Gehenna appears to those who put in there as fire, and that it is indeed like a fire, I was made to realize from the heat that poured out thence into my face. Spirits were saying mournfully that such a stink wells out from there as if from burnt bones and hairs that they could not bear it. In fact, it also drifted toward me, but I smelled little of it. The most deceitful are there, especially sirens, who, by a pretense of piety enter into the minds of others and most cleverly delude and lead them astray, so that one can in no way resist them except with the Lord's protection. Phalanges of sirens flew out thence, and I felt them in my hair and scalp, which they set aquiver. They are the kind also that place no value in the principle of marriage, having the deepest conviction that it is of no account, and considering adulteries as respectable. Again there blew out from there to my nostrils a stench as of bones and hair, together with heat. Such spirits greatly persecute the innocent, enticing them to lust, whoredom, and then adulteries, under a guise of respectability. There also are the kind [of women], especially, who had been esteemed in the world as having lived a proper life-few from the lower classes. There they feel a pleasantness, as if in their own proper atmosphere, which is such, [however,] that it changes into dreadful snakes that bite and eat up their breasts and genital members, as they report to me. I have heard them, when only a few snakes were beginning to touch them there, [saying] that they do not care, because they would rather encounter death than lose the pleasantness of that atmosphere-with such a most disgraceful erotic frenzy are they smitten! 1748, 19 Sept.