Cardan, Jerome

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

A so-called magician, who lived about the end of the fifteenth, or the beginning of the sixteenth, century. He was contemporary with Faustus and Para-- celsus, to whom, as to the other necromancers of his age, he was entirely dissimilar. He has left in his Memoirs a frank and detailed analysis of a curiously complicated and abnormal intellectuality, sensitive, intense, and not altogether free from the taint of insanity. He declares himself subject to strange fits of abstraction and exaltation, the intensity of which became at length so intolerable that he was forced to inflict on himself severe bodily pain as a means of banishing them. He would, he tells us, talk habitually of those things which were most likely to be distasteful to the company; he would argue on any side of a question, quite irrespective of whether he believed it right or wrong, and he had an extraordinary passion for gambling. He tells us of three peculiarities, in which we may trace the workings of a diseased imagination, and in the third, at least, that abnormal delicacy of perception which characterised him. The first was the faculty of projecting his spirit outside his body, to the accompaniment of strange physical sensations. The second was the ability to perceive sensibly anything he desired to perceive. As a child, he explains, he saw these images involuntarily and without the power of selection, but when he reached manhood he could control them to suit his choice. The third of his peculiar qualities was, that before every event of moment in his life, he had a dream which warned him of it. Indeed, he himself has written a commentary of considerable length on Synesius's treatise on dreams, in which he advances the theory that any virtuous person. can acquire the faculty of interpreting dreams, that, in. fact, anyone can draw up for himself a code of dreaminterpretations by merely studying carefully his own dreams. We cannot put much faith in Cardan's wonderful. dreams, however. His is not the type of mind to which we would go for an accurate statement concerning mental phenomena, but such significant dreams as he may have had, were probably, as has already been suggested, the result of his abnormal sub-conscious perceptiveness. In one instance at least, his prediction was not entirely successful. He foretold the date of his own death, and, at the age of seventy-five, was obliged to abstain from food in order to die at the time he had predicted.