ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a group of radical believers, who were active in the New Jerusalem Church around the time William Blake attended its first General Conference. For a history of the early New Jerusalem Church, the main source of information is the history written by its founder, Robert Hindmarsh. The micro-culture of radical Swedenborgians makes for a particularly interesting study. Reading Blake in isolation has left much of his work obscure. For all the negative press the London Swedenborgians received, it was their close ties to international Masonry that attracted the most hostile commentaries. An important figure for Swedenborgianism in late eighteenth-century London was Benedict Chastanier, a French physician and high-ranking J. C. S. Mason, who took residence in London in 1774. When Blake attended the First General Conference of the New Jerusalem Church in 1789, the backbone of Swedenborgianism in London centred on Chastanier and his Universal Society.
