The Anatomy of Melancholy

In the deserts of Lop in Asia, such apparitions of wandering spirits are often perceived, as you may read in the travels of Marco Polo the Venetian. If someone happens to lose his companions, these devils call him by name and imitate his companions’ voices to lead him astray.

Jeroni Pau, in his book on the mountains of Spain, tells of a great mountain in Cantabria where such apparitions may be seen. Lavater and Cicogna give a variety of examples of spirits and wandering devils of this kind.

Sometimes they sit beside the highway to make people fall and their horses stumble and shy as they ride—if you believe the account of that holy man Ketell in William of Newburgh. Ketell had received a special, divinely bestowed gift of seeing devils and “conversing fearlessly with spirits,” without harm. If a man curses or spurs his horse for stumbling, they rejoice heartily at it. They play many such pretty tricks.

Underground devils are as common as the rest and do as much harm. Olaus Magnus, book 6, chapter 19, distinguishes six kinds, some larger and some smaller. These, says Münster, are commonly seen around metal mines. Some are harmful; others do no harm. In many places miners consider the sight of them good luck, a sign of treasure and rich ore.

Georgius Agricola, in On Creatures Living Underground, chapter 37, identifies two especially notable kinds, which he calls Getuli and Cobali. Both dress like miners and often imitate their work. Their task, Pictorius and Paracelsus think, is to guard the treasure in the earth so that it is not all discovered at once.

Besides this, Cicogna asserts that they frequently cause those terrible earthquakes which often swallow up not only houses but entire islands and cities. He gives many instances in his third book, chapter 11.

The last kind inhabits the region around the earth’s centre, to torture the souls of the damned until Judgment Day. Some suppose that they enter and leave through places around Etna, Lipari, Mount Hekla in Iceland, Vesuvius, Tierra del Fuego, and the like, because many shrieks and fearful cries are continually heard thereabouts, and apparitions of dead people, ghosts and goblins commonly appear.

Thus the Devil reigns, and in a thousand different shapes, “like a roaring lion, continually seeks someone to devour,” 1 Peter 5. Through earth, sea, land and air he remains as yet unconfined. Some, however, hold that his proper dwelling is the air—all the space between us and the moon—for those spirits that transgressed least, and hell for the wickedest.

“Here they are held as if in prison until the end of the world, then to be thrust into a more dreadful place,” as Augustine holds in City of God, chapter 22; book 14, chapters 3 and 23. But wherever he may be, he rages while he can. To comfort himself with other people’s falls, as Lactantius thinks, he does all he can to bring them into the same pit of destruction as himself.