(plates 17-20) An angel came to me and said: 'O pitiable young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! Consider the hot dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which art going in such career. 'I said: you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see your lot or mine is most desirable. ' So he me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into the church vault. At the end of was a mill: thro' the mill we went, and to a cave: down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appear'd beneath us.& we by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: 'If you please we commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here if you will not, I will? ' But he 'Do not presume, o young-man, but as we here remain, behold thy lot which will soon when the darkness passes away. ' So I with him, sitting in a twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head into the deep. By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, as the smoke of a city; beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shinning; round it were fiery tracks on revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from the air was full of them,& seem'd composed of them: are devils, and are called of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? He said: 'Between the black & white spiders' but now, between the black & white spiders, a and fire burst and rolled thro' the deep. Black'ning all beneath, so that the deep grew black as a sea,& rolled with a terrible noise; us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the & waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones' from us appear'd and again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent; at last, to the east, distant three degrees, appear'd a fiery crest above the waves; slowly it reared like a of golden rocks, till we discover'd two globes of fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke; and now we saw it was the head of Leviathan; his was divided streaks of green & purple like those on a tyger's forehead: we saw his mouth & red gills hung just above the raging foam, tinging the black deep beams of blood, advancing towards us with all the fury of a existence. My friend the angel climb'd up from his station the mill; I remain'd alone;& then this appearance was no more, but I found myself on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight a harper, who sung to the harp;& his theme was: 'The man who never alters his is like standing water,& breeds reptiles of the mind. ' But I apose and for the mill,& there I found my angel, who, surprised asked me how I I answer'd: 'All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have my eternal lot, shall I shew you ' He lugh'd at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms,& flew westerly thro' the night, till we elevated the earth's shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; I clothed myself in white & taking in my hand Swedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and all the planets till we came to Saturn: here I staid to rest,& then into the void between Saturn & fixed stars. 'Here', said I, 'Is lot, in space, if space it may be call'd. ' Soon we saw the stable and the church,& I took him to the and open'd the bible, and lo! It was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the angel before me; we saw seven houses of brick; one we in it were a number of monkeys, baboons,& all of that species, chain'd by the middle, and snatching at one another, but by the shortness of their chains: however, I saw that they sometimes numerous; and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first with,& devour'd, by plucking off first one limb and then another, till the body was left a helpless trunk; this, after grinning & kissing it seeming fondness, devour'd too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own as the stench terribly annoy'd us both, we went the mill,& in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotele's analitycs. So the said: 'Thy phantasy has upon me,& thou oughtest to be ashamed. 'I answered: 'We on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are analytics. ' Opposition is true friendship.
(plates 21-22) I have found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning, Swedenborg that what he writes is new; Tho' it is the contents or index of already publish'd books. A man a monkey about for a shew,& because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev'd himself as much wiser than men. It is so with Swedenborg: He shews the folly of churches & hypocrites, till he imagines that all religious,& the single one on earth that ever broke a net. Now hear a plain Swedenborg has not written one net truth, now another: he has written all the old falsehoods. And now hear the reason. He with angels who are all & conversed not with devils who all hate religion. For he was incapable thro' his conceited notions. Thus writings are a recapitulation of all opinions, and an analysis of the more but not further. Have now another plain fact. Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelus or Behmen, produce ten thousand of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number. But he has done this, let him not say he knows better than his master, for he only holds a in sunshine.