1266. The antediluvians who perished are in a certain hell beneath the heel of the left foot.* There is a kind of misty rock with which they are covered, that is projected from their direful phantasies and persuasions, and by which they are separated from the other hells, and are kept away from the world of spirits. They are in the continual effort to rise out of it, but cannot get beyond the effort; for they are of such a nature that if they should come into the world of spirits, they, by their direful phantasies and the exhalations and venom of their persuasions, would take away the faculty of thinking from all the spirits they met, except the good. And unless the Lord, by His coming into the flesh, had liberated the world of spirits from this nefarious crew, the human race would have perished; for no spirit could have been with man, and yet if spirits and angels are not with man, he cannot live a moment.
* The author speaks of places in the spiritual world as being situated in accordance with their correspondence to the human body. [Reviser.]