The excellence of each person's life depends upon his conjugial love, for his life is linked with his wife's life and by being linked is raised to a higher level. But since in the case of these people there is not the slightest remnant of conjugial love, so that there is nothing either from the inmost level of life, their fate after death is pitiful. After spending a period in their outer levels, which allows them to talk rationally and act politely, they are brought into their inner levels, and at that time into the same kind of lust and the same degree of its pleasures that they experienced* in the world. In fact each person is after death brought into the same state of life as he had made his own, for the purpose of withdrawing him from it. No one can be withdrawn from his evil, unless he has first been brought into it. Otherwise the evil would bury itself and pollute the inner levels of the mind, and spread like a plague until it broke down the barriers and destroyed the outer or bodily levels. For this purpose the houses of ill fame on the edges of hell are opened for them; there they find whores with whom they are given the chance of indulging their varying lusts. But this permission is for one woman a day, and it is forbidden under threat of punishment to enjoy more than one on the same day.

[2] Afterwards, when they have been tested and their lust has been found to be so ingrained that they cannot be withdrawn from it, they are taken to a place directly above the hell assigned to them. There they seem to themselves to faint, but to others to fall flat on their backs; and in fact the ground opens up beneath their backs and they are swallowed up, slipping into a hell containing people like them. So they are gathered to their own.

I was allowed to see them there and also to talk with them. To themselves they look like human beings, a privilege allowed to prevent them terrifying their companions. But a little way off they look to have white faces, as if composed of nothing but skin. This is because they have no spiritual life in them, something everyone has in proportion to the marriage principle implanted in him.

[3] Their speech is dry, parched and depressing. When hungry they moan, and their moans make a peculiar humming noise. They are dressed in rags with breeches pulled up above the belly to around the chest, because they have no loins, but their ankles start from the lower part of their belly. This is because people's loins correspond to conjugial love, something they do not have. They said that as a result of impotence they loathe the other sex. But they can still reason among themselves on different subjects, as if they were rational; but being creatures of skin they reason from the fallacies of the senses. This hell is in the western quarter verging on the north. These spirits seen from a distance no longer look like men, nor like monsters, but like jellies. But it should be known that the ones who become like this are those who became so thoroughly immersed in that lust that they tore apart and annihilated the human principle of marriage in themselves. * Reading in quo fuerunt for in quo ejus fuerunt. The word ejus seems to have been repeated in error from the preceding clause.