1. The Latin word here translated "the [evil] people who lived before the Flood" is antediluviani, which means simply "people before the Flood. " However, the passages to which Swedenborg refers here make it clear that he means only those people in the Bible narrative who lived immediately before the Flood and died in it, as opposed to even earlier peoples, who were benign. Furthermore, since Swedenborg sees the Flood as symbolic or correspondential (see note 1 in Last Judgment 26), he did not see these pre-Flood people as dying out in a literal inundation, but as undergoing a particular spiritual decline during the general period symbolized by the Flood. The evil people who resulted from this decline are described by Swedenborg as totally governed by their feelings and as therefore, when they become spirits, being capable of working directly on the feelings of others, bypassing their victims' faculties of critical thinking. For example, one of the passages listed here, Secrets of Heaven 311, describes the spirits of these people as having "fantasies and self-deceptions . . . of a kind that puts other spirits in such a stupor that they cannot tell whether they are alive or dead," and adds, "The people who died in the Flood . . . were destined in the next life to be incapable of ever living among other spirits without bringing a sort of death to them. " Hence they are isolated from other spirits in a hell that is exclusively their own. [GFD, RS, SS]