Free Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Page B

that can tend to the revival of
saint-craft
. 118
    And so, Noble believed, the skull had been stolen for phrenological purposes, not out of veneration for the dead. But another letter quickly arrived at the
Times
to clarify the matter further, and this writer, John Isaac Hawkins, not only knew more of the story but also identified the thief.
    â€œCaptain Ludvig Granholm of the Royal Navy of Sweden,” he wrote, “called on me, near the end of the year 1817, invited me to his lodgings and showed me a skull, which he said was the skull of Swedenborg.” Granholm had been in the chapel, not for von Nolcken’s funeral but for the funeral of a fellow naval officer, when he noticed Swedenborg’s coffin. Hawkins described how, “on observing that the coffin was loose, he was seized with theidea of making a large sum of money, by taking the skull, and selling it to one of Swedenborg’s followers, who, he had heard, amounted to many thousands in this country, and amongst whom, he imagined, there would be much competition for the possession of so valuable a relic. He watched his opportunity, lifted the lid of the coffin, took out the skull, wrapped it in his pocket handkerchief, and carried it out of the chapel unnoticed.”
    Hawkins himself had tried to set the captain straight: “I informed Captain Granholm, to his great disappointment, that the members of the New Jerusalem Church reprobated the possession of any religious relic, and more particularly a part of a dead body, which, they believe, will never more come into use, the soul remaining, after death, a complete and active man in a spiritual body, not to be again fettered with material flesh, blood, and bones.” 119
    But did Hawkins have all his facts straight? A third writer, who signed himself “Tertius Interveniens” (a legal term for one who argues on another’s behalf), wrote to clarify. This was Johan Peter WÃ¥hlin, who was pastor of the Swedish Church during this time. Like Hawkins, he was intimately involved with the events surrounding the theft. On his deathbed Granholm had summoned WÃ¥hlin and confessed to taking the skull, which WÃ¥hlin took away with him. Granholm may have not lived long enough to find a buyer for the head, but after word got out that WÃ¥hlin now had the skull, someone offered him 500 pounds for it, which he claimed to have declined somewhat indignantly.
    The Swedish Church council asked WÃ¥hlin to keep the skull until the vault was opened again, “in order that it might not again come into unauthorized hands,” but WÃ¥hlin instead loaned it to Charles Tulk. Tulk was a member of Parliament and had helped Noble found the Swedenborg Society; he also was an avid believer in phrenology and had amassed a large private collection. Tulk displayed the skull in his museum until 1823, when Countess von Schwerin pushed for its reinterment; both Tulk and WÃ¥hlin were on hand when the skull was finally reunited with the rest of the remains in the Swedish Church’s vault.
    WÃ¥hlin’s letter to the
Times
primarily concerned how the vault had been opened in the first place. Like Broling and Hindmarsh, he confirmed that a doubting Thomas from America had bribed the sexton to open the coffin, and that only when the lid was finally opened did “the mephitic vapours did at the same time expel the septic and his doubts upon the subject.” These bizarre events in 1790, Wåhlin explained, had left the coffin unsealed and vulnerable to anyone who happened to wander into the crypt. Disagreeing with Hawkins’s account, Wåhlin claimed that the theft had happened in 1816, not 1817; in addition, like Noble, Wåhlin claimed that it had been done not by a follower of Swedenborg or for profit but by a phrenologist “who expected to fix the
organ of imagination
beyond any doubt.” 120
    The confusion that thus played out over a week in the
Times
was the question of what place