Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch,  "Optimism of the Will: Mind Power as a Philosophy of Life" Quest 110:4, pg 36-39

By Mitch Horowitz

It is a common assertion in alternative spirituality that mind power is the primary force in the universe and that thoughts are causative. If these statements are true, they place the practitioner in front of a daunting question: what is mind power for? Is it just a metaphysical ego trip? Or a mode of escapism?

I have wrestled with this question for many years. At this stage of my search, I have ceased to distinguish between what are considered to be eternal values and temporal ones. I believe that any such division is artificial, however deeply imbued in us it may be by the force of familiarity.

Much of Eastern and Western religious thought tells us that we live in a hierarchical cosmos, and things that are essential, eternal, sacred, and everlasting belong to the “greater you,” to a higher degree of existence. You progress toward this higher degree as you shed worldly attachments and illusions, sometimes broadly called maya or samsara, and realize that attachments foster suffering.

I believe that this idea, as foundational and familiar as it may be, does not suit the life and search of the contemporary seeker. In my observation, we have fallen into a rote and recitative division in which we think in terms of attachment and nonattachment, identification and nonidentification, personality and essence, ego and true self, temporal and eternal. At this point in my search, I have come to believe that the essential purpose of life is self-expression. Self-expression can take any number of forms that are intimate and necessary to the individual. This is not the same as consumption of a gross variety, which merely aims to salve a lack of self-expression.

I am opposed to any barriers that may have been thrown up between the seeker and his or her sense of self-expression. The only thing that I stand against—the only moral code I employ on the path—is that I would never intentionally do anything to block or deter another person from striving for the same human potential that I wish for myself.

Even in our age of decentered and discursive information, we imbibe too many homiletic ideas about what constitutes the search, what reflects progress on the path, and how one would evaluate that progress. I believe that the evaluation of the success (a term of which we should be unafraid) of a philosophy, therapy, religious, or spiritual viewpoint is the conduct and experience of the seeker.

In Scripture, we read that the creator fashioned the individual in its own image. In the ancient text called The Emerald Tablet, a similar note appears in the principle “as above, so below.” If we take these notions seriously, if these ideas actually mean something to us—and they are at the heart of the Abrahamic and Hermetic religious systems—they must mean that you, the individual, are capable of creating within your own sphere, as you were created.

Created from what? Hermeticism teaches that all of existence emanates from an infinite presence, from which nothing can be added or subtracted. This original substance has no proportion; it cannot be measured, limited, or contained within concepts of time, space, or dimension. The one thing that we consensually understand as fitting that definition is mind.

The Hermeticists used the Greek term nous to describe an Overmind, which they saw as the source of creation. These Greco-Egyptian thinkers believed that each individual emanates through concentric spheres from this higher mind. As a being born of mind, the individual is endowed with corresponding creative abilities within the physical framework in which he or she dwells. But this schema also holds that we are limited by the laws and forces of our cosmic framework. “Ye are gods,” the Psalmist says, “but ye shall die like men” (Psalm 82:6‒7).

Observation dictates that we live under immensely diffuse laws and forces—of which I believe mental causation is one. A law is, by definition, ever operative. This does not mean, however, that it is experienced uniformly. H₂O is always water, but water can, of course, be vapor, liquid, or solid depending upon temperature. Gravity is constant—it is mass attracted to itself—but you will experience gravity differently on the moon than on earth, on Jupiter, or in the vacuum of space. The law of mental causation may work similarly: it is constant, but myriad forces mitigate your experience, sometimes deterring it from its apparent function. Hence we do not categorically flee from limits when experimenting with the mind power thesis.

Is there any difference between thought and spiritual appeal? The sensitized mind may be what we colloquially call spirit. We know from academic ESP studies that the mind evinces extraphysical qualities.* Extraphysicality is my basic definition of spirituality. As such, mind and spirit may be part of the same scale. Let me share a personal experience, which touches on that prospect. 

Several years ago, I was part of a very demanding esoteric order. Many people in the group were intellectually refined, and the rigor of the search was deeply felt. Physical demands were placed on us. Seekers could be pushed to their limits. I can assure you that nothing does more, or works more quickly, to skewer fantasies about yourself than being awakened at an inconvenient hour in an unfamiliar or uncomfortable place to perform some difficult task: you discover your limits quickly. People who are accustomed to succeeding in familiar or comfortable settings, who are considered “wise owls” in their domestic realms, or who see themselves as spiritually advanced, become leveled when they are exposed to a very different scale.

One winter, we were planning a camping trip near the New York‒Pennsylvania border. If you have ever gone winter camping in the northeastern United States, you know it can be tough going. But this trip was planned for a purpose. We were gathering in the woods to join together in the search.

My teacher gave me a particular task in preparation. He mixed in a little humor with it, but it was nonetheless a veritable and meaningful effort. He said that the women in the group were going to sleep in tents in the freezing nights. The men were staying in a cold-water cabin—basically a large, uninsulated shack, which was little better. My teacher said that if the female campers had to get up at night to relieve themselves, in order that they would not have to venture into the icy woods, I was to go out and buy buckets for their tents to serve as chamber pots. But these buckets, he said with a glint in his eye, had to be of a particular type. They had to be pink and heart-shaped. If, after really trying, I could find no pink, heart-shaped buckets, it would be acceptable for me to buy red, heart-shaped ones. If I really found myself out of options, I could finally buy red buckets of a standard shape.

This was before digital commerce exploded, so the search for an unusual item required phone calls and visits on foot. I lived on the East Side of Manhattan, and I embarked on a search across New York’s boroughs for pink, heart-shaped buckets. I did not want to disappoint my teacher, and I felt that the task was important on several levels. I put everything into it. I called and visited bed and bath stores, hardware stores, home goods stores, and contractor stores, crossing myriad places off my growing list. I got nowhere. I could not find pink, heart-shaped buckets. So I decided to switch to plan B and look for red buckets, first heart-shaped and, if that proved futile, of a standard shape. That did not seem too difficult.

Oddly enough, here I was in New York City—one of the commercial hubs of the world—and I could not find red buckets of either type. Again, I called and visited hardware stores, paint stores, you name it. Nothing. Early one evening, out on a household errand, I told myself, “Well, it’s time to call my teacher and admit that I failed. I’ve searched everywhere for pink, heart-shaped buckets. I searched for red, heart-shaped buckets, and then just regular red, circular buckets—but came up empty.” Something told me to wait a bit longer: do not call him yet.

As this was running through my head, I was standing outside of a little neighborhood grocery store, someplace you run to pick up eggs or milk. I entered the store and headed toward the back to the cold foods section. When I reached the rear of the store, right there stood a gleaming, brand-new pile of pink, heart-shaped buckets. In near disbelief, I grabbed a stock boy and asked, “What color are those buckets?” He said, “Pink.” I asked, “And they’re heart-shaped?” Regarding me somewhat strangely, he agreed and volunteered, “They just came in today.”

I was astonished not only because the odds and circumstances of finding my hallowed item right then and there seemed infinitesimal (this is so even if you use the “law of large numbers,” which dictates that across a large population, weird things must happen to someone), but there was an additional factor. It is critical to recall that there is one thing that statistics cannot really get at: the emotional stakes and personal meaning of an experience. The individual is invested with a certain something in relation to the thing encountered—whether a yearned-for relationship, job offering, home listing, crisis averted, stranger who helps, or a friend who has been long out of touch. The emotional stakes and private meaning of a situation can heighten its rarity and pertinence beyond any measure of chance. That is what I experienced in this situation. It exemplified for me an ineffable truth: there is something lawful about mental exertion.

To focus on just one aspect of the mind causation thesis, it seems to me that the trigger of conveyance behind thought and circumstance is the uniqueness, dedication, and totality of an individual’s focus, mental and otherwise.

Why should this be? In Hermetic philosophy, all actions, cycles, and events represent a kind of rhythmical swing. A pendulous, rhythmical swing necessitates a mirroring swing. To switch for a moment to standard mechanics, Isaac Newton made the observation, which has been validated in both macro and particle physics, that objects separated over vast distances exert precise mirroring effects over one another, a process for which we have been unable to fully account.

Contemporary string theory is among the theses developed to explain this mirror effect. Within the schema of string theory, all of reality, from the particulate to the universal, is joined by networks of interwoven strings, providing unseen and extradimensional antecedents for observed events, including those that we call chance. 

In terms of human endeavor, when we dedicate ourselves to an ideal and we bring totality of effort—mental, emotional, and physical—to concentrate on that point, we set in motion a rhythmical swing. There must be a corresponding motion. That motion moves along the arc of your focus, provided there is no overwhelming countermovement based on another event, action, or physical barrier within your framework.

Is this more than supposition? To consider that, follow me briefly down a different path. It strikes me that our senses are nothing more than organic instruments of measurement. If we want to get down to definitions that even a philosophical materialist could love, what else are sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste than instruments of measurement, which transfer data to your central nervous system or psyche?

Over the course of more than ninety years, researchers in particle physics have amassed indelible evidence that a subatomic particle exists in what is called a wave state or a state of superposition: the particle appears in an infinite number of places simultaneously. It is not localized, or actual, until a sentient observer decides to take a measurement, or a technical device, such as a photometer, periodically takes one.

There exists debate over whether a device represents a method of measurement distinct from an observer, as well as whether the “collapse” from wave to particle results from an observer’s individual psyche or “transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws,” as noted by Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, and Menas C. Kafatos in a May 29, 2018, Scientific American article, “Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics.” This transpersonal mind, the writers continue, “comprises but far transcends any individual psyche,” a description similar to the Hermetic concept of nous. The authors compellingly argue that even if a device is used for measurement—and thus localization—perception and intent, either of the individual, the metamind, or both, remains the determining force.

Readers who look up this Scientific American article will find that my descriptions of quantum theory are, if anything, conservative. We are, in fact, witnessing a kind of reality selection in the quantum lab, pertaining not only to particle behavior but also to the nature of observation and creation—or, again, selection—from among infinite, coexisting realities. A decision to measure or not measure sets in motion innumerable possibilities. This is the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum physics. A law, as noted, must be constant, although it is not necessarily transferable to every situation or free from mitigating or surrounding circumstances.

Quantum mechanics has brought us to the undeniable conclusion that consciousness, or the psyche, cannot be extracted from physics and material existence. All is entangled or whole. Hence, if our senses function as devices of measurement, we are nudged in the direction of self-selection.

The implications of quantum data are increasingly important because we are encountering parallel insights in other sciences. Researchers in neuroplasticity use brain scans to demonstrate that thought alters neural pathways through which electrical impulses travel in the brain. Brain biology must be understood as the product of thought as much as the other way around. Hence I am engaging in more than metaphor when I speak of rhythmic correspondences, sensory measurements, and mental selectivity.

I believe that nothing on the path does more to stifle your sense of morale, purpose, possibility, and selfhood than being told what you are supposed to find, how you are supposed to live, what your spiritual values are supposed to be, or what the search is supposed to be about. Self-determination is vital to everything I have been describing.

In my observation, the ability to direct your mental and emotive energies requires a measure of assurance and hopeful expectancy. This is commonly observed in placebo studies. The belief that something can happen is critical. Another elusive concept, faith, is an umbrella term for these catalytic factors. Faith is bound up with, and in some ways equivalent to, persistence. That is the experience described in my story of the buckets. Through the passion of dedication and meaningful persistence, my full psyche was in play. The psyche is a compact of thought and emotion.

Nonetheless, thoughts, emotions, and physicality run on separate tracks. If thoughts ruled us, no one would have a problem with anger, addiction, or overeating. Emotion and physicality are often stronger than thought. We can use our minds (which run on a continuum with spirituality) to help circumvent mood or craving; but those things are enormously powerful, and they sometimes must receive their due. Moods and cravings are not just to be corralled and reorganized; they may have a valid claim on us. I point this out simply to highlight that thought is not the only mediator of power.

As an amalgam of thought and emotion, the unified psyche is powerful: it is the totality of your psychology. This compact entity forms only when you progress in the direction of a passionately felt need. That is why I consider desires sacred. A desire does not necessarily liberate you from things that are owed to others. But a desire points you in the direction of authenticity. As such, a desire should be carefully understood and, whenever principle permits, heeded. Do not allow a noninvasive desire to get taken from you. Because persistence in its direction summons the forces called faith, expectation, belief in self, and investment in the greater possibility of the individual.

In the afterword of The Culture of Narcissism, philosopher Christopher Lasch sharpened his critique of religious or social models that extol gratification and pointed to his vision of a sounder, stabler approach to life. He observed compellingly:

The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods. Psychoanalysis confirms the ancient religious insight that the only way to achieve happiness is to accept limitations in a spirit of gratitude and contrition instead of attempting to annul those limitations or bitterly resenting them.

My wish is not to foster an imagined escape from life’s obligations or a justification to bend others to our desires. Indeed, the chief sign of weakness masquerading as agency is when someone continually burdens others to repair his moods, support his psyche, or dispense rewards. Nor am I positing a system without limits or barriers. Unwillingness to bow to or acknowledge frustrations can become a form of theater in which the indestructible being conceals his or her own lack of self-belief.

I pursue experiential philosophies that elevate and encourage our expansion toward self-expression and heightened existence—without denying existential trauma. Such outlooks bring purpose, intention, striving, focus, and beingness to our existence. The philosophy of mind causation, on the terms explored here, not only abets authentic selfhood but forms its foundation.

As I see it, nothing in this approach abrogates or fundamentally conflicts with Lasch’s analysis. More importantly, the mind causation thesis contributes a defensibly greater possibility to the human situation than what appears in Lasch’s or many other secular psychosocial outlooks. As seeking people, we must avoid delusional excesses, which occur on either extreme—mystical or materialist—of how one views the psyche.

Within New Age culture, as Lasch justly observes, we are often conditioned to think in elusive or inflated concepts of self-development and its horizons. People of a spiritual orientation might use terms like realized, enlightened, or illumined. I find such language excessive. People of a psychological bent might use terms like well-adjusted, actualized, or fulfilled. Those concepts are more graspable; but, like the vocabulary of cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychological terminology can confine the individual to a life of diagnostic contentment rather than supporting a more expansive sense of attainment.

I reaffirm my contention that the true aim of life is self-expression. And we possess tools—including mind causation—that can help us in that effort. Such prospects are not to everyone’s spiritual and ethical tastes, but they do not require a break with philosophical sobriety.

* See, for example, a meta-analysis of psychical research data that appeared in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association: “The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review” by Etzel Cardeña, American Psychologist 73, no. 5 (2018): 663–77. 

A PEN Award‒winning historian, Mitch Horowitz is the author of books including Occult America, The Miracle Club, Daydream Believer, and Uncertain Places. Mitch is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library. His books have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Spanish. His work is censored in China. Mitch is a member of the Theosophical Society in America. He is on Twitter @MitchHorowitz and on Instagram @MitchHorowitz23.

This article is adapted from a chapter in Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind, published by G&D Media, July 2022.

Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 110:4, pg 2

It’s natural to associate the idea of other worlds with life on faraway planets as well as the subtle levels of reality described by the esoteric traditions.

Lately, though, my thoughts have been going toward the other worlds that may have existed on this planet. I’ve just finished a fascinating new book by Carole Nervig entitled The Petroglyphs of Mu: Pohnpei, Nan Madol, and the Legacy of Lemuria.

Nervig started out as a Peace Corps volunteer on Pohnpei in the late sixties. Pohnpei (in case the name isn’t instantly familiar to you) is one of the islands of Micronesia in the South Pacific, 1,339 miles northeast of New Guinea.

Pohnpei has some sites featuring ancient megaliths and petroglyphs (as usual, made when and by whom is unknown). One site, Nan Madol, on the east coast, is well-known to archaeologists. Nervig, who has traveled to Pohnpei intermittently since her Peace Corps days, has delved into ones that aren’t as well documented.

At one point, Nervig was told in a dream to climb Takaieu Peak in the center of the island. Although it’s only 164 feet high, a journey there has a number of impediments, notably mud. Nervig says that the interior of the island gets an unbelievable 400 inches of rain a year.

Nervig was told to climb it alone, but in the end a local family sent their two sons along with her as guides. Alone with them in the wild, she grew uncomfortable with their sexual banter, which is common among Pohnpeians, but only adults.

She had thought they were between eight and twelve, so she was led to ask how old they were. Eighteen and twenty-six, as it turned out. “Are you guys some of the aramas tiktik (little people or pygmies) of the legends?” she asked.  Yes, they were. “This was flesh-and-blood proof that oral history must be taken seriously” (emphasis Nervig’s).

The story proceeds in more detail, and Nervig produces many illustrations showing the petroglyphs and their similarity to similar carvings from far-flung locations.

Similarly, James Churchward’s books on Mu in the 1930s argued that this commonality of symbols points toward the existence of a lost continent in the South Pacific called Mu. By this view, Mu was home to an advanced civilization. It was submerged in a cataclysm, but outposts of its civilization can be found everywhere from Taiwan to Mesoamerica and points beyond. Churchward discussed this theme in a number of books, including The Lost Continent of Mu, The Children of Mu, and The Sacred Symbols of Mu.

If you want something more scientifically grounded, you can look up Zealandia online. Some geographers class it as a continent, though a submerged one: 94 percent of it is under water. The part that isn’t includes the two main islands of New Zealand (hence the name) and New Caledonia. On average, it’s about 3,500 feet below sea level.

It seems possible that Zealandia was above water recently enough to house an advanced civilization whose remnants were disseminated after the continent sank in prehistoric times (although Churchward considers Zealandia to have been only a colony of a much larger Mu).

How would Mu relate to the Lemuria known from the Theosophical literature? A map of Mu was commissioned by King Kalakaua of Kauai in 1886. It is reprinted in the book, and it shows Mu extending from the southwest coast of Alaska all the way to Africa. Thus Mu and Lemuria would have been part of the same megacontinent. But it may make more sense to think of them separately. Lemuria has traditionally been placed in the Indian Ocean, and there is a great deal of lore about it, particularly among the Tamils. If you want to delve into this subject, I recommend The Lost Land of Lemuria by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Then we have to consider the relation of these civilizations to other worlds in the interstellar sense, since many tribes contend that their ancestors came from star systems such as the Pleiades.

 My reaction to this information is complex. In the first place, like many such books, Nervig’s contains such a welter of details and ideas that it’s hard to sort through them. I come away from this work overloaded and unsure of quite what to do with it all. At the same time, I can’t avoid seeing some truth here. It is becoming increasingly evident that prehistory, even in comparatively recent times, differs greatly from conventional views.

It is not easy to relate these traditional ideas to archaeological discoveries. As Nervig writes, “Due to a contemporary cultural/intellectual bias, these oral accounts as input for analyzing incomprehensible archaeological or sacred sites are systematically ignored, discounted, and ridiculed by academia.”

A veil of silence separates history—what we know since written records start, around 3000 BC—from prehistory. This veil partly consists of what we think we know about these subjects versus the actual truth.

Possibly as the generations turn over in such fields as archaeology and archaeoastronomy, some of this veil will begin to lift.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:   "H.P. Blavatsky on Extraterrestrial Life" Quest 110:4, pg 35

We find in the romances as in all the so-called scientific fictions and spiritistic revelations from moon, stars, and planets, merely fresh combinations or modifications of the men and things, the passions and forms of life with which we are familiar, when even on the other planets of our own system nature and life are entirely different from ours. Swedenborg was pre-eminent in inculcating such an erroneous belief.

But even more. The ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than that to which the physical senses link him. Men dream; they sleep the profound sleep which is too deep for dreams to impress the physical brain; and in these states there must still be consciousness. How, then, while these mysteries remain unexplored, can we hope to speculate with profit on the nature of globes which, in the economy of nature, must needs belong to states of consciousness other and quite different from any which man experiences here?

And this is true to the letter. For even great adepts (those initiated of course), trained seers though they are, can claim thorough acquaintance with the nature and appearance of planets and their inhabitants belonging to our solar system only. They know that almost all the planetary worlds are inhabited, but can have access—even in spirit —only to those of our system; and they are also aware how difficult it is, even for them, to put themselves into full rapport even with the planes of consciousness within our system, but differing from the states of consciousness possible on this globe; i.e., on the three planes of the chain of spheres beyond our earth. Such knowledge and intercourse are possible to them because they have learned how to penetrate to planes of consciousness which are closed to the perceptions of ordinary men; but were they to communicate their knowledge, the world would be no wiser, because it lacks that experience of other forms of perception which alone could enable them to grasp what was told them.

Still the fact remains that most of the planets, as the stars beyond our system, are inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of science themselves. Laplace and Herschel believed it, though they wisely abstained from imprudent speculation; and the same conclusion has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific considerations by C. Flammarion, the well-known French Astronomer. The arguments he brings forward are strictly scientific, and such as to appeal even to a materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such thoughts as those of Sir David Brewster, the famous physicist, who writes:

Those “barren spirits” or “base souls,” as the poet calls them, who might be led to believe that the Earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, would have no difficulty in conceiving the earth also to have been destitute of inhabitants. What is more, if such minds were acquainted with the deductions of geology, they would admit that it was uninhabited for myriads of years; and here we come to the impossible conclusion that during these myriads of years there was not a single intelligent creature in the vast domains of the Universal King, and that before the protozoic formations there existed neither plant nor animal in all the infinity of space.

Flammarion shows, in addition, that all the conditions of life—even as we know it—are present on some at least of the planets, and points to the fact that these conditions must be much more favorable on them than they are on our Earth.

Thus scientific reasoning, as well as observed facts, concur with the statements of the seer and the innate voice in man’s own heart in declaring that life—intelligent, conscious life—must exist on other worlds than ours.

But this is the limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot carry him. Many are the romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others bristling with scientific knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and describe life on other globes. But one and all, they give but some distorted copy of the drama of life around us. It is either, with Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope, or, with de Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find that at bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. So strong is this tendency that even great natural, though non-initiated seers, when untrained, fall a victim to it; witness Swedenborg, who goes so far as to dress the inhabitants of Mercury, whom he meets with in the spirit-world, in clothes such as are worn in Europe.

From The Secret Doctrine, ed. Boris de Zirkoff (Wheaton: Quest, 1993), 2:701‒02. Emphasis Blavatsky’s.

Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "The Other Worlds of Emanuel Swedenborg" Quest 110:4, pg 29-34

 by Richard Smoley 

The concept of other worlds—that is, the idea that there are other planets in the solar system and, possibly, the universe with inhabitants recognizably like our own—has a longer history in the West than one may first imagine. The idea can be traced back to the Greek philosophers Leucippus (fifth century BC), Democritus (c.460‒c.370 BC), and Epicurus (341‒270 BC), who were the first to formulate an atomistic theory of the universe. Atoms in this sense consist of small, invisible, and indivisible particles of which all things were composed. All things were generated by their combinations and recombinations, including the sun, the stars, and the planets.

Since the number of atoms was supposed to be infinite, it would follow that the number of worlds would be infinite as well. One ancient source characterized Democritus’s views as follows:

He spoke as if the things that are were in constant motion in the void; and there are innumerable worlds, which differ in size. In some worlds there is no sun and moon, in others they are larger than in our world, and in others more numerous. The intervals between the worlds are unequal; in some parts there are more worlds, in others fewer; some are increasing, some at their height, some decreasing; in some parts they are arising, in others falling. There are some worlds devoid of living creatures or plants or any moisture. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, 1.13.2; in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 417‒18)

This account has proved remarkably robust: the views of a modern physicist could be described in the same way with only slight changes in wording. Democritus’ theory is all the more impressive because there was no empirical evidence for the existence of these other worlds until much later: the moons of Jupiter would not be discovered until the seventeenth century, and exoplanets—planets in other solar systems—would not be discovered until the late twentieth century.

Democritus’ views about other worlds were derived from the implications of his basic theory. The same could be said of all theories of other worlds until well into the early modern era. Aristotle, for example, held quite a different view of the universe, based largely on his own system of physics. The universe was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, each of which had its own natural motion and place—that is, its own natural position toward which it moved unless otherwise impeded: earth tended to move toward the center of the world; fire moved away from it, with the other two elements occupying places in between. For Aristotle, then, there could only be one world, because if there were more worlds, earth would have two directions in which to move—a possibility that he did not admit (Dick, 14‒18).

The Aristotelian worldview consisted of a central and static earth, around which the five known planets and the two luminaries revolved in concentric circles in this order: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, beyond which was the sphere of fixed stars. This picture of the universe, with elaborations by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 90‒c.168), would prevail in the West until the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century.

Nevertheless, the debate about other worlds and extraterrestrial life surfaced from time to time in antiquity. One example appears in a dialogue by Plutarch (AD c.46‒c.120) entitled On the Face on the Orb of the Moon. Plutarch discusses whether the moon is habitable and indeed inhabited. Although the treatise is more literary than scientific in intent and reaches no definitive conclusion, it does not attempt to prove that the moon cannot be inhabited, leaving the ultimate answer open.

Another, lighter approach was taken in a romance by the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata (c.AD 120‒after 185) entitled The True History, which tells of a journey to the moon by Lucian and his cohorts. Hailed by some as the first work of science fiction, it is clearly satirical and does not indicate any genuine belief in life on other planets on the author’s part. The book has exercised some influence over the centuries—but almost entirely on satirists and not on scientists (Dick, 20‒22).

 In the high medieval period, Aristotle’s views, reintroduced to the West by the Arabs and harmonized with Christianity by figures such as Thomas Aquinas, came to dominate the world of Catholic thought to the point of approaching religious dogma. Hence at this time the idea of other worlds was in eclipse, and was only rescued in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris (c.1210‒79) issued a condemnation of 219 beliefs that he called heretical; among these was the notion that “the First Cause [i.e., God] cannot make many worlds” (Dick, 28). Again the belief in other worlds was not in itself of primary concern: Tempier was not so much concerned to protect it as to oppose any notion that might suggest limits to divine power.

Other late medieval thinkers considered the possibility of inhabited worlds, including the German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401‒64) and the Franciscan theologian William Vorilong (d. 1464), who contended that “not one world alone, but that infinite worlds, more perfect than this one, lie hid in the mind of God,” and that such a world could have intelligent inhabitants that “would exist from the virtue of God, transported into that world” (in Crowe, 27).

After Copernicus

The debate about extraterrestrial life began to take its present form with the Copernican revolution, which posited the sun rather than the earth as the center of the universe. By displacing the earth in this way and positioning it as merely one of several planets, the Copernican theory opened new ground for other-worlds discussions, although Copernicus himself did not engage in it (Dick, 63).

It took the original and highly controversial scholar Giordano Bruno (1548‒1600) to bring the issue forward again. In a 1584 work entitled De l’infinito universo et mondi (“On the Infinite Universe and Worlds”), Bruno argued that the stars were suns, these planets had “earths” orbiting them, and that both these suns and these “earths” contained inhabitants (in Crowe, 49). Bruno’s views, on this and many other subjects, attracted the disfavor of the Catholic Church, and the Inquisition burned him at the stake in Rome in 1600. While he was willing to recant on some of his theological criticisms of church doctrine, he held to his belief in infinite worlds till the end.

In the early seventeenth century, the debate resumed with renewed vigor because of a revolutionary discovery by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564‒1642). Using the newly invented telescope, he observed that Jupiter had four moons orbiting it. This advanced the theory of heliocentrism (which at that time had not yet been fully accepted): if Jupiter could have moons, the earth could certainly have one moon while revolving around the sun.

Johannes Kepler (1571‒1630) took this argument one step further: “Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited” (in Crowe, 60‒61).

This argument reveals a great deal about the nature of scientific debate in the era. Kepler was arguing that the cosmos was created for a purpose, namely to serve man, or at any rate a being like him. The sun, moon, and planets could be said to serve man’s purposes (in providing light and heat and so forth), but what possible use to humanity could the moons of Jupiter serve? As a result, Jupiter must be inhabited, because it must have rational beings for whom the moons were created.

As this discussion shows, teleology was extremely important in the causal thinking of the early modern scientists: in order to consider why something should exist, we need to look at, not only what brought it about (its effective cause, to use the Aristotelian term) but its final cause. Without a final cause, a purpose, a thing had no place in the universe—a conclusion which cast aspersions on the wisdom of God in his arrangement of the cosmos, and which was therefore inadmissible. This argument would soon look untenable; in certain ways, the history of early modern science is the history of the expulsion of the final cause from scientific reasoning—to the point where today practically any teleological concept is taboo in mainstream scientific discussion.

Galileo, no doubt mindful of Bruno’s fate, was chary of advancing the idea of other worlds (Dick, 90), although his caution did not save him from condemnation by the Inquisition and lifelong house arrest for advocating heliocentrism.

The French philosopher René Descartes (1596‒1650) showed caution as well. His Principia philosophiae (“Principles of Philosophy”) set forth the first new physical system since Aristotle—one that propounded the existence of innumerable vortices in the universe, at the center of each of which was a fixed star. While this naturally suggested the possibility of other planets with inhabitants on them, Descartes remained carefully agnostic on this point (Dick, 111‒12).

This was not the case with Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657‒1757), one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment. In a 1686 work entitled Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (“Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds”) Fontenelle explicitly tied Descartes’s concept of vortices to the possibility of other worlds. The Entretiens was a light, witty book, which meant two things: (1) Fontenelle could hide behind the veil of jest in propounding his ideas, which he nonetheless took at least somewhat seriously; and (2) the Entretiens became enormously popular, going through many editions in the late seventeenth century (Dick, 123‒26), widely disseminating the idea of other worlds among the literate public.

The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629‒95) took a more serious tack but drew similar conclusions in his Cosmotheoros (“Observer of the Universe”), posthumously published in 1698. Like Kepler, Huygens uses teleological arguments to advance the idea of other inhabited planets: they must have life because life better manifests divine Providence than lifeless planets, and without it “we should sink [the planets] below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a thing that no Reason will permit” (in Dick, 130).

The second half of the Cosmotheoros discusses the nature of life on these planets—obviously a wholly speculative discussion, although it is based on observed phenomena as the relative distance of each planet from the sun (Huygens believed that, although Mercury would, from its proximity to the sun, receive nine times more heat than the earth, he also contended that its inhabitants would be adapted to these conditions.)

Although Isaac Newton (1642‒1727) did not explore this idea in any great detail, it was in his time and place—late seventeenth-century England—that the concept of other worlds became part of mainstream scientific opinion, being propounded by figures such as Richard Bentley (1662‒1742), William Whiston (1667‒1752), and William Derham (1657‒1735). One reason for this occurrence was that England permitted much greater liberty of religion than existed in the Catholic world, or even in many other Protestant countries. Another was that the great religious wars of the previous century had weakened faith in Scripture as testimony to God’s will and providence, and correspondingly strengthened the desire to see God’s handiwork in the natural universe. Because, as the argument went, the majesty and wisdom of God would be better demonstrated in a plurality of worlds rather than in a single one, many scientists began to incline toward this wider perspective.

Swedenborg’s Scientific Period

	The Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg, by Per Krafft the Elder, is from 1766. It shows Swedenborg at age seventy-five, holding the soon to be published manuscritpt of his Apocalypsis Revelata ("Apocalypse Revealed"). Image by courtesy of the Swedenborg Foundation.

In an early phase of his thought, the great Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688‒1772) reflects some of these themes and concerns. Swedenborg’s early works were scientific. One of them, ThePrincipia (1734), includes a short chapter entitled “The Diversities of Worlds” (Swedenborg, Principia, 2:240‒48) His arguments here, recapitulating many themes of the debate from the earliest times, argue in favor of the idea of other worlds.

Swedenborg begins with what is sometimes called “the argument from plenitude,” contending that nature “is most profusely fertile and ever essaying at further ends, inasmuch as she is never at rest, but always desirous to advance and extend the bounds of her dominion.” Like many of his predecessors, he argues that divine glory and omnipotence suggest that this is not only possible but likely: “Nor is there anything to prevent us from conjecturing that at the will of the deity may arise fresh systems at every moment; for there is nothing to shew that it is physically impossible” (Principia, 2:240‒41). At the end of the chapter he will say that God “can give birth to nature not only after the manner in which it is presented to our view in this world, but in ways infinitely diversified” (Principia, 2:247‒48).

 Just how diversified? Just how much could these worlds differ from one another? The problem exercised Newton, who wrote in a letter to Richard Bentley:

And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions of Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in all this. (In Dick, 146‒47)

Swedenborg’s answer is similar but not identical. While he does admit great variances in the properties of other worlds, he also holds that some principles will apply universally: “In every mundane system, the principles of geometry continue to be similar; as also nature and mechanism, as to first principles and force; and that the diversity consists only in the diversity of the series, in respect to degrees, ratios, and figures” (Principia, 2:245‒46).

Swedenborg is arguing that certain basic principles will remain constant in all systems, such as the laws of geometry (non-Euclidean geometries would not be developed until the nineteenth century), as well as “nature and mechanism, inasmuch as its motive forces cannot be separated from geometry.” These principles remain, as it were, axiomatic, but the series and modes in which they operate can vary; the elements may display different properties; in some worlds, even, the animals might be “deprived of the use of their senses” (Principia, 2:246).

From these two passages it would seem that Newton is more ready to admit possible variations in basic principles than Swedenborg is. Whichever view one takes, however, the same question applies: how different can these worlds be from our own before they are unknowable to us? This question is not addressed. While Swedenborg says that the phenomena of these other worlds might differ so much that “the learned of those worlds . . . might excite only a smile from the learned of ours” (Principia, 2:247), he does not ask whether they might differ so much that the learned of these worlds would be totally and irreversibly isolated from us.

Swedenborg goes on to say that these systems, which could arise at different times, would nonetheless display some resemblance to the Earth’s own life cycle: “We may also conjecture, that each earth in its infancy would be similar to ours in its infancy.” Swedenborg associates this “infancy” with the Golden Age of the earth, suggesting that each of these worlds would “exhibit the bloom of youth in its infant state.”

Swedenborg admits that the concept of other worlds is speculative: “from a mere possibility . . . we cannot reason to actuality” (Principia, 2:241). He goes on to emphasize the limits of our knowledge, not only of these putative other worlds, but even of our own: “In the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdom, what we now know is nothing to what we have yet to learn; for of that of which our senses are unconscious, the soul also is ignorant” (Principia, 2:247). Like everyone else before him in this debate, Swedenborg in his scientific phase comes across the immovable barrier created by the lack of empirical evidence.

Visions of Planetary Beings

It would prove otherwise in Swedenborg’s theological period, which started around 1745, when he began to experience visions of unseen realms, including heaven, hell, and the spirit world. At this point, Swedenborg does attempt to provide empirical evidence for the existence of other worlds and other beings—the evidence being his own experience. He begins his short work Other Planets by describing his experiences with spirits from the planets known in his time: Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and the moon (in that order). He then proceeds to beings from planets outside the solar system, of which he enumerates five. He does not seem to know of any further planets in our solar system, in keeping with the knowledge of his day: Uranus would not be discovered until 1781, nine years after his death.

These experiences differ radically from later encounters with extraterrestrial creatures, real or imagined, in one chief respect: Swedenborg is not dealing with these beings as they lived in physical form, but rather with their spirits. Nonetheless, he makes it clear that these spirits originally had physical bodies on their respective planets, just as inhabitants of earth have.

Swedenborg does not appear to be interested in drawing general conclusions about beings from other worlds, or what this might imply for scientific knowledge; rather he limits himself to concrete descriptions of these inhabitants, their patterns of mind, and their way of life. His work has one chief purpose: to show that “not enough people come into heaven from our world to make up [the] universal human. We are relatively few, and there must be people from many other worlds. So the Lord has provided that the moment any nuance of quality of substance of this responsive relationship is missing anywhere, people from another world are immediately summoned who fill the need so that the proper proportion is established and heaven therefore stands firm” (Swedenborg, Other Planets, 9).

In Swedenborg’s thought, the universal human (maximus homo in Latin) is a gigantic heavenly being of which each individual is a cell. The spirits of the planet Mercury, for example, correspond to “memory, specifically memory of things beyond things of earth and of mere matter” (Other Planets, 9).

It is tempting to look for some connection between Swedenborg’s descriptions of these spirits and the characteristics of the planets as they were portrayed in the Western esoteric tradition and in astrology. In general, the correspondences are present but faint. See, for example, a typical description of the characteristics of Mercury by Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486‒1535) in his classic work De occulta philosophia (“On the Occult Philosophy”):

Mercury is called the son of Jupiter, the crier of the gods, the interpreter of gods, Stilbon, the serpent-bearer, the rod-bearer, winged on his feet, eloquent, bringer of gain, wise, rational, robust, stout, powerful in good and evil, the notary of the Sun, the messenger of Jupiter, the messenger betwixt the supernal and infernal gods, male with males, female with females, most fruitful in both sexes, and Lucan calls him the arbitrator of the gods. He is also called Hermes, i.e., interpreter, bringing to light all obscurity, and opening those things which are most secret. (Agrippa, 2:49, 427)

Some traits of this occult Mercury are echoed in Swedenborg’s Mercurial spirits: in their collection and retention of impressions from many worlds (see Other Planets, 15) they can be said to have a kind of role as messengers; moreover, like the itinerant messenger of the gods, “they do not settle down in one place, . . . but roam through the universe” (Other Planets, 24). On the other hand, unlike the communicative Mercury of the occult philosophy, “bringing to light all obscurity,” Swedenborg’s Mercurians have a “custom of not giving direct answers to questions,” and “have a distaste for verbal speech” (Other Planets, 17).

Although these resemblances are faint, we can still ask whether Swedenborg was somehow influenced by this occult philosophy, which was then much more widely known and respected than it is in our day. The answer is difficult to give, and will certainly vary with one’s approach to Swedenborg’s writings as a whole. Those who take his writings as the fruit of divine inspiration will insist that he was reporting his own spiritual experiences and that he was not at all influenced by these earlier traditions. A more skeptical reader might be willing to see some traces of this influence on Swedenborg.

It is also tempting to correlate Swedenborg’s description of these planetary inhabitants with Dante’s astrological schema in The Divine Comedy, which is particularly evident in the Paradiso. In his ascent through the concentric spheres of the planets (Dante’s schema is based on Aristotle’s), Dante encounters souls at every level that embody the virtues of that planet. The moon, being the most rapidly changing of the heavenly bodies, is the realm of the inconstant. Mercury is the realm of seekers after glory. Venus, the planet of love, is the domain of lovers; the sun is the realm of the wise; Mars, of the warriors of the faith; Jupiter, of just rulers; Saturn, of contemplatives. While not absolutely identical to the occult schema in Agrippa’s Renaissance text, it is certainly close enough.

All of this is very far from Swedenborg. He does not take the planets in their traditional order; his descriptions of the beings of each planet bears only a faint resemblance to their astrological correspondents; he does not view his own journey in the form of an ascent; nor are the planets spheres of heaven. His extraterrestrials are human, or humanoid, with faults of their own. Mercurians, “because of their wealth of experience,” are more inclined to pride (Other Planets, 16). On Jupiter (traditionally the most benign and beneficent of all the planets) we find practitioners of a sinister priestcraft, who “call themselves saints and demand that their servants . . . call them ‘lords,’” and prohibit these servants from “worshipping the Lord of the universe, saying that they are mediators of that Lord and that their requests will be forwarded to the Lord of the universe” (Other Planets, 70). On Venus, those from the side that faces Earth “are savage and almost feral,” as well as “stupid, with no interest in heaven or eternal life” (Other Planets, 108).

On the whole, however, the inhabitants of Swedenborg’s other worlds seem to be better and kinder than those on Earth. Those who inhabit the side of Venus that faces away from Earth are “gentle and humane” (Other Planets, 108), while Mercurians “are completely unconcerned about earthly and physical matters” (Other Planets, 12). Spirits from Jupiter “are much wiser than spirits from our planet” (Other Planets, 61). Those from Mars “are some of the best from all the worlds in our solar system” (Other Planets, 85). Those from Saturn are “trustworthy and modest” and “profoundly humble in their worship” (Other Planets, 97‒98). Swedenborg does not mention the moral characteristics of the spirits of the moon, no doubt because his description of them is so short (Other Planets, 111‒12).

One last characteristic of these extraterrestrial spirits is worth noting. They do not seem in the slightest bit technologically advanced. Of the spirits from Mars, we learn that “the standard diet on their earth was fruit from trees . . . along with vegetables. They wore clothes that they made from the fibers of the bark of particular trees” (Other Planets, 93). Indeed the inhabitants of Jupiter seem somewhat apelike: “they do not walk upright like the inhabitants of our planet . . . but help themselves along with the palms of their hands” (Other Planets, 55).

Taken as a whole, the lives of these beings seem to resemble that of the primitive humanity of the classical Golden Age. Swedenborg himself contends that “the earliest peoples on our planet lived like that” (Other Planets, 49).

The modern notion of technologically advanced extraterrestrials is completely absent from Swedenborg. Contemporary speculations about extraterrestrials, focusing on visitors to our planet from other planets, presuppose technological sophistication: they could not reach us if they were not far more advanced than us. For Swedenborg, this requirement is unnecessary: no spaceships are required to encounter extraterrestrial beings in the world of spirits.

Swedenborg’s vision of other worlds reveals two main themes. The first, and most important, is the vastness of the universe and the complete inadequacy of the earth alone to fully furnish the population of heaven. The second is an emphasis on certain core values—notably the need to acknowledge the primacy of spiritual as opposed to earthly reality and the need for moral sincerity, and the relative backwardness of the human race in this regard.

Swedenborg’s insistence that his encounters have taken place in the spiritual plane and not on earth have meant that his visions have had very little influence on the subsequent debate regarding extraterrestrials. Moreover, there is no evidence at present for life forms in this solar system that even remotely resemble humans.

One’s response to these facts will vary with one’s attitude toward Swedenborg’s thought as a whole. However literally or metaphorically one wishes to take his encounters with the spirits of planets from this solar system and others, they remain an integral part of his powerful and all-encompassing spiritual vision.

Sources

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated by James Freake and edited by Donald Tyson. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1993 [1533]

Crowe, Michael J. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Dick, Steven J. Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds. and trans. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Swedenborg, Emanuel. The Earthlike Bodies Called Planets in Our Solar System and in Deep Space, Their Inhabitants, and the Spirits and Angels There, Drawn from Things Heard and Seen. Translated by George F. Dole. In Swedenborg, The Shorter Works of 1758: New Jerusalem, Last Judgment, White Horse, Other Planets. Translated by George F. Dole and Jonathan S. Rose. West Chester, Pa: Swedenborg Foundation, 2018.

———. The Principia; or, The First Principles of Natural Things. Translated by Augustus Clissold. Two volumes. Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1988 [1734].

Swedenborg’s works are conventionally numbered by sections; references are to these sections rather than to page numbers.

With permission from the Swedenborg Foundation, the above article was adapted from Richard Smoley’s introduction to Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Shorter Works of 1758, New Century Edition, trans. George F. Dole and Jonathan S. Rose (West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2018), 84–97.