788. 18:19 "And they put dust on their heads and cried out, weeping and mourning, and saying, 'Woe, woe, that great city!'" This symbolizes their interior and exterior grief and mourning, which is a lamentation that so eminent a religion was completely destroyed and condemned.

Putting dust on their heads symbolizes their interior and exterior grief and mourning over the destruction and damnation, as we will show below. To cry out, weeping and mourning, symbolizes their exterior grief and mourning - to weep symbolizing a mourning of the soul, and to grieve a grief of the heart. "Woe, woe, that great city!" symbolizes a grievous lamentation over the destruction and damnation. That "woe" symbolizes a lamentation over a calamity, misfortune, or damnation, and that "woe, woe," therefore symbolizes a grievous lamentation, may be seen in nos. 416, 769, 785; and that the city symbolizes the Roman Catholic religion may be seen in no. 785 and elsewhere.

That putting dust on the head symbolizes an interior grief and mourning over a destruction and damnation is clear from the following passages:

They will cry bitterly and cast dust on their heads; they will roll about in ashes. (Ezekiel 27:30)

(The daughters) of Zion sit on the ground...; they have cast dust on their heads... (Lamentations 2:10)

(Job's friends) rent their tunics and sprinkled dust upon their heads... (Job 2:12)

Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne... (Isaiah 47:1)

And so on elsewhere.

The people put dust on their heads when they grieved deeply, because dust symbolized something damned, as is apparent from Genesis 3:14, Matthew 10:14, Mark 6:11, Luke 10:10-12, and dust on the head represented the people's acknowledgment that of themselves they were damned, and thus their repentance, as in Matthew 11:21, Luke 10:13.

Dust symbolizes something damned because the land over the hells in the spiritual world consists of nothing but dust, without grass or plants.

784. As regards the dispensations by which they profit, these are of various kinds. Some dispensations have to do with the contracting of matrimony within degrees of relationship prohibited by law. Some have to do with divorces; some with evils, even heinous ones, and freedom then from temporal penalties, as may be granted also by indulgences. Some dispensations have to do with the governmental appointments of secular candidates without any power or authority. Among these are also the confirmations of duchies and principalities. Moreover, they profit by promises of heavenly joys made to those who enrich monasteries and swell their treasuries, calling their gifts "good works," in themselves sacred, and also merits. They induce them to do this by impressing on them a belief in the power and assistance of their saints, and in the miracles done by them.

Especially do they plot against the wealthy when they are ill, and they also inspire in them then a terror of hell and so extort legacies from them, promising sacrifices of the mass for their souls according to the value of their bequest, and thereby a gradual delivery from the place of torment they call purgatory so as to enter into heaven.

[2] As regards purgatory, I can assert that it is nothing but a Roman Catholic fiction invented for the sake of material gains, and that it neither exists nor can exist.

Every person comes first after death into the world of spirits, which is midway between heaven and hell, and there he is prepared either for heaven or for hell, each according to his life in the world. Moreover, no one suffers any torment in that world, but an evil person first meets with torment when, after being prepared, he enters hell.

The world of spirits contains countless societies, and found in them are joys like those on earth, because the inhabitants there are associated with people on earth, who also are in between heaven and hell. In the world of spirits their outward facades are gradually stripped away and their inner characters thus exposed, and this until their reigning love is revealed, which, being their life's love, is the inmost one and predominant over more external ones. When this is revealed, the person's real character becomes apparent, and he is sent according to the character of that love from the world of spirits to his own place, a good person to a place in heaven, and an evil one to a place in hell.

The reality of this I have been given to know for certain, because the Lord has granted me to be with people in that world and to see everything, and thus to report it from personal experience, and this for twenty years now.

Consequently I can assert that purgatory is a fiction, which may be called a diabolical one, because it was invented for the sake of material gains, and for the sake of power over souls, even those of the deceased, after death.