The Anatomy of Melancholy

Others suppose that the higher powers appoint them to watch over people from birth, and to protect or punish them as they see fit. The Romans call them good and evil guardian spirits. The Stoics call the good ones Heroes or Lares, and the bad ones Lemures or Larvae: governors of countries, people and cities, says Apuleius.

“They call gods those who, having lived justly and wisely as human beings, are afterwards generally acknowledged as divinities and honoured by people with temples and ceremonies: Osiris in Egypt, for example.” Capella calls them protecting spirits, who guard private individuals as well as princes.

Socrates had his Saturnine and fiery spirit, the best of all spirits, which raises the mind to lofty thoughts, as the Platonists supposed; Plotinus had his; and we Christians have our assisting angel, as Andrea Vittorelli, who writes extensively on this subject, the Jesuit Luis de la Cerda in his lengthy treatise On the Guardian Angel, Zanchi and some theologians believe. But Proclus refutes this absurd doctrine of Maximus of Tyre at length in his book On the Soul and the Daemon.

Psellus, a Christian and formerly tutor, according to Cuspinian, to Michael Parapinaces, emperor of the Greeks, was a close observer of the nature of devils. He holds that they are corporeal and have bodies made of air; that they are mortal, live and die—a view Martianus Capella also maintains, but which our Christian philosophers reject—and that they take nourishment and produce excrement.

They feel pain if injured or struck, a claim Cardano confirms and Scaliger rightly ridicules: “If they feed on air, why do they not fight for purer air?” and so on. If their bodies are cut apart, they join together again with astonishing speed.

Augustine, in On Genesis, book 3, and On Free Choice, supports a similar view: “Their bodies were changed by the fall into the inferior condition of denser air.” So do Jerome, in his commentary on chapter 3 of the Epistle to the Ephesians, Origen, Tertullian, Lactantius and many ancient Fathers of the Church: at their fall, their bodies were changed into a more airy and coarse substance.

Bodin, in book 4 of his Theatre of Nature, and David Crusius, in book 1, chapter 4 of his Hermetic Philosophy, offer several arguments to prove that angels and spirits have bodies: “Whatever is contained in a place is corporeal. But a spirit is contained in a place; therefore it is corporeal. If spirits have dimensions, they must be corporeal. But they do have dimensions; therefore they are corporeal. They are finite, and therefore have dimensions,” and so on.

Bodin goes further still. He holds that these disembodied souls, guardian spirits, angels and devils, and likewise the souls of the dead, if corporeal—as he strongly insists they are—must have some shape. That shape must be perfectly round, like the sun and moon, because this is the most perfect form: “It has no roughness, no indenting angles, no winding folds, no projections, but among perfect bodies is the most perfect.” He therefore concludes that all spirits are corporeal and round in their natural shapes.

Most writers on this subject regard it as credible that spirits can assume other bodies made of air and every kind of shape at will; appear in whatever likeness they choose; move with extraordinary speed and cover many miles in an instant; and likewise transform the bodies of others into any shape they please and move them from place to place with astonishing speed;