The Anatomy of Melancholy

Hearing, then, is deceived as often as sight, and by almost the same causes: someone listening to bells will make them sound whatever he pleases. “As the fool thinks, so the bell clinks.” Theophilus, in Galen, thought he heard music because vapours made his ears ring. Some are deceived by echoes, some by the roar of water, or by cavities and the reverberation of air in the ground, hollow places and walls. At Cadurcum in Aquitaine, a remarkable echo repeats words and sentences in full, or whatever you play on a musical instrument, more distinctly and loudly than they were first uttered.

Some echoes repeat something spoken seven times, as at Olympus in Macedonia, according to Pliny, book 36, chapter 15; some twelve times, as at Charenton, a village near Paris in France. At Delphi in Greece there was formerly a marvellous echo, and likewise in many other places. Cardan, On Subtlety, book 18, has remarkable stories of people deceived by these echoes. The Jesuit Blancanus, in his Echometry, has various examples and fully explains all such sounds to his reader by demonstration. At Barry, an island in the mouth of the Severn, people seem to hear a smith’s forge; likewise at Lipari and those sulphurous islands, and at many similar places mentioned by Olaus in the mainland of Scandinavia and those northern countries. Cardan, On the Variety of Things, book 15, chapter 84, mentions a woman, a painter’s wife in Milan, who constantly supposed she heard the devil calling and speaking to her; and many similar illusions and voices, which arise mostly from a disordered imagination.

I have briefly touched on how they come to prophesy, speak various languages, and discuss astronomy and other sciences unknown to them, of which they have always been ignorant. Here I will add only this: Arculanus, Bodin in his Demonomania, book 3, chapter 6, and some others regard it as a clear sign that such people are possessed by the devil. So do Hercules de Saxonia and Aponensis, and they consider them fit to be cured only by a priest.

But Guianerius, Montaltus, Pomponazzi of Padua, and Lemnius, book 2, chapter 2, ascribe it wholly to the disordered condition of the humour, citing Aristotle’s Problems 30.1, because such symptoms are cured by purging. Just as striking flint forces out fire, so violent movements of the spirits “draw forth unheard utterances”: they compel strange speeches to be spoken. Another argument he takes from “Plato’s recollection,” which is every bit as plausible as what Marsilio Ficino says of his friend Pierleone: by a kind of divine infusion he understood the secrets of nature and the doctrines of Greek and non-Greek philosophers before he had ever heard of, seen or read their works. But in this I would rather agree with Avicenna and his associates that such symptoms proceed from evil spirits, which take every opportunity afforded by corrupted humours, or otherwise, to pervert the human soul. Besides, the humour itself is “the devil’s bath”—the devil’s bath—and, as Agrippa proves, entices him to seize upon them.