Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven: Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons in early modern Sweden (The Northern World, Vol. 55)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004183124 ISBN 13: 9789004183124

Publisher: Brill, 2011

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) won fame and infamy as a natural scientist and visionary theosopher, but he was also a master intelligencer, who served as a secret agent for the French king, Louis XV, and the pro-French, pro-Jacobite party of "Hats" in Sweden. This study draws upon unpublished diplomatic and Masonic archives to place his financial and political actitivities within their national and international contexts. It also reveals the clandestine military and Masonic links between the Swedish Hats and Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"), providing new evidence for the prince's role as hidden Grand Master of the Order of the Temple. Swedenborg's usage of Kabbalistic meditative and interpretative techniques and his association with Hermetic and Rosicrucian adepts reveal the extensive esoteric networks that underlay the exoteric politics of the supposedly "enlightened" eighteenth century, especially in the troubled "Northern World" of Sweden and Scotland.

About the Author:

Marsha Keith Schuchard, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, has published extensively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century esoteric and political Freemasonry, including Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Brill, 2002), and Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (Random House, 2006).

Review:

"Perhaps the most important piece of Masonic scholarship in a very long time, this masterpiece will enrage many freemasons and most Swedenborgians. Summing Up: Essential. Faculty/specialists", J. M. B. Porter, Butler University, in Choice, June 2012 Vol. 49 No. 10