Melancholy: Ficino, Saturn and Dürer's engraving

One of the frequencies you can tune in to on Anima Mundis is called Melancholy. The word has a longer and stranger history than it seems. For centuries it did not name a mood but a humour of the body, black bile, and a planet, Saturn. And it was credited with something that sounds odd today: that anyone who thinks a great deal, and deeply, almost always has it.

A note before going on. This article tells the history of an idea from ancient medicine. It does not describe any diagnosis of today, and it does not replace anyone who can help you. If what you are carrying feels heavy, Find A Helpline lists helplines in more than 175 countries, and the data in each is checked by that country's own organisations.

The old suspicion: genius and black bile

A book of Problems attributed to Aristotle opens one of its sections with this observation: all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts are plainly melancholic. A translation of 1927 says "of an atrabilious temperament", from atra bilis, black bile.¹

Centuries later, a Florentine physician and philosopher repeats the line. Marsilio Ficino writes that Aristotle, in his book of Problems, says that all men outstanding in any faculty were melancholic. He adds Democritus, for whom there are no great minds without some furor, and Plato, who says in the Phaedrus that one knocks in vain at the doors of poetry without furor. And he concludes that this furor, among the physicians, is seen only in melancholics.² For him melancholy is black bile, dry and cold, "earthy".²

Ficino: three causes for one humour

Ficino wrote the Three Books on Life (De vita libri tres). In the preface he says he had two fathers, Ficino the physician and Cosimo de' Medici, and that Galen was the doctor of bodies and Plato "the doctor of souls". The first book looks after the health of those who study; the second prolongs life; the third teaches how to obtain life from the heavens.² They were published on 3 December 1489.³

In Book I he asks why the learned are melancholic and gives three causes.²

• The celestial one. Mercury invites us to investigate doctrines, and Saturn makes us persevere in it and keep what we found. The astrologers say that both are, in some way, cold and dry, like melancholy.
• The natural one. To reach the sciences, especially the hard ones, the mind has to withdraw from the external to the internal, as from a circumference to a centre, and stay there. That is proper to the earth, and black bile resembles it: so it invites the mind to concentrate. And in turn constant contemplation produces a nature like it. Black bile, he adds, also corresponds to Saturn, the highest of the planets, and so it helps to grasp what is highest.
• The human one. Agitating the mind without rest dries the brain and uses up the spirits; and with digestion neglected and the body still, the blood turns thick, cold and dark. All of it makes the mind sad and fearful, and Ficino says so in a sentence worth reading slowly: inner darkness, much more than outer, fills the mind with sadness and frightens it.

Those most affected, he says, are people who devote themselves hard to philosophy, because they separate the mind from the body. And he rests this on Plato. In the Timaeus, the same dialogue we discuss in another article, we read that when in the compound of man "there is an impassioned soul more powerful than the body, that soul ... convulses and fills with disorders the whole inner nature of man; and when eager in the pursuit of some sort of learning or study, causes wasting".⁴

Ficino does not idealise. He distinguishes natural black bile from burnt: only the natural kind leads to judgment and wisdom, and even so not always. Alone and in excess, it clouds the spirits, frightens the mind and dulls the wit. It is like iron: the more it leans to the cold, the colder it gets; the more it leans to the heat, the hotter. At one extreme it gives boldness; at the other, fear and cowardice. And he describes the worst state without ornament: nothing is hoped for, everything is feared, and one is weary of looking at the vault of heaven.²

Saturn is not a prize

The most surprising thing in the book is not the part that is always quoted, the one saying Saturn gives genius. It is that he also warns. In Book II there is a passage in which the speaker cautions scholars against Venus in the lures of touch and taste, and then adds: in the most secluded and over-constant delight of the contemplative mind, beware of Saturn. There, he says, he often devours his own children. Those he seizes with the lures of his highest contemplations and recognises there as his own, if they linger too long on that step, he cuts off from the earth with a kind of sickle, and from the careless he often steals earthly life.²

Ficino adds a nuance without drama. Saturn, he says, shows his hostility on his face, harms slowly, and denies no one time for remedies. The treacherous one, by contrast, is Venus, who arrives as a friend and acts in secret as an enemy.²

What Ficino advised

The remedy, in Book I, is not a formula. It is a list of simple things anyone would recognise today:²

• seeing clear water and green or reddish colours often, and using gardens and woods;
• walking beside rivers and through pleasant meadows, riding or sailing gently;
• music: he recalls that Mercury, Pythagoras and Plato bid us set the mind in order with the lyre and song, and that David, with the psaltery, freed Saul from madness;
• variety, easy occupations and varied affairs that do not vex;
• and "the constant company of agreeable people".

Alongside this, Ficino prescribes pharmacy preparations of his time, such as theriac or aloe pills, which are not copied here: they are from 1489, not from today. And according to Wikipedia's summary of the work, against the ambivalent influence of Saturn he recommends turning to the benign planets: the Sun, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury.³

Dürer, 1514

Twenty-five years later, in 1514, Albrecht Dürer engraved Melencolia I: a print of 24 × 18.8 cm in which a winged figure, head resting on her hand, sits surrounded by tools for measuring and for making: compass, scales, hammer, nails, saw, a sphere and a geometric solid, an hourglass, a bell, a ladder of seven rungs. At her feet, a gaunt dog. In the sky, a bat-like creature carries the title. And in the wall of the building, a magic square.⁵

Almost everything said about its meaning is interpretation, and it is worth separating from the facts. The traditional reading, which starts with Erwin Panofsky, sees in the print a mix of the iconographies of melancholy and of geometry, both governed by Saturn, and in the square a talisman of Jupiter, the favourable planet that wards off melancholy. Panofsky believed that Dürer knew Agrippa and, before him, Ficino, and proposed that the "I" of the title refers to the first of Agrippa's three kinds of melancholy, that of the imagination, of artists. Others see in it the first step of alchemy, the nigredo. And a common reading describes the figure as someone surrounded by the instruments of creative work, but brooding sadly with a feeling of achieving nothing.⁵

The square, in your hands

Of the whole engraving, the square is the only thing you can check with a sum. It is four by four. Each row, each column and the two diagonals add up to 34; so do the four quadrants, the four corners and the four cells in the centre; and each cell and its opposite across the centre add up to 17. The two middle cells of the bottom row, 15 and 14, make up the year: 1514.⁵

Try it yourself. The block below does the sums in your browser and lets you swap two cells. You will see what "magic" means: not that something adds up to 34, but that everything adds up at once, and that moving two numbers is enough to make almost nothing add up.

Some read a 5 and a 17 in two cells: the date of the death of Dürer's mother, 17 May 1514. That is interpretation, not arithmetic.⁵

What melancholy was, and what it was not

Before the Renaissance the melancholic was usually portrayed as the embodiment of acedia, sloth of the spirit, a vice. What Ficino and Agrippa did, according to Philip Sohm, was to give it positive connotations: a Neoplatonic conception of melancholy as divine inspiration.⁵ It is an attractive idea, but Ficino does not offer it without conditions, and the conditions are the whole book: the same humour that opens thought can close it, and whoever thinks a great deal has to look after the body.

And it is not the same as depression. The "melancholy" of these texts is an ancient theory of the humours, with stars and herbs, not a diagnosis of today. What you can read in Ficino, plainly, is that he thought that anyone who lives in the head also needs water, air, movement, music and people.

What we do with this

On Anima Mundis, the Melancholy frequency is described like this: "the search that hurts, the question with no answer". It does not come from Ficino, but it is in his territory. What this site does can be said quickly: someone says how they are, someone receives it, and the Observatory counts how many times it was said and at what UTC hour. It treats nothing, diagnoses nothing and promises nothing. What Ficino put first on his list, water, walking, music, variety and company, is done outside here.