix and Additions' (1943), No. 57. Typescript in Swedenborg Society, London. ↩
7. George Trobridge, Swedenborg: Life and Teaching, 4th rev. ed. (1907; London: Swedenborg Society, 1935), p. 295. ↩
8. For the Czar's masonic affiliation, see Tatiana Bakounine, Le Répertoire Biographique des Francs-Maçons Russes (Bruxelles, 1940), 290, 404; Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 28, 160. ↩
9. Robert Gilbert, 'Chaos Out of Order: The Rise and Fall of the Swedenborgian Rite', AQC 108 (1995), pp. 122–49. ↩
10. Rudolph Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (London, 1875), II, pp. 735–9. ↩
11. See 'Geschichte der Freimaurerbrüderschaft in Schweden und Norwegen', Latomia, VII (1846), pp. 175–6; Bro Merzdorf, 'Uber die Grundverfassung der Grossen Landsloge von Schweden dd. 1800', Latomia X (1873), p. 24 (1873), p. 29, and 'Die Münzen der Freimaurerbrüderschaft Schwedens', Latomia, XXV (1866), pp. X51–68. ↩
12. Alfred Acton, Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg (Bryn Athyn, 1948), pp. 12–14. ↩
13. J. R. Clarke, 'Was Sir Christopher Wren a Freemason?', AQC 78 (1965), pp. 201–6; 'A Note on the Place of Sir Christopher Wren's Death and His Funeral in 1723', Wren Society, 18 (1941), pp. 181–2. ↩
14. Christopher Wren, Parentalia (London, 1750), p. 293. ↩
15. Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), p. 92. Jacob gives 1774 as the date of the comment on Wren in a letter from Vignoles to Zinnendorf (member of the Swedish Rite). However, the original document in the Grand Lodge Library, The Hague, is dated 3 March 1772 ('Documens du Fr. De Vignoles'). ↩
16. British Library: Sloane MS. 3342.f.89, p. 104. 'Minutes of the Royal Society, 1699-–1712'. ↩
17. Robert F. Gould, 'The Medical Profession and Freemasonry', AQC 7 (1894), p. 151. Sloane owned the original MS of Thomas Martin's 'Narrative of the Freemasons Word and Signs' (1659); a transcription was deposited in the Royal Society. ↩
18. Acton, Letters, 486; Stockholm Riksarkiv: Hollandica, No. 608 (Preis to Desaguliers, 24 March 1740). ↩
19. For the complex Anglo-Swedish diplomatic situation, see John F. Chance, 'England and Sweden in the Time of William III and Anne', English Historical Review, 16 (1901), pp. 676–711, 'The Northern Policy of George I to 1718', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n. s., 20 (1906), and British Diplomatic Instructions, 1689–1789. Volume I. Sweden, 1689–1727 (London, 1922); Claude Nordmann, La Crise du Nord au Début de XVIIIème Siècle (Paris, 1962), and Grandeur et Liberté de la Suède, 1660–1792 (Paris, 1971); John J. Murray, George I, the Baltic, and the Whig Split of 1717 (London, 1969). ↩
20. Stroh and Sigstedt, 'Chronological List: Appendix and Additions', No. 78. ↩
21. Detailed documentation for this argument will be given in my projected biography, Emanuel Swedenborg: Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven. ↩
22. For these references, see Alain Mothu and Charles Porset, 'A Propos du Secret des Francs-Maçons: une Réfèrence Jacobite (l705)?', in Charles Porset, ed., Studia Latomorum & Historica: Mélanges offerts à Daniel Ligou (Paris, 1998), pp. 327–33; Paula Backsheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, 1989), p. 214; G. W. Speth, 'Two New Versions of the Old Charges', AQC 1 (1886–88), pp. 128–9; Steve Murdoch, 'Soldiers, Sailors, Jacobite Spy: Russo-Jacobite Relations 1688–1750', Slavonica, 3 (1996–97), p. 8. ↩
23. Alfred Acton, 'Life of Emanuel Swedenborg', typescript (Bryn Athyn, 1958), pp. 58, 64–5; C. G. Malmstrom, ed., Handlingar rörande Severiges historia under ären 1713–1720 (Stockholm, 1854), X, pp. 117–400. In Palmquist's letters to Gyllenborg (March 1713–June 1714), he uses complicated mathematical cyphers, refers to incognito couriers, and worries about forged letters and British interceptions (Riksarkiv: Anglica, p. 217–18). ↩
24. Emanuel Swedenborg, Ludus Heliconus and Other Latin Poems, trans. Hans Helander. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Latina Upsaliensis 23 (1995), p. 93. ↩
25. 'Charles Leslie', DNB; James Macpherson, Original Papers (London, 1775), II, pp. 211–18.↩
26. While in London, Swedenborg carefully studied The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London, 1703), which included his lecture to the Royal Society on Dee's angelic codes. ↩
27. Emanuel Swedenborg, Camena Borea, trans. and ed. Hans Helander (Uppsala, 1989), pp. 7, 224. ↩
28. Ibid., 149. ↩
29. Acton, Letters, 57. ↩
30. Camena Borea, op. cit., p. 190. ↩
31. Claude Nordmann, Grandeur, p. 424. ↩
32. Murdoch, 'Soldier', pp. 7–12. ↩
33. J. R. Clarke, 'Establishment of the Premier Grand Lodge: Why in London and Why in 1717?', AQC 81 (1968), pp. 1–7; Douglas Vieler, 'As It Was Seen — and As It Was', AQC 96 (1983), p. 83. ↩
34. Raghnild Hatton, Charles XII (New York, 1968), p. 83; Osvald Siren, Nicodemus Tessin D. Y:s Studieresor (Stockholm, 1914), vi, p. 6; 'Nicodemus Tessin', Svensk Man och Kvinnor, ed. N. Bohman (Stockholm, 1860), XII, pp. 113–14. ↩
35. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century 1599–1710 (1988; Cambridge, 1993), p. 198. Though Stevenson speculated that Tessin was Dutch, he actually came from Swedish Pomerania. ↩
36. Duc de Luynes, Mémoires du Duc de Luynes sur la Cour de Louis XV (Paris, 1860), XII, pp. 113–4. ↩
37. See 'An Account of Emanuel Swedenborg', European Magazine, (11 April 1787), p. 230. ↩
38. Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981), pp. 123–5. ↩
39. Acton, Letters, pp. 89, 155–6, 169–70.↩
40. Svante Lindquist, Technology on Trial (Uppsala, 1984), pp. 177–8. On Swedenborg's co-writing with Polhem of a similar dialogue between 'Mechanica and Chymia', see James Hyde, A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (London, 1906), p. 27.↩
41. Alfred Acton, 'Robert de Fluctibus', in 'Index to All Authors cited by Swedenborg', typescript (Bryn Athyn, 1968). For the Fludd traditon, see Christoph G. Murr, Über den wahren Ursprung der Rosenkreutzer und des Freymaurerordens (Sulzbach, 1803), pp. 68–9. ↩
42. [Daniel Defoe], The Plot Discovered (London, 1717), p. 15.↩
43. For the British exposure of the plot, see Carl Gyllenborg, Letters which Passed between the Count Gyllenborg, the Barons Görtz, Sparre, and Others Relating to a Design of Raising a Rebellion in his Majesty's Dominions to be Supported by a Force from Sweden (London, 1717). Also [Daniel Defoe], An Account of the Swedish and Jacobite Plot (London, 1717). ↩
44. Acton, Letters, 1, pp. 87–90. ↩
45. Elis Schröderheim, Anteckningar till Konung Gustaf IIIs Historia (Örebro, 1851), pp. 266–7. ↩
46. Arvid Lindman, An Outline of the History and Organization of Freemasonry in Sweden (Stockholm, 1932), p. 6. Typescript in Grand Lodge, London. ↩
47. Claude Nordmann, Crise du Nord, pp. 10, 153n.48; Grandeur et Liberté, pp. 199, 424; and Gustave III: Un Démocrate Couronné (Lille, 1986), pp. 214–20. ↩
48. For the enduring controversies about Carl XII's death (whether killed by a Norwegian soldier or a Franco-Hanoverian agent), see Michael Roberts, 'The Dubious Hand: The History of a Controversy', in his From Oxenstierna to Charles XII (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 144–203. ↩
49. Beswick, Swedenborg Rite, pp. 188–94. ↩
50. Emanuel Swedenborg, On Tremulation, trans. C. T. Odhner (1899; rpt. Bryn Athyn, 1976), p. 6. ↩
51. Wilfrid Holtz, Carl Gustaf Tessin (Lund, 1921), pp. 112–14; Stuart Papers: 83/89. ↩
52. Although the Jacobites and their allies referred to him as 'Earl', he merely assumed the title, although his elder brother, James, 3rd Earl, had been attainted, so he cannot properly be described as the 4th Earl. ↩
53. For important revisionist documentation on Swedish Masonic history, see Eero Ekman, Highlights of Masonic Life in the Nordic Countries (Helsinki, 1994), pp. 27–9; Roger Robelin, 'Die Johannis-Freimaurerei in Schweden während des 18 Jahrhunderts', in Gold und Himmelblau: Die Freimaurerei, Zeitloses Ideal, Turku Regionalmuseum, Austellungskatalog 15 (1993), pp. 32–5; Pierre Yves Beaurepaire, L'Autre et le Frère: l'Étranger et la Franc-Maçonnerie en France au XVIIIème Siècle (Paris, 1998), p. 296. ↩
54. The Duke of Wharton, current Grand Master in Paris, included Norfolk on his list of secret Jacobite peers; see Paul Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975), p. 160; Stuart Papers: 83/89 (microfilm). ↩
55. Norfolk Gazette (20 August 1730); quoted in Gilbert Daynes, 'The Duke of Norfolk, 1730–1731', AQC 29 (1926), pp. 109–10. See also Paul Monod,Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 30. ↩
56. Ibid., p. 110. ↩
57. F.C. Lindh, 'Swedenborgs Ekonomi', Nya Kyrkans Tidning, 54 (1929), p. 87. ↩
58. Acton, Letters, pp. 468–75. The important sections 13–16 are now missing from the report. ↩
59. Lars Bergquist corrects the surprising error made by nearly all commentators on Swedenborg who claimed that he was a Cap and supporter of Count Horn; see his revisionist biography, Swedenborgs hemlighet (Stockholm, 1999). ↩
60. On the 'Awazu', see Robelin, 'Die Johannis Freimaurerei', 35; B. J. Bergquist, St. Johanneslogen den Nordiska Fiirsta (Stockholm, 1935), p. 35; Martin Lamm, Olofvon Dalin (Uppsala, 1908), pp. 124–45. On the 'Tobosco', see Murdoch, 'Soldiers', pp. 13–14, 20; Historical Manuscripts Commission: Reports on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Eglinton, 10th Report, Appendix A (London, 1885), pp. 178–9, 184–5; Stuart Papers: 144/126. ↩
61. Ekman, Highlights, p. 28; B.J. Bergquist, St. Johanneslogen, pp. 37–8; Robelin, 'Johannis-Freimaurerei', pp. 34–6; Beaurepaire, L'Autre, p. 296; Magnus Kinnander, Svenska Frimureriets Historia (Stockholm, 1943), p. 38. ↩
62. Olle Hjem, 'Swedenborg in Stockholm', in Robin Larsen, ed., Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision (New York, 1988), p. 322. ↩
63. B.J. Bergquist, St. Johanneslogen, p. 6. Scheffer recorded this early history in 1760, while serving as Grand Master. ↩
64. Acton, Letters, p. 594. ↩
65. See Tafel, 'New Documents', New Church Magazine, 4 (1885), p. 381, for Dr Husband Messiter's belief that Swedenborg possessed second sight. ↩
66. Acton, 'Life', p. 454. ↩
67. For the allegations and controversy, see Beswick, Swedenborg, pp. 44–5; White, Life (1866), 204; Karl- Erik Sjöden, Swedenborg en France (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 4–10. ↩
68. Pierre Chevallier, Les Ducs sous l'Acacia, (Paris, 1964), pp. 31, 96. Acton, 'Life', p. 461, mislocates the hotel to Rue Jacob. ↩
69. Beswick, Swedenborg Rite, p. 44. ↩
70. Tafel, Documents, II, pp. 1, 92. ↩
71. Hilding, Danielson, Sverige och Frankrike, 1736–1739 (Lund, 1956), pp. 89–93; Jacques Levron, Stanislaus Leszczynski (Paris, 1984), pp. 172, 217–50. ↩
72. Stanislas Mnemon, La Conspiration du Cardinal Alberoni: la Franc-Maçonnerie et Stanislas Poniatowski (Cracovie, 1909), pp. 23–6; Chevallier, Ducs, pp. 72–81.↩
73. ↩ Herbert Luthy, La Banque Protestant en France (Paris, 1961), I, p. 78; II, p. 168. ↩
74. C.N. Batham, 'Chevalier Ramsay, a New Appreciation', AQC 81 (1968), pp. 280–315.↩
75. A. Lindman, Outline, 3. The document had earlier been signed by Sir Hector Maclean, previous Grand Master, on 26 December 1735. ↩
76. Tafel, Documents, II, pp. 1, 93–94. ↩
77. André Kervella, La Franc-Maçonnerie Écossaise dans l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1999), p. 141. ↩
78. Chevallier, Ducs, pp. 29–38, 72–97. ↩
79. Barbier, Chronique de la Régence et du Regne de Louis XV (1718–1763) (Paris, 1885), III, pp. 80–81; Benimeli, Masoneria, I, p. 252. ↩
80. Bodleian: Carte MS, 226.f.419; reprinted in José Ferrer Benimeli, Masoneria, Iglesia e Illustration (Madrid, 1976–77), I, p. 255. ↩
81. Beswick, Swedenborg Rite, pp. 44, 50. ↩
82. Ibid., 50. Parraud worked on French translations of Swedenborg from 1785 to 1817 and he definitely conferred with Chevreuil; see Hyde, Bibliography, p. 567. ↩
83. Stuart Papers: 203/163. ↩
84. Tafel, Documents, II, i, p. 110; Luthy, Banque, II, pp. 163–4. ↩
85. Linköping Stiftsbibliotek: Bref til Benzelius, XV, f.23b, p. 51; Holst, Tessin, pp. 156–60. ↩
86. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Spiritual Diary, ed. Alfred Acton (London, 1977), Nos. 5833, 5841. For Lambertini's alleged masonic membership, see [Johan August von Starck], Apologie des Francs-Maçons (Philadelphie, 1779), pp. 69–70. ↩
87. Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart (London, 1988), p. 533. ↩
88. Stuart Papers: 198/130. ↩
89. On the hieroglyphs, see 'Beiträge', Latomia, 21 (1865), p. 133. ↩
90. Robert Freke Gould, History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, 3rd rev. edn. (1882–87) (London, 1951), IV, p. 122. ↩
91. Tafel, Documents, II, i, p. 122. ↩
92. On Bielke's role as 'un des nombreux espions de la France à Rome', see Emile de Heeckeren, Correspondence de Benoit XIV (Paris, 1912), I, pp. 150–51. ↩
93. Stuart Papers: 194/61. ↩
94. Tafel, Documents, II, I, p. 122. ↩
95. Emanuel Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, trans. J.J.G. Wilkinson, commentary Wison Van Dusen (New York, 1986), No. 215. ↩
96. Benimeli, Masoneria, I, p. 146; Robelin, 'Johannis-Freimaurerei', p. 44. ↩
97. Duncan Warrander, ed., More Culloden Papers (Inverness, 1930), p. 161. ↩
98. W.B. Blaikie, Origins of the 'Forty-Five' (Edinburgh, 1916), p. 22. ↩
99. Chance, British Diplomatic Instructions: Sweden, I, p. 77. ↩
100. Acton, Letters, p. 725; Emanuel Swedenborg, The Apocalypse Revealed, trans. F.F. Carlson (London, 1979), No. 752. ↩
101. Riksarkiv: Gallica, No. 284. ↩
102. Carl Gustaf Tessin, Tableaux de Paris et de la Cour de France, 1739–1742, ed. Gunnar von Proschwitz (Götenborg, 1983), pp. 26–7.↩
103. Lindh, 'Swedenborgs Ekonomi' (March-April 1929), pp. 87–8. ↩
104. Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie Française (Paris, 1974), I, pp. 47–57, 100–126; Kervella, Franc-Maçonnerie, 1714–45, 262; Benimeli, Masoneria, I, p. 267. ↩
105. Anton F. Büsching, Beiträge zu der Lebengeschichte denkwürdiger Personen (Halle, 1783–89), III, p. 329; G.D. Henderson, Chevalier Ramsay (London, 1952), pp. 171–2. ↩
106. For an important revisionist study of Desaguliers's career, see Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1992). ↩
107. Riksarkiv: Hollandica, No. 608. ↩
108. Chetwode Crawley, 'Mock Masonry in the Eighteenth Century', AQC 18 (1905), p. 132. ↩
109. Edith Cutchell, The Scottish Friend of Frederick the Great: the Last Earl Marshal (London, 1915), pp. 188–90; Norrie Paton, The 'Jacobites: Their Roots, Rebellions, and Links with Freemasonry (Fareham, 1994), p. 45. ↩
110. Stuart Papers: 222/13. ↩
111. Lord Mahon, History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713–1783, 5th rev. ed. (London, 1858), III, pp. 7, 30–31. ↩
112. Tuckett, 'Origins', op. cit., p. 20. ↩
113. James Fairburn Smith, The Rise of the Écossais Degrees (Dayton, 1965), pp. 51–53. ↩
114. Ibid., 36. In French correspondence, the Stuart prince was usually named 'Edouard'. For Charles Edward Stuart as Grand Master of the Royal Order and its London branch, see William Wonnacott, 'The Rite of Seven Degrees in London', AQC 39 (1926), p. 75. ↩
115. Werner Zimmerman, Von den alten zur neuen Freimaurerei: Briefwechsel und Logenreden 'von Diethelm Lavater nach 1800 (Zürich, 1994), p. 143. ↩
116. London, Royal Society: Journal Book (14 May 1740).↩
117. Lindh, 'Swedenborgs Ekonomi' (March-April 1929), pp. 87–88. ↩
118. Bodleian: Rawlinson MS, D570. 'Correspondence between Wasenberg and Gyllenborg, 1739–40'; Rudolph Tafel, 'New Documents', New Church Magazine, 4 (1885), p. 381. ↩
119. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, trans. A. Clissold (London, 1845–46), I, p. 241. ↩
120. Acton, Letters, pp. 486–7. Acton mistakenly places the meeting between Swedenborg and Desaguliers in Holland. ↩
121. Daily Post (13 April 1741). ↩
122. Stewart, Rise, p. 380. ↩
123. For his references to writings on Cabala, Rosicrucianism, and Hermeticism, see Emanuel Swedenborg, A Philosopher's Notebook, ed. Alfred Acton (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 30, 158, 160, 178, 185, 232, 250, 258–9, 314, 508. For anguished concern with 'portents', see Nordmann, Grandeur, 418; Acton, 'Life', pp. 665, 691. ↩
124. Swedenborg, Economy, III, pp. 33, 195, 338–41. ↩
125. Riksarkiv: Anglica, No. 320. ↩
126. Riksarkiv: Hollandica, No. 823. Preis's Journal. ↩
127. C.H.L. Thulstrup, Anteckningar till Svenska Frimuriets Historia (1892), pp. 14–18; Göran Behre, 'Gothenburg in Stuart War Strategy, 1649–1760', in Grant Simpson, ed., Scotland and Scandinavia, 800–1800 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 113–14. ↩
128. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 77–81. ↩
129. Chevallier, Histoire, I, pp. 47–57, 100–126. ↩
130. Lindh, 'Swedenborgs Ekonomi' (March-April 1729), pp. 26–8, 90–91. ↩
131. Emanuel Swedenborg, Dream Diary, ed. Lars Bergquist, trans. Anders Hallengren (West Chester, 2001), pp. 27–38. Bergquist stresses Swedenborg's intense involvement with the Moravians. For Swedenborg's Cabbalistic visionary techniques, see my on-line article, Schuchard, 'Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake, and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision', Esoterica: The Journal of Esoteric Studies, II (September 1999); Michigan State University. Web address = http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/BlakeFull.html ↩
132. For the Moravians' occult and Jewish interests, see Pierre Deghaye, La Doctrine Ésotérique de Zinzendorf (1700–1760) (Paris, 1969); Christiane Dithmar, Zinzendorfs nortkonformistische Haltung zum Judentum (Heidelberg, 2000). ↩
133. Erik Ericksson, Emot Freymaurerna (1741), and Emot Zinzendorffianer (1741). ↩
134. Swedenborg, Dream Diary, pp. 332, 337; Karin Dovring, Striden kring Sions Sanger (Lund, 1951), p. 133. ↩
135. Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, No. 18, pp. 24, 167. ↩
136. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., No. 43. The words in brackets are Hallengren's translation in Bergquist's edition. ↩
137. On the Jacobite significance of 'honest', see Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 156; Ian Higgins, Swift's Politics (Cambridge, 1994), p. 79. ↩
138. Ibid., No. 133; on the new ritual name, see René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et le Franc-Maçonnerie Allemande (Paris, 1915), p. 145. ↩
139. Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, No. 37, p. 162. ↩
140. Frank McLynn, France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 56, 68. ↩
141. Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, No. 54, p. 136. ↩
142. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., No. 141. ↩
143. Ibid., p. 93. ↩
144. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., Nos. 191–95. ↩
145. Carl Gustaf Tessin, Tessin och Tessiana (Stockholm, 1819), pp. 301–2. ↩
146. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., No. 202, p. 283. ↩
147. London, Royal Society: Journal Book, XVIII, f, p. 251. ↩
148. Cyriel Sigstedt, The Swedenborg Epic (1952; London, 1981), 431–34. He and Dr Messiter, a Swedish freemason, attended Swedenborg on his deathbed. For his alchemical career, see J.F. Hampe, An Experimental System of Metallurgy (London, 1777). Through his friendship with Dr. Sigismund Bacstrom, a Swedenborgian Mason and Rosicrucian, Dr. Hampe provided a link between the illuminist circles of Swedenborg and William Blake; see Ron. Charles Hogart, Alchemy: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Manly P. Hall Collection (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1986), 234, 282. ↩
149. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., No. 170, p. 243. For the Moravians' exclusivity and troubles in London, see Colin Podmore, The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760 (Oxford, 1998). ↩
150. Swedenborg, Dream Diary, op. cit., pp. 54–57. ↩
151. For Smith's friendship with Falk, see Cecil Roth, 'The King and the Cabalist', Essays and Portraits in Anglo- Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 139–64; for his relationship with Swedenborg and Cabbbala-influenced medical theories, see my article, Schuchard, 'Yeats and the Unknown Superiors: Swedenborg, Falk, and Cagliostro', in Marie Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, eds., Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies. (New York, 1995), pp. 114–68. ↩
152. Benedict Chastanier, trans. and ed., Tableau Analytique et Raisonée de la Doctrine Celèste (London, 1786), 21–24. Chastanier had been a Martinist mason in France before establishing the Swedenborgina-masonic 'Universal Society' in London in 1776. See my article, Schuchard, 'The Secret Masonic History of Blake's Swedenborg Society', Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (1992), pp. 40–51. ↩
153. Arminian Magazine (January 1781), pp. 46–49. ↩
154. Cecil Adams, 'The Freemasons' Pocket Companions of the Eighteenth Century', AQC 45 (1932), pp. 176, 221. ↩
155. Wonnacott, 'Rite', pp. 79–80, 94; London, Grand Lodge: MS 'Livre des délibérations de la lodge de l'Union', No. 170 (c.1772–1790)'. In a note on the manuscript, W.I. Grantham identified 'John Falk' as Samuel Jacob Falk. For more on Falk, see article, 'Dr Samuel Jacob Falk: A Sabbatean Adventurer in the Early Masonic Underground', in Matt Goldish and Richard Popkin, eds., Millenarianism and Messianism Modern European Culture: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht, 2001), pp. 203–27. ↩
156. The Hague, Grand Lodge Library: MS G.O. 190 B57. MS notes by Georg Kloss, 'Andreas Ramsay. Sein Leben, sein Werken und sein Mitteilungen über die Freymaurerey'. ↩
157. Bruce Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated, trans. Arthur Lindsay (Graz, 1976), pp. 136–46. I argue that Swedenborg participated in the Rite of Seven Degrees, whose Master Lambert de Lintot claimed affiliation with the Royal Order. ↩
158. Journal of Dreams, op. cit., No. 274. ↩
159. Swedenborgs Hemlighet, op. cit., pp. 411–12. ↩
160. See the important chapter, 'Pengar fran Paris och "en God Konung"' ('Money from Paris and "a Good King"') in Swedenborgs Hemlighet, op. cit., pp. 400–414. I have found many more instances of Swedenborg's contacts with Louis XV's intelligence service. ↩
161. 'Falk's Commonplace Book' (12 February 1779); to be published by Prof Michal Oron of Tel Aviv University. I am grateful to Prof Matt Goldish for deciphering the difficult Hebrew text, which does not make clear who the copyist was nor when the original, earlier Emanuel reference occurred. ↩
162. For funds from Louis XV, see Falk MS (7 September 1772); also, my article, Schuchard, 'Dr Samuel Jacobi Falk'. ↩
163. Emanuel Swedenborg, Concerning the Messiah About to Come, trans. Alfred Acton (Bryn Athyn, 1949), p. 20. ↩
164. Op. cit., p. 53. ↩
165. Charles Edward Stuart, op. cit., p. 120. ↩
166. Messiah, op. cit., p. 93. ↩
167. Histoire, op. cit., I, p. 85. ↩
168. Messiah, op. cit., p. 67. ↩
169. Alfred Acton, An Introduction to the Word Explained (Bryn Athyn, 1927), pp. 89–90. ↩
170. Nordmann, Gustave III, p. 219. ↩
171. J.E. Shum Tuckett, 'Origins', p. 251; 'Prince Charles Edward Stuart', AQC 32 (1919), appendix; 'Dr. Begemann and the Alleged Templar Chapter at Edinburgh in 1745', AQC 39 (1920), pp. 40–62. (1920) pp. 40–62. Also Kervella, Maçonnerie, pp. 125–27. ↩
172. Paton, Jacobites, p. 45. ↩
173. Gustave III, op. cit., pp. 214–20. ↩
174. Göran Behre, 'Two Swedish Expeditions to Rescue Prince Charles', Scottish Historical Review (1980), pp. 140–53. ↩
175. Lisa Kahler, 'Freemasonry in Edinburgh, 1726–1746: Institutions and Contexts' (PhD dissertation, University of St. Andrews, 1998), p. 336. ↩
176. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, IV, No. 4827. ↩
177. L. Bergquist, Swedenborgs Hemlighet, op. cit., pp. 402–4 [not bold].↩
178. J.G. Findel, History of Freemasonry, ed. P. Murray Lyon, 2nd. rev. edn. (1865; London, 1869), pp. 329–30. ↩
179. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, Nos. 4467, 4848, 4507, 4496, 4525, 5059; Alfred Acton, 'Unpublished Parts of the "Arcana Caelestia"', New Church Life, 52 (1942), pp. 399–400. ↩
180. Gordon P. Hills, 'Notes on the Rainsford Papers in the British Museum', AQC 26 (1913), pp. 98–9. ↩
181. Swedenborg, Philosopher's Notebook, p. 160; Falk's Commonplace Book. ↩
182. Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Caelestia, trans. J.E. Potts (London, 1967), II, Nos. 3000, 3138, 3214, 3216, 3343–45, 3478. ↩
183. Riksarkiv: Anglica, Nos. 367, 369. ↩
184. Marquis d'Argenson, Journal and Memoirs, trans. K.P. Wormley (Boston, 1902), II, p. 64. ↩
185. Acton, Letters, op. cit., pp. 513–14. ↩
186. Stuart Papers: Box 2/114; Le Forestier, Illuminés, p. 162. ↩
187. See account in [Henry Goring], A Letter from H—— G——, &c. (London 1750) One of the Gentlemen of the Bed-Chamber of the Young Chevalier (London, 1750); John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, Tales of the Century (Edinburgh, 1847), p. 48. ↩
188. For the charge that Hopken, Tessin, and Swedenborg used his spirit-revelations for political purposes, see Tafel, Documents, II, pp. 669–70. ↩
189. Beswick, Swedenborgian Rite, pp. 52, 55, 109–10. Karl Frick, Die Erleuchteten (Graz, 1973), p. 599; Alice Joly, 'La "Sainte Parole" des Illuminés d'Avignon', Les Cahiers de la Tour Saint-Jacques, II-IV (Paris, 1960), p. 103. ↩
190. Charles Porset, Les Philalèthes et les Convents de Paris (Paris, 1960), p. 103. ↩
191. C.A. Thory, Acta Latomorum (Paris, 1815), p. 385; Jean-Luc Quay-Bodin, L'Armée et la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris, 1987), IX. ↩
192. For Gustaf III's secret diplomacy, see Helle Stiegung, Ludwig XV's hemliga Diplomati och Sverige, 1752–1774 (Lund, 1961); also Nordmann, Gustave III. ↩
193. Père Michel Riquet, Augustin de Barruel (Paris, 1989), p. 157. ↩
194. Tafel, 'New Documents', p. 381; Documents, II, p. 3; B.J. Bergquist, St. Johanneslogen, p. 102. ↩
195. Bro Dr Theodor Merzdorf, 'Münzen', pp. 51–68. ↩
196. Count Hans Axel von Fersen, quoted in Robelin, 'Die Johannis-Freimaurerei', p. 73. ↩
197. Garth Wilkinson, Emanuel Swedenborg: A Biography (London, 1849); quoted in White, Life (1882 ed.), pp. 205–6. ↩
198. Reinhard Breymayer, '"Elie Artiste": Johann Daniel Müller de Wissenbach/Nassau &c. (1716 jusqu'a aprés 1785), un aventurier entre le piétisme radicale et l'Illuminisme', Actes du Colloque International Lumières et Illuminisme, ed. Mario Matucci (Pisa, 1985), pp. 65–84. ↩
199. I. Barskov, Perepiska Moskovskikh Masonov 18–Go Veka (Petrograd, 1915), p. 217. ↩
200. J.E.S. Tuckett, 'Dr Begemann and the Alleged Templar Chapter at Edinburgh in 1745' AQC 33 (1920), p. 44. ↩
201. AQC 39 (1926), p. 75. ↩

Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Vol. 115, 2002