Complete Works, Volume 1: The Book on Games of Chance

...a betrayer, a magician, an enchanter, prone to frequent calamities, a hater of his own kin, given to foul lust, solitary, unpleasant, austere, even a spontaneous diviner, jealous, obscene, lascivious, slanderous, fickle, duplicitous, impure, a calumniator, and entirely unknown, due to the repugnance of his morals and nature, even to those with whom he associated daily. Nor is there any doubt in my mind that he was exactly such a person as he presented himself to be to all others. For he inculcates so often, not only here but elsewhere, that such morals were bestowed upon him by nature that nothing could be considered more true. And anyone who has known Cardano's character most deeply will find that it was not far removed from this hodgepodge of epithets. I pass over the judgments of other very grave men who do not falsely assert that Cardano concocted miraculous fables about himself and lived very near to the point of insanity.

And, by Hercules, I do not see what else could be thought of a man who placed his faith in the most vain and ridiculous dreams, portents, and auguries; who hung entirely upon the observations of delirious old women; who, as often as he wished, wandered away from his senses through ecstasy; who saw specters and phantoms; who either foolishly believed or maliciously lied about the presence of some attendant Paredrus a spirit companion and a Genius favoring him; who married a wife without a dowry; who neglected the education of his children; who often punished the younger of them by tearing his ear, and the boy named Guglielmo with lashes, though he was innocent; who reports that he was cast off by his father as a bastard and was attempted by an abortive medicine before he was born; who would sometimes go out in public in rags, and then immediately dressed in finery; who in conversations among friends would say nothing more willingly than that which he knew would be ungrateful to them; who saw the Moon in the sky by day no less than by night; who at Rome would walk about to be looked at in attire different from others; who at Bologna would sometimes use a carriage supported by only three wheels; who in his youth stirred up quarrels, as an adult pursued harlots, when he became a man did not refrain from games and gambling, and as an old man could not avoid prison; who, finally, did not merely divulge the reproaches and even the most minor turpitudes of his life—which would have been better hidden in the secrecy of his private home, no different from the filth and scandals of other men—but thrust them upon the reader, who was almost made nauseous by so many inanities and disconnected narrations. For if doing such things is the mark of a wise man, I truly do not know why Orestes, Coroebus, and Amphistides might not also be counted among the wise.

Indeed, Cardano could have looked after the decorum of his name and person—which he himself calls "anomalous" original: "anomalæ"—had he only laid bare in his birth chart (since this was the most appropriate place) those affections and propensities which, in order to indicate the excellence of his art, could be revealed with safety to modesty and the integrity of his name. He should not have mentioned the others, any more than Erasmus, Longolius, or Campanus, who, although they were born of doubtful parentage and endured the greatest difficulties in a poor and erratic life, nevertheless, because they were more cautious than Cardano in veiling and covering those things, have not yet suffered any diminution of their praises on that account. And pray, how many men are there to whom, as the Satirist Juvenal warns, it is easy:

To remove murmurs and humble whispers
From the temples, and to live with an open vow?

I truly, at this time, am no different than Juvenal was once:

If I see an egregious and holy man, I compare this monster
To a two-headed boy, or to fish found under the plow,
Or to a pregnant mule.

For all men are by their own nature evil, foolish, and wicked. If they offend openly, how much more do they exist like Cardano within the walls of their private families? Thus, he who hates him because of those private turpitudes should logically hate the rest of humanity, if he were to descend into their inner lives even once. Every single person sins, becomes insane, and raves in his own way, and they are wise only in this: that they have learned to cast a cloud over their sins and frauds, following the precept of the beautiful Laverna the Roman goddess of thieves and impostors. This is something Cardano could not do, whether by the impulse of a freer nature, or by the confidence of most excellent virtues, which far outweigh so many stains, or by some other cause.

Therefore, if anyone asks me what should finally be determined about the life and morals of Cardano, I would certainly not wish to claim he was free from ineptitude, since he is discovered to have been such even by the fact that he produced so many inept and absurd things about himself, which, after the manner of other men, he should have buried in eternal silence and condemned. But since the most grave censor Seneca asserts that no great intellect has ever existed without a mixture of madness original: "nullum unquam magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ fuerit", and since those philosophers of great name—Porphyry, Iamblichus, Aedesius, Maximus, Chrysantius, and their kind praised by Eunapius—did not live entirely free from it, they were so far from professing with Ennius that they did not care for:

A Marsian Augur,
Or village Aruspices, or astrologers from the circus,
Or Isiac guessers, or interpreters of dreams.

Because they were rather slaves to magical vanity, they did not value at a penny the dreams, terrors, portents, Geniuses, Lemures spirits of the restless dead, and such foolish observations of that kind, of which Eunapius is full. These things could indeed act as a defense for Cardano, so that he might not be immediately sent off to the Anticyrae the metaphorical asylum for the insane. For it is certain that the nature of intellects is not the same in all men, and in their differences, through the vicissitudes of time, some things are found which—due to an unknown syndrome of causes, whether the temperament of the body is highly equilibrated, or there is an abundance of burnt bile, or the organs are more skillfully composed—are touched by the more excellent rays of the active intellect. In this, they concur and know and see many things denied to all others. And just as they would be continuously drunk, or detached from their senses, they possess unrefined morals, turbulent speech, and an unequal life; but, on the contrary, they quickly grasp whatever is difficult.