Preponderance would be expressed through various four-fold schemata whether the seasons (beginning with spring and ending with winter) or the cycle of age-”sanguine” youth, “choleric” prime and “melancholic” old age. But there is a difference between the preponderance of a humor and disruption. Upset one and human functioning runs amok. The relation between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the human would persist throughout melancholia’s entire tradition but only with Hippocrates at the dawn of medicine do we find the body’s composition broken up into four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, the last of which, melaina cholē in Greek, gives us “melancholia.” The principle of harmony which governed the universe and the human body would be one of the principles upon which Greek medicine was based.

with the Greek philosophers usually called “the Presocratics.” Empedocles had already claimed that just as the universe is made from earth, air, water and fire so too was the human body. The story of melancholia begins circa 400 B.C. But it is in fact that very nostalgia that is in question in the book proper, for the study lays out just how persistently the posture of scholar, artist and anchorite alike has been one of despair at the path that separates them from the great transcendence lying on the horizon, whether that goes by the name of God, the eternal intellect or the Mallarmean “Book.” And in this respect, the history of melancholy itself joins up with the story of the long, arduous path by which the book came into being. It is also melancholic from the perspective of the contemporary reader who is able to fathom the shear catholicity of mind necessary to produce a Meisterwerk of this sort. If melancholia may be “ometimes painful and depressing, sometimes merely mildly pensive or nostalgic,” then this new edition is, in its own right, a melancholic exercise, a wistful homage to the once-world in which the book was produced. Those privy to this experience may also now spend the dead patrol of quarantined hours immersed in the new edition of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofksy and Frits Saxl’s epoch-making Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, reprinted in an edition that augments the long out-of-print classic. This tradition is documented as far back as the earliest pre-Socratic texts, a tradition that counts as its initiates all those pinioned between the proud daring of the mind’s flight and the near irredeemable hubris of its audacity. Those for whom this experience is an all too familiar exertion may count themselves as part of a tradition. Time coagulates the infinite expanse of empty days does not present the unobstructed path to the Idea, but an arduous trail, uphill both ways. For those in its thrall-”melancholics”-there is no ultimate answer, Ficino concludes, other than headlong submission to Saturn: dreary hunchbacked hours spent attempting to exorcise the phantasmatic demons of depression through creative production. (Others suggest flogging as a remedial tactic.) But the palliatives mitigate at best.

The entire day takes on the guise of a military regime, a clearly demarcated set of strategies for warding off the looming presence of black bile: avoiding eggplant, meat of the hare, solitude, darkness incorporating clear, light wines, scenic walks, music, coitus. This ritual might grant a morning of lively thought: chapters read, ideas generated, words on the page.īut warding off an attack of that most malignant of humors-”melancholia”-is a constant struggle in Ficino’s eyes, one recounted in depth in the text that was to be central to the re-emergence of melancholy’s place in the intellectual culture of the modern world: De vita triplici or Three Books on Life. If, following Marsilio Ficino’s prescriptions, you are sure to arise an hour or two before the first light of dawn, when the air is thinnest, massage your entire body, scalp included, and spend thirty minutes meditating while combing the hair from forehead to neck about forty times, then you may make a valiant effort towards the avoidance of black bile. McGill-Queen’s University Press, November 2019. pp.632 $65.00 (hardback)Ī pernicious threat looms on the horizon. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panosky, and Fritz Saxl. Makhlouf on a classic reissued Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art.

The melancholy of all things done