Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium remains a template of the ideas which he abuses. So do the standard medical notions of those who follow Plato, Aristotle and Avicenna (rather than always following Galen) of how food is digested and eventually refined into the ‘animal spirits’ (the spirits of the anima, the soul). The ‘rete mirabile’ is a supposed plexus of blood-vessels in the cranium at the end of the carotid artery. It refined the animal spirits. Rabelais holds to its existence, although Vesalius proved that it does not exist in Man.
