2656. CONCERNING SATAN There are those who not only practice cruelty, whereof [I have treated] previously, but also, as was said, delight in adulteries, so that nothing is more pleasant to them. Such a one has appeared to me whose upper lip only was displayed to my sight: it was big, unsightly and scaly; of what sort was the rest of their body was not displayed to my sight; it was represented to me that their leader is David, and is such a person. Such wish to possess men, yea, their bodies, and so inhabit them were it permitted: and they employ various artifices to possess [men's bodies], for they desire to return into the world. They are wholly contrary to conjugial love, for they delight in adulteries, and hence are contrary to love of the neighbor, for one follows from the other: wherefore they are cruel - he who was displayed to me acted in a subtle manner, so that he could pervert the most righteous if possible, for he inserts [ingerit] his venom into the marrows, as they say, that is, into the interiors of ideas, and bends good affections into evil with interior deceit. - 1748, July 20.