.
26. Persephone’s home was considered to be Akragas (modern Agrigento) in Sicily — the birthplace of Empedocles.
27. For the Mithras liturgy, see Wolfgang Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosis, 83. Nearer the present day, Antonin Artaud regarded the sun as the god of death, though the true manifestation of that was the total death of the sun (that is, the light), which leads to “the rite of the black night and of the eternal death of the sun,” and from there to an ecstasy that enhances life to an unbearable intensity (see his poem “Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun”).
28. In a work bearing the title The Mysteries, the Neoplatonist Iamblichus writes about casting spells with light or the awakening of light (
), which he regarded as a state of enlightenment and which modern theosophy identifies as glimpsing the light of the sun at midnight.
29. Some legends claim that the Temple of Saturn in the Forum in Rome was founded by none other than Heracles-Hercules.
30. The initial mysteries in Crete were public; it was from there that they spread out to other parts of Greece, where they became secret.
31. “Let us visit the dear land of Cecrops,” Aristophanes writes in The Clouds, “where the secret rites are celebrated, where the mysterious sanctuary flies open to the initiate” (299–300).
32. The Egyptians venerated the crocodile as a symbol of divine silence on account of its remarkably short tongue. The Greeks had a separate god for mystic silence: Harpokrates, with the index finger held to his mouth.
33. Aristotle, for instance, determined that imagining resembled sensing in that it was a movement brought into being as a result of the latter (On the Soul, 427).
34. Originally, “cosmos” denoted not only “the universe” but also “order”—Homer uses the word in the sense of “battle order”—and so it essentially alludes to closedness. Although the notion of infinity was not unknown to Greek thinking, Aristotle distinguished between actual and potential infinities and was willing to acknowledge only the latter. From the point of view of human reason, he said, infinity in the sense of indeterminacy was imperfection, and thus it was out of the question for thinking to arrive at indeterminacy through an infinite chain of cause and effect. Needless to say, melancholics considered the chain of cause and effect to be one of the forms, albeit not the sole form, of explanation for being, and thus they did not see sheer imperfection in indeterminacy.
35. Etymologically, “hubris” is derived from roots in Proto-Indo-European. It is cognate with ud = “up,” “out,” and with guer- = Latin gravis “heavy,” “grave,” “weighty,” the combined meaning of which is approximately to set about something with all one’s might, to stake everything on one item.
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1. In Dialogues of the Dead (20), he is given the following retort by Lucian:
MENIPPUS: Tell me, my brazen-slippered friend, what induced you to jump into the crater?
EMPEDOCLES: I did it in a fit of melancholy.
2. That was via Greco-Arabic intermediates, who located melancholy in the epigastric region — a view that survived into more modern times. In 1652, the Munich-based physician Malachias Geiger devoted an entire book to the topic: Microcosmos hypochondriacus sive de melancholia hypochondriaca tractatus.
3. Melancholia ascribed to the spleen was later to have an equivalent in the “spleen” (that is, melancholy) of the Romantics.
4. In the first century CE, Cornelis Celsus’s book De medicina libri octo was the first to recommend a wholly psychiatric treatment for melancholics. Galen, by contrast, ascribed all mental abilities to the mixture of bodily humors.
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1. Research on this question suggests that between 400 and 140 °CE, one cannot find even so much as a reference to suicide, since religious prescriptions served as internal prohibition and inhibited its spread.
2. For the Greeks, “mystery” in the singular meant just “secret,” without any wider, ritual connotation.
3. That was why St. Augustine regarded Cain as the first melancholic — thereby anticipating Leopold Szondi, who called him a typical melancholic on the basis of the dialectic of instincts.
4. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, acedia is tristitia de bono spirituali divino, “sorrow is about spiritual good as much as it is about a divine good” (Summa theologica, II, q. 22, a. 35).
5. Dante places melancholics in the muddy waters of the Styx, putting the following words in their mouths:
Wedged in the slime, they say: “We had been sullen
in the sweet air that’s gladdened by the sun;
we bore the mist of sluggishness in us:
Now we are bitter in the blackened mud.”
(Inferno, canto 7, 121–24)
The blackened mud refers to black bile; “sullen” in the original refers to tristi fummo (sorrowful soul) and, more particularly, to acedia (accidioso fummo—sluggish reek). Melancholia, sadness, and sloth all mutually presuppose one another. It should be noted that the automatic connection of acedia and melancholia was established only after the turn of the first millennium — until then, acedia had been virtually synonymous with tristitia and desperatio.
6. 
(Mark 3:21). In the King James Version of the Bible, the phrase used is “beside himself.”
7. Bonaventure remarks disapprovingly on a desire for annihilation as a consequence of nausea due to acedia, but he appraises it positively if the goal is union with God as soon as possible.
8. A famous example is the book entitled Planetomachia, published c. 1585 by Robert Greene.
9. It adopted the astrology of the Roman imperial age, which had toned down and expanded Ptolemaic-Julianic astrology with an admixture of science and mythology.
10. According to a Babylonian notion, the highest spheres of the planets “scatter prophetic thunderbolts”; a Greek text specifically mentions Saturn in that context (see Karl Kerényi, “Asterobléta Keraunos,” 86).
11. From the Latin splen, which in turn derives from Greek. Thence “spleen”—the modern equivalent of saturnine melancholia.
12. See the monologue of the melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (II.7).
13. In Convivio (II. 14), Dante associates astrology with Saturn.
14. Now somewhat archaic, the word still denotes sorrow, pity, or regret and repentance.
15. On the other hand, in the opinion of Pliny the Elder, it is a bat’s heart that acts against sleep (Natural History, bk. 29, 48).
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1. The title of a chapter in Three Books on Life is “How Many Things Cause Learned People Either to Be Melancholy or to Eventually Become So” (emphasis added). Helvétius was later to write in similar vein: “The most spiritual and most thoughtful people are, I know, sometimes melancholic; but they are not spiritual or thoughtful because they are melancholic, but melancholic because they are thoughtful” (“Les plus spirituels et les plus méditatifs sont quelquefois mélancoliques, je le sais: mail ils ne sont pas spirituels et méditatifs parcequ’ils sont mélancoliques, mais mélancoliques parcequ’ils sont méditatifs”; De l’Homme, 138–39).