1783. I was told they were the kind who in former times slaughtered whole armies, as we read in the historical portions of Scripture [see Judges 7:22, 1 Sam. 14:20, 2 Chron. 20:23], having induced insanities on them. For they rushed right into the chambers of their brain, then struck them with terror, so that the one would kill the other.

I was told that they had also been able to inspire terror, but at this day only a little. Nowadays the restraints on these spirits are very seldom relaxed. It occurs only in the case of someone who is of such a character that it must be permitted rather that they perish as to the body than as to the soul. For unless the person perished as to the body in this manner through insanity and suicide, he or she could not but perish to eternity.

5717. There are spirits who not only correlate with the very sticky substances in the brain, which are its waste products, but who also know how to infect those substances with what are like poisons. On arrival spirits of this kind charge inside the skull and continue without stopping right on into the spinal cord. This is not something that people whose interiors have not been opened are able to feel; but I have been allowed to feel them entering in, and to feel their endeavour to destroy, which however was to no avail because the Lord was protecting me. Their intention was to remove my entire power of understanding from me; I felt their activity clearly as well as the resulting pain, which however soon ceased. When I spoke to those spirits subsequently they were compelled to confess where they were from. They said they lived in dark forests where they do not dare to do anything at all to their companions, for if they do do anything their companions are allowed to treat them cruelly. Thus they are kept in bonds; and they are ugly, having faces that look like wild beasts, and they are covered with hair.

[2] I have been told that those in former times who slew entire armies, such as one reads about in the Word, were like them. They charged into the cells of each man's brain and introduced terror there, together with a kind of madness that caused one man to slay another. At the present day such spirits are kept locked up in their own hell and are not let out. They also correlate with malignant swellings of the head inside the skull. I have described those spirits as ones that charge inside the skull and continue without stopping right on into the spinal cord; but it should be realized that this charging in by them is an appearance. They are actually conveyed along a route outside the body which corresponds to those areas inside it; but it feels as though the force of them were inside. Correspondence is the explanation for this, for it enables the operation they are carrying out to be concentrated on the person at whom it is directed.