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Sinister Aesthetics
 Joel Elliot Slotkin

Sinister Aesthetics
The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English
Literature
Joel Elliot Slotkin
English Department
Towson University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-52796-3 ISBN 978-3-319-52797-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939714

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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For my parents, Richard and Iris Slotkin
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sinister Aesthetics grew out of my dissertation, and I want to acknowledge

again the professors and colleagues at UC Berkeley who helped with that
stage, especially Joel Altman, Albert Ascoli, Kevis Goodman, and my
advisor, the late Paul Alpers. Sarah Torpey deserves thanks not only for
her insightful feedback but also for keeping me mostly sane through most
of graduate school.
I would like to thank everyone at Palgrave for valuing this project
enough to see it into print, as well as for the generous and helpful
comments I received during the peer review and editing process.
Previously, I had adapted parts of my dissertation into articles:
“Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s Richard III”
(Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.1 [2007]: 5–32) and
“Poetic Justice: Divine Punishment and Augustinian Chiaroscuro in
Paradise Lost” (Milton Quarterly 38.2 [2004]: 100–127). I want to
thank both journals for publishing my work and for allowing me to
reincorporate versions of this material (significantly revised and expanded)
into my chapters on Richard III and Paradise Lost.
Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities Program and
Towson University provided me with employment, research leave, and
other professional assistance during my work on the book. I am grateful to
my colleagues in both places for providing such welcoming scholarly
communities.
This project benefited from seminars at the Shakespeare Association of
America annual meetings in 2006 and 2010, led by Lara Bovilsky and

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Simone Chess, in which my work received thoughtful responses from Jay

Farness, Justin Kolb, Aaron Kunin, and Zachary Lesser.
Several colleagues and friends gave generously of their time to read
drafts and to provide feedback, including Katherine Attié, Jennifer
Ballengee, Elizabeth Bearden, Kent Cartwright, Chris D’Addario,
Raphael Falco, Wendy Hyman, Natasha Korda, Linda McJannet, John
McLucas, and Bryan Reynolds. Rick Davis, of Towson’s Cook Library,
provided some time-saving research assistance and helped me acquire the
print and electronic resources I needed.
The love and support of family and friends have been at least as
important during this process as the scholarly assistance I have received,
and I want to thank all of you for sustaining me on this journey. My
parents, Iris and Richard Slotkin have spent considerable time and energy
over the years, not only providing moral support but also serving as
sounding boards and readers for innumerable ideas and drafts. I am also
grateful to my grandmother Roselyn Slotkin for her unflagging confidence
and interest in this project; I was motivated to finish the book in no small
part because I knew she wanted to read it. Lastly, I want to express my
deep gratitude and love to my wife Caroline Egan for her editorial and
strategic advice as well as her steadfast support in this—and every other—
endeavor.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Representing Evil in Early Modern England 1

Aesthetics and Morality 4
Sinister Aesthetics 8
The Problem of Evil 13
Chapter Overview 16
Notes 19

2 “Dreadful Harmony”: The Poetics of Evil

in Sidney, Tasso, and Spenser 23
Introduction: Literary Theory and Poetic Practice 23
Monsters and Medicine: Pleasure and Morality
in The Defence of Poesy 26
“The Contraries of These Delights”: Curiositas
and Chiaroscuro in Augustine 31
Chimeras and Concordia Discors:
Tasso’s Augustinian Aesthetics 39
“That Detestable Sight Him Much Amazde”:
Aesthetics of Filth in The Faerie Queene Book 1 48
“Pleasant Sin”: Beauty and Evil in the Bower of Bliss 61
Conclusion 65
Notes 69

3 Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Richard III 79

Introduction: Staging Evil 79

ix
x CONTENTS

Elf-Marks and Virtuous Visors: The Epistemological

Problem of Richard 84
Palpable Devices 86
Playing the Devil: The Theatricality of Evil 90
Descanting on Deformity 93
The “Nest of Spicery” and the Limits of Seduction 100
Poetic Invective and Demonic Identity 104
Providential Narratives and the Persistence of the Sinister 110
Conclusion 113
Notes 116

4 Monsters and the Pleasures of Divine Justice

in English Popular Print, 1560–1675 125
Introduction: Providential Punishments 125
Ballads, Pamphlets, and Sermons 128
Pleasure and Terror in Monster Ballads and Pamphlets 132
Monsters and Divine Wrath in Early Modern Sermons 138
Aesthetic Responsibility and the Problem of Evil 150
The Teratogenic God 154
Cultivating Sinister Piety 158
Conclusion 164
Notes 165

5 Satanic Sensibilities in Paradise Lost 173

Introduction: “Milton the Poet” and “Milton the Moralist” 173
“Strength from Truth Divided”: Satan and the Normative 178
“Evil Be Thou My Good”: Moral Perversity 186
“This Horror Will Grow Mild”: Aesthetic Perversity 192
“Materials Dark and Crude”: Sinister Pleasure and Poesis 198
Conclusion 209
Notes 210

6 Milton’s Sinister God: Poetic Justice and Chiaroscuro

in Paradise Lost 217
Introduction: God as Sinister Allegorist 217
Malum Poenae and “Enthusiastick Terror” 220
“A Universe of Death”: God’s Infernal Aesthetic 226
 CONTENTS xi

“Grateful Vicissitude”: Divine Chiaroscuro

and the War in Heaven 237
“Odious Truth”: The Degradation of Satan
and the Education of Adam 242
Conclusion 250
Notes 251

7 Epilogue: The Sinister After Milton 255

Notes 264

Bibliography 267

Index 281
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Representing Evil in Early

Modern England

This book addresses a fundamental contradiction between theory and

practice in the literary culture of early modern England. On the one
hand, Renaissance theories of poetry emphasize that literature must
morally improve its audience; indeed, a preponderance of Renaissance
theorists treat this didactic imperative as a defining feature of literature.
On the other hand, Renaissance writers are responsible for some of the
most compelling and attractive literary representations of evil ever pro-
duced: demonic villains like William Shakespeare’s insidious, enigmatic
Iago or the Machiavellian Richard III; protagonists who descend to
baroque acts of sadism or depravity, like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or
Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling; and the lush, cruel depictions of
infernal landscapes we see in The Spanish Tragedy or Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene. Such representations frequently seem to undermine
the very moral systems that early modern poetry was supposed to incul-
cate. This conflict of literary values was itself the expression of larger
cultural crises in early modern England concerning the role of evil in a
Christian cosmos and the proper relationship between religion and art.
These crises were fueled by the rise of Protestantism and the political and
sectarian conflicts of the seventeenth century.
Understanding the relationship between the treatment of evil in litera-
ture and religion requires careful attention to the central role played by
aesthetic constructs and aesthetic experience in both spheres of activity.
The domain of aesthetics encompasses abstract intellectual principles (ideas

© The Author(s) 2017 1

J.E. Slotkin, Sinister Aesthetics,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

about beauty), concrete cultural constructions (works of art that embody

these ideals), and affective responses (the reactions of audiences to these
works). Thus, an approach through aesthetics can bridge the gap between
literary theory and practice by showing how the embodiment of general
poetic principles in a particular poem may generate a particular audience
response. An aesthetic approach can be similarly productive for an investi-
gation of religion, because it helps to illuminate what Perry Miller, discuss-
ing early American Puritanism in The New England Mind (1954), calls
“piety”: “the inner core of Puritan sensibility apart from the dialectic and
the doctrine” (6). For Miller, piety is a form of subjectivity that includes
aesthetic elements.
In recent years, scholars of the early modern period have sought to
reorient the still-influential new historicist paradigm by re-engaging with
aesthetics and its associated concerns. Literary scholars have focused atten-
tion on two of its key components: artistic construction and affective
response. New formalist or historical formalist critics have re-emphasized
questions of literary form and its effects.1 Scholars belonging to the so-
called “affective turn” have investigated the importance of emotion and
the passions in early modern literature and culture.2
At the same time, scholars of the “religious turn” have moved away
from the new historicist and Marxist tendency to look through religion to
the networks of social and political power that undergird it. Instead, they
have sought to foreground the cultural manifestations of religious belief as
important objects of study in their own right.3 Scholars such as Debora
Shuger and Kevin Sharpe have rightly asserted that religion is not only a
system of theological beliefs; rather, aesthetic and affective elements are
also essential to its nature and function.4 As Sharpe notes in Remapping
Early Modern England (2000), “Religion was not just about doctrine,
liturgy or ecclesiastical government; it was a language, an aesthetic, a
structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics” (12). He urges further
attention to “religion as a visual, sensual and emotional experience—as
opposed to a theological system or polemical sermon” (390). These
scholars highlight the interplay between theological concepts and argu-
ments and the subjective experience and perspective of believers. Their
work raises a central question in the cultural history of religion, which is
well stated by Sharpe: “Were aesthetic revolutions the motor of changing
religious sensibilities or driven by them?” (390). Sinister Aesthetics
addresses this question by looking closely at what happens when writers
of the English Renaissance—poets and playwrights, as well as authors of
 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND 3

ballads, pamphlets, and sermons—try to integrate literary aesthetics with

religious piety in their accounts of evil.
In addition to clarifying the relationship between aesthetics and reli-
gion, this focus allows us to analyze the intersection of two overarching
problems regarding evil’s nature and function in the culture of the English
Renaissance. In religion, the so-called “problem of evil”—why an omni-
potent, omniscient, and totally benevolent God would permit evil to
occur—is the central challenge of Christian theodicy. It is traditionally
considered as a logical and theological problem, but this study will con-
cern itself primarily with the aesthetic and affective aspects of the problem
that seem to resist or survive resolutions of the logical conundrum. In early
modern art, the problem is to explain why artists at least nominally
committed to the inculcation of virtue would devote so much energy
and skill to the production of aesthetically pleasurable representations of
evil, and the monstrous, grotesque, and demonic forms conventionally
associated with evil. The latter problem has proved nearly as intractable for
literary scholars as the first has been for theologians, because critics have
lacked an appropriate language to talk about the appeal of aestheticized
evil. Indeed, both early modern writers and modern scholars of the period
all too frequently discount the idea that evil can possibly have aesthetic
appeal, or they dismiss positive aesthetic responses to evil as exceptional or
perverse.5 Such neglect inhibits their understanding of both the real
aesthetic complexity of Renaissance poetry and the affective complexity
of Renaissance piety.
This study speaks to both of these problems by recognizing at the
outset that attractive representations of evil are intrinsic to the production
of Renaissance poetry, to the pleasures of literary experience, and to early
modern English Protestant religious sensibilities. The appeal of evil in
both secular and religious writings of the period rests crucially on the
aesthetic qualities associated with evil, and the power of this appeal derives
from the interplay between two kinds of aesthetic systems: normative
aesthetics, which associate attractive beauty with prevailing notions of
the good; and sinister aesthetics, which evoke pleasure in the dark side
of divine creation, and thereby offer a potential resolution to the affective
component of the problem of evil.
No single work of literature better exemplifies the contradictory treat-
ment of evil in Renaissance thought and poetry than John Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1674), which provides early modern England’s foremost
instance of poetic theodicy and, in the character of Satan, its most
4 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

notoriously engaging villain. Many Milton critics over the centuries have
framed this paradox as an opposition between the poem’s poetic and
theological aspects, between aesthetic pleasure and religious doctrine.
This study argues instead that in Paradise Lost explicit theological argu-
ments are necessary for but prove inherently insufficient to the task of
theodicy, and that the poem’s justification of God ultimately relies on
aesthetic manipulation to supplement its theological arguments.
Specifically, the poem employs a complex aesthetic in which evil and
good, infernal and celestial, “dreadful shade” and “holy light” are seen
as integral to the beauty of God’s creation (6.828, 3.1).6 This reading of
Paradise Lost offers a more productive context for understanding Satan’s
attractiveness, a major crux (or deadlock) in Milton criticism. It also
elucidates the poetic strategy behind the theodicy of Paradise Lost: to
develop an aesthetic sensibility in readers that will make them capable of
loving a God whose creation includes the darkness of evil and the cruelty
of punishment.
Although aspects of Milton’s solution are strikingly original, Paradise Lost
is important because it brings together several major strands of Renaissance
discourse that explored the appeal of evil for both artistic and religious
purposes. This study traces the historical development, and the poetic and
religious effects, of sinister aesthetics through a range of early modern
English texts (in the context of such non-English writers as Saint
Augustine and Torquato Tasso): Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (written
1580s, published 1595), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596),
Shakespeare’s Richard III (c. 1592), and the popular print literature of
ballads, pamphlets, and sermons. I examine how these authors have used
the sinister to attract audiences to representations of evil, and in many cases
to produce affective theodicies that aim to make divine punishment viscerally
appealing, rather than simply morally justifiable. Paradise Lost represents the
culmination of these strategies in the period, and it serves as one of the
foremost inspirations for subsequent theorists to develop an aesthetic para-
digm—the sublime—that can encompass the pleasures of the sinister.

AESTHETICS AND MORALITY

Immanuel Kant’s seminal Critique of Judgment (1790) represents aesthetic
judgment as a subjective, individual response that aspires to universality
(47). While I share Kant’s insistence that judgments about beauty imply a
“subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (35), my approach more
 AESTHETICS AND MORALITY 5

closely follows Joseph Margolis’s Art and Philosophy (1980), which argues
that “works of art exist only in cultural contexts” and posits a mutually
constitutive relationship between the work’s “rule-governed order” and
culturally specific “appreciative traditions” (49). Crucially for my purposes,
Margolis’s theory allows for “divergent appreciative systems” within a
single culture (227).
Instead of treating aesthetics or the aesthetic as a universal philoso-
phical category, this book focuses on the idea of an aesthetic; that is, a
specific set of aesthetic standards operative in a given cultural, histor-
ical, and artistic context. This context could be broad or specific; for
example, we could speak of a Renaissance aesthetic, or a Miltonic
aesthetic, or even an aesthetic that operates only in a particular poem.
More precisely, an aesthetic is a culturally specific system comprising a
set of artistic ideals governing what should be depicted, and conventions
governing how things should be depicted, the successful use of which
produces a pleasurable affective response in the observer. A Petrarchan
aesthetic, for instance, would express a particular ideal of feminine
beauty through the culturally determined conventions of golden hair,
ruby lips, ivory neck, and so on. Presumably, this evocation of feminine
beauty would be expected to produce certain emotions in the poem’s
target audience. When referring to more than one of these aesthetic
systems, I use the plural form, aesthetics (not to be confused with the
singular noun).
Morality and aesthetics have a complex and interdependent relationship.
Aesthetic ideals are inherently prescriptive and reflect the values of a given
culture; as such, they can include or imply a moral component. For exam-
ple, Petrarchan depictions of feminine beauty are also invested in certain
notions of feminine virtue, as when Sir Philip Sidney, in Astrophil and Stella
(written c. 1582, published 1591), calls Stella’s face “Queen Virtue’s
court” and provides a blazon of her physical features that emphasizes her
purity and chastity (sonnet 9, line 1). Aesthetic conventions, on the other
hand, are more or less arbitrary signifiers possessing moral valences only
through their traditional association with ideals—there is nothing inher-
ently moral or immoral about golden hair, for instance. Nonetheless, early
modern writers routinely use such iconography to suggest the moral nature
of whatever object they are representing. The Platonic idea that beauty and
goodness were ultimately one was highly influential in the Renaissance. In
Renaissance literary practice, moral and aesthetic elements frequently bleed
into one another, and this study will trace some of these slippages.
6 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

An aesthetic whose ideals derive from culturally sanctioned conceptions

of beauty and/or virtue is what I term a normative aesthetic: it makes
pleasing those things that are positively valued within the relevant cultural
context. Most theories of early modern literature presuppose that norma-
tive aesthetics are the only aesthetics operative in Renaissance poetry. Early
modern theories such as Sidney’s in The Defence of Poesy assume that
artistic depictions of the opposites of beauty or virtue are unpleasant
because they violate normative standards. In Sidney’s model, images of
evil ought to function as a kind of aversion therapy by producing an
educational revulsion in readers. This theory explained the potential
appeal of evil characters in a few different ways. They could charm audi-
ences through normative forms of aesthetic beauty, like the seductive
disguise of Spenser’s evil witch, Duessa. They could also inspire approval
or admiration by invoking normative moral values, such as the heroic
virtues of Milton’s Satan, his “courage never to submit or yield”
(Paradise Lost 1.108). In other words, evil could appeal by deceptively
masquerading as good or ambiguously combining with good. A properly
moral poem would eventually resolve such confusions, making the evil
identifiable or separable and therefore repugnant to a right-thinking audi-
ence. Evil or ugliness as such could only appeal to audiences whose own
sensibilities were corrupt and perverse.
Like Renaissance critics, modern scholars have had difficulty fully
addressing the appeal of evil in literature because of their reliance on
normative models. Moreover, many modern critics have been just as
suspicious as Renaissance moralists of the myriad capacities of literature
to cause pleasure, although often for quite different ideological reasons.
Milton criticism has been especially susceptible to moralistic interpreta-
tions that, in an attempt to respect Renaissance poets’ own stated theories
about poetry and theology, often treat these theories too uncritically as
accurate representations of poetic and religious practice. The most promi-
nent example of this critical mode, which William Empson in Milton’s God
(1961) refers to disparagingly as “neo-Christian” (26), is Stanley Fish’s
Surprised by Sin (1967). Fish’s work has been and remains influential;
indeed, scholars such as John Rumrich, Neil Forsyth, and Peter Herman
argue that it has become the foundation for a kind of repressive “ortho-
doxy” in Milton studies.7 Fish reproduces key aspects of Sidney’s account
of vice in poetry, particularly the idea that representations of evil should
disgust readers and thereby incite them to virtue, and the assumption that
 AESTHETICS AND MORALITY 7

evil can appeal to healthy readers only by incorporating elements of mis-

guided virtue or deceptive beauty.
In fact, far from simply revolting audiences, the passages that describe
infernal landscapes, wicked villains, and demonic or monstrous beings
have been among the most attractive parts of The Faerie Queene,
Richard III, Paradise Lost, and many other works of poetry and drama
in the period—attractive in that they have drawn readers’ attention, inter-
est and emotional engagement, and they have inspired discussion, praise,
and debate. The catalog of such passages includes not only instances of evil
concealed within a fair exterior (which are readily explained in terms of
normative aesthetics) but also those generally described as repugnant:
Spenser’s serpentine Errour, who vomits pamphlets and blind toads;
Macbeth’s hideous witches, with their cauldron of unsavory spell ingredi-
ents; and Milton’s depiction of Sin, a literary descendant of Errour with a
pack of “hell hounds” (2.654) that crawl in and out of her womb. For
many readers, these supposedly distasteful representations have often
proved more poetically engaging than others that adhere to a normative
aesthetic.
To understand these representations, and readers’ responses to
them, we have to broaden our concept of what an aesthetic system
can contain. In theorizing the seemingly paradoxical appeal of evil and
the monstrous in art, it is helpful to consult scholarship on a genre
whose very existence depends upon the reality of this appeal: the
modern horror film. Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror: Or
Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) and Cynthia Freeland’s The Naked
and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (2000) are useful
indicators of the gap between Renaissance critics and critics of later
periods. These authors, in effect, provide serious analyses of the
“Horror-Comic or drug-like thrill” that even a pro-Satan critic like
Empson dismisses as both contemptible and irrelevant to an authenti-
cally Miltonic appreciation of Paradise Lost (Empson 272).
Carroll notes that the debate over horror tends to alternate between
two extremes:

Many journalists . . . underscore only the repellent aspects of the work—

rejecting it as disgusting, indecent, and foul. Yet this tack fails to offer any
account of why people are interested in partaking of such exercises. Indeed,
it renders the popularity of the genre inexplicable.
8 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

On the other hand, defenders of the horror genre . . . often indulge in

allegorical readings that make their subjects appear wholly appealing and
that do not acknowledge their repellent aspects. (160)

Commentators in the Renaissance often resort to analogous tactics, con-

demning poetic texts for their supposedly repugnant foulness, or defend-
ing them with elaborate allegorical interpretations that render the foulness
safely abstract.8 Carroll’s dichotomy of responses also finds an echo in the
work of “orthodox” Miltonists, who labor to make unappealing the poetic
elements that readers should find unappealing, while demonstrating that
these supposedly unattractive elements effectively convey a commendable
didactic message.
Carroll offers two hypotheses that enable a more productive view of the
problem. The first is that a love of horror is not in itself pathological or
anomalous: “it does not seem plausible to regard these consumers—given
the vast number of them—as abnormal or perverse in any way that does
not beg the question” (160). More importantly, Carroll theorizes that
“the monster—as a categorical violation—fascinates for the self-same
reasons it disgusts and, since we know the monster is but a fictional
confection, our curiosity is affordable” (189). The idea that fascination
and horror are sparked by the same elements, as part of a distinctive
aesthetic, is essential to any understanding of the appeal of evil.9

SINISTER AESTHETICS
Representations of evil, and the imagery associated with evil, can indeed
be described as ugly, to the extent that they violate normative aesthetic
principles. But artistic representations of evil are also aesthetic construc-
tions, crafted according to principles and traditions analogous to those
governing beautiful things. Thus, if these supposedly ugly representa-
tions are in some way pleasing, we could also say that they possess a
kind of beauty.10 Ultimately, though, the terms beautiful and ugly are
equally misleading ways to describe this category of aesthetic objects.
Neither is adequate by itself, and together they are oxymoronic.
Indeed, part of the difficulty in discussing attractive representations of
evil is that the language we use to describe them makes their very
existence seem paradoxical and implausible, when in fact they are
quite common.
 SINISTER AESTHETICS 9

For that reason, I propose the concept of sinister aesthetics to describe

imagery that appeals aesthetically while violating normative standards of
beauty. The word “sinister” can refer to moral evil or to the aesthetic
conventions associated with it; the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter
OED) definitions include such phrases as “full of dark or gloomy sugges-
tiveness” and “Of looks, etc.: Suggestive of evil or mischief” (I.6.a,b). Its
secondary meanings relating to “the left hand” (II.9.b) suggest a dichot-
omy of normative and alternative rather than superior and inferior, which
more accurately describes the role of sinister aesthetics in art.
Whereas a normative aesthetic derives its ideals from culturally sanc-
tioned conceptions of beauty and virtue, a sinister aesthetic is a set of poetic
conventions that generates pleasure by representing things we are sup-
posed to dislike, including deception and cruelty, filth and disease, defor-
mity and monstrosity, destruction and punishment, and the demonic and
infernal.11 In this scheme, poetic objects would be ugly only insofar as they
violate a normative aesthetic without evoking a sinister one. Although the
sinister stands in opposition to the normative (what we are supposed to
like), it could be described as normal, in that artists frequently make use of
it, audiences frequently take pleasure in it, and there is nothing inherently
pathological about either of these practices.12
Like any aesthetic judgment, distinguishing between the beautiful, the
ugly, and the sinister necessarily involves a subjective component. We can
empirically demonstrate the existence of particular artistic traditions for
representing evil, but they can evoke a wide variety of affective responses
from readers in practice. In this study, I have tried to focus on the kinds of
responses that texts appear to model or encourage, with the understanding
that these textual cues do not ineluctably determine whether actual readers
will experience attraction, aversion, or some combination of the two. If a
reader takes no pleasure from a given representation of evil and is simply
repulsed by it, then for them it is not sinister but ugly.
The normative/sinister relationship I propose is more complex than the
mutually defining binary model of containment and subversion popular in
new historicism and derived from post-structuralist linguistics and anthro-
pology. In a post-structuralist framework, the subversive represents all that
opposes the hegemonic, and for that very reason, so the logic of the
argument goes, the subversive defines and is defined by the hegemonic.13
Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Ästhetische Theorie, 1970) describes
how this idea works when translated into the realm of aesthetics:
“According to traditional aesthetics, the ugly is that element that opposes
10 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

the work’s ruling law of form; it is integrated by that formal law and
thereby confirms it” (60).
This paradigm has been productive, but it can also lead to oversimpli-
fication, reducing the subversive to the mere negation of whatever is
hegemonic, of order itself. Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject has been
very influential on these kinds of models, particularly for early modernists
analyzing monstrosity.14 Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) describes the
abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”
(4). The abject is useful because it offers a more inclusive notion of what
motivations can be psychologically realistic by theorizing a fascination
with what is horrifying, disgusting, or otherwise rejected by normative
standards. However, when defined purely in these terms, the abject ulti-
mately serves to re-inscribe the order that it violates.15
Another problem with overuse of this binary is that, as Eve Sedgwick
and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995) tartly notes, it
becomes all too easy to label everything as “kinda subversive, kinda hege-
monic” (500). Shuger’s analysis of early modern English Protestantism in
Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1990) reveals that the
supposedly “orthodox and subversive” elements are quite mingled in
actual religious discourse, to the point where “it is not always clear what
precisely is subversive with respect to the dominant ideology, nor does
orthodox ideology seem quite as monolithic and hegemonic” (1, 2–3).16
In their discussion of sexuality, Sedgwick and Frank advocate “an affect
system described as encompassing several more, and more qualitatively
different, possibilities than on/off” (504). The same could be said for
aesthetic responses to art and literature. Critics need to keep seeking more
precise and flexible alternative models for talking about the things we
associate with categories such as the other and the subversive. The sinister
and the normative do exist partly in symbiotic, mutually defining opposi-
tion to each other, but the sinister is above all a category of competing
aesthetic orders that exploit the appeal of objects rejected by normative
aesthetics.
Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) offers a productive model for a binary
system that nonetheless maintains these qualitative distinctions between
its opposing aesthetics. Burke wrote almost a century after Milton, but he
and most other early theorists of the sublime were inspired in no small part
by a desire to explain the poetic power of Paradise Lost, which they saw as
 SINISTER AESTHETICS 11

the defining example of sublimity. Burke ascribes to the sublime a set of

concrete aesthetic traits, such as large size, dark colors, rough textures, and
bitter tastes. Although most of these traits have corresponding opposites
in Burke’s definition of the beautiful, the accumulation of detail and
texture reveals the sublime to be a distinctive style, not merely an anti-
style. On the affective side, the sublime stirs a kind of paradoxical pleasure
in things that are supposed to be unpleasant. Finally, the aesthetic qualities
Burke identifies have inescapable moral valences, particularly in the sub-
lime’s association with darkness, terror, and pain, and yet Burke refuses to
simply identify the beautiful as good and the sublime as evil. Burke’s
distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is thus a useful example
of the distinction between a normative and a sinister aesthetic. I have
coined the term “sinister” because Burke’s sublime is not quite synon-
ymous with the concept I will discuss, and because theories of the sublime
after Burke have drastically expanded the term’s meaning in directions less
relevant to the aesthetics of evil.17
Like Burke’s sublime, the sinister uses its own representational stan-
dards and conventions that do not merely reproduce or invert normative
aesthetics. It has what Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness (2007) describes as an
“‘autonomy’ . . . which makes it far richer and more complex than a series
of simple negations of the various forms of beauty” (16).18 This autonomy
allows the sinister to produce qualitatively distinctive forms of pleasure.
A sinister aesthetic is thus not simply the violation of aesthetic order, but
an aesthetic order in its own right, partly overlapping with the normative,
partly conflicting with it, and partly independent of it. As such, the sinister
encompasses literary traditions of substantive representational techniques
that are amenable to classification. They include the medieval Vice tradi-
tion for representing villains, the classical and Dantean traditions for
representing the underworld and hell, some aspects of the early modern
grotesque, and the chimera (a creature composed of disparate animal
parts) as a paradigm for constructing monsters.19 By the early modern
period, there were many rich traditions of visual iconography that could be
categorized as sinister, such as the conventional depiction of devils with
horns, bat wings, tails, and cloven hooves.
Renaissance authors faced a dilemma in confronting these traditions.
Sinister aesthetics constituted a significant and powerful portion of the
poetic repertoire they inherited. Unfortunately, although these conven-
tions were not evil in themselves, their association with evil rendered them
problematic for a culture that placed such great emphasis on literature’s
12 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

moral responsibilities. Authors in the early modern period thus felt power-
ful pressures to contain and assimilate the sinister within a larger whole
that was morally and aesthetically normative. As a philosophical grounding
for this practice, early modern writers could draw on Augustine’s depic-
tion of the universe as a chiaroscuro painting that derives its beauty from
the combination of good and evil elements (see The City of God book 11,
Chapter 23). Similarly, the neoclassical aesthetic principle of concordia
discors, or discordant harmony, allowed authors to employ sinister ele-
ments provided that they were balanced with normative ones.
While they strove to circumscribe the dangerous power of the sinister,
early modern authors—often the very same authors—also pursued a con-
trary impulse: to push the limits of readers’ tolerance for the horrible with
elaborate depictions of physical and psychological cruelty, baby-eating
hags, the torments of hell, wasting diseases, and blind toads in puddles
of vomit. The level of intensity and sensuous detail in such descriptions
often accumulates to a point of excess that becomes a sinister technique in
its own right, insofar as it violates normative principles of literary decorum,
harmony, order, and restraint for its own aesthetic purposes.
Central to the nature and significance of the sinister are the complex
cognitive and affective responses that it evokes in audiences. Whereas pure
ugliness is simply unpleasant and produces aversion or repulsion, the
sinister offers a pleasure that is analogous to but qualitatively distinct from
the response to beauty. Moreover, because an object that conforms to a
sinister aesthetic must also, by definition, violate a normative aesthetic,
appreciating it involves an attraction to something that one simultaneously
also recognizes as evil, horrifying, or disgusting. The sinister thus requires
audiences to balance opposing sensibilities, emotions, and systems of value.
Works that employ the sinister almost inevitably rely on the normative as
well, and this combination of elements within a single work can demand a
kind of code-switching from audiences. Ultimately, they must negotiate
their relation to the dark and morally questionable subject matter and
reconcile their interest in it with their ostensible moral and aesthetic values.
Enjoying a representation of evil is not the same as committing an evil act
oneself, but the sinister can create a powerful imaginative engagement that
raises questions about the audience’s complicity. Renaissance authors who
wished to capitalize on the sinister had to help readers manage this process:
to decide which aesthetic sensibilities should govern their responses in a
given instance, and to assimilate their appreciation of the sinister into the
context of their own moral standards. The result was a poetry that played
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 13

complex games with readers’ understanding of the difference between

reality and fiction and the interplay of good and evil in the moral universe.
Sinister aesthetics have several consequences for the poetic enterprise,
consequences that are both enabling and, for poets and critics with a moral
agenda, potentially problematic. On the one hand, they provide the poet
with a much wider range of sensuous, emotional, and symbolic expression.
On the other hand, the pleasure they produce complicates the normative
presumption of a mutually reinforcing relationship between beauty and
virtue. Since sinister aesthetics have their own appeal as major elements of
the poet’s art, the poems run the risk of making evil itself appealing. Concern
about this fascination with evil was strongly felt in the Renaissance, and not
without reason.
Although critics and philosophers often moralize aesthetic issues,
poetry inevitably aestheticizes moral ones. Literary depictions of evil are
poetic constructions like any other, and therefore capable of producing
aesthetic pleasure. It follows that we must understand the aesthetic prin-
ciples behind these constructions and the responses they elicit, if we are to
understand how poetry functions. Without a concept like sinister aes-
thetics, all representations of evil must be considered either ugly or decep-
tively beautiful. This limited paradigm makes it difficult to explain or even
discuss the appeal of literary epics such as The Faerie Queene and Paradise
Lost, as well as the mysterious poetic energy associated with so many
villains in early modern drama. It prevents critics from accurately describ-
ing the aesthetic structures out of which representations of evil are built,
and it makes readers’ engagement with representations of evil look like
bad aesthetic and/or moral judgment: either they naïvely take beauty for
virtue, they wickedly take vice for virtue, or they perversely and inexplic-
ably take ugliness for beauty. In fact, an appreciation of the sinister reflects
a more sophisticated aesthetic sensibility, not a failure of aesthetic judg-
ment, and acknowledging the sinister complicates moral judgment rather
than impairing it.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

While the idea of the sinister could productively be applied to a wide
variety of historical periods and art forms, from medieval sculpture to
contemporary popular music, part of its value as a concept is that it allows
us to identify historically and culturally specific aesthetic traditions for
representing evil. Moreover, the sinister can play very different roles in
14 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

different cultural contexts: demonic iconography does not function in the

same way for Milton as it does for heavy metal fans. Accordingly, although
I hope that the sinister as a theoretical paradigm may find a wider scholarly
application, this study will not attempt to prove its universal or transhis-
torical validity. Rather, I will focus on the development, use, and cultural
significance of certain particular sinister aesthetics in English literature
from the Elizabethan period through Milton.
Concerns about evil manifested in a variety of early modern literary,
dramatic, and popular texts. Some of the most important literary works of
the period were Christian epics that took the conflict between good and
evil as their central focus. There was also an explosion of newly sophisti-
cated theatrical productions and of cheap printed material that examined
evil from a variety of angles. These developments allowed elite and popular
culture, as well as secular and religious culture, to overlap and enter into
dialogue in new ways. Playwrights, ballad-makers, and preachers and
publishers of sermons competed with each other for market share.
All of these writers used the sinister in order to attract audiences.
Underworld set pieces had been an essential feature of the epic genre
since its inception, long before Milton made Satan one of his main
characters. Dramatists built on the medieval tradition of the demonic
Vice figure to create a range of engaging villains. Marlowe’s Barabas in
The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) seeks to draw the audience in with his gloating
evil even though he quickly sheds any redeeming human qualities with
which he began the play. Shakespeare’s Richard III seduces other char-
acters and many audiences despite—or rather, by means of—his villainy
and monstrosity. Although Protestant anti-theatrical writers derided the
London theater as Satanic, religious writers and dramatists freely appro-
priated sinister poetic techniques from each other. Writers of ballads and
sermons employed the sinister not only to terrify audiences but also to
engage them. It is important to emphasize that, with the exception of
compulsory churchgoing, early modern audiences chose to invest their
time and money in experiencing these representations.
In this period, the sinister is not merely an artistic element; it has
significant religious consequences and is fundamentally linked with shifts
in early modern Protestant piety. The aesthetic appeal of evil, as both a
theoretical problem and a practical poetic resource, becomes entangled in
important religious debates about divine providence and the problem of
evil. These concerns grew particularly urgent with the Protestant
Reformation, the rise of Calvinism, and the conflicts between more and
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 15

less radical Protestants. The opposing branches of early modern

Christianity distinguished themselves in no small part through their dis-
agreements about what kind of moral agency human beings possessed,
and whether and how sinful behavior could be avoided and/or expiated.
Their differing answers to these questions necessarily had implications for
understanding God’s responsibility for evil.
If we acknowledge the intimate relationship between aesthetics and
religious ideology, we can see that the Christian problem of evil has both
a logical and an affective component. Solving the problem of evil requires
more than a proof of God’s innocence based on abstract moral and theo-
logical principles, as many early modern writers and modern scholars
assume. Logical theodicy is obviously necessary for resolving the problem
of evil, but by itself, it cannot offer a complete solution because it does not
satisfy the aesthetic sensibilities, which are a fundamental component of
religious piety.20 It is challenging but not insurmountably difficult to
demonstrate, as a matter of doctrinal logic, that humanity is morally
responsible for its own sins. Indeed, the Christian theological tradition is
littered with such justifications. But God shapes the form that evil takes; as
Shuger says, he “plots the didactic narrative of crime and punishment”
(Habits 201). It is precisely when we see divine providence as a literary
narrative—as in the narratives of the Bible, of history, and of personal
experience—that troubling questions arise about the sensibilities of the
author. The weakness of any merely logical theodicy is that it does not
assuage the repugnance inspired by a God whose aesthetic sensibilities
determine both the horrifying details of the human crimes he permits
and the cruel forms of the punishments he inflicts in response. This dis-
junction between divine and human aesthetic sensibilities is the aspect of
monotheistic divinity that has always been most in need of justification.
In seeking an affective solution to the Christian problem of evil, one that
would work not simply on the level of theology but on the level of piety, some
early modern writers exploited the poetic techniques that their contempor-
aries used to make evil engaging. Sermon writers such as Thomas Adams
(1583–1653) and Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) used sinister imagery not
only to describe Satan, as we might expect, but even more to describe God
and thereby make his punishments appealing. Milton’s Paradise Lost repre-
sents the period’s most searching and ambitious attempt to address both
aspects of the problem of evil. The poem demonstrates the limits of logical
theodicy and the necessity of a poetic theodicy that uses aesthetics to generate
an appropriate affective response to God.
16 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

As a poetic theodicy, Paradise Lost must convince its readers not just to
accept but to actively approve the universe and all of the many evils within
it. By presenting divine punishment, particularly its infernal manifesta-
tions, as a source of aesthetic pleasure, the poem in effect grants God
some aspects of the appeal of a Renaissance stage villain. Of course, Milton
also powerfully presents some of God’s more conventionally positive
aspects. Overall, in fact, the God of Paradise Lost is characterized by a
chiaroscuro aesthetic, the fusion of light and dark elements, and the poem
thereby presents an Augustinian vision of the universe as a troubling but
ultimately beautiful combination of good and evil.
This study thus offers an answer to Sharpe’s question about whether
“changing religious sensibilities” produced new aesthetic sensibilities or
vice versa: the two are causally interdependent. Christianity inflects sinister
aesthetics by emphasizing the importance of evil as a moral category and by
providing a wealth of demonic cosmology and iconography for early
modern authors and playwrights to exploit. Christian writers, from lowly
ballad-makers to preachers to Milton himself, re-appropriate sinister aes-
thetics in order to attract audiences and to offer affective theodicies.
Finally, sinister aesthetics inflect Christianity by shaping the religious sen-
sibilities of believers who experience an affective response to them—and by
becoming part of how early modern Christians represent the divine.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This book examines the development of sinister aesthetics in England
from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, through
the interaction and competition between several different forms of early
modern cultural discourse: elite literature (as embodied particularly in
poetic theory and the epic tradition), cheap print, religious writing, and
drama. That development culminates in Milton’s Paradise Lost, which
combines and transforms the various strands of sinister poetics into a
new kind of poetry and a new conception of God.
The second chapter ranges over a generically diverse set of ancient and
early modern texts in order to provide some of the intellectual–historical
context for the more historically focused chapters that follow. It highlights
the tensions between early modern literary theory and practice regarding
the attractiveness of artistic representations of evil by looking briefly at
selected elements of the literary philosophy and epic poetry of Sidney,
Tasso, and Spenser. As theorists, these writers were unable to fully
 CHAPTER OVERVIEW 17

reconcile the appeal of literary representations of evil with their own

models for how poetry ought to function. However, they did open up
the possibility of acknowledging the sinister and assimilating it into a
Christian context by drawing on the ideas of Augustine, who conceives
of the universe aesthetically, as a chiaroscuro composition of good and evil
elements that together produce a divinely ordained beauty. Moreover, as
epic poets, Tasso and Spenser helped to develop an elaborate repertoire of
images and techniques for representing evil in appealing ways, thereby
generating and refining several varieties of sinister aesthetics for subse-
quent early modern writers.
Chapter 3 uses Shakespeare’s Richard III as a model for the treatment
of evil and the demonic in English Renaissance drama. Theater in this
period saw a tremendous proliferation of figures that challenge or overturn
traditional moral and aesthetic standards: attractive villains, malign gods,
and humanized or even sympathetic devils. Richard III is one of the most
influential examples of a Renaissance stage villain whose physical and
moral monstrosity empowers him to dominate his play and charm other
characters and audiences. Not only is the play unusually comprehensive in
the kinds of sinister aesthetics that it explores but it also offers some of the
most explicit theorization available within an early modern play about the
appeal of ugliness and evil. While Richard III primarily presents evil as a
form of entertainment, it also raises questions about divine providence,
which in the play appears to operate largely through the sinister curses of
the vengeful “hag,” Queen Margaret (1.3.212).
Early modern theater lies at the intersection between literary and
popular culture, and the popularity of demonic figures on the stage reflects
larger cultural interests and concerns, including the theological problem of
evil. The fourth chapter therefore examines the depiction of divine punish-
ment in two kinds of Renaissance cheap print texts: broadside ballads and
sermons. The market competition between plays, ballads, and sermons
encouraged their appropriation of infernal and monstrous aesthetics from
each other. Ballads about so-called monstrous births not only present
them as pleasurably fearful spectacles but they also employ what Helaine
Razovsky in the title of her 1996 essay calls “Popular Hermeneutics,”
treating monsters as texts written by God. Depicting God as a monster-
maker has important implications for early modern English conceptions of
God and his relationship to evil. The chapter concludes with a look at
seventeenth century sermons that explore this relationship and cultivate an
approval of monstrous and infernal forms of divine punishment.
18 1 INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTING EVIL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

In choosing to write Paradise Lost as a poetic theodicy and not a

treatise, Milton inherits both the literary and religious problems of evil
faced by early modern English Protestants. He must offer a theological
explanation for God’s apparent tolerance of evil, but more importantly, he
must make his vision of God poetically compelling. The resulting work
fundamentally integrates the aesthetic and the theological. Milton sees
God’s creation as a chiaroscuro composition in which darkness and light,
evil and good, are closely intermingled. The poet’s task is to bring the
reader to a state of mind in which that mingling seems divinely beautiful.
From drama, Milton borrows the model of the attractive villain and applies
it, first to Satan but eventually to God himself. Milton’s representations of
divine evil and punishment recall and transform the imagery of popular
religious discourse. He constructs a poetic theodicy that engages with the
darkest elements of God’s nature, and he seeks to justify these elements
affectively by infusing them with pleasingly sinister qualities.
Milton’s Satan, the period’s most notoriously appealing villain, is essen-
tial to this strategy. Accordingly, the fifth chapter analyzes Satan’s attrac-
tiveness and his gradual degeneration. The centuries-old critical debate
about Satan has traditionally placed Milton’s poetic impulses in opposition
to his theological principles. Understanding that piety includes aesthetic
and affective components as well as abstract dogmas, however, allows us to
see the ways in which Milton’s Satanic poetry can express his religious
sensibilities. Attending to Satan’s own changing aesthetic perspectives
elucidates the poem’s interweaving of moral and aesthetic concerns, as
well as the importance and the dangers of engaging with the infernal.
The sixth chapter examines the crux of Milton’s poetic response to the
problem of evil in Paradise Lost, which is to gradually transfer the poetic
power of the sinister from Satan to God, and it explains the religious
consequences of this strategy. Milton develops the poetic power of evil
while revealing the ultimate origin of that power in God, thus creating a
poetic universe that encourages approval of and pleasure in God’s punish-
ments, not merely reluctant acceptance of them. In this way, Milton
depicts God himself as a sinister allegorist: one who afflicts his creations
with punishments that are horrible representations of their own evil for
artistic purposes, namely to delight and instruct heavenly and human
audiences. Milton seeks to show that God’s justice is a poetic justice and
that the aesthetic principles behind that poetry are sinister.
The epilogue summarizes the book’s analysis of how early modern
authors made aesthetic use of the appeal of evil, and how the sinister
 NOTES 19

aesthetics they developed affected their religious piety and theodicy. It then
briefly considers the life of the sinister after Milton. The rise of the sublime
as a major aesthetic paradigm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
offered a theoretical validation for taking pleasure in artistic representations
of evil, one that ultimately allowed sinister aesthetics to become more
independent from religious concerns. Finally, the epilogue suggests some
of the uses of—and anxieties about—the sinister in the modern era.

NOTES
1. See Susan J. Wolfson’s “Reading for Form” (2000) and the other essays in
the Modern Language Quarterly special issue of the same title, Mark David
Rasmussen’s collection Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements
(2002), Stephen Cohen’s collection Shakespeare and Historical Formalism
(2007), Marjorie Levinson’s “What Is New Formalism?” (2007), Verena
Theile and Linda Tredennick’s collection New Formalisms and Literary
Theory (2013), and Frederic V. Bogel’s New Formalist Criticism: Theory
and Practice (2013).
2. See Gail Kern Paster’s Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean
Stage (2004) and several collections, including Reading the Early Modern
Passions (2003) edited by Paster, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson;
Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (2006) edited by Victoria Kahn, Neil
Saccamano, and Daniela Coli; and Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern
Culture (2013) edited by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis.
3. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, in “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern
English Studies” (2004), contrast Marxist scholars who “decode religious
language and ideas as mystifications of economic, political, and social con-
ditions and relationships, usually assuming that religion itself is a form of
‘false consciousness’” with scholars who “take seriously religious beliefs,
ideas, and history” (168).
4. See, for example, Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance
(1990).
5. C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and Stanley Fish’s Surprised
by Sin (1967) have helped promulgate this perspective among Miltonists.
6. Paradise Lost passages are cited by book and line number.
7. See, for example, Rumrich’s 1996 study, Milton Unbound: Controversy and
Reinterpretation (1).
8. Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), for example,
castigates playgoing as sitting in “the chaire of pestilence” (B7, Kinney
154) and eating the “pollution of idoles” (B8v, Kinney 155). On retro-
spective moralizing, see my Chapter 2, especially regarding Tasso’s
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 Barclay’s Refutation of Astrology.
Astrological superstition, it is said, transcended from the
Chaldeans, who transmitted it to the Egyptians, from whom the
Greeks derived it, whence it passed to the Romans, who, doubtless,
were the first to disseminate it over Europe, though some will have it
to be of Egyptian origin, and ascribe the invention to Cham; but it is
to the Arabs that we owe it. At Rome, the people were so infatuated
with it, the Astrologers, or, as they are called, the mathematicians,
maintained their ground in spite of all the edicts to expel them out of
the city[11].
The Brahmins introduced and practised this art among the
Indians, and thereby constituted themselves the arbiters of good and
evil hours, which gives them vast authority, and in consequence of
this supererogation, they are consulted as Oracles, and take good
care they never sell their answers but at a good price.
The same superstition, as we have already shewn, has prevailed in
more modern ages and nations. The French historians remark, that,
in the time of Queen Catherine of Medicis, Astrology was in so great
repute, that the most inconsiderable thing was not undertaken or
done without consulting the stars. And in the reigns of king Henry
III. and IV. of France, the predictions of Astrologers were the
common theme of the court conversation.
This predominant humour in the French court was well rallied by
Barclay in his Argenis, lib. ii, on account of an Astrologer who had
undertaken to instruct king Henry in the event of a war then
threatened by the faction of the Guises.
“You maintain,” says Barclay, “that the circumstances of life and
death depend on the place and influence of the celestial bodies, at the
time when the child first comes to light; and yet you own, that the
heavens revolve with such vast rapidity that the situation of the stars
is considerably changed in the least moment of time. What certainty
then can be in your art, unless you suppose the midwives constantly
careful to observe the clock, that the minute of time may be conveyed
to the infant, as we do his patrimony? How often does the mother’s
danger prevent this care? And how many are there who are not
touched with this superstition? But suppose them watchful to your
wish; if the child be long in delivery; if, as is often the case, a hand or
the head come first, and be not immediately followed by the rest of
the body; which state of the stars is to determine for him; that, when
the head made its appearance, or when the whole body was
disengaged? I say nothing of the common errors of clocks, and other
time-keepers, sufficient to elude all your cares.
“Again, why are we to regard only the stars at his nativity, and not
those rather which shone when the fœtus was animated in the
womb? and why must those others be excluded, which presided
while the body remained tender, and susceptible of the weakest
impression, during gestation?
“But setting this aside, and supposing, withal, the face of the
heavens accurately known, whence arises this dominion of the stars
over our bodies and minds, that they must be the arbiters of our
happiness, our manner of life, and death? Were all those who went to
battle, and died together, born under the same position of the
heavens? and when a ship is to be cast away, shall it admit no
passengers but those doomed by the stars to suffer shipwreck? or
rather, do not persons born under every planet go into the combat,
or aboard the vessel; and thus, notwithstanding the disparity of their
birth, perish alike? Again, all who were born under the same
configuration of the stars do not live or die in the same manner. All,
who were born at the same time with the king, monarchs? Or are all
even alive at this day? I saw M. Villeroy here; nay, I saw yourself:
were all that came into the world with him as wise and virtuous as
he; or all born under your own stars, astrologers like you? If a man
meet a robber, you will say he was doomed to perish by a robber’s
hand; but did the same stars, which, when the traveller was born,
subjected him to the robber’s sword, did they likewise give the
robber, who perhaps was born long before, a power and inclination
to kill him? For you will allow that it is as much owing to the stars
that the one kills, as that the other is killed. And when a man is
overwhelmed by the fall of a house, did the walls become faulty,
because the stars had doomed him to perish thereby; or rather, was
his death not owing to this, that the walls were faulty? The same may
be said with regard to honours or employ: because the stars which
shone at a man’s nativity, promised him preferment; could those
have an influence over other persons not born under them, by whose
suffrages he was to rise? or how do the stars at one man’s birth
annul, or set aside, the contrary influences of other stars, which
shone at the birth of another?
“The truth is, supposing the reality of all the planetary powers; as
the sun which visits an infinity of bodies with the same rays, has not
the same effect on all, as some things are hardened thereby, as clay;
others softened, as wax; some seeds cherished, others destroyed; the
tender herbs scorched up, others secured by their coarser juice: so,
where so many children are born together, like a field tilled so many
different ways, according to the various health, habitude, and
temperament of the parents, the same celestial influx must operate
differently. If the genius be suitable and towardly, it must
predominate therein: if contrary, it will only correct it. So that to
foretel the life and manners of a child, you are not only to look into
the heavens, but into the parents, into the fortune which attended
the pregnant mother, and a thousand other circumstances utterly
inaccessible.
“Further, does the power that portends the new-born infant a life,
for instance of forty years; or perhaps a violent death at thirty; does
that power I say, endure and reside still in the heavens, waiting the
destined time, when, descending upon earth, it may produce such an
effect? Or is it infused into the infant himself; so that being
cherished, and gradually growing up together with him, it bursts
forth at the appointed time, and fulfils what the stars had given it in
charge? Exist in the heavens it cannot; in that depending
immediately on a certain configuration of the stars; when that is
changed the effect connected with it must cease, and a new, perhaps
a contrary one, takes place. What repository have you for the former
power to remain in, till the time comes for its delivery? If you say it
inherits or resides in the infant, not to operate on him till he be
grown to manhood; the answer is more preposterous than the
former; for this, in the instance of a shipwreck, you must suppose the
cause why the winds arise, and the ship is leaky, or the pilot, through
ignorance of the place, runs on a shoal or a rock. So the farmer is the
cause of the war that impoverishes him; or of the favourable season,
which brings him a plenteous harvest.
 “You boast much of the event of a few predictions, which,
considering the multitude of those your art has produced, plainly
confess its impertinency. A million of deceptions are industriously
hidden and forgot, in favour of some eight or ten things which have
succeeded[12]. Out of so many conjectures, it must be preternatural if
some do not hit; and it is certain, that, by considering you only as
guessers, there is no room to boast you have been successful therein.
Do you know what fate awaits France in this war; and yet are not
apprehensive what shall befal yourself? Did you not foresee the
opposition I was this day to make you? If you can say whether the
king will vanquish his enemies, find out first whether he will believe
you.
Des Cartes and Agrippa, as they inveigh much against some other
sciences, especially Agrippa, so the latter of them does not favour or
spare astronomy, but particularly astrology, which he says, is an art
altogether fallacious, and that all vanities and superstitions flow out
of the bosom of astrology, their whole foundation being upon
conjectures, and comparing future occurrences by past events, which
they have no pretence for, since they allow that the heavens never
have been, nor ever will be, in one exact position since the world
commenced, and yet they borrow the effects and influence of the
stars from the most remote ages in the world, beyond the memory of
things, pretending themselves able to display the hidden natures,
qualities, &c. of all sorts of animals, stones, metals, and plants, and
to shew how the same does depend on the skies, and flow from the
stars. Still Eudoxus, Archelaus, Cassandrus, Halicarnassus, and
others, confess it is impossible, that any thing of certainty should be
discovered by the art of judicial astrology, in consequence of the
innumerable co-operating causes that attend the heavenly
influences; and Ptolemy is also of this opinion. In like manner those
who have prescribed the rules of judgments, set down their maxims
so various and contradictory, that it is impossible for a
prognosticator out of so many various and disagreeable opinions, to
be able to pronounce any thing certain, unless he is inwardly
inspired with some hidden instinct and sense of future things, or
unless by some occult and latent communication with the devil. And
antiquity witnesseth that Zoroaster, Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar,
Cæsar, Crassus, Pompey, Diatharus, Nero, Julian the Apostate, and
several others most addicted to astrologers’ predictions, perished
unfortunately, though they were promised all things favourable and
auspicious. And who can believe that any person happily placed
under Mars, being in the ninth, shall be able to cast out devils by his
presence only; or he who hath Saturn happily constituted with Leo at
his nativity, shall, when he departs this life, immediately return to
heaven, yet are the heresies maintained by Petrus Aponensis, Roger
Bacon, Guido, Bonatus, Arnoldus de Villanova, philosophers;
Aliacensis, cardinal and divine, and many other famous Christian
doctors, against which astrologers the most learned Picus Mirandola
wrote twelve books, so fully as scarcely one argument is omitted
against it, and gave the death blow to astrology! Amongst the ancient
Romans it was prohibited, and most of the holy fathers condemned,
and utterly banished it out of the territories of Christianity, and in
the synod of Martinus it was anathematized. As to the predictions of
Thales, who is said to have foretold a scarcity of olives and a dearth
of oil, so commonly avouched by astrologers to maintain the glory of
their science, Des Cartes answers with an easy reason and probable
truth, that Thales being a great natural philosopher, and thereby well
acquainted with the virtue of water, (which he maintained was the
principle of all things,) he could not be ignorant of the fruits that
stood the most in need of moisture, and how much they were
beholden to rain for their growth, which then being wanting, he
might easily know there would be a scarcity without the help of
astrology; yet if they will have it that Thales foreknew it only by the
science of this art, why are not others who pretend to be so well
skilled in its precepts, as able to have the same opportunities of
enriching themselves? As for the foretelling the deaths of emperors
and others, it was but conjectures, knowing most of them to be
tyrants, and hated, and thereupon would they pretend to promise to
others the empires and dignities, which sometimes spurring up
ambitious minds, they neglected no attempts to gain the crown, the
astrologers thereby occasioning murders, add advancements by
secret instructions, rather than by any rules of art, which they
publicly pretended to, to gloss their actions and advance the honour
of their conjecturing science: by the same manner might Ascletarion
have foretold the death of Domitian, and as for himself being torn to
pieces by dogs, it was but a mere guess, for astrologers do not extend
their predictions beyond death, and therefore he did not suppose his
body would be torn to pieces after his death, as it proved, but alive as
a punishment for his boldness in foretelling the death of the
emperor, which being a common punishment, had it proved so, it
had been by probability from custom, but not of the rules of
astrology.—See Blome’s Body of Philosophy, pt. iii. chap. 14, in the
history of Nature.
 ON THE ORIGIN AND IMAGINARY
EFFICACY OF
AMULETS & CHARMS,

In the Cure of Diseases, Protection from Evil Spirits, &c.

Amulets are certain substances to which the peculiar virtue of

curing, removing, or preventing diseases, was attached by the
superstitious and credulous; for which purpose they were usually
worn about the neck or other parts of the body. The council of
Laodicea prohibited ecclesiastics from wearing amulets and
phylacteries, under pain of degradation. St. Chrysostome and Jerome
were likewise zealous against the same practice. “Hoc apud nos,”
says the latter, “superstitiosæ mulierculæ in parvulis evangeliis, et in
crucis ligno, et istiusmodi rebus, quæ habent quidam zelum Dei, sed
non juxta scientiam usque hodie factitant.”—Vide Kirch. Oedip.
Egypt.
At the present day, although by no means entirely extinct, amulets
have fallen into disrepute; the learned Boyle nevertheless considered
them as an instance of the ingress of external effluvia into the habit,
in order to shew the great porosity of the human body. He moreover
adds, that he is persuaded “some of these external medicaments do
answer;” for that he was himself subject to a bleeding from the nose;
and being obliged to use several remedies to check this discharge, he
found the moss of a dead man’s skull, though only applied so as to
touch the skin until the moss became warm from being in contact
with it, to be the most efficacious remedy. A remarkable instance of
this nature was communicated to Zwelfer, by the chief physician to
the states of Moravia, who, having prepared some troches, or
lozenges of toads, after the manner of Van Helmont, not only found
that being worn, as amulets, they preserved him, his domestics, and
friends, from the plague, but when applied to the carbuncles or
buboes, a consequence of this disease, in others, they found
themselves greatly relieved, and many even saved by them. Mr. Boyle
also shews how the effluvia, even of cold amulets, may, in the course
of time, pervade the pores of the living animal, by supposing an
agreement between the pores of the skin and the figure of the
corpuscules. Bellini has demonstrated the possibility of this
occurrence, in his last proposition de febribus; the same has also
been shewn by Dr. Wainwright, Dr. Keil, and others. There were also
verbal or lettered charms, which were frequently sung or chaunted,
and to which a greater degree of efficacy was ascribed; and a belief in
the curative powers of music has even extended to later times. In the
last century, Orazio Benevoli composed a mass for the cessation of
the plague at Rome. It was performed in St. Peter’s church, of which
he was maestro di capella, and the singers, amounting to more than
two hundred, were arranged in different circles of the dome; the
sixth choir occupying the summit of the cupola.
The origin of amulets may be traced to the most remote ages of
mankind. In our researches to discover and fix the period when
remedies were first employed for the alleviation of bodily suffering,
we are soon lost in conjecture, or involved in fable; we are unable to
reach the period in any country, when the inhabitants were destitute
of medical resources, and we find among the most uncultivated
tribes, that medicine is cherished as a blessing, and practised as an
art, as by the inhabitants of New Holland and New Zealand, by those
of Lapland and Greenland, of North America and the interior of
Africa. The personal feelings of the sufferer, and the anxiety of those
about him, must, in the rudest state of society, have incited a spirit of
industry and research to procure alleviation, the modification of heat
and cold, of moisture and dryness; and the regulation and change of
diet and habit, must intuitively have suggested themselves for the
relief of pain, and when these resources failed, charms, amulets, and
incantations, were the natural expedients of the barbarians, ever
more inclined to indulge the delusive hope of superstition than to
listen to the voice of sober reason. Traces of amulets may be
discovered in very early history. The learned Dr. Warburton is
evidently wrong, when he assigns the origin of these magical
instruments to the age of the Ptolemies, which was not more than
300 years before Christ; this is at once refuted by the testimony of
Galen, who tells us that the Egyptian king, Nechepsus, who lived 630
years before the Christian era, had written, that a green jasper cut
into the form of a dragon surrounded with rays, if applied externally,
would strengthen the stomach and organs of digestion. We have
moreover the authority of the Scriptures in support of this opinion:
for what were the ear-rings which Jacob buried under the oak of
Sechem, as related in Genesis, but amulets? and we are informed by
Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, (lib. viii. c. 2, 5,) that
Solomon discovered a plant efficacious in the cure of epilepsy, and
that he employed the aid of a charm or spell for the purpose of
assisting its virtues; the root of the herb was concealed in a ring[13],
which was applied to the nostrils of the demoniac; and Josephus
himself remarks, that he himself saw a Jewish priest practise the art
of Solomon with complete success in the presence of Vespasian, his
sons, and the tribunes of the Roman army. Nor were such means
confined to dark and barbarous ages; Theophrastus pronounced
Pericles to be insane, because he discovered that he wore an amulet
about his neck; and in the declining era of the Roman empire, we
find that this superstitious custom was so general, that the Emperor
Caracalla was induced to make a public edict, ordaining, that no man
should wear any superstitious amulets about his person.
In the progress of civilization, various fortuitous incidents[14], and
even errors in the choice and preparation of aliments, must gradually
have unfolded the remedial powers of many natural substances:
these were recorded, and the authentic history of medicine may date
its commencement from the period when such records began.
We are told by Herodotus, that the Chaldeans and Babylonians
carried their sick to the public roads and markets, that travellers
might converse with them, and communicate any remedies which
had been successfully used in similar cases; this custom continued
during many ages in Assyria: Strabo states that it also prevailed
among the ancient Lusitanians, or Portuguese: in this manner,
however, the results of experience descended only by oral tradition.
It was in the temple of Æsculapius in Greece, that medical
information was first recorded; diseases and cures were then
registered on durable tablets of marble; the priests and priestesses,
who were the guardians of the temple, prepared the remedies and
directed their application; and as these persons were ambitious to
pass for the descendants of Æsculapius, they assumed the name of
the Asclepiades. The writings of Pausanias, Philostratus, and
Plutarch, abound with the artifices of those early physicians.
Aristophanes describes in a truly comic manner, the craft and pious
avarice of these godly men, and mentions the dexterity and
promptitude with which they collected and put into bags the
offerings on the altar. The patients, during this period, reposed on
the skins of sacrificed rams, in order that they might procure celestial
visions. As soon as they were believed to be asleep, a priest, clothed
in the dress of Æsculapius, imitating his manners, and accompanied
by the daughters of the God, that is, by young actresses, thoroughly
instructed in their parts, entered and delivered a medical opinion.
 Definition of Amulets, &c.
All remedies working as it were sympathetically, and plainly
unequal to the effect, may be termed Amulets; whether used at a
distance by another person, or immediately about the patient: of
these various are related. By the Jews, they were called Kamea; by
the Greeks, Phylacteries, as already mentioned; and by the Latins,
Amuleta or Ligatura; by the Catholics, Agnus Dei, or consecrated
relicts, and by the natives of Guinea, where they are still held in great
veneration, Fetishes. Different kinds of materials by these different
people, have been venerated and supposed capable of preserving
from danger and infection, as well as to remove diseases when
actually present.
Plutarch relates of Pericles, an Athenian general, that when a
friend came to see him, and inquiring after his health, he reached out
his hand and shewed him his Amulet; by which he meant to intimate
the truth of his illness, and, at the same time, the confidence he
placed in these ordinary remedies.
Amulets still continue among us to the present day, indeed there
are few instances of ancient superstition some parcel of which has
not been preserved, and not unfrequently they have been adapted by
men of otherwise good understanding, who plead in excuse, that they
are not nauseous, cost little, and if they can do no good they can do
no harm. Lord Bacon, whom no one can suspect of being an ignorant
man, says, that if a man wear a bone ring or a planet seal, strongly
believing, by that means, that he might obtain his mistress, or that it
would preserve him unhurt at sea, or in battle, it would probably
make him more active and less timid; as the audacity they might
inspire would conquer and bind weaker minds in the execution of a
perilous duty.
There are a variety of Amulets used by the common people for the
cure of ague; and however this may be accounted for, whether by the
imagination or the disease subsiding of its own accord, many have
been apparently cured by them, when the Peruvian bark had
previously failed. Agues, says Dr. Willis, resisting Amulets have often
been applied to the wrist with success. Abracadabra written in a
conical form, i. e. in the shape of an Isoceles triangle, beginning with
A, then A B, A B R, and so on, and placed under each other, will have
a good effect. The herb Lunaria, gathered by moonlight, we are
assured by very respectable authorities, has performed some
surprising cures. Naaman, we are told (numero deus impare gaudet)
was cured by dipping seven times in the river Jordan. An old
gentleman, of eighty years of age, who had nearly exhausted his
substance upon physicians, was cured of a strangury, by a new glass
bottle that had never been wet inside, only by making water in it, and
burying it in the earth. There were also certain formalities performed
at the pool of Bethseda for the cure of diseases. Dr. Chamberlayne’s
Anodyne necklace for a long time was the sina qua non of mothers
and nurses, until its virtue was lost by its reverence being destroyed;
and those which have succeeded it have nearly run their race. The
Grey Liverwort was at one time thought not only to have cured
hydrophobia, but, by having it about the person, to have prevented
mad dogs from biting them. Calvert paid devotions to St. Hubert for
the recovery of his son, who was cured by this means. The son also
performed the necessary rites at the shrine, and was cured not only
of the hydrophobia, “but of the worser phrensy with which his father
had instilled him.” Cramp rings were also used, and eel skins tied
round the limbs, to prevent this spasmodic affection; and also by
laying the sticks across on the floor in going to bed, have also
performed cures this way. Numerous are the charms, amulets, and
incantations, used even in the present day for the removal of warts.
We are told by Lord Verulam (vol. iii. p. 234,) that when he was at
Paris he had above an hundred warts on his hands; and that the
English Ambassador’s lady, then at court, and a woman far above all
superstition, removed them all only by rubbing them with the fat
side of the rind of a piece of bacon, which they afterwards nailed to a
post, with the fat side towards the south. In five weeks, says my Lord,
they were all removed.
As Lord Verulam is allowed to have been as great a genius as this
country ever produced, it may not be irrelevant to the present
subject, to give, in his own words, what he has observed relative to
the power of Amulets. After deep metaphysical observations in
nature, and arguing in mitigation of sorcery, witchcraft, and
divination, effects that far outstrip the belief in Amulets, he observes
“we should not reject all of this kind, because it is not known how far
those contributing to superstition depend on natural causes. Charms
have not their power from contracts with evil spirits, but proceed
wholly from strengthening the imagination; in the same manner that
images and their influence, have prevailed in religion; being called
from a different way of use and application, sigils, incantations, and
spells.
 Effect of the Imagination on the Mind, &c.
Imagination, indubitably, has a powerful effect on the mind, and in
all these miraculous cures is by far the strongest ingredient. Dr.
Strother says, the influence of the mind and passions works upon the
body in sensible operations like a medicine, and is of far the greater
force upon the juices than exercise. The countenance, he observes,
betrays a good or wicked intention; and that good or wicked
intention will produce in different persons a strength to encounter,
or a weakness to yield to the preponderating side. “Our looks
discover our passions; there being mystically in our faces, says Dr.
Brown, certain characters, which carry in them the motto of our
souls, and therefore probably work secret effects in other parts,” or,
as Garth, in his “Dispensatory,” so beautifully illustrates the idea:
“Thus paler looks impetuous rage proclaim,
And chilly virgins redden into flame:
See envy oft transformed in wan disguise,
And mirth sits gay and smiling in the eyes:
Oft our complexions do the soul declare,
And tell what passions in the features are.
Hence ’tis we look, the wond’rous cause to find,
How body acts upon impassive mind.”

Addison, on the power and pleasure of the imagination (Spect. vol.

vi.) concludes, from the pleasure and pain it administers here below,
that God, who knows all the ways of afflicting us, may so transport us
hereafter with such beautiful and glorious visions, or torment us with
such hideous and ghastly spectres, as might even of themselves
suffice to make up the entire of Heaven or Hell of any future being.
St. Vitus’ dance was cured by visiting the tomb of the saint, near
Ulm, every May. Indeed, there is some reason in this assertion; for
exercise and change of scene and air will cure many obstinate
diseases. The bite of the Tarantula is cured by music; and what is
more wonderful still, persons bitten by this noxious animal are only
to be cured by certain tunes; thus, for instance, one might be cured
with “Nancy Dawson,” while another could only reap a similar
benefit from “Moll in the wood,” or “Off she goes.”
The learned Dr. Willis, whom we have already mentioned, in his
treatise on Nervous diseases, does not hesitate to recommend
Amulets in epileptic disorders. “Take,” says he, “some fresh Pæony
roots, cut them into square bits, and hang them round the neck,
changing them as often as they dry. In all probability the hint from
this circumstance was taken for the Anodyne necklaces, which was in
such strong requisition some time ago, and which produced so much
benefit to the proprietors; as the doctor, a little further on, prescribes
the same root for the looseness, fevers, and convulsions of children
during the time of dentition, mixed, to make it appear more
miraculous, with some elk’s hoof.
Turner, whose ideas on hydrophobia are so absurd, where he
asserts, that the symptoms may not appear for forty years after the
bite; and who asserts, “that the slaver or breath of such a dog is
infectious; and that men bit, will bite like dogs again, and die mad;
although he laughs at the Anodyne necklace, argues much in the
same manner. It is not so very strange that the effluvia from external
medicines entering our bodies, should effect such considerable
changes, when we see the efficient cause of apoplexy, epilepsy,
hysterics, plague, and a number of other disorders, consists, as it
were in imperceptible vapours.
Lapis Ætites (blood stone) hung about the arm, by some similar
secret means is said to prevent abortion, and to facilitate delivery,
when worn round the thigh. Dr. Sydenham, in the iliac passion,
orders a live kitten to be laid constantly on the abdomen; others have
used pigeons split alive, and applied to the soles of the feet with
success, in pestilential fevers and convulsions. The court of king
David thought that relief might be obtained by external agents;
otherwise they would not have advised him to seek a young virgin;
doubtless thereby imagining that the virgin of youth would impart a
portion of its warmth and strength to the decay of age. “Take the
heart and liver of the fish and make a smoke, and the devil shall
smell it and flee away.” (Tobit, c. vi.)
During the plague of London, arsenic was worn as an amulet
against infection. During this melancholy period, Bradley says, that
Bucklersbury was not visited with this scourge, which was attributed
to the number of druggists and apothecaries living there.
During the plague at Marseilles, which Belort attributed to the
larvæ of worms infecting the saliva, food, and chyle; and which, he
says, were hatched by the stomach, took their passage into the
blood, at a certain size, hindering the circulation, affecting the
juices and solid parts, advised amulets of mercury to be worn in bags
suspended at the chest and nostrils, either as a safeguard or as a
means of cure; by which method, through the admissiveness of the
pores, effluvia specially destructive of all venemous insects, were
received into the blood. “An illustrious prince,” continues Belort, “by
wearing such an amulet, escaped the small-pox.”
An Italian physician (Clognini) ordered two or three drachms of
crude mercury to be worn as a defensive against the jaundice; and
also as a preservative against the noxious vapours of inclement
seasons: “it breaks,” he observes, “and conquers the different figured
seeds of pestilential distempers floating in the air; or else, mixing
with the air, kills them where hatched.”
Other philosophers have ascribed the power of mercury in these
cases, to an elective faculty given out by the warmth of the body;
which attracts the infectious particles outwards. For, say they, all
bodies are continually emitting effluvia more or less around them,
and some whether they be external or internal. The Bath waters
change the colour of silver in the pockets of those who use them;
mercury the same; cantharides applied externally (or taken
inwardly) affects the urinary organ; and camphor, in the same
manner, is said to be an antiphrodesiac. Quincey informs us, that by
only walking in a newly-painted room, a whole company had the
smell of turpentine in their urine. Yawning and laughing are
infectious; so is fear and shame. The sight of sour things, or even the
idea of them, will set the teeth on edge. Small-pox, itch, and other
diseases, are infectious; if so, mercurial amulets bid fair to destroy
the germ of some complaints when used only as an external
application, either by manual attrition or worn as an amulet, or
inhaled by the nose. One word for all; amulets, medicated or not, are
precarious and uncertain; and, now a-day, are seldom resorted to,
much less confided in.
 Baglivi refines on the doctrine of effluvia, by ascribing his cures of
the bite of the tarantula to the peculiar undulation any instrument or
tune makes by its strokes in the air; which, vibrating upon the
external parts of the patient, is communicated to the whole nervous
system, and produces that happy alteration in the solids and fluids
which so effectually contributes to the cure. The contraction of the
solids, he says, impresses new mathematical motions and directions
to the fluids; in one or both of which, is seated all distempers, and
without any other help than a continuance of faith, will alter their
quality, a philosophy as wonderful and intricate as the nature of the
poison it is intended to expel; but which, however, supplies this
observation, that, if the particles of sound can do so much, the
effluvia of amulets may do more.
The Moors of Barbary, and generally throughout the Mahomedan
dominions, the people are remarkably attached to charms, to which
and nature they leave the cure of almost every distemper; and this is
the more strongly impressed on them from the belief in
predestination; which, according to this sect, stipulates the evils a
man is to suffer, as well as the length of time it is ordained he should
live upon the land of his forefathers: consequently, they conceive that
the interference of secondary means would avail them nothing, an
opinion said to have been entertained by King William, but by no
means calculated for nations, liberty, and commerce; upon the
principle, that when the one was entrenched upon, men would
probably be more sudden in their revenge and dislike physic and its
occupation, and when actuated with religious enthusiasm, nothing
could stand them in any service.
“A long and intense passion on one object,” observes an old navy
surgeon[15], “whether of pride, love, anger, fear, or envy, we see have
brought on some universal tremors; on others, convulsions,
madness, melancholy, consumption, hecticks, or such a chronical
disorder, as has wasted their flesh or their strength, as certainly as
the taking in of any poisonous drugs would have done. Any thing
frightful, sudden, and surprising, upon soft, timorous natures, not
only shews itself in the countenance, but produces sometimes very
troublesome consequences; for instance, a parliamentary fright will
make even grown men sh-t themselves, scare them out of their wits,
turn the hair grey. Surprise removes the hooping-cough; looking
from precipices, or seeing wheels turn swiftly, gives giddiness, &c.
Shall then these little accidents or the passions, (from caprice or
humour perhaps,) produce those effects, and not be able to do any
thing by amulets? No, as the spirits in many cases resort in plenty,
we find where the fancy determines, giving joy and gladness to the
heart, strength and fleetness to the limbs, lust a flagrancy to the eyes,
palpitation, and priapism; so amulets, under strong imagination, is
carried with more force to a distempered part; and, under these
circumstances, its natural powers exert better to a discussion.
“The cures compassed in this manner are not more admirable than
many of the distempers themselves. Who can apprehend by what
impenetrable method the bite of a mad dog[16] or tarantula should
produce their symptoms? The touch of a torpedo, numbness? or a
woman impress the marks of her longings and her frights on her
fœtus? If they are allowed to do these, doubtless they may the other;
and not by miracles, which Spinoza denies the possibility of, but by
natural and regular causes, though inscrutable to us.
“The best way, therefore, in using amulets, must be in squaring
them to the imagination of patients: let the newness and the surprise
exceed the invention, and keep up the humour by a long roll of cures
and vouchers: by these and such means many distempers, especially
of women, that are ill all over, or know not what they ail, have been
cured, I am apt to think, more by a fancy to the physician than his
prescription; which hangs on the file like an amulet. Quacks again,
according to their boldness and way of addressing (velvet and
infallibility particularly) command success by striking the fancies of
an audience. If a few, more sensible than the rest, see the doctor’s
miscarriages, and are not easily gulled at first sight, yet when they
see a man is never ashamed, in time jump in to his assistance.”
Our inability upon all occasions to appreciate the efforts of nature
in the cure of disease, must always render our notions, with respect
to the powers of art, liable to numerous errors and multiplied
deceptions. Nothing is more natural, and at the same time more
erroneous, than to attribute the cure of a disease to the last medicine
that had been employed; the advocates of amulets and charms[17]
have ever been thus enabled to appeal to the testimony of what they
are pleased to call experience, in justification of their superstitions;
and cases which in truth ought to have been considered lucky
escapes, have been triumphantly puffed off as skilful cures; and thus
have medicines and practitioners alike acquired unmerited praise or
unjust censure.
 HISTORY OF POPULAR MEDICINES, ETC.—
HOW INFLUENCED BY SUPERSTITION.

“Did Marcus say ’twas fact? then fact it is.

No proof so valid as a word of his.”

Devotion to authority and established routine has always been the

means of opposing the progress of reason, the advancement of
natural truths, and the prosecution of new discoveries; whilst, with
effects no less baneful, has it perpetuated many of the stupendous
errors which have been already enumerated, as well as others no less
weighty, and which are reserved for future discussion.
To give currency to some inactive substance as possessing
extraordinary, nay wonderful medicinal properties, requires only the
sanction of a few great names; and when established upon such a
basis, ingenuity, argument, and even experiment, may open their
impotent batteries. In this manner have all the nostra and patent
medicines got into repute that ever were held in any estimation. And
the same devotion to authority which induces us to retain an
accustomed remedy upon the bare assertion and presumption either
of ignorance or partiality, will, in like manner, oppose the
introduction of a novel practice with asperity, unless indeed it be
supported by authorities of still greater weight and consideration.
The history of various articles of diet and medicine, will amply
prove how much their reputation and fate have depended upon
authority. For instance, it was not until many years after ipecacuanha
had been imported into England, that Helvetius, under the
patronage of Louis XIV. succeeded in introducing it into practice:
and to the praise of Katherine, queen of Charles II. we are indebted
for the general introduction of tea into England. Tobacco,
notwithstanding its fascinating powers, has suffered romantic
vicissitudes in its fame and character; it has been successively