(Periphyseon, bk. 3, 27, 205–7)
Since among the elements earth is the one that is dry and cold, those born of Saturn are attracted to earth. (Cronus is, in part, a chthonian — earthly, or rather subterranean — deity, like the gods of the mysteries of antiquity.) Melancholics, being attracted to earth, seek their home in the world of perceptible things, which is why they remain down-to-earth (they become handicraftsmen and peasants; they are stupid, dull, and evil-minded). Long after the toppling of the theory of humors, Jakob Böhme considered melancholics, like the earth, to be cold, stiff, dark, disconsolate, lacking in light, and constantly afraid of God’s wrath. That earthiness and cleaving to palpable things is not a natural state, however, but a flight in the literal sense: the melancholic is incapable of breaking away from the world of opposites and always perceives absence everywhere. His desire for safety turns his gaze to the ground, but earthly matters draw his attention to transitoriness and otherwordliness. Saturn’s child, Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote in 1510, “constantly brooding, as it were drills through the ground” (quoted in Benjamin,
German Tragic Drama
, ch. 5, 350). That is so in a double sense. Agrippa interpreted the drilling through the ground literally, taking the view that melancholics were able to discover treasure hidden below the ground. In a broader sense, however, it was not just treasures that were hidden underground; the deep itself was also the antithesis of the surface, a denial of life, the domain of death (or “otherworldliness”). In a work published in 1727, Martin of Cochem propounded that if benignant God did not ward off the noxious influence of Saturn with his own power, or through the resistance of other stars, few people on Earth would remain alive. Melancholics hold on to the world more tightly than anyone else; or to be more accurate, they value it more highly, but a true accounting warns them of its transience (not of its vanity!). The correlation of melancholia with talent in soothsaying, as antiquity saw it, has already been noted. A person who is truly able to prophesy is
inside
things and is not approaching them from the outside; he is someone who does not warn one of an event that will happen
sometime in the future, but who tells the truth about
today
, the
current
state of matters. A down-to-earth melancholic is a soothsayer in this sense.
10
Saturn invested him with the capability of adopting an ambivalent attitude, and that was why he was well aware that the earthly world itself provided no ultimate foothold: the only one truly able to assess the earthly realm was someone who saw its transience, but the only people who have any notion of its transience are those who have thrown themselves into the petty annoyances of this world. Saturn was the lord of the earth as well as the underworld, in body and soul; to quote Schiller’s Wallenstein, “Lord of the secret birth of things is he; / Within the lap of earth, and in the depths / Of the imagination dominates” (
The Death of Wallenstein
, act 4, scene 1). The offspring of Saturn cannot find his home anywhere; he is unable to find a hold and sees himself as an outcast. In a letter to Andrea Dandolo, the doge of Venice, melancholic Petrarch writes: “Thus am I tossed about in the knowledge that there is no resting place here, and that I must long for such rest through many difficulties: here indeed I must perpetually toil and groan and — what is perhaps worst of all — amidst so many trials and fires of life” (Petrarch,
Letters on Familiar Matters
, vol. 2, bk. 15, letter 4, 260—a justification for his frequent moves). Saturn’s children are doomed to long journeys, so says Agrippa von Nettesheim; and like his previous comment, this, too, is ambiguous: a long journey signifies adventures on sea and land (which is what Agrippa is thinking of), but it can also denote homelessness, a never-achieved arrival. And what could better characterize the deep kinship of the mythological-astrological notion with melancholia than the well-known ball of
Melencolia I
, Albrecht Dürer’s copperplate etching of 1514—since antiquity, a symbol of death and good luck. Death and luck are poised, sleeping, on a ball, and it is just
a matter of luck which way it will set off with them. The ball possesses uncontrollable power: it can roll this way or that, make a mockery of expectations; and while it possesses the most perfect, closed, and unopenable body, its movements represent the extreme uncertainty and homelessness visited on Saturn’s children, the melancholics.
The ball signals Saturn’s power, and what could be more natural than that astrology, professing cosmic closedness, should extend that power to everything. In keeping with the increasingly complex vision of the passing Middle Ages, melancholia thus extended to the whole of nature. According to Tycho Brahe, every part of the body had its own planet, and corresponding to Saturn is the spleen,11 which was regarded as a cold and dry part of the body. The seven planets also denoted the seven ages of man;12 advanced old age, in which life’s forces and juices gradually cool and stiffen, belonged to Saturn. They could also denote the seven sciences.13 But Saturn influenced even the direction of the wind: Hippocrates connected the pathological influence of black bile with a northerly wind — an idea revived by Dürer in his woodcut Philosophia, in the four corners of which are the four cardinal wind directions personified. The saturnine Boreas (north wind) appears grouped with earth (terra), winter, and melancholia. Saturn’s power to bring on melancholia made its influence felt everywhere in nature. “Melancholy,” writes Robert Burton, “extends itself not to men only, but even to vegetals and sensibles. I speak not of those creatures which are saturnine, melancholy by nature, as lead, and such like minerals, or those plants, rue,14 cypress, &c. and hellebore itself; of which Agrippa treats, fishes, birds, and beasts, hares, conies, dormice, &c., owls, bats, nightbirds, but that artificial, which is perceived in them all” (Burton, Anatomy, “Democritus to the Reader,” 179). In accordance with medieval so-called natural magic (Roger Bacon), owing to the unity of the cosmos, earthly materials also possessed some of the properties of the stars and planets, and for that reason these materials could have a therapeutic effect in the form of amulets. If certain materials, such as lead or turquoise, or (according to Niccolò Cabeo of Ferrara, a Jesuit-schooled philosopher) a magnet, are saturnian and melancholic, then other materials, whose effects oppose Saturn, may have the opposite qualities and thus be able to dispel melancholia. According to Albertus Magnus, in the gizzard of a swallow there was a stone called chelidonius, which, if folded in a piece of cloth and tied to the right arm, could cure melancholics. As late as the fourteenth century, Konrad of Megenberg still recommended chelidonius to counter melancholia, and Robert Burton, a granatus (or alternatively, hyacinth and topaz) to be hung from the neck. An influence of Saturn can extend to animals, as has been seen: certain animals, or parts of their bodies, are able to abolish melancholia (an old cock, a ram’s head, and a wolf’s heart, even goat’s milk), whereas other animals embody melancholia. According to Agrippa von Nettesheim, melancholics were “all creeping animals, living apart, and solitary, nightly, sad, contemplative, dull, covetous, fearful, melancholy, that take much pains, slow, that feed grossly, and such as eat their young. Of these kinds therefore are the mole, the wolf, the ass, the toad, the cat, the hog, the bear, the camel, the basilisk, the hare, the ape, the dragon, the mule, all serpents, and creeping things, scorpions, ants, and such things as proceed from putrefaction in the earth, in water, or in the ruins of houses, as mice, and many sorts of vermin” (Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic, ch. 25, 99–100). Dogs, for example, are prone to melancholia, but according to William of Conches, oxen and donkeys are typically melancholic animals, or according to Thomas Nash, the owl, “that customary messenger of death”—but above all bats, which not only embodied nocturnal darkness and uncleanness (in the seventeenth century they were a symbol of the Antichrist), but also, in the view of Ficino, symbolized the futility and noxious effect of studying during the night. (In medieval miniatures, melancholics were often depicted sleeping.) Bats, the hearts of which, according to Agrippa, can serve as a talisman against somnolence,15 were the very symbol of irregularity and extraordinariness: neither birds nor mice, but intermediates between those species. Opposing the bat is the eagle, which drives away melancholia, it being not only a bird of light, but also Jupiter’s creature, and just as Jupiter defeated Cronus-Saturn, so too will the eagle vanquish melancholy. Jupiter’s influence is displayed in another way too: the Jupiterian magic square (mensula Iovis), the numbers of which add up to the same total in each direction, as shown prominently in Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, is also capable of curing melancholia. According to Paracelsus, “this symbol makes its bearer fortunate in all his dealings and drives away all cares and fears” (quoted in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 326). The influence of the planet Jupiter can also stand in the way of melancholia: “For when Venus is located as we have described, and if Saturn is in any aspect,” writes Firmicus Maternus at the beginning of the fourth century, “this produces minds involved in perverse vices, not successful in any normal human activities. . But if Venus in this house is aspected to Jupiter, the native is freed from the evil described above” (Ancient Astrology, bk. 3, 6). Bassardus Visontinus commends hypericum, or St.-John’s-wort, gathered on a Friday in the hour of Jupiter (that is, during a full moon in July); whereas according to Melanchthon, “melancholy is much more generous if it is tempered by the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Libra” (quoted in Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 151). The horoscopes of Kleist and Nietzsche attest to the same: the strength of their dominant Saturn was moderated by Jupiter being in Libra, and that was why their melancholia was “nobler” than common depression.