Breaking physical boundaries: blood and imagination

To speak of the body was to speak of the soul. Though the opposition of the divine soul to the mortal human body was a central idea in the western tradition, rooted in both Christian theology and in the platonic philosophy, it was apparently blurred in the construction of the theory of the spirits. The rational soul, deriving from God, was identified with the mind and ruled on the corporeal or sensitive one, which was thin, subtle, comparable to a spectre or a shadow, but nevertheless inscribed in a physical status. This last could be impressed, shaken, snatched by both internal and external agents and above all by a sinful or a pure moral conduct. In his :atural history of the

passions, published in the late seventeenth century, Walter Charleton explained that

two souls cohabited inside the body. The rational one was incorporeal, indivisible and finite and was identified in the intellect and on which depended the discerning and understanding capacities of the individual. The sensitive soul, on which depended life and sense, was instead made of a fiery substance, an intermediate state of being between the matter of the body and the unsubstantial nature of the reasoning principle.245 A few years later, the physician Thomas Willis similarly argued that the corporeal soul permeated the bodily parts and the circulating blood, maintaining the whole constitution of the person; yet if it was disturbed it could alter the circulation of the liquid, the humours and the activities of the various organs. The sensitive soul was distributed in the body thanks the action of the spirits, that moved between the brain and the heart and impressed on the blood both fantasies and passions.246 Life was brought forth by blood, but it came from the sensitive soul: vital spirits and vital blood, carried by the arteries, were often confused, spiritual and physical life merged more deeply in the evidence of blood.

The ambiguity of the spirits’ nature seems less important than the sympathetic relationship between the body and the qualities of the soul, obtained through their mediation. Inside the human structure physical characteristics coincided with the

245

Walter Charleton, :atural history of the passions. (London, 1674), pp.46-53

246

Thomas Willis, Two discourses concerning the soul of brutes which is that of the vital and sensitive

of man. The first is physiological, shewing the nature, parts, powers, and affections of the same. The other is pathological, which unfolds the diseases which affect it and its primary seat; to wit, the brain and nervous stock, and treats of their cures: with copper cuts. (1683), pp. 13-18

125 spiritual ones: choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic individuals bore in their bodies the evidences of their emotions, and were more inclined to certain passions and sicknesses according to the prevailing humour in the blood. According to the disposition of the heart, humours and body, “diverse sorts of persons be subject to diverse sorts of passions, and the same passion affected diverse persons in diverse manners”.247 We will see now in more details how passions behaved inside the body and how mental sickness was explained, following a dual path that proceeded from the emotions to the humours and then moved to the head and vice versa. In this discussion we will also explore better the link between the sensitive and the rational soul that allowed passions to overcome mental balance.

In the words of Agrippa, the passions of the mind could alter the body through imitation, impressing on the blood the image of the thing seen or heard. In this way they could induce certain diseases, agitating and heating the humours, or, as in the case of pregnancy, also transmit the features of a distorted imagination to the foetus, through the nourishing blood.248 Robert Burton gave a complete explanation, highlighting the mutual influence of passions and humours:

the body works upon the mind by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into the brain, and so disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it, with fear, sorrow, etc. (…), on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself.249

The seat of affections was the heart, from where they worked directly on the blood: they primarily fixed their impressions on it through the spirits and then affected its movements in the rest of the body. The stronger the feeling, the faster was the process of the blood’s accumulation. Disturbed, sudden, prolonged emotions influenced the bodily temperature, provoking changes in the humoral balance. Pleasure, for instance, made the fluid circulate; fear and anger agitated and heated it abnormally, while grief

247

Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in generall. (London, 1684), pp. 37-38. See also Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam. Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century

England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 183-187. Timothie Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy. (London: John Windet, 1586), pp. 37-69

248

Cornelius Heinrich Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book I, pp. 204-205

249

126 refrigerated the body, overwhelming the natural heat, oppressing the heart with thickened blood, withering the bones, depriving the rest of the organism of its normal flux and so weakening its normal strength. In the words of the English clergyman Edward Reynolds no passion was comparable to sorrow or grief, which “stoppeth the voice, looseth the joints, withereth the flesh, shrivelleth the skinne, dimmeth the eyes, cloudeth the countenance, defloureth the beauty, troubleth the bowels, in one word, disordereth the whole frame”.250 The immediate evidence was given by an abnormal paleness which distinguished the afflicted individual. Though negative feelings were the worst, it was thought than every kind of excessive passion could be dangerous, even joy or love, because their continuous action on the humours caused the drying up or the suffocation of the spirits. Also happiness and love could turn into sorrow, if lacking, betrayed or obsessively searched, and so they could distress the individual in the same way in which negative emotions did.251

When the blood, full of corrupted humours and their exhalations entered the brain, they reached the imagination, sickening the whole mind. Imagination, together with common sense and memory, constituted the three inner senses of the sensitive soul. Common sense discerned the things of the surrounding world and was seated in the frontal part of the brain. Imagination or fantasy considered in depth and recalled for a longer period the same matter judged by the commons sense, making new things and thoughts by the observed objects, that were consequently stored inside memory. Both memory and imagination were seated in the back of the brain, together with memory, close to the intellect, that belonged to the rational soul and differentiated man by the animals. While for animals imagination was the only faculty of apprehension, inside the human being the intellect could correct the errors of fantasy and elaborate the images and the notions into useful ideas. The intellect exercised control on fantasy, dividing true from false ideas, deciding what was worth speculation and what had to be discarded, as “extravagant, useless conceptions”.252 Yet the rational soul did not control completely the sensitive one, which, in the words of Charleton:

250

Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man. (London: R.H. for Robert Bostock, 1640), 232

251

Robert Burton, Anatomy, I: pp. 252, 253; II: 103; Thomas Willis, Two discourses, pp. 44-54; Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde, pp. 60-64; William Buchan, Domestic Medicine or A

Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases. (by regimen and simple medicines) (London, 1772),

pp. 139-148; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam., pp. 182-183

252

127 being much neerer allied to the body, and immediate Guardian thereof; is by

that affinity and relation obliged to addict itself altogether to the gratification, welfare and conservation of the same. And that this province may be more gratefull and agreeable to so delicate a Governess, she is continually courted and presented by all the Senses with variety of blandishments and tempting delights. So that charmed by those powerful enchantments of sensible objects, and intirely taken up with care of the body, and in that respect prone to pursue pleasures: she too often proves deaf to the voice of Reason advising the contrary, and refuses to be diverted from her sensual to nobler affections.253

The three inner senses corresponded to the outer five senses, to which they were connected through the spirits. Imagination was the only sense partly free from the power of reason and therefore it could be dangerous and deceptive. Again in Burton’s words it was “the instrument of the passions”, amplifying their effects. Similarly a distorted imagination acted on the body, descending towards the heart, where it pushed blood and passions into motion. According to this theory a deranged mind put at risk not only mental health, but also the physical one, because to fancies of imagination followed distempered spirits and corrupted humours.254 Furthermore, following the same sympathetic relationships, man was placed in a system of correspondences that went beyond his own person, allowing similarities and connections that thought of in terms of disease, made every kind of contagion possible. This meant the effects of mental sickness could be endemic to a certain extent. During the early sixteenth-century the Italian philosopher Pietro Pamponazzi, for instance, described how spirits and blood, corrupted by fantasies and feelings, produced vapours and exhalations which affected the whole welfare of the person. Through the pores and the openings in the body they also could spread to the external environment.255

From these descriptions physical boundaries seem almost non existent: in the early modern thought the skin was a porous matter where the body was displayed, more than concealed or separated from the outer world. Blood and spirits were easily

253

Walter Charleton, :atural history, pp. 58-59

254

Robert Burton, Anatomy, I: pp. 157-160, 257-258; Thomas Willis, Two discourses, pp. 38-43

255

Pietro Pomponazzi, De :aturalium effectuum causis sive de incantatinibus (Basle, 1556). In David Gentilcore, “The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear.” In William G. Naphy, Penny Roberts, Fear

128 influenced by the external world256 and the landmarks became more obnoxious when we arrive to imagination. Due to its own spiritual nature in fact it had to do with the visible as well as the invisible reality, where demonic forces were at work, trying to enter and manipulate the human being. Imagination and blood cooperated, linking the spiritual domain to the physical one: while the first continuously worked on the passions and could become the gate for malevolent influences, a weakened or unnatural bodily condition made the spreading of sickness easier.

For a good example of this we can look at the state of sleep to which every body surrendered its defences, and, consequently, investigate the perception of dreams and the peculiar disease of the nightmare. Sleep was caused by an abundant afflux of blood to the head: the liquid was full of vapours coming from the digestive process of the stomach, which overwhelmed the spirits so that the senses were temporarily obstructed, giving to the body and the mind the opportunity to renew their energies. During sleep blood was hotter than during the waking hours and its correct ebullition acted on the imagination, provoking dreams. The purer the exhalations from the concocted nourishment, the sweeter were the dreamy visions.257 In his treatise on dreams, published in 1689 Thomas Tryon explained how a prolonged flux of blood to the head was unhealthy. In sleep blood washed the cortex of the brain, it heated up but did not circulated, so that it could stagnate there, overfilling the head and causing headaches and other diseases, including sleep-walking, typical of young people and those with sanguine complexions. Exuberant blood swelled and stimulated the animal spirits of the nerves, responsible for motion, so that even if all the other senses and spirits were inhibited the person moved as apparently awake. Though sleep-walking was not particularly dangerous, it demonstrated how not just sickening humours and vapours, but every kind of excess carried disease. The most frequently suggested healing method for sleepwalking, but also for headaches induced by excessive sleep, was bloodletting, which helped to keep the mind at a cool temperature.258

Bad vapours and humours, especially black bile, were instead the origin of awful dreams and the phenomenon of the nightmare, or sleep paralysis, a disease in which

256

Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century

Germany. Trans Tomas Dunlap.(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.123; Claudia

Benthien, Skin. On the cultural border between the self and the world. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 38-40.

257

Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions. (1689); Robert Burton, Anatomy, I:p. 160; Thomas Willis, Two discourses, pp. 90-92

258

129 the mind and the body were both involved. The diseased person felt physically oppressed, hindered in movements, respiration and speech, but was also subject to sudden, strong frights and hallucinatory states. The medical explanation relied on Galen’s theory of disturbed digestion, according to which sleep-paralysis was due to the rising of bad vapours to the brain where they hindered the flux of the spirits through the nervous system. Another theory, though generally dismissed by the eighteenth century, posited that an excessively relaxed stomach did not complete a proper digestive cycle, causing the malfunction of the circulation of blood, which, in turn, led to stagnation in the head and other parts of the body. The supine position, assumed during sleep, was believed to help the blood to stagnate and the disease to take advance of the person. Pregnant women or those recovering from childbirth were among the most affected.

Beyond this widely accepted explanation there was also a supernatural one, according to which, the nightmare or the incubus was caused by witchcraft or by fairies and devilish animals. The belief derived from the troubled mind and the frightful visions which accompanied the bodily sensation, so that common people were prone to assert that a witch or a demon was sitting on their chest, oppressing their sleep.259 Discussing the power of imagination, Robert Burton wrote this summarized description of the disease:

although this phantasy of ours be a subordinated faculty to reason, and should be ruled by it, yet in many men, through inward or outward distemperature, defect of organs, which are unapt or hindered, or otherwise contaminated, it is likewise unapt, hindered, and hurt. This we see verified in sleepers, which by reason of humours and concourse of vapours troubling the phantasy, imagine many times absurd and prodigious things, and in such as are troubled with

incubus, or witch-ridden: if they lie on their backs, they suppose an old woman

rides and sits so hard upon them that they are almost stifled for want of breath; when there is nothing offends but a concourse of bad humours, which trouble the phantasy.260

259

Owen Davies, “The Nightmare Experience sleep paralysis, and witchcraft accusations.” Folklore 114 (2003), pp. 181-203; Thomas Tryon, A Treatise of Dreams, pp. 24-25; William Buchan, Domestic

Medicine, p. 556

260

130 The supernatural theory did not have a real medical validation, nevertheless the fact that it was sometimes accepted together with the scientific one, suggests that diseased bodies and imaginations could become the prey for external spiritual intruders. Up to the eighteenth century we find that the “indisposition of the body” could allow spirits and otherworldly beings to interfere with the process of dreaming.261 The historian Janine Rivière has discussed ideas regarding the natural and divine origin of dreams in the context of reformed England. Though some reformers denied the continued existence of prophetic dreams, some astrologers and philosophers believed in their power, while in popular culture dreams were often used as a means of divination.262 The interest in dreams and their role in the reformers’ fight against superstition, testifies to a belief in the proximity of the supernatural, which endured among common people, but which also stimulated intellectual debate. In both cases the means by which a connection was established between the body and the imagination, and allowed the work of external, demonic influences, was the blood where spiritual and physical matter mingled together.