4019. CONCERNING THE SIRENS. It was shown how the sirens hold those bound whom they endeavor to obsess, viz. that [they pervert] all the influx from the angels, which is continual whenever evil spirits induce evil; the angels then avert it, and react against it. But whenever permission is granted to sirens, they would enter into the interior of thoughts, and by perverting turn away everything which flowed from heaven. Thus whithersoever my own thought was directed, still it was turned to evil, and that to such a degree that I was at length so wearied by it as to be induced to desist from writing, for it was then especially that they flowed in, and as, was also perceived, into interior things with which it had not then been given me to become so well acquainted. They have the eyes, as it were, of serpents, which seem to possess sight or ideas on every side, giving them a kind of ubiquity of presence.