Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/503

   When they die, Then doth not leave them all their misery. They having not repented of their crimes, Must now he punish'd for their mispent times.

For as the manners and habits of men are in this life, such affections for the most part follow the soul after death, which then calls to mind those things which it did formerly do in its life, and then intently thinks on them, for as much as then the divers offices of life cease, as those of nourishing, growing, generating, and various occupations of senses, and humane affairs, and comforts, and obstacles of a grosser body. Then are represented to the plantastick reason those species, which are so much the more turbulent and furious, by how much in such souls there lies hid an intellectuall spark more or lesse covered, or altogether extinct, into which are then by evil spirits conveyed species either most false, or terrible: whence now it is tormented in the concupiscile faculty, by the concupiscence of an imaginary good, or of those things which it did formerly affect in its life time, being deprived of the power of enjoying them, although it may seem to it self sometimes almost to obtain its delights, but to be driven from them by the evil spirits into bitter torments, as in the Poets, Tantalus from a banquet, Sardanapalus from embraces, Midas from gold, Sisyphus from power; and they called these souls hobgoblins, whereof if any taking care of houshold affairs lives and inhabits quietly in the house, it is called a houshold god, or familiar. But they are most cruelly tortured in the irascible faculty with the hatred of an imaginary evil, into the perturbations whereof, as also false suspitions, and most horrible Phantasmes they then fall, and there are represented to them sad representations; sometimes of the heaven falling upon their head, sometimes of being consumed by the violence of flames, sometimes of being drowned in a gulfe, sometimes of being swallowed up into the earth, sometimes of being changed into divers kinds of beasts, sometimes of being torn and devoured by ugly monsters, sometimes of being