Member 2. Subsection 1. Causes of heroic love: bodily temperament, plentiful diet, idleness, place, climate, and so forth.

Of all the causes, the most remote are the stars. Ficino, chapter 19, says that those most prone to this burning lust are people who have Venus in Leo in their horoscope, when the Moon and Venus are in mutual aspect, or who have a temperament governed by Venus.

Plutarch interprets the story of Mars and Venus astrologically: “Those in whose birth charts Mars and Venus are in conjunction are commonly lustful; and if they are women, whores”—as Chaucer’s good Wife of Bath confessed:

I always followed my inclination, Under the influence of my birth constellation.

But of all the astrological aphorisms I have ever read, Cardan’s is the most memorable. However bitterly Marinus Mersenne, an impudent friar, and some others condemn him for it—as he himself anticipated—it seems to me frank, straightforward, plain and candid.

In his eighth birth chart, or example, he says this about himself: “Mars, Venus and Mercury in Mercury’s dignities will give me constant thoughts of sexual matters, so that I shall never have any rest.” And a little later: “Thoughts of sexual matters torment me continually; and the pleasure I was unable to fulfil in action, or was ashamed to act on when I could, I have counterfeited through constant thought.”

And elsewhere: “Because of the dominion of the Moon and Mercury, and the mingling of their rays, my intellect was profound but lustful, and I was given to shameful desire and obscenity.” So much for Cardan’s account of himself, “which he confesses about himself in order to benefit students of this discipline.”

For this Mersenne maligns him, although in effect he says no more than Gregory of Nazianzus long ago said to his pupil Chilo: “Women presented themselves to my sight, whose outstanding elegance and visible beauty put the integrity of my chastity to the test. I did indeed avoid the disgrace of fornication, but I stained the flower of virginal purity with the secret thoughts of my heart.”

But to the point. Those at whose birth Venus is in a masculine sign and in Saturn’s terms or in opposition to him are more inclined to sexual relations with males, and so forth. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos contains many detailed aphorisms on these matters, undoubtedly confirmed by long practice and perfected through much experience, says his commentator Cardan.

Tommaso Campanella, in his Astrology, book 4, chapter 8, articles 4 and 5, amasses more aphorisms than most on the signs of lovesickness: anyone who wishes may consult them. Palm readers generally draw their conclusions from the girdle of Venus and the mount of Venus; for their judgements, consult Taisnier, Johann von Indagine, Goclenius and the others, if you like.

Physicians make their predictions entirely from bodily temperament and constitution. According to Ficino’s Commentary, chapter 9, phlegmatic people are seldom affected, and those naturally melancholic still less; but once caught, they are never freed. Many, however, believe that people with flatulent or hypochondriacal melancholy are more subject than anyone else to this affliction.

Valescus gives their powerful imagination as the cause; Bodin, an abundance of wind; Gordon, an abundance of semen and spirits, or atoms in the semen, which produce their violent and furious passions. People of a sanguine temperament, then, are soon caught; the young are most inclined to love and, if they had their way, says Lucian, “would have a bout with everyone they see.” The colt’s complaint is common to every constitution.

Theomestus, a vigorous young gallant in the same author, admits that all this is true of him: “I am so amorously disposed that you could sooner count the sands of the sea and the snow falling from the sky than my different loves. Cupid has shot all his arrows at me. I am beguiled by different desires: one love follows another so quickly that, before one is over, I begin a second. The latest is always the fairest, and the woman before me pleases me most.

“My loves multiply like the heads of the Hydra; no Iolaus can help me. My eyes are so moist a refuge and sanctuary of love that they draw every beauty to them and are never satisfied. I wonder what wrath of Venus this can be. Alas, how have I offended her, that she torments me so? What Hippolytus am I? What Telchin is my guardian spirit? Or is this a natural defect, an inherited passion?”

Another speaker in Anacreon confesses that he had twenty sweethearts in Athens at once, fifteen at Corinth, as many at Thebes, Lesbos and Rhodes, twice as many in Ionia, three times as many in Caria—twenty thousand in all. Or, in a word, “If all the leaves,” and so forth:

If you know how to number All the leaves of all the trees, Or count all the sands Within the sea, You alone will I appoint Accountant of my loves.

Can you count the leaves in May, Or the sands in the ocean? Then count my loves, I pray.

His eyes are like a balance, ready to tip either way and to be weighed down by every girl’s looks; his heart is a weathercock; his affection is tinder, or naphtha itself, which every beautiful sight, sweet smile or favour from a mistress sets alight.

Guaineri, treatise 15, chapter 14, attributes all this “to the hot temperament of the testicles”; Ferrand, a Frenchman, in his Erotic Melancholy—a book that first came into my hands after the third edition—to certain atoms in the semen, in people “who produce much semen and are full of it.” I find the same in Aristotle, section 4, problem 17: “If semen is not discharged, erections cannot cease,” as his commentator Guastavini translates it. This is why these sturdy, vigorous young men are so subject to it.

Ercole Sassonia says substantially the same. But generally, I say, those most inclined to love are the young and vigorous, living at ease, stall-fed and free from care, like cattle in a lush pasture; idle and solitary people must inevitably “go into heat like goats,” as Guastavini quotes from Censorinus.