The Anatomy of Melancholy

Bede, book 5, chapters 13, 14, 15 and 20, and book 4, chapter 11, of his Ecclesiastical History, reports strange visions, including those of King Sæbbi; and Stumpf’s Swiss chronicle tells of a cobbler of Basel who saw extraordinary apparitions at Augsburg in Germany in 1520.

Alessandro d’Alessandro, Genial Days, book 6, chapter 21, tells of an inspired prisoner. All this is every bit as probable as the story of Eris Armenius in the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, who revived ten days after being killed in battle and told strange wonders, like the tales Ulysses told Alcinous in Homer, or Lucian’s True History itself. It always happened after prolonged solitude, fasting or long illness, when their brains were addled and their bellies as empty of food as their heads of sense.

Florilegus has many such examples: on folio 191, one of Saint Guthlac of Crowland fighting with devils, but always after long fasting and excessive solitude. The Devil therefore persuaded him to fast as Moses and Elijah did, the better to deceive him.

The same author records Charlemagne’s vision or ecstasy in the year 185, in which he saw heaven and hell after much fasting and meditation. So the Devil acted in former times with Apollo’s priests, Amphiaraus and his companions, and those Egyptians:

he always prescribed long fasting before he would give any oracles, “abstaining from food and wine for three days,” before they gave any answers, as Volateran records in book 13, chapter 4. Strabo, Geography, book 14, describes Charon’s cave, on the road between Tralles and Nissum, where priests led sick and frenzied people: but nothing could be accomplished without long fasting; no good could be done.

That scoffer Lucian takes his Menippus to the underworld under the direction of the Chaldean Mithrobarzanes, but only after long fasting and similar empty preparations.

The Jesuits, perceiving very well how powerfully this fasting and solitary meditation can alter people’s minds, when they wish to make a man mad, transport him and work him up beyond himself to undertake some great enterprise—kill a king or the like—bring him into a gloomy, dark chamber. There he will see no light for many days together, have no company and little food, with ghastly pictures of devils all around him;

and they leave him to lie as he pleases on the bare floor of this “chamber of meditation,” as they call it, on his back, side or belly, until this strange treatment makes him wholly mad and beside himself. Then, after some ten days, when they find him fired up and resolute, they make use of him. The Devil has many such agents, many such instruments. You will hear what effects they produce in the symptoms that follow.