hing apparatus, and presumably most powerful voices,
imagination presented them to him accordingly. 'Some spirits appeared
overhead,' he says, 'and thence were heard voices like thunder; for
their voices sounded precisely like thunder from the clouds after
lightning. I supposed it was a great multitude of spirits who had the
art of giving voices with such a sound. The more simple spirits who were
with me derided them, which greatly surprised me. But the cause of their
derision was soon discovered, which was, that the spirits who thundered
were not many, but few, and were as little as children, and that on
former occasions they (the thunderers) had terrified them by such
sounds, and yet were unable to do them the least harm. That I might know
their character, some of them descended from on high, where they
thundered; and, what surprised me, one carried another on his back, and
the two thus approached me. Their faces appeared not unhandsome, but
longer than those of other spirits. In stature they were like children
of seven years old, but the frame was more robust, so that they were
like men. It was told me by the angels that they were from the moon. He
who was carried by the other came to me, applying himself to my left
side under the elbow, and thence spoke. He said, that when they utter
their voices they thunder in this way,'--and it seems likely enough that
if there are any living speaking beings in the moon, their voice, could
they visit the earth, would be found to differ very markedly from the
ordinary human voice. 'In the spiritual world their thunderous voices
have their use. For by their thundering the spirits from the moon
terrify spirits who are inclined to injure them, so that the lunar
spirits go in safety where they will. To convince me the sound they make
was of this kind, he (the spirit who was carried by the other) retired,
but not out of sight, and thundered in like manner. They showed,
moreover, that the voice was thundered by being uttered from the abdomen
like an eructation. It was perceived that this arose from the
circumstance that the inhabitants of the moon do not, like the
inhabitants of other earths, speak from the lungs, but from the abdomen,
and thus from air collected there, the reason of which is that the
atmosphere with which the moon is surrounded is not like that of other
earths.'

In his intercourse with spirits from Jupiter, Swedenborg heard of
animals larger than those that live on th