Swedenborg, Emanuel

Emanuel Swedenborg
natal chart (Placidus)
natal chart English style (Equal houses)
natal chart with Whole Sign houses

Name	Swedenborg, Emanuel Gender: M
born on	29 January 1688 Jul.Cal. (8 Feb 1688 greg.) at 05:45 (= 05:45 AM )
Place	Stockholm, Sweden, 59n20, 18e03
Timezone	LMT m18e03 (is local mean time)
Data source	Bio/autobiography Rodden Rating B Collector: Rodden
Astrology data	19°27' 14°42 Asc. 27°35'

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Emanuel Swedenborg

Biography

Swedish writer and educator, brilliant and eclectic student of fields that ranged from physics and astronomy to the Bible, seeking to find a Key to Everything.

The son of a Swedish royal chaplain, Swedenborg spent 30 years working on the Board of Mines, from 1716. With his scholarly private interests, he established Sweden's first scientific journal and anticipated a number of modern inventions, including prototype submarines and aeroplanes. He also published treatises on cosmology, lunar measurements, chemistry, physics, the circulations of the blood and sensory perception, and developed a theory of atomic structure with anticipates our own by describing matter as a system of indefinitely divisible particles grouped in swirling vortices.

In his search to locate the human soul and prove its immortality, Swedenborg was granted transcendent religious experiences which began in 1743. The following year Jesus appeared to him again with a commission to present a new revelation based on the premise that Heaven and Hell are not places, but states of being. He wrote a series of 30 volumes describing Heaven and Hell and the New Jerusalem. His visions were frequent and he himself visited heaven and hell, conversing with angels and spirits, and even with God Himself. His basic conclusion was that the universe is a harmonious whole temporarily disturbed by sin, (equated with error.)

Swedenborg died 3/29/1772, London, England.

Link to Wikipedia biography

Events

• Work : New Career 1716 (Board of Mines)

• Misc. : Mystical Experience 1745 (Transcendent religious experience)

• Mundane : Fire, major 1 September 1759 at 6:00 PM in Göteborg (Vision of Stockholm burning;all details were confirmed exactly)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

• Death, Cause unspecified 29 March 1772 at 5:10 PM in London (Age 84)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

Source Notes

Maggie Meister sends a copy of his own letter, taken from his Preface to the "World of Spirits," giving the data, "I was born at Stockholm, in the year of our Lord 1689, January 29, the son of Jesper Swedberg." However, on p.825 of the article, his horoscope is described, "Upon the ascendant we find fifteen degrees of the tropical sign Capricorn. Four planets are dignified, Saturn, Moon, Mercury and Mars, with Jupiter on the Ascendant." This is a description of a chart for February 8, 1688 NS, 6:39 AM MET, not the 1689 chart as given by Swedenborg himself. One testimony or the other is in error.

(Leo in MA 4/1892 gives February 8, 1688, 5:30 AM, Stockholm. Penfield Collection quotes Notable Nativities No.023 for 6:00 AM LMT. 1/29/1688 OS, same date in Britannica.)

LMR notes that Sweden began the Gregorian calendar in 1753, so it was definitely Julian when Swedenborg was born. What is not known is whether Sweden was on the Annunciation calendar with the year beginning on March 25th. If so, the year would be notated as 1688/89 and by modern calculations, 1689. The date conversion for Julian to Gregorian is plus 10 days: ergo, January 29, 1688/89 may be converted to February 8, 1689 NS. A time of 6:48 AM LMT gives us 15 Capricorn rising.

Agneta Borstein writes, 4/2002, "My sister’s boyfriend is a distant relative to Swedenborg and he informed us that he has a book in his library that records Swedenborg’s birth as January 29, 1688. Swedenborg was the son of a priest and the Church kept all records carefully."

Larry Ely writes in an email on 6 Dec 2012: --- begin quote --- The following information is from the online ECCO version of Ebenezer Sibly's book "A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology: Or, the Art of Foretelling Future Events and Contingencies, by the Aspects, Positions, and Influences of the Heavenly Bodies", London, 1784. This book was the actual source of the Maggie Meister statement (www.astrodatabank.com, entry for Swedenborg), where she cited "p. 825 of the article." It was p. 825 of this book where Sibly, not Swedenborg, says that Swedenborg was born with 16 degrees of Capricorn rising (as the Ascending degree, the Ascendant). It was sixteen degrees Capricorn, not the fifteen degrees of Capricorn that Meister misread from the old fashioned letter formation for letter "s."

On page 821 Sibly gave the birth chart, and the rest of the pages up to p. 828 are mostly an interpretation of the meaning of this chart. For some reason, on an intermediate page Sibly reproduced Swedenborg's letter from London of 1769, in which he gave his birth as January 29, 1689, the year one year greater than his actual year, as we know from subsequent information via Swedenborg himself in a clarifying letter towards the end of his life.

But the chart given by Sibly on p. 821 is very odd and is inexplicably full of inconsistencies for an otherwise careful writer, technical astrologer, and medical doctor. To begin with, he gives Swedenborg's birthtime as 5:30 a.m. in the center of the chart wheel, a conventional way of presenting the data. (He does not describe this 5:30 a.m. time as being Apparent Time, yet that was the time that was kept until nearing 1800 when accurate clocks became commonplace in cities.) This needs to be stated, because a time that is rather close, but sufficiently different to warrant care, is Local Mean Time. Local Mean Time began to be used near 1800 when clocks became more accurate. The Local Mean Time corresponding to 5:30 a.m. Apparent Time is 5:44:48 a.m. The corresponding zone time, had that been in use back then, was 5:30:48 a.m., which is equal to 4:30:48 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

I came to understand from reading a section of this book (p. 390) that Sibly was an advanced and rigorous astrologer, who would rectify (ascertain) a birth time when one was not provided, before reading a chart. Just by way of context vis a vis other astrological practice when there is no provided birth time, a sloppy practice has arisen since his time. It consists in substituting for the actual birth chart, a simplified chart having the Sun on the Ascendant. A more rational practice is to compute a noon chart, since that presents a closer estimate of the actual positions of the planets compared with when one biases the birth time by taking a time only a quarter of the way from the time when the birth date began (at midnight).

A person like Sibly would typically have no recourse to rectify a chart when the birth time was provided, since this would be mostly make work, given the laboriousness of hand computing planetary positions out of tables at that time, and also given the lack of refinement of positional theories used at this time for finding the extent of the motions of the various planets corresponding to a given event used to check on the accuracy of the birth time (the accuracy of the birth-time-computed Ascendant).

Sibly does not mention rectifying this chart, which he would have done had he changed the Ascendant from that computed by the provided birth time. And oddly, he does not say where, from whom, and when he got this 5:30 a.m. birth time. Yet if he had rectified the chart starting only with the birth date to get a chart of 16 Capricorn rising, he would then have to have computed a corresponding birth time for this 16 Capricorn rising chart. That corresponding birth time would have been 6:39:16 a.m. Apparent Time, not 5:30 a.m. Apparent Time. The chance of making such a huge mistake in computing the birth time is remote. Also, when one asks someone for a birth time, the provided birth time is almost invariably a rounded off or approximate time, such as this 5:30 a.m. Sweden, even in the 20th century, did not record birth times to the nearest minute like in the US or to the nearest 15 minutes like in European continental countries like France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Italy. Sweden did not record birth times of any accuracy at all in the 20th century, I know from speaking to a Swedish friend and contemporary. If Sweden did not record birth times in the 20th century, it is hard to imagine that it would have done so in the 17th century and then disbanded doing so in subsequent, more scientific and bureaucratic centuries. Yet parents often have fairly good memories of the approximate time of birth, and in this case, this 5:30 a.m. time could very well have been the birth time that Swedenborg's parents reported to him at some point in his life, and hence the birth time that he would have told Sibly, had Sibly communicated with him at some point. It seems likely that Sibly would have taken notice of Swedenborg, for they both lived and worked in London for many overlapping years, and they were both in similar fields, Sibly in medicine and Swedenborg in science, and their fields of astrology and clairvoyance were quite similar.

The proof of the pudding for Swedenborg's chart (and revealed birth time) is rigorous rectification via events, and that is how we can settle this puzzle. To to this will require an accurate chronological list of the important events and insights of Swedenborg's life. Sibly himself said the most reliable method for ascertaining a birth time was via this very method, not the Tuitine of Hermes or the Animodar of Ptolemy (Sibly, op. cit., p. 390).

Alan Leo, in material you quoted, gave 5:30 a.m. since he got this from Sibley, op. cit. Penfield cites Alan Leo, but Penfield's time of 6:00 AM LMT only adds confusion; 5:30 a.m. is Apparent Time, as I have shown in my development above. The corresponding LMT is 5:44:48 a.m.

Lois Rodden was wise to be cautious to ask if the year was reported in the January 1 Style or the Annunciation Style beginning March 25. There is no indication that Sweden used the outdated March 25 Style; only England and her American colonies used that until 1752. Swedenborg does say he was born on a Sunday, and this also settles the ambiguity over calendar style. --- end quote Larry Ely ---

Categories

• Traits : Mind : Exceptional mind

• Personal : Religion/Spirituality : Mystical experience

• Vocation : Occult Fields : Divination/ Prophecy (Remarkable visionary)

• Vocation : Writers : Metaphysics/ Parapsychology (A new revelation)

• Notable : Book Collection : American Book