438. They had tails like scorpions. (9:10) This symbolizes the Word's truths falsified, by which they induce a mental numbness.

A tail symbolizes the last extension of the head, because the brain extends through the spinal column into the tail. Consequently the head and the tail are united as their first and last elements. Consequently, when the head symbolizes a justifying and saving faith alone, the tail symbolizes in summary all its proofs, and as these are taken from the Word, it symbolizes the Word's truths falsified.

Everyone who assumes some principle of religion on the basis of on his own intelligence and puts it at the head of the rest, also takes proof passages from the Word and puts them at the tail, thus inducing a mental numbness in others and so doing them injury. That is why we are told that "they had tails like scorpions," and next, that "there were stings in their tails," and that "their power was to hurt men." For a scorpion symbolizes a persuasiveness that induces a numbness in the intellect (no. 425).

To be assured that the tail is an extension of the brain through the spinal column to its final point, ask any anatomist and he will tell you. Or look at a dog or some other fierce animal that has a tail, and if you treat it kindly and make yourself agreeable to it, you will see its stiffened back soften and its tail move in a corresponding manner. But on the other hand, if you annoy it, its backbone stiffens.

[2] The primary tenet of the intellect that is assumed as a principle is symbolized by the head, and its final expression by the tail, also in the following passages:

...He will cut off head and tail from Israel... The elder and honorable man is the head; but the prophet who teaches lies is the tail. (Isaiah 9:14-15)

There will not be any work for Egypt that the head or tail... may do. (Isaiah 19:15)

Nothing else is symbolized by the dragon's seven heads and the tail by which it drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth, in Revelation 12:3-4; and also by the tails like serpents, having heads, with which they do harm, in verse 19 of this chapter.

Since the tail symbolizes the final element, and the final element embraces all the rest, therefore Jehovah said to Moses,

"...take (the serpent) by the tail." And he... caught it, and it became a rod... (Exodus 4:3-4)

The priests were also commanded therefore to remove the whole tail close to the backbone and to sacrifice it with the fat on the entrails, the kidneys, the intestines, and the liver (Leviticus 3:9-11; 8:25; 9:19, Exodus 29:22).

To be shown that the final element contains and embraces all the prior ones, see The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Sacred Scripture, nos. 38 65, and Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Love and Wisdom, nos. 209-216 217-222.

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.