ABSTRACT
The spiritual sciences were the great fashion of the 1780s. Wonderful invisible forces were afoot: gravity, invisible fluids, magnetic powers, swarming spirits, and 'the often fictitious powers that one meets like ghosts inhabiting the dead treatises of such respectable eighteenth-century scientists as Buffon, Euler, la Place and Macquer'. In 1787 the Swedenborgian Exegetical and Philanthropic Society of Stockholm sent a long letter and a Swedenborgian brochure promising a vaster range of spiritual experience to the mesmerists of Strasbourg. The creation of Frankenstein is embedded in a cultural matrix that included the spiritual sciences and their accompanying fascination with animal magnetism, somnambulism, clairvoyance, spirit apparitions, thought transfer, second sight, posthumous survival and thought transference between the living and the dead. Swedenborg's impact was phenomenal; Immanuel Kant was moved by the well-known stories of Swedenborg's experiences of foreknowledge and his ability to converse with the spirits of the recently departed, feats which he viewed as having considerable 'evidential force'.
