The Anatomy of Melancholy

Many people doubt, says Nicolaus Taurellus, whether the Devil can cure diseases that he has not caused, and some flatly deny it. Yet common experience confirms, to our astonishment, that magicians can perform such feats, and that the Devil can penetrate every part of our bodies without hindrance and cure such diseases by means unknown to us.

Daneau, in his treatise On Witches, agrees with Taurellus; Erastus, in On Witches, maintains the same, as do most theologians: through their exceptional knowledge and long experience, they can bring together “active agents and the things they act upon, collect the seeds of things, and apply them to matter,” as Augustine concludes in The City of God and On the Trinity, book 3, chapters 7 and 8. They can produce astounding and wonderful results. We see only the effects, not their causes.

Nothing is more familiar than reports of such cures. Sorcerers are all too common: cunning men, wizards and “white witches,” as they call them, in every village. If consulted, they will help with almost every infirmity of body and mind. They are called servitores—“servants”—in Latin, and commonly have St Catherine’s wheel imprinted on the roof of the mouth or elsewhere on the body. “They resist the deceptions of enchanters,” Boissard writes, “and drive away illnesses caused by witches,” etc. To doubt this any longer, or refuse to believe it, would be to fall into the opposite sceptical extreme of disbelief, says Taurellus.

Leo Suavius, in his commentary on Paracelsus, seems to present it as an art that deserves approval. Pistorius and others stoutly defend the use of charms, words, inscribed signs, etc. “The art is real, but few practitioners are to be found”: the art is true, but few people possess its skill.

Marcellus Donatus, Medical Wonders, book 2, chapter 1, argues from Josephus’s eighth book of Antiquities that Solomon cured all diseases of the mind by spells and charms, and drove away devils; and that Eleazar did the same before Vespasian. Lange, in his Medical Letters, believes that Menecrates, called Jupiter, who performed so many astonishing cures in his time, used this art and was nothing more than a magician. Many celebrated cures of this kind take place daily. The Devil is an expert physician, as Godelmann calls him, book 1, chapter 18; and God often permits these witches and magicians to produce such effects, as Lavater, chapter 3, book 8, part 3, chapter 1; Polydore Vergil, On Prodigies, book 1; Delrio and others admit.

Such cures can be performed; and, as Paracelsus firmly maintains in volume 4, On Diseases of the Insane, these diseases can be cured only by spells, seals and spiritual medicine. Arnoldus, in his book On Seals, explains how to make them, as do Ruland and many others.

“Assuming this”—that they can effect such cures—the main question is whether, in a desperate case, it is lawful to ask for their help or consult a wizard. Some people commonly go first to a witch and then to a physician: if one cannot help, the other shall. “If they cannot bend the gods above, they will stir up Acheron.”