The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or, as Lodovicus Mercatus argues, internal vapours and humours arising from blood, choler and so on, mixed in different ways, cause them to perceive and seemingly see outside themselves various images that do not in fact exist. As wine drinkers think everything is spinning when the disturbance is in their own brain, so it is with these people: the fault and cause are internal. As Galen affirms, mad people and those near death “have within their eyes the images they think they see outside themselves.” What seems to be before them is in their brain; the brain reflects solid bodies like a concave mirror. “Even decrepit old people have a hollow and dry brain, so that they imagine they see,” says Boissardus, “things that do not exist.” Old people too are often mistaken and mentally confused in this way.

Or, just as someone looking through red glass judges everything red, corrupt vapours rise from the body to the head and distil from there back into the eyes. Once mixed with the watery crystal that receives the images of visible things, they make everything appear the colour of the humour that spreads over our sight: to melancholy people everything is black, to phlegmatic people white, and so on. Or else, as before, organs corrupted by a corrupted imagination—as Lemnius aptly observes in book 1, chapter 16—cause a great agitation of spirits and humours, which wander to and fro through every recess of the brain and produce such apparitions before their eyes.

One thinks he reads something written in the moon, as Pythagoras is said to have done long ago; another smells sulphur or hears Cerberus bark. Orestes, now mad, imagined he saw the Furies tormenting him and his mother always ready to rush at him.

Mother, I beg you, do not pursue me with these Furies, snake-like in appearance, terrible. Look, look, they attack me; now they rush upon me.

But Electra told him, as he raved in his fit of madness, that he saw no such sights at all; it was only his disordered imagination.

Rest, poor sufferer, rest in your bedclothes; you do not see what you think you see.

So Pentheus, in Euripides’ Bacchae, saw two suns and two cities of Thebes: his brain alone was disturbed. Sickness is a common cause of such sights. Cardan, On Subtlety, book 8: “A sick mind, broken by labour and fasting, makes them see and hear,” and so on. Both Andreas Osiander and Alexander ab Alexandro saw strange visions during illness, which he relates in On the Variety of Things, book 8, chapter 44. Albategnius, that distinguished Arabian, saw a ship rising and falling on his deathbed; Fracastorius records the same of his friend Baptista Tirrianus.

Weak eyesight, together with a groundless conviction, may have the same effect when secondary causes combine, as an oar in water is refracted and seems larger, bent in two, and so on. Thick air may cause such effects; or fear and imagination will suspect any object imperfectly seen in the dark to be a ghost or devil. “What the wretched greatly fear, they readily believe”: we are prone to belief and error in such cases. Marcellus Donatus, book 2, chapter 1, introduces a story from Aristotle about a certain Antepheron who apparently saw his own image in the air, as in a mirror, wherever he was.