Free Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Page A

the collective unconscious of the age, as if from some common Romantic wellspring.
    A series of letters quickly reached the
Times
to correct the erroneous account. The first of these, by one Reverend SamuelNoble, was by far the most indignant. Noble was not only a minister in the New Church but was also the founder of the Society for Printing and Publishing the Writings of Swedenborg (now the Swedenborg Society) and editor of the leading Swedenborgian journal in Britain, the
Intellectual Repository.
To Noble, the
Times’s
account was “certainly sufficiently ridiculous, and calculated, with all who might believe it, to throw unmerited obloquy on the whole body of the admirers of [Swedenborg’s] writings,” and he had written to correct this miscarriage of justice. Yes, Noble confirmed, Swedenborg’s head had been stolen, “but
it is not true
that the person who executed this singular robbery was
one of his disciples
.” Rather than anyone connected with Swedenborgianism or the New Church, the thief was, Noble claimed, someone affiliated with phrenology, the New Science: “I understand that the motive which led him to obtain possession of this ‘relic,’ was the same as led Drs. Gall and Spurzheim to posses themselves of similar relics of other eminent men.” The phrenologist, Noble explained, had been at the Swedish Church for the burial of Baroness von Nolcken, who had died in 1816, and after the funeral had been wandering in the tomb when he had noticed the opened coffin.
    The reinterment, Noble went on, was carried out not by friends of this thief but by the Swedish Countess von Schwerin, who had heard of the situation and “requested an English gentleman of rank to wait upon the possessor, and request that he would allow the skull to be restored to its former situation.” Most importantfor Noble were the motives for this reinterment: “
It is true
, then, that its re-interment took place; but
it is not true
that this was attended with any solemnity, or ‘excited unbounded (or any) interest among his numerous followers.’” 116
    The erroneous claim that a Swedenborgian had done this was bad enough for Noble. But what was doubly insulting was any suggestion that the Swedenborgian community cared one way or another about the body: “Some of them knew that the skull had been taken away: but I believe that none of them (or not more than one) knew when it was restored; and I am sure that none of them cared anything about the matter.”
    Swedenborg in life had been a mystic, and those who valued his teachings above all valorized the spirit over the body. As David George Goyder, a phrenologist, Swedenborgian, and contemporary of Noble, wrote, “Of all the different classes of Christians, the Swedenborgians are the least accessible to relics of any kind, but more especially relics of the dead.” As a temporary vessel, once the body has “fulfilled its use in this world, which use is principally to prepare the soul for heaven, it will be consigned ‘to the earth as it was, while the spirit will return to God who gave it.’” 117 No matter who had taken the skull, he couldn’t have been involved with Swedenborgianism.
    In fact, Noble concluded, the sole motive of Countess von Schwerin was that
    the admirers of the writings of Swedenborg might not be charged with such stupidity as that of venerating the mortal remains of any man, which, Swedenborg maintains, are entirely unnecessary to the future existence of the soul, and will never be resumed; for she was aware, that if at any future period it should be discovered that the skull was gone, the robbery would be imputed to the admirers of his doctrines, and that misrepresentations of their sentiments, such as your anecdote contains, would be the result. Nothing, I assure you, can be more abhorrent to their principles, or to the doctrines of the New Jerusalem church, than any thing