The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or is it the place of hell, as Virgil in his Aeneid, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others describe it in their imaginative writings, and as many of our theologians think? In all seriousness, Antonio Rusca, a member of the Ambrosian College in Milan, firmly maintains this position in book 1, chapter 47 of his great volume On Hell. The fire is physical too, as he argues there in book 2, chapter 5.

“Whatever philosophers may write,” says Surius, “there are certain mouths of hell and places appointed for the punishment of human souls, as at Hekla in Iceland, where the ghosts of the dead are often seen and sometimes speak with the living. God wished there to be such visible places so that mortals could know for certain that such punishments exist after death, and learn from this to fear God.”

Krantz, in book 2, chapter 24 of his History of Denmark, subscribes to Surius’s opinion, as does Colerus in chapter 12 of his book On the Immortality of the Soul. Presumably they rely on St Gregory, Durandus, and the other Schoolmen, who draw the same conclusion from Etna in Sicily, Lipari, Hiera, and those sulphurous volcanic islands. They make Tierra del Fuego, the many volcanoes of America described by Acosta in book 3, chapter 24, and that dreadful mountain Heckleberg in Norway a special argument for their case:

“There pitiful shrieks and howls are continually heard, striking terror into the hearers; fiery chariots are often seen bringing in human souls in the shape of crows, and devils regularly go in and out.”

Another such proof, offered to confirm both this belief and the resurrection, is the place near the pyramids in Egypt, close to Cairo, mentioned by Kornmann in book 1, chapter 38 of The Wonders of the Dead, by Camerarius in chapter 37 of his Spare-time Works, by Breydenbach in his Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and by others. There, once a year around March, dead bodies rise and walk, then after a while hide themselves again; thousands of people come every year to see them.

But others reject these and similar testimonies as fables or deceptions by spirits. They will allow no such known, physically situated place, any more than the Styx or Phlegethon, Pluto’s court, or that poets’ underworld where Homer’s soul was seen hanging from a tree, and so on. People crossed to it in Charon’s boat, or went down at Hermione in Greece, “by a short route to the dead”—which is the shortest way—“because at that place they demand no ferry fare from the dead,” as Gerbelius says; and besides, there were no fees to pay.

Well then, is it hell, or purgatory, as Bellarmine would have it; or the limbo of the fathers, as Gallucius and Rusca maintain—for they have made maps of it—or Ignatius’s parlour?