Friday, February 01, 2008
SWEDENBORG AND FREEMASONRY
The Bayside Swedenborgian Church openly admits to Swedenborg's Sabbatean roots. George F. Dole tells us:
...if Swedenborg began his study of Hebrew at Uppsala, as Sigstedt believes,3 [Johan] Kemper would have been his principal instructor. ...
My closer study of Kemper's manuscript has yielded one startling result--the discovery that before his baptism, he was a Sabbatian, an adherent of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. ...
At the end of the year 1696, Moses ben Aaron (then staying in a village near Schweinfurt) became receptive to the Christian message that all expectation of the Messiah should be abandoned because the Messiah had already come. His conversion to the Augsburg Confession is credited to Deacon Johann Friedrich Heunisch in messianic religious discourses. He accepted Christian baptism and the new name of Johan Christian Jakob Kemper. The archive preserved at Schweinfurt, the Chronik yon Rassdorfer zum Jahre 1696, proudly proclaims that the newly baptized not only was learned, but also was true to his new faith, "which was something rare."...
In Kemper's case, though, it is like this--no one can escape from his own skin. While the Christian theologians at Uppsala were delighted by the beautifully zealous faith of diligent converts, Kemper has basically only rewoven the threads of Sabbatianism. His whole interpretation of the trinity and its Jewish legitimizing, that is, were nothing but the old pet Sabbatian teaching. The messianic language of the Sabbatian "Holy King" runs through his whole commentary on Matthew.
Keeping in mind that Sabbatean beliefs revolved around holy sinning, and the greatest sin against Judaism would be to proclaim Jesus Christ as the Messiah, we have to wonder what secrets Kemper held in his heart. In any case that would appear to be the source of Swedenborg's knowledge of the Kabbalah as far as we know today. The Kabbalah, of course, is used extensively in Freemasonry's upper degrees.
Christopher McIntosh discusses "The Masonic Phase" in chapter 3 of THE ROSE CROSS AND THE AGE OF REASON. There you can read:
This whole amalgam of occultism and high-degree Masonry is often referred to as "Illuminism" (not to be confused with the system of Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati, which...was the very antithesis of French Illuminism). To the extent that it was masonic, it would also be called "theosophical Masonry."(p. 41-42)
He also says:
Another of [Martines de] Pasqually's ["founder of an order called the Elect Cohens (Elus Coens)" - p. 40] former disciples, Jean-Baptiste Willermos (1730-1824), went on to found a high-degree masonic order called the Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cite Sainte, also known as the Rite of Ecossais Rectifie. He also founded in 1763, a rite with alchemical and Rosicrucian themes, the Chevaliers de l'Aigle Noir et Rose-Croix. Another figure who was influential in this world was the Swedish philosopher, scientist and visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), propounder of a highly idiosyncratic and occult form of Christianity which attached itself to certain branches of Masonry.(p. 41)
Dole provides another bit of information in the Swedenborg paper linked above. He tells us that this movement has embraced the idea of the lost tribes of Israel.
Most consequential was the English self-identification with the ten lost tribes, nourished by Calvinist affinities...All the prophecies and promises for the Jews were transferred to the English nation...this was proclaimed again and again. In particular, the British Israel Movement founded by Richard Brothers promulgated these concepts by a copious literature of sermons and tracts for the educated English classes. We can read in these documents that the coronation stone at Windsor Abey is the stone of the patriarch Jacob at Bethel, that Joseph of Arimathea himself came to England and built the first Christian church, that the lineage of the house of Windsor goes back to David and Solomon, etc.
Sound familiar? How about the claims of "The DaVinci Code"? Not surprisingly, those claims have been made by Freemasonry particularly in the book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL.
At the website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia we can find out the Masonic version of Swedenborg. There you can read that
Samuel Beswick claimed that Swedenborg was initiated into freemasonry at Lund, also styled Lunden, Sweden, in 1706, and created the Swedenborgisan Rite; the Abbé Pernetti made a similar claim in a brief biography he published as a preface for his French translation of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell; and Dr. Marsha Schuchard has continued the argument; but masonic historian, R. A. Gilbert, discredits the theory.
Michael Baigent is a trustee of the Canonbury Masonic Research Center. R. A. Gilbert is Past Master of Quatuor Coronati [Masonic research] Lodge and an author of many books on Freemasonry and Esoterica. Both of them are pictured at the Canonbury website.
Swedenborg's membership in Freemasonry, in other words, is controversial. His enthusiasm for illuminism, a teaching of the esoteric lodges, as well as his promotion of liberty and equality, a teaching of the deist lodges places him well within the philosophy of Freemasonry.
In any case, the sort of illuminism practiced in the theosophical lodges has now evolved into churches here in America, apparently with the financial backing of Sir John Templeton and the Templeton Foundation.
