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)