The Anatomy of Melancholy

Beneath the equator itself, among the Sierras, Andes, and Lanes, as Herrera, de Laet, and Acosta maintain, there is “such wonderful and unexpected variety,” such variety of weather, “as well deserves to exercise our minds”: no philosophy can yet discover its true cause.

“When I consider,” says Acosta, “how temperate it is in one place within the Tropic of Capricorn, as around La Plata, and yet how extremely cold nearby Potosí is, at the same latitude and equally mountainous; and how extremely hot Brazil is,” and so on. “Here,” Acosta says, “I heartily laughed at Aristotle’s meteorological philosophy, when,” and so on. When the sun comes nearest to them, they have great tempests, storms, thunder and lightning, abundant rain and snow, and the foulest weather. When the sun is directly overhead, their rivers overflow; the morning is fine and hot, midday cold and wet—all the opposite of our experience. How does this happen?

Scaliger discusses the subject in this way in book 3, chapter 16 of his Poetics. How does this “haphazard arrangement of the stars” come about, this rash placing of stars—or, as Epicurus would have it, “fortuitous,” or accidental? Why are some large and others small? Why are they placed so confusedly and unevenly in the heavens, so much out of order?

In everything else Nature is even, proportionate, and consistent: there are “proper dimensions and a wise arrangement of parts,” as in the structure of a human being, whose eyes, ears, nose, face, and limbs correspond. “Why is it not the same with heaven, the most beautiful work of all?” Why are the heavens so irregular, “with neither equal masses nor equal intervals”? Where does this difference come from?

“To produce different spirits of places,” he concludes: to create among us differences of countries, soils, manners, customs, characters, and constitutions, “so that whatever nearness contributes to affection, the stars may pull apart towards destruction.” Thus, by these means, “people separated by a river or mountain are unlike”: places almost identical will differ in their manners. But this explanation is weak and wholly inadequate.

Since Ptolemy’s time, the fixed stars have shifted twenty-six degrees from the beginning of Aries. If the earth is immovable, countries should change as the stars’ positions change, and various alterations should follow. Yet we see no such thing. As in Cicero’s time, so still in our Britain: “the sky is foul to look at, and clouds form readily in it,” and so on.

Therefore Bodin, in book 2 of his Theatre of Nature, and some others maintain that all these changes and effects proceed directly from the genii, spirits, or angels that rule and hold sway in different places. They cause storms, thunder, lightning, earthquakes, destruction, tempests, great winds, floods, and so on. The philosophers of Coimbra attribute this diversity to the influence of the Empyrean heaven. Some say that the sun’s eccentric path has come nearer to the earth than in Ptolemy’s time, and that consequently the power of all plants has declined, people grow smaller, and so on.