1742. Give me the souls, and the property take for yourself, means to give [evil spirits] their lives and they would ignore the rest. This can be seen from the symbolism of a soul as life, as discussed earlier, in §§1000, 1005, 1040; and from the symbolism of property as the rest, which is not strictly speaking alive (or not as much so), discussed just below.

[2] The life that evil spirits have and desperately love is a life consisting in the urges of self-love and materialism. So it is a life of hatred, revenge, and cruelty. No other kind of life offers any joy, they believe. They resemble humans, since they once were human; and from their former life as humans they retain this belief that all life consists in the joy of such wicked urges. They remain wholly convinced that such a life is the only life, and that if they lose it they will be obliterated. The nature of the life these people love can be seen from their existence in the other world, where it turns into something that resembles reeking excrement. Amazingly, they perceive the stench to be an extremely pleasant fragrance, as shown by the personal experiences related in §§820, 954.

[3] They act like the demons that the Lord was casting out of a madman, who in terror for their lives begged him to send them into some pigs (Mark 5:7-13). These demons had been sordid misers during bodily life, as can be seen from the fact that in the other life they seem to themselves to spend their lives among pigs. The life of a pig corresponds to greed, which makes such a life pleasing to them, as indicated by the experience related in §939.

1000. The symbolism of soul as life is established by the symbolism of the soul in many passages of the Word. ¹ In the Word, soul in general symbolizes all life, both inward life (or that of the inner self) and outward life (or that of the outer self). Since it symbolizes all life, it also symbolizes the specific kind of life possessed by the people to whom it is attributed. Here it is used in connection with the life that a regenerate person has, which is separate from the person's will. As noted earlier, the new life that a spiritual person who has been reborn receives from the Lord is completely separate from human will or human autonomy [§§730:1; 731; 848; 933:2, 3]. That is to say, it is completely separate from the person's own life, which is not life (although that is what it is called) but death, because it is the life of hell. So in the present verse, the flesh in its soul that they were not to eat means flesh together with its soul. That is, they were not to mingle this new life, which is the Lord's, with the evil, unsavory life that is a human being's. In other words, they were not to mingle the new life with human will, or human selfhood.

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