The Anatomy of Melancholy

I therefore advise them to read that section cautiously. “It speaks stones,” as Agrippa said of Occult Philosophy, “and readers should beware lest it knock their brains out with them.” The rest, I do not doubt, they may read safely and to their benefit. But I have gone on too long. I shall proceed.

If anyone doubts what I have said about the need for this work and the extent of its subject, I ask him to take a brief survey of the world, as Cyprian advises Donatus: imagine yourself carried to the top of a high mountain, and from there look at the disturbances and accidents of this unstable world; you cannot help either laughing at it or pitying it. While in the wilderness, Saint Jerome imagined so vividly that he thought he could see people dancing in Rome;

and whether you picture the view or climb up to see it, you will soon perceive that the whole world is mad, melancholy, and deluded. It is shaped like a fool’s head—as Epichthonius Cosmopolites showed some years ago in a map bearing the motto “A head deserving hellebore”—a deranged head, “a cage of fools,” a fool’s paradise; or, as Apollonius calls it, a common prison of dupes, cheats, flatterers, and so on. It needs reform.

In the ninth book of his Geography, Strabo compares Greece to the outline of a man, a comparison Nicolaus Gerbelius approves in his explanation of Sophianus’s map. The chest stretches from the Acroceraunian Mountains in Epirus to Cape Sunium in Attica; Pagae and Megara are the two shoulders, the Isthmus of Corinth the neck, and the Peloponnese the head. If this comparison holds, it is certainly a mad head: Morea might be Moria—“folly.” And, to say what I think, the inhabitants of modern Greece depart as far from reason and true religion today as Morea departs from the shape of a man.

Examine the rest in the same way and you will find that kingdoms and provinces are melancholy, as are cities and families, and all living things—plants, creatures with sensation, and rational beings. Every class, sect, age, and condition is out of tune. As in the Tablet of Cebes, “everyone drinks error” before entering the world: they are intoxicated by error’s cup, and all, from highest to lowest, need medicine. Those particular cases in Seneca, where father and son each prove the other mad, may apply to everyone: Porcius Latro will plead against us all.

For who, indeed, is not foolish, melancholy, or mad? “Who undertakes nothing foolishly?” Who is not sick in the mind? Folly, melancholy, and madness are only one disease: “delirium” is a name common to them all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savonarola, Guianerius, and Montaltus treat them together as differing “in degree.” So does David, Psalm 37:5: “I said to the fools, do not act so madly.” And it was an old Stoic paradox that “all fools are mad”—all fools are mad, though some are madder than others.