Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 505

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505. (4) Those who persuade themselves that the lust to deflower is not a sinful evil, after death suffer a grievous fate. Their fate is as follows. After they have passed through the first period of time in the world of spirits - which is one of modesty and morality because it is spent in the company of angelic spirits - they are then propelled from their outward qualities into their inward ones, and so into the lusts which had consumed them in the world. They are thus propelled into their lusts in order that it may be seen to what degree they had been caught up in them; and this to the end that, if it was to a minor degree, after having been propelled into them they may be delivered from them and filled with shame. [2] However, those who had been caught up in this malevolent lust to the point that they felt its delight as exquisite, and who boasted about their thefts as over rich spoils, do not allow themselves to be withdrawn from them. Therefore they are let go to do as they please, and they immediately wander about then, looking for brothels, which they also enter when these are pointed out to them (the brothels being situated on the peripheries of hell). But when they encounter only prostitutes there, they leave and ask where they may find virgins. At that point they are then taken to harlots who are able by mirage to assume exceptional beauty and a rosy girlish charm and to pass themselves off as virgins, for whom they conceive a passionate ardor like that which they had felt in the world. They come to an arrangement with these women, therefore; but when they are about to consummate the arrangement, the mirage assumed from heaven is removed and the alleged virgins are seen in their ugliness, monstrous and dark. Yet they are compelled to remain with them for a while. Harlots of this sort are called sirens. [3] After that, if these men do not allow themselves to be withdrawn from that insane lust of theirs by such beguilements, they are cast down into a hell which is located on the border between the south and west beneath the hell of harlots more cunning still, and there they are associated with their like. I have also been granted to see them in that hell, and I was told that many of them there come from noble stock and the wealthier classes. Yet because they had been of the character they were in the world, all memory of their lineage and the standing they had because of their wealth is taken away, and they have instilled in them the persuasion that they were lowly bond servants and so unworthy of any respect. [4] To each other, indeed, they appear as human, but to others who are permitted to look into that hell they appear as apes, having a cruel face instead of a gentle one, and a menacing expression instead of a good-humored one. They go about bowed at the waist and thus bent over, with the upper part of their body hanging forward as though they are about to fall. And they smell. They loathe the opposite sex, and turn away from any they see, for they have no desire. That is how they appear at close range, but at a distance they look like pet dogs or little dogs kept for amusement, and something like the sound of barking is also heard in the intonations of their speech.


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