3 Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, l967), 14.
4 Edwin Ellis and William Butler Yeats, eds., The Works of William Blake (London: Quaritch, l893), I, 42.
6 Arthur Symons, William Blake (London: Archibald Constable, l907), 74-75. In an Appendix, Symons reprinted the Blakean extracts in Robinson's diary.
7 Nancy Bogen, "The Problem of Blake's Early Religion," The Personalist, 49 (l968), 509, 517. She refers to the doubts raised by David Erdman in "Blake's Early Swedenborgianism: A Twentieth-century Legend," Comparative Literature, V (l953), 247-57. However, subsequent discoveries of Blake's early drawings with Swedenborgian themes have reinforced the tradition.
8 See Abraham Reincke, A Register of Members of the Moravian Church (Bethlehem: H.T. Clauder, l873), 11-12, 18.
9 Keri Davies, "William Blake's Mother: A New Identification," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (forthcoming). Davies convincingly disproves E.P. Thompson's claim of a Muggletonian connection. As he continues extensive archival research on Blake's family background, he notes that the Moravian association is more plausible, though not yet proven (personal communication). It is possible that the Mr. and Mrs. Parker on the l743 list were the parents of Blake's later business partner James Parker.
10 Bogen, "Problem," 517. Muir was the source for Thomas Wright's Moravian argument in Life of William Blake (London: Olney Bucks, l929), I, 2; see also Margaret Lowry, Windows of the Morning (New Haven: Yale UP, l940), 14-15.
11 Erich Beyreuther, "Zinzendorf und das Judentum," Judaica, l9 (l963), l93-246; Markus Schoop, "Zum Gespräch Zinzendorfs mit Israel," Reformatio, 16 (l967), 258-65.
12 Jack Lindsay, William Blake: His Life and Work (London: Constable, l978), 3-5.
13 See Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, l967), 101-03, 120-22.
14 Jerusalem, plate 21, l. 21; in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. by David Erdman and Harold Bloom (New York: Doubleday, l988), 166. [Cited henceforth as Blake, CPP].
15 See chapter on "Sexuality and Spirituality in the Kabbalah" in David Biale, Eros and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, l992), 101-20.
16 Elliot Wolfson, "Images of God's Feet: Some Obervations on the Divine Body in Judaism," in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York, l992), 162.
17 For excerpts from Crabb Robinson's diary, see Nineteenth-century Accounts of William Blake, ed. J.A. Wittreich (Gainesville: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, l970), 65, 89, 296.
18 Arthur E. Waite, A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (London: William Ryder, l921), 194. The collaboration of Zinzendorf and the German and Swedish Moravians with Jacobite Freemasons made them targets of surveillance by the British government in London and Hanover. For a lurid but inadequately documented account of Zinzendorf's sexual-Masonic rituals, see Tim O'Neill, "The Erotic Freemasonry of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf," in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), 103-08. I am grateful to Ron Heisler for sending me this article.
19 Daniel Benham, Memoirs of James Hutton (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., l856), 118. On Zinzendorf's "règle du secret, disciplini arcani," see Pierre Deghaye, La Doctrine Esotérique de Zinzendorf (1700-1760) (Paris: Klincksieck, l969).
20 For the similarities, see Lowry, Windows, 14-15.
22 Henry Rimius, A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhutters (London: A. Linde, l753), I, 9-10; II, 3, 19-22, 36, 77, 80.
23 Wittreich, Nineteenth-Century Accounts, 100.
24 Rimius, Candid Narrative, II, 3, 60, 64.
25 ibid., II, 56-57, 63-65; Appendix, xix-xx.
26 William Blake, The Four Zoas, eds. David Erdman and Cettina Magno (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, l987), 158; description of sketch by Peter Ackroyd, Blake: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, l996), 281.
27 I am currently completing a political and Masonic biography of Swedenborg. In the meantime, information on his connections with Jacobites, Jews, Moravians, and Masons can be read in my articles, "Swedenborg, Jacobitism, and Freemasonry," in Swedenborg and His Influence, ed. Erland Brock (Bryn Athyn: Academy of New Church, l988), 359-79; "Yeats and the Unknown Superiors: Swedenborg, Falk, and Cagliostro," in Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies, eds. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon (New York: AMS, l995), 114-68; "Swedenborg's Travels: New Documents Raise New Questions," in Swedenborg Society Annual Report (London, l998), 35-45; and "Emanuel Swedenborg: Deciphering the Codes of a Celestial and Terrestrial Intelligencer," in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, ed. Elliot Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges, 1999), 177-208.
28 On Rabbi Johan Kemper, Swedenborg's probable Hebrew instructor at Uppsala, see my article, "Leibniz, Benzelius, and Swedenborg: the Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism," in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion, eds. A.P. Coudert, R.H. Popkin, and G.M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, l998), 84-106. Also, Elliot Wolfson, "Messianism in the Christian Kabbalah of Johann Kemper," in Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern Period, eds. Matt Goldish and R.H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, forthcoming).
29 Wittreich, Nineteenth-century Accounts, 269-70.
30 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., l974), 272-74.
31 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3; in Blake, CPP, 34.
33 Beyreuther, "Zinzendorf," 240.
34 On the mistresses, see William White, Emanuel Swedenborg: His Life and Writings, 2nd. rev. ed. (London: Simpkin-Marshall, l868), 53, 92. According to G.E. Klemming, who first published the Journal of Dreams in l859, Swedenborg had led an "irregular life in respect to the other sex" from his young manhood through l744: "This has not been known publicly until now, but the fact has been handed down, quietly, by tradition among the older and higher adepts in Sweden." Quoted in C.T. Odhner, "Swedenborg's Dreams or Diary of l744," New Church Life (l914), 391.
35 Swedenborg acquired various extremely graphic treatises on masturbation, conjugal sexuality, and venereal disease (such as the anonymous Onania, Venette's The Pleasures of Conjugal Love Explained, and Astruc's A Treatise of the Venereal Disease); see Emanuelis Swedenborgii, Catalogus Bibliotheca, ed. Alfred Stroh (Holmiae, l907), 14-15.
36 Emanuel Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, trans. J.J.G. Wilkinson, ed. Guy Woofenden (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, l986), #200.
38 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Generative Organs, trans. J.J. Garth Wilkinson (London: W. Newberry, l852), 20-21. He quotes Winslow, Heister, and Boerhaave. Though he had announced in The Animal Kingdom that he had completed this section, he inexplicably decided against publication. The manuscript was later studied by Blake's Swedenborgian associates.
40 On genital respiration, see Emanuel Swedenborg, The Spiritual Diary, trans. George Bush and James Buss (London: James Speirs, 1889), #3325. On the role of the cremaster in the sexual-visionary process, see Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial Love, trans. Alfred Acton (1768; London: Swedenborg Society, l970), #107.
41 The French Revolution (1791), pl 10, l. 185; in Blake, CPP, 294. Blake portrays the Duke of Orleans, Grand Master of French Freemasonry and a student of Falk's and Swedenborg's techniques of genital respiration, as Orleans performs a Mesmeric-Masonic ritual.
42 Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, #260; White, Swedenborg, 131-33.
43 J. Wittreich, Nineteenth-century Accounts, 62.
44 Moshe Idel, "Sexual Metaphors and Practice in the Kabbalah," in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, l989), 200.
45Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, #87-88
46 For the maggid as psychological projection, see Joseph Dan's article, "Maggid," in Encyclopedia Judaica; also, Elliot Wolfson, "Mystical Rationalization of the Commandments in the Prophetic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia," in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. A.L. Ivry, E.R. Wolfson, A. Arkush (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, l998), 347-48.
47 See, on Blake and Swedenborg in relation to Gnosticism, Jos van Meurs, "William Blake and His Gnostic Myths," in Gnosis and Hermeticism, R. van den Broek and W. Hanegraaff, eds., (SUNY: 1998), 269-310.
48 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #6061.
49 ibid., #4989-92. According to Scholem, Abraham Abulafia's Kabbalistic treatise, "The Light of the Intellect," gives the impression of "a Judaized treatise on Yoga"; see his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, l954), 139.
50 Swedenborg, Catalogus, 8; La Crequinière's work was translated from French into English by John Toland, whose associations with radical Rosicrucians and Freemasons created great interest in its theories among the secret fraternities.
51 See Anders Hallengren, "The Secret of Great Tartary," Arcana, I (l994), 35-54.
52 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #6077; see Philip John Strahlenberg, An Historical-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Part of Europe and Asia (London: W. Innis and R. Manby, l736), 75-96.
53 The Register Books of the Royal Society reveal Swedenborg's previously unknown attendance and contacts with the Masonic scientists J.T. Desaguliers, Martin Folkes, Hans Sloane, and Cromwell Mortimer in 1740 and 1744-45. In my biography of Swedenborg, I will document his association with a shadowy network of British scientists, physicians, and authors (Theobald, Stuart, Hampe, Smith, Marchant, Morton, Woulfe, etc.), who shared his interest in Hermetic, Rosicrucian, and Kabbalistic studies.
54 Royal Society Journal Book, XVII, ff. 369, 374, 376 (February-March l745).
55 See James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphroditism (London, l741), xxiii, xlix; also his Gynaicopathologicus (l741) and Description of the Human Urinary Bladder (l741).
56 James Parsons, The Remains of Japhet; Being Historical Inquiries into the Affinity and Origins of European Languages (l767; facs. rpt. Meston: Scolar Press, l968), 184-218, 397-98. Parsons argued that the Gaelic and Scandinavian languages descended from the ancient Hebrew and Tartar tongues, and he was a great admirer of James Macpherson's Ossianic translations. He perhaps influenced Swedenborg's effort to meet Macpherson's French translator, the Marquis de St. Simon, in l768.
57 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #6067. On the similarities of Swedenborg's meditative breath control and Asian Yoga, see the chapter, "Was Swedenborg a Yogi?" in D. Gopaul Chetty, New Light upon Indian Philosophy, or Swedenborg and Saiva Siddhanta (London: J.M. Dent, l923), 125-46; also, Stephen Larsen, "Swedenborg and the Visionary Tradition," in Swedenborg: The Continuing Vision, ed. Robin Larsen (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, l988), 192-206.
58 The notion of a Chinese "pre-Kabbala" was especially promulgated by the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, who had a major influence on Écossais and Swedish Freemasonry; see [A.M. Ramsay], The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, l748-49), II, 173-85, 304, 356, 537-38. For a provocative comparison of eighteenth-century Tantric and Masonic esoteric practices, see Hugh Urban, "Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry," Numen, 44 (1997), 1-38.
59 Jerusalem, plate 58; Blake, CPP, 207-208. Blake read the English translation of Swedenborg's True Christian Religion (London, 1781), his most openly Masonic work, which included a section (#278) on the pre-Judaic "Lost Word" preserved in Tartary. He may also have seen relevant extracts from the Spiritual Diary.
60 W.B. Yeats, "The Mandukya Upanishad" (l935), Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, l968), 484.
61 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #4408.
62 Idel, "Sexual Metaphors," 205-06.
63 Swedenborg, Journal of Dreams, #171-72.
64 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #146.
65 See Michael Volin and Nancy Phelan, Sex and Yoga (London: Pelham Books, l967), 63-64; George Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy (Boston: Shambhala, l998), 134-38, 232-49.
66 According to the Chinese text, The Manuals of the Immortals, the adept can make the semen "nourish the brain" by applying the two middle fingers to "a spot behind the scrotum and in front of the anus, while at the same time the breath should be fully expelled through the mouth, none being retained (in the lungs)"; thus, the semen "will come back from the Stalk of Jade and mount upwards to enter the brain."" See Fan Fu Ruan, Sex in China (New York: Plenum, l991), 6263.
67 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #108.
70 Urban, "Elitism," 34n.22, refers to the legend that Martinez de Pasqually (a crypto-Jewish Mason, Kabbalist, and contemporary of Swedenborg) had journeyed to China to learn secret traditions, which were assimilated into certain Écossais lodges in France. See also Edmund Mazet, "Freemasonry and Esoterism," in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre (New York: Crossroad, l993), 256.
71 For the intense spirituality and sheer beauty of the earthly and heavenly sexual ritual, see Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 195, 268.
72 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #144.
74 For the Kabbalistic source of Swedenborg's angelized humans, see Moshe Idel, "The World of Angels in Human Form" [Hebrew], in Studies in Jewish Mysticism Presented to Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem, l984), 66n.251. On the angelization process, see Elliot Wolfson, "Tiqqun ha-Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto," History of Religions (forthcoming). I argue that Swedenborg was influenced by Luzzatto's Kabbalism in the early l740's.
75 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #210.
78 Emanuel Swedenborg, Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg, trans. Alfred Acton (Bryn Athyn: Swedenborgi Scientific Association, l948), II, 715. See Karl Frick, Die Erleuchteten (Graz, 1975), 532-33, on the career of the cryptoJewish Rosicrucian, Martinez de Pasqually, and his disciples' practice of sexual magic. Some French Masonic historians claim that Swedenborg initiated Pasqually into his system of Masonry; see Reghellini de Scio, La Maçonnerie considerèe comme le resultat des Religions Egyptiénne, Juive et Chrêtien (Paris, l822-29), II, 436; Papus [Gerard Encausse], Martinésisme, Willermosisme, Martinisme, et Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: Chamuel, 1899), 6. As noted earlier, Pasqually allegedly journeyed to China in search of esoteric arts.
79 Michal Oron, "Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk and the Eibeschuetz-Emden Controversy," in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazic Judaism, eds. Karl Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, l995), 243-56. Professor Oron, of Tel Aviv University, will publish Hebrew and English editions of the diaries of Falk and his factotum Hirsch Kalisch.
80 Engraving reproduced in Erich Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated, trans. Arthur Lindsay (Graz: Akademische Drück, l976), 147. Original in Freemasons' Hall, London. The Royal Order of Heredom drew on Ramsay's theories of Chinese-Jewish Kabbalism.
81 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #56, 76.
82 John Shaftesley, "Jews in English Regular Freemasonry, 1717-1860," Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England, 15 (l973-75), 158.
83 Christopher Haffner, "Eastern Masonic Frontiers Before the Union," Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 104 (l991), 6-9.
84 See my article, "The Secret Masonic History of Blake's Swedenborg Society," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26 (l992), 40-50.
85 On Cosway, see Stephen Lloyd, "The Life and Art of Richard Cosway, R.A. (1742-1821) and Maria Cosway (1760-1838)," Ph.D. Thesis: Oxford University, l995; and Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, l995).
86 The engraver James Gillray, whose work was followed closely by Cosway and Blake, also came from a Moravian background; after he became more politically conservative, he used his "Modern" Masonic affiliation to expose the "Ancient" Masons who were visited by Cagliostro and certain Swedenborgians. See The Works of James Gillray, ed. Thomas Wright (rpt. London, l968), plate 37; also my, "William Blake and the Promiscuous Baboons: A Cagliostroan Séance Gone Awry," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (l995), 187.
87 The Modern Grand Lodge condemned members of the Ancient (Scottish-rite) system as "irregular" Masons. The Ancient system was an outgrowth of Jacobite Freemasonry, and it attracted British and international members who opposed the Hanoverian court and the governments of Walpole and Pitt. In l749 Blake's father voted for the anti-court, Tory candidate of the "Westminster Independents; see Davies, "William Blake's Mother." In Jacobitism and the English People (Cambridge UP, l988), p. 230, Paul Monod argues that the Independent Electors of Westminster "may have become an exclusively Jacobite club" by l749. Among their supporters were many whose disafffection went far beyond mereloyalty to the Stuarts. The name James Blake appears among Ancient Masons in the Atholl Register, lodge #38, in l757 (Freemasons' Hall, London). This Masonic schism possibly inspired Blake and his later circle of artistic friends to call themselves "the Ancients."
88 Registers in Freemasons' Hall, London.
89 Jan Häll, I Swedenborgs Labyrint: Swedenborgarnas Liv och Tänkande (Stockholm: Atlantis, l995), 19-21, 87-88, 116-17.
90 I give more details on Levison's Sabbatian and Swedenborgian associations in "Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk: A Sabbatian Adventurer in the Masonic Underground," in Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern Period, eds. Matt Goldish and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, forthcoming).
91 For Levison's scientific and theological theories, see David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale UP, l995), 344-70.
92 John Wright, A Revealed Knowledge of Some Things that Will Speedily be Fulfilled in the World. Communicated to a Number of Christians, Brought together at Avignon (London, l794), 4; M.L. Danilewicz, "The King of the New Israel: Thaddeus Grabianka," Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 1 (l968), 49-73.
93 Louis-Claude de St. Martin was a disciple of Martinez de Pasqually.
94 That Tulk's father was named James Stuart Tulk suggests his own family's "disaffected" Jacobite background.
95 Swedenborg, Conjugial Love, #433.
97 Morton Paley, "A New Heaven is Begun: William Blake and Swedenborgianism," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 12 (l979), 71-72.
98 Schuchard, "Secret Masonic History," 49-50.
99 [Augustus Nordenskjöld], Plan for a Free Community Upon the Coast of Africa, Under the Protection of great Britain; But Entirely Independent of All European Laws and Government (London: Robert Hindmarsh, l789), 34-35.
102 Blake was probably aware of Martin Madan's treatise Thelyphthora (1780), in which the philo-Semitic Methodist preacher advocated polygamy and concubinage as a preventative against adultery and prostitution. Like Swedenborg and Nordenskjöld, Madan drew on Jewish and Kabbalistic sources for his argument. However, he did not link concubinage with visionary capacity or a theosophy of "Use," which suggests a greater influence from Swedenborg on Blake's Thel.
103 Thel, plate 6, l.7; Blake, CPP, 6.
104 ibid. plate 3, l. 22; CPP, 5.
105 The Tableau was printed in London in early l790 and then presented in Paris in the summer; see Ronny Ambjörnsson, Det okända landet: Tre Studier om Svenska Utopister (Gidlunds: Druckhaus Köthen, l981), 87, 141n.8.
106 Danilewicz, "King of New Israel," 49-73.
107 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, 4th rev. ed. (London: Caldwell and Davis, l798), 470. In this edition, Robison added a detailed exposé of the Swedenborgian Masons who allegedly contributed to the assassination of Gustav III. See my "Blake and the Grand Masters: Architects of Repression or Revolution?," in Blake in the Nineties, eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1999), 187-89, 192-93.
108 Micheline Meillissoux-Le Cerf, Dom Pernety et les Illuminés d'Avignon (Milano: Arché, l992), 99-101.
109 Grabianka evidently learned of the "Asiatics" through his contacts with certain Polish Jews, whose Sabbatian beliefs fueled the Count's nationalistic and Zionistic fantasies.
110 For background on the "Asiatic Brethren," see Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (Leiden: E.J. Brill, l992), 161-77; Gershom Scholem, Du Frankism au Jacobinisme (Paris: Le Seul, Gallimard, l981). Lambert de Lintot, General Charles Rainsford, and Ebenezer Sibly (all Swedenborgian Masons) collected and translated publications about the "Asiatics," while Prince Carl of Hesse-Cassel (a Swedenborgian Mason and Danish chief of the "Asiatics") was in contact with the Swedenborg societies in London and Stockholm.
111 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3; Blake, CPP, 34.
112 Daughters of Albion, plate 7, ll. 1, 22, 25; Blake, CPP, 50.
113 Denis Duckworth, late librarian of the Swedenborg Society in London, informed me about Tulk's collaboration with Grabianka, but he was unable to find the relevant documents which are now missing.
114 Geoffrey Keynes, "An Unpublished Poem by William Blake," Times Literary Supplement (14 September l984), 1021-22; Robert Essick, "William Blake's `The Phoenix': A Problem in Attribution," Philogical Quarterly, 67 (l988), 365-84.
115 "Notebook" (ca. 1793); Blake, CPP, 467.
117 Ruan, Sex in China, 64; Feuerstein, Tantra, 232-34, 248.
118 Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of Blake's "Vala" or "The Four Zoas" (Oxford: Clarendon, l995), 57-58.
119 William Blake, Milton: a Poem, ed. Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi (Blake Trust and Princeton UP, l993), 27, plate 29.
121 See Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (London: T. Spilsbury, l786), 18, 70, 73, 80, 100, 136, 148.
122 Wolfson, "Images," 163, 168.
123 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, 5106-07.
124 Omar Garrison, Tantra: The Yoga of Sex (London: Academy Editions, l972), 23.
125 Moor worked on his illustrations and explications throughout his English residency, and he eventually published them in The Hindu Pantheon (London: Joseph Johnson, 1810). For the Yogic toe and its relation to sexual-mystical rites, see pp. 103, 394, plate 20.
126 S. Ghosh, Original Yoga, 101.
128 Sheila Spector, "Blake's Milton as Kabbalistic Vision," Religion and Literature, 25 (l993), l9-33.
129 For the date l809-10, see Blake, CPP, 806. For his current interest in Swedenborg, Hinduism, and Kabbalism, see ibid., 117 (Milton); ibid., 530-31, 546, 548 (Descriptive Catalogue, 1809; ibid., 560 (A Vision of the Last Judgment, 1810-"If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought" (reference to Merkabah meditation).
130 Personal communication from the artist Don Karr (Ithaca, New York), who utilizes his knowledge of Yogic-Kabbalistic techniques in his visionary paintings (including one of "Dr. Falk Instructing Swedenborg"). An erudite student of Kabbala, Karr compiles an on-going bibliography of publications on the subject, which he distributes to interested students. See also Urban, "Elitism," 11-14, 2023, 34n.22, for suggestive parallels between Tantric, Kabbalistic, and Masonic symbols and rituals.
131 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #3453. I am grateful to Professor John Bugge and Robert Shaw-Smith for translating the Latin original.
132 Wolfson, "Images," 171-72.
133 For the following interpretation, I draw on Volin and Phelan, Yoga and Sex, 62-65; Ruan, Sex in China, 62-63; Garrison, Tantra, 23; Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 232-33, 246-49. This passage is also discussed in my "Swedenborg: Deciphering the Codes," 204-06.
134 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #3324-25.
135 On the difficult technique of Vajroli or in-breathing of semen, see Ghosh, Original Yoga, 66-71; Feurstein, Tantra, 247-48; André Van Lysebeth, Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, l995), 326-27.
136 Idel, "Sexual Metaphors," 213.
137 Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #3550.
138 On the fate of the unpublished diary in London, see James Hyde, A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (London: Swedenborg Society, 1900), #3500 and p. 119. The first 76 pages are missing and were perhaps destroyed by Swedenborg's heirs, who also removed the more erotic sections of his Journal of Dreams. On the flyleaf of the MS. "Exerpta ex Diario Spirituali" is written, "J.A. Tulk, 1790. The gift of Mr. Augustus Nordenskjold." Chastanier's MS. copies, from which he hoped to publish English translations, are in the Swedenborg Society, London.
139 Emanuel Swedenborg, Dictionary of Correspondences, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1860), 120, 130, 137, 387 ("great toe").
140 Milton, plate 15; Blake, CPP, 110.
141 Spector, "Blake's Milton," 26.
142 According to eighteenth-century anatomical descriptions; see "Tarsus" in OED.
143 Roy Rosenberg, The Anatomy of God (New York: Ktav, l973), 122-23.
144 David Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (London: Oxford UP, 1975), 248; Blake, Milton, 100.
146 Wolfson, "Images," 166-67.
147 Notebook (ca. 1793, 1800-03); Blake, CPP, 474, 477.