220 HEAVEN and HELL §383
h. Acts of adultery are unholy: 9961 , 10174. Heaven is closed to adulterers: 275 [ 2750 ]. People who
feel pleasure in acts of adultery cannot enter heaven: 539 , 2733 , 2747 , 2748 , 2749 , 2751 , 10175.
Adulterers are merciless and have no religion: 824 , 2747 , 2748. Adulterers’ ideas are fi lthy: 2747 ,
2748. In the other life they love fi lth and are in that kind of hell: 2755 , 5394 , 5722. Acts of adultery
in the Word mean adulterations of what is good, and prostitution means the distortion of what is
true: 2466 , 2729 , 3399 , 4865 , 8904 , 10648.marriages are the work of the Lord alone. They also hold a feast in cele-
bration with many people gathered; these feasts differ from community
to community.384 Marriages on earth are the seedbed of the human race and also of the
angels of heaven, for as already noted in its own chapter, heaven is from
the human race. For this reason, and because they do have a spiritual
origin (from the marriage of the good and the true), and because the
Lord’s divine nature fl ows especially into this love, these earthly mar-
riages are seen as most holy by heaven’s angels. Correspondingly, adul-
tery, as the opposite of marriage love, is seen by them as unholy; for as
angels see in marriages a marriage of the good and the true, which is
heaven, so in adultery they see a marriage of the false and the evil, which
is hell. So if they even hear adultery mentioned, they turn away. This is
why heaven is closed to people if they commit adultery because they
enjoy it. Once it is closed, the Divine Being is no longer acknowledged,
nor is anything of the faith of the church.h
I could tell that everyone in hell is opposed to marriage love from the
aura that emanated from hell. It was like a ceaseless effort to break up
and destroy marriages. This showed that the dominant pleasure in hell is
the pleasure of adultery, and that the pleasure of adultery is also the plea-
sure of destroying the union of the good and the true, the union that
makes heaven. It follows from this that the pleasure of adultery is a hell-
ish pleasure, diametrically opposed to the pleasure of marriage, which is a
heavenly pleasure.
385 There were some spirits who plagued me with particular ingenuity
because of their practice during their physical life. They did this by a
rather subtle infl ow, almost wavelike, a kind that is characteristic of hon-
est spirits; but I could tell that there were elements of deception and the
like within them, intended to ensnare and deceive. Eventually I talked
with one of them who had been in command of an army when he lived
in the world, so I was told. Since I could tell that there was something
licentious in what he was processing mentally, I talked with him about
marriage in a spiritual language, using images—many of them very