439. And there were stings in their tails, and their power was to hurt men five months. This symbolizes their clever falsifications of the Word, by which for a short time they darkened and enchanted the intellect, and so deceived and captivated it.

Stings in the tails symbolize clever falsifications of the Word - stings symbolizing cunning and guile, and tails the Word's truths falsified (no. 438). Their power to hurt means, symbolically, that they could induce a mental numbness, or in other words, that they could darken and enchant the intellect and so deceive and captivate it. For their tails were like scorpions, and scorpions have this symbolism (no. 425). Five months means, symbolically, for a short time, as in no. 427 above.

Such is the case when people like this take some things from the Word and apply them. For the Word was written in terms of things that correspond, and the correspondent expressions are partly apparent truths, which conceal genuine truths within them. If these genuine truths are unknown in the church, it is possible for people to take from the Word many things which at first appear to support heresy. But when genuine truths are known in the church, then the apparent truths are laid bare, and the genuine truths come into view. Before this comes about, however, a heretic may use various things from the Word to draw a veil over the intellect and enchant it, and so to deceive and captivate it.

This is what those people do who assert that a person's sins are forgiven him so that he is justified, by an act of faith of which no one is at all aware, and this in a moment - if not before, then in the last hour of dying. This also can be illustrated by examples, but here is not the place for it.

Stings symbolize falsities arising from evil and doing harm also in Amos:

Behold, the days shall come upon you when they will take you away with stings... (Amos 4:2)

And in the book of Numbers, that the people should drive out the inhabitants of the land, lest they be thorns in their eyes and stings in their sides (Numbers 33:55).

Thorns, briers, nettles, and thistles also symbolize falsities accompanying evil because of their stings.

209. The last degree embraces, contains, and is the foundation of the prior degrees. The doctrine of degrees presented in this part of the work has been illustrated so far by various phenomena that occur in one or the other worlds, as by the degrees of the heavens where angels dwell, the degrees of warmth and light in them, and the degrees of their atmospheres, and by various phenomena in the human body, and likewise in the animal and mineral kingdoms.

This doctrine, however, has a wider application. It extends not only to natural phenomena, but also to civil, moral and spiritual matters, and to each and all of their components.

The doctrine of degrees extends to these matters as well for two reasons. The first is that everything of which anything can be predicated has in it a trine called end, cause and effect, and these three are related to each other as degrees of height.

[2] The second reason is that no civil, moral or spiritual matter is something abstracted from substance, but rather they are substances. For as love and wisdom are not abstractions, but are substance (as we demonstrated above in nos. 40-43), so likewise are all matters which we call civil, moral and spiritual. One can indeed think of these abstractly from substances, but still in themselves they are not abstract.

Consider, for example, affection and thought, charity and faith, will and intellect. For the case with these is the same as with love and wisdom, namely, that they do not exist apart from the subjects of which they are predicated - subjects which are substances - but rather they are states of the subjects or substances. In subsequent discussions we will see that it is changes in these states which produce their variations.

By substance we mean also form, for substance does not exist without form.