The Anatomy of Melancholy

Those governed by Mercury are solitary, much given to contemplation, subtle, poets and philosophers, and spend most of their time pondering such matters. If the Moon has a hand, they are all for journeys and sea voyages, greatly taken with travel and with discussing, reading and thinking about such things; wandering in their thoughts, changeable, greatly delighting in water, fishing, fowling and the like.

But the most immediate symptoms arise from the constitution itself and the organs—the head, liver, spleen, mesenteric veins, heart, womb, stomach and so on—and especially from a disordered balance of the spirits, which Hercules de Saxonia maintains are wholly immaterial; or from the four humours in those locations, whether hot or cold, natural or unnatural, innate or acquired, intensified or diminished, unmixed or mixed.

Their various mixtures, additions and combinations may vary as widely as those four primary qualities in Clavius, and produce as many different symptoms and monstrous imaginings as wine produces effects—which, as Andreas Bachius observes in On Wine, book 3, chapter 20, are infinite. The more notable are these.

If it is natural melancholy, as Lodovicus Mercatus in On Melancholy, book 1, chapter 17, and Timothy Bright, chapter 16, have described at length, whether in the spleen or the veins, defective through excessive quantity or thickness of substance, it is a cold and dry humour, as Montanus affirms in consultation 26. Those affected are sad, timid and fearful. Prosper Calenus, in his book On Black Bile, considers them more stupefied than usual, cold, heavy, dull, solitary and sluggish, “if they have much black and cold bile.” Hercules de Saxonia, chapter 19, book 7, holds that those who are naturally melancholic have a leaden or dark complexion; so does Guianerius, chapter 3, treatise 15. When it is excessive, they often think themselves dead, or frequently imagine that they see and speak with black men, dead people, spirits and goblins.

These symptoms vary according to the mixture of the four scorched humours, which constitutes unnatural melancholy. For, as Trallianus writes in chapter 16, book 7, there is no single cause of this melancholy, nor one humour that produces it, but several, variously intermixed, from which this variety of symptoms arises. And these vary again according to whether they are hot or cold. Cold melancholy, says Benedictus Victorius Faventinus in his Great Practice, causes mental derangement and milder symptoms; if hot or more thoroughly scorched, it causes more violent passions and frenzies.

Fracastorius, in On the Intellect, book 2, would have us consider carefully what kind of melancholy troubles each person, for it is very useful to know: one is enraged by burning heat, another possessed by sadness and cold; one is fearful and bashful, the other shameless and bold. Like Ajax: “He snatches up his weapons and, raging, challenges the gods to battle”—quite mad, or tending towards madness: “Now he attacks these, now those.” Bellerophon, on the other hand, “wanders deranged in lonely fields”: he wanders alone in the woods. One despairs, weeps and is weary of life; another laughs, and so on.