The Anatomy of Melancholy

But these are utterly erroneous paradoxes, “foolish, fabulous nonsense,” rejected by our theologians and Christian churches. It is true that, with God’s permission, they have power over us, and experience shows that they can harm not only our fields, cattle and possessions, but also our bodies and minds. At Hamelin in Saxony, on 20 June 1484, the Devil, in the likeness of a piper in multicoloured clothes, carried away 130 children who were never seen again.

People are often frightened out of their wits, carried off altogether, as Scheretzius illustrates in book 1, chapter 4, and tormented in various ways through his agency. Plotinus the Platonist, in Against the Gnostics, book 14, laughs to scorn those who believe that the Devil or spirits can cause such diseases. Many think he can act upon the body but not the mind. Experience declares otherwise: he can act upon both body and mind.

Tertullian holds this opinion in chapter 22: he can cause both sickness and health, and do so secretly. Taurellus adds that by hidden poisons he can infect our bodies and obstruct the workings of our internal organs without our perceiving it, “stealthily creeping into them,” says Lipsius, and so torment our souls: “And by harmful melancholy he drives people mad.”

For, being a spiritual body, he struggles with our spirits, says Rogers, and suggests—as Cardan puts it—“words without a voice, images without sight,” envy, lust, anger, and so on, according to the inclinations he sees in people.

Biarmannus explains adequately how he does this in his Oration against Bodin: he begins with the imagination and stirs it so powerfully that reason cannot resist. He acts upon the imagination through the humours, although many physicians think the Devil can alter the mind and produce this disease by himself. “Some physicians have thought,” says Avicenna, “that melancholy arises from a demon.”

Psellus and Rhazes the Arab, in the Continens, book 1, treatise 9, share the opinion that this disease proceeds especially from the Devil, and from him alone. Arculanus, chapter 6 of his commentary on Rhazes’s ninth book; Elianus Montalto, chapter 9; and Daniel Sennert, book 1, part 2, chapter 11, likewise affirm that the Devil can cause this disease, because those affected often prophesy or speak unfamiliar languages.

But this is “not without the intervention of a humour,” as he himself explains; nor does Avicenna mean otherwise: “If it arises from a demon, it is enough for us that the demon changes the bodily constitution towards black bile, and that its immediate cause is black bile.” The immediate cause is burnt choler, a claim that Pomponazzi also labours to establish.

Galgerandus of Mantua, a famous physician, in this way cured a possessed woman of his time who spoke every language: he purged her black bile. Hence, presumably, this humour of melancholy is called “the Devil’s bath.” Seeing his opportunity in such humours, the Devil often drives people to despair, fury, rage, and so forth, mingling himself among these humours.