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A MEMORABLE FANCY
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel
dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to
them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, &
so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my
senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain
confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for
consequences but wrote.
Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied, All poets that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion
removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.
Then Ezekiel said, The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human
perception: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another; we of
Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all
other others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the priests &
Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved to
originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our
great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he
conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his
name all deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these
opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.
This said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the jews
code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be?
I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction. After dinner I ask'd
Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works, he said none of equal value was lost.
Ezekiel said the same of his.
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer'd, the same
that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian.
I then asked Ezekiel, why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he
answer'd, the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the
North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience
only for the sake of present ease or gratification?
The ancient tradition that the
world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard
from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of
life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy
whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged: this I
shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary
and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
A MEMORABLE FANCY
I was in a Printing house in Hell
& saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a caves moth;
within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.
In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others
adorning it with gold, silver and precious stones.
In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air; he caused the inside of
the cave to be infinite; around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the
immense cliffs.
In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals
into living fluids.
In the fifth chamber were Unnam'd forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.
There they were reciev'd by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of
books & were arranged in libraries.
The Giants who formed this world
into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth, the causes
of its life & the sources of all activity; but the chains are, the cunning of weak and
tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in
courage is strong in cunning.
Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it
seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of
existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved the
excess of his delights.
Some will say, Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer, God only Acts & Is, in
existing beings or Men.
These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever
tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.
Note. Jesus Christ did not wish to unit but to seperate them, as in the Parable of sheep
and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.
Messiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the Antediluvians who are
our Energies.
A MEMORABLE FANCY
An Angel came to me and said O
pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon
thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career.
I said, perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate
together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable.
So he took me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into the church vault at the
end of which was a mill: thro' the mill we went, and came to a cave, down the winding
cavern we groped our tedious way till a void boundless as a nether sky appear'd beneath
us, & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity, but I said, if you
please we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also, if
you will not, I will? but he answer'd, do not presume O young-man but as we here remain
behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.
So I remain'd with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a
fungus, which hung with the head downward into the deep.
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us
at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which
revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather swum in the
infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption, & the
air was full of them, & seem'd composed of them; these are Devils, and arc called
Powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? he said, between the
black & white spiders.
But now, from between the black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled
thro' the deep, blackning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea &
rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest,
till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed
with fire, and not many stones throw from us appear'd and sunk again the scaly fold of a
monstrous serpent; at last to the east, distant about three degrees appear'd a fiery crest
above the waves; slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks till we discover'd two
globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw,
it was the head of Leviathan; his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple
like those on a tygers forehead: soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the
raging foam tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the
fury of a spiritual existence.
My friend the Angel climb'd up from his station into the mill; I remain'd alone, &
then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a
river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp, & his theme was, The man who
never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.
But I arose, and sought for the mill & there I found my Angel, who surprised asked me
how I escaped?
I answer'd, All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found
myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall
I shew you yours? he laugh'd at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my
arms, & flew westerly thro' the night, till we were elevated above the earths shadow;
then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; here I clothed myself in
white, & taking in my hand Swedenborgs volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and
passed all the planets till we came to saturn; here I staid to rest, & then leap'd
into the void, between saturn & the fixed stars.
Here, said I! is your lot, in this space, if space it may be call'd. Soon we saw the
stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open'd the Bible, and lo! it was
a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me; soon we saw seven houses
of brick; one we enter'd; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that
species, chain'd by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the
shortness of their chains; however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the
weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then
devour'd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a
helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour'd
too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail; as
the stench terribly annoy'd us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the
skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.
So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.
I answer'd: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose
works are only Analytics.
Opposition is true
Friendship.
I have always found that Angels
have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho' it is only the Contents or Index
of already publish'd books.
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the
monkey, grew vain, and conciev'd himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with
Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that
all are religious, & himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:
Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed
not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro' his conceited notions.
Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial, opinions, and an
analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of
Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs,
and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he
only holds a candle in sunshine.
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