358 HEAVEN and HELL §587
regions live people from the so-called Catholic religion who wanted to
be worshiped as gods and who therefore burned with hatred against any-
one who did not acknowledge their power over human souls and over
heaven. They have the same kind of animus—the same kind of hatred
and vengefulness—toward people who oppose them, as they did in the
world. They take particular delight in cruelty, but in the other life this is
turned against them; for in their hells (and the western quarter is full of
them) they rage against each other because everyone is claiming divine
power. There is more about this, though, in my booklet The Last Judg-
ment and Babylon Destroyed.
[ 3 ] Still, we cannot know how the hells are arranged in this region,
only that the most horrifying are off to the side toward the northern quar-
ter and the less horrifying toward the southern quarter. That is, the hor-
ror of the hells decreases between the northern region and the southern,
and also, successively, toward the east. The people toward the east there
are the ones who were foolish and did not believe in the Divine, but still
were not given to the same kind of hatred and vengefulness or trickery as
the people who are deeper in the western quarter.
[ 4 ] At present, there are no hells in the eastern region. The people
who were there have been transferred to the front of the western quarter.
There are a good many hells in the northern and southern regions.
The people there were absorbed in love of the world during their lives
and therefore in various kinds of evil such as enmity, hostility, thievery,
robbery, fraud, avarice, and callousness. The worst hells of this sort are in
the northern quarter and the milder ones in the south. Their dreadfulness
increases the nearer they are to the western region and the farther they are
from the south, and decreases toward the east and also toward the south.
Behind the hells in the western region lie dense forests where malevo-
lent spirits roam like wild animals, and much the same is true of the hells
in the northern quarter. Behind the hells in the southern quarter, though,
lie the deserts just described. So much for the location of the hells.588 As for the number of the hells, there are just as many hells as there
are angelic communities in the heavens, because there is a hellish com-
munity that corresponds inversely to each heavenly one. I explained
in the chapter on the communities that constitute heaven (§§ 41 – 50 )
and the chapter on the vastness of heaven (§§ 415 – 420 ) that there are
countless heavenly communities, all differentiated according to their
virtues of love, thoughtfulness, and faith. The same holds true for the
hellish communities, which are differentiated according to the evils
opposite to those virtues.