The Anatomy of Melancholy

Bernardus Penotus maintains that heresy and superstition spring from this source: as a person falsely imagines, so he believes; as he conceives a thing, so it must be and shall be—“against the whole world,” he insists on it. But imagination shows its strange and unmistakable effects most especially in passions and emotions. What will a frightened person not imagine in the dark? What strange shapes of bogeys, devils, witches and goblins! Lavater makes fear the chief cause of spectres and similar apparitions. Above all other passions, fear produces the strongest imagination, says Weyer; so too do love, sorrow, joy and the rest.

Some die suddenly, like the woman who saw her son return from the battle of Cannae. The patriarch Jacob, through the force of imagination, produced speckled lambs by laying speckled rods before his sheep. Persinna, the Ethiopian queen in Heliodorus, looked at a picture of Perseus and Andromeda and gave birth to a beautiful white child instead of a black one.

Perhaps in imitation of her, an ugly fellow in Greece, since both he and his wife were ill formed, sought to beget a handsome family: “he placed the most beautiful pictures in his bedchamber,” and so on. He hung the finest pictures money could buy in his room so that his wife, frequently seeing them, might conceive and bear children like them. And if we may believe Bale, one of Pope Nicholas III’s concubines gave birth to a monster after seeing a bear.

If a woman, says Lemnius, thinks of another man, present or absent, at the time of conception, her child will resemble him. Pregnant women with cravings give us extraordinary examples of this kind: moles, warts, scars, cleft lips and monstrous births, caused in their children especially by the force of their own disordered imagination. “She impresses upon the foetus the very form she pictures in her mind”: she stamps upon her child the image she conceives within herself.

And therefore Luis Vives, in On the Christian Woman, book 2, particularly warns pregnant women not to admit such absurd fancies and thoughts, but by every means to avoid those horrible things heard or seen, or filthy spectacles. Some people laugh, weep, sigh, groan, blush, tremble or sweat at things suggested to them by their imagination.

Avicenna speaks of someone who could bring on paralysis whenever he wished; and some can imitate the sounds of birds and beasts so closely that the difference can scarcely be detected. Agrippa supposes that Dagebertus’s and St Francis’s scars and wounds, resembling Christ’s—if indeed there ever were any such—arose through the force of imagination. To the same imagination he attributes people’s transformation into wolves, from men into women and women back into men, which is firmly believed, or from men into asses, dogs or any other shapes.