Heliodorus, in book 3, argues at length that love is witchcraft: it enters through our eyes, pores and nostrils, and produces in us the same qualities and feelings as those of the person from whom it came. Ficino, in chapter 10 of his commentary on Plato, explains how this bewitchment works: “People are especially bewitched when, by repeatedly gazing at one another, they meet gaze with gaze and eye with eye, and so drink and draw love into themselves; for this disease begins in the eye. Consequently, someone with bright eyes, though otherwise misshapen, can drive another person mad by repeatedly looking at him, and bind him fast through the eye.”

Leonardus Varius, in On Fascination, book 1, chapter 2, tells us that through this exchange of looks “the purer spirits are infected.” One eye pierces the other with the rays it sends out. Many people have such remarkably penetrating eyes: as Suetonius relates of Augustus, their brightness makes those who look at them turn away, unable to bear them any more than the sun’s rays.

Barradius, in his Harmony of the Gospels, book 6, chapter 10, reports the same of our Saviour Christ, and Peter Morales of the Virgin Mary. Nicephorus likewise describes her as having yellow hair, a wheat-coloured complexion, and most lovely, penetrating eyes.

The rays sent out by the eyes, some think, carry certain vapours of the spirits with them, and thus infect the other person in an instant. I know that those who hold that “vision occurs by receiving something from outside” will question this; but Ficino proves it by inflamed eyes, “which make other people’s eyes inflamed through sight alone. It is more than evident that the vapour of corrupted blood enters together with the rays, and so the observer’s eyes are infected by contagion.”

Further arguments concern the basilisk, which kills from a distance by sight, as did that Ephesian of whom Philostratus speaks, whose eye was so deadly that he poisoned everyone he looked at steadily. Then there is that other argument from Aristotle’s Problems, concerning “menstruating women”—“diseased women,” Capivaccius adds, and Septalius the commentator—who taint a mirror by looking into it.

Thus the beams coming from the active person’s heart through the eyes infect the spirits surrounding the person affected, wound that person inwardly, and so the spirits infect the blood. To this effect the woman in Apuleius complained: “You are the cause of my suffering. Your eyes, piercing through mine into my innermost parts, have set my entrails on fire. Pity me, then, for I am now ready to die for your sake.”

Ficino illustrates this with the familiar example of Myrrhinusian Phaedrus and Lysias of Thebes. “Lysias stares at Phaedrus’s face, and Phaedrus fixes his eyes on Lysias, sending out his spirits with those sparkling rays. The beams from Phaedrus’s eyes readily mingle with those from Lysias’s, and spirits join with spirits. This vapour, generated in Phaedrus’s heart, enters Lysias’s entrails; and, more wonderfully still, Phaedrus’s blood is in Lysias’s heart. Hence those ordinary expressions of love: ‘Phaedrus, my sweetheart, my very self, my dear heart’; and Phaedrus in turn says to Lysias, ‘Oh, my light, my joy, my soul, my life.’”

“Phaedrus follows Lysias because his heart wants its spirits back, and Lysias follows Phaedrus because he loves the home of his spirits. Both pursue the other, but Lysias more eagerly: the river needs the spring more than the spring needs the river. Just as iron is drawn towards something touched by a magnet, without drawing it back in return, so Lysias draws Phaedrus.”

But how, then, does a blind man fall in love, if he has never seen? In the Lives of the Fathers we read of a child brought up from infancy in the wilderness by an old hermit. When he had grown to manhood, he happened to see two beautiful women wandering in the woods. He asked the old man what creatures they were; he told him, “Fairies.” Later, in passing conversation, the hermit asked him what was the most pleasing sight he had ever seen in his life. He promptly replied, “The two fairies I saw in the wilderness.”

So there is undoubtedly some hidden lodestone in a beautiful woman, a magnetic power, a natural, inborn affinity that stirs our desire; and, as the poet sings,

I think I have a mistress still to come; And still I seek, I love, I know not whom.

That is indeed true of natural and chaste love, but not of this heroic passion—or, rather, the brutish, burning lust we are discussing. We mean roving, wanton, adulterous eyes, which, as he says, “lie constantly in ambush like soldiers. When they see an innocent onlooker gazing at them, they shoot him through and bewitch him at once; especially when they gaze and stare amorously, as wanton lovers do at one another, sharing each other’s souls in a delightful encounter of eyes.”

From this you can see how easily and quickly we may be caught by love, since in the blink of an eye Phaedrus’s spirits may so dangerously infect Lysias’s blood. “Nor is this surprising, if we consider how many other diseases are caught imperceptibly and just as suddenly through infection: plague, itching, scabs, flux, and so on.” Once absorbed, the spirits will give the person who has received them no rest, but urge him on.

It seeks the body that wounded the mind with love;

And we can plainly perceive a strange drawing-out of spirits in those who bleed from the nose after death in the presence of their murderer. But read further in Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 2, chapter 7; Valleriola, Observations, book 2, chapter 7; Valesius’s Controversies; Ficino; Cardan; Libavius, On Bleeding Corpses; and so on.