• 1 For a survey of the book see still Bürke Georg, Vom Mythos zur Mystik. Joseph von Görres mystische (...)
• 2 Görres Joseph, Die christliche Mystik (4 vols.), Regensburg: Manz, 1836–42, vol. 3, on enchanting s (...)

1In 1840 Joseph Görres published the third of five volumes in his work Christliche Mystik (Christian Mysticism). In these volumes Görres, a Munich theologian, had laid out a monumental intellectual edifice that aimed not only to explain the phenomenon of mysticism, but was also intended to rehabilitate almost the whole tradition of Christian demonology1. Almost every esoteric occurrence, from the murky legends of Germanic folklore to contemporary poltergeists, found its place in this mosaic. In the religious architecture that Görres had designed in the spirit of the romantic era, every area of the micro- and macrocosmos that he was able to coopt for his rhetoric of universal interconnection and divinisation was faced, with relentless symmetry, by an opposite dark side. Even in the world of animals and plants, consequently, phenomena of possession and depravation existed. After the Fall, the natural order had been perverted into its opposite and, so Görres believed, in its flora and fauna would know only domination and subjection. Humans had become herders or hunters but no longer lived in harmony with the Creation. Through the forces of darkness, magic had become a central aspect of these power structures, the decisive instrument of unlawful elevation or degradation, which by word and ritual and, above all, by base magnetism had cut a swathe of domination through nature. As an example of the occult subjection of a species, Görres treated snake charming, at heart a magical ritual, which he illustrated with some eyewitness reports from Egypt and Mauretania. In this the human succeeds, according to Görres, in stamping his signature on the creature by magical manipulation via tones and metallic sounds, which were able to work directly on the animal’s instinct. The disrupted order permitted both poison and antidote; God’s grace had therefore granted humans adequate remedies against snakebites. The same perverted symmetry that allowed an occult domination of man over beast also permitted an influence by a creature on the life of the human soul that forced it down to the level of a beast. Görres here treats in detail not only rabies, which imposed on the human the attributes of a dog, but also werewolves, which had played an important role especially in Lithuania2.

• 3 Saint-André François, Lettres de M. de Saint-André, conseiller-médecin ordinaire du Roy, à quelques (...)
• 4 Görres, Die christliche Mystik, vol. 3 : 260–264.

2But the most telling example of the animalisation of a human through a variant of beast-like possession, so Görres wanted it to be believed, was the tarantella. Görres cites a case that itself lay hundreds of years in the past, but, as we shall see, fitted entirely into the standard themes treated in relation to the tarantula bite. It was taken from a treatise that, curiously, is firmly anti-magical, written by François Saint-André in 17253. A Neapolitan soldier had been bitten in Apulia by the famous spider and the effect of the venom was as devastating as the cure was curious. The symptoms, reported frequently, had descended on the sick man once a year in Italy but four times in France. After melancholia and strong seizures, the officer was thrown to the ground choking and with his face the colour of lead; he would have died unconscious if music had not come to his aid in the form of a violin, so Görres records. It was played for a period of 48 hours and the sick man danced until he collapsed from exhaustion, took wine to encourage him and then danced on until his situation evidently improved. During his ecstatic dance the sick man at times cut wounds in his upper arms with a sabre and treated them by spitting on them, as if to heal them. Two oddities seemed especially remarkable to Görres. In a mirror placed in front of the patient, the frenzied man sometimes thought he could see the image of a spider, before which he knelt down. He was frightened by black clothing, but the colour red attracted him. For Görres this was without doubt a form of possession: the beast had gained power over the man by its bite and its venom. In the mirror, according to Görres, the specific emanations in the sick man’s body collided with the Thiergeist, the animal spirit, as Görres calls it, which had in this way materialised in the human imagination. That the sick man worshipped it like a fetish was only logical. The orgiastic celebration and the dance were at the the same time both an expression of the disease and also its medicine. The man had through metamorphosis become animal in nature and had healed himself4.

• 5 Leonhardt Ernst Friedrich, De tarantismo dissertatio inauguralis medica, Berlin: August Petsch, 183 (...)
• 6 For a general overview see the masterly study of Di Mitri Gino L., Storia biomedica del tarantismo (...)

3If Görres had consulted two medical dissertations on the tarantula bite that appeared at the same time in Berlin, he would have been unlikely to find any talk of magic, magnetism, symmetry or possession, but rather of hysteria and autosuggestion caused in the victims by an in itself harmless spider bite5. But assessments like these would hardly have fitted into the Munich professor’s grand demonological edifice. That tarantula bites caused the victims not just physical complaints, but also cast them into mental confusion, had been described repeatedly since the Renaissance. But why did the venom of this spider, native to Apulia and named after the city of Taranto, have such a fatal effect? And, above all, why was music evidently able not only to soothe the victim’s pains but, if applied for a long period, even to make them disappear altogether? In order to fit the tarantula into his system, Görres was not able to draw on the contemporary demystifications of the animal. The theologian had instead found useful material in the many baroque approaches to the phenomenon, which had been presented long before the 18^th century. Prominent there had been the proportionality of spider and sufferer, a music that intervened in the human sufferer’s balance of humours and controlled his emotions, and the resulting healing effect that depended on the harmony of the two. In what follows I wish to show how the natural philosophers of the 17^th century presented the reciprocal relation of spider, music and venom. It will thus surely come as no surprise that the emotions and their governance, and therefore also pathos, played a major role6.

• 7 On the early modern dances see Montinaro Brizio, Il Teatro della taranta. Tra finzione scenica e si (...)
• 8 On 17^th century corpuscular philosophy in general see e.g. Michael Emily, “Sennert’s Sea Change: At (...)

4In the 17^th century, too, the two key questions asked of the phenomenon of the tarantula had been: How did the spider’s venom work in the human body and produce the bizarre symptoms in it? And why was it possible to cure the effects of the spider bite by music and dance7? I have selected three authors from the second half of the 17^th century who tried to answer these questions, three authors who have also been almost wholly ignored in the large research literature on the tarantella: Wolfert Senguerd, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Leiden; Hermann Grube, a medic from Lübeck and Hadersleben; and Bernhard Albinus, Professor of Medicine at Frankfurt on the Oder. All three scholars are forming a part of early modern latin university culture and its academical networks and they are representing, even if not innovative in all aspects, the often neglected high average level of 17^th century scientific culture. They all sought a solution to explain how the spider’s venom worked on the human psychic balance and why music not only soothed patients but in the case of tarantula bites could even cure them. As we will see, their approaches differ. Yet they are all working against the background of their times and draw on an amalgam of Cartesian motifs and elements of corpuscular theory, as it was in vogue in Europe at the end of the 17^th century8. The combination of these motifs was selective and was primarily intended to make plausible a phenomenon that otherwise threatened to elude explicability. All authors were indebted to classical authorities like Pliny or Dioscurides, or at least towards their commentaries, and their were inheriting, as already stressed, a discussion and sources, already valid in the Renaissance.

• 9 Aldrovandi Ulysses, De animalibus insectis libri septem, in quibus omnia illa animalia accuratissim (...)
• 10 Sennert Daniel, Practica medicina (6 vols.), Wittenberg: Schürer, 1628–35, vol. 1, Liber I, Pars 2. (...)
• 11 Perotti Niccolo Cornucopiae sive linguae latinae commentarii, Basel: Cratander, 1521, cl. 51, Camer (...)
• 12 Cardano Girolamo, De subtilitate libri XII, Basel: Sebastianus Henricpetrus, 1582, Liber IX, p. 494 (...)
• 13 Kircher Athanasius, Magnes sive De arte magnetica opus tripartitum, quo universa magnetis natura no (...)
• 14 As early academic readers of Kircher see for example Müller Johannes – Braun Christian Friedrich (r (...)

5What seems noteworthy here is above all the standards that the authors applied to a given theory, which was expected to meet the demands of scientific standing; certain hypotheses were ruled out on this ground. None of the three authors had ever seen a tarantula, or have been present in Italy at one of the tarantella healing rituals. They were all dependent on others’ reports, on their reading and on their own powers of interpretation. Yet these shared aspects would probably not have stopped them from declaring themselves empiricists in the spirit of Bacon. The starting point of their reflections were the reports on spiders by Ulysses Aldrovandi and Thomas Moffett and the first medical comments on the tarantella9, as presented by the Wittenberg atomist Daniel Sennert10, as well as Philippus Camerarius, Alexander ab Alexandro and Nicolo Perotti11. One of the first complete early modern hypotheses was from Girolamo Cardano; it could no more be omitted from the large treatments on the tarantula than the long riposte that Cardano’s attempt had received, as was to be expected, from his rival Scaliger12. The actual empirical basis had been provided by another author, Athanasius Kircher, whose major treatise on magnetism, De arte magnetica, had given detailed treatment to the tarantula and its relation to music. His explanation had been a particular variant of magnetism that had fitted perfectly into his baroque doctrinal structure of universal sympathy, but at its core, as we will see, it remained rather vague. Yet Kircher, unlike his contemporaries, had a major advantage on his side. He had not only autopsied spiders, something that many medical writers did only long after him, in the 18^th century, but had also collected accounts of the healing rituals in their actual locations, which were able to illustrate both the effect of the spider venom and the eurhythmic therapies that were applied to heal it13. The first-hand reports he collected from Apulia therefore made the Jesuit Kircher an indispensable source even among the Lutheran and Calvinist universities, which were otherwise rather disinclined to cite Jesuit authorities14.

• 15 As examples see Senguerd Wolferd – Luders Anton (resp.), Disputatio medica de rabie vulgo dicta hyd (...)
• 16 First Senguerd Wolferd, Disputatio philosophica inauguralis de tarantula, Leiden: Elzevier, 1667, a (...)
• 17 Senguerd Wolferd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium continens experimentorum physicorum, mechan (...)
• 18 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, §§ 1–2, p. 281–285.
• 19 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 3, p. 285–288.
• 20 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 4, p. 288–292, and see Mattioli Pietro Andrea, C (...)
• 21 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 4, p. 292–293, § 13, §§ 326–328, and see Leonice (...)
• 22 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 5, p. 293–295, and see for Senguerd Pomponazzi P (...)

6The Leiden professor Wolferd Senguerd (Sengwerd), my first example, had published across a wide area of natural philosophy and later presented a much cited work on physics, which relied especially on the English mechanists around Boyle. Senguerd’s father, Arnold, had been Professor of Physics in Utrecht and Amsterdam. Wolferd himself had included medicine in his works, resulting in studies of rabies, anaemia, apoplexy and other illnesses15. His treatise on tarantula bites appeared for the first time in 1668 and is one of his early works16; he included it in his 1715 publication Rationis et experientiae connubium, which collected a number of decidedly empirical writings17. Senguerd begins with a zoological description of the Apulian spider, which feeds on moths and butterflies and due to its cold temperament, so it seemed, preferred to winter in holes in the ground and gaps in walls. It could survive fifty days without feeding, if Aldrovandi was to be believed. Different variations of tarantula could be distinguished by colour, patterning and size18. An important observation confirmed by Kircher was that the creatures only became aggressive in summer and the victims of bites were primarily farmers and gardeners who had not been wearing gloves while they worked. Initially the wound was barely visible, then it turned red and ultimately took on a festering black-yellow colouring19. Senguerd provides a whole catalogue of symptoms that the bite was generally held to produce and which had been continuously expanded by Kircher, Moffett and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, the commentator on Dioscurides. The reader would get the impression that almost any ailment harming body or mind might be considered to result from a tarantula bite; the symptoms also varied – an important point – according to the victim’s temperament, sex, age and lifestyle, by the weather at the time, by the sex and age of the spider and by the quantity of venom that passed into the wound. Fever, loss of appetite, coughing, headaches and pains in the limbs, breathlessness, cold sweat and vomiting featured, as well as depression, misanthropy and a mind disturbed in every way, at times running to extremes, as some cases documented. The symptoms here included constant singing, massive sweating, shivering, sudden emotional outbursts that switched between euphoria and subjection, restlessness, but also lethargy and delusions of every kind. Many of the victims thought they were kings or convicted prisoners, others that they were animals, and they behaved accordingly. In general the sufferers felt drawn to music, as both Scaliger and Moffett had stated, and in addition, according to Kircher, there was a strong emotional reaction to colours, to which the patients responded sometimes with passionate enthusiasm, sometimes with frenzied revulsion20. Nicolo Leoniceno, one of the great Renaissance medics, had, as Senguerd knew, proposed the thesis that the idea present at the moment of the bite had been, as it were, frozen as an image in the victim’s imagination and thereafter controlled the sufferer’s behaviour. This hunch seemed, so Senguerd admitted, to be contradicted by experience, since the majority of sufferers were not afflicted by such symptoms21. Or could it be the outflow of spiritus that caused particular fantasised images to dominate the sufferer’s concentration? No less mistaken was an observation made also by Pomponazzi, that the influence of the venom depended by sympathy on the life of the spider itself. Clearly the victims remained sick even after they had stamped the spider to death22.

• 23 On the concept of fermentation in 17^th century philosophy in general see now e.g. Schmechel Carmen (...)
• 24 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 6, p. 295–302, and see Kircher, Magnes, Liber II (...)

7In a first approach Senguard tries to develop a model that could make the effect of the spider venom plausible. He first makes a key decision: occult causes, be they in the form of magnetism or of other attempts to determine an artificial, remotely operating causal relation without being able to name the specific cause, deserved no place in an explanatory approach. Neither Kircher’s magnetism nor the vague, but often claimed causae occultae, which, as Senguerd reports, had been proposed as a hypothesis by the Wittenberg scholar Sennert, were therefore to be considered. Venoms were produced by processes of fermentation and so were to be regarded as ferments and, for that reason, would develop their effect in the heat of summer rather than in the cold season23. Spiders bore in themselves sufficient stickiness, viscosity and moisture, as their webs demonstrated. Spider venom, so Senguerd inferred, in its consistency must therefore likewise be fermenting and sticky. But that, admittedly, did not really explain the extremely heterogeneous symptoms, which harmed both body and soul. Once the spider had bitten the victim, tiny particles of venom flowed into the blood circulation. At first they remained there still largely without effect, due to their tough consistency, but then, so Senguerd believed, the ferment of the venom caused a disruption in the blood circulation; the venom particles had become finer – Senguard presents them as sharp-edged and destructive – and they cut up the corpuscles of the blood and accelerated the circulation, so that, through the corresponding hotbloodedness, fever and sweat outbreaks began, as well as emotions such as rage and excessive exuberance. Some of the still sticky particles, in a contrary effect, clotted the circulation by their viscosity and so caused a thickening of certain parts of the blood, which in turn would necessarily result in anxiety and hypochondria. Since venom particles forced their way into the nerve pathways, where the fluctuating spiritus provided for the flow of information, the ferment here too succeeded in causing serious damage. Delusional ideas were the result, further reinforced by the abrupt irregularities in the bloodflow. All in all, it was an unfortunate chain of circumstances, but one that was explicable through a corpuscular theory of the blood. Once the summer heat faded, the rotation of the blood also lost its external source of agitation. The venom that had not yet been excreted clotted together, combined into lumps and lost its effect24.

• 25 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 7, p. 302–307, and see Kircher, Magnes, Liber II (...)
• 26 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 8, p. 307–314.

8But the real mystery of the tarantella was connected to music. Why did the sufferers feel compelled to dance when music was played and why did they evidently – as all accounts, from Aldrovandi and Mattioli to Kircher, unanimously agreed – feel no pain during the dance? Why did the symptoms only start again afterwards, when the patient fell to the ground in exhaustion? Firstly, it was established that if music was to set a patient in motion then it must be attuned to their temperament. Kircher had shown that cholerics, melancholics or the sanguine required particular types of sound to be able to dance; indeed, he had seen patients who took to movement only in response to thoroughly harsh sounds, such as war trumpets or cannonfire. At the same time, the effectiveness of music, so Kircher believed, also stood in a proportional relation to the temperament of the spider, since he had observed that the animal itself began to jump when it heard the right sound-sequence. Was it the calming influence on the patient’s balance of humours that made the symptoms of poisoning temporarily disappear, as Kircher had maintained25? Senguerd took the phenomenon of the healing tarantella as a reason to inquire generally into the effect that music might have on humans. Its success, too, needed to be made comprehensible against the background of the corpuscular theory and its causality. Sounds should be understood as the vibration of air, which was corporeal and composed of fine material, the impacts of which reached to the ear when perception, in the form of acoustic information, was received and was usually also assigned mental contents. The perception of the sound in turn set in motion muscle movements, which were in part connected to decisions of the will, but in part motivated arbitrarily and entirely emotionally. Barely any sound lacked an accompanying feeling, be it horror, joy or sorrow. However, the tarantula venom had done lasting disruption to the orderly balance of the circulating blood and of the nerve spiritus, as had been shown, and had caused it to deteriorate. So, Senguard concluded, when the corpuscular vibrations, as harmony, encountered the new, disturbed temperament, they were able to bring the disrupted balance of blood and spiritus into a new, balanced order26.

• 27 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 9, p. 315–319.
• 28 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 10, p. 320–321.
• 29 Senguerd, Rationis atque experientiae connubium, § 11, p. 321–324, and see Kircher, Magnes, Liber I (...)

9But there was more. The vibrations of music pervaded the skin through the corpuscles and into the patient’s muscles and their spiritus and set them in motion; the patient began ineluctably to dance. The multiplied corpuscula, but above all the nerve pathways, which had now become even more fluid, caused the spiritus and blood to rotate even faster; through this, the blockages of the venom subsided, the sharp points of the venom particles were ground off by the contraction and expansion of the muscle parts and could finally be excreted through sweat. If the patient was lucky, the result was a return to health. If venom still remained in the body, the procedure – dance, music, movement, sweat – had to be repeated, perhaps even the following summer, when the venom again gained its pervasive power27. Mere movement, as Senguerd noted, was here just as ineffective a therapy as was sweat alone. Only music that was precisely attuned to the balance of humours and the spiritus, and in addition the viscosity-dissolving dance, produced success. The decisive point was that the correct sequence of sounds be chosen, trained and ideally proportioned in relation to the character of both the person and of the spider. That cholerics needed different treatment from melancholics was self-evident28. A final remark by the Leiden scholar was given to Kircher’s assumption that spider venom would not only result in an elevated receptiveness to sound, but could also summon up a special sensitivity to colour, a sensitivity for which Görres had, as we saw, offered an example. Did a relatio magnetica, such as Kircher had claimed, really exist? The negative proof that the patient was repelled by all other colours had not been sufficiently demonstrated, according to Senguerd. The connection between the colour of the spider and its temperament remained entirely obscure. Would it not be more logical, according to Senguerd, if the victim fled from the colour of the spider, rather than seeking it out29?

• 30 As first disputations see Grube Hermann – Wörger Franz (resp.), Disputatio physica de odoratu, Jena (...)
• 31 Grube Hermann, De arcanis medicorum non arcanis commentatio, ex inventis recentiorum Harveianis, Ba (...)
• 32 As examples see Grube Hermann, De transplantatione morborum analysis nova, Hamburg: Schultze, 1674, (...)
• 33 Grube Hermann, De ictu tarantulae et vi musices in eius curatione coniecturae physico-medicae, Fran (...)
• 34 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Praefatio, p. 1–20.

10Overall, the corpuscular theory offered an option by which the disease and the cure could be made plausible. And above all it had been shown how a somatopsychic causal nexus could be identified that was able to explain the disturbed emotional balance too. The second tarantula treatise I have selected, the work of Hermann Grube in 1679, was likewise produced far from Apulia. Grube was from Lübeck, studied in Helmstedt, Jena and Leiden and after various other positions became a doctor in Hadersleben30. His academic connections lay above all in Denmark, as was to be expected. In a similar way to Senguerd, Grube saw himself as a defender of English-language science and made a name for himself as an apologist for Harvey and for the scholarly community of Leiden31. Grube too had argued in several works against the causae occultae: all sympathetic effects must be justified by an explicitly verifiable causal nexus32. And Grube too wants to explain how the tarantula venom takes effect in the body and how music and dance are able to release the sufferer from the symptoms of the venom33. His hypothesis is in many parts similar to the model of Senguerd, whom he may have known from Leiden. Nonetheless their terminology and specific realisation differ in some areas. In the preface of his tarantula treatise Grube at first presents himself as an enlightened figure: for too long demonology had been granted a special territory when considering the reach and vulnerability of the power of imagination, for too long it had been forgotten that the imagination is also dependent on blood circulation and factors specific to the body itself. In the past, therefore, discussion had arrived too fast at magical processes, which the doctors of the present would necessarily find thoroughly ridiculous. A phenomenon such as the ‘Evil Eye’, the fascinatio, could, according to Grube, be explained via the air, through particle transfer and so through direct organic effect; there was no need for diabolic support. The tarantella, Grube continued, could rank as a perfect example of how an apparently esoteric procedure, which was able to seize the whole human emotional balance, could be made comprehensible in a natural and rational way34.

• 35 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio I, a. 1, p. 21–23.
• 36 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio I, a. 2, p. 23–28, and see for Grube Tappe Jacob – Meibom Heinric (...)
• 37 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio I, a. 3, p. 28–34, and see for Grube Sylvius de Boe Frans, Totius (...)
• 38 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio I, a. 4, p. 34–39, and see for Grube’s description of the St Vitu (...)

11Grube too begins with a review of the thoroughly complex symptoms, which differ little from those of his predecessor. How could a spider bite unleash such an effect35? Grube too regards the venom as a ferment, the product of fermentation, that was able to reach directly into the blood and the spiritus, the vehicle of information in the nerves, in a similar way to how this had been demonstrated for the spittle of rabid dogs. The tiny particles of the spider venom infiltrated the pathways of the human blood and nerves. The heat of the summer then caused the ferment to germinate and bloom, bearing the whole disaster in itself as the seed of a plant already bears the tree. The corrupted spiritus brought the fatal images into the imagination and led to the well known delusions. Grube has a series of at times rather anecdotal examples to illustrate the transfer of an animal’s habits to a human via spittle, blood, sweat, urine and other bodily fluids. They all show that the crasis, the mixture of humours, of an animal could be transferred to a human36. Differing from Senguerd, Grube is able to specify the nature of spider venom somewhat more. The tarantula did not have a cold temperament, as Cardano had claimed, but was agile and hotblooded, like the majority of people recently bitten. Accordingly, it could be ruled out that the dances and music were able to develop their effect on the basis of an opposition to the spider, as had been believed in the 16^th century. The venom did harm, so Grube believed, on the basis of its principal component, sal volatile, urine salt, as well as gall and acid, which brought impurities to both body and soul. Above all Grube’s teacher in Leiden, Franciscus Sylvius, had here been of help to him. If the venom, on the basis of its consistency, resulted in a corresponding hotbloodedness which attacked the senses and capsized the harmony of its emotions, then the cause of the effectiveness of music on the patient must lie in a symmetry between music and venom37. The latter point, Grube adds, gave a special status to the tarantella syndrome and distinguished it clearly from other apparently similar diseases. In the case of St Vitus’ Dance, described above all by Felix Platter, it had been shown that its arbitrary movements could not be controlled by music. In other forms of convulsion the patients lost all control over their bodies and the syndrome developed entirely arbitrarily38.

• 39 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio II, a. 1, p. 39–50, and see for Grube Scaliger, Exotericarum exer (...)
• 40 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio II, a. 2, p. 50–53.
• 41 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio II, a. 3, p. 54–59, and see for Grube on the pulse of lovers Fore (...)

12The power of music needed to be defined more closely by Grube too. What led the sufferers to their dancing frenzy? Grube too begins with some general remarks that aim to give meaning to the special relation of music to the human balance of humours. In contrast to Senguerd, Grube largely tries to avoid introducing the corpuscular theory. The vibration of the air, which is set in motion by the sounds, works directly on the human body, just as a string that is struck causes the other strings to sound too. An understanding of harmony, according to Grube, was already present through temperament as well as education and even through prenatal experience. Sounds, which were to be understood as airwaves, exerted direct influence on blood and spiritus and caused both well-being and motion from the chest downward. That the effects were individual and not always welcome is shown for Grube by an example from Scaliger: a Spanish aristocrat for whom the sound of the lyre regularly caused an urge to urinate, which his friends once took advantage of in a socially uncongenial setting, exposing the man to ridicule ever after. How strongly the types of notes, be they lydian or phrygian, appealed to the human temperaments had been known well enough already by Plato39. Similar physical effects were generated also by the metres of poetry or the periodic structure of rhetoric. And it was hardly coincidence, according to Grube, that music too had tropes and figures and thus elements corresponding to the clausulae and cadences of common sentence-structure, which by the same logic exerted an influence directly on the human body and its organic sensitivity to harmony. Music, like poetry, was addressed not only to the mind but also, via the spiritus, to the body40. A natural measuring standard, for Grube, was the pulse, on which the beat of music had an immediate effect, but which was itself the organic expression of the patient’s general character and specific well-being. Music could bring the pulse of troubled lovers back to its eurhythmic rate, but could also directly accelerate it. Medics such as Franz Joel from Swedish Greifswald had even provided notations for age- and sex-specific tone levels41.

• 42 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio II, a. 4, p. 59–68.
• 43 Grube, De ictu tarantulae, Sectio II, a. 5, p. 68–75.

13Grube slowly arrived at the result of his reflections. In the case of the victim of venom, the spider had cast blood and spiritus into confusion by the sal volatile, the urine salt, of its injection and so caused both pains and delusions. Through the bite, the temperament of the victim became adapted to the character of the spider. Music, which via the air caused changes in the human balance of humours, corresponded in its beat both to the new – as it were: poisoned –temperament of the listener and also to the temperament of the tarantula. At least indirectly, the sufferer, when beginning to dance, was transformed into a spider and began to leap around like one. And more: since they both, human and spider, so Grube believed, received particles of salt too through the air, the transfer occurring must here too come to a balance. But why did music have a curative influence? The movement caused the venom particles, which had also damaged the nerve system, to move outward from the heart and the centre of the blood circulation and were excreted from the body through sweat. The purged body no longer exhibited any symptoms, even though it, as soon as the music stopped, had returned from the level of the spider again. Admittedly some questions remained open. Why did the venom itself not make the victim dance? Why did music seem to cure the patient at once? And why did the symptoms return when the music stopped and the patient had calmed? Here too Grube attempted an answer. The symmetry between air, music, venom and the human body guaranteed the harmony that, via the spiritus, set the muscles in motion, a motion which, via the degenerated spiritus, even brought forth new, peculiar delusions and which therefore, according to Grube, accelerated ever further to the point of total exhaustion. That all particles of venom would be excreted already in the first excess was unlikely, Grube stressed. The stopping of the music would hence not only cause the disappearance of the artificially achieved balance, but would also make the remaining venom particles become effective again. In the case of the tarantula bite, the doctor had not only the music therapy, but also the possibility of accelerating the healing process with other medicines to induce sweating42. Similarly, music was not without effect in other diseases affecting the blood43.

• 44 As examples see Albinus Bernhard Friedrich – Letsch Johann Gottlieb (resp.), Dissertatio medica de (...)
• 45 As examples, after his move to Leiden, see Albinus Bernhard Friedrich – Pont Franciscus (resp.), Di (...)
• 46 As examples see on comparable problems and motifs in ten years Albinus Bernhard Friedrich – Ortlob (...)
• 47 Albinus Bernhard Friedrich – de Pivier Nicolas Benoît Noël (resp.), Dissertatio de tarantismo, Fran (...)
• 48 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 1–2, p. 4–8, and see for Albinus beside the already ment (...)
• 49 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 3–4, p. 8–11, and see van Helmont Johannes Baptista, Tum (...)
• 50 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 5, p. 11–12.

14My third and last example is from 1691. It is owed to the Brandenburg medic and anatomist Bernhard Friedrich Albinus, who worked in Frankfurt on the Oder. Albinus, a medic with a focus on gynaecology, was significantly more productive even than his two colleagues44. As doctor and surgeon he was probably also much more of a practitioner. In a second profession he was also a jurist, which was probably of real use to a doctor in practice45. In a similar field as his work on tarantula bites, which was presented as a university disputation, are Albinus’ remarks on manias and rabies46. His work on the tarantella is of interest here also because it responds explicitly to the theses of Grube, and thereby also of Senguerd, and explicitly points out what he saw as their failings47. On the external details of the spider and the symptoms that came over those plagued by it, Albinus too has little to add. The Frankfurt medic too had read Kircher, Sennert, Scaliger and other authorities. Almost everything seems to have been possible as a result, including priapism, semen flow, flatulence or constipation, and finally even, if only in rare cases, total lethargy and lingering illness until death, along with the well known accompanying mental phenomena48. The second approach of Albinus is to review the previous explanations that had been given for the effect of the venom and of music as therapy. The qualitates occultae, which Sennert and indirectly also Kircher had proposed, were, according to Albinus, the last refuge of ignorance in the attempt to make the inexplicable meaningful. They had become redundant. The rather blunt solution of Cardano, too, which assigned venom and cure to the antinomy cold-moist / hot-dry, was too simplistic and was refuted by experience. Albinus believed, further, that he had found it already in Albertus Magnus. More interesting, but no less esoteric, were the attempts of Paracelsists of the cast of Johan van Helmont, who had likewise offered a hypothesis: Was it perhaps an ideal character, which was impressed via the venom upon the imagination of the victim, that led to the formation of the ideas that conformed to it, i.e. deformed ideas? Had the spider’s spittle reproduced imagines that, via the Paracelsist archeus, had been able to develop their own formative power? Helmont’s student Franz Oswald Grembs had presented a similar thesis, as Albinus reported. This idea was arcane too; to master the phenomenon seriously, according to the Frankfurt medic, required an organic cause, not a vague ideal Platonic one. The idea effectrix, as Helmont had postulated it, was just another word for a causa occulta. But mental contents alone were not transferable49. As the next proposal, Albinus reviews Hermann Grube, along with whom Senguerd was probably also being addressed, and behind the two of them lay, as Albinus notes, the authority of Athanasius Kircher. Could the air via the current of particles transfer a vibration and directly exert an effect on the body of the patient? That such a remote effect on anatomy might fall within the bounds of the plausible was not to be ruled out but, as Albinus remarks sarcastically, it hardly seems plausible that the tiny particles could be sufficient cause to yield such consequences. Why then was contact with air alone not just as poisonous? Grube’s hypothesis, that venom and the music transported via the air stood in a proportional relation to each other, might be correct, but would such an undulatio of the air, a wave motion, be enough to call up the necessary degree of activity? Why did the patients not then also dance when their ears were covered and could no longer hear the music, receiving the necessary information only through the pores of their skin? Harmony was a phenomenon of body and soul, according to Albinus, and needed to be explained by bearing in mind both components, both body and soul50.

• 51 On the circulation and the nature of blood Albinus wrote four separate disputations, see Albinus Be (...)
• 52 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 6–7, p. 12–18.
• 53 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 8, p. 18–20, and see for Albinus on the venom, transferr (...)
• 54 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 9, p. 20–23.
• 55 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 10, p. 23–26. Regarding the pores and its role Albinus w (...)
• 56 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 11–12, p. 26–29.

15Albinus’ own reading makes use of pieces of Cartesian physiology and he first attempts to visualise the effective power of the spider venom. From the body, the venom must pass to the mind. Already the usual delirium, which Albinus explains in Cartesian terms, made these premisses clear. An altered consistency of the blood, an excess of gall and a destroyed syncrasis produced motions in the human brain-mass and its fibres which left tracks51. The mind received these motions, according to Albinus, like the characters of Chinese script, and with these pictograms produced ideas that were then in turn translated into willed decisions. To the deformed bodily structure corresponded a mind that was compelled to false conclusions and therefore produced delusional ideas52. The summer heat had equipped the tarantula venom with a corresponding efficacy and the bite brought it into the patient’s blood53. Albinus prefers to leave open whether it was sal volatile, urine salt, to which it owed its power. Of snake venom, it was known that it was an oily substance that tasted of almonds. In the case of the tarantula, it was perhaps the high acid content that guaranteed its efficacy54. The devastations in the body are explained by Albinus strictly with Descartes. Initially the substance might remain inactive in the body of the victim for some time, but then it attacked the rotating motion of blood corpuscles, the circulation of which was produced by its ether. The venom with its ether pervaded the pores of the blood corpuscles and disrupted their rotation; the blood circulation became disordered55. The confusion of the blood passed over into the nervous system with its spiritus; blood, spiritus, venom and the other bodily fluids, so Albinus sets out in detail, began to enact a tragedy, which had different victors depending on the season of the year, but which might end with the death of the hero. The disrupted blood circulation released more spiritus and forced it into the nerve pathways and the tubuli of the brain or blocked them; the result was the delusional ideas already mentioned frequently56.

• 57 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 12, p. 29–31.
• 58 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 13, p. 31–33, and see for Albinus Descartes René, Observ (...)
• 59 Albinus – de Pivier, De tarantismo, Thesis 14–19, p. 33–39, and see for Albinus on medical advices (...)

16The key point was of course, once again, the question of what contribution could be made by music to solving the problem. Turkish arias, the ‘Ottava siciliana’ and the well known tarantella dance, accompanied by dulcimer, drum, flute, guitar or lute, demonstrated their success. The patient, whose emotions, according to Albinus, were entirely seized, was released from the pains. What had happened? Why did the patient become involuntarily motivated to dance and why had the venom lost its effect? Music, too, worked on both body and soul, as Albinus notes: it affects the body, but also causes the mind to translate impressions into images, which in turn were able to entirely fill it57. Instead of a balance of humours at a higher level, as Grube and Senguerd had postulated, i.e. the adaptation of the human syncrasis to the syncrasis of the tarantula, Albinus believed it was another, perhaps more trivial form of balance that was set in train. Music had a natural potential to overwhelm, which set humans in movement. The overflowing joy led to an excessive release of nerve spiritus, which in turn was carried over on to the rotation of the blood circulation. Its wild rotation, which could, as it were, outrun the venom in the body and force it to the body’s periphery through sweat, was responsible not only for the anaesthetisation of the pains, but also for their cure. However, the spiritus forcing its way out of the interior of the body also caused the dancer at some point necessarily to lose consciousness. If venom still remained in the body, the procedure needed to be repeated, sometimes in the following summer if, as we have seen, the venom was brought back to life by the heat58. Albinus too would have been no doctor if he had not added some advice at the close of his treatise, from prompt washing of the wound with alcohol, to medicines such as lemon balm and antimony59.

• 60 See note 6.
• 61 Leonhard Karin, Bildfelder. Stilleben und Naturstücke des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 2013, p. 218–22 (...)
• 62 Baglivi Giorgio, De praxi medica ad priscam observandi rationem revocanda libri duo, Rom: Ercoli, 1 (...)
• 63 Baglivi, De praxi medica, De Anatome, morsu et effectibus Tarantulae : 321–324.
• 64 Caputi Niccolo, De tarantulae anatome et morsu. Opusculum historico-mechanicum, in quo nonnullae de (...)
• 65 Kähler Mårten, „Anmarkningar vid Dans-sjukan eller den så kallade Tarantismus“, Kongliga Vetenskaps (...)
• 66 Vallerius Harald – Vallerius Georg (resp.), Exercitium philosophicum de Tarantula, Uppsala: Werner, (...)

17As we have seen, all three authors had managed in the same way to develop a coherent model for the curative power of music, a model that had its foundations in contemporary natural science but which also took into account the effect of music on mental life. That these attempts were just one episode in the long history of studying tarantism is self-evident. For the following, 18^th century, there is the thoroughly researched 2006 study by Gino di Mitri, which was able to build on the older works of Henry Sigerist and the 1956 Habilitation of Wilhelm Katner60. A whole catalogue of treatments of the tarantella can be found there, though it still has some room for additions. Karin Leonhard has recently shown how much these texts were able to cross over into art history61. With the 18^th-century treatments of Giorgio Baglivi and Ludovico Valetta, to name just two, works on the tarantella were produced in Italy, indeed in Apulia itself, which ranged in their explanatory approaches from models of fever physiology to melancholy62. Not least, these studies were able to provide case studies and animal experiments that exemplified the range of the venom. In the following period, knowledge of venomous creatures would be significantly expanded. Baglivi recorded the experience, among others, that rabbits, which he had a tarantula bite, had not developed any healing effect from a fiddler he summoned for the purpose. The animals died unimpressed63. The major monographs of Niccolo Caputo and Francesco Serrao also deserve to be highlighted, both of whom had treated a large number of patients on location64. Finally, there was also the student of Carl Linnaeus, Mårten Kähler from Karlskrona, who was sent by the master to do field research in Apulia. Kähler, who complains constantly in his letters to Linnaeus about the poor hygiene of the locals and their low civilisational level, adds a Swedish note to the debate once again around 175065. Already Harald Vallerius had given a disputation on the tarantella in Uppsala in 1702, which had cited Senguerd and Kircher but which was above all musicological in approach66. The interest in the phenomenon had gripped academies throughout Europe.

• 67 Katner, Das Rätsel des Tarentismus : 97–112.

18At the end of the 18^th and in the early 19^th century, the flood of treatises on tarantulas had swelled considerably, also because ever more spiders were drawing attention. Now also discussed as possible causes of the symptoms were hysteria and neuroses, nymphomania, organised fraud or individual malingering, as well as a continuity of ancient-pagan rites that had lived on in the tarantella dances. Wilhelm Katner had wanted to interpret the tarantella symptoms as the result of heatstroke67. Joseph Görres in his Christliche Mystik had named no specific treatise on the tarantula as the source of his theory, aside from François Saint-André, who was probably inspired above all by Kircher. Görres had also not felt obliged to engage with more recent interpretations of the tarantella. What he found informative, however, were the crypto-physical baroque ideas that tried to make plausible an interaction between human and spider, indeed a sympathetic relation between the two, be it in the form of the physics of elementary bodies or of magnetism. The extent to which the romantic natural philosophy of the early 19^th century was in the debt of its baroque predecessors has still not been appreciated much, although its exponents found in this reservoir of intellectual history the holistic models that the compartmentalised and part-secularisted 18^th century was no longer able to offer. For this reason too, it seems to me, they merit a new reading.