The Anatomy of Melancholy

If at any time you see, says Guaineri, a member of a religious order who is excessively superstitious, too solitary or much given to fasting, that person will certainly become melancholic: you may boldly say it; he will. Pieter van Foreest says almost the same thing, and Cardano, On Subtlety, book 18, and On the Variety of Things, book 8, chapter 40, says that solitude, fasting and the melancholic humour cause all hermits’ illusions.

Lavater, On Spectres, part 1, chapter 19, and part 1, chapter 10, makes solitude a principal cause of such spectres and apparitions. No one, he says, is so melancholic as monks and hermits; melancholy is the Devil’s bath. No one is so subject to visions and delusions of this kind as those who lead solitary lives: in their delusion they hear and do strange things.

Polydore Vergil, On Prodigies, book 2, holds that those prophecies, monks’ revelations and nuns’ dreams that they suppose come from God proceed wholly “from the prompting of demons,” by the Devil’s means. So too with those enthusiasts, Anabaptists and false prophets: the cause is the same.

Fracastoro, On Understanding, book 2, maintains that all your prophetic women, sibyls and false prophets are merely melancholic. Weyer likewise argues, in book 1, chapter 8, and book 3, chapter 7, as does Arcolani on book 9 of Rhazes, that melancholy is a sufficient cause, together with the Devil, fasting and solitude, of such Sibylline prophecies—if such prophecies ever existed, which, with Casaubon and others, I have good grounds for questioning.

For it is unlikely that the Spirit of God would ever disclose such clear revelations and predictions of Christ to those prophetesses, witches, Apollo’s priests, the Devil’s ministers—they were no better—and conceal them from his own prophets. Yet these sibyls set out every particular circumstance of Christ’s coming and many other future events far more clearly and plainly than any prophet ever did.

But even if there are no prophetesses of Apollo or sibyls, I am certain there are other enthusiasts, prophets, oracular gods, magicians and so on. Read Jean-Jacques Boissard about them: he has recently and laboriously gathered them into a large volume, with fine pictures and summaries of their lives. They have existed in every age, always arising from those causes: “They recount their visions, dream of future events, prophesy, and, driven by delusions of this kind, think that the Holy Spirit is imparted to them.”

What is written about Saint Francis’s five wounds, and other such monastic experiences of his and of others, may reasonably be attributed to this melancholy of ours. So may what Matthew Paris relates about the monk of Evesham, who saw heaven and hell in a vision, and about Sir Owen, who went down into Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in King Stephen’s days and saw as much; and what Walsingham tells of the man to whom Saint Julian showed as much.