Please Accept My Most Saturnine Birthday Wishes, My Melancholic Friend: A Caption Contest

Caption Contest! I’m working on a birthday card, because melancholiacs, Goths, and ghosts have birthdays too. (Or do they…?) I guess it could work for ghosts who are graduating from high school and college too. Comment with your best caption for this festive ghost birthday card. If I use it, I’ll send you one for free […]

Anatomy of Melancholy, 159-160: Subsect. VII – Of the Inward Senses

  In this section Burton discourses on common sense, phantasy (or imagination), and memory. On imagination he writes: In melancholy men this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense or memory. In […]

Anatomy of Melancholy , 154-157: Of the Soul and her Faculties, continued

  The common division of the soul is into three principal faculties–vegetal, sensitive, and rational, which make three distinct kinds of living creatures–vegetal plants, sensible beasts, rational men. How these three principal faculties are distinguished and connected, Humano ingenio inaccessum videtur, is beyond human capacity, as Taurellus, Philip, Flavins, and others suppose. The inferior may […]