Bad news. I just purchased "The Collected Works of Emmanuel Swedenborg" (190,544 pages!!) as part of my studies of Trumpian occultism.
Better news. It's on Kindle so the house won't open up a sink hole.
Best news. It costs $0.00.
I've heard about Swedenborg for years and when I was at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bethlehem Pennsylvania our church secretary - who was not a member of our church - belonged to a Swedenborgian church. (Swedenborg, himself, did not form a church.)
He was a scientist and an engineer before becoming a Christian mystic (albeit heretical, as most mystics in ALL religions are considered).
I'm developing a theory that, while occultism and esotericism has always existed, its flowering in America was the result of a broader backlash against the Enlightenment's restriction of reality to that which can be confirmed through a consensual process of reason and evidence AS WELL AS the American genius of separating church and state.
With tolerance, America's entrepreneurial spirit could invent its own homegrown religions, many of which focused on the direct experience of the divine rather than on authoritative holy books and creeds. (Emerson's trancendentalism is a good example.)
And the separation of church and state meant that, absent funding from the state, a religious entrepreneur or snake oil salesman, well. had to hustle to pay the rent. 😀
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