150

THE POWER OF A MELANCHOLY HUMOUR

1

Divination and Divine Tears

Angela Voss (University of Kent)


The sixteenth-century magus Cornelius Agrippa, in his comprehensive Three Books on
Occult Philosophy, observes:

[the melancholy humour] when it is stirred up, burns and stirs up a
madness conducing to knowledge and divination, especially if it is
helped by any celestial influx, particularly of Saturn By melancholy
saith [Aristotle], some men are made as it were divine, foretelling things
to come, and some men are made poets.
2


In this paper I shall explore the connections between the physiological condition of
melancholy and the possession of divinatory knowledge, via the development of the idea of
philosophical genius which arose in the work of the fifteenth-century Florentine Platonist
Marsilio Ficino. Ficinos revival of neoplatonic and Hermetic cosmology and magic within
a Christian context was to inform, on many levels, the music, art and literature of the
Elizabethan Renaissance, and I would like to trace this influence in particular on the
composer John Dowland. Dowlands appropriation of the persona of the melancholic artist
does, I suggest, have far deeper implications than mere conceit or the indulgence of a
world-weary personality, and to explore these we will take a multi-levelled approach and
evoke the image of melancholy through physiological, mythological, astrological,
magical and metaphysical contexts. I will conclude that there can be no one definitive
interpretation of Dowlands musical jewel Lachrimae, and that the depth and power of its
musical symbolism point to more profound dimensions of reality than even the composer
himself may have envisioned.

The melancholic humour

Firstly, what do we mean by melancholy? The categorisation of the four humours is
attributed to Hippocrates (fifth-fourth centuries BCE) who, through close examination of
blood, deduced four conditions or substances within it: phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and
blood itself.
3
Each of these gave rise to a physiological temperament: phlegmatic,
melancholic, choleric and sanguine, which then became the basis of medical diagnosis and
prescription. An imbalance of any humour would give rise to an exaggerated display of its
characteristics in the personality, thus too much black bile - which was considered to be
cold, dry and heavy in quality - would result in groundless depression, sluggishness and
mental disorder. If overheated, however, it would produce a madness or frenzy and a
breaking out of sores. Aristotle, in his Problems, asks why it is that outstanding
philosophers, statesmen, poets or artists (or heroes such as Heracles, Lysander, Ajax and
Bellepheron) are of a melancholic temperament, or even infected by the diseases arising

1
C. Agrippa, Three Books on Occult Philosophy (De occulta philosophia, 1
st
ed. Antwerp, 1531), ed. Donald
Tyson, trans. J. Freake (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1997), LX, 188.
2
Ibid.
3
See Hippocrates, Nature of Man, Regimen in Health, Humors, Aphorisms, Regimen 1-3, Dreams trans. W.H.S.
Jones (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1931).


151
from black bile.
4
The idea arises here that black bile causes a super-human quality to
manifest when it is heated excessively, an eruption of mental acuity, passion or desire
which shifts the consciousness to another level of insight:

Those in whom the bile is considerable and cold become sluggish and
stupid, while those with whom it is excessive and hot become mad,
clever or amorous and easily moved to passion or desire, and some
become more talkative. But many, because this heat is near to the seat
of the mind, are affected by the diseases of madness or frenzy, which
accounts for the Sybils, soothsayers, and all inspired persons.
5


Even those with moderately heated black bile, says Aristotle, are superior to the rest of
the world in many ways,
6
chiefly through their acute intelligence.
Thus black bile has two effects: if excessive, it will weigh the body down, force the
mind into the body and lead to despondency. On the other hand, if it is not stable it may
combust and lead to outbursts of mania. The remedy would be to rarefy the bile with
moisture derived from phlegm and blood, and to temper and refine it through the use of
specific foods, remedies and healthy regimes. When harmoniously tempered, the black bile
was seen to produce a capacity for an understanding of a particular kind one more
penetrating than that produced by the other three humours. Why would this be? We will
return to this question a little later.

Divine frenzy

It was Plato who established the spiritual potential of the frenzied condition, in
suggesting that in such an altered state of consciousness it was possible to become a
channel for the influx of divine knowledge. Through the observation of four contexts in
which such madness manifested - religious ritual, poetic inspiration, erotic love and
prophetic utterance - he transformed a pathology into a gift of heaven
7
as it enabled the
individual to transcend the human condition and lift his or her mind to the level of the gods
- in effect, to realise their innate divine nature. The Platonists insisted on the distinction
between this divine-sent madness which led to inspiration or ecstasy and a derangement
of mental faculties which was of purely human physiological or psychological origins and
led to insanity.
8
The near-identity of the words manike (madness) and mantike (prophetic
divination) proved, for Plato, their common etymological origins and therefore the essential
and prerequisite condition for both foresight and artistic genius which could never be
derived from merely human talents:

But he who, having no touch of the Muses madness in his soul, comes
to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art
he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is
nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
9



4
Aristotle, Problems 30.1, translation in J. Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch.1, 57.

5
Ibid, 58.
6
Ibid.
7
Plato, Phaedrus 244.
8
For example, Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2.104, III.25.158, 5-159,13; See Emma C. Clarke, Iamblichus De
mysteriis: A Manifesto of the Miraculous (Ashgate 2001), 75-8; Gregory Shaw, Containing Ecstasy: The
Strategies of Iamblichean Theurgy in Dionysius vol. XXI, Dec. 2003, 54-88.
9
Plato, Phaedrus 244.


152
This state of divine possession - the enraptured performer who was both man and god
- was to take hold of the Renaissance imagination and lift the status of poetry and music to
unprecedented heights; for if music could embody divine qualities, it could have the effect
of raising the listeners soul to a similar ecstatic union through sympathetic resonance.

Saturn

It became commonplace in Medieval and Renaissance literature to associate the planet
Saturn with the melancholic humour, as if he were to blame for it.
10
The correspondence
between humours and planets was established by Arabic astrologers such as Abu Mashar
(died 885 CE) who associated stars, elements, humours and colours through their
analogical qualities, in the tradition of neoplatonic and Hermetic magical practice. In the
tenth century Arabic text Faithful of Basra we read:

The spleen occupies the same position in the body as Saturn in the
world. For Saturn with its rays sends forth transcendent powers which
penetrate into every part of the world. Through these, forms adhere to,
and remain in, matter. Even so goes forth from the spleen the power of
the black bile, which is cold and dry and it flows with the blood through
the veins into every part of the body, and through it the blood coagulates
and the parts adhere to one another.
11


Such correspondences formed the basis of both medical and magical procedures, and
were based on obvious correlations between traditional astrological symbolism and
literal observation. Bile is black, cold and dry like the earth Saturn, ruling matter, is
also cold (being far from the Sun), slow in its revolutions and dark in colour. Similarly,
Mars ruled the choleric, Jupiter the sanguine, and the Moon the phlegmatic temperaments.
In classical astrology, as it was established by Ptolemy
12
and affiliated to an Aristotelian
natural scientific framework, planets were seen to influence human life causally and
directly, and so we find Saturn making the individual unlucky, lonely, miserly and selfish
if prominent in particular places in a nativity.
13
Yet the Roman Saturn was originally
wholly good, the guardian of wealth and god of farming, and it is only when we go back to
his mythological origins as the Greek Kronos that we begin to observe an internal
ambivalence which lies at the roots of his nature.
14
As the authors of Saturn and
Melancholy observe, Kronos, in Homer and Hesiod, is a god of opposites; according to
Homer, Kronos as father of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades is great but also of crooked
counsel. He is the benevolent god of agriculture, ruler of the Golden Age, but also a
gloomy, dethroned solitary god, exiled beneath the earth and the flood of the seas. He is
the father of gods and men, but also the devourer of his own children.
15

To summarise Robert Graves account,
16
Kronos was a Titan, fathered by Uranus upon
Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons the Cyclopes into Tartarus. In
revenge, Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father, led by Kronos who castrated him
with a flint sickle as he slept, throwing the genitals into the sea with his left hand. This act

10
Noted by R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky & F. Saxl, in Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964), 1.1.
11
Quoted in Saturn and Melancholy, 129-30.
12
The primary text being Ptolemys Tetrabiblos (trans. F.E. Robbins, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1940).
13
For example, Julius Firmicus Maternus Matheseos Libri VIII trans Jean Rhys Brams (Parkridge, New
Jersey: Noyes Press, 1975), Liber tertius, II.
14
See Saturn and Melancholy 1.2.
15
Saturn and Melancholy 134 5, quoting Iliad IV.59; V.721;XIV.204.
16
In Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Cassell, 1955), 6-7; see also Saturn and Melancholy 144.


153
engendered the Furies, who avenge crimes of parricide and perjury. Kronos married his
sister Rhea, but it had been prophecied by Uranus and Earth that one of his own sons would
dethrone him. So every year he swallowed his children. Rhea was so enraged that she took
her third son Zeus to Mother Earth who hid him in a cave to be brought up by nymphs,
including the goat-nymph Amaltheia (when he became Lord of the Universe, Zeus set her
image among the stars as Capricorn). Rhea had tricked Kronos by giving him a stone in
swaddling clothes to swallow. Eventually, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades banished Kronos to
Tartarus, where he enjoyed a sad and thoughtful old age.
The astrological Saturn preserved the sickle of Kronos in its glyph, along with such
symbolism of the heaviness of the stone,
17
the sadness, the old age, the father. But in the
tradition of classical astrology the allegory of the myth became concretised into analogy;
Manilius speaks of Saturn holding the fate of fathers and old men
18
and those born under
Saturn were said to display qualities of heaviness and melancholy. As the doctrine of the
four humours developed, Saturnine people inevitably began to be associated with those in
whom the melancholic humour was strongest. Yet Kronos old age was not only sad, but
thoughtful. It was this attribute which was to become the key to the transformation of
traditional astrological doctrine that occurred in the fifteenth century, as Marsilio Ficino,
fervent Platonist, had no choice but to re-interpret Saturn in the light of his philosophical
convictions. This was to have extraordinary consequences, both for astrology itself and in
the birth of the Renaissance man of genius.

The transformation of Saturn

In his medical/astrological treatise of 1489, Three Books on Life, Ficino achieves an
unprecedented synthesis of the Aristotelian physiology of melancholy, Platonic frenzy and
the astrological/mythological Saturn in a typical multi-levelled approach. But before
looking at this in some detail, we need to understand why Saturn had such extraordinary
resonance for Ficino on both personal and philosophical levels, and how he came to re-
vision the possibilities of astrological interpretation. In 1477, Ficino had condemned
outright the astrologers of his day, accusing them - the petty ogres - of usurping Gods
Providence and Justice and denying the freewill of mankind.
19
He could see that astrology,
as it survived in its traditional, fatalistic form, remained bound to the literal world of cause
and effect, prey to the conjectures and false interpretations of its practitioners and devoid of
piety or philosophical insight. Ficino, following Plotinus, understood the human soul to be
autonomous and divine, able to move freely, amphibian-like, in a cosmos where every part
connected to the whole in a complex ballet. A supreme and unified divine presence or ONE
emanated out into creation by means of the continual motion of the anima mundi, its traces
in the material world perceived by humans not through their abstract reasoning but as
occult properties through their imagination, the souls organ of perception.
Plotinus speaks of a universe where the stars are signs or indications of divine will as it
manifests throughout creation, signs which can be read by one who is able to see with
different eyes that is, poetically, through metaphor and symbol. Such vision, he says,

17
The stone swallowed by Saturn can also be associated with the philosophers stone of alchemy, in which
the literal stone has become transfigured into gold, i.e. spiritual substance. It is often identified with the
divine child (see C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies [CW13, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1968], 94-101, 294-7; Psychology and Alchemy [CW 12, London: Routledge 1989], 357-431) which has
resonances with the original deception of Rhea in her substitution of the material stone for the living king of
the gods, Zeus. Interpreted alchemically, the stone is Zeus, but the spiritual substance must first be
extracted from the inert matter before being re-introduced as the transforming agent.
18
Manilius, Astronomica trans. G.P.Goold (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2, 157.
19
Marsilio Ficino, A Disputation against the Pronouncements of the Astrologers in The Letters of Marsilio
Ficino vol.3, no.37 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1981), 75-7.


154
depends on the sympathy and correspondence of all parts of the living universe with each
other, and is of another order entirely from cause and effect action:

The stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-
operators contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic
quality. Their symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their
efficacy only to what they patently do.
20


Plotinus observes that the powers of the stars do not lie in themselves, but in the ability
of the human being to perceive their patterns as analogies: the wise man is the man who in
any one thing can read another.
21
They facilitate the act of divination, in that they are
embodiments, on the level of the cosmos, of the archetypal principles residing in the Divine
Mind itself and thus can be read as signs of a transcendent wisdom. This is the basis of
esoteric thinking, and applied to astrology, implies that a horoscope is not, in essence, a
set of finite definitions, but an image of universal principles particularised for the life of
an individual. As such, the individual is free to interpret them on whatever level he finds
himself - since the soul, for Plotinus, is self-directive.
22
Each principle can be understood
literally - which will appear like a fixed fate - or symbolically, which allows for a deeper
penetration into its meaning. Astrology as poetic metaphor rather than natural-scientific
fact frees the imagination and allows a mirroring to take place in which the soul sees itself;
but more than that, making the step from the literal to the symbolic interpretation,
discerning a hidden meaning, was understood by Ficino as the first step towards a deeper
spiritual understanding.
23
Allegory, symbolism and metaphor had long been established as
means to spiritual knowledge via the Christian Platonic visionary mysticism of Dionysius
the Areopagite
24
(who we will return to later) and the four levels hermeneutic of medieval
scriptural interpretation; a mode of perception which moved from the objective detachment
of a literal fact to a sense of participation and identification of knower with the thing
known - a meeting of outer and inner worlds in a teleological process whose ultimate end
was anagogic union with God.
25
Theology for Ficino was essentially this dynamic process
of understanding, not a statement of dogma - his divine Plato could point to deep
mysteries through poetry and metaphor, and he adopts the same method.
26

Thus Saturn, for all his negative attributes in traditional astrology, had to contain a
hidden gold, not only because all the stars revealed the workings of Providence as divine

20
Plotinus, Enneads II.3.7 trans. S. Mackenna (London: Faber 1962, repr. ed. J. Dillon, New York: Penguin
Books, 1992).
21
Ibid.
22
See for example ibid., II.3.9.
23
As demonstrated most succinctly in his Liber de sole (Opera omnia, Basle 1576, repr. Phnix Editions, Paris
2000), vol. 1, 965-75, trans. G. Cornelius, D. Costello, G. Tobyn, A. Voss and V. Wells in Sphinx, A Journal for
Archetypal Psychology vol. 6 (The London Convivium for Archetypal Studies, 1994), 124-48.
24
See Pseudo-Dionysius (sixth century CE), Divine Names; The Celestial Hierarchy. Arthur Versluis remarks
that in its emphasis on the power of symbolism to convey spiritual understanding, this aspect of Dionysius
work can be seen as a cornerstone for what has come to be known as Western esotericism, for [it] speaks to the
power of the imagination in perceiving transcendent reality through symbolism. (Versluis, Dionysius the
Areopagite in Esoterica, www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/Dionysius.html).
25
The Christians were indebted to the neoplatonists in their appropriation of the power of symbolic vision, and
the neoplatonists to the Egyptians (as for example, Iamblichus, De mysteriis. See Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and
the Soul (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1998); Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), chaps. 6&7. On the four levels of interpretation, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa
theologia I. 9-10; Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, the Four Senses of Scripture (repr.trans.Continuum
International Publishing Group, 1998 & 2000); A. Voss, From Allegory to Anagoge; the challenge of symbolic
perception in a literal world in eds. N. Campion, P. Curry & M. York, Astrology and the Academy (Bristol:
Cinnabar Books 2004).
26
Explicitly stated in Ficino, Proemium to the Commentaries on Plato, Opera omnia vol.2, 1128-30.


155
signs, but because Saturn was the highest of them, the nearest to the Divine Mind itself. No
planet could be malefic for the Platonist, for whom the entire cosmos moves towards the
Good, and increases in divine potency up through the concentric spheres of Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond Saturn lies the realm of the fixed
stars - symbolically, the divine mind - and beyond that, the One itself. In the microcosm of
the human soul, therefore, Saturn represents the furthest outreach of the human mind, its
deepest connection with spiritual reality, an intelligence which borders on that of God. The
discovery of this gold was even more crucial for Ficino, as he was born with Saturn
prominent and strong in his nativity, on his Ascendant in Aquarius, and he identified with a
melancholy temperament (see figure 1).
27
He had no choice: if as a philosopher he was
penetrating to the unity of all things in the Good, then he had to find the qualities in himself
which would lead him there; if it was his melancholy temperament that led him to
penetrate to the heart of things, then this became a gift, not a curse, of Saturn. He wrote to
his great friend Giovanni Cavalcanti:

Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the
beginning, set, as it is, almost in the midst of my ascendant Aquarius
So what shall I do? I shall seek a shift; either I shall say, if you wish,
that a nature of this kind does not issue from Saturn, or if it should be
necessary that it does issue from Saturn, I shall, in agreement with
Aristotle, say that this nature itself is a unique and divine gift.
28


From this perspective, Saturns influence would not be helpful to those who did not
practice contemplation but led a worldly life. Ficino explains:

The contemplating intellect - insofar as it separates itself not only from
things we perceive but even from those things which we commonly
imagine and which we prove about human behaviour and insofar as it
recollects itself in emotion, in intention and in life to supra-physical
things - exposes itself somewhat to Saturn. To this faculty alone is
Saturn propitious. For just as the Sun is hostile to nocturnal animals, but
friendly to the diurnal, so Saturn is hostile to those people who are either
leading publicly an ordinary life or even to those fleeing the company of
the crowd but not laying aside their ordinary emotions. For Saturn has
relinquished the ordinary life to Jupiter, but he claims for himself a life
sequestered and divine.
29


Saturn has taken over things which transcend the physical; in this assertion, a new
astrology was born, in which Saturn becomes a symbol of the most profound self-
knowledge.
30
In one of his most elegant passages of astrological metaphor, Ficino suggests

27
Added to which, as an astrologer Ficino would understand the Moon and Mars in Saturns sign of Capricorn
to emphasise his Saturnine characteristics.
28
Ficino, letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, Letters, vol.2 no.24 (1978), 33-4.
29
Ficino, Liber de vita III.22, eds. C. Kaske and J. Clark, Three Books on Life (Binghamton, New York:
Renaissance Society of America 1989), 367.
30
A humanistic astrology which re-surfaced in the twentieth-century development of theosophical,
psychological and archetypal schools of practice. On Ficinos astrology, see Thomas Moore, The Planets
Within (Toronto, 1982, repr. Herndon, VA: Lindisfarne Press, 1990); Angela Voss The Astrology of Marsilio
Ficino, Divination or Science? in Culture and Cosmos vol.4, no.3 (2000), 29-45; Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley,
California: North Atlantic Books, Western Esoteric Masters Series, 2006); Father Time and Orpheus (Oxford:
Abzu Press, 2003).


156
that in the innermost sanctum of the Platonic Academy it is the true philosophers who will
come to know their Saturn, contemplating the secrets of the heavens.
31


Figure 1: Ficinos horoscope
(19
th
October, 1433, Florence, 13.45 LMT)
32






Black Bile and Genius

In the first part of his Three Books on Life De vita sana (On a healthy life) - Ficino
discusses ways in which scholars prone to over-stimulation of the mind can lead a healthy
life, in a multi-layered exploration of the Saturnine principle when dominant in the human
body and psyche. It is typical of Ficino to write on many levels simultaneously, in an
attempt to shift the perception of the reader from a literal interpretation and open it up to
metaphorical understanding.
He begins by suggesting that learned people are particularly subject to phlegm and
black bile, due to an inactive body and over-active mind, for melancholy, if it is too
abundant or vehement, vexes the mind with continual care and frequent absurdities and
unsettles the judgment.
33
The causes of melancholy, he continues, are threefold. Firstly,
celestial, because both Mercury who invites us to investigate doctrines and Saturn who
makes us persevere in investigating doctrines and retain them when discovered are

31
Ficino, Proemium to the Commentaries on Plato (Opera omnia, vol. 2), 1130 (unpublished translation by the
School of Economic Science).
32
Ficino tells us in a letter to Martinus Uranius of 1489 (Ficino, Opera omnia vol.I [Basle 1576, repr. Phnix
Editions, Paris 2000], 901) that he was born at unam supra vigesimam on 19
th
October, 1433 in Figline,
Florence. At this period in Italy the system of Italian hours was kept, where the day was considered to
begin at sunset on the previous day. Therefor 21.00 hours means 21 hours after sunset on 18
th
October, e.g.
approx. mid-afternoon on 19
th
. The GMT of 13.45 gives the most accurate correspondence to Ficinos own
description of his chart in this letter. See also A.Voss Ficino and Astrology in Astrology, the Astrologers
Quarterly vol.60, no. 3, 1986, 126-138 and vol.60, no.4, 1986, 191-199.
33
Ficino, Liber de vita I.3, Kaske & Clark, 113.


157
considered astrologically to be cold and dry in quality therefore analogous to the
melancholic nature; secondly, natural, in that in intensive study the soul must draw in
upon itself from external things to internal as from the circumference to the centre, and
while it speculates, it must stay immovably at the very centre of man. This is like the
Earth itself, fixed at the centre of the cosmos, which is also analogous to black bile in its
qualities. But study does not only force the attention inwards, but also upwards, since
black bile is also congruent with Saturn, the highest of planets. Thirdly, the human cause
derives from a drying out of the brain due to frequent agitation of the mind; the subtle
and clear parts of the blood become used up in the restoring of spirits, and it becomes
dense, dry and black. Digestion suffers, and lack of exercise results in heaviness and
depression. Those who will suffer most and no doubt Ficino is talking here from first-
hand experience are those who over-zealously apply their mind to incorporeal truth so
that it begins to detach itself from the body, which becomes deadened and melancholic.
The soul then may become so powerful that it overreaches the body above what the
corporeal nature can endure and may even fly out of it.
34

Ficino continues by taking up the Aristotelian association of melancholy with supreme
intelligence, which, he says, neither Aristotle, Plato nor Democritus have fully explained.
35

There are two kinds of melancholy, the natural variety which is a dense and dry part of
the blood, and that brought about by adustion. The latter is in turn divided into four kinds,
originating from the combustion of the four humours, and can cause harm to the wisdom
and judgment due to the mania produced by the action of kindling and burning. When the
flaring-up of combustion dies down, it leaves a foul black soot which weighs down the
body and leads to melancholy. So, Ficino suggests, it is the natural black bile which leads
to wisdom, but only when it is not too abundant or too scarce - conditions which lead to
dullness and instability. It must be subtle and rarefied, refreshed and tempered by the
moisture of phlegm, bile and blood. It is then easily kindled and burns longer and more
vehemently, sustaining its power and maintaining the conditions ripe for intelligence and
genius - in fact, Ficino suggests that the level of insight produced in this way conforms to
Platos definition of divine frenzy.
What is more, this new, refined black bile has much the appearance of gold, and in an
alchemical image Ficino describes how the spirits distilled from this humour are more
rarefied, hotter, brighter and more vigorous, just like the aqua vita distilled from heated
wine. Their influence on the intelligence promotes sustained investigation and sound
judgment, but also leads it further - to a knowledge of a different order of being:

the soul with an instrument or incitement of this kind - which is
congruent in a way with the centre of the cosmos, and, as I might say,
collects the soul into its own centre - always seeks the centre of all
subjects and penetrates to their innermost core. It is congruent,
moreover, with Mercury and Saturn, of whom the second, the highest of
planets, carries the investigator to the highest subjects. From this come
original philosophers, especially when their soul, hereby called away
from external movements and from its own body, is made in the highest
degree both a neighbour to the divine and an instrument of the divine.
As a result, it is filled from above with divine influences and oracles,
and it always invents new and unaccustomed things and predicts the
future.
36



34
All quotations in this para. from ibid. I.4, Kaske & Clark, 113-5.
35
Ibid. I.5, Kaske & Clark, 117.
36
Ibid. I.6, Kaske & Clark, 121-2.


158
So in the same way that the heaviness of physical black bile is a necessary condition for
its transformation into rarefied spirit, so the worldly limitations and depression of Saturn
must be a basis for its potential as intellectual concentration, for the literal or material level
must not be abandoned, but rather re-visioned and transfigured. Alchemically, if sulphur as
prima materia is heated to the right temperature, Mercury separates from it and becomes
the agent of transmutation during the initial nigredo stage of the work. In a constant
process of refining and burning eventually the philosophers stone is produced, the
realisation of the unus mundus or conjunction of opposites in the psyche of the alchemist.
37

So too, in the re-working of melancholy, it is the Mercurial qualities of intellectual insight
which are sustained and fed by the burning vapours of the bile and which in turn penetrate
its inert density. Mercury is, astrologically, of an airy nature, and the potent combination
of air and earth can also be seen in the position of Ficinos own Saturn in the air sign of
Aquarius. Bringing Mercurial qualities to bear on Saturn could therefore be a way to
access and free the potential for genius associated with Aquarius (which Saturn rules by
night)
38
- and for Ficino there could be no more effective way of effecting and refining the
heaviness of black bile, tempering it and harmonising it, than through invoking the airy
spirit of music and song. Furthermore, in doing this, he was consciously identifying with
the perennial wisdom of the ancient theologians:

Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras and Plato tell us to calm and to cheer
the dissonance of the sorrowful mind with the constant and harmonious
lyre and song I too (if I may compare the lowliest person with the
greatest), frequently prove in myself how much the sweetness of the lyre
and song avail against the bitterness of black bile.
39


This experience was to inspire an entire system of music therapy based on the imitation of
the heavens in words and music, with the aim of engaging the powers of the imagination in
the alchemical task of transforming the human soul.

The music spirit

In the third part of his Book of Life, De vita coelitus comparanda (On fitting your life
to the heavens), Ficino recommends the use of specially composed music and song to
affect the human spirit in such a way that it takes on the life of the cosmic spirit through the
specific qualities of the seven planetary spirits. Song, says, Ficino, works its power through
imitation, so when it imitates celestial qualities, it will allow a two-way interaction between
the spirits of the performer and audience, and the heavens:


37
On the psychic processes of the alchemical marriage, see for example C.G. Jung, The Spirit Mercurius in
Alchemical studies, part IV; The Conjunction in Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14, 1963 repr. 1981), part
VI; The Psychic Nature of the Alchemical Work in Psychology and Alchemy, pt.II, chap.2. See also Liz
Greene, Love, Alchemy and Planetary Attraction in this volume.
38
Albrecht Durers two engravings Melencolia I and St Jerome in his Study can be seen to illustrate the
qualities of Saturn in Aquarius and Saturn in Capricorn, its night and daytime houses, the former
exemplifying artistic frenzy, genius and wild intellectual disorder, the latter discipline, structure and quiet
diligence. See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London and New York:
Routledge Classics 1979, repr. 2002), ch.6, who suggests that, following Agrippas distinctions, two different
stages of melancholy are depicted here: the inspired imagination of the artist and on a higher plane, the
mystical knowledge of divine things. See also the interpretation by J ohn Read at
http://www.alchemylab.com/melancholia.htm
39
Ficino, Liber de vita I.10, Kaske & Clarke. Other references to the beneficial effects of his lyre-playing
include Letters vol.1 (1975), nos. 92, 93, 130; vol.2 (1978), nos. 5, 8, 24; vol.4 (1988), no.11; vol.7 (2003),
no.18.


159
Now the very matter of song, indeed, is altogether purer and more
similar to the heavens than is the matter of medicine. For this too is air,
hot or warm, still breathing and somehow living; like an animal, it is
composed of certain parts and limbs of its own and not only possesses
motion and displays passion but even carries meaning like a mind, so
that it can be said to be a kind of airy and rational animal.
40


If the song corresponds to the stars, both in relation to the characteristics of the actual
constellations AND in respect to the imagination of the performer, then it will cast its
power into the singer and listener, especially if the singer has in his or her heart a
powerful vital and animal spirit. The influence will be intensified by the choosing of a
suitable astrological hour to maintain a vital connection between the meaning of the
words, the musical form and the quality of the moment. But most essential of all, is the
intention of the performer, an intense desire to make contact with the life-giving cosmic
energy which itself effects connection:

For if a certain vapour and spirit directed outwards through the rays of
the eyes or by other means can sometimes fascinate, infect, or otherwise
influence a bystander, much more can a spirit do this, when it pours out
from both the imagination and heart at the same time, more abundant,
more fervent, and more apt to motion.
41


Each planet will have a kind of music proper to it, which can be imitated in order to
attract its qualities, for example the voices of Saturn are slow, deep, harsh and plaintive
and the songs of Mercury relaxed, gay, vigorous and complex.
42
Deliberately guarded,
Ficino remarks that prayers will have similar power, through the combination of emotional
affect and the natural power of words themselves. As a Christian priest, he does not want
to be seen to be worshipping divinities, yet it is quite clear that affiliating oneself to the
spirits of the stars in this way is at least religious in intent, and at most a thinly-disguised
example of neoplatonic theurgy whose rituals of invocation to cosmic deities were merely
stepping stones in a process of the souls assimilation to the supreme One.
43

Now if we apply a musical analogy to the physiological distillation of black bile, it
would surely be to bring the qualities of Mercury - quickness, lightness, subtlety - to bear
on a music which is melancholy, heavy, ponderous and earth-bound. We could also suggest
that it is precisely through representing in sound the alchemical process of transmutation

40
Liber de vita 3.21, Kaske & Clark, 359.
41
Ibid. Kaske & Clark, 361.
42
Ibid.
43
At the end of De vita coelitus comparanda Ficino tentatively suggests, following Iamblichus, that
sometimes it can happen that when you bring seminal reasons to bear on forms, higher gifts too may
descend (3.26, Kaske & Clark, 391) but he dare not go so far as to imply that his natural magic could lead to
mystical union with God. Orthodox theology demanded a clear distinction between the realm of Divine
Providence and the natural movements of the cosmos. For further discussion on this issue, see Angela Voss
Marsilio Ficino, Introduction; On Ficinos natural magic in general, see esp. Brian Copenhaver, Scholastic
Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino, in Renaissance Quarterly vol.37, no.4,
523-554; Thomas Moore, The Planets Within; Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Angela Voss, Father Time and Orpheus, Marsilio Ficino, the
Second Orpheus in Music as Medicine ed. P. Horden (Vermot: Ashgate, 2000), 154-72, Orpheus
Redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino in Marsilio Ficino, his Theology, his Philosophy, his
Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 227-41, The Music of the Spheres: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Harmonia
in Culture and Cosmos vol.2, no.2 (1998), 16-38; D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella (repr. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2000), Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).


160
that the listener undergoes, through sympathy, a similar process of refining and intensifying
his melancholy humour in the way experienced by Ficino. Hence we could conclude that
melancholy music which reflected back to the listener his or her own earth-bound
condition, and yet also invoked the cosmic spirit, would have immense power - the power
to lift the consciousness of both performer and listener to a new level of perception, and
even perhaps induce a condition of sustained frenzy in which prophetic utterance might
occur.

Hermes Trismegistus

Ficinos legacy to Western philosophical magic was not only via his neoplatonic
translations, but perhaps even more influentially through his translation of the Corpus
Hermeticum attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. In fact the
Hermetic corpus proved, for the Renaissance magi, an unbroken genealogy of ancient
philosophers from which Plato himself derived his wisdom.
44
As Frances Yates has
demonstrated, the popularity of this work in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and the
influence of occult philosophy - both Hermeticism and Cabala - on art and literature during
this period was profound.
45
Hermetic religious philosophy provided a revelatory
counterpart to the Platonic path of intellectual knowledge, being concerned with the direct
spiritual initiation of the adept by his teacher. The texts translated by Ficino were in fact
composed in the Hellenistic period and owe much to Gnostic and Platonic cosmology, but
nevertheless they preserve an essential Egyptian element of experiential wisdom,
portraying a transmission of spiritual knowledge through the induction of a dream
consciousness which culminated in the rebirth of the adept.
46
Indeed, that this process
could be accomplished whilst still alive is now being considered by Egyptian scholars as a
potent recapitulation of ancient initiation ritual in which the Pharoah underwent a
divinisation process involving a psychic journey to the realm of the dead.
47

The myth of the descent and ascent of the soul in Book I of the Corpus Hermeticum
48

tells of its original, pristine condition at one with God, its fall to earth, embodiment, and
subsequent remembering and desire to return. When clothed in its earthly body, the soul is
as if asleep, forgetful of its divine origins, heavy and withdrawn - essentially in a condition
of melancholy. Its awakening may take place through a glimpse of the divine (Platonically,
through erotic connection with a beauty which is an image of divine beauty) and from there
the re-ascent may begin. As the soul travels down through the cosmos to become mingled
with Nature, it passes through the spheres of the seven planets, acquiring attributes from
them. Similarly, as it returns, it passes up through the spheres, discarding the unnecessary
qualities it no longer needs, until it becomes one with God once more.
The notion of the soul trapped in an earthly body, in a vale of tears, gave rise to the
phrase pessimist gnosis- that the intense despair of this condition could in some way

44
The authority of Hermes Trismegistus was accepted on the authority of both Lactantius (Institutes) and
Augustine (De civitate Dei) for refs. see Yates, Giordano Bruno 6-19; Ficino first specifies the genealogy
of the Ancient Theologians in his Preface to the Corpus Hermeticum (quoted in B. Copenhaver, Hermetica,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xlviii. See Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986); D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (London: Duckworth 1972).
45
See Yates, Giordano Bruno; The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age part I.
46
See Peter Kingsley, Poimandres: the Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica in Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993), 1-24.
47
For example, see Jeremy Naydler, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts (Vermont: Inner Traditions,
2005); Alison Roberts, My Heart, My Mother (Rottingdean: Northgate, 2000).
48
Corpus Hermeticum I, trans. B. Copenhaver, Hermetica or C. Salaman, C. van Oyen & W. Wharton, The
Way of Hermes (London: Duckworth, 1999). Similar myths may be found in Macrobius, Commentary on the
Dream of Scipio and Platos Myth of Er in Republic X.


161
contain the seeds of a yearning to return, and fuel the journey.
49
The essential part played
by emotional desire in the gaining of spiritual knowledge - the force of eros as described by
Plato
50
- was emphasised in the Dionysian tradition of mystical ascent
51
and thereby
assimilated by the Sufi mystics (together with Platonic and Hermetic gnostic cosmology)
into esoteric Islam. Henry Corbin points out that in this tradition the power of music lies
precisely in its ability to arouse the full realisation of both our alienation from the divine
and our deep sympathy with it:

It is He who seeks and is sought for, He is the Lover and He is the
Beloved. To state this identity is simply to recall the nostalgia of the
Hidden Treasure yearning to be known, the nostalgia which is the
secret of Creation. It is with Himself that the Divine Being sympathised
in sympathising with the sadness of His Names, with the sadness of our
own latent existences yearning to manifest those Names, and that is the
first source of His love for us who are His own beings... it is precisely
therein that Ibn Arabi discerns the cause of the emotion we experience
when we listen to music.
52


The metaphysics of Love and the melancholy condition of the lover became a dominant
theme in the revival of occult philosophy by poets and composers in Italy and England in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One has only to listen to the madrigals of
Claudio Monteverdi to glimpse the sentiments expressed by Corbin, to sense the arousal of
a passionate connection with a dimension beyond ones grasp. The many levels in which
love was experienced pointed, ultimately, to a path of initiation in which the lovers
yearning, aroused by the physical presence of the beloved, would culminate in union with
divine Lover Himself. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, it was the artists, poets and
musicians who deliberately created the conditions for such a re-awakening of the soul to
itself.

John Dowland

Alas there are few that find the narrow way and those few what are
they? Not dancers but mourners, not laughers but weepers, whose tune
is Lachrimae, whose musicke sighes for sin, who know no other
cinquapace but this to heaven.
53



49
Both pessimist (apophatic) and optimist forms of spiritual teaching are found in early Gnostic writings,
Hermetic texts and Dionysian theology. Pessimist forms tend to take a negative view of the physical
cosmos, emphasising the need to transcend and deliver ones soul from the bonds of matter. For the
optimist Gnostic, creation is a manifestation of divinity, the cosmos itself a divine being. The literature on
Gnosticism is extensive; for a convenient survey of the tradition see Kurt Rudolph Gnosis: The Nature and
History of Gnosticism (San Francisco: Harper, 1987); Hans Jonas The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon,
1958); Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
50
Chiefly in Phaedrus 250-2and Symposium 210-11.
51
For example, see Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 154 (op.cit): But when we speak of desire in
connection with intellectual beings we must understand by this a divine love of the Immaterial, above reason
and mind, and an enduring and unshakeable superessential longing for pure and compassionless
contemplation, and true, sempiternal, intelligible participation in the most sublime and purest Light
52
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of IbnArabi (Princeton, New
Jersey: University Press, 1969, repr.1997), 152.
53
William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633). As a hard-line Puritan, Prynne (1600-69) attacks theatre
and dancing in this extensive pamphlet.


162
The English composer John Dowland (1563-1625) is best remembered for his
melancholy persona - semper Dowland, semper dolens (ever Dowland, ever doleful) was
his motto, and the title of one of his compositions. Many of his lute-songs are settings of
texts of the utmost despair, darkness and misery, where there is no life or hope left, and
Dowlands biographer Diana Poulton has pointed out that three of the most mournful texts
- In Darkness let me Dwell, Mourne, Mourne Day is with Darkness Fled and Flow my
Tears could well stem from Dowlands own hand.
54
But to read these texts as merely
expressions of Dowlands own personal misery or his difficult life circumstances
55
, or
even as examples of an artistic genre,
56
is surely to deny the most suggestive Hermetic
imagery of the soul alienated from its source:

Flow my tears, flow from your springs
Exiled for ever, let me mourne
Where nights black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorne.

Downe vain lights, shine you no more,
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pitie is fled, and tears, and sighs and groans
My weary days of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown
And fear and pain and grief
For my deserts are my hopes since hope is gone.

Hark you shadows that in darkness dwell
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy, they that in hell
Feele not the worlds despite.
57


Dowland was not working alone, for such dark thoughts were nurtured in his artistic
milieu. Around Queen Elizabeth herself and her courtier Lucy, Countess of Bedford
esoteric circles gathered to discuss philosophy, including the poets Walter Raleigh, Philip
Sidney, George Chapman, the playwright Christopher Marlowe and the magus John Dee
and most significantly, the radical Italian Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno who
joined the Sidney circle in London in the 1580s. Their immediate inspiration was
Hermeticism, Platonism and Christian Cabala filtered through the Italian Renaissance,

54
Diana Poulton, John Dowland (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 255.
55
Dowland left England for the continent in 1594, having failed to obtain the post of court lutenist. See
Poulton, 30-45.
56
Peter Holman, in his study of Dowlands Lachrimae (Dowland, Lachrimae 1604, [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999]) is unwilling to concede that Dowlands music might be connected to occult
neoplatonic philosophy (48) and prefers to interpret its melancholy as a fashionable malady of the late
Elizabethan Age (50-1), although he does suggest that one of the functions of the Lachrimae compositions
was to cure the melancholy they so powerfully evoke.(52).
57
John Dowland, Flow my Tears, Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (London: Thomas East, 1600), dedicated
to Lucy, Countess of Bedford. See Poulton, John Dowland, 254-7.


163
principally through the works of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. I have already mentioned
that a poetic genre arose dedicated to conveying the deeper mysteries of spiritual Love
through its human counterpart,
58
and Platonic ideas concerning the initatiory power of
artistic forms and the nature of poetic furor was hotly debated.
59
But the image with which
they consciously identified, an image which infused both popular and intellectual culture,
was that of melancholy and darkness. Some say they adopted the name School of the
Night (following an allusion by Shakespeare)
60
- but whether a formal school or not, they
certainly created a milieu for the artistic representation of the despair and hopelessness of
the soul trapped in the material world, exalting the veiled mysteries and inward truths of
the night over the rational clarity of the day.
We may turn to Dionysius and Sufism again for a deeper metaphysical insight into the
divine darkness of negative theology, a darkness which symbolises the utter
incomprehensibility of God, and which can only be described in paradox as the dazzling
obscurity of the secret Silence where the mysteries of theology outshine all brilliance
with the intensity of their darkness.
61
This superessential Radiance of the Divine
Darkness
62
is the dwelling place of the One, and can only be reached through the
realisation of utter ignorance, nothingness, and the suspension of all thought processes.
63

More luminous than the day, this black light
64
is not to be identified with the density or
darkness of ignorance. As Arthur Versluis explains:

Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or nescience as ordinarily
understood, bur rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully
know the infinite One, and that therefore it is only truly to be approached
by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. There are
two main kinds of darkness: the subdarkness and the super-darkness,
between which lies, as it were, an octave of light. But the nether-dearkness
and the Divine Darkness are not the same darkness, for the former is
absence of light, while the latter is excess of light. The one symbolizes
mere ignorance, and the other a transcendent unknowing - a
superknowledge not obtained by means of the discursive reason.
65



58
For example, Brunos De glEroici Furori dediated to Sir Philip Sidney (1585), Edmund Spensers The
Fairie Queene (1590); Sidneys Astrophel and Stella (1591), and of course the plays of William Shakespeare.
59
The chief characteristic of esoteric knowledge is its secret or hidden nature, only to be found by those
who are able to comprehend it. As for example, Sidney, Astrophel and Stella (Apology) There are many
mysteries in poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused which re-
iterates the suggestion of Pico della Mirandola that the wisdom of the ancients was concealed in a poetic
form: Orpheus covered the mysteries of his doctrines with the wrappings of fables, and disguised them with
a poetic garment, so that whoever reads his hymns may believe there is nothing underneath but tales and the
purest nonsense. (On the Dignity of Man trans. D. Carmichael, P.J.W. Miller & C.G. Wallis (New
York/Indianapolis: Hackett, 1965), 33.
60
Frederick Turner (The School of Night at (http://www.montana.edu/corona/4/school.html) suggests the
group was a sort of loose network of poets and intellectuals: See also M.C. Bradbrook, The School of Night:
A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Raleigh (Cambridge: University Press, 1936); Frances
Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, 169, 177-8.
61
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology ch.1 (trans.A.Versluis, at
www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html).
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid. through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers [he] is united by his highest faculty to it that is
wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond his knowledge.
64
On the black light of Sufi mysticism, see Sara Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things (Inverness, California:
The Golden Sufi Centre, 1997), 145-73.
65
Arthur Versluis, fn.1 to Dionysius Mystical Theology op.cit.


164
There are obvious parallels here with the two faces of Saturn: the obtuse harshness of
material reality obscuring the superior power of an inner vision which turns the world
upside down and sees through the veil of appearances. The unconscious Saturn - the
alchemical nigredo - is Darkness that is only Darkness, a darkness that refuses Light and
is demonic, thick and heavy in the extremity of its distance from the Light
66
- the
darkness of the last verse of Dowlands Lachrimae text; whereas Ficinos Saturnine gold is
the luminous Night, the Black Light of Divine Night
67
which dawns on the soul as it
sees itself through the mirror of art - that is, the power of the symbolic imagination.
Versluis musical analogy suggests that the journey from melancholy to enlightenment can
begin through an opening of the senses to the sounding of light, that music can in some
way become a vehicle for the turning of the darkness into light. As Plato put it, it is
through the gifts of sight and hearing that the soul may harmonise itself with the cosmos.
68

Frances Yates has shown how George Chapmans poem The Shadow of Night (1594)
evokes a melancholy humour as a path to such knowledge, and mentions a letter preceding
the poem in which Chapman would seem to allude directly to Ficinos alchemical
astrology; the group of elite noblemen are pursuing their occult studies, says Chapman,
with the winged sandals of Mercury and girt with Saturns adamantine sword.
69
They
would have been fully aware that the mirroring of human estrangement and longing, the
evocation of the luminous Night in poetic and musical images, provided the very means
by which the soul could free itself - for it was a function of poetic image to sever
attachment to material constraints and illuminate the inaccessible, providing a vehicle
through which the senses may perceive intimations of transcendent levels of being. As
another example, the poet Henry Vaughan (1622-95) takes us straight back to Dionysius
with his deep but dazzling darkness of God, exclaiming O for that Night! Where I in
Him might live invisible and dim!
70

There is no concrete evidence of Dowlands association with the School of the Night,
or of his own philosophical interests, but he was working in an artistic milieu permeated by
esoteric ideas. Christian Cabala and its incorporation into the new movement of
Rosicrucianism was finding fertile soil for growth on the continent; Anthony Rooley has
pointed out that Dowland was in France from 1580-86 where the academies were actively
promoting Platonic philosophy through the arts, and his patrons the Duke of Brunswick,
King Christian IV of Denmark and Moritz, Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel were all seriously
engaged with Hermetic ideas. The latter was at the centre of an alchemical circle at Kassel
where Dowland was employed in 1595.
71
Whilst in England Dowland certainly knew

66
Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World
(New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 71. See ch.4, Within this Darkness: Incarnation, Theophany and the
Primordial Revelation.
67
Ibid. See also Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone, 191: The theosophy of light suggests the metaphor of
a mirror and a shadow. But shadow must not be taken to imply a dimension of Satanic darkness. this
shadow is essentially a reflection, the projection of a silhouette or face in a mirror. Our authors even speak of
a luminous shadow and that is how we must take the following statement: Everything we call other than
God, everything we call the universe, is related to the Divine Being as the shadow (or his reflection in the
mirror) to the person. The World is Gods shadow(Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam 101 & 102).
68
Timaeus, 47b-e.
69
Yates, op.cit, 158.
70
Henry Vaughan, The Night (The Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, ed. E.K. Chambers [London: Lawrence
& Bullen Ltd., 1896]), 253. Poem based on J ohn, ch.3, verse 2. For an overview of the literature, see Douglas
Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
71
See Anthony Rooley, New Light on John Dowlands Songs of Darkness in Early Music 11 (1983), 6-22
(revised as Dowland, Ficino and Elizabethan Melancholy in Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry,
Drama and Music ed. R.H. Wells [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 189-207); Poulton, John
Dowland, Ron Heisler, The Forgotten English Roots of Rosicrucianism at
www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/1895/rootsrc.html, 6.


165
William Shakespeare, whose The Tempest has been called almost a Rosicrucian
manifesto,
72
and Dowlands friend Henry Peacham may have been alluding to certain
occult interests in a poem dedicated to the musician:

Heere, Philomel, in silence sits alone,
In depth of winter, on the bared brier,
Whereas the Rose, had once her beautie showen;
Which Lordes, and Ladies, did so much desire:
But fruitless now, in winters frost and snow,
It doth despisd and unregarded grow.
73


Certainly the emblem of the Rose was a common one, and poets delighted in using such
metaphors for underlying moral purposes. Dowlands preoccupation with melancholy can
also be seen in this light, for in adopting the personal emblem of a tear, he created a formal
vehicle for his art, a symbolic device which could resonate on many different levels.
74
In
this way lute-song texts of the period served the same purpose as the popular Emblem
Books, which consisted of pithy, epigrammatic poems illustrated by woodcuts designed to
teach a moral lesson through allegorical representation.
75
But whatever its religious or
even Hermetic associations, Dowlands musical emblem of Lachrimae was a powerful one.
He was a renowned lutenist, and there could be no instrument more obviously tear-shaped
than a lute; furthermore, the tear, whilst indicating grief, also has a cleansing and healing
property, and Dowland alludes to this ambivalence in his dedication of Lachrimae or Seven
Teares to Queen Anne:

.and though the title does promise tears, unfit guests in these joyfull
times, yet no doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weepes,
neither are teares shed always in sorrowe, but sometime in joy and
gladness. Vouchsafe then (worthy Goddesse) your Gracious protection
to these showers of Harmonie, least if you frowne on them, they bee
Metamorphosed into true teares.
76


A sentiment re-iterated seventeen years later by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of
Melancholy, a vast compendium of melancholic physiology and psychology:

Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing
melancholy that it causeth; and therefore to such as are discontent, in
woe, fear, sorrow or dejected, it is a most present remedy; it expels
cares, alters their grieved minds, and easeth in an instant.
77



72
Yates, Occult Philosophy, 199.
73
Henry Peacham, Heere, Philomel in silence sits alone (1612), quoted in Heisler, op.cit., 8.
74
On the tear motif in Renaissance music see Holman, Dowland, 40-42.
75
The origin of the Renaissance production of and enthusiasm for emblem books was the discovery in 1419
of a fifth c. ms., the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (printed in Venice, 1505), a Greek translation of an allegedly
Egyptian work explaining the hidden meanings of hieroglyphs. The most well-known emblem books were
based on the model by Alciati, Emblemata liber (1531) which was reprinted 130 times between 1532 and
1790, and included Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems (1586).
76
Poulton, John Dowland, 343.
77
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, eds. Floyd Dell & Paul Jordan-Smith, New York: Tudor
Publishing Company, 1927), Partition II, Memb.6, subs.3.,481. See Holman, Dowland, 50-52; Penelope
Gouk, Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in ed. P. Horden, Music as Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000), 179-84.


166
The emblem of the tear was given exquisite musical form by Dowland in the motif of
the falling fourth set to the rhythm of a dotted minim followed by two quavers and a
minim, suggestive of its welling up and overflowing:
78


The phrase then continues with another falling fourth, from c to g sharp, as if to restate
more emphatically this moderate and seemingly human discord as Ficino describes it.
79

The number four carries with it the significance, in the Pythagorean number symbolism
which underlies esoteric thought, of the manifested material world.
80
It is also the mid-
point of the seven stages of descent and return of the Hermetic journey, the place occupied
by man in his straddling the two realms of nature and divinity. The fourth carries a
melancholy quality, neither fully concordant or dissonant, seeking a resolution into the
strength and security of the perfect fifth, and its descending motion is a powerful symbolic
evocation of a fall from grace into earthly existence.
81
Dowland used this theme first of
all in his lute solo, Lachrimae, before re-working it as a lute-song with the Flow my tears
text, and it was to be taken up by many of his contemporaries and interwoven into their
own compositions as well as alluded to by writers and poets.
82
A catch-tune in popular
culture, it became a vehicle for the most emotionally intense and extraordinarily complex
unfolding of musical melancholy ever composed, in Dowlands set of seven pavans for five
viols and lute, Lachrimae or Seven Teares of 1604.
83

It would seem impossible to ignore a Hermetic programme underlying this work,
which on a more exoteric level owes much of the rhetorical subtlety of its musical gesture
to the innovations in Italy at the time - in particular the madrigalian school of Luca
Marenzio and the nuove musiche of the Florentine Camerata whose declamatory style, in
service to the arousal of specific emotions through the nuances of musical language,
deliberately revived the ancient Greek ideal of musical ethos.
84
It consists of a series of
seven passionate pavans (each having three repeated sections) which represent seven
stages or conditions of weeping, with emblematic Latin titles: Lachrimae antiquae,
Lachrimae antiquae novae, Lachrimae gementes, Lachrimae tristes, Lachrimae coactae,
Lachrimae amantis, Lachrimae verae. These can be translated as: Ancient tears, Ancient
tears renewed, Groaning tears, Sad Tears, Compelled or Forced tears, Tears of the Lover

78
An association first suggested to me by Anthony Rooley.
79
Ficino, The Principles of Music, Letters vol.7 (2003), no.76, 87. See also Holman, Dowland, 40-42 on
Dowlands models for his tear motifand an analysis of its musical structure.
80
Obvious examples include the four cardinal directions, four elements and four humours.
81
I am indebted to Anthony Rooleys paper New Light for observations on number symbolism.
82
Composers include William Byrd, John Danyel, Giles Farnaby, Anthony Holborne, Jan Sweelinck and
Thomas Weelkes, and more recently Benjamin Britten, Elaine Fine, and Andrew Wilson-Dickson. Literary
references include many allusions by Dowlands contemporaries, including William Shakespeare. The
Lachrimae sequence (Tenebrae, 1978) by the contemporary poet Geoffrey Hill is an example of the revival of
interest in the twentieth century. See Holman, Dowland, 75-78.
83
Peter Holman (Dowland) gives a detailed musical analysis of the seven Lachrimae pavans (52-60). There
are various recordings available, recommended are The Image of Melancholy (The English Fantasy Consort
of Viols with Lynda Sayce, Andrew Wilson-Dickson and John Line, Riverrun Records, 2003, including
readings from the Corpus Hermeticum); Lachrimae or Seven Teares (The Dowland Consort, dir. Jakob
Lindberg, Virgin Veritas 1986); John Dowlands Lachrimae (The Rose Consort of Viols with Jacob
Heringman, Amon Ra, 1992).
84
See Claude V. Palisca, (ed)., The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Holman, Dowland 42-46. On Dowlands connections with Marenzio,
see Rooley, New Light. Other influences on Dowlands music include popular song, French chansons,
polyphonic church music and dance forms.


167
and True Tears. Can we not see here the fall, initiation and return of the soul through the
lens of pessimist gnosis? At first at one with God, the soul is renewed in the act of
incarnation; as it falls to earth it groans with despair, and becomes immersed in its unhappy
condition. But it awakes, and begins to be compelled towards a movement away from its
immersion in matter, through the yearning of Love, which eventually leads it back to Truth.
There are also interesting resonances to be found with the three phases on the path to
God in Sufi tradition. Sara Sviri recounts the writings of Al-Hallaj who describes the states
of effort, passive purification and Oneness in a way which corresponds closely to our
Hermetic interpretation of Coactae, Amantis and Verae.
85
Coactae, in the literal sense of
meaning forced or compelled, has always been rather an enigma for students of Lachrimae,
in that it is unclear exactly what this means in relation to tears. Peter Holman suggests they
are the insincere tears or even crocodile tears of the revenger or malcontent,
86
an
interpretation which does not accord with any underlying spiritual programme. More
relevant, perhaps, is the Sufi state of effort, where the disciple is constrained or forced
into a situation without any freedom of choice on his part. He must make enormous
efforts to attain God, but reaches a point where he realises that all these are futile, and that
he must let go of his will, and surrender to Love.
87
Thus follows the phase of Grace, where
the one who desires becomes Gods desire and finally that of divine union, an
immutable state of being, a centered point of stillness where fluctuation ceases, where the
impulsive self becomes the serene self.
88
Can one really dismiss as improbable the
associations here with the forced, the lovers and the true tears of Dowlands work?
There is a hypnotic quality about the repetition of the Lachrimae theme, which acts on
the mind as a constant reference point as it is re-worked inventively in different ways, and
Dowland captures, in the very texture of the music, the qualities of each stage through his
use of musical space and resolving dissonance. Those familiar with the lute-song would be
able to hear the words in their imagination as they listened to the first pavan, Lachrimae
antiquae, which would then be present like a mantra, gradually revealing a deeper meaning
through the ever more subtle re-working of the theme. The third pavan Gementes literally
appears to groan with its repeated falling intervals; the fourth pavan, Tristes, is the most
dense and melancholic, complex and earth-bound, whereas the fifth Coactae carries more
movement, the beginnings of active intention (or wilful effort?) and change of direction. In
the final two pavans the texture becomes more translucent and ethereal, the rising themes in
Amantis representing the active force of eros,
89
and Verae ending with an evocation of
eternity in which the music seems suspended in time: complete receptivity, complete
fluidity, complete transparency.
90
At the very end, the lachrimae theme turns upside
down and rises a fourth, symbolising the complete reversal of the human condition from
falling into matter to reunion with transcendent being.
It is important to note that Dowland called these pavans passionate, a word which we
have already encountered in reference to the heartfelt longings of the Sufi mystics, and
which suggests both suffering and intense emotion or desire; this music is not for merely
cerebral or aesthetic appreciation.
91
One is reminded of Ficinos insistence that only songs

85
Sviri The Taste of Hidden Things, 41-3.
86
Holman, Dowland, 56-7.
87
Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, 24.
88
Ibid., 42.
89
Although Peter Holman disagrees: Amantis, I suggest, is concerned withtypes of virtuous love, not
erotic passion (Dowland, 59).
90
Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, 43.
91
The common medieval understanding of passion was to to suffer or endure. From the fourteenth
century a sense of strong emotion or desire was added, and from the late sixteenth a sense of amorous or
sexual love. The meanings strong liking or enthusiasm derive from the mid seventeenth-century (from
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=p).


168
which are full of emotion and affect, that imitate the intentions and passions of the
[human] soul can attract the sympathies of the cosmic soul.
92
I would suggest again that
they are passionate in the most fervent religious sense, in the intensely personal context of
heartfelt prayer. The music is inward, private, certainly not intended for public display, but
encouraging a focussed concentration more akin to participation in a ritual. Again we can
use the words of Corbin to articulate the evocation of connection deeply implicit in these
pieces, a sense of the fragility of the human condition and longing for its spiritual
fulfilment which lies at the Hermetic roots of Islamic mysticism:

IbnArabis method of theophanic prayer [is a] prayer which draws its
inspiration from a God whose secret is sadness, nostalgia, aspiration to
know Himself in the beings who manifest his Being. A passionate God,
because it is in the passion that his fedele damore feels for him, in the
theophany of his fedele, that He is revealed to Himself.
93


Or, in the language of the neoplatonic magi, Dowlands music can be seen as theurgic
in the sense of creating the conditions for the sympathetic resonance of macrocosm and
microcosm the soul of the world and the soul of the human being. Certainly Lachrimae
demands engagement from the heart of both player and listener, a passion given
containment and direction by the formal musical structure and sustained by the very quality
of the sound - for perhaps the most striking characteristic of these pieces lies in the
combination of the instruments. The five viols produce a texture which is intense and
unremitting, sonorous, heavy and earthy - analogous to black bile and the qualities of
Saturn. The pitch range of instruments (treble, two tenors, two basses)
94
is a microcosm in
itself, corresponding to the threefold Platonic intellect, imagination and sense, or heaven,
cosmos and earth. If we were to hear these instruments alone, it would be difficult not to
remain in the forgetful, if intoxicating, condition of self-indulgent melancholy. But with a
stroke of genius, Dowland adds a lute to the texture, whose quality is predominantly airy,
transparent and ethereal. There could be no better illustration of Ficinos slow, deep,
harsh and plaintive sounds of Saturn, penetrated by the relaxed, gay, vigorous and
complex music of Mercury - for the lute part weaves a continual commentary through
uniting all five parts at once, penetrating to the core of the texture yet also binding it,
infusing it with air, transmuting the prima materia of the viols and distilling its intensity.
In this way, the music embodies the immense sadness of human life and yet simultaneously
the possibility of another order of existence, inducing the divine discontent which Plato
describes as the necessary condition for the wings of the soul to grow.
95
It is as if the lute,
as Mercury, tempers the melancholy humour of the viols and allows it to burn more
powerfully and steadily, as Ficino described - a process demonstrated at the close of the
last pavan where the viols remain suspended and motionless like a halo whilst the moving
lute part performs the active alchemical operation, drawing the attention inwards towards
the centre.
The number seven, numerologically, is deeply significant in terms of evoking the
unfolding of a cosmological principle: for example, the sevenfold cycle of Saturn,
96
the
seven planetary spheres and the seven notes of the musical octave. In the same way, these
pavans unfold musically, each stage containing the potential qualities of, and leading
inevitably to, the next. We could suggest that whilst the tear embodies human melancholy;

92
Ficino, Three Books on Life III.21, Kaske & Clark, 359.
93
Corbin, Alone with the Alone, 94.
94
Or one tenor and three basses.
95
Plato, Phaedrus 251-2.
96
The cycle of Saturn is 28 years.


169
the music provides the image or container within which that melancholy may become
gradually transformed or reworked into the realisation of a divine will. Thus Lachrimae
works on all levels - sense perception, emotion, symbolic imagination and spiritual
surrender.
Might it possible that Dowland knew, either first or second-hand, the work of Ficino or
Agrippa on the power of melancholy to induce divination and prophecy? Had he read the
Hermetic texts, or come into contact with Sufi mysticism?
97
Or does it matter? Lachrimae
or Seven Teares is unique in the repertoire in terms of its length (around half an hour) and
instrumentation; it deliberately cultivates a hidden meaning under the guise of an artistic
genre and moreover its repetitive and rhythmic structure seems purposefully designed to
induce the altered state of consciousness prerequisite for Hermetic initiation. It is as
though - whatever Dowlands intentions - the music itself is the catalyst which allows the
soul to awake from its dark night and strive to return. Through the juxtaposition of extreme
beauty and extreme melancholy an almost unbearable tension of opposites is constellated -
like the alchemical burning within the alembic - which can only result in the breaking
through of a new order of insight. I would even suggest that in this work, Dowland has
forged a musical crucible in which the unus mundus of the alchemists may be glimpsed, the
gnosis of the philosophers tasted. Whether he intended it or not, is perhaps not even
important. For those on a spiritual path, the symbolism of music such as this will be self-
evident, because it will resonate with inner experience. For those who do not sympathise
with this way, such meanings will appear opaque and without foundation, if not fantastic
and irrelevant. The truth is surely not to be found in the historical facts, the musicological
analysis, the literary sources or the artistic genres, but in what is revealed to the soul of the
listener.
To end, some further thoughts of Cornelius Agrippa who carried the practical magic of
Ficino so influentially into the sixteenth century. He developed the taxonomy of
melancholy into a three-fold process, describing the melancholy power as attracting three
kinds of daemons; firstly, daemons which carry the mind into the imagination, resulting in
artistic gifts; secondly, those which turn the mind to the reason, bestowing a profound
human wisdom, and thirdly those which elevate the mind to the intellectual understanding,
where it may know the secrets of divine things through supernatural divination.
98

Dowland may have been plagued with black bile and weighed down by the world but he
was also inspired by the daemons of the imagination. Might we not consider the possibility
that, in unspoken collaboration with Hermes Trismegistus, he is able to lead his listeners -
those who have ears to hear - even further, to the place where the power of melancholy is
fulfilled in the souls gift of divination, which is also the place of its divinisation?

97
There appears to be a considerable lack of clarity on Dowlands religious position in relation to his Catholic
or Protestant allegiances; see Poulton, John Dowland, 41-44. From the surviving contradictory evidence she
concludes: perhaps the answer may be found in Dowlands temperament; as complex and as full of
contradictions as the age in which he lived (43).
98
Agrippa , Occult Philosophy, LX, 189.