The Worship and Love of God: A Study in Theatrical Form (Part 2)
I have referred in the previous article to the fact that the cosmology in The Worship and Love of God (and that of the Principia from which it is derived) seems to belong on a “line” of cosmologies running through Greek and Roman literature to a very early source. The image of the vortical movement of creation occurs all over the world: in megalithic design, in the Hindu myth of the “churning of the ocean” and in similar myths among the Pueblo peoples of the southwestern United States, and on the north-west coast of America, where it is usually symbolised as a whirl-pool.1 Our current knowledge of the pre-Greek literatures of the Middle East and the material collected by ethnographers enables us to trace this line with fair assurance; but this material was not available to Swedenborg. It is astonishing that he should have succeeded in finding this central line on the basis of a knowledge only of Scripture and of Greek and Latin literature.
