László Földényi - Melancholy

The seventh planet is Saturn, and it seems fateful that this planet — which according to astrology and its related body of beliefs is endowed with the most extreme properties (for Neoplatonists, Saturn exerts the greatest influence on earthly affairs) — was allied to melancholia during the Hellenistic era. Melancholics were seen as persons of extremes ( ), exposed to risk from all directions. Their capabilities extended to the limits of human life, and like the planet Saturn, melancholics could rightly claim that beyond them there was either nothingness or God . It mattered not whether one gave a name to that void and held it to be God; it was more important that on reaching that utmost point, the melancholic would no longer be faced with any human being. Standing there, he was no longer surrounded by people; anyone hitherto familiar would become unfamiliar, and anything that appeared before him would arouse feelings of homelessness. As a result of his extreme position, he felt himself to be an outcast, an elect, sinful and saintly. And like souls that reach Saturn after voyaging among the other planets, where they have to leave their earthliness behind and become incorporeal (according to Neoplatonists) as well as to step into earthliness and assume a definite form (Gnostics), the melancholic is subjected to multiple trials: in one and the same person, the most excellent and most unfortunate, like Heracles; the wisest and most ignorant, like Socrates; the most blasphemous and holiest, like Empedocles. The Neoplatonist and the Gnostic explanations of Saturn seem, at first sight, to contradict each other. Plotinus explained the name of Cronus, the Greek counterpart of Saturn, as being a compound of koros (a boy or plenty) and nus (spirit), seeing Cronus as a symbol of fulfillment (other suppositions derived the name from the verb , “to carry out, accomplish”): “Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty” ( Enneads , V. 1. 7.). According to the Gnostics, however, the seven planetary gods guaranteed the materiality of a world that had broken away from the Creator; their leader was Jaldabaoth — also known as Moloch, Cronus (that is, Saturn) — about whom the Perates (a Gnostic sect) said: “For Cronus is a cause to every generation, in regard of succumbing under destruction, and there could not exist (an instance of) generation in which Cronus does not interfere” (Hippolytus, The Refutation of All Heresies , bk. 5, ch. 11). But the two different views agreed on the matter of Saturn’s extreme position — as was authenticated by the condition of melancholia, which united the most extreme human states (without their extinguishing each other), and its planet became Saturn, which the Arabic astrologers called the “Star of Great Misfortune.” In both the Gnostic and the Neoplatonist interpretations, Saturn was a boundary. Melancholics would reach that boundary: despite being humans, they stepped beyond the limits of human existence to a place where worldly notions lost their meaning and were set in a new light; a place not only where excellence and misfortune, wisdom and ignorance, presupposed each other, but also where the most profound search for God and the most highly consistent rejection of God could equally become a source of the most unfortunate lunacy. Souls under Saturn’s influence were opposed both to the earthly world and to God, and turned their back equally on both. That, too, applied to melancholics, although they understood this in a figurative sense because they were not “confronting” God but carrying God within them, and instead of “confronting” the earthly world, they were themselves part of it. Consequently, if they “turned their back on” God and the world, then they were coming into conflict with themselves; they denied God, even as they were carrying him within themselves, and their existence would be inconceivable without him; they denied the earthly world, even though they were dust — and thereby they made the void the fundamental principle, the God of the world. Nothingness, however (being nothing), was elusive: it resided in the heart. It was inseparable from the melancholic interpretation of existence: it presupposed Something, without which Nothingness would be inconceivable — but the shadow of Nothingness was also cast onto Something, which for that reason was cloaked in obscurity for melancholics. They would fain escape from Nothingness, and throw themselves fanatically into the tangible earthly world; but the Something onto which they wished to cling was unknown and therefore did not offer a home, and wherever they might have turned, everything led back to Nothingness. They discovered the ephemeral in the finite, whereas they missed the finite in the infinite. They were Saturn’s children, and like Socrates, who according to the medieval conception had a “ Daemonium Saturninum et ignium ” (“saturnine and fiery daimon”; Burton, Anatomy , partition 1, sec. 2, member 1, subsec. 2, 191), whichever way they turned, they were faced with absence. That made them refined, sensitive, and ironic, but also downcast, despondent, and inconsolable.

Polarity and ambivalence — those were what marked out Saturn and melancholia. The Babylonians worshipped the planet Saturn as the deity Ninib, the nighttime counterpart of the sun, and that belief was augmented by Marcus Manilius, a Roman astrologer, to the effect that since Saturn faced the sun but was located at the other end of the world’s axis, the world viewed from there was seen from a fundamentally opposing perspective. In this case, opposition implied ambiguity; since the world was inconceivable without the sun, people and things that were under Saturn’s influence enjoyed both the light of the sun and Saturn’s nighttime glimmer — they could simultaneously see the face of the world and its reverse side. Cronus, the Greek counterpart of Saturn, like most Greek deities, was himself of ambiguous character. On the one hand, he was lord of the Saturnian age, the master of annual fertility and renewal, the founder of city building and agriculture; on the other hand, deposed from his throne, he was a solitary god who, according to some notions, resides “at the outer gates of [Olympus’s] many valleys” ( Iliad , bk. 8, 479), “in the depths that are under earth and sea” (bk. 14, 204), and “who rules the world below” (bk. 15, 225), a prisoner; in some cases, he is even represented as the god of death and the dead. Saturn was a father of gods and humankind, but he devoured his own children: with the sickle used for reaping, he castrated and deposed Uranus, making his own father infertile. The sickle is thus a symbol of both fertility and infertility. Those who are born under the influence of Saturn-Cronus inherit his characteristics, in the view of Hellenism, prone as it was to link mythology with astrology, making Saturn (its symbol: ) the planet of melancholics. Anyone born under Saturn’s sign will be torn apart by contradictions, the astrologists taught, long before the planet was associated with melancholia, and their interpretation determined views on Saturn’s earthly influence that are held to the present day. According to early Greek astrology (Dorotheus), which was concerned with general planetary effects, the influence of Saturn assured a person of sturdy character, intellect, and talent; during the period when scientific astrology was evolving, Ptolemy held the view that Saturn’s offspring were fond of solitude, were deep thinkers, and were prone to mysticism, but at the same time were down-to-earth: stingy, dirty, and decrepit. In the opinion of Roman imperial astrologers (Valeus, Firmicus), in line with the conjunction of the planet, Saturn’s children were famous, high-born personages, but they might also be completely unknown, extremely low-ranking people who had to endure much pain. Saturn’s children might be under the threat of being exiled, shipwrecked, or imprisoned (they might become robbers and killers, the Middle Ages vowed), but they were just as likely to possess a lofty intellect and a profound soul. (Saturn was a patron of learning; in Dante’s Divine Comedy , the representatives of the vita contemplativa appear in the “Seventh Heaven, the sphere of Saturn”— Paradise , canto 21.) Those born under the sign of Saturn were characterized by the most contradictory attributes (rich — poor, slave — master, stay-at-home — traveler, dry — damp, clever — stupid, etc.), including cases where just one of these attributes was present in them, but even so — as with true melancholics — the opposites might appear simultaneously in the same person. “Saturn,” writes Ficino, “seldom denotes ordinary characters and destinies, but rather men who are set apart from the others, divine or animal, joyous or bowed down by the deepest grief” (quoted in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy , 253). The four attributes that Aristotle associated with the four elements (cold, warm, dry, wet) were transferred to the planets, with Saturn being characterized by coldness and dryness. (Since the time of Hippocrates, melancholics have been regarded as dry by nature.) John Scotus Eriugena explained this as follows: the rays of the sun,