The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 3. Whether it is lawful to seek the saints' help in this disease.

No one doubts that we must pray to God. But it may legitimately be debated whether we should pray to saints in such cases, or whether they can help us at all: whether their images, shrines, relics, consecrated objects, holy water, medals, blessings, those divine amulets, holy exorcisms and the sign of the cross are effective against this disease.

The papists, on one side, firmly maintain that many melancholy, mad and demon-possessed people are cured every day at St Anthony's church in Padua, at St Vitus's in Germany, by Our Lady of Loreto in Italy and Our Lady of Sichem in the Low Countries. “She restores sight to the blind, health to the sick, life to the dead and the power to walk to the lame; she cures every disease of body and mind and commands the demons themselves.” She cures the crippled, the lame and the blind, every disease of body and mind, and commands the devil himself, says Lipsius.

Twenty-five thousand come there in a day: “Who but a divine power led them in this way to that place?” Who brought them? “Deeds in everyone's ears, before everyone's eyes, fresh and recent”: new news of recent events—our eyes and ears are full of her cures, and who can tell them all?

They have a particular saint for almost every distinct affliction: Petronella for poisoning, gout and agues; St Romanus for the possessed; Valentine for the falling sickness; St Vitus for mad people, and so on. In the same way, Pliny lists ancient gods for every disease—“a temple was dedicated to Fever”—and Lilio Giraldi recounts many of her ceremonies.

All the mind's affections were once considered gods. Love and Sorrow, Virtue, Honour, Liberty, Insult and Shamelessness had their temples; so did Storms, Seasons and the Breaking of Wind. There were the goddess Vacuna and the goddess Cloacina—a goddess of idleness and a goddess of the privy or latrine—Prema, Premunda and Priapus: obscene gods, and gods for every function.

Varro counts thirty thousand gods. Lucian makes Podagra, gout, a goddess and gives her priests and ministers. Melancholy is not left behind: as Augustine mentions in The City of God, book 4, chapter 9, there was once the goddess Angerona. She had her chapel and festivals, and, Macrobius says, they sacrificed to her every year so that she might be appeased along with the rest.

You see, there is nothing new in this practice of the papists. In my judgement, after all his labours, that doting old Lipsius might more fittingly have dedicated his pen to this goddess of ours, Melancholy, than to his Virgin of Halle, and become her chaplain: it would have suited him better.

But the poor man saw no harm in what he did and cannot be persuaded that he is doing anything but good. He has so many supporters and distinguished precedents of the same kind, who vouch at equal or greater length for as much as he says there of his Lady and Mistress, and more besides.