The Anatomy of Melancholy

For human misery, calamity and ruin are the Devil’s banquet dishes. Through many temptations and various devices he seeks to enslave our souls. The lord of lies, says Augustine, himself deceived, seeks to deceive others. The ringleader of all wickedness, he would treat the whole world as he treated Eve and Cain, Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sometimes he tempts through greed, drunkenness, pleasure, pride, and so on; he leads astray, casts down, saves, kills, protects, and rides some people as they ride their horses. He plans our overthrow and seeks our destruction in every way.

Although he often professes to benefit humanity and claims to be a god by curing various diseases, “restoring health to the sick and sight to the blind,” as Augustine declares, City of God, book 10, chapter 6—as Apollo, Aesculapius and Isis did in ancient times—though he turns plagues aside, helps people in war and professes to promote their happiness, still “nothing is more impure or criminal, nothing more hostile to the human race”: nothing so impure, nothing so pernicious.

This is plain enough from their tyrannical and bloody human sacrifices to Saturn and Moloch, which are still practised among those barbarous Indians; from their various deceits and frauds to keep people obedient; their false oracles and sacrifices; their superstitious imposition of fasting, poverty, and the like; their heresies; and their superstitious observance of rules about foods and times.

By these means they crucify mortal souls, as will be shown in our treatise on religious melancholy. “He is permitted to do evil for a little while yet,” as Bernard puts it. By God’s permission he rages for a time, later to be confined to hell and darkness, “which is prepared for him and his angels,” Matthew 25.

How far their power extends is hard to determine. I will briefly show you what the ancients believed about their effects, strength and workings. Plato in the Critias, and his followers after him, declared that these spirits or devils were humanity’s rulers and guardians, our lords and masters, as we are of our cattle.

They govern provinces and kingdoms through oracles, omens, dreams, rewards and punishments, prophecies, inspirations, sacrifices and religious superstitions, which take as many forms as there are kinds of spirits. They send war, plague, peace, sickness, health, scarcity and plenty, “standing here beside us even now, watching and judging,” and so on.

This appears in the histories of Thucydides, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and in many others full of their astonishing stratagems. The Roman and Greek states therefore adored and worshipped them as gods, with prayers, sacrifices, and so forth. In a word, “They seek nothing more than human fear and wonder.” As another writer puts it, “Words cannot express the ungovernable passion with which evil spirits covet dominion over humanity and divine worship.”