Andrew Manns is a doctoral student at the Warburg Institute. His research focuses on the psychological and political theories of Renaissance philosopher Tommaso Campanella. As the founding editor of thethinkersgarden.com and a contributor to Abraxas Journal, Andrew has written on a number of topics in the history of religion, science, and magic.
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) has been called a genius and a madman. A doctor, astrologer, and mathematician who had a knack for both fascinating and irritating his peers, Cardano chronicled his adventures and thoughts in his De Vita Propria Liber [Book on His Own Life], which was published posthumously in 1643. Even his dreams hinted at his future celebrity. In one of his dreams he pictured himself amidst a multitude of people who were all marching along a mountainside to ‘Death’. Eager to evade the reaping, Cardano somehow found a path to a paradisal plain where he was greeted by a handsome youth and welcomed to a solitary villa. Convinced of his ‘higher than thou’ calling, Cardano declared:
“From this vision I read a manifest prophecy, pointing to the immortality of my name, to my arduous and neverending labours, to my imprisonment, to the overwhelming fear and sadness of my life.” (Cardano, 2002, p. 140)
Just as he’d forseen, Cardano’s career veered on the tragic and picaresque, with plenty of bickering and swashbuckling to go around. Some of his more infamous misadventures include dueling over gambling debts (Cardano, 2002, pp. 92-93), piecing together a horoscope for Jesus Christ (Shucker, 1982, pp. 53-90), and healing more than a hundred men, “given up as hopeless at Milan, Bologna and Rome” (Cardano, 2002, p. 158). For him, everything was alive and everyone had something to tell, regardless of whether they were living, dead, or somewhere in-between. Interestingly, many of these ‘visitations’ manifested either as auditory or visual apparitions in the late hours of the night or wee hours of the morning when Cardano was suddenly aroused by feelings of foreboding, sadness, or curiosity.
Cardano’s abilities to interpret his experiences of the ‘anomalous’ were crucial to his understanding of himself and often served to help him address and solve a number of personal issues. Additionally he seemed to be unsure of whether they were caused by a type of mental mechanism or by something from another world. Much like other creatives in history, such as Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, and Carl Jung, Cardano’s visions were coincidental with his mental exhaustion and anxiety.
Much of the querulous polymath’s extraordinary sensations of altered consciousness also resemble the phenomena reported during experiences of hypnagogia and hypnopompia. While Hypnagogia is the name given to the onset of sleep, Hypnopompia refers to the period leading out of sleep. Scientific literature categorizes both states by the person’s high susceptibility to vivid hallucinations. Witness accounts describe the experiences as waking dreams where phantoms, strange smells, and frightening noises occur at random (Blom, 2009, pp. 253-254). Extraordinary for the person experiencing them, H & H, are also often the usual culprits for reports of paranormal activity (cf. Sherwood, 2002).
Cardano’s descriptions of his experiences are very similar to those found in documented cases of H&H. In one account, he described being troubled by heart palpitations and a vibrating bed as he was laying down (Cardano, 2002 p. 168). In another example, Cardano wrote that throughout his life he would wake up abruptly and see that his room was basked in a ghostly luminosity (Cardano, 2002, p. 170). In still another example, Cardano woke up in the early morning to disembodied knocking noises in the house (Cardano, 2002, p. 180). Perhaps the most amazing vision happened when he glimpsed an apparition of a farmer in his doorway. The entity stared back at the astonished doctor, whispered a mysterious phrase, then disappeared:
“I kept looking at him intensely, for many reasons; and he, thereupon, when he was almost at the threshold of the door uttered these words: Te sin casa; and having spoken, he vanished” (Cardano, 2002, p. 182).
Although he was keen on attributing his visions to ministrations from his tutelary spirit, Cardano did not shy away from speculating that they might be produced from his imagination (Cardano, 2002, p. 180). His reservations however did not stop him from constantly interpreting the phenomena as signifiers of his various social and domestic troubles (such as the murder of his son) (Cardano, 2002, pp.166-173). In this way, Cardano found meaning in the unexplainable. He was so confident in his own abilities to interpret mysteries that he even came up with a temporary solution to his angst from one of his dreams. In the dream a voice instructed him to put an emerald in his mouth whenever he felt upset. Upon awakening, Cardano was surprised to find out that the remedy worked (Cardano, 2002, pp.181-182).
Finally there is the issue of what Cardano believed to be his unique heredity and personality. His father, Fazio Cardano, often spoke to him about his personal experiences within the spirit world. At one point, Fazio considered summoning his demon to heal his ailing son (Cardano, 2002, p. 11). Entirely convinced of the reality of his invisible friends, Fazio claimed that he first got acquainted with spirits when he was just a child (Giglioni, 2010 pp. 463-466). Thus Cardano’s acceptance of and understanding of spirits may have been affected by his father’s enthusiastic folk pneumatology.
Cardano’s idea of himself was also constructed around the archetype of the melancholic. According to many Renaissance thinkers, people who had melancholic temperaments were victims to extremes in social and private behaviour. Melancholics easily fell into disastrous relationships and other unfortunate circumstances. However, they were also highly inspired by planetary and astral influences and, like poets and prophets, could be regularly ‘contacted’ by otherworldly intelligences. Cardano was born with a melancholic horoscope. Bathed in a vat of warm wine as a newborn, Cardano was destined to be “harpocratic”, or gifted with an “intense and instinctive desire to prophesy” (Cardano, 2002, p. 6).
Cardano’s temperament and his discussions with his father may have had some influence on his oracular moments. With these facts and the descriptions of H&H in mind, it is tempting to explain his experiences with a contemporary point of view. Nevertheless one cannot deny that Cardano’s visions forged his identity and his perception of his prodigious place in the cosmos.
References
Blom, Jan Dirk (2009). A Dictionary of Hallucinations. New York: Springer.
Cardano, Girolamo (2002). Book of my Life (trans. Jean Stoner). New York: New York Review of Books.
Giglioni, Guido (2010). Fazio and His Demons: Girolamo Cardano on the Art of Storytelling and the Science of Witnessing. Bruniana & Campanelliana, XVI (2). Rome: Fabrizio Serra.
Sherwood, Simon J. (2002). Relationship between the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states and reports of anomalous experiences. Journal of Parapsychology, 66, 127-150,
Shucker, Wayne (1982). Renaissance Curiosa. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies.
© Andrew Manns
Intriguing article, Drew – really enjoyed it. Does the Sherwood paper relate H& H to specific neurological conditions, via repeatable lab procedures? If not we are still left with another enigma in consciousness studies.
Dear Paul, the Sherwood paper does state that there is conclusive evidence for the phenomena and explicitly refers to studies linking H&H to reports of’ ESP, apparitions, visions of previous lives or other worlds, alien abductions, witchcraft, or attacks by evil spirits or demons etc’. Additionally, Sherwood mentions that there is a strong association of H&H with sleep paralysis. In Cardano’s case however, we can never know for sure what he experienced. Historians must be careful not to diagnose the subjects of their research and commit the positivist ‘original sin’! Cardano will surely remain a mystery wrapped in an enigma, as he was while he was alive 🙂