By Brandon Anders

Key Terms:

Correspondences – Linguistic analogies that connect the spiritual world to our material universe.

Vastation – An unmasking by divinity that reveals the flaws within humanity.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a scientist, philosopher, and Christian mystic in Sweden. He got his start as in natural science. He ended up studying human anatomy and physiology (as well as other things). According to Britannica, his reason for studying anatomy was to find a physical location of the soul. “He believed the soul to be the inmost life of the blood and located in the brain, specifically in the cellular cortex.”^[1] Eventually he had a series of visions that are classified now as his religious crisis, which mostly involved “mystical experiences” that gave him a sense of spiritual unworthiness and the necessity to purify himself from sin.^[2] Because of these visions, he turned to theology and interpreting the Bible. He created a new line of “Swedenborgian thought” that influenced how many people saw the world, including August Strindberg.

            Strindberg fell in love with Swedenborg’s writings during his Inferno period, a time in his life where he was hospitalized for his mental well-being. It was these writings that helped him escape this internal hell. In his book The Cambridge Companion to August Strindberg Michael Robinson writes, “For both men [Swedenborg and Strindberg] the rigorous language of natural science failed to evoke the inner truth that was concealed beyond the visible forms of nature and they turned instead to the hermetic  and cabalist traditions.”^[3] Hermetic traditions are ancient occult practices that include participation in alchemy, astrology, and theosophy. Cabalism is the mystical thought of the Jewish Kabbalah, which focuses on understanding God and the universe. Swedenborg had a thought that Hell, or Inferno, is an internal, spiritual state that we might encounter during our lifetime, not a place in which we might eventually reside.^[4] This helped Strindberg understand that Hell is a reality that is on earth,^[5] a central theme in The Ghost Sonata. Swedenborg described a journey through this Hell that served as a path of salvation for Strindberg. 

            Strindberg used many of Swedenborg’s thoughts to help influence many of his plays, including The Ghost Sonata. Strindberg was especially fond of vastation, an important element of Swedenborgian thought. As Robinson puts it, vastation is a process in which, after death, “humans are transported to the spiritual world…”^[6] They walk around this spiritual world as ghosts, unaware that they have died. Eventually, they are unmasked and their true nature is revealed, after which they are sent to a society in either Heaven or Hell. Robinson writes that vastation is when “the world and humanity in all its aspects reflect spiritual realities, and its dramatic unmaskings, processions of shame and spectacular transformations provide Strindberg with both the themes and structure of his later dramatic art.”^[7] In Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman, author Arnold Weinstein describes vastation as, “an annihilation of all human and personal design under the onslaught of the divinity.”^[8] Strindberg saw vastation as a process of ‘spiritual purification’. In The Ghost Sonata, Strindberg shows vastation as this brutal unmasking that allows the unmasked to be fit for death. 

            Correspondences are another important work of Swedenborg, one that Strindberg used much of in The Ghost Sonata. According to Inge Jonsson in his journal “Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)”, correspondences are “linguistic terms [that] may be used with three different meanings – the natural, the spiritual, and the divine… [They] describe and explain the relations between the spiritual world and our material universe by means of linguistic analogies.”^[9] There are several biblical references in The Ghost Sonata that serve as connections between the spiritual world and the liminal space in which the play takes place. Strindberg indeed uses correspondences as comparisons between the spiritual world and our material universe, but he also uses them as metaphors to interconnect the relationships between characters, states of being, sounds, and symbols within this play.

            There are many more Swedenborgian thoughts that have impacted Strindberg’s life, but vastation, correspondences, and theological visions of Hell on Earth are perhaps some of the strongest Swedenborgian themes in The Ghost Sonata. Egil Törnqvist, in his book Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, notes that Swedenborg had an idea, “that a sense of light arises when a film is removed from the eyes of the dying person.”^[10] Strindberg removed the film from the eyes of the characters in this play, allowing them to see the light before they arrive at their destination, the Isle of the Dead.
 

Bibliography

Britannica Editors. “Emanuel Swedenborg.” Encyclopedia Britannica, January 25, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emanuel-Swedenborg.

Jonsson, Inge. “Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772).” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd ed., edited by Donald M. Borchert, 336-339. Vol. 9. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. Gale eBooks (accessed February 17, 2026). https://link-gale-com.uccs.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CX3446801978/GVRL?u=colosprings&sid=summon&xid=60a3e4fd. 

Prideaux, Sue. Strindberg: A Life. 2013.

Sgarbi, Federica. "D.T. Suzuki on Swedenborg. An Introduction." GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON JAPAN, no. 5 (2022). https://forumtauripress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/03-Global-Perspectives-on-Japan-No5-2022-Federica-Sgarpi-pp64-82.pdf.

Stockenström, Göran. “Crisis and Change: Strindberg the Unconscious Modernist.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to August Strindberg, edited by Michael Robinson, 79–92. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Törnqvist, Egil. Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata: From Text to Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.

Weinstein, Arnold. Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.