Earths in the Universe

About this book

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a mining engineer, an anatomist who studied the brain, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In his fifties his spiritual sight, as he put it, was "opened", and he spent the rest of his life writing about heaven, the spirits and the inner meaning of the Bible. In 1758 he published this book in Latin in London, without his name. It was translated into English in 1787 and has been read ever since — by Kant, who mocked it, by William Blake, Balzac and Helen Keller, who loved it.

Swedenborg does not guess or argue — he calmly reports. The spirits of Mercury gather knowledge from the whole universe and leaf through his memory like a book. The people of Jupiter are honest and kind, speak with their faces and believe their faces grow larger after death. The Martians live without rulers. From Saturn the ring looks "whitish, like snow". And on Earths around other stars there are temples grown from living trees, peoples without kings, and brides chosen by the face, which there is the mirror of the mind.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the English edition of 1787 and checked against them. A complete, sentence-by-sentence text — not a summary. Swedenborg's paragraph numbers (1–178) are kept; his references by number to his other works are left out, but his own notes are kept.

What is inside

• fourteen parts: the Earths in the universe; Mercury; Jupiter; Mars; Saturn; Venus; the Moon; why the Lord was born on our Earth; the Earths in the starry heaven; the first, second, third, fourth and fifth Earth among the stars
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 175 footnotes — every name and idea explained on the same page, and where we now know otherwise, the note says what we know today
• twelve colour illustrations in the manner of 18th-century visionary painting, one opening each part (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what modern science says — Mercury, Jupiter's ocean moons, Mars rovers, Saturn's icy rings, Venus, exoplanets, SETI
• foreword: who Swedenborg was and how to read this book today

Who it is for

Readers of mystical and spiritual classics; anyone curious about angels, spirits and the life after death; lovers of old books and of the history of ideas about life on other worlds; readers of William Blake and Swedenborg.

A historical and spiritual source: Swedenborg writes as a man of the eighteenth century, with the beliefs of his time; it is a testimony of faith, not a book of astronomy. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.