The Assessor of Heaven

Emanuel Swedenborg spent thirty years on the Royal Swedish Board of Mines as Assessor Extraordinary, publishing three volumes on metallurgy, sketching a flying machine, and locating the human soul, correctly, in the cerebral cortex. He proposed a nebular hypothesis two decades before Kant.

In April 1745, at fifty-seven, dining alone in a London tavern, he looked up and saw a man who told him, "Do not eat too much." That night the figure returned as the Lord and appointed him to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible.

He resigned his post in June 1747 and applied himself, methodically, to the beyond.

He surveyed heaven the way an assessor surveys a mine. Eight Latin volumes of commentary on Genesis and Exodus, verse by verse. Sections 183 to 190 of Heaven and Hell concern angels' homes; 234 to 245, their language. Angels, he reported, are married in pairs, still have sex, and wear clothing that changes with their mood. He wrote it all in the same tidy prose he had used for iron ore.

That same year, 1758, he published a book on the inhabitants of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon. Jupiter's are wiser than ours.

He predicted his own death down to the day and paid his London rent through it.

He died on schedule.