There are some women who have risen from a sordid and lowly condition to become rich. Vain as a result, they have dedicated themselves to pleasure and to a lazy, pampered life, reclining like queens on cushions, sitting at table to feast, and caring for nothing. When they come together in the other life, they go at each other in a shocking fashion, punching, scratching, pulling each other’s hair, and turning into furies.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 944
There are some for whom sensory pleasure was their sole aim during bodily life. The only thing they loved was indulging in luxury and living on delicacies and rich food. They focused entirely on themselves and the material world, considered divine things worthless, and lacked faith and charity. After death they are at first brought into the same kind of life they had in the world. There is a place out in front, to the left, and down a little, which offers unending fun, games, dancing, feasting, and conversation. This is where they go, and while there they are completely unaware that they are not in the world.
But the scene changes. In a little while they descend into a hell below the buttocks, a hell of mere excrement. The kind of pleasure just described, which belongs strictly to the body, turns into excrement in the other life. I have seen people there carting dung and complaining bitterly.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 943
Not far from the foul Jerusalem is yet another city called Gehenna’s Judgment. This is the home of people who claim heaven for themselves on the strength of their own righteousness and who condemn others for not living out the same fantasies.
Between this city and Gehenna appears a kind of bridge, pretty enough, of a dingy, grayish color, where there is a dark-looking spirit they fear, who keeps them from crossing. On the other side of the bridge, you see, appears Gehenna.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 942
There is another city on the right of Gehenna too, or between Gehenna and the lake, where the better Jews seem to themselves to live. But the city changes for them as their fantasies change. At one point it turns into a collection of small towns, at another into a lake, and at another back into a city. The residents have a fear of robbers, but as long as they are in the city they are safe.
Between the two cities is a kind of triangular space dark with shadows. That is the home of the outlaws, who are Jews but of the worst kind. Anyone they come across they torture cruelly. The Jews are so terrified of these outlaws that they call them “Lord,” and they call the wilderness the outlaws live in “the [Holy] Land.”
To keep those who enter the city on the right-hand side safe from the bandits, a good spirit stands at one corner of the city limits and welcomes arrivals. When they reach the spirit, they bow down to the ground and enter at the spirit’s feet. That is the ritual they go through to get into the city.
One spirit came up to me quite suddenly. “Where did you come from?” I asked.
“I ran in terror from the thieves, because they kill people, and chop, roast, and boil them,” was the answer. “Where can I be safe?”
“What place, what land are you from?” I asked.
Out of fear, the spirit did not dare to answer more than, “The land is the Lord’s.” (As noted, they call the wilderness the [Holy] Land and the thieves Lord).
Then some of these outlaws came up, and they were very dark. They had deep voices, like giants’ voices, and wherever they make an appearance they inflict an amazingly palpable fear and horror. I asked who they were. They said they were looking for goods to loot. “Where do you expect to pile your loot?” I asked. “Don’t you know that you’re spirits and can’t make off with loot or pile it up? Such are the delusions of the evil!”
“We live in the wilderness, looking for plunder,” they answered, “and we torture the people we run into.” While they were with me they finally admitted that they were spirits, but they still could not be persuaded to believe they were not living in their bodies.
There are Jews who wander around in this way, making talk about indiscriminately murdering, chopping, roasting, and boiling others, even if the victims are Jews or friends of theirs. This has allowed others to recognize their character, despite the fact that they dare not divulge it in the world.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 941
This hell is where most of the Jews who had been appallingly greedy go. When they come near other spirits, the stench of rats announces their presence.
Speaking of Jews, let me tell how wretched their condition is after death—at least the condition of those who had been rapacious and despised others in comparison with themselves (from the inborn arrogance of their belief that they alone were the chosen people). Let me also say something about their cities and about some outlaws in the wilderness.
During bodily life they had dreamed up and proved to their own satisfaction the idea that they were destined to arrive in Jerusalem—in the Holy Land there—and possess it, unwilling to see that the New Jerusalem means the Lord’s kingdom in the heavens and on the earth. When they reach the next life, their delusion causes them to see a city that is to the left of Gehenna and a little out in front of it, which they enter in a mob. The city is full of putrid-smelling mud, though, and for this reason is called the foul Jerusalem. There they run around through the streets, ankle deep in muck and mud, complaining and howling.
(With their eyes they see cities, and streets too. Such things are represented to them as in clear daylight. I myself have seen cities several times.)
I observed one rather shadowy spirit coming from this foul Jerusalem. A kind of gate opened. There were some wandering stars around him, especially on his left. (Wandering stars around a spirit symbolize falsity in the world of spirits; the case is different with stars that do not wander.) He came up and attached himself from above to my left ear, which he seemed to touch with his mouth in order to speak with me. He did not talk in a clearly audible voice, as others do, but inwardly, to himself, though still in such a way that I could hear and understand it.
He said that he was a Jewish rabbi and that he had lived in that muddy city for a long time. “The streets you have to go on there,” he said, “are nothing but muck and mud. And there’s nothing to eat but mud.”
“Since you’re a spirit, why should you want to eat?” I asked.
“I do eat,” he said, “and when I want to eat, no one offers me anything but mud. So I complain bitterly.
“What’s to be done, then?” he went on to ask. “I can’t find Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob.”
I told him a few things about the patriarchs. “There’s no point in looking for them,” I added. “If you do find them, they won’t be able to help you at all.” And I said some other, rather hard-to-grasp things. “You should not be looking for anyone but the Lord alone,” I went on. “He’s the Messiah, whom the Jews despised during their lives. He rules the whole of heaven and all the earth without anyone else’s help.”
“Where is he?” the rabbi anxiously asked me several times.
“You find him everywhere,” I said, “and he hears and knows everyone.” But then some other Jewish spirits dragged him away.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 940
Evidence that the ideas composing the thoughts of sordid misers turn into sordid hallucinations can be seen in their hell, which is deep down under the feet. Out of it wafts a cloud of steam, like the steam from pigs being skinned in a trough. That is where misers’ houses are. The people who go there are dark-looking at first, but when they have their hair scraped off, as pigs do, they seem to themselves and to each other to grow lighter in color. But the process still leaves a mark indicating that this is their nature, no matter where they go.
A dark-looking spirit who had not yet been shunted into his own hell (because he was to stay longer in the world of spirits) was sent down to that locale. He was not very miserly, but even so, while he lived he had harbored a malicious envy of others’ wealth. When he arrived, the misers there ran away, saying that since he was dark, he was a robber and so would kill them. Misers flee such people in tremendous fear for their lives. Finally they discovered that he was not that lawless and told him that, if he wanted to turn lighter, all he had to do was to be stripped of his hair, as was happening to the pigs right there in plain view, and then his color would grow lighter. But he did not want this. He was taken up among the spirits.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 939
Of all people, misers are the vilest and think the least about life after death, the soul, and the inner being. They do not even know what heaven is. This is because of all people they do the least to elevate their thinking, which they completely saturate and drench with bodily and earthly preoccupations. The result is that when they enter the other world, for a long time they fail to realize that they are spirits, remaining firmly convinced instead that they are still in the body.
Their thoughts, dragged down to the bodily and earthly level by their greed, turn into dreadful hallucinations. Strange to say, but true, in the next life the grossly avaricious seem to themselves to live in cellars where their money is stored and where they are overrun with rats. Despite the rats, they do not leave until they grow unbearably tired of the situation, at which point they finally emerge from these tombs of theirs.
from Heaven and Hell, Section 938
There are women who lived a life of indulgence, focusing their energies on themselves and the world and centering their whole lives and all the pleasure of life on external decorum. As a result polite society valued them more than others. From practice and habit they learned to behave in socially acceptable ways in order to tap into others’ desires and sensual pleasures. This they did under a pretense of respectability but with the desire to control. Consequently their lives became a sham and a lie. They attended church just as others did, but for no reason except to appear honorable and devout. Furthermore, they lacked any conscience and were very much drawn to immoral and adulterous conduct, so far as it could be kept hidden.
Their thinking remains the same in the next life. What a conscience is they do not know, and they scoff at people who use the word. They get inside others’ feelings, whatever those may be, simulating honesty, piety, mercy, and innocence, and using these as covers for deception. Whenever outward restraints are removed from them, they plunge into the most criminal obscenities.
In the other life, these women become sorceresses or witches, some of whom are called sirens. There they eagerly take up arts unknown in the world. They are like sponges that soak up wicked and cunning methods, for which they have such a talent that they put them directly into practice. The stratagems unknown in this world that they learn there are these:
• They can throw their voices, so that it seems as though the sound were coming from good spirits somewhere else.
• They can seem to be with several people at once, convincing others that they are present almost everywhere.
• They can speak as though they were many people talking simultaneously and in many places at once.
• They can deflect what flows in from good spirits and even from angelic ones and immediately twist it to their own advantage in a variety of ways.
• They can impersonate another by seizing on the person’s patterns of thought and mimicking them.
• They can induce affection for themselves in anyone by worming their way into the actual emotions the person is feeling.
• They can suddenly drop out of sight and turn invisible.
• They can create the appearance of a dazzling white flame—the sign of an angel—around their head, and this in front of a large number of spirits.
• They have different ways of pretending innocence, even causing babies to appear and kissing them.
• And they inspire the people they hate to kill them (since they know they cannot die) and then publicly accuse them of being murderers.
In my case, using consummate skill they dredged up out of my memory everything bad that I had ever thought or done. While I was sleeping, they talked to others exactly as if I were speaking, managing to dupe those spirits; and what they said was false and lewd. They have many other devices as well.
Their nature is so persuasive that not a trace of hesitation can be detected in it. For this reason their ideas are not shared generally, as other spirits’ ideas are. Their eyes are like snakes’ eyes, as people say, turning their unflinching, conscious gaze in every direction.
These witches or sirens are punished severely, some in Gehenna, some surrounded by snakes in a kind of assembly hall. The punishment of some consists in being torn apart and buffeted in various ways, with the greatest pain and anguish. After a while they are ostracized and turn into seeming skeletons from head to toe.
More on this subject follows at the end of the chapter [Sections 938–946].
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 831
Some people fool others with great subtlety and craft, presenting a pleasant face and pleasant speech but inwardly concealing poisonous deceit. In this way they captivate others for the purpose of destroying them. Their hell is more forbidding than others’ hells, more forbidding even than the one murderers are in. They seem to themselves to live among snakes, and the more hurtful their plots had been, the more dreadful, poisonous, and numerous appear the snakes that surround and torture them. They have no idea that these are not snakes, the pain and torment they feel being the same. Few will believe this, perhaps, and yet it is true.
These are people who premeditate the frauds they practice, and find the highest pleasure of their life in them.
Dissemblers are chastised in several different ways, according to the nature of their deceit. In general, the communities banish such people rather than tolerate them. Whatever a spirit thinks, those nearby immediately know and perceive it, so they can tell if any duplicity is at work and what kind of duplicity it is. In consequence, after being driven away from society, they end up sitting alone. They then appear to have a broad face, equal in width to four or five others’ faces. They wear a wide, white straw hat and sit like images of death, racked with pain.
There are others who by nature are given to deception, so that they do not act from forethought or under cover of a false appearance. They are recognized instantly, and their thinking is perceived plainly. They even boast about their dishonesty, as if wanting to appear clever. These people do not have the same kind of hell. But more on charlatans later [Sections 947, 957–960, 1271, 6197], by the Lord’s divine mercy.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 830
Some during their bodily life think lewdly and turn whatever others say into something indecent, even if the subject is holy, and they continue to do so even into adulthood and old age, when nothing of earthly lust remains to goad them. Neither do they stop thinking and speaking this way in the other world. Since in that world their thoughts are shared generally, and sometimes present themselves in obscene form to the eyes of other spirits, they cause offense.
Their punishment consists in being laid out flat before the spirits they have hurt and spun quickly from left to right like a scroll. Then they are spun crosswise in another position, and then in yet another, stripped naked in the sight of all, or else half-naked (depending on the nature of their debauchery). All the while they suffer shame. Next they are twirled horizontally by their head and feet as if around an axis. Resistance is triggered in them, together with pain, since two forces are acting, one spinning one direction and the other pushing back. So the procedure tears them apart in an agonizing way.
At the end of all this, the individuals have a chance to remove themselves from the gaze of other spirits, and they are filled with shame. Still there are some spirits who test them to see whether they will persist in such behavior. But as long as they continue to feel humiliation and pain, they shy away from it. So they hide, despite the fact that others know just where they are.
This punishment appeared in front, some distance away.
There are also boys, adolescents, and young men who in their youthful folly and lust have taken it as a principle (a horrendous one) that a wife—especially one who is young and beautiful—should not belong to her husband but to themselves and others like them. The only role they leave to the husband is as head of household and educator of the children. In the other life they are distinguished by the childish sound of their voices. They are at the back and fairly high up.
The ones who have hardened themselves in these principles and in actually living their lives by them undergo wretched punishment in the other life. They suffer dislocation and rearticulation of their joints, or having their limbs wrenched in one direction and then the other. The spirits who administer the punishment know how to create the illusion of a body and along with it the physical sensation of pain. The back-and-forth motion and the resistance to it induced in them at the same time tear at them so violently that they seem to themselves to be ripped into minute shreds, with excruciating pain. The process repeats until, struck with horror for a life based on such principles, they abandon their former way of thinking.
from Secrets of Heaven, Section 829
Means "Happiness" in Greek
Following Jesus while Seeking Joy and Contentment in the Christian Life
Poetry, Psychology & Education
Chungsoo means Clean Water in Korean. This site brings Peace and Love.
Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg
Secrets of Heaven 