The Anatomy of Melancholy

A crowd of giddy heads presumes to determine how many in a parish will be saved and who will be damned, and where they will sit in heaven. They interpret apocalyptic visions—rash and dizzy commentators, someone rightly calls them—and apply those hidden mysteries to particular people, times and places, as their own spirit informs them or private revelations suggest. They set down exactly when the world will end: the year, the month, the day.

Others have such strong faith, so presumptuous, that they will enter plague-infected houses, cast out devils and fast forty days as Christ himself did. Some question God and his attributes, like Vorstius and Socinus; others question princes, civil magistrates and their authority, like the Anabaptists, and will do everything their own private spirit dictates, and nothing else.

Brownists, Barrowists, Familists and those Amsterdam sects and sectarians are all led by as many private spirits. The episodes Sleidan recounts in his Commentaries about Cretink, Knipperdolling and their associates, those madmen of Münster in Germany, are astonishing: their strange claims of divine inspiration, their foolish revelations, their absurd behaviour and the ways they deceived others.

And just as the irreligious Machiavelli argues in his political discussions that Christianity in general weakens and debilitates people, takes away their spirit and courage, makes them less worldly, and produces soldiers far less courageous than Roman religion did, so we may say of these particular sects that their religion takes away not only spirit but intelligence and judgment, and deprives them of understanding.

For some are so far carried away by their private inspirations and revelations that they are completely mad, out of their senses. What greater madness could there be than for a man to claim to be God, as some do, or the Holy Spirit, Elijah, or anything else? In Poland in 1518, in King Sigismund’s reign, a man said he was Christ, gathered twelve apostles, came to judge the world and extraordinarily deceived the common people.

Not many years ago a certain David George, an unlearned painter, did the same in Holland: he claimed to be the Messiah and had many followers. Benedictus Victorinus of Faenza, in consultation 15, writes similarly of a certain Honorius, who thought himself not only inspired as a prophet but a god himself, and believed that he conversed familiarly with God and his angels.

Lavater, On Apparitions, chapter 2, part 8, tells of a certain John Sartorius who thought he was the prophet Elijah; and in chapter 7, of several others who conversed with angels and were saints and prophets. Weyer, On Witches, book 3, chapter 7, mentions a prophet of Groningen who said he was God the Father, and an Italian and a Spanish prophet who made the same claim.