The Anatomy of Melancholy

Scaliger, in exercise 302, explains these effects: the spirits around the heart draw that trembling, dancing air into the body and are moved and stirred along with it. Or else, as some suppose, the mind is itself composed in harmony and is awakened by musical tunes. Nor are human beings alone affected in this way: almost all other creatures are too.

You know the tale of the Gallic Hercules, Orpheus, and Amphion—“fortunate souls,” Ovid calls them—who could “move stones with the sound of the lyre,” and so forth: make logs and stones, as well as beasts and other animals, dance after their pipes. Dog and hare, wolf and lamb—“the lamb offered her flank beside the wolf”—and “the noisy jackdaw, the shrill crow, and Jupiter’s eagle,” as Philostratus describes them in his Images, all stood gazing open-mouthed at Orpheus.

And trees, uprooted, came to hear him: “The friendly pine draws the oak along as her companion.”

Arion made fish follow him; common experience shows that they are strongly affected by music. All songbirds take great pleasure in it, especially nightingales, if we may believe Calcagnini. Bees, too, though flying away, will stay behind when they hear a tinkling sound. Stags, hinds, horses, dogs, and bears take extraordinary delight in it—Scaliger, exercise 302. Agrippa adds elephants, in book 2, chapter 24. And in Lydia, in the middle of a lake, there are certain floating islands which, if you will believe it, dance to music.

But leaving these rhetorical praises of divine music, I will keep to my proper subject. Besides its remarkable power to drive out many other diseases, it is a supreme remedy for despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself. In Philostratus, Canus, a Rhodian musician, was asked by Apollonius what he could do with his pipe. He replied that he could make a melancholy man cheerful, a cheerful man much more cheerful, a lover more enamoured, and a religious man more devout.

Ismenias the Theban and Chiron the centaur are said to have cured this and many other diseases by music alone, just as, Bodin says, people now treat those afflicted by the mad dance of Saint Vitus. Timotheus the musician made Alexander leap about and leave his dinner, like the tale of the Friar and the Boy; Augustine, in The City of God, book 17, chapter 14, praises him greatly for it.

Who has not heard how David’s music drove the evil spirits away from King Saul, in 1 Samuel 16? And when Elisha was greatly troubled by insistent kings, he called for a musician; when the musician played, the hand of the Lord came upon him, in 2 Kings 3.

Censorinus, On the Birthday, chapter 12, reports how the physician Asclepiades helped many people suffering from frenzy by this means: “the minds of the delirious, disturbed by illness.” Jason Pratensis, in his chapter on mania, gives many examples of Clinias and Empedocles curing some who were desperately melancholy and others who were mad through this music of ours.