Philip Barrough’s 1590 manual “The Methode of Phisicke” includes a long section called “Of swounding” with the following recipe to revive a fainting person: make them a meal of “the stones of cockes, which be nourished with milke” and “swynes brayne … diligently rosted, or well sodden in water with leekes, and dill.” The goal was to thicken the skin as a means to stop the “exhalations” that might have resulted in a loss of consciousness. Treatises on humoral medicine are rife with such, to modern tastes at least, unorthodox remedies. In reading Barrough and other medical exegeses on swooning, what comes as a surprise are the relatively mundane curatives for a disorder frequently addressed in philosophical works and elaborately depicted in literature. Newton’s translation of Levinus Lemnius’s An herbal for the Bible argues for the physical efficacy of certain plants based on their virtuous properties in scripture, suggesting a parallel between the olfactory qualities of olive oil and the rejuvenating “ointment” of “wholesome doctrine.” Marsilio Ficino speaks of swooning as one of the seven states of vacatio that might bring the subject closer to the divine and even enable prophecy. And Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s “Three books of occult philosophy,” widely read in Latin and finally “englished” in the mid-seventeenth century, equates the swoon with rapture. In his chapter, “Of rapture, and extasie, and soothsayings, which happen to them which are taken with the falling sickness, or with a [H] swoune, or to them in an agonie,” he echoes Plato’s view, calling it “an abstraction, and alienation” that results from “continuall contemplation of sublime things” that can bring the soul to “incorporeal wisdom.” Perhaps a person can simply be revived by consuming “cockes stones,” but the swoon state itself offered early modern authors a chance to contemplate existential quandaries not so easily remedied. Differing perspectives on the causes and outcomes of swooning attest to the uncertainty with which early moderns viewed many such states as well as the intellectual possibility they perceived on the cognitive thresholds. At the boundary of activity and passivity, life and death, mind and body, the swoon presented perplexing physical effects and profound opportunities for artistic creation and access to the divine.