De Conjugio (Whitehead) n. 125

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125. There are those who have the cupidity of deflowering young virgins, or to whom virginities and thefts of virginities are the greatest pleasures, without the end of marriage, and when they have stolen the flower of virginity, they afterwards desert them. Those who have led such a life, because it is contrary to their spiritual and celestial nature, and because they destroy the conjugial, are interior murderers, who undergo the most grievous punishment in the other life, for they regard this only from the flower of virginity, which being bereft, they love them no longer, and because it is contrary to innocence, which they wound and kill by leading into a life of harlotry innocent women who otherwise would be chaste, who might be imbued with conjugial love, and thus are destroyers of marriages. It is known that it is the first flower of love which initiates virgins into chaste conjugial love and conjoins the souls of consorts, and because the sanctity of heaven is founded upon conjugial love, thus upon innocence. They are led into phantasies, the actions in which appear as it were real and sensible, and they seem to themselves to sit upon a furious horse which throws them upwards, so that they are thrown down from the horse as if with risk of life, such a terror is struck into them; afterwards they appear to themselves to be under the belly of a furious horse, and shortly it seems to them as if they went through the posteriors of a horse into his belly, and then it appears to them as if they were in the belly of a filthy harlot, which harlot is changed into a great dragon, and there they remain wrapped up in torments; this punishment returns as often as they are in that cupidity, and approach young virgins with their craft. Others are punished by disjointings and unjointings, or by contortions and retortions, from which punishments they are so torn to pieces that they seem to themselves as if cut into bits or fragments with cruel pain, and if then they do not desist, they are cast into a hell of foul-smelling odor.


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