The Anatomy of Melancholy

Their foolish customs when they rise in the morning, the way they prepare themselves for prayer and meals, their superstitious washings, and how they prepare for their Sabbath and other festivals, weddings, burials, and so on.

Lastly, their expectation of the Messiah, and the fictions, miracles and empty splendour that will attend him: how he will terrify the Gentiles and overcome them with new diseases; how the archangel Michael will sound his trumpet; how he will gather all the scattered Jews into the Holy Land and prepare a great banquet for them, containing all the birds, beasts and fish that God ever made, and a cup of wine grown in Paradise and kept in Adam’s cellar ever since.

The first course will include that great ox in Job 4:10, which feeds every day on a thousand hills, Psalm 50:10, the great Leviathan, and a great bird that laid an egg so large that, accidentally falling from its nest, it knocked down three hundred tall cedars, then broke and flooded one hundred and sixty villages.

This bird stood knee-deep in the sea, yet the sea was so deep that a hatchet could not reach the bottom in seven years. Then there are accounts of their Messiah’s wives and children; of Adam and Eve, and so on.

And among the rest there is that one astonishing fiction: when a Roman prince asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah why the Jews’ God was compared to a lion, the rabbi answered that he compared himself to no ordinary lion, but to one in the forest of Ela. When the prince wished to see it, the rabbi prayed to God that he might, and the lion immediately set out.

But when it was four hundred miles from Rome, it roared so loudly that all the pregnant women in Rome miscarried and the city walls collapsed. When it came a hundred miles nearer and roared a second time, their teeth fell from their mouths, the emperor himself fell down dead, and so the lion went back.

With countless such lies and fabrications, which they truly believe, they feed themselves on empty hope. Meanwhile no persuasion will turn them aside: they continually torment their souls with a host of idle ceremonies, live like slaves and wanderers, and will neither accept relief nor be reconciled.

Muslims are a mixture of Gentiles, Jews and Christians, and so absurd in their ceremonies that they seem to have taken the most foolish elements from each. Their superstitious law is full of idle fables; their Quran itself is a jumble of lies, tales, ceremonies, traditions and precepts stolen from other sects and heaped together in confusion to deceive a crowd of ignorant, barbarous rustics.

For example, how birds, beasts and stones greeted Muhammad when he came from Mecca, how the moon came down from heaven to visit him, how God sent for him and spoke to him, and a host of astonishing inventions about angels, the sun, moon and stars, and so on.