The Anatomy of Melancholy

I shall briefly include just one example. A German nobleman was sent as ambassador to the king of Sweden—for his name, the date and similar details, I refer you to Boissard, my source. When his business was finished, he sailed to Livonia expressly to see those familiar spirits that are said to associate with people there and do their menial work.

Among other things, one of them told him where his wife was, which room she was in, what she was wearing and what she was doing, and brought him a ring from her. On his return he found the account true, to everyone’s considerable astonishment; and from then on he believed what he had previously doubted.

Cardano, in book 19 of On Subtlety, relates that his father, Fazio Cardano, after performing the customary rites on 13 August 1491, summoned seven devils in Greek clothing. They appeared to him about forty years old, some ruddy in complexion and some pale. He asked them many questions, and they readily answered that they were spirits of the air, living and dying like humans, except that their lives were much longer—seven or eight hundred years.

They surpassed humans in rank as much as we surpass beasts of burden, and those above them surpassed them by the same degree. Moreover, they are our rulers and guardians, as Plato taught long ago in the Critias, and they are subordinate to one another: “Just as one human rules another, so one spirit rules another.” They govern their own kind as well as us.

The lower spirits commonly held the sorts of posts that we assign to grooms, cowherds and the lowest among us, setting them over our livestock. We can no more understand their natures and duties than a horse can understand a human’s. They knew everything but were not allowed to reveal it to people, and ruled and exercised authority over us as we do over our horses. Our best kings and noblest minds could not compare with the lowest of them.

Sometimes they taught people and shared their knowledge, rewarded and fostered them; at other times they frightened and punished them to keep them in awe, as they saw fit: “Desiring nothing more,” says Lipsius in his Philosophy of the Stoics, “than human worship.”

The same author, Cardano, drawing on Stoic teaching in his Hyperchen, maintains that some of these genii, as he calls them, desire human company and are very friendly and familiar with people, like dogs; others, like serpents, loathe people and want nothing to do with them. Presumably these are the same beings Trithemius calls “fiery and sublunary spirits, who never descend to the lower regions, or have scarcely any dealings on earth.”

Generally they far surpass humans in worth, as a human surpasses the humblest worm. Yet some are inferior in worth to others of their own kind, like the lowest servants in a prince’s court, and even inferior to humans, just as some degraded, base creatures endowed with reason are surpassed by beasts.

Besides these statements by Cardano, Martianus and others, many other theologians and philosophers hold that spirits are mortal: “After a long time they all die.” So do the Platonists and some rabbis, Porphyry and Plutarch, as appears from the story of Thamus: “The great god Pan is dead.” Pythian Apollo fell silent, and so did the others.

In his Life of Paul the Hermit, Saint Jerome tells how one of them appeared to Saint Antony in the wilderness and told him the same. Among our recent writers, Paracelsus firmly maintains that they are mortal, living and dying as other creatures do. Zosimus, in book 2, further adds that religion and government die and change with them.