CONTENTS
 
 
Acknowledgements iv
Introduction
 Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the "Covert" Enlightenment
1 Emanuel Swedenborg: The Alternate-Reality Paradigm
2 Franz Anton Mesmer and Animal Magnetism
3 The Marquis de Puységur: The Alternate-
Consciousness Paradigm
4 The End of the "Covert" Enlightenment
5 Millenarian Prophets in America: Heaven on Earth
6 Transformation in America: The Earth as Heaven
7 Swedenborg Redivivus: A. J. Davis and the Harmonial
Philosophy
 Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Index
 [p. vi---dedication]
For Cherry and Darwin
and the enlightenment
of all sentient beings
 
 
 
 Acknowledgments
I am very pleased to acknowledge the help and encouragement of
the following people and organizations: first, LaTrobe
University, which granted two Outside Studies Programmes and
funding that enabled me to do the basic research for this book;
Dr. F. B. Smith, mentor and friend, who read the manuscript
carefully and made many valuable comments; Dr. Erland Brock,
whose academic and personal support has been invaluable; Leslie
Price, who introduced me to new ways of understanding the
material and to important new sources; and Carroll Ohdner and
the staff at the Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania,
always ready to lend assistance and to share their extensive
knowledge; the helpful staff at the British Library Rare Books
section, who made the voyage of discovery both useful and
pleasurable; Mary Lou Bertucci, senior editor at the Swedenborg
Foundation, who gently and expertly guided the work to
completion. Finally, I owe the deepest gratitude to my family
for their many exertions on my behalf, and their unflagging
support throughout the lengthy process of research and writing.
Introduction
Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the "Covert" Enlightenment
The European Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth
century heralded a grave conflict between theological and
scientific modes of thought, starkly revealing the ancient
tensions between spiritual gnosis and rational modes of
knowledge. This conflict had complex sources, among them the
fruits of the seventeenth-century revolution in methods of
observation and the quantification of nature's phenomena and
the resultant maxims of the rule of law, together with the
rising cult of a confident progress. The reification of reason
that took hold of peoples' minds set publicists like Voltaire
(1694-1778) to explain Isaac Newton (1642-1727) to the masses
and to argue for limited monarchy and religious toleration
while condemning the clerics with "écrasez l'infâme!"1 The
philosophes undertook the Baconian task of systematizing all
knowledge through the Encyclopédie; and from the 1760s,
political radicals, following John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-
Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778), began to strain against the
anciens régimes. Various "benign" despotisms arose, while
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) proclaimed the Age of Reason and urged
the end of monarchy and American colonists and disaffected
Frenchmen gave practical effect to democratic theories. In
England, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) pondered utility, and
Joseph Banks (1743-1820) promoted the scientific exploration of
a New World in the southern seas. In these closing decades,
Adam Smith (1723-1790), along with Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1727-1781) and the French Physiocrats, urged free trade based
upon an analysis of the economic relations within human
societies. Almost inevitably, in this developing atmosphere of
free and rational inquiry, religion suffered casualties. Those
in the West who rejected Christianity in the late-eighteenth
century often found solace in Deism or in secular efforts to
ameliorate the conditions of this life. A rejection of
supernaturalism was thus a common feature of the Age of Reason.
 There was another, a "covert" aspect to the High
Enlightenment, bringing fresh perspectives on the soul, and by
extension, on the human mind and on consciousness, in
particular (Garrett 1984, page number needed).2 At this point,
the dichotomy between science and religion was breached in a
number of interesting and historically significant ways. In
reaction to Newton's science and the mechanistic philosophy,
numerous challenges were being posed to the religious,
scientific, and medical establishments, and these would extend
even to orthodox freemasonry. Through the increasing popularity
of heterodoxy in religion, the line of a hermetic or "occult"
tradition extending from Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541)
and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to Jacob Boëhme (1575-1624) and
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was revived among the literate,
especially in Britain and France. Another challenge was posed
to the medical arts by the Austrian physician Franz Anton
Mesmer (1734-1815), who claimed to have discovered, or
rediscovered, a universal fluid which he called "Animal
Magnetism," which promised a panacea for diseases.
 Finally, within the murky world of freemasonry, numbers of
aristocrats and haute bourgeoisie adopted a rational religion,
claiming an antien' lineage to Hermes or even earlier which
soon, however, abandoned its early occult connections (Jacob
1991, 22). A breakaway reforming trend was observed, especially
in France over the last decades of the century, that
reconstituted its votaries into new quasi-Masonic societies.
Their syncretic program involved a millenarian outlook and
incorporated a wide range of ritual and theoretical, as well as
practical, elements, drawing upon a variety of sources:
Catholic and talmudic theology, mysticism and Renaissance
Hermeticism, and especially on the teachings and practices of
Swedenborg and Mesmer. These quasi-Masonic societies, while at
times sharing a common membership, had different concerns and
outlooks from what might be called the mystic materialism of
Mesmer or the religious dispensationalism of Swedenborg. In the
 closing decades of the eighteenth century, new groups were
established like the Avignon Society, which, though small in
numbers, had a disproportionate influence upon the religious
and cultural life of its votaries and a far more permeating
influence upon later generations than has generally been
recognized. They comprised the substance of what some
historians have called the "mystical" or "covert" Enlightenment
(Garrett 1975, passim)1.
 In Paris, London, and Stockholm and in provincial centers
like Lyon and Avignon, the Swedenborgian, mesmeric, and other
intellectual currents then circulating among the European
intelligentsia became manifest in different ways. Specifically,
these amalgamations of ideas and practices, through Mesmer's
theory of "crises" and Swedenborg's teachings on an afterlife
produced a hybrid, having firm roots in the Enlightenment and
in particular in its covert aspects, that would hold
considerable importance for later generations, firstly in the
magnetic movement, then in spiritualism. This hybrid was the
mediumistic séance, a nineteenth-century phenomenon through
which it was claimed that "sensitives" could transcend the
liminal zone between this world and a putative Other World.
 The application of the language and methods of science to
metaphysical concerns was one attempt at rapprochement between
empirical and theological modes of knowing; its most
characteristic expression would be found in nineteenth-century
America. The chief postulate of this study is that the
principal features of the mystical Enlightenment were attempts
at just such a rapprochement, as those who could accept neither
religious orthodoxy nor the mechanistic philosophy nor yet the
glittering generalities of orthodox freemasonry began to
organize themselves into para-Masonic, mystical, and
millenarian societies, drawing upon the vast fundament of
eighteenth-century learning. The result was no less than a new
formulation concerning the nature and purposes of the human
experience; this cultural transformation and its aftermath in
Europe and North America constitute the principal focus of this
 book. It is within this context of change and discovery, during
the covert Enlightenment, that the lives and labors of
Swedenborg and Mesmer are best understood, both in the relation
of their ideas to each other and in their broader significance
to the era.
 Intercourse with distinctly human spirits
As exploration increased in the world at large, some thinkers
were exploring the interior regions of the human psyche. At
least one, Emanuel Swedenborg, advanced the boldest of claims,
that he was the instrument of a new Christian Dispensation, a
revelation for humanity based upon reason, which entailed
direct knowledge of an afterlife, of its inhabitants and their
conditions. One unintended result of Swedenborg's writings was
the amazing profusion of spiritisms, occultisms, and Masonic-
style societies they inspired throughout the Atlantic world
over the closing decades of the eighteenth century. This was
apart from the gradual establishment of the New Church based
upon Swedenborg's theology and moral philosophy. One central
feature of these developments was a new attitude toward an
afterlife. It was above all else this hypothesis, the "proof"
of the continuance of life beyond the grave, that would spur
the growth of spiritualism from the 1850s, and a generation
later would bring into existence the Society for Psychical
Research (S.P.R.), the first scientific society formed
specifically to investigate these supernatural claims. Frank
Podmore (1963, 1:15), better known as an original Fabian
socialist, was among the core workers for the S.P.R. Writing in
1902, he asserted that:
 The idea of intercourse with distinctively human spirits,
 if not actually introduced by Swedenborg, at least
 established itself first in the popular consciousness
 through his teaching. E. Swedenborg is therefore
 deservedly ranked as the first Spiritualist in the
 restricted sense in which the term is here used.
While the New Church and her unwelcome stepdaughter
spiritualism would have severe differences, it was on this
point, the accessibility of an afterlife, that Swedenborg
established the first element of what in the spiritualist
movement would evolve into a plebeian cosmology for the
nineteenth century.
 Swedenborg believed in contact with the spirits of those
who had once lived as men and women, although this interaction
was authorized to him alone as agent of the Lord and was
subsumed within his broader message of spiritual regeneration.
He taught that the future life is a state much the same in
variety, character, and circumstances as life on earth. These
became the two chief articles of the spiritualist creed.
Podmore observed that "[Swedenborg's] special contribution to
the Spiritualist belief consists in his conception of a future
life," though Swedenborg, unlike the spiritualists, populated
his heaven not only with the spirits of the departed, but also
with demons and angels (Podmore 1963, 1:15).3
 In most other societies, and in Europe's own past culture,
belief in spiritual influences has figured prominently, these
being associated with and frequently deemed accessible through
the induction of altered states of consciousness.4 During the
Christian era, spiritual manifestations were understood
principally as demonic possession, and those branded as
diabolos were dealt with accordingly. In the persecution of
unfortunate medieval "witches," in seventeenth-century Salem or
in the Cévennes, the shared assumption of both persecutors and
persecuted was that spiritual beings exist, but that they are
not human spirits:
 The nuns of Loudun were possessed by demons, the Tremblers
 of the Cévennes had claimed inspiration by a divine
 afflatus, the Rosicrucians and Paracelsus believed they
 were dealing with elemental creatures. (Podmore 1963,
 1:14)
At least until the age of the baroque, deviance from accepted
norms was condemned according to religious and canonical
understandings incorporating a complex demonology. However with
the advent of the age of the individual reason, as the
mechanistic philosophy infused order into the universe, along
with those among the European educated elite who sought better
to understand society and to probe the human mind, there were
many persons in the West also thinking differently about the
nature and purposes of the human experience in its spiritual
aspects. This was apart from and sometimes in opposition to the
accepted church views.
 Three major trends can be identified in England and on the
Continent up to the early eighteenth century that helped to
transform attitudes to the Christian message, setting the stage
for the radically new understandings of the covert
Enlightenment. These were millennialism, based upon biblical
exegesis, and in particular prophecies as to the Last Days;
popular millenarianism, comprising small but influential
movements usually grouped around a charismatic leader; and the
rising organization and influence of freemasonry and quasi-
Masonic societies.
 These trends became manifest in many forms throughout this
century of Enlightenment. Some turned to biblical prophecy and
the millennial predictions of impending doom during the Last
Days; others joined freemasonry, claiming to possess secret
knowledge reaching back to Egyptian or other antiquity, and
rendered obeisance to the rational worship of a Great
Architect. Still others in England and on the Continent, in
small but increasing numbers, grew in sympathy with the "new"
Christianity, like that exhibited in the ecstatic visions and
inspired writings of the German mystic Jacob Boëhme. Over the
last decades of the eighteenth century, many of these same
people adopted a new revelation and Christian Dispensation as
proclaimed in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. These trends
were in evidence throughout Europe and when in the 1780s was
added the potent influence of the new magnetic techniques of
Mesmer and comte de Puységur (Antoine-Hyacinthe-Anne Chastenet,
1752-1807)2, all the principal elements of the occult revival
were in place.
 The occult revival was due in part to the same forces that
 in the broader Atlantic community gave rise to romanticism: a
breakdown of intellectualist, rational explanations that was
given its dominant impetus from J. J. Rousseau and the nature
philosophy (Brooke 1994, 94-97). To better understand these
transformations in attitudes, it is necessary first to examine
the various heterodoxies that flourished at the advent of the
Enlightenment and to connect them to the more diverse trends
that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe and
North America.
 The great swell of sectaries following the English Civil
War produced numerous sects such as the Quakers and the
Muggletonians, who continued in small but devoted groups into
the new century. In England, as J. F. C. Harrison has argued,
this millennial inheritance from the seventeenth century
produced an intellectual milieu favorable to the eschatological
interpretation of events (Harrison 1979, 14). Aided by a free
press, millenarian and prophetic traditions flourished in
England as they had never done in France, due to the pervasive
influence of the Catholic Church on the populace (Garrett 1975,
166).
 The Muggletonians and numerous other sects proclaimed the
imminent end of the world. The six principles of Lodowick
Muggleton (1609-1698) include the belief that God and the man
Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions. Around the same time,
the Philadelphian Society, named after the sixth of the seven
churches in Asia mentioned in Revelations, flourished in
London. It was headed by Jane Lead (1623-1704), author of A
Fountain of Gardens, a chiliastic spiritual diary that drew
substantially on Boëhme's ideas (Harrison 1979, 23-24). Unlike
Swedenborg, whose message was based on a new revelation and a
personal witness to the continued existence of humans beyond
the grave, these seventeenth-century mystic millenarians did
not recast the Christian message to proclaim a new
dispensation; rather they placed their faith in the private
spiritual insights of their leaders and founders. They did,
however, provide a receptive environment for Swedenborg's
teachings, inasmuch as his insistence that Jesus Christ is God
echoed the views of Muggleton, while his symbolic
interpretation of biblical stories was a strong feature of the
chiliasm of the previous century.
 The rising interest in the millennium was not limited to
the broad populace. Millenarians were found primarily within
popular culture throughout the eighteenth century; they awaited
more direct manifestations, as shown by the appearance of
various sects centered on individual prophets. The archetype of
the millennial philosopher was William Whiston (1667-1752),
Newton's successor at Trinity, Cambridge, while the Camisards,
and arising out of their influence, the Shakers, represented
the interests of the humbler classes. In general, millennial
ideas were more prevalent among the educated classes, and
largely concerned with various schemes of biblical prophecy as
to the Last Days, the breaking of the Seven Seals and so forth.
The Bible was used in a variety of ways: as literal and
divinely inspired, as a guide to contemporary events, or as
allegory, where stories would be interpreted as internal states
of the human mind (Harrison 1979, 14). Swedenborg would
continue the latter trend after his illumination in 1745. He
brought a new and deeper interpretation of the Bible based on
the doctrine of correspondences and degrees, believing that he
had been permitted by divine favor to understand these truths,
thence commanded to convey them to humanity at large. After
1745, Swedenborg taught the arrival of an "internal
millennium"; this was in stark contrast to contemporary
understandings of the millennium, awaiting an apocalyptic
conflagration to be followed by a thousand years of peace. Yet
such beliefs did urge among many in Hanoverian England and
elsewhere a loss of faith in orthodox Christianity, at the same
time as the Act of Settlement and other measures flowing from
the Glorious Revolution strengthened the established Church and
secured its relation to the Crown.
 The most radical millenarians were the Camisards, or
French prophets, a breakaway sect of Jansenism strongest in
southeast France, and especially in Lyon. They taught the
impending arrival of the millennium, to be preceded by the
conversion of the Jews and their return to the Holy Land
(Garrett 1975, 21). Resulting from the tensions that followed
Louis XIV's revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, thereby
withdrawing a guarantee of religious freedom to French
Protestants, there was official oppression of sects like the
Quietists and the Jansenists. After revolts in 1702 and 1705
stemming from this new environment of persecution, the
Camisards fled to England (Harrison 1979, 25). Their three
principal prophets, Élie Marion (dates needed), Jean Cavalier
(dates needed), and Durand Fage (dates needed) were filled with
the spirit; when they arrived in London in 1706 from the
Cévennes, where the Huguenots were in rebellion, they preached
an imminent millennium. Brooking no disagreement with their
prophecies and visions, which were often accompanied by
tremblings and seizures, they denounced all those who rejected
their authority. Inspired by the sermons of the Huguenot pastor
Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713), then living in the Netherlands, they
understood their struggle in apocalyptic terms, with the French
monarchy and its armies seen as serving the Great Beast in
Revelations. They departed after six years, leaving many
followers like John Lacey (dates needed), Richard Cuninghame
(dates needed), and Richard Roach (dates needed), who became
known as the English Prophets (Garrett 1975, 147; Rousseau
1988, 94, 98).
 Although numbering only in the hundreds, the Camisards
were a significant bridge between French and English cultures.
In their style and in their eschatology, they formed a
continuity with the seventeenth-century sectaries. Richard
Roach, rector of St. Augustine's church in Hackney, was a
follower of Jane Lead. He regarded them as God's instruments,
and as yet another sign of the millennium approaching; in
London, the Camisards joined with Philadelphians to announce
that the Last Days had begun in 1700 (Harrison 1979, 27). Élie
Marion, an unlettered peasant, delivered thunderous addresses
under inspiration, where he promised the common people, "Je
vengerai mes enfants ma cause; votre sang sera vengé. . . . je
vous éléverai sur des trônes, je mettrai ma force en Sion . .
.. C'est la forteresse de l'éternel, ton Dieu, qui doit
défendre son peuple d'entre les mains du diable du monde" (I
will avenge my children, my cause; your blood will be avenged.
. . .I will raise you upon thrones, I shall apply my force in
Zion. . . . It is the fortress of the eternal, your God, who
will defend his people from entering into the hands of the
devil of the world). Such zeal cost three of their leaders a
sentence at the pillory in 1707 (Podmore 1963, 1:6; Rousseau
1988, 94).
 In England, Dr. George Cheyne (1673-1743), author of The
English Malady, reflected a rising interest among the educated
in the French prophets. This trend was augmented by his
concurrent interest in Jacob Boëhme's hermetic treatises,
recently translated into English by the mystic William Law
(1686-1761), that were popular among intellectuals, but not
confined to them. Frequently the sort of people interested in
Boëhme later adopted Swedenborg's writings. Ralph Mather
(1750?-1803), an early Swedenborgian missionary from Bolton
evangelizing in various corners of England during the 1780s,
confirmed that, among the artisan class, many of those who
sought "inward religion" had already been influenced by the
works of Boëhme and Law (Harrison 1979, 21). John Wesley
(1703-1791) had been an early student of William Law, while
Boëhme's works exercised a more lasting effect on mystics like
Thomas Tryon (dates needed), as later they would influence the
Reverend John Clowes (1743-1831), an Anglican clergyman with a
deep and lifelong interest in the theology of Emanuel
Swedenborg (Garrett 1975,145).
 Cheyne's interests in the mystical millennium and his
association with Prophets and Quietists were not aberrant among
educated men in his era. In speaking of those like William Law,
Thomas Tryon, and others greatly influenced by Boëhme (Rousseau
1988, 101), as well as those like (first name needed) Fatio
(dates needed) and Dr. Cheyne himself, "stricken" by the French
and English prophets, G. S. Rousseau mildly rebukes traditional
historians of the Enlightenment for failing to recognize this
perpetual interest in heterodoxies of all kinds, a lacuna
whereby "Enlightenment scholars have remained largely oblivious
to this huge underbelly of their so-called Age of Reason"
(Rousseau 1988, 117). This "underbelly" and the momentous
events flowing from it form the principal focus of this study.
 The other main current among the educated of the early
eighteenth century-millennialism-drew on speculations about
biblical prophecies that were being fulfilled in current
events, as advanced earlier by Thomas Brightmann (1562-1607)
and Joseph Mede (1586-1638). These ideas were taken up by
Newton and his successor at Trinity, 3William Whiston, and by
the Unitarian theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley
(1733-1804) (Garrett 1975, 126). Steven Bullock (1996, 10)
notes the irony that Newton "drank deeply from the mysteries of
alchemy and biblical prophecy, even as he forged many of the
concepts that underlay the later mechanistic science that
ultimately denied these occult connections." Fatio, Newton's
disciple, enlisted himself in the service of Élie Marion, and
it seems that, for a time, Newton was not averse to the
Camisards (Rousseau 1998, 94). William Whiston also had a visit
from the French prophets, but he rejected their version of the
Last Days; and from his own calculations, he predicted in 1712
that a comet would soon destroy the world. Whiston listed
ninety-nine signs preceding the restoration of the Jews to the
Holy Land, an important precondition to the millennium, which
he set first at 1736, then 1766 (Garrett 1975, 153-154;
Rousseau 1988, 95).
 The third significant aspect of the "underbelly" of the
Enlightenment was freemasonry. While more elusive to the
historian, the freemasons' status and undoubted permeation of
European society in this century make the movement more than a
mere adjunct to any study of the Enlightenment, and more
especially to a deeper understanding of its covert aspects.
 This holds true because freemasonry, despite claims to an
antient and venerable lineage, was itself a product of the
Enlightenment. By 1789 there were between six and seven hundred
lodges in France, and some thirty thousand members (McIntosh
1975, 19). Its popularity reflects a current dissatisfaction
with religious orthodoxy among the aristocracy and haute
bourgeoisie. More directly, not only were many of these same
individuals involved in freemasonic lodges, Swedenborgian study
groups, and mesmeric conclaves, but, as we shall see, there was
a continuity with Masonic forms of organization, and other
features like its exclusivity and secrecy, that are found again
in the rash of societies that grew from the 1780s, whose aspect
was often syncretistic and millenarian. One contributing factor
to this spilling out of Masonic-like associations was a schism
occurring within freemasonry itself. An urge for reform from
the 1730s resulted in the "Scottish" rites, and later still in
other reformed fraternities like the Templars or "Strict
Observance" Masons (Jacob 1991, 59; Weisberger 1993, 72). As
orthodox freemasonry steered further from occultism, other
groups from mesmerism and a host of other practices devoted to
chiliastic pursuits and often borrowing from Swedenborgian
theology arose throughout Europe. While they retained the quasi-
secret and hierarchical Masonic structures, groups like
Mesmer's harmonial societies, the Exegetic and Philanthropic
Society in Stockholm, and the Illuminés at the Avignon Society
became virtual clearinghouses for heterodox ideas of all kinds.
It was especially within these cultural trends of the 1780s and
beyond, that the melding of Swedenborgian and mesmeric
influences was to figure prominently.