The Anatomy of Melancholy

Ficino illustrates this with the familiar example of Myrrhinusian Phaedrus and Lysias of Thebes. “Lysias stares at Phaedrus’s face, and Phaedrus fixes his eyes on Lysias, sending out his spirits with those sparkling rays. The beams from Phaedrus’s eyes readily mingle with those from Lysias’s, and spirits join with spirits. This vapour, generated in Phaedrus’s heart, enters Lysias’s entrails; and, more wonderfully still, Phaedrus’s blood is in Lysias’s heart. Hence those ordinary expressions of love: ‘Phaedrus, my sweetheart, my very self, my dear heart’; and Phaedrus in turn says to Lysias, ‘Oh, my light, my joy, my soul, my life.’”

“Phaedrus follows Lysias because his heart wants its spirits back, and Lysias follows Phaedrus because he loves the home of his spirits. Both pursue the other, but Lysias more eagerly: the river needs the spring more than the spring needs the river. Just as iron is drawn towards something touched by a magnet, without drawing it back in return, so Lysias draws Phaedrus.”

But how, then, does a blind man fall in love, if he has never seen? In the Lives of the Fathers we read of a child brought up from infancy in the wilderness by an old hermit. When he had grown to manhood, he happened to see two beautiful women wandering in the woods. He asked the old man what creatures they were; he told him, “Fairies.” Later, in passing conversation, the hermit asked him what was the most pleasing sight he had ever seen in his life. He promptly replied, “The two fairies I saw in the wilderness.”

So there is undoubtedly some hidden lodestone in a beautiful woman, a magnetic power, a natural, inborn affinity that stirs our desire; and, as the poet sings,

I think I have a mistress still to come; And still I seek, I love, I know not whom.

That is indeed true of natural and chaste love, but not of this heroic passion—or, rather, the brutish, burning lust we are discussing. We mean roving, wanton, adulterous eyes, which, as he says, “lie constantly in ambush like soldiers. When they see an innocent onlooker gazing at them, they shoot him through and bewitch him at once; especially when they gaze and stare amorously, as wanton lovers do at one another, sharing each other’s souls in a delightful encounter of eyes.”

From this you can see how easily and quickly we may be caught by love, since in the blink of an eye Phaedrus’s spirits may so dangerously infect Lysias’s blood. “Nor is this surprising, if we consider how many other diseases are caught imperceptibly and just as suddenly through infection: plague, itching, scabs, flux, and so on.” Once absorbed, the spirits will give the person who has received them no rest, but urge him on.

It seeks the body that wounded the mind with love;

And we can plainly perceive a strange drawing-out of spirits in those who bleed from the nose after death in the presence of their murderer. But read further in Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 2, chapter 7; Valleriola, Observations, book 2, chapter 7; Valesius’s Controversies; Ficino; Cardan; Libavius, On Bleeding Corpses; and so on.