The Anatomy of Melancholy

The superstition of the people of Dibra, a frontier town in Epirus besieged by the Turks, is almost incredible to relate. Because a dead dog had been thrown into the town’s only spring, they would all die of thirst rather than drink that unclean water, and would surrender the city on any terms. Although the magistrate and leading citizens drank first and used every reasonable argument, their superstition was such that no words would persuade them: they must all immediately die or surrender the city.

“I scarcely dared believe such superstition myself,” says Barleti, “or assert so trivial—or rather ridiculous—a cause for so great an event, since I do not doubt it will provoke laughter rather than astonishment in posterity.” The story was too ridiculous: he was ashamed to report it, because he thought no one would believe it.

It is astonishing to relate the strange effects this idolatry and superstition have produced in recent years in the Indies and neighbouring regions: in what savage shapes the Devil is worshipped, “lest they threaten some harm,” as they say. For in the mountains between Alexandretta and Aleppo there now lives a people called Kurds, descended from the ancient Parthians, who worship the Devil and give this reason for doing so: God is a good man and will do no harm, but the Devil is bad and must be appeased lest he hurt them.

It is extraordinary to tell how the Devil deceives and terrifies them, how they sacrifice men and women to him, a hundred at a time, as people once offered infants to Saturn in Crete—the finest children, like Agamemnon’s Iphigenia, and so on.

At Mexico, when the Spaniards first conquered them, they daily sacrificed “living human hearts torn from living bodies”—the hearts of people still alive: 20,000 a year, according to Acosta, book 5, chapter 20, to their idols made of flour and human blood, and every year six thousand children of both sexes.

Equally monstrous to relate is how they bury wives with their dead husbands: fearful to report, and harder still to believe.

For they compete for death—to follow their husband while still alive; It is a disgrace not to have been allowed to die.

And they burn them alive, together with the finest possessions, servants and horses, when a great person dies: 12,000 at once among the Tartars when a great khan dies, or an emperor in America.