Swedenborg and the New Church
- Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), scientist-turned-seer, traveled the astral realms and described the spiritual anatomy of the universe in works like Heaven and Hell and Arcana Coelestia.
- He taught that correspondences link the material and spiritual, that Christ is the Divine Human, and that the Second Coming is an inner awakening, not an outer event.
William Blake and the Prophetic Imagination
- William Blake (1757–1827) saw himself as a prophet of the Everlasting Gospel, calling for the overthrow of "Urizen" (the Demiurge) and the restoration of "Albion" (the Divine Human).
- His illuminated books—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem—are Gnostic, alchemical, and apocalyptic, a mythopoetic resistance to Newtonian materialism and Anglican rigidity.
- He embodies the Bardic Mystery Tradition—where art, vision, and prophecy are one.
Blake is the esoteric poet-prophet par excellence, the Western answer to Rumi or Kabir. H