The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 4 Love potions and magical and poetic cures

Where persuasion and other remedies have no effect, many turn to unlawful means: love potions, amulets, magical spells, bindings, signs and charms. As with a wound from Achilles’ spear, if the wound has been made and caused in that way, it must be cured in the same way.

If imposed by spells and love potions, says Paracelsus, it must be relieved by magical signs—Magic, book 2, chapter 28—and by incantations: Fernel, Pathology, book 6, chapter 13. Schenck, Medical Observations, book 4, has examples of cases brought about by magic and cured by magic and witchcraft. So too says Giovanni Battista Codronchi, On Venereal Diseases, book 3, chapter 9; The Hammer of Witches, chapter 6.

It is not permissible, I admit, yet it is often attempted. See further Weyer, On the Deceptions of Demons, book 3, chapter 18, on remedies through love potions; Delrio, Magical Investigations, volume 2, book 2, question 3, section 3. Cardano, book 16, chapter 90, lists many sympathetic remedies, such as pissing through a ring, etc. Mizaldus, third century, item 30; Giambattista della Porta; Jason Pratensis; Lobel, page 87; Mattioli, etc., prescribe many absurd remedies.

Mandrake root taken in a drink; rings made from an ass’s hooves; the beloved woman’s dung placed under the pillow without her knowledge, etc.: when he smells its foulness, his love dissolves.

An owl’s egg, eaten on the advice of Iarchas, the Indian naked philosopher in Philostratus, book 3, makes people abstain from wine. Drinking a mistress’s blood removes all feeling of love: Julius Capitolinus reports that Faustina, Marcus Aurelius’s wife, who was captivated by love for a gladiator, was completely freed from it in this way on the Chaldeans’ advice.

Some of our astrologers will accomplish as much through images bearing magical signs: “from the seals of Hermes, Solomon, Chael, etc.; an image of a woman with her hair loose,” etc.

Our old poets and imaginative writers have many fabulous remedies for the lovesick, such as the tomb of Protesilaus in Philostratus, in his dialogue between a Phoenician and a vinegrower. Taking the opportunity to discuss the shrine’s remarkable powers, the vinegrower tells him that the altar and tomb of Protesilaus cure almost every kind of disease: wasting illnesses, dropsy, quartan fevers and sore eyes; among the rest, the lovesick will find relief there.

But the most famous is Leucata Petra, that renowned rock in Greece of which Strabo writes in Geography, book 10, not far from Saint Maura, according to Sandys, book 1. If any lover threw himself headlong from that rock, he was instantly cured. After Adonis’s death, when Venus could find no rest for love,

When a maddening flame scorched her very marrow,