New Church Life May/June 2016 | Page 62

n e w c h u r c h l i f e : m ay / j u n e 2 0 1 6 journey not unlike like that of Carl Jung nearly 200 years later. Swedenborg’s experience, however, was undoubtedly more intense – living for nearly three decades a “dual existence in both the spiritual and natural worlds alternately.” (Warren xxxiii) In his introduction to the Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Samuel Warren speaks to the gravity of this unprecedented occurrence: Swedenborg came to believe that God had called him to bring a new revelation to the world, and from 1745 until his death 27 years later, he spent the bulk of his time adding theological works to his already lengthy scientific and philosophical writings. Few transcendent experiences recorded in human history encompass such a sweeping claim. According to Swedenborg, the nature of this “new revelation” was not a new prophet, nor even a new text, but rather a new, metaphorical interpretation of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. He argued that contemporary Christian beliefs in the “Second Coming” and “End of Days” were in fact symptomatic of an overly literal interpretation of the Bible. To this end, he then began the monumental task of outlining – verse by verse – the “internal sense” of the Bible. His study of Genesis and Exodus alone extends more than 7,000 pages. It is in Swedenborg’s exegesis of the first chapters of Genesis that we see startling consistency with the Popol Vuh. In the characters of Adam and Eve, Swedenborg does not see a literal description of two individuals, but a representative description of the earliest stage of humanity. This Golden Age of humanity – which he calls the Most Ancient Church – is described in some detail: I have been informed that the men of the Most Ancient Church were of so heavenly a character that they conversed with angels, and that they had the power of holding such converse by means of correspondences. (Warren 26) This ability to communicate openly with the heavens is directly echoed in the Mayan Popol Vuh, in which the people of the Golden Age are described as anthropomorphic wooden manikins: The first four humans, the first four earthly beings who were truly articulate when they moved their feet and hands, their faces and mouths, and who could speak the very language of the gods, could also see everything under the sky and on the earth. (Tedlock 21) Both texts describe the antediluvian peoples of the earth being in direct communication with another world, but the similarities do not end there. On a more symbolic level, the ability of the people of the Mayan Golden Age to “see everything under the sky and on earth” seems to correlate strongly with Swedenborg’s description of the people of the Most Ancient Church: “When they looked upon any of the objects of this world they not only thought of 264