Heaven and Hell

In 1758 a book appeared in London, in Latin, with no author's name on it. It described where angels live, what they wear, how they talk, and what happens to a person in the first hours after death. It was divided into numbered sections and footnoted like a legal brief.

The man who wrote it had spent most of his life on mines, metals, machines and the anatomy of the brain. He was one of the best-educated men in Sweden, a member of its nobility and a senior official of the state.

That pairing is the strange heart of the book. The visions are not written in the voice of a prophet. They are written in the same careful hand that once described smelting furnaces.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688, the son of a Lutheran bishop. Religion was the air of the house, but the young man's appetite was for the new sciences. After Uppsala he spent years abroad, in England, Holland and France, learning from the mathematicians and instrument-makers of the day.

He came home with notebooks full of inventions. Among them was a design for a flying machine, sketched in his twenties, and soon afterwards he launched Sweden's first scientific journal.

None of this looks like the youth of a seer. It looks like a practical, restless engineer: someone who wanted to know how things work, and who wrote everything down.

In 1716 the king appointed him to the Royal Board of Mines, the office that oversaw one of Sweden's chief sources of wealth. He held the post for about thirty years. The work was literal and physical: inspecting mines, judging ores, advising on smelting works.

He wrote as he worked. His heavy volumes on iron and copper sat beside a theory of how matter and the planets came to be. When his family was ennobled in 1719 and the name became Swedenborg, he also took a seat in the House of Nobles.

This is the man to picture behind every page of Heaven and Hell: thirty years of inspecting what is there, and reporting it plainly to people who needed it to be accurate.

What did Swedenborg do for most of his working life, before he wrote about heaven and hell?

• He served on Sweden's Royal Board of Mines✓Correct answer
• He taught theology at Uppsala University
• He was a Lutheran pastor, like his father
• He worked as a physician at the royal court

For about thirty years he was an official of the Board of Mines, inspecting mines and writing on metals. The church was his father's world, and his later study of anatomy was research, not medical practice.

In his fifties his curiosity moved from the earth to the body. He wrote long works on the blood, the heart and the brain, and he was open about what he was after. He wanted to find where the soul meets the body, and he meant to find it the way an anatomist finds anything: by following the structures inward.

Some of his ideas about the brain's outer layer, the cortex, were later recognised as well ahead of their time.

But the soul did not turn up under the lens. He kept pushing, book after book, through physiology and philosophy, and by his mid-fifties he had written a great deal about the soul without ever laying a finger on it.

Then, between 1743 and 1745, something changed. He kept a private journal of vivid dreams, full of temptation and self-reproach, and by his own later account an inner sight was opened to him in London in 1745. In 1747 he resigned from the Board of Mines to give the rest of his life to what he had been shown.

The book states the claim with no drama at all. It was granted to him, he writes, "to associate with angels and to talk with them as man with man," and to see what is in the heavens and the hells, "and this for thirteen years."

The phrase to hold on to is as man with man. Not one blinding moment, but conversation, repeated over years, the way one colleague talks to another.