263. As I was pondering these matters, I was told by the Lord through an angel, "Now you will see and be convinced by visual demonstration what that hellish love is like."
And suddenly then the earth to my left opened up, and I saw a devil ascending out of hell. He had on his head a square hat pulled down over his forehead to his eyes, a face full of pustules as though from a burning fever, savage eyes, and a chest swollen up into a drum. From his mouth he belched smoke like a furnace; his loins were completely on fire; instead of feet he had only bony ankles without any flesh; and from his body emanated a foul and unclean heat.
[2] On seeing him I was terrified, and I cried out to him, "Don't come any closer! Just say where you have come from."
So he replied, hoarsely, "I come from below, and I live there with two hundred others in a society which is the most preeminent society of all. We are all emperors of emperors, kings of kings, dukes of dukes, and princes of princes there. No one among us is merely an ordinary emperor, or an ordinary king, duke or prince. We sit there on our thrones of thrones, and send out decrees to all the world and beyond."
I then said to him, "Do you not see that your delusion of preeminence has made you insane?"
But he replied, "How can you say that, seeing that we all appear to ourselves completely as I have described, and are acknowledged as such by our colleagues?"
Hearing this, I did not want to say, "You are insane," again, because he really was insane as a result of his delusion.
It was then granted me to learn that when this devil lived in the world, he had been only the caretaker of someone else's house, and that even then he had been so carried away in spirit that he looked down on all the rest of the human race in comparison with himself, indulging in the fantasy that he was worthier than any king, even worthier than any emperor. Because of this conceit, he had rejected God, regarding all the sanctities of the church as of no value to him but only something for the stupid masses.
[3] Finally I asked him, "The two hundred in your society - how long will you go on vaunting yourselves like that with each other?"
"To eternity," he said. But he added, "Those of us who do injury to others for denying our preeminence, sink down. For we are allowed to vaunt ourselves to each other, but we may not inflict harm on anyone."
I inquired further, "Do you know what the fate is for those who sink down?"
He said that they sink down into a certain prison, where they are called lower than the low or the very lowest and are made to labor.
I then said to that devil, "You had better take care, therefore, lest you too sink down."
