The Anatomy of Melancholy

out of pride, a desire to stand apart, vainglory and blind zeal, they cause still more madness. They throw everything into uproar with their new doctrines, paradoxes, inventions and fancies; create new divisions, subdivisions and sects; set one superstition against another and one kingdom against another; pit ruler against subjects, brother against brother, father against son; ruin and destroy a commonwealth, disturb the peace, and throw every rank of society into confusion.

How those Arians raged in former times! How many did they ensnare? Those Pelagians, Manichaeans and the rest—their names alone would fill a whole volume. How many simple souls have impostors continually deceived, drawn away and wholly estranged from Christ! Lucian’s Alexander; Simon Magus, whose statue could be seen and worshipped in Rome after his death, Justin Martyr says, inscribed “To Simon, the holy god,” and so on;

Apollonius of Tyana; Cynops; Eumo, who, by devising sham new ceremonies and conjuring tricks connected with that Syrian goddess, spitting fire and the like, gathered an army of forty thousand men and did much harm;

and Eudo de Stellis, of whom William of Newburgh speaks in book 1, chapter 19: in King Stephen’s days he imitated most of Christ’s miracles, fed I do not know how many people in the wilderness, and built castles in the air, and so on, misleading multitudes of poor souls.

In Franconia in 1476, a low-born, illiterate fellow took it upon himself to be a prophet and to preach. His name was John Beheim, a cattle herder at Nicholhausen. He led thirty thousand people astray, and the common people regarded him as a most holy man come from heaven.

Tradesmen left their shops, women their distaffs; servants ran away from their masters, children from their parents, and students left their tutors, all to hear him, some for novelty, some from zeal. At last he was burned by the bishop of Würzburg, and so he and his heresy disappeared together.

How many such impostors and false prophets have lived in every king’s reign? What chronicle does not offer examples? Like so many will-o’-the-wisps, they have led people astray, frightened some and deceived others, people ready to be blown about by every gust of wind: an uncultivated, fickle multitude, a simple company of poor souls who follow anyone and are huddled together like pebbles washed up by the tide.

The monstrous follies, madness, torments, persecutions, absurdities and impossibilities that these impostors, heretics and the rest have thrust upon the world, and their strange effects, will be shown in the Symptoms.

Now the means by which the Devil and his infernal ministers so deceive and unsettle the world with these empty ceremonies, false doctrines and superstitious follies—the advantages they exploit—come from people themselves: inborn fear, ignorance and simplicity; Hope and Fear, those two battering cannon and chief siege engines, with their objects, reward and punishment, purgatory, the limbo of the fathers, and so on, which tyrannize now more than ever.