XIII
The Deliverer
When Balzac introduced me to my noble countryman, “The Buddha of the North,” by means of his book Séraphita, he showed me the evangelistic side of the Prophet. Now it is the Law which encounters, crushes, and releases.
A single word suffices to illuminate my soul, and to scatter my doubts and vain fancies regarding supposed enemies, electricians, black magic, etc., and this single word is “Devastation.”13 All my sufferings I find described by Swedenborg—the feelings of suffocation (angina pectoris), constrictions of the chest, palpitations, the sensation which I called the “electric girdle”—all exactly correspond, and these phenomena, taken together, constitute the spiritual catharsis (purification) which was already known to St. Paul, “Whom,” he says speaking of someone, “I have determined to hand over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,” and “Among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have delivered over to Satan, that they may be taught not to blaspheme.”
When I read the visions of Swedenborg belonging to the year 1744, the year preceding his establishment of relations with the spiritual world, I discover that the Prophet has endured the same nightly tortures as I have, and what astonishes me still more is the complete identity of the symptoms, which leave me no longer room for doubting the real nature of my illness. In the Arcana Cœlestia, the mysterious occurrences of the last two years are explained with such convincing exactness, that I, a child of the renowned nineteenth century, am firmly convinced that there is a hell—a hell, however, on earth, and that I have just come out of it.
Swedenborg explains to me the reason of my detention in the Hospital St. Louis thus:
“Alchemists are attacked by leprosy and scratch the scurf off like fish-scales. It is an incurable skin disease.” The apparition of the chimney sweep which my daughter saw in Austria is also explained: “Among the spirits, there is a kind called ‘chimney sweeps,’ because they actually have faces blackened by smoke, and seem to wear soot-coloured clothes. … One of these ‘chimney sweep’ spirits came to me, and begged me earnestly to pray for his admission into heaven. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘I have done anything on account of which I should be excluded. I have often rebuked the inhabitants of earth, but after rebuke and punishment, I have always given them instruction.’
“The chastising, reforming, or instructing spirits approach a man from the left side, lean on his back, consult his book of memory, and read his deeds and even his thoughts in it. For when a spirit enters a man, he first of all takes possession of his memory. If they behold an evil deed or the intention to commit one, they punish him with a pain in the foot or in the hand, or the neighbourhood of the stomach, and they do this with unexampled dexterity. A shudder announces their approach.
“Besides inflicting pains in the limbs, they employ a painful pressure against the navel, which gives the sensation of being surrounded with a prickly girdle; moreover, they sometimes cause constrictions of the chest, which they intensify to a terrible degree; finally, they inspire a disgust of all food except bread, which continues for days.
“Other spirits try to convince their victims of the opposite to that which the instructing spirits have said. These spirits of contradiction were, during their earthly existence, men who had been expelled from society on account of some crime. Their approach is heralded by a flickering flame, which seems to hover about one’s face; their place is above the back, whence they make themselves felt to the extremities.” (These flickering flames or sparks have appeared to me twice, and both times on occasions when I resisted my better self, and rejected all apparitions as idle dreams.)
“These spirits of contradiction tell men not to believe what the instructing spirits have been commissioned by the angels to say, and not to rule their lives accordingly, but to live in all licence and wantonness as they choose. Usually the former come as soon as the latter have gone. Men know what to expect from them, and do not trouble much about them, but they learn through their assaults to distinguish between good and evil. For the knowledge of good is first gained through that of its opposite, just as every perception or idea of a matter is obtained by carefully observing what distinguishes it from its contrary.” The reader may remember the faces like antique sculptures which I saw formed by the white cover of my pillow in the Hôtel Orfila. Swedenborg speaks regarding them as follows:
“Two signs show that they (the spirits) dwell with a man; one is an old man with a white face. This sign will signify to him that he is always to speak the truth, and to act justly. … I myself have seen such an antique human face. There are faces of pure whiteness and great beauty, from which uprightness and modesty beam.”
(In order not to alarm the reader, I have purposely concealed the fact, that all the above relates to the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter. My surprise may be imagined when one spring morning they bring me a French review containing a picture of Swedenborg’s house in the planet Jupiter, drawn by Victorien Sardou. Why on Jupiter? What a remarkable coincidence! And has the master and doyen of the Théâtre Français observed that the left façade of the building seen from a sufficient distance forms an antique human face? This face is the same as that which was formed by my cushion-cover. But in Sardou’s drawing there are more of such silhouettes formed by the lines of the building. Has the master’s hand been guided by another hand, so that he produced more than he knew?)
Where has Swedenborg seen his heaven and hell? Are they visions, intuitions, inspirations? I hardly know, but the correspondence of his hell to that of Dante, and of the Greek, Roman, and German mythologies, leads to the idea that the powers have generally used similar means to realise their purposes. And what are these purposes? The completion of the human type; the production of the higher Man—the Superman, as Nietzsche, that rod of chastisement prematurely used and cast into the fire, has announced him. So the problem of good and evil is again set up for us to solve, and Taine’s moral indifference seems insipid before these new demands.
The belief in spirits follows as a natural consequence. What are spirits? As soon as we admit the immortality of the soul, we see that the dead are still alive and continue their relationships with the living. “Evil spirits,” then, are not evil, for their object is good, and it would be better to call them, with Swedenborg, “corrective spirits,” than to abandon oneself to fear and to despair. Accordingly, there exists no Satan, as an autonomous personality opposed to God, and the undeniable apparitions of the Evil One in his traditional form must be regarded as a scarecrow conjured up by Providence—Providence the Supreme and Good, which carries on its government by means of an enormous comprehensive staff, consisting of departed souls.
Be comforted, and be proud of the grace bestowed upon you, all ye who suffer from sleeplessness, nightmares, apparitions, palpitations, and fears of death! Numen adest! God is seeking for you!