The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (26 page)

The Druids that dwelt in the Isle of Man, which are famous for great conjurers, are reported to have been lousy with familiars.
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Had they but put their finger and their
thumb into their neck, they could have plucked out a whole nest of them.

There be them that think every spark in a flame is a spirit, and that the worms which at sea eat through a ship are so also; which may very well be, for have not you seen one spark of fire burn a whole town and a man with a spark of lightning made blind or killed outright? It is impossible the guns should go off as they do, if there were not a spirit either in the fire or in the powder.

Now for worms: what makes a dog run mad but a worm in his tongue?
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And what should that worm be but a spirit? Is there any reason such small vermin as they are should devour such a vast thing as a ship, or have the teeth to gnaw through iron and wood? No, no, they are spirits, or else it were incredible.

Tullius Hostilius,
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who took upon him to conjure up Jove by Numa Pompilius' books, had no sense to quake and tremble at the wagging and shaking of every leaf but that he thought all leaves are full of worms, and those worms are wicked spirits.

If the bubbles in streams were well searched, I am persuaded they would be found to be little better. Hence it comes that mares, as Columella reporteth, looking their forms in the water run mad. A flea is but a little beast, yet if she were not possessed with a spirit, she could never leap and skip so as she doth. Froisard saith the Earl of Foix had a familiar that presented itself unto him in the likeness of two rushes fighting one with another. Not so much as Tewkesbury mustard
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but hath a spirit in it or else it would never bite so. Have we not read of a number of men that have ordinarily carried a familiar or a spirit in a ring instead of a spark of a diamond? Why, I tell ye we cannot
break a crumb of bread so little as one of them will be if they list.

From this general discourse of spirits, let us digress and talk another while of their separate natures and properties.

The spirits of the fire which are the purest and perfectest are merry, pleasant, and well-inclined to wit, but nevertheless giddy and unconstant.

Those whom they possess they cause to excel in whatever they undertake. Or poets or boon companions they are, out of question.

Socrates' genius was one of this stamp, and the dove
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wherewith the Turks hold Mohamet their prophet to be inspired. What their names are and under whom they are governed
The Discovery of Witchcraft
hath amplified at large, wherefore I am exempted from that labour. But of the divinest quintessence of metals and of wines are many of these spirits extracted. It is almost impossible for any to be encumbered with ill spirits who is continually conversant in the excellent restorative distillations of wit and of alchemy. Those that ravenously englut themselves with gross meats and respect not the quality but the quantity of what they eat, have no affinity with these spirits of the fire.

A man that will entertain them must not pollute his body with any gross carnal copulation or inordinate beastly desires, but love pure beauty, pure virtue, and not have his affections linsey-wolsey,
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intermingled with lust and things worthy of liking.

As for example, if he love good poets he must not countenance ballad-makers; if he have learned physicians he must not favour horse-leeches and mountebanks. For a bad spirit and a good can never endure to dwell together.

Those spirits of the fire, however I term them comparatively good in respect of a number of bad, yet are they not simply well-inclined, for they be by nature ambitious, haughty, and proud; nor do they love virtue for itself any
whit, but because they would overquell and outstrip others with the vain-glorious ostentation of it. A humour of monarchizing and nothing else it is, which makes them affect rare qualified studies.
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Many atheists are with these spirits inhabited.

To come to the spirits of the water, the earth and the air: they are dull phlegmatic drones, things that have much malice without any great might. Drunkards, misers and women they usually retain to. Water, you all know, breedeth a medley kind of liquor called beer; with these watery spirits they were possessed that first invented the art of brewing. A quagmire consisting of mud and sand sendeth forth the like puddly mixture.

All rheums, poses,
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sciaticas, dropsies and gouts are diseases of their phlegmatic engendering. Sea-faring men of what sort soever are chief entertainers of those spirits. Greedy vintners likewise give hospitality to a number of them; who, having read no more scripture than that miracle of Christ's turning water into wine in Canaan, think to do a far stranger miracle than ever he did, by turning wine into water.

Alehouses and cooks' shady pavilions, by watery spirits are principally upholden.

The spirits of the earth are they which cry ‘All bread and no drink', that love gold and a buttoned cap above heaven. The worth in nought they respect, but the weight; good wits they naturally hate, insomuch as the element of fire, their progenitor, is a waste-good and a consumer. If with their earth-ploughing snouts they can turn up a pearl out of a dunghill, it is all they desire. Witches have many of these spirits and kill kine with them. The giants and chieftains of those spirits are powerful sometimes to bring men to their ends, but not a jot of good can they do for their lives.

Soldiers with these terrestial spirits participate part of their essence; for nothing but iron and gold, which are earth's excrements, they delight in. Besides, in another
kind they may be said to participate with them, insomuch as they confirm them in their fury and congeal their minds with a bloody resolution. Spirits of the earth they were that entered into the herd of swine in the gospel. There is no city merchant or country purchaser, but is haunted with a whole host of these spirits of the earth. The Indies is their metropolitan realm of abode.

As for the spirits of the air, which have no other visible bodies or form, but such as by the unconstant glimmering of our eyes is begotten, they are in truth all show and no substance, deluders of our imagination and naught else. Carpet knights, politic statesmen, women and children they most converse with. Carpet knights they inspire with a humour of setting big looks on it, being the basest cowards under heaven, covering an ape's heart with a lion's case, and making false alarums when they mean nothing but a may-game. Politic statesmen they privily incite to blear the world's eyes with clouds of commonwealth pretences, to broach any enmity or ambitious humour of their own under a title of their country's preservation; to make it fair or foul when they list, to procure popularity, or induce a preamble to some mighty piece of prowling, to stir up tempests round about, and replenish heaven with prodigies and wonders, the more to ratify their avaricious religion. Women they underhand instruct to pounce and bolster out their brawn-fallen deformities, to new parboil with painting their rake-lean withered visages, to set up flax shops on their foreheads when all their own hair is dead and rotten, to stick their gums round with comfits when they have not a tooth left in their heads to help them to chide withal.

Children they seduce with garish objects, and toyish babies, abusing them many years with slight vanities. So that you see all their whole influence is but thin overcast vapours, flying clouds dispersed with the least wind of wit or understanding.

None of these spirits of the air or the fire have so much predominance in the night as the spirits of the earth and the water; for they feeding on foggy-brained melancholy engender
thereof many uncouth terrible monsters. Thus much observe by the way, that the grossest part of our blood is the melancholy humour, which in the spleen congealed whose office is to disperse it, with his thick steaming fenny vapours casteth a mist over the spirit and clean bemasketh the fantasy.

And even as slime and dirt in a standing puddle engender toads and frogs and many other unsightly creatures, so this slimy melancholy humour, still still thickening as it stands still, engendreth many misshapen objects in our imaginations. Sundry times we behold whole armies of men skirmishing in the air: dragons, wild beasts, bloody streamers, blazing comets, fiery streaks, with other apparitions innumberable. Whence have all these their conglomerate matter but from fuming meteors that arise from the earth? So from the fuming melancholy of our spleen mounteth that hot matter into the higher region of the brain, whereof many fearful visions are framed. Our reason even like drunken fumes it displaceth and intoxicates, and yields up our intellective apprehension to be mocked and trodden under foot by every false object or counterfeit noise that comes near it. Herein specially consisteth our senses' defect and abuse, that those organical parts, which to the mind are ordained ambassadors, do not their message as they ought, but, by some misdiet or misgovernment being distempered, fail in their report and deliver up nothing but lies and fables.

Such is our brain oppressed with melancholy, as is a clock tied down with too heavy weights or plummets; which as it cannot choose but monstrously go a-square or not go at all, so must our brains of necessity be either monstrously distracted or utterly destroyed thereby.

Lightly this extremity of melancholy never cometh, but before some notable sickness; it faring with our brains as with bees, who, as they exceedingly toil and turmoil before a storm or change of weather, so do they beat and toil and are infinitely confused before sickness.

Of the effects of melancholy I need not dilate, or discourse how many encumbered with it have thought themselves
birds and beasts, with feathers and horns and hides; others, that they have been turned into glass; others, that if they should make water they should drown all the world; others, that they can never bleed enough.

Physicians in their circuit every day meet with far more ridiculous experience. Only it shall suffice a little by the way to handle one special effect of it, which is dreams.

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.

How many sorts there be of them no man can rightly set down, since it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike. Divers have written diversely of their causes, but the best reason among them all that I could ever pick out was this: that as an arrow which is shot out of a bow is sent forth many times with such force that it flieth far beyond the mark whereat it was aimed, so our thoughts, intensively fixed all the daytime upon a mark we are to hit, are now and then overdrawn with such force that they fly beyond the mark of the day into the confines of the night. There is no man put to any torment, but quaketh and trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the daytime we torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night-time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured. To nothing more aptly can I compare the working of our brains after we have unyoked and gone to bed than to the glimmering and dazzling of a man's eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into the dark shadow.

Even as one's eyes glimmer and dazzle when they are withdrawn out of the light into darkness, so are our thoughts troubled and vexed when they are retired from labour to ease, and from skirmishing to surgery.

You must give a wounded man leave to groan while he is in dressing. Dreaming is no other than groaning, while sleep our surgeon hath us in cure.

He that dreams merrily is like a boy new breeched, who leaps and danceth for joy his pain is passed. But long that joy stays not with him, for presently after, his master, the day, seeing him so jocund and pleasant, comes and does as much for him again, whereby his hell is renewed.

No such figure
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as the first chaos whereout the world was extraught,
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as our dreams in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places, are confounded
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and meet together.

Our cogitations run on heaps like men to part a fray where every one strikes his next fellow. From one place to another without consultation they leap, like rebels bent on a head.
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Soldiers just up and down
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they imitate at the sack of a city, which spare neither age nor beauty: the young, the old, trees, steeples and mountains, they confound in one gallimaufry.
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Of those things which are most known to us, some of us that have moist brains make to ourselves images of memory. On those images of memory whereon we build in the day, comes some superfluous humour of ours, like a jackanapes, in the night, and erects a puppet stage or some such ridiculous idle childish invention.

A dream is nothing else but the echo of our conceits
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in the day.

But otherwhile it falls out that one echo borrows of another; so our dreams, the echoes of the day, borrow of any noise we hear in the night.

As for example: if in the dead of the night there be any rumbling, knocking or disturbance near us, we straight dream of wars or of thunder. If a dog howl, we suppose we are transported into hell, where we hear the complaint of damned ghosts. If our heads lie double or uneasy, we imagine we uphold all heaven with our shoulders, like Atlas.
If we be troubled with too many clothes, then we suppose the night mare rides us.

I knew one that was cramped, and he dreamed that he was torn in pieces with wild horses; and another, that having a black sant
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brought to his bedside at midnight, dreamt he was bidden to dinner at Ironmongers' Hall.

Any meat that in the daytime we eat against our stomachs, begetteth a dismal dream. Discontent also in dreams hath no little predominance; for even as from water that is troubled, the mud dispersingly ascendeth from the bottom to the top, so when our blood is chased, disquieted and troubled all the light imperfect humours of our body ascend like mud up aloft into the head.