by Erik Sandstrom
About ten days ago I took the liberty to send to you extracts of three previous articles. That was because what I want to say today is on the same line of thought as in those presentations. Each time the central idea is the relationship of affection to knowledge and thought. This time, however, I want to focus attention on a special aspect of this relationship, namely, the place of the doctrine of faith in this context: to wit, that it is from not a rational but a celestial origin (AC 2496 et al). I would like to try to demon-strate that while knowledges of various kinds—scientifics, cogni-tions, and doctrinals—go to make up the structure of the mind, it is nevertheless not the reasoning faculty that orders these knowl-edges, but affections; and affections, springing from love, are the celestial element in the mind.
by Thomas W. Keiser
The purpose of this paper is to support the position that the later Neandertals constituted the degenerate stages of the Most Ancient men. In addition, I would like to suggest that “Noah” is not to be identified as Neandertal or Cro-Magnon but in the Proxi-mate Internal sense of the Word refers to a population of inter-mediate or transitional forms known as “Progressive Neandertal” in the anthropological literature. I will also attempt to clarify the term “Most Ancient.”
by Wilson Van Dusen
Swedenborg meditated, and the Writings speak strongly in favor of this practice which is almost universal among religions. Yet many followers of his Writings often know nothing of medita-tion, misunderstanding it, or even consider it dangerous. We would like to correct misunderstandings in this area, for meditation is one of the keys to regeneration.
by J. D. Odhner
The following article, based on a study of Indo-European word origins entitled “semophonics,” espouses a generally disputed premise that in the earliest language individual sounds were the minimal semological units: hence the term semophone, coined and defined by the writer as a sound-unit of the proto-language that constituted the least semantic component of a word.One justification for this premise is the observation that a com-parative grouping of many Proto-Indo-European (henceforth abbreviated to PIE) roots by their initial phonemes has borne out an astonishing relationship of each group with basic concepts arising from the physiological, mechanical and echoic suggestions in the articulation of the sounds concerned.
by Aubrey C. Odhner
New Church scholarship in the study of mythology has been largely a product of the Ninetheenth Century. The initial stimulus for that study was the light that the then newly revealed Science of Correspondences shed on our cherished Western heritage of myths and legends. The Writings themselves, in illustrating the use and existence of that science with the Ancients, alluded to countless Greek myths. The many references to the meaning of the Pegasus myth is one striking example of this.