The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 2. The power of imagination.

I have sufficiently explained what imagination is in my Digression on the Anatomy of the Soul. Now I will only point to its extraordinary effects and power. Prominent in everyone, it rages most fiercely in melancholy people, retaining the mental images of objects for so long, misconceiving and magnifying them through continual, intense meditation, until at last it produces real effects in some people, causing this and many other illnesses.

Although this imagination of ours is a faculty subordinate to reason and should be governed by it, in many people it too becomes unfit, obstructed and damaged through internal or external disorders, or defects in its organs, which are unfit, obstructed or otherwise impaired.

We see this confirmed in sleepers, who often imagine absurd and monstrous things because humours and a gathering of vapours trouble their imagination. So too those troubled by incubus, or “witch-ridden,” as we call it: if they lie on their backs, they suppose that an old woman rides them, sitting so heavily on them that they are almost suffocated for lack of breath, when nothing is harming them except a gathering of bad humours disturbing their imagination.

This is also evident in those who walk at night in their sleep and perform strange feats. These vapours stir the imagination, the imagination stirs the appetite, and the appetite, moving the animal spirits, causes the body to walk about as though awake. Fracastoro, in On the Intellect, book 3, attributes all trances to this power of imagination: people who lie entranced for whole days together, for example, or that priest mentioned by Celsus who could withdraw from his senses whenever he wished and lie like a dead man, without life or sensation. Cardan boasts that he could do as much himself, whenever he pleased.

Often, when such people come to themselves, they tell strange things about heaven and hell and the visions they have seen: like Sir Owen in Matthew Paris, who entered St Patrick’s Purgatory, and the monk of Evesham in the same author. Those familiar apparitions in Bede and Gregory, St Bridget’s revelations, and all those tales of witches’ journeys, dancing, riding, transformations and operations, and so on, are attributed, as I have already said, to the power of imagination and the devil’s illusions by Weyer in On Witches, book 3, chapter 11, and Cesare Vanini in his Dialogues, among others.

Almost the same effects can be seen in those who are awake. How many chimeras, grotesques, golden mountains and castles in the air they build for themselves! I appeal to painters, makers of machines and mathematicians. Some attribute all vices—anger, revenge, lust, ambition and greed—to a false and corrupted imagination, which prefers falsehood to what is right and good, deceiving the soul with false appearances and suppositions.