828. There are men who like nothing better than deflowering virgins — that is, who take the greatest pleasure in virgins and in robbing them of their virginity without any thought of marriage or children. When they have stolen the bloom of their virginity, they abandon them in disgust or prostitute them.
Men who have lived this kind of life have contravened the order of nature, of the spirit, and of heaven. They violate not only marriage love, a love held very sacred in heaven, but also innocence, which they wound and murder when they take innocent girls, who could have had the love of marriage instilled in them, and introduce them instead to the life of a whore. (People know that the first blossoming of love is what introduces young women to the chaste love in marriage and unites the minds of married partners.) 1
Because heaven's holiness is founded on marriage love and innocence, and these men are inward murderers (as described), in the other life they suffer punishment of the most severe kind. They seem to themselves to be riding a frenzied horse that bucks them up into the air, throwing them off, apparently in danger of their lives; such is the terror that strikes them. Later they see themselves under the belly of the maddened horse and soon seem to go up through the horse's rump into its stomach. Then suddenly it appears to them as if they are in the belly of a woman, a foul slut, who changes into a huge dragon. 2 There they remain hidden and in pain. This punishment recurs many times over hundreds and thousands of years, until the offenders gain a horror for such desires.
I have heard that their children are worse than others, since they inherit this quality from their fathers. Accordingly, when people of this kind engage in sexual intercourse, it rarely produces offspring, and such babies as are born do not live long. 3
Footnotes:
1. For a discussion of how love unites the minds of marriage partners, see Marriage Love 179. [RS]
2. This may be an echo of Revelation 17:1-5, which refers to a "whore," "a woman sitting upon a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names." [RS]
3. The assertion that the children of seducers perish early is unusual to Swedenborg, and the specification that he has been told this by others is striking. He elsewhere (for example, §8550) states that the impure habits of a parent are passed on to a child as evil, but the implication of such passages is that the evil has spiritual, not physical, consequences. In addition, in Marriage Love 392 he says that the Lord so orders the universe that even evil people love and care for their children. However, the actions of men such as are here described are counter to the ideal of faithful monogamy, a state that Swedenborg saw as divinely ordained for the generation of physical progeny (see Marriage Love 481); so it is at least consonant with his theology that the intercourse of those who flouted married love should prove unproductive. A possible biblical parallel to this general rule can be seen in 2 Samuel 11, 12, where the child of David and Bathsheba that is conceived in adultery dies an infant, whereas the child they later conceive when they are married flourishes. Compare also Ecclesiasticus 24:22-25. Furthermore, the belief that the children of parents who engage in sexual irregularities are defective can be found in at least one other author of the early modern era (see the instance cited in Harvey 1994, 26). In any case, when children failed to thrive, it would have been logical to seek in the actions of the parents for an explanation. [SS]
