541. Its tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. (12:4) This symbolically means that by falsifying the Word's truths they exiled all spiritual concepts of goodness and truth from the church, and by appeals to falsity completely destroyed them.

When referring to people who have used the Word to establish heresies, a tail symbolizes the Word's truths falsified (no. 438). Stars symbolize spiritual concepts of goodness and truth (nos. 51, 420). A third symbolizes all (nos. 400, 505). And to draw stars from heaven and throw them to the earth means, symbolically, to exile these concepts from the church and completely destroy them. For when they are taken down from heaven, they are also taken away from the church, as every truth of the Word is introduced into a person of the church by the Lord through heaven. Nor are truths taken away by anything else than by falsifications of truths in the Word, since that is where the truths of heaven and the church are found and originate.

[2] The idea that those people meant by the dragon, as described in no. 537 above, have destroyed all the Word's truths, is something no one in the world can believe; and yet they have so destroyed them that not one doctrinal truth remains. This has been investigated in the spiritual world by examining learned members of the clergy, and it has been found to be the case.

I know several reasons for this, but here I will mention only one: They assert that anything springing from a person's will and judgment is not good, and that because goods of charity or good works are done by the person, they therefore contribute nothing to his salvation, but that only faith does. And yet the only thing that makes a person human, and the only means by which he is conjoined with the Lord, is his ability to do good and believe truths as though of himself, namely, as though of his own will in accordance with his own judgment. If this one ability were to be taken away, every means of a person's conjunction with the Lord and of the Lord with the person would be taken away at the same time. For it is this ability to reciprocate love that the Lord confers on everyone who is born human, which He also preserves in the person even to the end of his life, and afterward to eternity.

If this were to be taken from a person, he would have every truth and good of the Word taken from him at the same time, to the point that the Word would become nothing but a dead letter and an empty book. For the Word teaches nothing else but a person's conjunction with the Lord through charity and faith, both emanating from the person as though from himself.

[3] People meant by the dragon, as described in no. 537 above, have broken this unique bond of conjunction by asserting that the goods of charity or good works that emanate from a person and from his will and judgment are nothing more than moral, civic and political works, works by which a person has a conjunction with the world, but not at all with God and heaven. And when that bond has been thus broken, then none of the Word's doctrinal truths remains. Moreover, if the Word's truths are used to support faith alone as saving apart from works of the Law, then those truths are all falsified. And if the falsification progresses to an affirmation that the Lord does not command good works in the Word for the sake of a person's conjunction with Him, but only for the sake of a conjunction with the world, then the Word's truths are profaned. For the Word thus becomes no longer a holy book, but a profane one. But on this subject, see the account at the end of the chapter.

The following report concerning the goat in Daniel has a similar symbolic meaning:

(The male goat with his horn) cast down some of the host (of heaven) and some of the stars to the ground, and trampled them...; and he cast truth down to the ground. (Daniel 8:10, 12)

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.