Agrippa: The Philosophy of Natural Magic, Chapter LX — Of Madness, and Divinations which are made when men are awake, and of the Power of a Melancholy Humor, by which Spirits are sometimes induced into Men's Bodies
§ About this work
Agrippa opens by positing a three-fold World—Elementary, Celestial, Intellectual—ascended toward the First cause (I), then defines Magic as the chief Science comprehending Natural, Mathematical, and Theological Philosophy (II). He treats the four Elements, their qualities, orders, and the properties of Fire and Earth, Water and Air, their compounded bodies, and their presence in all things up to God (III–VIII). He distinguishes elementary, secondary, and occult virtues, tracing the latter to Ideas, the Soul of the World, and celestial situation (IX–XIV), then how virtues move to their like, infuse likeness, form friendships and enmities, and reside in species, individuals, whole substances, parts, and life or death (XV–XXI). He assigns things to Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, planetary governments, kingdoms, Signs, stars, and Characters (XXII–XXXIII), then shows how virtues are drawn down through conformable things, mixtions, prepared matter, correspondence of Worlds, and animated Images (XXXIV–XXXVIII). Turning operative, he treats raising spirits (XXXIX), bindings, sorceries, catamenia, suffumigations and their recipes, collyries and unguents, alligations, rings, and virtues of places (XL–XLVIII). He describes light, fascination, wonder-working acts, and gestures and bodily figures (XLIX–LII), then divinations—Auguria and Auspicia, birds and beasts, lightnings and prodigies, and the four elemental divinations (LIII–LVII)—and reviving of bodies (LVIII). He treats dreams and prophetic madness (LIX–LX), then man's body, senses, mind, and passions, how the phantasy alters one's own and another's body, and how passions gain power through Heaven, faith, and the stars' minds (LXI–LXVIII). He closes with the power of words, proper names, sentences, enchantments, writing, and the Hebrew letters ordered to Signs, Planets, and Elements, ending the first book (LXIX–LXXIV).
The chapter states that waking men, like sleepers, sometimes divine through a madness Aristotle calls ravishment, arising from a melancholy humor. Aristotle names the Sibyls, Bacchides, Niceratus, and Ammon as melancholy prophets. The text distinguishes black choler, which draws evil spirits, from white choler, aided by Saturn. Democritus and Plato affirm melancholy men seem divine; Tynnichus, Hesiod, Ion, Homer, Lucretius became poets. Plato in Ion notes prophets forget their words. Melancholy draws spirits threefold: imaginative (arts), rational (Cornelius Patrarus, the Sibyl), and mental (divine secrets). The Sibyls prophesied Christ; Virgil sang to Pollio of Cumæa's prophecy. Finally, the dying and aged foresee things, per Plato.
Chapter LX, Section 1aChapter LX, Section 1bChapter LX, Section 1c