ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the people attracted to Swedenborgianism and how they adapted and transformed his ideas. Swedenborgianism’s attack on the established Church as corrupt invited critical commentaries on the way in which this foreign import related to the English tradition of radical dissent. From the late 1780s, conservative censors had been on the watch for the potential threat Swedenborgianism posed to social order. Swedenborgianism is erroneously associated with a number of seventeenth-century sects connected with the social upheaval of the English Civil War. Even when Swedenborgianism was acquitted of direct involvement in subversive activity, the theological ideology was continually assessed for its appeal to radical thinking. The fact that the mystical and spiritual writings of the Swedish theosophist were used as a platform for revolutionary politics provides an invaluable paradigm for understanding William Blake’s radical interpretation of Christianity in general, and his attraction to Emanuel Swedenborg in particular.
