Yet it is natural for one animal to dote on another of its own kind. What strange madness is it when an animal dotes on a human being? Saxo Grammaticus, in his Danish History, book 10, tells of a bear that loved a woman, kept her in his den for a long time and fathered a son by her, from whom many northern kings descended. This, perhaps, is the origin of the familiar tale of Valentine and Orson.

Aelian, Pliny and Pierre Gilles are full of such accounts. A peacock in Leucadia loved a girl, and when she died, the peacock wasted away. “A dolphin loved a boy called Hernias; when he died, the fish came ashore and perished.”

Aulus Gellius adds a similar story, book 10, chapter 22, from Apion’s Egyptian History, book 15. A dolphin at Puteoli loved a child, often came to him, let him climb onto its back and carried him about; “when illness took the child away, the dolphin died.”

“Every book is full of such examples,” says Busbecq, who was recently the emperor’s ambassador to the Grand Seignior, in the third of his Turkish Letters. “I was always afraid to believe them, lest I be thought to put faith in fables, until I saw a lynx I had from Assyria so attached to one of my men that there could be no denying it was in love with him.”

“When my man was present, the animal would make many striking attempts to entice him, with playful movements. When he was leaving, it would hold him back, and after he had gone, gaze after him. It was very sad in his absence, but delighted when he returned. When my man left my service, the animal expressed its love through continual sickness, and after wasting away for a few days, died.”

He has another such story of a crane from Majorca that loved a Spaniard. She would walk anywhere with him, look for him in his absence, call out so that he might hear her and knock at his door. “When he said his last farewell, she starved herself.” Such curious tricks can love play on birds, fish and beasts.

Venus holds the keys of heaven’s air, the sea and earth; She alone has dominion over them all.

And, if all that is credibly reported is true, love plays these tricks on the spirits of the air and the devils of hell themselves. They are as enamoured, and dote as much—if I may use that word—as any other creatures. For if the written accounts of incubi and succubi, nymphs, lustful fauns and satyrs, and those pagan gods who were devils, are true; or those of the lustful Telchines, about whom the Platonists tell so many tales; or those familiar meetings and intercourse between witches and devils in our own day: then there is some probability in it.

I know that Biarmannus, Weyer in book 3, chapters 19 and 24, and others firmly deny that the devil has any sexual intercourse with women. They maintain that the devil takes no pleasure in such acts, that they are mere fantasies, and that all such accounts of incubi and succubi are lies and fables.

But Augustine, in The City of God, book 15, acknowledges it; so do Erastus in On Witches, Jacob Sprenger and his colleagues, Zanchi in On the Works of God, book 4, chapter 16, Dandini’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, book 2, text 29, comment 30, Bodin, book 2, chapter 7, and Paracelsus, a leading defender of this opinion. They offer particular instances and demonstrate it through many testimonies, proofs and confessions.

Hector Boece, in his Scottish History, gives three or four such examples, repeated in confirmation by Cardano, book 16, chapter 43: people who had intimate company for many years with these beings, appearing in the form of men and women.

Philostratus, in the fourth book of his Life of Apollonius, gives a memorable example of this kind that I must not omit. A young man of twenty-five, Menippus of Lycia, was travelling between Cenchreae and Corinth when he met such a phantom in the form of a beautiful gentlewoman. She took his hand and led him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, saying that she was Phoenician by birth.

If he would stay with her, “he would hear her sing and play, drink wine such as no one had ever drunk, and no man would trouble him. Beautiful and lovely as she was, she would live and die with him, who was himself so beautiful and lovely to behold.”

The young man was a philosopher, otherwise steady and judicious, able to control his passions—though not this passion of love. He stayed with her for a while in great contentment and eventually married her. Among the wedding guests came Apollonius, who, from certain plausible indications, discovered that she was a serpent, a lamia, and that all her furnishings were like Tantalus’s gold as described by Homer: without substance, mere illusions.

When she saw that she had been discovered, she wept and asked Apollonius to be silent. But he would not yield; whereupon she, her silverware, her house and everything in it vanished in an instant. “Many thousands knew of this event, for it happened in the midst of Greece.”

Sabinus, in his commentary on book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, at the story of Orpheus, tells of a gentleman of Bavaria who mourned the loss of his dear wife for many months. At last the devil came in her form and comforted him, saying that, because he was so insistent in longing for her, she would return and live with him again, provided he married her anew and never swore or blasphemed as he had formerly done. If he did, she would leave.

“He made the vow, married her and lived with her. She bore him children and managed his household, but remained pale and sad. This continued until one day, during a quarrel, he began to swear. She immediately vanished and was never seen again.” “I have heard this,” says Sabinus, “from people of good repute, who told me that the Duke of Bavaria related it to the Duke of Saxony as a certain fact.”