Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/338

322. He wrote of marital "coldness" as matter-of-factly as any modern doctor, tracing its origins to mental and emotional factors. He favored neither sex against the other; in that wonderful table of weights, so to speak, in which he assesses the gravity of various kinds of adulteries; he blames equally a "crafty wife" who inflames a man and a man who "by powerful enticements" leaves a woman no longer mistress of herself "by reason of the fire kindled in her will." 13

With his idea of adultery as self-regarding lust it was natural that he saw the place in hell for those who delight in adultery as also "the place for those who delight in cruelty . . . they think nothing can be more pleasant." This kind of pleasure, he adds, "is today so common as to extend even to infants." 14

In a series of deeply etched pictures from hell, he gave his report on the fate of those who sinned even more grievously against love. Those whose lust it had been to deflower maidens, among whom there were many of the rich and noble, he said he had seen in hell where they inquired after virgins and were shown harlots who assumed a florid beauty, but who turned into monstrous shapes when the bargain was clinched. Nevertheless the Casanovas had to remain with them. Among themselves, Swedenborg said, these men might indeed still look like men, but to the eye of others who were allowed to see them "instead of their former agreeable and courteous expression of countenance they appear like apes with faces stern and bestial, walking with their bodies bent forward, and they emit a disagreeable smell. They loathe females, and turn away from those they see, for they have no desire for them." 15

In similar plight Swedenborg saw those who had lusted for variety, wanting "all the women in the world, and wishing for whole troops and a fresh one every day." They, he said, think of "the whole female sex as a common harlot, and of marriage as common harlotry . . ." In hell they are rationed to a harlot a day, but they lose their potency and on this account, he says, they loathe the sex.16

Still viler are those who need to be stimulated by resistance and thus become violators. Fighting cats, they look like, when at "their theatrical venery" in hell, and Swedenborg gives an extremely vivid description of such a "brothel-contest." 17