The Anatomy of Melancholy

Agrippa, in book 1, chapter 48 of Occult Philosophy, attributes considerable power of this kind to love potions, amulets and images; so does Salmuth in his commentary on Panciroli, title 10, On Clocks. Leo Africanus, in book 3, says this is common practice at Fez in Africa: “There are many magicians there who compel love and sexual intercourse.” They are every bit as skilful as the Hyperborean magician about whose wonderful feats in this line Cleodemus tells so many stories in Lucian.

But Erastus, Weyer and others oppose this explanation. They concede that such things may indeed happen, but, as Weyer argues in book 3, chapter 37 of On Witches, they are done by the Devil himself, not by charms, incantations or love potions. He argues the same in book 5, chapter 2; so do Freitag, in chapter 74 of Medical Nights, and Andrea Cesalpino, in chapter 5. Sigismund Scherertz also sets out a lengthy demonstration in chapter 9 of The Night Goat.

“Unchaste women, with the help of these witches, the Devil’s kitchen maids, have their lovers brought to them at night and carried back again by a phantom flying through the air in the shape of a goat. I have heard several people confess,” he says, “that they have been carried in this way on a goat’s back to their sweethearts, many miles in a single night.”

Others think these feats, which most people suppose are achieved by charms and love potions, result entirely from natural causes. Chemically prepared human blood, for example, is very effective, says Ernst Burggraf in The Lamp Indicating Life and Death, “for producing love and hatred.” This is how huntsmen make their dogs love them, and farmers their poultry. He holds it to be an excellent love potion, “but to reveal it to the public is a great crime”: it is not fit for common knowledge.

So are “mad apples,” mandrake roots and fruits, precious stones, dead people’s clothes, candles, “Bacchic apples,” “swine’s bread,” hippomanes, a particular hair from a wolf’s tail and so on. These are discussed by Rhazes, Dioscorides, Porta, Wecker, Rubeus, Mizaldus and Albertus. A swallow’s heart, powdered dove’s heart; “vipers’ tongues are very powerful, as are asses’ brains, the membrane from a foal’s birth, the cauls in which babies are born, the rope of a hanged man, and a stone from an eagle’s nest,” and so forth.

For more examples, see book 4 of Schenck’s Medical Observations. Their power and efficacy are as great as those of the fountain Salmacis in Vitruvius, Ovid and Strabo, which drove everyone who drank from it mad with love; or of the hot bath at Aachen in Germany, where Cupid once dipped his arrows, and which has ever since had the special power of making lovers of everyone who bathes in it. But hear the poet’s own description:

Why this heat in waters springing from the damp earth? Love once playfully dipped his fiery arrows here; Delighted by the strange hissing, “Boil on for ever,” He said, “and let these waters commemorate my quiver.” Ever since, the spring has boiled; few visitors bathe here Without gentle love stirring in their breasts.