510. (4) The lot of these people after death is a miserable one, since the inmost element of life is missing in them. The excellence of a person's life depends on his conjugial love, for his life then unites itself with the life of his wife and by that union is ennobled. But because not a particle of conjugial love remains in people of the character described here, and so nothing of the inmost element of life, therefore their lot after death is a miserable one. After they have spent a period of time in the outward appearances of their lives, in which they speak rationally and behave civilly, they are propelled into their inner qualities, and so into the same lust and its delights, and into the same degree of it, in which they had been in the world. For everyone is introduced after death into the same state of life that he had adopted for himself, in order that he may be withdrawn from it, since no one can be withdrawn from his evil unless he has first been brought into it. Otherwise the evil would conceal itself and pollute the interior elements of the mind, and like a pestilence spread, and eventually break through its restraints and destroy the outward elements which are those of the body. To accomplish this purpose, brothels are opened to them, which are on the periphery of hell, where they find harlots with whom they are given an opportunity to exercise their lusts with variety. But they are permitted to do this with only one a day, and are forbidden under threat of penalty from being with more than one on the same day. [2] After that, when they have been examined and found to have that lust so ingrained in them that they cannot be withdrawn from it, they are conveyed to a particular place which is just above the hell reserved for them. They then appear to themselves as though to fall into a state of unconsciousness, and to others as though to sink down backwards with upturned face; and the ground actually opens under their backs and swallows them, and they sink down to their like. Thus they are gathered to their own. It has been granted me to see them there and also to speak with them. To each other they appear as human, an appearance accorded them to keep them from terrifying their companions. However, at some distance they appear to have a white face, consisting, seemingly, only of skin, and this because they have no spiritual life in them, which in everyone depends on the conjugial inclination implanted in him. [3] Their speech is dry, arid, and melancholy. When they are hungry, they lament, and their laments have a peculiar moaning sound. Their garments are tattered, and they wear their breeches drawn up over the belly around the chest because they do not have any loins. The ankles of their feet commence instead from the area just below the belly. The reason is that the loins in human beings correspond to conjugial love, and this is missing in them. They told me that they loathe the opposite sex in consequence of their having become impotent. Nevertheless, they can still reason with each other in regard to various matters, as though from rationality; but because they are only skin-deep in their thinking, they reason from misconceptions of the senses. That hell is in the western zone towards the north. These same people, however, from afar do not appear as human, nor as monsters, but as bits of frozen gelatin. Still, it should be known that this is what becomes of those who have imbibed that lust to the degree that they have destroyed the human, conjugial inclination in them and annihilated it.