In the 18th century, when modern Egyptology was just beginning to be introduced to the Western world, and before even the hieroglyphics were deciphered, Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist and a Christian mystic wrote,:
“The Egyptians were in possession of religious representatives and symbolic signs. Their hieroglyphics served to denote spiritual realities: and people knew that they did in actual fact correspond to those realities.” (Heavenly Secrets section 7097)
The hieroglyphics, according to this view, were originally pictorial representations of objects which also had a higher ideological value. So a picture of a hand meant a hand, but also carried the idea of ‘power’. A musical instrument had a derived meaning of ‘joy and gladness’. Later still, each sign had a vocal value as letters have in other alphabets. Many of these symbols, or what Swedenborg called ‘correspondences’, are said to be common to all cultures. He held the view that, at one time, the knowledge of ‘correspondences’ was universally known.
According to Swedenborg, correspondences are the mystical knowledge which describes how spiritual energy manifests itself in visible forms in the material world. And so, on the human level, a sense of happiness in the mind expresses itself in a smile: the inner feeling is invisible, unknowable, but if the smile is genuine and not just a pretence, it corresponds to that inner, spiritual reality we feel within ourselves. This knowledge thus shows us how the two worlds are linked and united.
The general idea here is that in ancient times, people perceived that every created thing is linked with creation’s purpose and design and therefore can represent a quality of the infinite. In line with this, the sun, for the Egyptians, was important and represented by them as a solar disk with rays ending in a hand. Swedenborg’s mystical insight is that during the days of enlightenment they did not worship the physical sun, but the divine sun, the true source of all life.
Science tells us that the sun reaches us in two distinct ways: through warmth and by its light. These two realities are the primary source of life’s progression or regression. When they are balanced then there is new life and growth as in springtime and summer. When they are out of harmony and one predominates, then life’s processes close down, as in winter, or become deformed, as vegetation, which grows in heat without light.
Swedenborg’s thesis is that because everything is created through the laws of correspondence, these principles apply on the spiritual and mental plane equally well. Our inner warmth is love; our inner light is our understanding. He wrote that it is extremely important that our faculties for loving and thinking should be balanced and work together for the fruitfulness which will benefit all mankind. In other words if one faculty were to predominate then there would be disaster, pain and disorder. We actually can easily recognise this: why else do we talk about a person who has no loving motivation as ‘cold’ and giving us a ‘chilly reception’? This is an example of correspondences being expressed in our everyday speech.
He went on to say that eventually, the knowledge of correspondences became corrupted and was misused as black magic. Gradually people were content to worship the symbols or idols instead of the spirit which these originally represented.
The reforming Pharoah, Akheaten, wished to wean the people away from the polytheistic worship of many minor deities. To get people to worship the One God, (the invisible Spirit named Aten represented as the Solar Disk), he wrote the following hymn:
“You do appear beautiful on the horizon of heaven,
O living Aten, you who was the first to live.
When you have risen on the eastern horizon,
You have filled every land with your beauty.
You are fair, great, dazzling, high above every land;
Your rays encompass the lands to the very limit of all you have made.”
The Bible also speaks of the sun as the representation of the Divine Love and its everlasting arms reaching towards each individual, though the Jews never worshiped the physical sun:
“My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
The Lord will grace and glory;
No good thing will he withold
From those who walk uprightly.” (Psalm 84:2,11)
“But to you who fear my name
The Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings.” (Malachi4:2)
When seeing, what we can think of as, Divine Light shining from within the human form of Jesus Christ, his disciples had a moment of enlightenment and a visible glory was described in these words:
“And he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” (Matt 17:2)
Swedenborg said that this will become clear when we pass from this world into the next:
“In heaven there is a Sun, but because the things in heaven are spiritual, the Sun in heaven is the Lord. The light there is the Divine Truth and the heat there the Divine Good, and these radiate from the Lord as from a Sun. The reason the Lord in heaven is seen as a Sun is that He is Divine Love from which all spiritual things come into existence, as do all natural things by means of the sun of the world. That Love is what shines as a Sun” (Heaven and Hell section 117)
His conclusion is that the knowledge of correspondences can unlock for us the real code within the Bible and reveal the spiritual concepts which lie within it, just as our spirit dwells within our body. The stories of creation, the flood as well as the parables of Jesus can thus suddenly take on a new and clear meaning.
Can we see in them a universal truth which is valid in every age and touches every person with the gentle rays of new enlightenment?
(Based on material produced by Christopher Hasler previously published by the Swedenborg Movement.)