The Anatomy of Melancholy

Heliodorus, in book 3, argues at length that love is witchcraft: it enters through our eyes, pores and nostrils, and produces in us the same qualities and feelings as those of the person from whom it came. Ficino, in chapter 10 of his commentary on Plato, explains how this bewitchment works: “People are especially bewitched when, by repeatedly gazing at one another, they meet gaze with gaze and eye with eye, and so drink and draw love into themselves; for this disease begins in the eye. Consequently, someone with bright eyes, though otherwise misshapen, can drive another person mad by repeatedly looking at him, and bind him fast through the eye.”

Leonardus Varius, in On Fascination, book 1, chapter 2, tells us that through this exchange of looks “the purer spirits are infected.” One eye pierces the other with the rays it sends out. Many people have such remarkably penetrating eyes: as Suetonius relates of Augustus, their brightness makes those who look at them turn away, unable to bear them any more than the sun’s rays.

Barradius, in his Harmony of the Gospels, book 6, chapter 10, reports the same of our Saviour Christ, and Peter Morales of the Virgin Mary. Nicephorus likewise describes her as having yellow hair, a wheat-coloured complexion, and most lovely, penetrating eyes.

The rays sent out by the eyes, some think, carry certain vapours of the spirits with them, and thus infect the other person in an instant. I know that those who hold that “vision occurs by receiving something from outside” will question this; but Ficino proves it by inflamed eyes, “which make other people’s eyes inflamed through sight alone. It is more than evident that the vapour of corrupted blood enters together with the rays, and so the observer’s eyes are infected by contagion.”

Further arguments concern the basilisk, which kills from a distance by sight, as did that Ephesian of whom Philostratus speaks, whose eye was so deadly that he poisoned everyone he looked at steadily. Then there is that other argument from Aristotle’s Problems, concerning “menstruating women”—“diseased women,” Capivaccius adds, and Septalius the commentator—who taint a mirror by looking into it.

Thus the beams coming from the active person’s heart through the eyes infect the spirits surrounding the person affected, wound that person inwardly, and so the spirits infect the blood. To this effect the woman in Apuleius complained: “You are the cause of my suffering. Your eyes, piercing through mine into my innermost parts, have set my entrails on fire. Pity me, then, for I am now ready to die for your sake.”