439. THAT THE MALICE OF THOSE WHO ENTER THE OTHER LIFE AT THIS DAY IS INCREDIBLE. WHAT THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT [SIGNIFY] For many days it was permitted those who had died and entered the other life not many years ago, to exercise their deceits and machinations against those things which are true and good, by perverting them and by very many other machinations which I can never describe. They have subjects. They mutually instigate each other. They concentrate their malicious [arts] which are incredible; from which it can be sufficiently confirmed that faith at this day is vastated. 1748, Jan. 2.
[439a.] The whole lower sphere, or that of the spirits coming from the earth, is almost such that when a word is sent down from heaven, it is perverted, and what its quality is can scarcely be perceived. Those things lying inwardly concealed in man and increased by exercise, he brings forth in the entrance to the other life, when they are admitted among spirits, who were represented to me at the left side, in front towards the [left] half of the face. Those who were at the right are the upright. This should be observed, for all at the left, however many they may be, are perverted, and perverters in ways so direful that no man in the world can ever believe it. The things they actuate are only the roots of evil, of which there is an instinct; but in the case of those who seem to themselves to excel by any light of reason, it is more loathsome than the infernal crowd which is destitute of the lumen of nature.
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