The Anatomy of Melancholy

And how they torment themselves with excessive fasting, abstaining from everything that has life, like the ancient Pythagoreans: the Banians around Surat, for example, and people in China who, for superstition’s sake, never eat meat or fish throughout their lives, never marry, but live in deserts and remote places. Some pray to their idols for twenty-four hours without interruption, biting off their tongues when they have finished, out of devotion.

Others are driven to such madness by their superstitious priests, who tell them these empty stories of immortality and the joys of heaven in the life to come, that many thousands voluntarily break their own necks. Like the hearers of Cleombrotus of Ambracia in ancient times, they throw themselves from heights to share in that unspeakable happiness in the other world. One poisons himself, another strangles himself; and the king of China, deceived by this empty hope, would have done the same had his servant not restrained him.

But who can adequately recount their many superstitions, vexations, follies and torments? I may conclude with Possevino: “Religion makes the rough gentle, human beings out of beasts; superstition makes beasts out of human beings.” Religion civilizes wild beasts; superstition makes wise people beasts and fools. Even the most sensible, if they give way to it, are no better than fools.

More than that, if Plotinus’s saying is true, “The sole aim of religion is that we should become like the one we worship”—if religion’s purpose is to make us like him whom we worship—what will idolaters come to but to degenerate into blocks and stones? What will those who worship these pagan gods become—for “the gods of the nations are demons”—but devils themselves?

It is therefore “a ruinous and supremely dangerous error,” the most perilous and dangerous of all errors, as Plutarch holds: “a turbulent passion that strikes a person with terror,” a pestilent, distressing passion that utterly ruins people. Unhappy superstition, Pliny calls it, “does not end with death”: death takes away life, but not superstition. The impious and ignorant are far happier than the superstitious. No torment equals it: none is so unremitting, so widespread, so destructive, so violent.

In this superstitious line, Jews may follow the Gentiles in order of antiquity. What they did in ancient times, what idolatries they committed in their groves and high places, what their Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Essenes and similar sects maintained—I will not even mention.

As for the present, I believe no nation under heaven can be more foolish, ignorant, blind, superstitious, wilful, obstinate and perverse, wearing themselves out with pointless ceremonies. Anyone who reads their rabbis’ ridiculous commentaries, their strange interpretations of Scripture, their absurd ceremonies, fables and childish tales, which they firmly believe, will think them scarcely rational creatures.