NEUOFFENBARUNG5 August 1847
[JS.01_004,01] Here is the last hour and early death of a dandy who knew little beyond smoking tobacco, gambling, gorging, guzzling, courting all the more attractive women, dancing superbly and playing waltzes on a grand piano for the benefit of those same ladies. And yet he had spent almost all his time at colleges and universities. The specimen of a dandy presented to us was the son of fairly wealthy parents. Naturally, as soon as their promising, thoroughly pampered boy had put down his ABC, they had him do nothing but study.
[JS.01_004,02] But so that the tender little boy should not find the arduous study of Latin too hard, he was first placed in a very good boarding house, where he would have enough to eat and would naturally grow, though only in body, and hardly in wisdom and favour with God and man. And lest strenuous study should bring on a wasting disease, he was allowed to repeat any year if he could not manage, with the lightest effort of course, to get through a class in one year. To this end the professors, especially in the lower schools, were always suitably paid off, and a tutor of the utmost gentleness was engaged for each subject.
[JS.01_004,03] In this way our student just managed to slip through the lower schools, though little or nothing slipped into his head. The result was that he was constantly held back in the higher schools. And since he generally found studying nauseating, he applied himself chiefly to the liberal arts listed above: smoking tobacco, gambling, gorging, guzzling and so on.
[JS.01_004,04] Having completed his studies and passed all his examinations with mediocre results, he tried his hand at office work. But this atmosphere of paper and ink did not agree with him. After all, his mother always gave him enough money to get along in gentlemanly style without an office. He courted all the young ladies of good family and proposed marriage to one after another, with the result that quite a few of the beauties he adored went from expecting a promised marriage to actually ‘expecting’, without the marriage.
[JS.01_004,05] Besides these beauties, endowed with blind expectations and therefore, as noted, very often with unpleasant but living ‘expectations’, our ‘statesman’ also turned to other women. He could always have them for a modest payment, without promising them marriage or raising their hopes, and without fearing that he might leave these graces ‘expecting’ in that other sense.
[JS.01_004,06] Yet it was by no means rare for him to find himself dealing with syphilis at every stage, until it became so severe that even the most experienced physicians in the field could offer him neither advice nor help. The general drying up of the natural vital fluids was the outcome of this ‘fine’ life of a dandy. Unfortunately, in creating the world, I, the Lord, quite ‘forgot’ to create a ‘little healing herb’ for that ailment. So our little dandy was obliged, willy-nilly, to get ready to die. A most disagreeable prospect, to be sure, for a man of fashion who had grown so inordinately fond of the world with its sweet pleasures of Venus. But it is simply the way of things that all must go the way of the flesh. And so in the end this dandy, who found his greatest earthly bliss in the flesh, was all the more bound to go the ‘way of the flesh’ in the fullest sense.
[JS.01_004,07] Now look at his foul-smelling bed. See how he writhes and arches, gasping for air and thirsting for water. He cannot get any water down into his stomach, for the sinews of his throat have all dried up and can no longer draw down a single drop. His breath is short and very painful, for his lungs are almost entirely dried up. His voice, too, is quite broken. Only with great pain can he utter short, paralysed fragments of words, sounding like a bad bassoon in the hands of a pupil. He would still like to swear in the manner of a dandy and perhaps even stammer out a few learned phrases from Voltaire or Sir Walter Scott. But the general dryness prevents him, and the violent pains in every corner of his being give him no time to gather his thoughts once more on a single point. So he lies there rattling wordlessly, only now and then forcing a shrill, rasping bassoon note from his utterly dried-out throat.
[JS.01_004,08] See, this is often how such libertines come to their end on this side. There is nothing more to see of this dandy here, for death, as you say, is already on his tongue and due the next minute. Let us turn at once to the world beyond and see how our ‘man’ makes his entrance there.
[JS.01_004,09] See, there is his bed just as it was in the world. He still lies upon it in the same shape. But at his bedside you also see a single angel holding a burning torch, with whose spiritual flame he is to destroy the last drops of the dandy's vital fluids.
[JS.01_004,10] Only one angel appears to people of this kind because their soul and spirit are as good as dead. The destroying angel alone, who is set over the flesh and the spirit of the nerves, has a task here. He is to torment and burn the flesh and the spirit of the nerves as severely as possible, driving the tattered remnants of the soul and the equally shattered spirit within them back into the spirit of the nerves. In this way he preserves the dying person from eternal death.
[JS.01_004,11] The angel will say nothing to this man either. He will simply burn him over from the natural world into this world of spirits with his torch. This is what usually happens and must happen to such people, for without this last act of grace they would lose their very existence.
[JS.01_004,12] This act corresponds to the distorted pagan one in the legend of Prometheus. For the more spiritually minded people of the earliest times saw such acts in the world of spirits, where they were then unspeakably rarer than in this age, which far surpasses Sodom and Gomorrah in sensuality. Legends of them thus survived, though after a few thousand years they were distorted beyond measure.
[JS.01_004,13] Here the same Prometheus appears once again, in his true, undistorted work. But look, the solitary angel has now completed his work well. Our dandy's flesh has visibly burnt through and through to ashes here. See what rises very slowly and sluggishly from the ashes! Can it be a glorious, rejuvenated phoenix? Oh no. Look, it is only a stupid ape that resembles an old, decrepit baboon! He is quite mute and can only see a little.
[JS.01_004,14] The animal form arises because such people, throughout their dissolute life, completely squander the finer constituent particles of the human soul in their lust and keep only the coarser animal particles as a remainder. In this case at least the soul of an ape is left. But there are others who ruin themselves so utterly that they become the most hideous amphibians.
[JS.01_004,15] The ‘water of his life’ cannot yet be determined for this man either. He must now, as you say, go to a holding place and be handed over to spirits appointed to care for such degenerate animal souls. Perhaps, with all their diligence, they will manage to restore this soul to human shape in a hundred years.
[JS.01_004,16] Nothing more can be described of this soul at present. Another example will follow.