The Anatomy of Melancholy

Yet it is natural for one animal to dote on another of its own kind. What strange madness is it when an animal dotes on a human being? Saxo Grammaticus, in his Danish History, book 10, tells of a bear that loved a woman, kept her in his den for a long time and fathered a son by her, from whom many northern kings descended. This, perhaps, is the origin of the familiar tale of Valentine and Orson.

Aelian, Pliny and Pierre Gilles are full of such accounts. A peacock in Leucadia loved a girl, and when she died, the peacock wasted away. “A dolphin loved a boy called Hernias; when he died, the fish came ashore and perished.”

Aulus Gellius adds a similar story, book 10, chapter 22, from Apion’s Egyptian History, book 15. A dolphin at Puteoli loved a child, often came to him, let him climb onto its back and carried him about; “when illness took the child away, the dolphin died.”

“Every book is full of such examples,” says Busbecq, who was recently the emperor’s ambassador to the Grand Seignior, in the third of his Turkish Letters. “I was always afraid to believe them, lest I be thought to put faith in fables, until I saw a lynx I had from Assyria so attached to one of my men that there could be no denying it was in love with him.”

“When my man was present, the animal would make many striking attempts to entice him, with playful movements. When he was leaving, it would hold him back, and after he had gone, gaze after him. It was very sad in his absence, but delighted when he returned. When my man left my service, the animal expressed its love through continual sickness, and after wasting away for a few days, died.”

He has another such story of a crane from Majorca that loved a Spaniard. She would walk anywhere with him, look for him in his absence, call out so that he might hear her and knock at his door. “When he said his last farewell, she starved herself.” Such curious tricks can love play on birds, fish and beasts.

Venus holds the keys of heaven’s air, the sea and earth; She alone has dominion over them all.

And, if all that is credibly reported is true, love plays these tricks on the spirits of the air and the devils of hell themselves. They are as enamoured, and dote as much—if I may use that word—as any other creatures. For if the written accounts of incubi and succubi, nymphs, lustful fauns and satyrs, and those pagan gods who were devils, are true; or those of the lustful Telchines, about whom the Platonists tell so many tales; or those familiar meetings and intercourse between witches and devils in our own day: then there is some probability in it.

I know that Biarmannus, Weyer in book 3, chapters 19 and 24, and others firmly deny that the devil has any sexual intercourse with women. They maintain that the devil takes no pleasure in such acts, that they are mere fantasies, and that all such accounts of incubi and succubi are lies and fables.