The correspondence between natural and spiritual is, for Swedenborg, causal in both directions. Spiritual realities flow into natural ones and produce them; at the same time, natural things affect the spiritual world through a kind of resonance. Fire corresponds to love; light to wisdom; warmth to the affection of charity; cold to its absence. Sight corresponds to understanding; hearing to obedience; smell to perception. Each sense, each element, each creature has its spiritual counterpart, and knowing these correspondences unlocks the inner meaning of everything visible.
This principle is the hermeneutic key to Swedenborg's scriptural interpretation. In the Arcana Caelestia, he works through Genesis and Exodus word by word, identifying the spiritual sense of each term. Egypt corresponds to natural knowledge; Canaan to the heavenly state; the Israelites to those in whom the church is being formed; Pharaoh to the natural mind resisting spiritual influx. The stories are literally true but spiritually they are maps of interior transformation.
In heaven, Swedenborg reports, the landscape and environment correspond exactly to the inner state of the angels who inhabit them. The gardens, architecture, light, and clothing of a heavenly community are the outward expression of the community's collective loves and wisdom — they are, in a sense, those loves made visible. An angel who moves to a community that suits a different love will find the landscape changing around them accordingly. There is no gap between inner and outer in heaven; what you are is what you see.
The doctrine of correspondences is the interpretive backbone of the Arcana Caelestia and is described in Heaven and Hell in chapters specifically devoted to the subject. Swedenborg was familiar with earlier correspondence traditions (Neoplatonic, Paracelsian) but claimed his own version was received by direct angelic communication rather than derived from them.
