Swedenborg’s Other Planets: Mercury, Jupiter, and Mars in a Telepathic, Communal Afterlife
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Swedenborg’s 1758 account imagines a non-physical afterlife where humanoid spirits travel by consciousness between Mercury, Jupiter, and Mars, form planet-linked communities that preserve family ties and marriages, and use telepathy to learn and share scripture, with Jesus’ incarnation anchoring written scripture and astrology echoing inner states.
The episode revisits Emanuel Swedenborg’s Other Planets, focusing on Mercury, Jupiter, and Mars as he describes them in 1758, where spirits remain humanoid and travel the cosmos in a non-physical way grounded in a universal human architecture. Mercury spirits are insatiable learners who ferret through memory telepathically, chasing knowledge for its own sake and viewing travel as a mind-to-mind exchange rather than a physical journey. The afterlife is presented as a network of planet-linked communities where death preserves family ties, marriages endure beyond life, and individuals continue to engage with a living social world. Jupiter’s people are depicted as genuinely open and caring, with wealth secondary to character, and with punitive or corrective spirits that aim to protect communal harmony by discouraging deceit and isolation from loved ones. Mars inhabitants are described as exceptionally communal and protective, with Earth visitors finding adaptation difficult; angels or higher powers intervene to keep Earth–Mars interactions peaceful. Swedenborg’s framework treats travel as a spiritual transfer—the physical body remains on Earth while the spirit experiences other realms—an idea the hosts compare to astral or interdimensional travel. Across these realms, Mercury spirits communicate primarily by telepathy, while the landscapes appear as states of consciousness rather than concrete geographies, and Swedenborg even narrates meetings with Aristotle as part of his dialogues. A thread runs that scripture and divine knowledge could be disseminated through the cosmos by these Mercury spirits, with Jesus’ incarnation serving to anchor written scripture for universal distribution. The hosts close by reflecting on astrology’s resonance with this universal-human view, imagining a cosmos where planetary realms echo internal states, and hint at further explorations of the topic and related cross-disciplinary ideas.
Source: youtube.com