The Anatomy of Melancholy

But Augustine, in The City of God, book 15, acknowledges it; so do Erastus in On Witches, Jacob Sprenger and his colleagues, Zanchi in On the Works of God, book 4, chapter 16, Dandini’s commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, book 2, text 29, comment 30, Bodin, book 2, chapter 7, and Paracelsus, a leading defender of this opinion. They offer particular instances and demonstrate it through many testimonies, proofs and confessions.

Hector Boece, in his Scottish History, gives three or four such examples, repeated in confirmation by Cardano, book 16, chapter 43: people who had intimate company for many years with these beings, appearing in the form of men and women.

Philostratus, in the fourth book of his Life of Apollonius, gives a memorable example of this kind that I must not omit. A young man of twenty-five, Menippus of Lycia, was travelling between Cenchreae and Corinth when he met such a phantom in the form of a beautiful gentlewoman. She took his hand and led him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, saying that she was Phoenician by birth.

If he would stay with her, “he would hear her sing and play, drink wine such as no one had ever drunk, and no man would trouble him. Beautiful and lovely as she was, she would live and die with him, who was himself so beautiful and lovely to behold.”

The young man was a philosopher, otherwise steady and judicious, able to control his passions—though not this passion of love. He stayed with her for a while in great contentment and eventually married her. Among the wedding guests came Apollonius, who, from certain plausible indications, discovered that she was a serpent, a lamia, and that all her furnishings were like Tantalus’s gold as described by Homer: without substance, mere illusions.

When she saw that she had been discovered, she wept and asked Apollonius to be silent. But he would not yield; whereupon she, her silverware, her house and everything in it vanished in an instant. “Many thousands knew of this event, for it happened in the midst of Greece.”

Sabinus, in his commentary on book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, at the story of Orpheus, tells of a gentleman of Bavaria who mourned the loss of his dear wife for many months. At last the devil came in her form and comforted him, saying that, because he was so insistent in longing for her, she would return and live with him again, provided he married her anew and never swore or blasphemed as he had formerly done. If he did, she would leave.

“He made the vow, married her and lived with her. She bore him children and managed his household, but remained pale and sad. This continued until one day, during a quarrel, he began to swear. She immediately vanished and was never seen again.” “I have heard this,” says Sabinus, “from people of good repute, who told me that the Duke of Bavaria related it to the Duke of Saxony as a certain fact.”