In Swedenborg's account, the entire heavenly realm is organised into a single human shape — not metaphorically but structurally. Angels closest to the divine correspond to the head and heart; those in outer heavens to the limbs and extremities. Each community of angels performs a function in the whole that mirrors the function of the bodily part it corresponds to. The community that corresponds to the lungs, for instance, is engaged in the kind of spiritual activity that corresponds to breathing — the reception and distribution of truth.
This is not decoration but ontology. Swedenborg holds that the human form is the form of God himself — that God is the Divine Human, and that creation at every level is the progressive embodiment of that form. Heaven is human-shaped because God is human-shaped because the human form is the form of love and wisdom themselves. The consequence for Swedenborg's account of death and the afterlife is striking. Angels are not a different order of being from humans but humans who have completed the process of spiritual formation. After death, the spirit sheds the material body but retains everything inward — memory, personality, characteristic loves, habitual thoughts.
The spiritual body that remains after death is more fully human than the natural one, not less: more vivid in sensation, more coherent in identity, more completely what the person always most deeply was. The Grand Man is therefore not a poetic metaphor but the literal destination of human development — the community of all who have become fully themselves through love.
The doctrine of heaven as the Grand Man runs throughout Heaven and Hell and is elaborated systematically in Divine Love and Wisdom. Swedenborg claims this was communicated to him directly by angels during his spiritual experiences rather than deduced philosophically.