The Anatomy of Melancholy

Hence they grieve and fear, avoiding light, And shut themselves in a dark prison, out of sight.

Like Bellerophon in Homer,

“Who wandered wretched and grieving in shadowy woods, Devouring his own heart, shunning the paths of men.”

Who wandered sadly in the woods alone, Forsaking human company, lamenting greatly.

They delight in rivers and waters, deserted places, walking alone in orchards, gardens, secluded walks and back lanes, averse to company like Diogenes in his tub or Timon the Misanthrope. At last they abhor all companions, even their closest acquaintances and most intimate friends, for they imagine, I say, that everyone watches them and will mock, scorn or ill-treat them. They therefore confine themselves entirely to their own houses or rooms. “They flee people without a cause,” says Rhazes, “and hate them,” Continens, book 1, chapter 9: they will die by themselves, eat and live alone.

It was one of the chief reasons why the citizens of Abdera suspected Democritus of melancholy and madness: because, as Hippocrates related in his letter to Philopoemen, he left the city and lived in groves and hollow trees, on a green bank beside a brook or meeting of waters, all day and all night. “These things,” he says, “happen especially to those afflicted with black bile and melancholy: they frequent deserted places and shun human company.”

This is common among melancholic people. The Egyptians therefore, in their hieroglyphics, represented a melancholic person by a hare sitting in its form, as an exceedingly fearful and solitary creature: Pierius, Hieroglyphics, book 12. But this and all the preceding symptoms are more or less apparent as the humour is intensified or lessened: scarcely perceptible in some, or not at all, and most evident in others.

Childish in some, terrible in others; to be laughed at in one, pitied or wondered at in another; occurring in spells in one, continually in a second. And although these symptoms are common and may affect everyone, they are more conspicuous, frequent, furious and violent in melancholic people.

To put it in a word, there is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible or incredible, no chimera so monstrous, so prodigious and strange that painters and poets would not dare attempt it, which they will not truly fear, invent, suspect and imagine for themselves. And what Ludovicus Vives said in jest of a foolish countryman who killed his donkey for drinking up the moon, “so that he might restore the moon to the world,” you may truly say of them in earnest.

They will act out and conceive every extreme, opposition and contradiction, in endless varieties. “Melancholic people persuade themselves of utterly incredible things, so that in all the ages scarcely two have been found who imagined the same thing” (Erastus, On Witches): scarcely two in two thousand agree in the same symptoms.