Article: The misty realms of the German psyche; Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany, 1870-1920. Edited by Ingrid Ehrhardt and Simon Reynolds (Prestel pounds 45). Reviewed by Richard Edmonds.

Who reads Swedenborg today? Scarcely anyone I imagine, except students and those engaged upon research projects. But once upon a time it was the French novelist Balzac who expounded his theories in the novel Seraphita thus turning Swedenborg into a Symbolist hero, sage, spiritualist and dandy.

Charles Baudelaire had already discovered Swedenborg's theories some years earlier, and wrote: 'Natural things exist only to a limited degree - reality lies only in dreams.' Baudelaire went on to describe a hunger for the after-life, whose earthly revelations implied an ...

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