Subsection 2. The power of imagination.

I have sufficiently explained what imagination is in my Digression on the Anatomy of the Soul. Now I will only point to its extraordinary effects and power. Prominent in everyone, it rages most fiercely in melancholy people, retaining the mental images of objects for so long, misconceiving and magnifying them through continual, intense meditation, until at last it produces real effects in some people, causing this and many other illnesses.

Although this imagination of ours is a faculty subordinate to reason and should be governed by it, in many people it too becomes unfit, obstructed and damaged through internal or external disorders, or defects in its organs, which are unfit, obstructed or otherwise impaired.

We see this confirmed in sleepers, who often imagine absurd and monstrous things because humours and a gathering of vapours trouble their imagination. So too those troubled by incubus, or “witch-ridden,” as we call it: if they lie on their backs, they suppose that an old woman rides them, sitting so heavily on them that they are almost suffocated for lack of breath, when nothing is harming them except a gathering of bad humours disturbing their imagination.

This is also evident in those who walk at night in their sleep and perform strange feats. These vapours stir the imagination, the imagination stirs the appetite, and the appetite, moving the animal spirits, causes the body to walk about as though awake. Fracastoro, in On the Intellect, book 3, attributes all trances to this power of imagination: people who lie entranced for whole days together, for example, or that priest mentioned by Celsus who could withdraw from his senses whenever he wished and lie like a dead man, without life or sensation. Cardan boasts that he could do as much himself, whenever he pleased.

Often, when such people come to themselves, they tell strange things about heaven and hell and the visions they have seen: like Sir Owen in Matthew Paris, who entered St Patrick’s Purgatory, and the monk of Evesham in the same author. Those familiar apparitions in Bede and Gregory, St Bridget’s revelations, and all those tales of witches’ journeys, dancing, riding, transformations and operations, and so on, are attributed, as I have already said, to the power of imagination and the devil’s illusions by Weyer in On Witches, book 3, chapter 11, and Cesare Vanini in his Dialogues, among others.

Almost the same effects can be seen in those who are awake. How many chimeras, grotesques, golden mountains and castles in the air they build for themselves! I appeal to painters, makers of machines and mathematicians. Some attribute all vices—anger, revenge, lust, ambition and greed—to a false and corrupted imagination, which prefers falsehood to what is right and good, deceiving the soul with false appearances and suppositions.

Bernardus Penotus maintains that heresy and superstition spring from this source: as a person falsely imagines, so he believes; as he conceives a thing, so it must be and shall be—“against the whole world,” he insists on it. But imagination shows its strange and unmistakable effects most especially in passions and emotions. What will a frightened person not imagine in the dark? What strange shapes of bogeys, devils, witches and goblins! Lavater makes fear the chief cause of spectres and similar apparitions. Above all other passions, fear produces the strongest imagination, says Weyer; so too do love, sorrow, joy and the rest.

Some die suddenly, like the woman who saw her son return from the battle of Cannae. The patriarch Jacob, through the force of imagination, produced speckled lambs by laying speckled rods before his sheep. Persinna, the Ethiopian queen in Heliodorus, looked at a picture of Perseus and Andromeda and gave birth to a beautiful white child instead of a black one.

Perhaps in imitation of her, an ugly fellow in Greece, since both he and his wife were ill formed, sought to beget a handsome family: “he placed the most beautiful pictures in his bedchamber,” and so on. He hung the finest pictures money could buy in his room so that his wife, frequently seeing them, might conceive and bear children like them. And if we may believe Bale, one of Pope Nicholas III’s concubines gave birth to a monster after seeing a bear.

If a woman, says Lemnius, thinks of another man, present or absent, at the time of conception, her child will resemble him. Pregnant women with cravings give us extraordinary examples of this kind: moles, warts, scars, cleft lips and monstrous births, caused in their children especially by the force of their own disordered imagination. “She impresses upon the foetus the very form she pictures in her mind”: she stamps upon her child the image she conceives within herself.

And therefore Luis Vives, in On the Christian Woman, book 2, particularly warns pregnant women not to admit such absurd fancies and thoughts, but by every means to avoid those horrible things heard or seen, or filthy spectacles. Some people laugh, weep, sigh, groan, blush, tremble or sweat at things suggested to them by their imagination.

Avicenna speaks of someone who could bring on paralysis whenever he wished; and some can imitate the sounds of birds and beasts so closely that the difference can scarcely be detected. Agrippa supposes that Dagebertus’s and St Francis’s scars and wounds, resembling Christ’s—if indeed there ever were any such—arose through the force of imagination. To the same imagination he attributes people’s transformation into wolves, from men into women and women back into men, which is firmly believed, or from men into asses, dogs or any other shapes.