I therefore advise them to read that section cautiously. “It speaks stones,” as Agrippa said of Occult Philosophy, “and readers should beware lest it knock their brains out with them.” The rest, I do not doubt, they may read safely and to their benefit. But I have gone on too long. I shall proceed.

If anyone doubts what I have said about the need for this work and the extent of its subject, I ask him to take a brief survey of the world, as Cyprian advises Donatus: imagine yourself carried to the top of a high mountain, and from there look at the disturbances and accidents of this unstable world; you cannot help either laughing at it or pitying it. While in the wilderness, Saint Jerome imagined so vividly that he thought he could see people dancing in Rome;

and whether you picture the view or climb up to see it, you will soon perceive that the whole world is mad, melancholy, and deluded. It is shaped like a fool’s head—as Epichthonius Cosmopolites showed some years ago in a map bearing the motto “A head deserving hellebore”—a deranged head, “a cage of fools,” a fool’s paradise; or, as Apollonius calls it, a common prison of dupes, cheats, flatterers, and so on. It needs reform.

In the ninth book of his Geography, Strabo compares Greece to the outline of a man, a comparison Nicolaus Gerbelius approves in his explanation of Sophianus’s map. The chest stretches from the Acroceraunian Mountains in Epirus to Cape Sunium in Attica; Pagae and Megara are the two shoulders, the Isthmus of Corinth the neck, and the Peloponnese the head. If this comparison holds, it is certainly a mad head: Morea might be Moria—“folly.” And, to say what I think, the inhabitants of modern Greece depart as far from reason and true religion today as Morea departs from the shape of a man.

Examine the rest in the same way and you will find that kingdoms and provinces are melancholy, as are cities and families, and all living things—plants, creatures with sensation, and rational beings. Every class, sect, age, and condition is out of tune. As in the Tablet of Cebes, “everyone drinks error” before entering the world: they are intoxicated by error’s cup, and all, from highest to lowest, need medicine. Those particular cases in Seneca, where father and son each prove the other mad, may apply to everyone: Porcius Latro will plead against us all.

For who, indeed, is not foolish, melancholy, or mad? “Who undertakes nothing foolishly?” Who is not sick in the mind? Folly, melancholy, and madness are only one disease: “delirium” is a name common to them all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savonarola, Guianerius, and Montaltus treat them together as differing “in degree.” So does David, Psalm 37:5: “I said to the fools, do not act so madly.” And it was an old Stoic paradox that “all fools are mad”—all fools are mad, though some are madder than others.

And who is not a fool? Who is free from melancholy? Who is not affected by it, more or less, as an established condition or a passing disposition? If it is a disposition, bad dispositions become habits when they persist, says Plutarch; habits either are diseases or turn into them. Cicero maintains the same thing in the second book of his Tusculan Disputations: “The minds of all the unwise, and of all the disturbed, are diseased.” Fools are sick, and so is everyone troubled in mind;

for what is sickness but, as Gregorius of Toulouse defines it, a breaking or disturbing of the bodily alliance that health holds together? And who is not sick or unwell? In whom do passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear, and sorrow not rule? Who does not suffer from this disease? Give me a little time and you will see the evidence, admissions, and arguments by which I shall prove that most people are mad. They need to make a pilgrimage to the Anticyras—as people did in Strabo’s time—as much as people now hurry to Compostela, Our Lady of Sichem, or Loreto for help. The voyage is likely to be as successful as the voyage to Guiana; and there is far more need for hellebore than for tobacco.

To show that people are so disordered, melancholy, mad, and giddy-headed, hear Solomon’s testimony, Ecclesiastes 2:12: “And I turned to consider wisdom, madness, and folly,” and so on. And verse 23: “All his days are sorrow, his labour grief, and his heart takes no rest at night.” So take melancholy in whatever sense you like—strictly or loosely, as a disposition or an established condition, involving pleasure or pain, delusion, discontent, fear, sorrow, or madness; for part of this or all of it, literally or metaphorically—it comes to the same thing. Laughter itself is madness, according to Solomon; and, as Saint Paul says, “Worldly sorrow brings death.” “Human hearts are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live,” Ecclesiastes 9:3.

Wise people themselves are no better: Ecclesiastes 1:18, “In much wisdom there is much grief, and whoever increases wisdom increases sorrow.” Chapter 2:17: he hated life itself; nothing pleased him; he hated his labour. Everything, he concludes, is sorrow, grief, emptiness, and vexation of spirit. And although he was the wisest man in the world, “a sanctuary of wisdom,” possessing wisdom in abundance, he will not defend himself or justify his own actions. “Surely I am more foolish than anyone, and I do not have a human being’s understanding,” Proverbs 30:2. Whether these are Solomon’s words or those of Agur son of Jakeh, they belong to the canon of Scripture.