(plates 17-20)
An angel came to me and said: 'O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! Odreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing forthyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career. 'I said:'
Perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we willcontemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is mostdesirable. ' So he took me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into thechurch vault. At the end of which was a mill: thro' the mill we went, andcame to a cave: down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till avoid boundless as a nether sky appear'd beneath us.
& we held by the rootsof trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: '
If you please we willcommit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also: ifyou will not, I will? ' But he answered: '
Do not presume, o young-man, butas we here remain, behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darknesspasses away. ' So I remain'd with him, sitting in a twisted root of anoak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward intothe deep. By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of aburning city; beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black butshinning; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders,crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinitedeep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption;
& theair was full of them,
& seem'd composed of them: these are devils, and arecalled powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternallot? He said: '
Between the black & white spiders' but now, from betweenthe black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro' thedeep. Black'ning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as asea,
& rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seenbut a black tempest, till looking east between the cloudes & waves, we sawa cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones' throw from usappear'd and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent; at last, tothe east, distant about three degrees, appear'd a fiery crest above thewaves; slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discover'dtwo globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds ofsmoke; and now we saw it was the head of Leviathan; his forehead wasdivided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tyger's forehead:soon we saw his mouth & red gills hung just above the raging foam, tingingthe black deep with beams of blood, advancing towards us with all the furyof a spiritual existence. My friend the angel climb'd up from his stationinto the mill; I remain'd alone;
& then this appearance was no more, but Ifound myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlighthearing a harper, who sung to the harp;
& his theme was: '
The man who neveralters his opinion is like standing water,
& breeds reptiles of the mind. '
But I apose and sought for the mill,
& there I found my angel, who,surprised asked me how I escaped? I answer'd: '
All that we saw was owingto your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank bymoonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall Ishew you yours? ' He lugh'd at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caughthim in my arms,
& flew westerly thro' the night, till we were elevatedabove the earth's shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into thebody of the sun; here I clothed myself in white & taking in my hand
Swedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all theplanets till we came to Saturn: here I staid to rest,
& then leap'd intothe void between Saturn & fixed stars. '
Here', said I, '
Is your lot, inthis space, if space it may be call'd. ' Soon we saw the stable and thechurch,
& I took him to the altar and open'd the bible, and lo! It was adeep pit, into which I descended, driving the angel before me; soon we sawseven houses of brick; one we enter'd; in it were a number of monkeys,baboons,
& all of that species, chain'd by the middle, grinning andsnatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains:however, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous; and then the weak werecaught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with,
&then devour'd, by plucking off first one limb and then another, till thebody was left a helpless trunk; this, after grinning & kissing it withseeming fondness, they devour'd too; and here & there I saw one savourilypicking the flesh off of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoy'd usboth, we went into the mill,
& in my hand brought the skeleton of a body,which in the mill was Aristotele's analitycs. So the angel said: '
Thyphantasy has imposed upon me,
& thou oughtest to be ashamed. 'I answered:'
We impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with youwhose works are only analytics. ' Opposition is true friendship.(plates 21-22)I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak ofthemselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolencesprouting from systematic reasoning, Swedenborg boasts that what he writesis new; Tho' it is only the contents or index of already publish'd books.A man carried a monkey about for a shew,
& because he was a little wiserthan the monkey, grew vain, and conciev'd himself as much wiser than sevenmen. It is so with Swedenborg: He shews the folly of churches & exposeshypocrites, till he imagines that all religious,
& himself the single oneon earth that ever broke a net. Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has notwritten one net truth, now hear another: he has written all the oldfalsehoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with angels who are allreligious & conversed not with devils who all hate religion. For he wasincapable thro' his conceited notions. Thus Swedenborg writings are arecapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the moresublime but not further. Have now another plain fact. Any man ofmechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelus or Jacob Behmen,produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and fromthose of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number. But when he has donethis, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he onlyholds a candle in sunshine.
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