The Anatomy of Melancholy

So Eusebius informs us in chapter 48 of his book Against the Philosophers, on Xenophanes’ authority; or they are little clouds, “flying with some movement I cannot explain.” They never appear, says Cardano, without signifying that some harm or other is coming to people; though others hold that they portend good, and victory for the side towards which they move in sea battles.

They are commonly called Saint Elmo’s fires and usually appear after a storm at sea. The Polish duke Radziwiłł calls this apparition “Saint Germanus’ star,” and adds that he afterwards saw the same thing in a storm while sailing from Alexandria to Rhodes in 1582.

Our histories are full of such apparitions of every kind. Some think these spirits have their homes in Hekla, a mountain in Iceland, in Etna in Sicily, Lipari, Vesuvius and so on. These devils were formerly worshipped through that superstitious practice of divination by fire, and the like.

Spirits or devils of the air are those that lodge chiefly in the air. They cause many tempests, thunder and lightning, split oaks, set steeples and houses on fire, strike people and animals, and make it rain stones—as in Livy’s time—wool, frogs, and so on.

They produce phantom armies in the air, strange noises, swords, and the like—as at Vienna before the Turks came, and often at Rome. Scheretzius, On Apparitions, part 1, chapter 1; Lavater, On Apparitions, part 1, chapter 17; Julius Obsequens, an ancient Roman, in his Book of Prodigies, under the year 505 from Rome’s foundation; and Machiavelli supply many examples. So does Josephus in The Jewish War, describing the time before Jerusalem’s destruction.

Guillaume Postel uses all this in On the Harmony of the World, book 1, chapter 7, as an effective argument—as indeed it is—to convince those who refuse to believe that spirits or devils exist. These beings cause sudden whirlwinds and violent storms. Though our writers on atmospheric phenomena generally attribute these to natural causes, I agree with Bodin, Theatre of Nature, book 2, that they are more often caused by these devils of the air in their respective regions.

For “they thrust themselves into storms,” says Richard Argentine—for instance, when a desperate person takes his own life, as people often do by hanging or drowning. Then, as Kornmann observes in Wonders of the Dead, part 7, chapter 76, the devils “dance in triumph,” dancing and rejoicing at a sinner’s death.

They can corrupt the air and cause plagues, sickness, storms, shipwrecks, fires and floods. Jovianus Pontanus records a most memorable example at Mons Draconis in Italy. And nothing is more common—if we may believe the accounts of Saxo Grammaticus, Olaus Magnus and Damião de Góis—than for witches and sorcerers in Lapland, Lithuania and throughout Scandinavia to sell winds to mariners and raise storms. Marco Polo the Venetian tells the same story of the Tartars.

This kind of devil takes great delight in sacrifices, says Porphyry. They held the whole world in awe and had different names, idols and sacrifices in Rome, Greece and Egypt. They still tyrannize over and deceive those pagans and Indians, who adore and worship them as gods.