Free Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey

avoid discovery. After a heated discussion over dinner with friends one night, the American and his party resolved to settle the matter. Bribing the sexton, the American descended into the crypt with a small entourage, which included Gustav Broling and Robert Hindmarsh, who both later recounted the story. The coffin, it turned out, was airtight and had to be opened with the aid of a solderer called in to break the seal. Because no air or moisture had been able to aid in decomposition, Swedenborg’s body was almost perfectly preserved—and smelled. Broling recalled how, upon opening the coffin, “there issued forth effluvia in such abundance and of such a sort that the candles went out, and all the observers were obliged to rush head over heels out of the burial vault in order not to be smothered.” This was, finally, enough to satisfy the doubting American. 114
    Once the vault was cleared out, they returned to find Swedenborg’s body unchanged after eighteen years. “We all stood for a few minutes in silent astonishment,” Hindmarsh wrote, “to observe the physiognomy of that material frame now prostrate in the hands of death, which had once been the organ of so much intellect.” In awe, Hindmarsh placed his hand on the philosopher’s face, triggering the sudden decomposition that had been postponed for so long: “The whole frame was speedily reduced to ashes, leaving only the bones to testify to future inspectors of the coffin that a man had once lived and died.”
    The coffin was never resealed, so anyone who happened to be in the vault might easily have had access to Swedenborg’s remains. With phrenology spreading like wildfire through Great Britain, it was only a matter of time before curiosity got the better of someone.
    The skull was stolen in either 1816 or 1817—the circumstances surrounding the theft were never very clear—but not much was made of the theft until 1823, when the
Times
of London ran a short notice on the skull’s reunion with the rest of the philosopher’s bones. The ensuing confusion regarding the circumstances and motives of the theft speaks volumes of the changing attitudes toward the dead body during this time. The
Times
article, which appeared on March 31, 1823, offered a particularly colorful version of the events. The newspaper related how a Swedish disciple of Swedenborg, “whether prompted by supernatural inspiration or by his own blind superstition,” had in fact

    The skull of Emanuel Swedenborg.
    contrived, by means of bribing the sexton or gravedigger, to gain admittance to the cemetery where his body was deposited. Here, in the silent hour of midnight (having previously supplied himself with the necessary implements)he broke open the coffin, and severed the head from the trunk of the departed saint, with the former of which he safely decamped to his own country. This
relic
he preserved with the greatest care and veneration till the day of his death, when it was discovered by his surviving relatives.
    The writer went on to relate how the thief’s friends, “alarmed at the consequences that might follow such an unhallowed violation of the tomb, and being desirous of atoning in some measure for the sins of him who had been guilty of so great a crime, caused the head to be forthwith transmitted” back to London so that it could be reunited with Swedenborg’s body, “with due solemnity in the presence of the elders of the church.” 115
    Alas, the story was almost entirely an invention of the
Times
writer. Oddly, it bore a striking similarity to the saga of Haydn and Rosenbaum: a devoted disciple motivated by a misguided passion and devotion, a midnight theft to retrieve a prized relic. Odd because at that time the story was not known at all beyond those few involved, many of whom (including Nicholas II) did not know the whole story. It was almost as if Rosenbaum’s story had percolated into