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: jung history 2:2
same time he was reading these other authors, we also
had no idea which ones. 5 Now, due to the investigations
of Sonu Shamdasani, we have a list of the
books on Swedenborg that Jung, in the middle of his
medical training, checked out of the Basel Library
during 1898. 6 The charging records of the
Library indicate the following:
January 18 1898 Swedenborg, Himmlische Geheimnisse,
[tr. F. Tafel, Tübingen, 1850] [The Heavenly Arcana]
September 16 1898 Swedenborg Vom Himmel und dem
wunderbaren Dingen desselben. [tr. J. C. Lenz, Leipzig
1775] [Heaven and Hell]
October 18 1898 Swedenborg Die Erdkörper in unserem
Sonnensystem, welche wir Planeten heissen, [tr. E. Hofater,
Tübingen 1841] [Earths in the Solar System]
October 18 1898 Swedenborg, Der Verkehr zwischen
Seele und Leib. [Tübingen 1830] [Intercourse between the
Soul and the Body]
October 18 1898 Swedenborg, Die Wonnen der Weisheit
betreffen die eheliche Liebe, [tr. T. Tafel, Tübingen, 1845]
[Conjugial Love]
From this information we may conclude a number
of interesting points. The first work Jung checked
out was The Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg’s multivolume
compendium giving the true internal spiritual
meaning of the first two books of the Bible and the
the angels, swedenborg believed, were the souls of departed
human beings once alive, who live in heaven in the form of
their old bodies, and consociate with those whom they have
most loved on earth…
first major work of Swedenborg’s visionary era after
the original revelations of 1744. The importance of
the Arcana is that, referring to the opening of the
interior spiritual sense, Swedenborg maintains that
the images of the Bible must be read symbolically
and metaphorically according to the level of spiritual
self-actualization of the person. The Bible is fundamentally
a map indicating the stages of spiritual
consciousness one must go through to reach the
final stage of regeneration. One sees, however, into
one’s own interiors to the level of one’s ability. To
the literalist, for instance, God created earth and
man and woman in seven days. For Swedenborg,
each day of creation is the expression of a different
stage of consciousness that must be mastered in the
process of self-realization. The crucifixion of Jesus
and his resurrection is the death of the personal,
self-centered ego and the arising of the spiritual
dimension of personality, expressed as the purification
of the soul, which is our link to the Divine
while alive and to heaven upon our death. Revelation
is not the end of the physical world, but a cataclysmic
event in consciousness, an ecstatic, nay, mystical
awakening in which the doors of perception are
cleansed and we finally see that the natural is derived
from the spiritual, not the other way around, and in
this way the earth has been transformed.
A period of nine months then intervened, during
which time we presume Jung was contemplating
the content and meaning of the Arcana. Then in
September, 1898, he checked out Swedenborg’s
Heaven and Hell. Heaven and Hell is a work that should