An Angel came to me and said: "O pitiable foolish young man! Ohorrible, O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou artpreparing for thyself to all Eternity, to which thou art going in suchcareer."
I said: "Perhaps you will be willing to show me my eternal lot, and wewill contemplate together upon it, and see whether your lot or mine ismost desirable."
So he took me through a stable, and through a church, and down intothe church vault, at the end of which was a mill; through the mill wewent, and came to a cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tediousway, till a void boundless as a nether sky appeared beneath us, and weheld by the roots of trees, and hung over this immensity; but I said:"If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whetherProvidence is here also; if you will not, I will." But he answered: "Donot presume, O young man; but as we here remain, behold thy lot, whichwill soon appear when the darkness passes away."
So I remained with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he wassuspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward into the 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 butshining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders,crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinitedeep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption;and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These areDevils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companionwhich was my eternal lot. He said: "Between the black and whitespiders."
But now, from between the black and white spiders, a cloud and fireburst and rolled through the deep, blackening all beneath so that thenether deep grew black as a sea, and rolled with a terrible noise.Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till lookingEast between the clouds and the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixedwith fire, and not many stones' throw from us appeared and sunk againthe scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. At last to the East, distantabout three degrees, appeared a fiery crest above the waves; slowlyit reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discovered two globesof crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke; andnow we saw it was the head of Leviathan. His forehead was divided intostreaks of green and purple, like those on a tiger's forehead; soon wesaw his mouth and red gills hang just above the raging foam, tingingthe black deeps with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all thefury of a spiritual existence.
My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. Iremained alone, and then this appearance was no more; but I foundmyself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearinga harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: "The man who neveralters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of themind."
But I arose, and sought for the mill, and there I found my Angel, who,surprised, asked me how I escaped.
I answered: "All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for whenyou ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight, hearing a harper.But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?" Helaughed at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms,and flew Westerly through the night, till we were elevated above theearth's shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the bodyof the sun; here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my handSwedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all theplanets till we came to Saturn. Here I stayed to rest, and then leapedinto the void between Saturn and the fixed stars.
"Here," said I, "is your lot; in this space, if space it may becalled." Soon we saw the stable and the church, and I took him to thealtar and opened the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which Idescended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses ofbrick. One we entered. In it were a number of monkeys, baboons, andall of that species, chained by the middle, grinning and snatching atone another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, Isaw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caughtby the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with and thendevoured by plucking off first one limb and then another till the bodywas left a helpless trunk; this, after grinning and kissing it withseeming fondness, they devoured too. And here and there I saw onesavourily picking the flesh off his own tail. As the stench terriblyannoyed us both, we went into the mill; and I in my hand brought theskeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics.
So the Angel said: "Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtestto be ashamed."
I answered: "We impose on one another, and it is but lost time toconverse with you whose works are only Analytics."
"I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselvesas the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sproutingfrom systematic reasoning.
"Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; though it is onlythe contents or index of already published books.
"A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a littlewiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as muchwiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shows the follyof churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all arereligious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.
"Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Nowhear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.
"And now hear the reason: he conversed with Angels who are allreligious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for hewas incapable through his conceited notions.
"Thus Swedenborg's writings are a recapitulation of all superficialopinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
"Have now another plain fact: any man of mechanical talents may fromthe writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousandvolumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante orShakespeare an infinite number.
"But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better thanhis master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine."