they prescribe times and foods, buy and sell their merits, give them greater weight than the Ten Commandments, and count eating meat in Lent a greater sin than killing a man. As someone says, “They care more for a roast fish than for Christ crucified, more for salmon than for Solomon: Christ is in their mouths, Epicurus in their hearts.” When some pretend, and others credit these works of theirs with more than Christ’s death and passion, the Devil gets a foothold, strangely deceives them, and so makes them overturn the balance of their bodies and endanger their souls.

There have never been any strange demonic illusions among hermits or anchorites, any visions, phantoms, apparitions, states of inspiration, prophets or revelations, without excessive fasting, bad diet, sickness, melancholy, solitude or some such thing as their preceding causes, forerunners or companions. These give the Devil his best opportunity and very occasion to deceive them. Marcilius Cognatus, book 1, cont., chapter 7, has many stories to this effect, about people seduced by devils after long fasting;

and it is astonishing to relate, as Cardano writes, what strange effects arise from fasting: dreams, superstition, contempt for torments, a desire for death, prophecies, paradoxes, madness. Fasting naturally prepares people for these things. Monks, anchorites and the like, after prolonged emptiness, become melancholic and dizzy. They think they hear strange noises and speak with hobgoblins and devils; they shrivel their bodies; “and while we pursue the enemy,” says Gregory, “we slaughter the fellow citizen we love.” They become bare skeletons, skin and bones: “Abstaining from flesh, they devour their own flesh, until nothing remains but skin and bones.”

Hilarion, as Jerome reports in his life, and as Athanasius reports of Antony, was so wasted by fasting that his skin scarcely clung to his bones. For lack of vapours he could not sleep, and for lack of sleep his mind became disordered. Every night he heard infants crying, oxen lowing, wolves howling, lions roaring—or so he thought—chains clattering, strange voices and similar demonic illusions.

Such symptoms are common in those who fast for long periods, live alone, and give themselves to contemplation—to excessive solitude and meditation. Not that these things, as I said of fasting, deserve blame in themselves: in some cases they are beneficial and good. Temperance and contemplation unite our souls with God, as even the pagan Porphyry can tell us. Ecstasy is a taste of future happiness, through which we are united with God, a divine melancholy, a spiritual wing, as Bonaventure calls it, to lift us to heaven. But when abused it is sheer delusion and madness, a cause and symptom of religious melancholy.

If at any time you see, says Guaineri, a member of a religious order who is excessively superstitious, too solitary or much given to fasting, that person will certainly become melancholic: you may boldly say it; he will. Pieter van Foreest says almost the same thing, and Cardano, On Subtlety, book 18, and On the Variety of Things, book 8, chapter 40, says that solitude, fasting and the melancholic humour cause all hermits’ illusions.

Lavater, On Spectres, part 1, chapter 19, and part 1, chapter 10, makes solitude a principal cause of such spectres and apparitions. No one, he says, is so melancholic as monks and hermits; melancholy is the Devil’s bath. No one is so subject to visions and delusions of this kind as those who lead solitary lives: in their delusion they hear and do strange things.

Polydore Vergil, On Prodigies, book 2, holds that those prophecies, monks’ revelations and nuns’ dreams that they suppose come from God proceed wholly “from the prompting of demons,” by the Devil’s means. So too with those enthusiasts, Anabaptists and false prophets: the cause is the same.

Fracastoro, On Understanding, book 2, maintains that all your prophetic women, sibyls and false prophets are merely melancholic. Weyer likewise argues, in book 1, chapter 8, and book 3, chapter 7, as does Arcolani on book 9 of Rhazes, that melancholy is a sufficient cause, together with the Devil, fasting and solitude, of such Sibylline prophecies—if such prophecies ever existed, which, with Casaubon and others, I have good grounds for questioning.

For it is unlikely that the Spirit of God would ever disclose such clear revelations and predictions of Christ to those prophetesses, witches, Apollo’s priests, the Devil’s ministers—they were no better—and conceal them from his own prophets. Yet these sibyls set out every particular circumstance of Christ’s coming and many other future events far more clearly and plainly than any prophet ever did.

But even if there are no prophetesses of Apollo or sibyls, I am certain there are other enthusiasts, prophets, oracular gods, magicians and so on. Read Jean-Jacques Boissard about them: he has recently and laboriously gathered them into a large volume, with fine pictures and summaries of their lives. They have existed in every age, always arising from those causes: “They recount their visions, dream of future events, prophesy, and, driven by delusions of this kind, think that the Holy Spirit is imparted to them.”

What is written about Saint Francis’s five wounds, and other such monastic experiences of his and of others, may reasonably be attributed to this melancholy of ours. So may what Matthew Paris relates about the monk of Evesham, who saw heaven and hell in a vision, and about Sir Owen, who went down into Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in King Stephen’s days and saw as much; and what Walsingham tells of the man to whom Saint Julian showed as much.