The Anatomy of Melancholy

protect themselves and their followers from every prince’s persecution by moving instantly from place to place; reveal secrets and future events; tell what is happening in distant countries; make those long dead appear; and perform many similar miracles, terrifying and astonishing the world and winning a reputation as gods. Yet the Devil abandons them in the end, and they come to evil ends. Such impostors are found “rarely or never.”

The ordinary sort can perform no such feats. But to return to my subject: lastly, they can cure and cause most diseases in those they love or hate, and melancholy among the rest. Paracelsus, On the Diseases of the Mentally Disturbed, volume 4, treatise 1, expressly affirms from his own experience: “Many are bewitched into melancholy”—many are driven into melancholy by witchcraft.

Daneau says the same in On Sorcerers, book 3: “I have seen people who brought on the most grievous melancholic diseases.” I have seen those who caused melancholy in its gravest form, dried up women’s breast milk, cured gout and palsy—these, together with apoplexy and epilepsy, which no medicine could relieve—“by touch alone.”

Ruland, in his third Hundred Cures, case 91, gives the example of a young man, David Helde, who ate cakes a witch had given him and “soon began to rave”: he suddenly lost his reason and immediately went mad. F. H. D., in Hildesheim, consulted about a melancholy man, thought the disease partly magical and partly natural, because the man vomited pieces of iron and lead and spoke languages he had never been taught. Such examples are common in Scribanius, Hercules of Saxony and others.

They usually work through charms; images, like that of King Duff in Hector Boece; signs stamped on various metals under particular constellations; knots, amulets, words, love potions, and so forth. These generally make the people affected melancholy, as Monavius explains at length in a letter to Acolsius, citing a Bohemian baron so afflicted after taking a love potion.

It is not that these spells, charms, signs and barbarous words have any power in themselves; the Devil uses such means to deceive them, “so that he may thereby keep magicians faithful in his service,” says Libanius, “and then draw them into a fellowship of evildoers.”