The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some observe new motions of the heavens, new stars, “wandering stars,” comets, clouds—call them what you will—like those recently discovered Medicean, Bourbon, and Austrian planets. These do not perish, but come and go, rise higher and lower, hide and show themselves among the fixed stars and the planets, above and below the moon, at set times; now nearer, now farther away, together, apart. Just as a player on a sackbut changes his notes and tunes by pulling it up and down, so they change their positions and places, though we do not perceive it. From these movements, they believe, various changes proceed. Clavius conjectures otherwise, but they are only conjectures.

The country around Damascus in Coele-Syria is a Paradise because of the abundance of water: “the cause is plain.” The deserts of Arabia are barren because of rocks, rolling seas of sand, and dry mountains: “because the land is waterless,” says Adricomius, “with mountains rugged, rocky, precipitous, presenting an image of horror and death.” It is therefore uninhabitable by people, birds, and beasts, without green trees, plants, or fruits: a vast, rocky, dreadful wilderness that no skill can cultivate. This is evident. Bohemia is cold because it lies far to the north.

But why should Egypt be so hot, or never have rain? Why should those Etesian and north-easterly winds blow continually and steadily for so long in some places, at set times, always in one direction, only during the dog days? Why perpetual drought here and falling showers there; foggy mists here and pleasant air there; terrible thunder and lightning at particular seasons here; seas frozen all year here and open at the same latitude there, while elsewhere nothing like this occurs—indeed, quite the opposite?

Sometimes, as in Peru, it is hot on one side of the mountains and cold on the other; here snow, there wind, with countless similar differences. Fromondus, in his Meteors, would account for or explain all this by the sun’s motion. But when there are such differences between people on the same latitude, or in very nearby places, how can that position hold?

Who can explain this variety of atmospheric phenomena: that it should rain stones, frogs, mice, and so on? The rats they call lemmings in Norway are clearly observed by the inhabitants, as Münster writes, to descend and fall in certain filthy showers, and, like so many locusts, devour everything green.

Leo Africanus says much the same of locusts: around Fez in Barbary, countless swarms suddenly appear in their fields. The same calamity occurred at Arles in France in 1553: all their grass and crops were devoured, “to the great amazement and consternation of the inhabitants,” as Valleriola relates in book 1, observation 1 of his Medical Observations. “They suddenly darkened the sky,” and so on. He concludes that this could not come from natural causes; they cannot imagine where the creatures come from except heaven.