The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Among these pure books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the eighth century B.C., and the most recent is Ecclesiastes, from the second century B.C. They are both short books, and I hope that you will turn to them before reading on, that you may for yourself sense authentically this difference between an almost bicameral man and a subjective conscious man.

For this evidence is dramatically in agreement with the hy-3 Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 224$.

4 Donald B. Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph, Genesis 37-50

(Leiden: Brill, 1970). The original may be a secular story from Mesopotamia on the art of divination.

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pothesis. Amos is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an illiterate desert herdsman, and dictated to a scribe. In Ecclesiastes, in contrast, god is rarely mentioned, let alone ever speaking to its educated author. And even these mentions are considered by some scholars to be later interpolations, to allow this magnificent writing into the canon.

In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or understand or anything similar whatever 3 Amos never ponders anything in his heart; he can't; he would not know what it meant.

In the few times he refers to himself, he is abrupt and informative without qualification; he is no prophet, but a mere "gatherer of sycamore fruit"; he does not consciously think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought is done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes those about him with a "Thus speaks the L o r d ! " and follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.

Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points. He ponders things as deep in the paraphrands of his hypostatic heart as is possible. And who but a very subjective man could say, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," (1:2), or say that he sees that wisdom excels folly (2:13). One has to have an analog ‘I’ surveying a mind-space to so see. And the famous third chapter, " T o everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven

. . ." is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in mind-space, so characteristic of consciousness as we saw in I.2.

Ecclesiastes thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing and another, and making brilliant metaphors as he does so.

Amos uses external divination, Ecclesiastes never. Amos is fiercely righteous, absolutely assured, nobly rude, speaking a blustering god-speech with the unconscious rhetoric of an Achilles or a Hammurabi. Ecclesiastes would be an excellent fireside friend, mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way that would have been impossible for Amos.

These then are the extremes in the Old Testament. Similar

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comparisons can be made with other early and late books, or early and late parts of the same book, all revealing the same pattern, which is difficult to account for apart from the theory of the bicameral mind.

Some Observations on the Pentateuch

We are so used to the wonderful stories of the first five books specifically that it is almost impossible for us to see them freshly for what they are. Indeed, in trying to do so, whatever our religious backgrounds, we feel, if not blasphemous, at least disrespectful to the profoundest meanings of others. Such disrespect is certainly not my intention, but it is only by a cold unworshipful reading of these powerful pages that we can appreciate the magnitude of the mental struggle that followed the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Why were these books put together? The first thing to realize is that the very motive behind their composition around Deuteronomy at this time was the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality of a subjectively conscious people. This is what religion is.

And it was done just as the voice of Yahweh in particular was not being heard with any great clarity or frequency. Whatever their sources, the stories themselves, as they have been arranged, reflect human psychologies from the ninth century up to the fifth century B.C., the period during which there is progressively less and less bicamerality.

The Elohim. Another observation I would like to make concerns that very important word which governs the whole first chapter of Genesis, elohim. It is usually incorrectly translated in the singular as God. 'Elohim' is a plural form; it can be used collectively taking a, singular verb, or as a regular plural taking a plural verb. It comes from the root of 'to be powerful', and better translations of ‘elohim’ might be the great ones, the prominent ones, the majesties, the judges, the mighty ones, etc.

From the point of view of the present theory, it is clear that

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elohim is a general term referring to the voice-visions of the bicameral mind. The creation story of the first chapter of Genesis is thus a rationalization of the bicameral voices at the edge of subjectivity. "In the beginning the voices created heaven and earth." Taken as such, it becomes a more general myth that could have been indigenous to all of the ancient bicameral civilizations.

He-who-is, At the particular time in history that we pick up the story as the Pentateuch has put it together, there are only a few remaining elohim in contrast to the large number that probably previously existed. The most important is one recognized as Yahweh, which among several possibilities is most often translated as He-who-is.5 Evidently one particular group of the Khabiru, as the prophetic subjective age was approaching, was following only the voice of He-who-is, and rewrote the elohim creation story in a much warmer and more human way, making He-who-is the only real elohah. And this becomes the creation story as told from Genesis 2:4 et seq. And these two stories then interweave with other elements from other sources to form the first books of the Bible.

Other elohim are occasionally mentioned throughout the older parts of the Old Testament. The most important of them is Ba'al, usually translated as the Owner. In the Canaan of the times, there were many Owners, one to each village, in the same way that many Catholic cities today have their own Virgin Marys, and yet they are all the same one.

5 The derivation of Exodus 3: 14, that Yahweh means I AM T H A T I AM , is regarded by most scholars as folk etymology, as if somebody should claim that the derivation of Manhattan came from a man on the island with a hat on. More serious scholarship traces the name back to an epithet, such as he who casts down or the Downcaster. But the sense of the majority, including- the Septuagint and Latin Vulgate, seems to be more in line with He-who-is. Cf. William Gesenius, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, E. Robinson, trans., F. Brown, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 218. I must ask the forbearance of professional'

scholars for my inconsistency in straining for the English here while keeping other terms such as elohim and nabi in the Hebrew. My purpose is the defamiliarization which I feel is essential for my main point.

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Paradise Lost. A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The Hebrew arum> meaning crafty or deceitful, surely a conscious subjective word, is only used three or four times throughout the entire Old Testament. It is here used to describe the source of the temptation. The ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. The serpent promises that "you shall be like the elohim themselves, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only subjective conscious man is capable of. And when these first humans had eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly "the eyes of them both were opened," their analog eyes in their metaphored mind-space, "and they knew that they were naked" (Genesis 3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them.6 And so is their sorrow "greatly multipled" (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man.

As a narratization of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the coming of consciousness, the story should be rationalistically contrasted with the Odyssey as discussed in the previous chapter.

But the problems are similar, as is the awe we should feel toward its unknown composition.

The Nabiim who naba. The Hebrew word nabi,7 which has been misleadingly translated by the Greek designation of

'prophet', presents an extremely interesting difficulty. To prophesy in its modern connotations is to foretell the future, but this is not what is indicated by the verb naba, whose practitioners were the nabiim (plural of nabi). These terms come from a group of cognate words which have nothing to do with time, but rather 6 It is interesting in this connection to read Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:2 .

7 Transliteration from Hebrew into English is always misleading. Perhaps a better case here might be made for nbi or nvi. That its meaning was ambiguous even at the time seems to be indicated in I Samuel 9:9. See also John L. McKenzie, A Theology of the Old Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 85.

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with flowing and becoming bright. Thus we may think of a nabi as one who metaphorically was flowing forth or welling up with speech and visions. They were transitional men, partly subjective and partly bicameral. And once the bright torrent was released and the call came, the nabi must deliver his bicameral message, however unsuspecting (Amos 7:14-15), however un-worthy the nabi felt (Exodus 3:113 Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1:6), however distrustful at times of his own hearing (Jeremiah 20:7-10). What does it feel like to be a nabi at the beginning of one of his bicameral periods? Like a red hot coal in one's mouth (Isaiah 6:7) or a raging fire shut up in one's bones that cannot be contained (Jeremiah 20:9) and that only the flowing forth of divine speech can quench.

The story of the nabiim can be told in two ways. One is external, tracing out their early role and the acceptance of their leadership to their massacre and total suppression in about the fourth century B.C. But as evidence for the theory in this book, it is more instructive to look at the matter from the internal point of view, the changes in the bicameral experience itself. These changes are: the gradual loss of the visual component, the growing inconsistency of the voices in different persons, and the increasing inconsistency within the same person, until the voices of the elohim vanish from history. I shall take each of these up in turn.

The Loss of the Visual Component

In the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual component to the hallucinated voice, either itself hallucinated or as the statue in front of which one listened. The quality and frequency of the visual component certainly varied from one culture to another, as can be indicated by the presence of hallucinogenic statuary in some cultures and not in others.

If only because its sources are so chronologically diverse, it is

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somewhat astonishing to find the Pentateuch consistently and successively describing the loss of this visual component. In the beginning, He-who-is is a visual physical presence, the duplicate of his creation. He walks in his garden at the cool of the day, talking to his recent creation, Adam. He is present and visible at the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah's Ark with his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sichem, Bethel, and Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.

But by the time of Moses, the visual component is very different. Only in a single instance does Moses speak with He-who-is

"face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend" (Exodus 33:11).

And another time, there is a group hallucination when Moses and the seventy elders all see He-who-is at a distance standing on sapphire pavement (Exodus 24:9-10). But in all the other instances, the hallucinated meetings are less intimate. Visually, He-who-is is a burning bush, or a cloud, or a huge pillar of fire. And as visually the bicameral experience recedes into the thick darkness, where thunders and lightnings and driving clouds of dense blackness crowd in on the inaccessible heights of Sinai, we are approaching the greatest teaching of the entire Old Testament, that, as this last of the elohim loses his hallucinatory properties, and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the nervous system of a few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something written upon tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable by all, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, universal and transcendent.

Moses himself reacts to this loss of the visual quality by hiding his face from a supposed brilliance. At other times, his bicameral voice itself rationalizes the loss of its visual hallucinatory components by saying to Moses, "No man shall see me and live . . . I will put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen" (Exodus 33:20-23).

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The very conception of a cupboard called the ark, for some tablets of written word as a replacement for an hallucinogenic image of a more usual kind, like a golden calf, is illustrative of the same point. The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.

After the Pentateuch, the bicameral voice retreats even further. When the writer of Deuteronomy (34:10) says that no nabi has been like Moses "whom He-who-is knew face to face," he is indicating the loss of the bicameral mind. The voices are heard less frequently and less conversationally. Joshua is more spoken to by his voice than speaking with it; and, halfway between bicamerality and subjectivity, he has to draw lots to make decisions.

Inconsistency Between Persons

In the bicameral period, the strict hierarchy of society, the settled geography of its limits, its ziggurats, temples, and statuary, and the common upbringing of its citizens, all co-operated in the organization of different men's bicameral voices into a stable hierarchy. Whose bicameral voice was the correct one was immediately decided by that hierarchy, and the recognition signals as to which god was speaking were known by everyone and reinforced by priests.

But with the breakdown of bicamerality, particularly when a previously bicameral people has become nomadic as in the Exodus, the voices will begin to say different things to different people and the problem of authority becomes a considerable difficulty. Something of the sort might be referred to in Numbers 12:1-2, where Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, who all hear the voice of He-who-is, are not sure which is the most authentic.

But the problem is much more acute in the later books, particu-

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larly in the competition between the remaining bicameral voices.

Joash has a bicameral voice that he recognizes as the Owner to whom he builds an altar; but his son Gideon hears a voice he recognizes as He-who-is which tells him to tear down his father's altar to the Owner and build another to himself (Judges 6:25-26). The jealousy of the remaining elohim is the direct and necessary result of social disorganization.

Such a dissonance of bicameral voices in this unorganized breakdown period inaugurates the importance of signs or magical proofs as to which voice is valid. Thus Moses is constantly compelled to produce magical proofs of his mission. Such signs, of course, continue all through the first millennium even into present times. The miracles that today are required as criteria of sainthood are of precisely the same order as when Moses hallucinates his rod into a serpent and back again, or his healthy hand into a leprous one and back (Exodus 4:1-7).

Some of our present-day enjoyment of magic and prestidigita-tion is possibly a holdover from this desire for signs, in which in some part of ourselves we are enjoying the thrill of recognizing the magician as a possible bicameral authority.

And if there are no signs, what then? In the seventh century B.C., this is particularly the problem of Jeremiah, the illiterate wailer at the wall of Israel's iniquity. Even though he has had the sign of the hand of He-who-is upon him (1: 9; 25:17) has heard the word of He-who-is continually like a fire in his bones, and has been sent (23:21, 32, etc.), yet still he is unsure: whose voice is the right one? "Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar?"

Jeremiah mistrustfully jabs back at his bicameral voice (15:19).

But on this point, it is sure in its answering. It breaks down what authority Jeremiah's rational consciousness may have had, and commands him to denounce all other voices. Chapter 28 is a particular example, with the somewhat ridiculous competition between Hananiah and Jeremiah as to whose bicameral voice is the right one. And it was only the death of Hananiah two months

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later that was the sign of which to choose. Had Jeremiah died, we would probably have had the Book of Hananiah instead of his competitor's.

Inconsistency Within Persons

In the absence of a social hierarchy that provides stability and recognitions, the bicameral voices not only become inconsistent among persons, but inconsistent within the same person as well.

Particularly in the Pentateuch, the bicameral voice is often as petty and foot-stampingly petulant as any human tyrant under questioning. "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy." (Exodus 33:19).

There is no question of virtue or of justice. So He-who-is prefers Abel to Cain, slays Er, the first-born of Judah, having taken a dislike to him, first tells Abraham to beget a son, and then later orders him to kill the son, even as criminal psychotics might be directed today. Similarly, the bicameral voice of Moses possibly has a sudden impulse to kill him (Exodus 4:24) for no reason at all.

This same inconsistency is found in the non-Israelite prophet, Balaam. His bicameral voice first tells him not to go with the princes of Moab (Numbers 22:12), then reverses itself (22:20).

Then when Balaam obeys, it is furious. Then a visual-auditory hallucination out to kill Balaam blocks his way, but then this too reverses its commands (Numbers 22:35). Also in the self-recriminating category is the self-punishing voice of the ash-faced nabi who tries to get passersby to punch him because his voice commands him to (I Kings 20:35-38). And also, the "nabi from Judah" whose bicameral voice drives him out of the city and tries to starve him (1 Kings 13, 9-17). All of these inconsistent voices are coming close to the voices heard by schizophrenics which we noted in Chapter 4 of Book I.

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Divination by Gods

The deciding things by casting gorals or lots, probably throwing dice, bones, or beans, runs through much of the Old Testament. As we saw in II.4 of this essay, it is the making of an analog god. The goral by metaphor becomes the word of god deciding lands and tribes, what to do or whom to destroy, taking the place of the older bicameral authority. As mentioned earlier, it is a help in appreciating how authoritative such practices could be when we realize that there was no concept of chance until well into the subjective eras.

But of much greater interest is the occurrence of the spontaneous divination from immediate sensory experience that in the end becomes the subjective conscious mind. Its interest here is because it begins not in the man-side of the bicameral mind but in the bicameral voices themselves.

It is, then, another way that the bicameral voices show their uncertainty when they too, like men, turn to divination, and need to be primed or instigated. In the ninth century B.C., the voice of one of the nabiim before Ahab divines by metaphor from a pair of horns how an army may be defeated (I Kings 22:11). The bicameral voice of Jeremiah several times takes what he, Jeremiah, is looking at and divines from it what to say. When he sees a boiling wind-blown pot facing north, He-who-is metaphorizes it into an evil invasion blowing down from the north, consuming all before it like a fire driven by the wind (Jeremiah 1:13-15).

When he sees two baskets of figs, one good and one bad, his right hemisphere has He-who-is speaking about picking good and bad people (Jeremiah 24:1-10). And when Amos sees a builder judging the straightness of a wall by holding a plumb line to it, his mind hallucinates the builder into He-who-is, who then metaphorizes the act into judging people by their righteousness (Amos 7:8).

Particularly when spontaneous divinations are being made by

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gods (who after all cannot perform other types of divination), puns may 'seed' the analogy. Thus, when Amos stands looking at a basket of summer fruit, his bicameral voice puns over on the Hebrew qayits (summer fruit) to gets (end) and starts talking about the end of Israel (Amos 8:1-2). Or when Jeremiah sees an almond branch ( shaqed), his bicameral voice says it will watch over him ( shaqad) because the Hebrew words for the two are similar (Jeremiah 1:11-12).

The Book of I Samuel

The Book of I Samuel is an instructive register of all this, and a reading of it gives one the feeling of what it was like in this partly bicameral, partly subjective world as the first millennium B.C.

moved into consciousness. Represented across its intriguing chapters is almost the entire spectrum of transition mentalities in what is perhaps the first written tragedy in literature. Bicamerality in a rather decadent form is represented in the wild gangs of nabiim, the winnowed-out bicameral chaff of the Khabiru that we spoke of earlier in this chapter, roaming outside the cities in the hills, speaking the voices they hear within themselves but believe to come from outside them, answering the voices, using music and drums to increase their excitement.

Partly bicameral is the boy Samuel, prodded from sleep by a voice he is taught is the voice of He-who-is, encouraged at the critical age and trained into the bicameral mode by the old priest Eli, and then acknowledged from Dan to Beersheba as the medium of He-who-is. Though even Samuel must at times stoop to divining, as he does from his own torn garment (15:27-29).

Next in bicamerality is David, whom Samuel chooses from all the sons of Jesse in a bicameral manner, and who is only so bicameral as to obtain short sharp "Go up"s from He-who-is. His subjective consciousness is demonstrated in his ability to deceive Achish (I Samuel 21:13). And then Jonathan, subjectively able

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to deceive his father, but having to rely on cledonomancy, or divining by first words spoken by someone, for military decisions (14:8-13). That idols were common in the period is shown by the casual reference to what must have been a life-sized "image"

that, with the help of some goat hair, is made to resemble David in bed (19:13). The casual presence of such an idol in David's house may point to some common hallucinogenic practice of the time that has been suppressed from the text.

And finally, the subjective Saul, the gaunt bewildered country boy whisked into politics at the irrational behest of Samuel's bicameral voice, trying to be bicameral himself by joining a band of the wild nabiim until he, too, to the throbbing of drums and strumming zithers, feels he hears the divine voices (10:5). But so unconvincing are these to his consciousness that, even with the three confirmed signs, he tries to hide from his destiny. Subjective Saul seeks wildly about him for what to do. A new situation, as when the irresponsible Samuel does not keep an appointment, with the Israelites hoveled up in caves, the Philistines knotting together against him, and he tries to force a voice with burnt offerings (13:12), only to be called foolish by the tardy Samuel.

And Saul building an altar to He-who-is, whom he has never heard, to ask it questions in vain (14:37). Why doesn't the god speak to him? Saul, divining by lot the supposed culprit that must be the cause of the divine silence, and, obedient to his divination, even though it is his own son, condemning him to death. But even that must be wrong, because his people rebel and refuse to carry out the execution — a behavior impossible in bicameral times. And Saul, too consciously kind to his enemies for Samuel's archaic hallucination. And when Saul's jealousy of David and of his son's love for David reaches its extremity, suddenly losing his conscious mind, becoming bicameral, stripping off his clothes, naba-ing with the bicameral men of the hills (19:23-24). But then when such nabiim cannot tell him what to do, driving them along with other bicameral wizards out of the

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city (28:3) , seeking some divine certainty in dreams or in gazing into crystal (if we may translate urim as such) (28:6). And despairing Saul, at the end of his consciousness, disguising himself, something only a subjective man could do, and consulting at night that last resort, the Witch of Endor, or rather the bicameral voice that takes possession of her, as confounded conscious Saul grovels before it, crying that he knows not what to do, and then hears from the weird woman's lips what he takes to be the dead Samuel's words, that he will die and Israel will fall (28:19).

And then, when the Philistines have all but captured the remnant of Israel's army, his sons and hopes all slain, the committing of that most terrible subjective act, the first in history — suicide, to be followed immediately by the second, that of his armor bearer.

The date of the story is the eleventh century B.C.; of the writing of it, the sixth century B.C.; of the psychology of it, therefore, perhaps the eighth century B.C.

The Idols of the Khabiru

As holdovers from the bicameral period are the hallucinogenic statuary that are mentioned throughout the Old Testament. As might be expected in this late stage of civilization, there are many kinds. While there are some general terms for idols, such as the elily which is Isaiah's word for them, or matstsebah for anything set up on a pillar or altar, it is the more specific words which are of greater interest.

The most important type of idol was the tselem, a cast or molten statue usually fashioned with a graving tool, often of gold or silver, made by a founder from melted money (Judges 17:4) or melted jewelry (Exodus 32:4), and sometimes expensively dressed (Ezekiel 16:17). Isaiah scoffingly describes their construction in Judah around 700 B.C. (44:12). They could be images either of animals or of men. Sometimes the tselem may

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have been just a head placed high on a pedestal or high altar (II Chronicles 14:3) or even the huge golden tselem which Nebu-chadnezzar placed upon a pillar 90 feet high (Daniel 3:1). More often, they seemed to have been placed in an asherah, probably one of the wooden shrines hung with rich fabric that the King James scholars translated as "groves."

Next in importance seems to be the carved statue or pesel, of which very little is known. It was probably chiseled out of wood and was the same as the atsab, which is what the Philistines, who destroyed Saul's army, worshiped. After Saul's death and the defeat of Israel, the Philistines run to tell their atsabim first of their victory and then their people (I Samuel 31:95 I Chronicles 10:9). That they were painted gold or silver is indicated by several references in the Psalms, and that they were of wood by the fact that David in wreaking his revenge on the Philistines makes a bonfire out of them (II Samuel 5:21). There were also some kind of sun idols of unknown shape called chammanim, which seem also to have been set up on pedestals, since they are ordered cut down by Leviticus (26:30), Isaiah (27:9), and Ezekiel (6:6).

If not the most important, perhaps the most common hallucinogenic idol was the terap. We are told directly that a terap could seem to speak, since the king of Babylon at one point consults with several of them (Ezekiel 21:21). Sometimes they were probably small figurines, since Rachel can steal a group of prized terafhim (to use the Hebrew plural) from her furious father and hide them (Genesis 31:19). They also could be life-sized, since it is a terap that is substituted for the sleeping David (I Samuel 19:13). As we have already seen, the very casual-ness of this last reference seems to indicate that such teraphim were common enough around the houses of leaders. But in the hills, such idols must have been rare and highly prized. In Judges we are told of Micah, who builds a house of elohim containing a tselem, a pesel, a terap, and an ephod, the latter

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being usually an ornate ritual robe which, perhaps put over a frame, could be made into an idol. And these he calls his elohim, which are then stolen by the children of Dan (Judges: 17 and 18 passim). We would probably have more archaeological evidence of these hallucinogenic idols of the Hebrews today had not King Josiah had them all destroyed in 641 B.C. (II Chronicles 34: 3-7.

A further vestige from the bicameral era is the word ob, often translated as a "familiar spirit." "A man also or woman that have a n ob . . . shall surely be put to death," says Leviticus (20:27). And similarly Saul drives out from Israel all those that had an ob (I Samuel 28:3). Even though an ob is something that one consults with (Deuteronomy, 18:11), it probably had no physical embodiment. It is always bracketed with wizards or witches, and thus probably refers to some bicameral voice that was not recognized by the Old Testament writers as religious.

This word has so puzzled translators that when they found it in Job 32:19, they translated it absurdly as "bottle," when clearly the context is that of the young frustrated Elihu, who feels as if he had a bicameral voice about to burst forth into impatient speech like an overfull wineskin.

The Last of the Nabiim

We began this chapter with a consideration of the refugee situation in the Near East around the latter part of the second millennium B.C., and of the roving tribes uprooted from their lands by various catastrophes, some of them certainly bicameral and unable to move toward subjective consciousness. Probably in the editing of the historical books of the Old Testament, and the fitting of it together into one story in the sixth or fifth century B.C., a great deal has been suppressed. And among such items of information that we would like is a clear account of what happened to these last communities of bicameral men. Here and

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there through the Old Testament, they appear like sudden glimpses of a strange other world during these periods which historians have paid too little attention to.

Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall of the Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other tribes or with any organization to their hallucinated voices in the form of gods, we don't know. They are often referred to as the

"sons of nabiim," indicating that there was probably a strong genetic basis for this type of remaining bicamerality. It is, I think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as part of the etiology of schizophrenia.

Edgy kings consulted them. Ahab, king of Israel in 835 B.C., rounded up 400 of them like cattle to listen to their hue and clamor (I Kings 22:6). Later, in all his robes, he and the king of Judah sit on thrones just outside the gates of Samaria, and have hundreds of these poor bicameral men herded up to them, raving and copying each other even as schizophrenics in a back ward (I Kings 22:10).

What happened to them? From time to time, they were hunted down and exterminated like unwanted animals. Such a massacre in the ninth century B.C. seems to be referred to in I Kings 18:4, where out of some unknown, much larger number, Obadiah took a hundred nabiim and hid them in caves, and brought them bread and water until the massacre was over.

Another such massacre is organized by Elijah a few years later (I Kings 18:40).

We hear no more of these bicameral groups thereafter. What remained for a few centuries more are the individual nabiim, men whose voices do not need the group support of other hallucinating men, men who can be partly subjective and yet still hear the bicameral voice. These are the famous nabiim whose bicameral messages we have already selectively touched upon: Amos, the gatherer of sycamore fruit, Jeremiah, staggering under his yoke from village to village, Ezekiel with his visions of lofty

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thrones on wheels moving through the clouds, the several nabiim whose religious agonies are ascribed to Isaiah. These of course merely represent the handful of that much larger number whose bicameral voices seemed to be most consistent with Deuteronomy. And then the voices are as a rule no longer actually heard.

In their place is the considered subjective thought of moral teachers. Men still dreamed visions and heard dark speech perhaps. But Ecclesiastes and Ezra seek wisdom, not a god. They study the law. They do not roam out into the wilderness "inquiring of Yahweh." By 400 B.C., bicameral prophecy is dead. "The nabiim shall be ashamed everyone of his visions." If parents catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are to kill them on the spot (Zechariah 13, 3-4).8

That is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it is an evolutionary selection which helped move the gene pool of humanity toward subjectivity.

Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind.

Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at 8 The date of Zechariah is around 520 b.C., but scholars are agreed that the final chapters of the book ascribed to him are later additions from some other source. The date of this injunction is probably the fourth or third century B.C.

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such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it.

Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times.

Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action.

But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious waysj it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.

As the stag pants after the waterbrooks,

So pants my mind after you, O gods!

My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods!

W h e n shall I come face to face with gods?

— Psalm 42

BOOK T H R E E

Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind

in the Modern World

C H A P T E R 1

The Quest for Authorization

WE ARE NOW at last in a position where we can look back and see the history of mankind on this planet in its proper values for the first time and understand some of the chief features of the last three millennia as vestiges of a previous mentality. Our view of human history here must be that of a furthest grandeur. We must try to see man against his entire evolutionary background, where his civilizations, including our own, are but as mountain peaks in a particular range against the sky, and from which we must force ourselves into an intellectual distance so that we see its contours aright. And from this prospect, a millennium is an exceedingly short period of time for so fundamental a change as from bicamerality to consciousness.

We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past. We have our houses of gods which record our births, define us, marry us, and bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with the gods to forgive us our trespasses. Our laws are based upon values which without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforce-able. Our national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine invocations. Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.

The most obvious and important carry-over from the previous

318 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World mentality is thus our religious heritage in all its labyrinthine beauty and variety of forms. The overwhelming importance of religion both in general world history and in the history of the average world individual is of course very clear from any objective standpoint, even though a scientific view of man often seems embarrassed at acknowledging this most obvious fact. For in spite of all that rationalist materialist science has implied since the Scientific Revolution, mankind as a whole has not, does not, and perhaps cannot relinquish his fascination with some human type of relationship to a greater and wholly other, some mys-terium tremendum with powers and intelligences beyond all left hemispheric categories, something necessarily indefinite and unclear, to be approached and felt in awe and wonder and almost speechless worship, rather than in clear conception, something that for modern religious people communicates in truths of feeling, rather than in what can be verbalized by the left hemisphere, and so what in our time can be more truly felt when least named, a patterning of self and numinous other from which, in times of our darkest distress, none of us can escape — even as the infinitely milder distress of decision-making brought out that relationship three millennia ago.

There are many things that could be said at this point — many.

A full discussion here would specify how the attempted reformation of Judaism by Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new religion for conscious men rather than bicameral men. Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and penance are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is 'within' not in extenso.

But even the history of Christianity does not and cannot remain true to its originator. The development of the Christian Church returns again and again to this same longing for bicam-

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eral absolutes, away from the difficult inner kingdoms of agape to an external hierarchy reaching through a cloud of miracle and infallibility to an archaic authorization in an extended heaven. In previous chapters I have often paused to point out various parallels between ancient bicameral practices and modern religious ones, and I shall not labor such comparisons here.

Also beyond the purview of the present book is a full exploration of the way that the more secular developments of the last three millennia are related to their emergence from a different mentality. I am thinking here of the history of logic and conscious reasoning from the Greek development of Logos to modern computers, and of the spectacular historical pageant of philosophy, with its efforts to find a metaphor of all existence in which we may find some conscious familiarity and so feel at home in the universe. I am thinking too of our struggles toward systems of ethics, of attempting with rational consciousness to find substitutes for our previous divine volition which could carry with them that obligation which at least could simulate our earlier obedience to hallucinated voices. And too of the cyclic history of politics, the gyres of our wavering attempts to make governments out of men instead of gods, secular systems of laws to perform that formerly divine function of binding us together into an order, a stability, and a commonweal.

These larger questions are the important ones. But here, in this chapter, I wish to introduce the issues of Book III by considering a handful of more ancient topics of lesser importance that are precise and clear carry-overs from the earlier mentality.

My reason for doing so here is that these historical phenomena shed a needed and clarifying light back into some of the darker problems of Books I and II.

One distinguishing characteristic of such vestiges is that they are more obvious against the complexity of history the closer we are to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The reason for this

320 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World is quite clear. While the universal characteristics of the new consciousness, such as self-reference, mind-space, and narratization, can develop swiftly on the heels of new language construction, the larger contours of civilization, the huge landscape of culture against which this happens, can only change with geological slowness. The matter and technic of earlier ages of civilizations survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them the older outworn forms in which the new mentality must live.

But living also in these forms is a fervent search for what I shall call archaic authorization. After the collapse of the bicameral mind, the world is still in a sense governed by gods, by statements and laws and prescriptions carved on stelae or written on papyrus or remembered by old men, and dating back to bicameral times. But the dissonance is there. Why are the gods no longer heard and seen? The Psalms cry out for answers. And more assurances are needed than the relics of history or the paid insistences of priests. Something palpable, something direct, something immediate! Some sensible assurance that we are not alone, that the gods are just silent, not dead, that behind all this hesitant subjective groping about for signs of certainty, there is a certainty to be had.

Thus, as the slow withdrawing tide of divine voices and presences strands more and more of each population on the sands of subjective uncertainties, the variety of technique by which man attempts to make contact with his lost ocean of authority becomes extended. Prophets, poets, oracles, diviners, statue cults, mediums, astrologers, inspired saints, demon possession, tarot cards, Ouija boards, popes, and peyote all are the residue of bicamerality that was progressively narrowed down as uncertainties piled upon uncertainties. In this chapter and the next we shall examine some of these more archaic vestiges of the bicameral mind.

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O R A C L E S

The most immediate carry-over of bicamerality is simply its perpetuation in certain persons, particularly itinerant prophets, which I have discussed in 11.6, or those institutionalized as oracles, which I shall describe here. While there is a series of cuneiform tablets describing Assyrian oracles1 dating from the seventh century B.C., and the even earlier oracle of Amon of Thebes in Egypt, it is really in Greece that we know this institution best. Greek oracles were the central method of making important decisions for over a thousand years after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. This fact is usually obscured by the strident rationalism of modern historians. Oracles were subjectivity's umbilical cord reaching back into the sustaining unsubjective past.

The Oracle at Delphi

Coincidental with my metaphor is the fact that at the most famous oracle, that of Apollo at Delphi, there was a queer cone-like stone structure called the omphalos or navel. It stood at the reputed center of the earth. Here presided on certain days, or in some centuries every day throughout the year, a supreme priestess, or sometimes two or three in rotation, selected so far as we know on no particular basis (in Plutarch's day, in the first century B.C., she was the daughter of a poor farmer).2 She first bathed and drank from a sacred brook, and then established contact with the god through his sacred tree, the laurel, much as conscious Assyrian kings are depicted being smeared by tree-cones in the hands of genii. She did this either by holding a 1 Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrews and Other Semites (New York, Harper, 1938), p. 42ff.

2 Plutarch, Pyth. rac. 22, 405C.

322 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World laurel branch, or by inhaling and fumigating herself with burnt laurel leaves (as Plutarch said), or perhaps by chewing the leaves (as Lucian insisted).

The replies to questions were given at once, without any reflection, and uninterruptedly. The exact manner of her announcements is still debated,3 whether she was seated on a tripod, regarded as Apollo's ritual seat, or simply stood at an entrance to a cave. But the archaic references to her, from the fifth century on, all agree with the statement of Heraclitus that she spoke

"from her frenzied mouth and with various contortions of her body." She was entheos, plena deo. Speaking through his priestess, but always in the first person, answering king or freeman,

'Apollo' commanded sites for new colonies (as he did for present-day Istanbul), decreed which nations were friends, which rulers best, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues or famines, the best trade routes, which of the proliferation of new cults, or music, or art should be recognized as agreeable to Apollo — all decided by these girls with their frenzied mouths.

Truly, this is astonishing! We have known of the Delphic Oracle so long from school texts that we coat it over with a shrugging usualness when we should not. How is it conceivable that simple rural girls could be trained to put themselves into a psychological state such that they could make decisions at once that ruled the world?

The obdurate rationalist simply scoffs plena deo indeed! Just as the mediums of our own times have always been exposed as frauds, so these so-called oracles were really performances manipulated by others in front of an illiterate peasantry for political or monetary ends.

But such a realpolitik attitude is doctrinaire at best. Possibly there was some chicanery in the oracle's last days, perhaps some bribery of the prophetes, those subsidiary priests or priestesses 3 See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and, the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), which I have used as a handbook in these matters.

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who interpreted what the oracle meant. But earlier, to sustain so massive a fraud for an entire millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had yet known is impossible, just impossible. Nor can it gibe with the complete absence of criticism of the oracle until the Roman period. Nor with the politically wise and often cynical Plato reverently calling Delphi

"the interpreter of religion to all mankind."4

Another kind of explanation, really a quasi-explanation, still busied about with in the popular and sometimes professional literature, is biochemical. The trances were real, it says, but caused by vapors of some sort rising from a casium beneath the floor of the cave. But the French excavations of 1903 and more recent ones have shown distinctly that no such casium existed.5

Or else there might be a drug in the laurel that could have produced such an Apollonian effect. To test this, I have crushed laurel leaves and smoked quantities of them in a pipe and felt somewhat sick but no more inspired than usual. And chewed them as well for over an hour, and very distinctly felt more and more Jaynesian, alas, than Apollonian.6 The glee with which external explanations are sought out for such phenomena simply indicates the resistance in some quarters to admitting that psychological phenomena of this type exist at all.

Rather, I suggest a quite different explanation. And for that purpose, I shall introduce here the notion of

The General Bicameral Paradigm

By this phrase, I mean an hypothesized structure behind a 4 Plato, Republic, 4, 427B. We should also remember that Socrates derived some of what I am about to call his 'archaic authorization* from the oracle. See Apology, 20E.

5 A. P. Oppe, "The Chasm at Delphi," Journal of Historical Studies, 1904, 24: 214f.

6 I am grateful to EveLynn McGuinness for much in my life and here for acting as an observer, although her role was somewhat compromised both by her participation and a certain minimal reverence. Our negative result agrees with T. K.

Oesterreich. See his Possession, Demoniacal and Other, English translation, 1930, p. 319, note 3.

324 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World large class of phenomena of diminished consciousness which I am interpreting as partial holdovers from our earlier mentality.

The paradigm has four aspects:

the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out within that form;

an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of preoccupations;

the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, characterized by a lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing of the analog or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, tolerated, or encouraged by the group; and

the archaic authorization to which the trance is directed or related to, usually a god, but sometimes a person who is accepted by the individual and his culture as an authority over the individual, and who by the collective cognitive imperative is prescribed to be responsible for controlling the trance state.

Now, I do not mean these four aspects of the general bicameral paradigm to be considered as a temporal succession necessarily, although the induction and trance usually do follow each other. But the cognitive imperative and the archaic authorization pervade the whole thing. Moreover, there is a kind of balance or summation among these elements, such that when one of them is weak the others must be strong for the phenomena to occur.

Thus, as through time, particularly in the millennium following the beginning of consciousness, the collective cognitive imperative becomes weaker (that is, the general population tends toward skepticism about the archaic authorization), we find a rising emphasis on and complication of the induction procedures, as well as the trance state itself becoming more profound.

By calling the general bicameral paradigm a structure, I not

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only mean a logical structure into which these phenomena can be analyzed, but also some presently unspecified neurological structure or relationships between areas of the brain, perhaps something like the model for the bicameral mind presented in 1.5. We might thus expect that all of the phenomena mentioned in Book III in some way involve right hemispheric function in a way that is different from ordinary conscious life. It is even possible that in some of these phenomena we have a partial periodic right hemisphere dominance that can be considered as the neurological residue of nine millennia of selection for the bicameral mind.

The application of this general bicameral paradigm to the oracle at Delphi is obvious: the elaborate induction procedures, the trance in which consciousness is lost, the ardently pursued authorization of Apollo. But it is the collective cognitive" imperative or group belief or cultural prescription or expectancy (all of these terms indicating my meaning) which I wish to emphasize.

The immensity of the cultural demand upon the entranced priestess cannot be overemphasized. The whole Greek world believed, and had for almost a millennium. As many as thirty-five thousand people a day from every part of the Mediterranean world might struggle by sea through the tiny port of Itea that snuggles the receptive coast just below Delphi. And they, too, went through induction procedures, purifying themselves in the Castalian spring, making offerings to Apollo and other gods as they persisted up the Sacred Way. In the latter centuries of the oracle, more than four thousand votive statues crowded this 220-yard-long climb up the side of Mount Parnassus to the temple of the oracle.

It was, I suggest, this confluence of huge social prescription and expectancy, closer to definition than mere belief, which can account for the psychology of the oracle, for the at-once-ness of her answers. It was something before which any skepticism would be as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a radio originates in a studio that we cannot see. And it is something before which modern psychology must stand in awe.

326 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World To this causative expectancy should be added something about the natural scene itself. Oracles begin in localities with a specific awesomeness, natural formations of mountain or gorge, of hallucinogenic wind or waves, of symbolic gleamings and vistas, which I suggest are more conducive to occasioning right hemisphere activity than the analytic planes of everyday life. Perhaps we can say that the geography of the bicameral mind in the first part of the first millennium B.C. was shrinking down into sites of awe and beauty where the voices of gods could still be heard.

Certainly the vast cliffs of Delphi move into such a suggestion and fill it fully: a towering caldron of blasted rock over which the sea winds howl and the salt mists cling, as if dreaming nature were twisting herself awake at awkward angles, falling away into a blue surf of shimmering olive leaves and the gray immortal sea.

(It is, however, difficult for us to appreciate such scenic awe today, so clouded is the purity of our response to landscape with our conscious 'inner' worlds and our experience with swift geographical change. Moreover, Delphi today is not quite as it was.

Its five acres of broken columns, cheerful graffiti, camera-click-ing tourists, and stumps of white marble over which heedless ants crawl indecisively, are not exactly the stuff of divine inspiration.)

Other Oracles

Particularly recommending such a cultural explanation of Delphi is the fact that there were similar if less important oracles throughout the civilized world at the time. Apollo had others: at Ptoa in Boeotia and at Branchidae and Patara in Asia Minor. At the latter, the Prophetess, as part of the induction, was locked into the temple at night for connubial union with her hallucinated god that she might better be his medium.7 The great 7 Herodotus, 1 :I82.

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oracle at Claros had priests as mediums whose frenzies were visited by Tacitus in the first century A.D.8 Pan had an oracle at Acacesium, but it became defunct early.9 The golden oracle at Ephesus, famous for its enormous wealth, had tranced eunuchs as the mouthpieces of the goddess Artemis.10 (The style of their vestments, incidentally, is still used today by the Greek Orthodox Church.) And the abnormal dancing on the tips of the toes of modern ballerinas is thought to derive from the dances before the altar of the goddess.11 Anything opposite to the everyday can serve as a cue for the engagement of the general bicameral paradigm.

The voice of Zeus at Dodona must have been one of the oldest oracles, since Odysseus visited it to hear whether to return to Ithaca openly or by stealth.12 It was at that time probably just a huge sacred oak tree and the Olympian voice was hallucinated from the wind trembling in its leaves, making one wonder if something similar took place among the Druids who held the oak holy. It is only in the fifth century B.C. that Zeus is no longer heard directly, and Dodona has a temple and a priestess who speaks for him in unconscious trances,13 again conforming to the temporal sequence the bicameral theory would predict.

Not only the voices of gods, but also of dead kings, could still be heard bicamerally, as we have earlier suggested was the origin of gods themselves. Amphiaraus had been the heroic prince of Argos who had plunged to his death in a chasm in Boeotia, supposedly at the nudge of an angry Zeus. His voice was 'heard'

from the chasm for centuries after, answering the problems of 8 Tacitus, Annates, 2 15 4.

9 Pausanias, Description of Greece, J. E. Fraser, trans. (London: Macmillan, 1898), 37:8.

10 Charles Picard, Ephese et Claros (Paris: de Bocard, 1922).

11 Louis Sechan, La Dance Greque Antique (Paris: de Bocard, 1930)} and also Lincoln Kirstein, The Book of the Dance (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1942).

12 Odyssey, 14:327 ;19:296.

13 Aelius Aristides, Orationes, 45 : n .

328 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World his petitioners. But again as centuries passed, the Voice' came to be hallucinated only by certain entranced priestesses who lived there. At that later time they did not so much answer questions as interpret the dreams of those who consulted the voice.14

In some ways the most interesting, however, from the hypothesis of the bicameral mind is the hallucinated voice of Tropho-nius at Lebadea, twenty miles east of Delphi. For it is the longest lasting of the direct Voices' without intermediary priests or priestesses. The locale of the oracle even today bears some remnants of its ancient awesomeness, a meeting of three soaring preci-pices, of murmuring springs easing strongly out of the solemn ground and crawling submissively away into stony ravines. And up a little, where one ravine begins to wind into the heart of the mountain, there was once a carved-out cell-like pit in the rock that squeezed down into an ovenlike shrine over an underground flume.

When the collective imperative of the general bicameral paradigm is less, when belief and trust in such phenomena are waning with rationalism, and particularly when it is being applied not to a trained priestess but to any suppliant, the induction is longer and more intricate to compensate. And this is what occurred at Lebadea. Pausanias, the Roman traveler, described the elaborate induction procedure that he found there in A.D.

150.15 After days of waiting and purification and omens and expectancy, he tells us how he was abruptly taken one night and bathed and anointed by two holy boys, then drank from Lethe's spring to forget who he was (the loss of the analog 'I'), then made to sip at the spring of Mnemosyne so as to remember later what was to be revealed (like a post-hypnotic suggestion). Then he was made to worship a secret image, then was dressed in holy linen, girded with sacred ribbons, and shod with special boots, and then only after more omens, if favorable, was finally inserted 14 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1, 34:5.

15 Ibid., 9, 39:11.

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down an impassive ladder into the devout pit with its dark torrent where the divine message grew swiftly articulate.

The Six Oracular Terms

As the Greek mind moves from the universally bicameral to the universally conscious, these oracular vestiges of the bicameral world and their authority change until they become more and more precarious and difficult to obtain. There is, I suggest, a loose pattern in all this, and that over the thousand years of their existence, oracles were in a continuing decadence which can be understood as six terms. These can be regarded as six steps down from the bicameral mind as its collective cognitive imperative grew weaker and weaker.

1. T h e locality oracle. Oracles began simply as specific locations where, because of some awesomeness of the surroundings, or some important incident or some hallucinogenic sound, waves, waters, or wind, suppliants, any suppliants, could still

'hear' a bicameral voice directly. Lebadea remained at this term, probably because of its remarkable induction.

2. T h e prophet oracle. Usually there then occurred a term where only certain persons, priests, or priestesses, could 'hear'

the voice of the god at the locality.

3. T h e trained prophet oracle, when such persons, priests, or priestesses, could 'hear' only after long training and elaborate inductions. Up to this term, the person was still himself and relayed the god's voice to others.

4. T h e possessed oracle. Then, from at least the fifth century B.C., came the term of possession, of the frenzied mouth and contorted body after even more training and more elaborate inductions.

330 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 5. T h e interpreted possessed oracle. As the cognitive imperative weakened, the words became garbled and had to be interpreted by auxiliary priests or priestesses who themselves had gone through induction procedures.

6. T h e erratic oracle. A n d then even this became difficult.

T h e voices became fitful, the possessed prophet erratic, the interpretations impossible, and the oracle ended.

The oracle of Delphi endured longest. It is striking evidence for its supreme importance to the god-nostalgic subjectivity of Greece in its golden age that it lasted so long, particularly when it is recalled that in almost every invasion it sided with the invader: with Xerxes I in the early fifth century B.C., with Philip II in the fourth century B.C., and even in the Peloponnesian Wars, it spoke on the side of Sparta. Such the strength of bicameral phenomena in the forces of history. It even lived out its sad, hilarious, patriotic mocking by Euripides in the amphitheaters.

But by the first century A.D., Delphi had come to its sixth term.

Bicamerality having receded further and further into the unremembered past, skepticism had overgrown belief. The mighty cultural cognitive imperative of the oracular was played out and shattered, and the thing with increasing frequency would not work. One such instance at Delphi is told by Plutarch in A.D. 60.

The prophetess reluctantly attempted a trance, the omens being dreadful. She began to speak in a hoarse voice as if distressed, then appeared filled with a "dumb and evil spirit," and then ran screaming toward the entrance and fell down. Everyone else, including her prophetes, fled in terror. The report goes on that they found her partly recovered when they returned, but that she died within a few days.16 As this was probably observed by a prophetes who was a personal friend of Plutarch's, we have no reason to doubt its authenticity.17

16 Plutarch, Def. Orac., 51, 438C.

17 Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, p. 72.

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Yet even with these neurotic failures, Delphi was still consulted by the tradition-hungry Greece-haunted Romans. The last to do so was my namesake, the Emperor Julian who, following his namesake Julianus (who had written down from hallucinated gods his Chaldaean Oracles), was attempting to revive the ancient gods. As part of this personal quest for authorization, he tried to rehabilitate Delphi in A.D. 363, three years after it had been ransacked by Constantine. Through his remaining priestess, Apollo prophesied that he would never prophesy again. And the prophecy came true. The bicameral mind had come to one of its many ends.

Sibyls

The Age of Oracles occupies the entire millennium after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And as it slowly dies away, there appear here and there what might be called amateur oracles, untrained and uninstitutionalized persons who spontaneously felt themselves possessed by gods. Of course some simply spoke schizophrenic nonsense. Probably most. But others had an authenticity that could command belief. Among such were those few but unknown number of weird and wonderful women known as the Sibyls (from the Aeolic sios = god + boule =

advice). In the first century B.C., Varro could count at least ten at one time around the Mediterranean world. But there were certainly others in more remote regions. They lived in solitude, sometimes in reverenced mountain shrines that were built for them, or in tufaceous subterranean caverns near the groan of the ocean, as did the great Cumaean Sibyl. Virgil had probably personally visited the latter around 40 B.C., when he described her frenzied laboring with a possessing Apollo in Book VI of the Aeneid.

Like oracles, the Sibyls were asked to make decisions on matters high and low up to the third century A.D. So gristled with

332 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World moral fervor were their replies that even the early Christian Fathers and Hellenistic Jews bowed to them as prophets on a level with those of the Old Testament. The early Christian Church, in particular, used their prophecies (often forged) to buttress its own divine authenticity. Even a thousand years later, at the Vatican, four of the Sibyls were painted into prominent niches on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. And even centuries later, copies of these muscular ladies with their oracular books open used to look down on the wondering present writer in a Unitarian Sunday school in New England. Such is the thirst of our institutions after authorization.

And when they too had ceased, when the gods no longer would inhabit living human forms in prophecy and oracle, mankind searches for other ways of taking up the slack, as it were, between heaven and earth. There are new religions, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Neo-Platonism. There are new orders of conduct to relate god-shorn men to the enormous conscious landscape of a now spatialized time, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism. There is an institutionalization and elaboration of divination beyond anything in Assyria, divination built into the political state officially to generate decisions on important matters. As the Greek civilizations had been anchored into the divine by oracles, so the Roman now is by auspices and augurers.

A Revival of Idols

But even these cannot fill the need of the common man for transcendence. Following the failure of oracles and prophets as if to replace them is an attempted revival of idols similar to those of bicameral times.

The great bicameral civilizations had, as we have seen, used a wide variety of effigies to help hallucinate bicameral voices. But when those voices ceased in the adjustment to subjective consciousness, all this was darkened. Most idols were destroyed.

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Late bicameral kingdoms at the behest of their jealous gods had always smashed and burned the idols of opposing gods or kings.

And the practice accelerated when the idols were no longer heard and worshiped. King Josiah, in the seventh century B.C., ordered all idols in his domain destroyed. The Old Testament is full of the destruction of idols, as well as imprecations on the heads of those who make new ones. By the middle of the first millennium B.C., idolatry is only here and there, fitful and unim-portant.

Curiously, there is at this time a very minor cult of hallucinating from severed heads. Herodotus (4:26) speaks of the practice in the obscure Issedones of gilding a head and sacrificing to it.

Cleomenes of Sparta is said to have preserved the head of Archonides in honey and consulted it before undertaking any important task. Several vases of the fourth century B.C. in Etru-ria depict scenes of persons interrogating oracular heads.18 And the severed head of the rustic Carians which continues to 'speak'

is mentioned derisively by Aristotle.19 And this is about all. Thus, after subjective consciousness is firmly established, the practice of hallucinating from idols is only sporadically present.

But as we approach the beginning of the Christian era, with the oracles mocked into silence, we have a very true revival of idolatry. The temples that whitened the hills and cities of decadent Greece and ascendant Rome were now crammed with more and more statues of gods. By the first century A.D., the Apostle Paul despairingly found Athens full of idols (Acts 17), and Pausanias, whom we met a few pages ago at Lebadea, described them as being simply everywhere on his travels and of every conceivable sort: marble and ivory, gilded and painted, life-sized and some two or three stories high.

Did such idols 'speak' to their worshipers? There is no doubt 18 See John Cohen, "Human Robots and Computer Art," History Today, 1970, 8:562.

19 De Partibus Animalium, III, 10:9-12.

334 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World that this sometimes occurred, just as in bicameral times. But in general in the subjective era, it seems very doubtful that this happened spontaneously very often. For otherwise there would not have been the rising attention to artificial means, magical and chemical, for obtaining hallucinated messages from stone and ivory gods. And here again we see the entrance into history of the general bicameral paradigm: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization.

In Egypt, where the breaking point between bicamerality and subjectivity is far less sharp than in more volatile nations, there was the development of the so-called Hermetic literature. This is a series of papyri describing various induction procedures that came into being at the edge of bicameral certainty and spread over the conscious world. In one of them, there is a dialogue called the Asclepus (after the Greek god of healing) that describes the art of imprisoning the souls of demons or of angels in statues with the help of herbs, gems, and odors, such that the statue could speak and prophesy.20 In other papyri, there are still other recipes for constructing such images and animating them, such as when images are to be hollow so as to enclose a magic name inscribed on gold leaf.

By the first century A.D., this practice had spread over most of the civilized world. In Greece, rumors broke into legends over the miraculous behavior of public cult statues. In Rome, Nero prized a statue which warned him of conspiracies.21 Apuleius was accused of possessing one.22 So common were hallucinogenic idols by the second century A.D. that Lucian in his Philopseudes satirized the belief in them. And Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonist apostle of theurgy, as it was called in his Peri agalmaton, tried to 20 The records of the various temples to the medical god Asclepius are full of reported diagnoses and therapeutic directives told to the sick as they slept there. These have been collected and translated by E. J. and L. Edelstein, Asclepus: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies, 2 vols., 1945.

21 Suetonius, Nero, 56.

22 Apuleius, Apol., 63.

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prove “that idols are divine and filled with the divine presence,”

establishing a vogue for such idols against the fuming execration of Christian critics. His disciples obtained omens of every sort and distinction from idols. One hallucinator boasted he could make a statue of Hecate laugh and cause the torches in her hand to light up. And another feels he can tell whether a statue is animate or inanimate by the sensation it gives him. Even Cyprian, the good gray Bishop of Carthage, complained in the third century of the “spirits that lurk under statues and consecrated images.”23 The whole civilized world, in this effort to recall the bicameral mind after the failure of oracles and prophecy, was filled with epiphanies of statues of every sort and description in this remarkable revival of idolatry.

How was all this believable? Since this is well into the subjective era, when men prided themselves on reason and common sense, and at last knew there were such experiences as false hallucinations, how was it possible that they could actually believe that statues embodied real gods? And really spoke?

Let us recall the almost universal belief of these centuries in an absolute dualism of mind and matter. Mind or soul or spirit or consciousness (all these were confused together) was a thing imposed from heaven on the bodily matter to give it life. All the newer religions of this era were allied about this point. And if a soul can be imposed on so fragile a thing as flesh to make it live, on a hurtable carcass that has to have vegetable and animal matter stuffed in one end and stenchfully excreted at another, a sense-pocked sinful vessel that the years wrinkle and the winds chafe and diseases cruelly hound, and that can be sliced off in a trice from the soul it holds by the same act that stabs an onion, how much more possible for life, divine life, to be imposed by heaven upon a statue of unbleeding beauty with a faultless and immaculate body of unwrinkling marble or diseaseless gold!

23 Other instances are mentioned by E. R. Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational.

336 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World Here is Callistratus, for example, in the fourth century A.D., writing about an ivory and gold statue of the god Asclepius: Shall we admit that the divine spirit descends into human bodies, there to be even defiled by passions, and nevertheless not believe it in a case where there is no attendant engendering of evil? . . . for see how an image, after Art has portrayed in it a god, even passes over into the god himself! Matter though it is, it gives forth divine intelligence.24

And he and most of the world believed it.

The evidence for all this would be much more obvious today, had not Constantine in the fourth century, even like King Josiah in Israel one millennium earlier, sent his armies of Christian converts out with sledge hammers through the once bicameral world to smash all its physical vestiges in sight. Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

But even this destruction could not abolish idolatrous practice, so vital is it to have some kind of authorization for our behavior.

Medieval Italy and Byzantium believed in enchanted idols who had power to avert disaster. The notorious Knights Templars were at least accused of taking orders from a gold head called Baphomet. So common had hallucinogenic idols become in the late Middle Ages that a bull of Pope John X X I I in 1326 denounced those who by magic imprison demons in images or other objects, interrogate them, and obtain answers. Even up to the Reformation, monasteries and churches vied with each other to attract pilgrims (and their offerings) by miracle-producing statuary.

In some epochs, perhaps when the cognitive imperatives for such neo-bicameral experiences began to wither under the sun-light of rationalism, the belief in statue animation was occasion-24 Callistratus, Descriptions, 10, A. Fairbanks, trans. (Loeb Classical Library, 1902).

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ally sustained by the use of fraudulent contrivances.25 In one instance of many, a life-sized medieval rood of the crucified Jesus at Boxley, which rolled its eyes at penitents, shed tears, and foamed at the mouth, was found in the sixteenth century to have

“certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back of the same.”26 But we shouldn’t cynicize too deeply here. While such artificial animation often functioned as chicanery to fool the miracle-hungry pilgrim, it may also have been meant as an enticement to the god to body itself in a more lifelike statue. As a fourteenth-century tract on the matter explained, “God’s power in working of his miracles loweth down in one image more than in another.”27 Animated idols in some contemporary tribes are explained by their worshipers in the same way.

Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force — its original function.

Our parks and public gardens are still the beflowered homes of heroic effigies of past leaders. While few of us can hallucinate their speech, we still on appropriate occasions might give them gifts of wreaths, even as greater gifts were given in the gigunus of Ur. In churches, temples, and shrines the world over, religious statues are still being carved, painted, and prayed to. Figurines of a Queen of Heaven dangle protectively from the mirrors of American windshields. Teen-age girls I have interviewed, living in deeply religious convents, often sneak down to the chapel in the dead of night and have mentioned to me their excitement at being able to ‘hear‘ the statue of the Virgin Mary speak, and ‘see’

her lips move or her head bow or — sometimes — her eyes weep.

Gentle idols of Jesus, Mary, and the saints throughout much of the Catholic world are still being bathed, dressed, incensed, 25 See F. Poulsen, “Talking, weeping-, and bleeding- sculptures.” Ada Archeologica, 1945, 16 : 178f.

26 See Jonathan Sumption’s Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (Totawa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 56; also Julia Holloway’s forthcoming The Pilgrim. I am grateful to her for bringing this to my attention.

27 Quoted from the Lollard manuscript Lanterne of Lights by Sumption, p. 270.

338 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World flowered, jeweled, and launched shoulder-high and glorious out of bell-bellowing churches on outings through towns and coun-trysides on feast days. Placing special foods in front of them or dancing and bowing before them still generates its numinous excitement.28 Such devotions differ from similar divine outings in bicameral Mesopotamia 4000 years ago mostly in the idol's relative silence.

28 As in Flaubert's beautiful story Un Coeur Simple.

C H A P T E R 2

Of Prophets and Possession

IN THE FOREGOING theory of oracles, I am sure that the reader has seen the profound gap that I have jumped over in my argument. I have called the general bicameral paradigm a vestige of the bicameral mind. And yet the trance state of narrowed or absent consciousness is not, at least from the fourth oracular term and thereafter, a duplicate of the bicameral mind. Instead we have for the rest of the oracle's existence a complete domination of the person and his speech by the god-side, a domination which speaks through the person but does not allow him to remember what has happened afterwards. This phenomenon is known as possession.

The problem it presents is not confined to far-off ancient oracles. It occurs today. It has occurred through history. It has a negatory form that seems to have been one of the most common maladies in the Galilee of the New Testament. And a good case could be made that at least some of the wandering prophets of Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, and elsewhere did not simply relay to listeners something they were hearing in hallucination, rather that the divine message was coming directly from the prophet's vocal apparatus without any cognition on 'his' part during the speech or memory of it after. And if we call this a loss of consciousness, and I shall, such a statement is quite problematic.

Is it not also possible to say that it is not the loss of consciousness so much as its replacement by a new and different conscious-

340 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World ness? But what can that mean? Or is that linguistic organization which speaks from the supposed possessed person not conscious at all in the sense of narratizing in a mind-space as described in I.2?

These questions are not solved by simple answers. The fact that we may regard possession by metaphysical essences as ontological nonsense should not blind us from the psychological and historical insights that examination of such idiosyncrasies of history and belief can give us. Indeed, any theory of consciousness and its origin in time must face such obscurities. And I do suggest that the theory in this book is a better torch for such dark corners of time and mind than any alternative theory. For if we still hold to a purely biological evolution of consciousness back somewhere among the lower vertebrates, how can we approach such phenomena or begin to understand their historically and culturally segregated nature? It is only if consciousness is learned at the mercy of a collective cognitive imperative that we can take hold of these questions in any way.

Our first step in understanding any mental phenomenon must be to delimit its existence in historical time. When did it first occur?

The answer in Greece, at least, is very clear. There is no such thing as possession or any hint of anything similar throughout the Iliad or Odyssey or other early poetry. No 'god' speaks through human lips in the truly bicameral age. Yet by 400 B.C., it is apparently as common as churches are with us, both in the many oracles scattered about Greece as well as in private individuals. The bicameral mind has vanished and possession is its trace.

Plato, in the fourth century B.C., has Socrates casually say in the midst of a political discussion that "God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say,"1 as if such 1 Meno, 99C. See also Ttmaeus, 71E-72A, where it is said "no man in his wits attains prophetic truth and inspirations."

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prophets could be heard every day around the streets of Athens.

And he was very clear about the loss of consciousness in the oracles of his time:

. . . for prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have con-ferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none.2

And so in the centuries that follow, supposed possession is the obliteration of ordinary consciousness. Four hundred years after Plato, in the first century A.D., Philo Judaeus categorically states, W h e n he (a prophet) is inspired he becomes unconscious; thought vanishes away and leaves the fortress of the soul; but the divine spirit has entered there and taken up its abode; and this later makes all the organs resound so that the man gives clear expression to what the spirit gives him to say.3

And so also in the century after that, as in Aristides5 saying that the priestesses at the oracle of Dodona

. . . do not know, before being seized by the spirits, what they are going to say, any more than after having recovered their natural senses they remember what they have said, so that everyone knows what they say except themselves.4

And Iamblichus, the leading Neo-Platonist at the beginning of the third century, insisted that divine possession "participated" in divinity, had a "common energy" with a god, and "comprehends indeed everything in us but exterminates our own proper con-2 Phaedrus, 244B.

3 Philo, De Special Legibus, 4, 343M, Cohn and Wendland, eds., who in another place says, "He who is really inspired and filled with god cannot comprehend with his intelligence what he says; he only repeats what is suggested to him, as if another prompted him." 222M.

4 Aristides, Opera, 213.

342 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World sciousness and motion."5 Such possession, then, is not a return to the bicameral mind properly speaking. For when Achilles heard Athene a millennium earlier, he certainly did know what was said to him; that was the function of the bicameral mind.

This then is the very core of the problem. The speech of possessed prophets is not an hallucination proper, not something heard by a conscious, semi-conscious, or even nonconscious man as in the bicameral mind proper. It is articulated externally and heard by others. It occurs only in normally conscious men and is coincident with a loss of that consciousness. What justification then do we have for saying that the two phenomena, the hallucinations of the bicameral mind and the speech of the possessed, are related?

I do not have a truly robust answer. I can only meekly maintain that they are related (1) because they are serving the same social function, (2) because they yield similar communications of authorization, and (3) because the little evidence we have on the early history of oracles indicates that possession in a few institutionalized persons at certain locations is a gradual outgrowth from the hallucinations of gods by anyone at those locations. We can therefore at least suggest that possession is a transformation of a particular sort, a derivative of bicamerality in which the rituals of induction and the different collective cognitive imperatives and trained expectancies result in the ostensive possession of the particular person by the god-side of the bicameral mind. Perhaps we could say that, to retrieve the older mentality, developing consciousness more and more had to be obliterated, inhibiting the man-side with it, leaving the god-side in control of speech itself.

And what of the neurology of such a mentality? From the model I have presented in 1.5, we must naturally hypothesize that 5 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, 3:8, or the English translation by Thomas Taylor (London: Theosophical Society, 1895), pp. 128-129.

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in possession there is some kind of disturbance of normal hemispheric dominance relations, in which the right hemisphere is somewhat more active than in the normal state. In other words, if we could have placed electrodes on the scalp of a Delphic oracle in her frenzy, would we have found a relatively faster EEG

(and therefore greater activity) over her right hemisphere, correlating with her possession? And particularly over her right temporal lobe?

I suggest that we would. There is at least a possibility that the dominance relations of the two hemispheres would be changed, and that the early training of the oracle was indeed that of engaging a higher ratio of right hemisphere activity in relation to the left as a response to the complex stimulus of the induction procedures. Such a hypothesis might also explain the contorted features, the appearance of frenzy and the nystagmic eyes, as an abnormal right hemisphere interference or release from inhibition by the left hemisphere.6

And a comment can be added here about sexual differences. It is now well known that women are biologically somewhat less lateralized in brain function than men. This means simply that psychological functions in women are not localized into one or the other hemisphere of the brain to the same degree as in men.

Mental abilities in women are more spread over both hemispheres. Even by age six, for example, a boy can recognize objects in his left hand by feel alone better than in his right hand. In girls both hands are equal. This shows that haptic recognition (as it is called) has already been primarily localized in the right hemisphere in boys but not in girls.7 And it is common knowledge that 6 It is likely that it is not the right motor cortex controlling- the facial grimaces, but that the unusual right temporal-parietal lobe activity distorts the symmetry of input from the basal ganglia to facial expression.

7 Sandra F. Witelson, "Sex and the Single Hemisphere," Science, 1976, 193:425-427. A collation of about thirty other studies on the subject may be found in Richard A. Harshman and Roger Remington, "Sex, Language, and the Brain, Part I: A Review of the Literature on Adult Sex Differences in Lateralization," authors' preprint, 19755

see also Stevan Harnad, "On Gender Differences in Language," Contemporary Anthropology, 197 6, 17:327—328.

344 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World elderly men with a stroke or hemorrhage in the left hemisphere are more speechless than elderly women with a similar diagnosis.

Accordingly we might expect more residual language function in the right hemisphere of women, making it easier for women to learn to be oracles. And indeed the majority of oracles and Sibyls, at least in European cultures, were women.

Induced Possession

Institutionalized unconscious speaking in the prophets of oracles as if by a god becomes, as we have seen in III.1, erratic and silent toward the first centuries of the Christian era. It falls to a siege of rationalism, to volleys of criticism and ramming irrever-ence in comic drama and literature. Such public (indeed urban) suppression of a general cultural characteristic often results in pushing it into private practice, into abstruse sects and esoteric cults where its cognitive imperative is protected from such criticism. And so with induced possession. With the oracles mocked into silence, such the quest for authorization that there is a widespread attempt in private groups to bring back the gods and have them speak through almost anyone.

The second century A.D. saw a growing number of such cults.

Their seances were sometimes in official shrines, but increasingly more often in private circles. Usually one person called a felestike or operator tried to incarnate the god temporarily in another called a katochos, or more specially a docheus, or what in contemporary lore is called a medium.8 It was soon found that if the phenomenon was to work, the katochos should come from a simple unsophisticated background, something that runs through all the literature on possession. Iamblichus in the early third century, the real apostle of all this, states that the most suitable 8 In this part of my discussion I am indebted to the wealth of information in E. R.

Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), Appendix II, Theurgy, where many other references may be found.

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mediums are "young and simple persons." And so, we remember, were the uneducated country girls chosen to train as priestesses for the oracle at Delphi. Other writings mention adolescents such as the boy Aedesius, who "had only to put on the garland and look at the sun, when he immediately produces reliable oracles in the best inspirational style." Presumptively, this was due to careful training. That such induced bicameral possession has to be learned is known from the training of oracles as well as a comment of Pythagoras of Rhodes in the third century, that the gods come at first reluctantly, then more easily when they have formed the habit of entering the same person.

What was learned, I suggest, was a state approaching the bicameral mind as a response to the induction. This is important.

We do not ordinarily think of learning a new unconscious mentality, perhaps a whole new relationship between our cerebral hemispheres, as we think of learning to ride a bicycle.

Since this is the learning of a now difficult neurological state, so different from ordinary life, it is not surprising that the cues of the induction had to be wildly distinctive and have an extreme difference from ordinary life.

And they certainly were different: anything odd, anything strange: bathing in smoke or sacred water, dressing in enchanted chitons with magical girdles, wearing weird garlands or mysterious symbols, standing in a charmed magic circle as medieval magicians did, or upon charakteres as Faust did to hallucinate Mephistopheles, or smearing the eyes with strychnine to procure visions as was done in Egypt, or washing in brimstone (sulphur) and seawater, a very old method which began in Greece, as Porphyry said in the second century A.D., to prepare the anima sfiritalis for the reception of a higher being. All these of course did nothing except as they were believed to do something — just as we in this latter age have no 'free wil' unless we believe we have.

346 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World And what was done, this 'reception of the god', was not psychologically different from the other forms of possession we have examined. Consciousness as well as normal reactivity in the katochos was usually in complete suspension so that it was necessary to have others look after him. And in such a deep trance, the 'god' would supposedly reveal past or future, or answer questions and make decisions, as in the older Greek oracles.

How was it to be explained when these gods were incorrect?

Well, evil spirits might have been invoked instead of true gods, or other intrusive spirits might have occupied the medium. Iamblichus himself claims to have unmasked in his medium an alleged Apollo who was only the ghost of a gladiator. Such excuses reverberate throughout the subsequent decadent literature of spiritualism.

And when the seance did not seem to be working, the operator as well often went through an induction of purifying rites that put him into a hallucinatory state, such that he might 'see' more clearly or 'hear' from the unconscious medium something that perhaps the medium did not even say. This kind of doubling-up is similar to the prophetes’ relationship to their oracles, and explains various reported levitations, elongations, or dilations of the medium's body.9

By the end of the third century, Christianity had suddenly flooded the pagan world with its own claims to authorization and began to dissolve into itself many of the then existing pagan practices. The idea of possession was one of those. But it was absorbed in a transcendental way. At almost the same time that Iamblichus was teaching the induction of gods into statues, or young illiterate katochoi to "participate" in divinity and have "a common energy" with a god, Athanasius, the competitive Bishop of Alexandria, began claiming the same thing for the illiterate 9 It is safe to suggest that many feats of present-day stage magicians have their origin in duplicating these 'proofs' of divine intervention.

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Jesus. The Christian Messiah had heretofore been regarded as like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps, half human, half divine, reflecting his supposed parentage. But Athanasius persuaded Constantine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity thereafter, that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the Bicameral Word made Flesh. I think we can say then that the growing church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated the subjective phenomenon of possession into an objective theological dogma. It did so to assert an even greater claim to an absolute authorization. For Athanasian Christians the actual gods had indeed returned to earth and would return again.

Curiously, neither the oracle at Delphi nor the Sibyls were doubted as contacting a heavenly reality by this expanding Christian Church. But such pagan seances as induced divine possession in simple boys seemed theologically rowdy, the mischief of devils and shady spirits. And so as the church arches up into political authority over the Middle Ages, voluntary induced possession disappears at least from public notice. It goes even further underground into witchcraft and assorted necromancies, emerging into notice only from time to time.

Its contemporary practice I shall come to in a moment. But first we should examine a cultural side effect of induced possession, a disturbing phenomenon I shall call

Negatory Possession

There is another side to this vigorously strange vestige of the bicameral mind. And it is different from other topics in this chapter. For it is not a response to a ritual induction for the purpose of retrieving the bicameral mind. It is an illness in response to stress. In effect, emotional stress takes the place of the induction in the general bicameral paradigm just as in antiquity. And when it does, the authorization is of a different kind.

The difference presents a fascinating problem. In the New

348 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modem World Testament, where we first hear of such spontaneous possession, it is called in Greek daemonizomai, or demonization.10 And from that time to the present, instances of the phenomenon most often have that negatory quality connoted by the term. The why of the negatory quality is at present unclear. In an earlier chapter (II.4) I have tried to suggest the origin of ‘evil5 in the volitional emptiness of the silent bicameral voices. And that this took place in Mesopotamia and particularly in Babylon, to which the Jews were exiled in the sixth century B.C., might account for the prevalence of this quality in the world of Jesus at the start of this syndrome.

But whatever the reasons, they must in the individual be similar to the reasons behind the predominantly negatory quality of schizophrenic hallucinations. And indeed the relationship of this type of possession to schizophrenia seems obvious.

Like schizophrenia, negatory possession usually begins with some kind of an hallucination.11 It is often a castigating ‘voice’

of a ‘demon’ or other being which is ‘heard’ after a considerable stressful period. But then, unlike schizophrenia, probably because of the strong collective cognitive imperative of a particular group or religion, the voice develops into a secondary system of personality, the subject then losing control and periodically entering into trance states in which consciousness is lost, and the

‘demon’ side of the personality takes over.

Always the patients are uneducated, usually illiterate, and all believe heartily in spirits or demons or similar beings and live in a society which does. The attacks usually last from several minutes to an hour or two, the patient being relatively normal be-10 Moreover, instances of such possession occur most often in the oldest and most authentic of the Gospels: Mark 1:32, 5:15-18} and Matthew (which scholars are agreed is based upon Mark as well as some unknown older Gospel) 4:24; 8:16; 8 :2 8—33; 9 :32 ; 12 :22.

11 Here I am summarizing cases in the literature. For fuller discussions of this topic as well as other case descriptions (not very complete) see Oesterreich, Possession; as well as J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes (Chicago: Revell, 1896).

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tween attacks and recalling little of them. Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons.

The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon j he just talks like one.

Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet.

As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god.

12 I probably should not be making these cross-comparisons. But I am at least revealing my thinking. Is it possible that what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere always 'looks down' on Wernicke's area on the left? The references are to Exodus 4:24 and to Hesiod's Theogony, line 26, respectively.

350 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World The exorcist can be said to fit into the authorization element of the general bicameral paradigm, replacing the 'demon.' The cognitive imperatives of the belief system that determined the form of the illness in the first place determine the form of its cure.

The phenomenon does not depend on age, but sex differences, depending on the historical epoch, are pronounced, demonstrating its cultural expectancy basis. Of those possessed by 'demons'

whom Jesus or his disciples cured in the New Testament, the overwhelming majority were men. In the Middle Ages and thereafter, however, the overwhelming majority were women.

Also evidence for its basis in a collective cognitive imperative are its occasional epidemics, as in convents of nuns during the Middle Ages, in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, or those reported in the nineteenth century at Savoy in the Alps.

And occasionally today.

Now, again, with any alteration of mentality as striking as this, we cannot escape the neurological question. What is happening?

Are the speech areas of the right nondominant hemisphere activated in spontaneous possession, as I have suggested they were in the induced possession of the oracles? And are the contorted features due to the intrusion of right hemisphere control? The fact that the majority of instances (as well as most oracles and Sibyls) were women, and that women are (presently in our culture) less lateralized than men is somewhat suggestive.

At least some instances of possession begin with contortions on the left side of the body, which may indicate this is true. Here is one case reported at the beginning of this century. The patient was a forty-seven-year-old uneducated Japanese woman who would become possessed by what she called the fox, six or seven times a day, always with the same laterality phenomena. As it was then observed by her physicians:

At first there appeared slight twitchings of the mouth and arm on the left side. As these became stronger she violently

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struck with her fist her left side which was already swollen and red with similar blows, and said to me: “ A h , sir, here he is stirring again in my breast.” T h e n a strange and incisive voice issued from her mouth: “Yes, it is true, I am there. Did you think, stupid goose, that you could stop me?” Thereupon the woman addressed herself to us: “Oh dear, gentlemen, forgive me, I cannot help it!”

Continuing to strike her breast and contract the left side of her face . . . the woman threatened him, adjured him to be quiet, but after a short time he interrupted her and it was he alone who thought and spoke. T h e woman was now passive like an automaton, obviously no longer understanding what was said to her. It was the fox which answered maliciously instead. At the end of ten minutes the fox spoke in a more confused manner, the woman gradually came to herself and assumed back her normal state. She remembered the first part of the fit and begged us with tears to forgive her for the outrageous conduct of the fox.13

But this is one case. I have not found any other patient in which such distinct laterality phenomena were in evidence.

In puzzling about the neurology of negatory possession, it can be helpful, I think, to consider the contemporary illness known as Gilles de la Tourette’s Syndrome,14 or, occasionally, "foul-mouth disease." This bizarre group of symptoms usually begins in childhood at age five or sometimes earlier, with perhaps merely a repeated facial twitch or bad word out of context. This then develops into an uncontrollable emission of ripe obscenities, grunts, barks, or profanities in the middle of otherwise normal 13 E. Balz, Ueber Besessenheit (Leipzig, 1907), as translated by Oesterreich, Possession,, p. 227. Physicians attending her were astonished to see the cleverness of speech, the witty and ironic language, so unlike the patient's own, which the 'fox'

displayed.

14 For recent work on this subject as well as its history, see the references and data in A. K. Shapiro, E. Shapiro, H. L. Wayne, J. Clarkin, and R. D. Bruun,

"Tourette's Syndrome: summary of data on 34. patients," Psychosomatic Medicine, 973, 35:419-435.

352 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World conversation, as well as various facial tics, sticking out the tongue, etc. These often continue through adult life, much to the distress of the patient. Such persons often end up refusing to leave their homes because of their horror and embarrassment at their own intermittent uncontrollable vulgarity. In one case I knew of recently, the man invented a cover of having severe bladder problems requiring him to urinate often. Actually, every time he dashed to the Men’s Room while at a restaurant or to the bathroom in a house, it was the welling up of profanity that he went to relieve himself of by shouting it at toilet walls.15 To be profane myself, the linguistic feeling within him may not have been unlike the prophet Jeremiah’s fire shut up in his bones (see 11:6), although the semantic product was somewhat (but not altogether) different.

What is of interest here is that Tourette’s Syndrome so clearly resembles the initial phase of stress-produced possession as to force upon us the suspicion that they share a common physiological mechanism. And this may indeed be incomplete hemispheric dominance, in which the speech areas of the right hemisphere (perhaps stimulated by impulses from the basal ganglia) are periodically breaking through into language under conditions which would have produced an hallucination in bicameral man.

Accordingly it is not surprising that almost all sufferers from Tourette's Syndrome have abnormal brain wave patterns, some central nervous system damage, and are usually left-handed (in the majority of left-handed persons there is mixed dominance), and that the symptoms begin around the age of five when the neurological development of hemispheric dominance in regard to language is being completed.

Now all of this says something important but unsettling about 15 Tourette’s Syndrome is often if not usually misdiagnosed as a form of insanity, which it definitely is not. Fortunately and interestingly, however, one of the new anti-psychotic tranquilizers, haloperidol, has been found to abolish the symptoms — which it did in the above-mentioned cases. I am grateful to Dr. Shapiro for discussion on these points.

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our nervous systems. For while I believe the neurological model in I.5 to be in the right direction, we are getting further and further away from it. It is very improbable that modern spirit possession is everywhere engaging right hemisphere speech centers for the articulated speech itself. Such an hypothesis is contrary to so many clinical facts as to rule it out except in highly unusual cases.

A more likely possibility, perhaps, is that the neurological difference between the bicameral mind and modern possession states is that in the former, hallucinations were indeed organized and heard from the right hemisphere; while in possession, the articulated speech is our normal left hemisphere speech but controlled or under the guidance of the right hemisphere. In other words, what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere is using Broca's area on the left hemisphere, the result being the trance state and its depersonalization. Such cross control could be the neurological substrate of the loss of normal consciousness.

Possession in the Modern World

I wish now to turn to induced possession in our own times to demonstrate with some conclusiveness that it is a learned phenomenon. The best example I have found is the Umbanda religion, the largest by far of the Afro-Brazilian religions practiced today by over half the population of Brazil. It is believed in as a source of decision by persons of all ethnic backgrounds and is certainly the most extensive occurrence of induced possession since the third century.

Let us look in on a typical gira or “turn around,” as an Umbanda session is so aptly called.16 It may be taking place at the present time in a room above a store or in an abandoned garage.

16 This entire section on the Umbanda is based on the extremely rich and definitive study of Esther Pressel, “Umbanda Trance and Possession in Sao Paulo, Brazil,” in Felicitas Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination (New York: Wiley, 1974.).

354 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World Perhaps a dozen or fewer mediums (70 percent are women), all dressed ceremoniously in white, come out from a tiring room in front of a white-draped altar crammed with flowers, candles, and statues and pictures of Christian saints, an audience of a hundred or so being beyond a railing on the other side of the room. The drummers beat and the audience sings, as the mediums begin to sway or dance. This swaying and dancing is always in a counter-clockwise motion, that is, beginning with motor impulses from the right hemisphere. There follows a Christian type of service.

Then drums are once more pounded furiously, everyone sings, and the mediums begin to call their spirits; some spin to the left like whirling dervishes, again exciting their right hemispheres.

There is the explicit metaphor here of the medium as a cavalo or horse. A particular spirit is supposed to lower himself into his cavalo. As this is happening, the head and chest of the cavalo, or medium, jerks back and forth in opposing directions like a bronco being ridden. The hair falls into disarray. Facial expressions become contorted, as in ancient examples I have cited.

Posture changes into the likeness of any of several possessing spirits. The possession accomplished, the ‘spirits’ may dance for a few minutes, may greet each other in the possessed state, may perform other actions suitable to the type of spirit, and then, when the drumming stops, go to preassigned places, and, curiously, as they wait for members of the audience to come forward for the consultas, they snap their fingers impatiently as their hands rest beside their bodies, palms outward. In the consultas the possessed medium may be asked for, and may give, decisions on any illness or personal problem, on getting or keeping a job, on financial business practices, family quarrels, love affairs, or even, among students, advice about scholastic grades.

Now the evidence that possession is a learned mentality is very clear in these Brazilian cults. In a bairro playground, one may occasionally see children in their play imitating the distinctive back-and-forth jerking of the head and chest that is used for

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inducing and terminating spirit possession. If a child wishes to become a medium, he is encouraged to do so and given special training, just as were the young country girls who became the oracles at Delphi and elsewhere. Indeed, some of the many Umbanda centers (there are 4000 in Sao Paulo alone) hold regular training sessions, where the procedures include various ways of making the novice dizzy in order to teach him or her the trance state, as well as techniques similar to those used in hypnosis.

And in the trance state, the novice is taught how each of several possible spirits behaves. This fact of a differentiation of possessing spirits is important, and I wish to comment further on it and its function in culture.

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. That is, they should not be considered as isolated phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter around doing nothing but leaning on their own antique merits.

Instead, they always live at the very heart of a culture or subcul-ture, moving out and filling up the unspoken and the unrationalized. They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of excerption and the constraints on narratization and conciliation.

Such vestiges of the bicameral mind as we are here considering are no exception. A possession religion such as the Umbanda functions as a powerful psychological support to the heterogeneous masses of its poor and uneducated and needy. It is pervaded with a feeling of caridade, or charity, which consoles and binds together this motley of political impotents, whose urbaniza-tion and ethnic diversity has stranded them without roots. And look at the pattern of particular neurological organizations that emerge as possessing divinities. They remind us of the presenting personal gods of Sumer and Babylon, interceders with those

356 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World above them. Each medium on any particular night may be possessed by an individual spirit from any of four main groups.

They are, in order of frequency:

the caboclos, spirits of Brazilian-Indian warriors, who advise in situations requiring quick and decisive action, such as obtaining or maintaining a job;

the pretos velhos, spirits of old Afro-Brazilian slaves, adept at handling long drawn-out personal problems;

the crianças, spirits of dead children, whose mediums make playful suggestions;

the exus (demons) or, if female, pombagiras (turning pigeons), spirits of wicked foreigners, whose mediums make vulgar and aggressive suggestions.

Each of these four main types of possessor spirits represents a different ethnic group corresponding to the ethnic hybridism of the worshipers: Indian, African, Brazilian (the criangas are “like us”), and European, respectively. Each represents a different familial relationship to the petitioner: father, grandfather, sibling, and stranger respectively. And each represents a different area of decision: quick decisions for choices of action, comforting advice on personal problems, playful suggestions, and decisions in matters of aggression respectively. Even as the Greek gods were originally distinguished as areas of decision, so the spirits of the Umbanda. And the whole is like a network or metaphor matrix of four-way inner-related distinctiveness that binds the individuals together and holds them in a culture.

And all this, I suggest, is a vestige of the bicameral mind, as we go through these millennia of adjusting to a new mentality.

True possession, as described by Plato and others, has always been held to go on without consciousness, thus differentiating it from acting. But the training of the persons of oracles must have admitted of degrees and stages toward such a state. In the Brazilian possession religions, apparently, this is exactly what happens.

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The young novice may begin by acting out possession in play, then proceed with his training until eventually he can separate what a spirit would say from what he himself would normally talk about. Then there occurs a stage of passing back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. And then with full possession, perhaps the connecting up of Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere with Broca's on the left, the much-desired state of unconsciousness, with no remembrance of what happens.

This, however, is true of only some mediums. And in any pseudobicameral practice as extensive as this, it is to be expected that there will be many different qualities and degrees of acting and trance even within the same individual.

Glossolalia

A final phenomenon that is weakly similar to induced possession is glossolalia, or what the apostle Paul called “speaking in tongues.” It consists of fluent speech in what sounds like a strange language which the speaker himself does not understand and usually does not remember saying. It seems to have begun with the early Christian Church17 in the asserted descent of the ghost of God into the assembled apostles. This event was regarded as the birthday of the Christian Church and is commemo-rated in the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter.18

Acts 2 describes what is probably its first instance in history as a great rushing wind roaring with cloven tongues of fire, in which all the apostles begin to speak as if drunk in languages they had never learned.

17 Old Testament references to Yahweh’s pouring out his spirit are sometimes put forth as references to glossolalia, but I find this utterly unconvincing. The phenomenon can be regarded as peculiarly of Christian origin, particularly in the writings of, or influenced by, Paul.

18 Today at Vatican celebrations of Pentecost, red is worn to symbolize the tongues of fire; and in Protestant churches, white, to symbolize the Holy Ghost, hence the English term Whitsuntide, around white Sunday.

358 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World This alteration of mentality happening to the likes of the apostles became its own authorization. The practice spread.

Soon early Christians were doing it everywhere. Paul even put it on a level with prophecy (I Corinthians 14:27, 29). From time to time in the centuries since Paul, glossolalia as a search for authorization after the breakdown of the bicameral mind has had its periods of fashion.

Its recent practice, not just by the sects that are theologically extremely conservative, but also by members of mainline Protestant churches, has pushed it into some scientific scrutiny with some interesting results. Glossolalia first happens always in groups and always in the context of religious services. I am stressing the group factor, since I think this strengthening of the collective cognitive imperative is necessary for a particularly deep type of trance. Often there will be what corresponds to an induction, particularly hymn singing of a rousing sort, followed by the exhortations of a charismatic leader: “If you feel your language change, don’t resist it, let it happen.”19

The worshiper, through repeated attendance at such meetings, watching others in glossolalia, first learns to enter into a deep-trance state of diminished or absent consciousness in which he is not responsive to exteroceptive stimuli. The trance in this case is almost an autonomic one: shakes, shivers, sweat, twitches, and tears. Then he or she may somehow learn to "let it happen."

And it does, loud and clear, each phrase ending in a groan: aria ariari isa, vena amiria as aria!20 The rhythm pounds, the way epic dactyls probably did to the hearers of the aoidoi. And this quality of regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables, so similar to that of the Homeric epics, as well as the rising and then downward intonation at the end of each phrase, does not — and this is astonishing — does not vary with the native 19 Felicitas D. Goodman, "Disturbances in the Apostolic Church: A Trance-Based Upheaval in Yucatan," in Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination, pp. 227-364.

20 From a tape of Dr. Goodman's of a male glossolalist of Mayan descent in Yucatan. Ibid., pp. 262-263.

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language of the speaker. If the subject is English, Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, African, or Mayan, or wherever he is, the pattern of glossolalia is the same.21

After the glossolalia, the subject opens his eyes and slowly returns from these unconscious heights to dusty reality, remembering little of what happened. But he is told. He has been possessed by the Holy Spirit. He has been chosen by God as his puppet. His problems are stopped in hope and his sorrows torn with joy. It is the ultimate in authorization since the Holy Spirit is one with the highest source of all being. God has chosen to enter the lowly subject and has articulated his speech with the subject's own tongue. The individual has become a god —

briefly.

The cruel daylight of it all is less inspiring. While the phenomenon is not simply gibberish, nor can the average person duplicate the fluency and structure of what is spoken, it has no semantic meaning whatever. Tapes of glossolalia played before others in the same religious group are given utterly inconsistent interpretations.22 That the metered vocalizations are similar across the cultures and language of the speakers, probably indicates that rhythmical discharges from subcortical structures are coming into play, released by the trance state of lesser cortical control.23

The ability does not last. It attenuates. The more it is prac-21 The important result of Dr. Goodman's earlier study., Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

22 This is a generalization from the careful work of John P. Kildahl on twenty-six American glossolalists all belonging to major Protestant denominations. See his The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). He also gives a very complete bibliography on the matter.

23 "The surface structure of a non-linguistic deep structure," as Dr. Goodman says in structuralist terms (p. 151-152). But the idea of an energy discharge from subcortical structures under diminished consciousness has been sharply criticized, particularly by the linguist W. J. Samarin in his review of Goodman in Language, 1974, 50:207-212. See also his Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972). I am grateful to Ronald Baker of the University of Prince Edward Island for bringing this to my attention.

360 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World ticed, the more it becomes conscious, which destroys the trance.

An essential ingredient of the phenomenon, at least in more educated groups where the cognitive imperative would be weaker, is the presence of a charismatic leader who first teaches the phenomenon. And if tongue speaking is to be continued at all, and the resulting euphoria makes it a devoutly wished state of mind, the relationship with the authoritative leader must be continued. It is really this ability to abandon the conscious direction of one's speech controls in the presence of an authority figure regarded as benevolent that is the essential thing. As we might expect, glossolalists by the Thematic Apperception Test reveal themselves as more submissive, suggestible, and dependent in the presence of authority figures than those who cannot exhibit the phenomenon.24

It is, then, this pattern of essential ingredients, the strong cognitive imperative of religious belief in a cohesive group, the induction procedures of prayer and ritual, the narrowing of consciousness into a trance state, and the archaic authorization in the divine spirit and in the charismatic leader, which denotes this phenomenon as another instance of the general bicameral paradigm and therefore a vestige of the bicameral mind.

Aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos

My comparison of the sound of speaking in tongues with the sound of the Greek epics to their hearers (the second line above is the first line of the Iliad) is not just an ornature of my style. It is a very deliberate comparison. And one that I intend now as a lead-in to the next chapter. For we should not leave our inquiry into these cultural antiques without at least noting the oddity, the difference, the true profundity, and — ultimately — the question of and for poetry.

24 John P. Kildahl, The Final Progress Report: Glossolalia and Mental Health (for NIMH), privately circulated.

C H A P T E R 3

Of Poetry and Music

WHY HAS so much of the textual material we have used as evidence in earlier chapters been poetry? And why, particularly in times of stress, have a huge proportion of the readers of this page written poems? What unseen light leads us to such dark practice? And why does poetry flash with recognitions of thoughts we did not know we had, finding its unsure way to something in us that knows and has known all the time, something, I think, older than the present organization of our nature?

To charter a discussion down this optional and deserted topic at this point in what has hitherto been a fairly linear argument may seem an unwarranted indirection. But the chapters of Book III, in contrast to the previous two books, are not a consecutive procession. They are rather a selection of divergent trajectories out of our bicameral past into present times. And I think it will become obvious that the earlier argument, particularly as relating to the Greek epics, needs to be rounded out with the present chapter.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.

362 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World The evidence is, of course, only inferential. It is that all of those individuals who remained bicameral into the conscious age, when speaking of or from the divine side of their minds, spoke in poetry. The great epics of Greece were of course heard and spoken by the aoidoi as poetry. The ancient writings of Mesopotamia and Egypt are darkened with our ignorance of how such languages were pronounced; but with such assurances in transliteration as we can muster, such writings when spoken were also poetry. In India, the oldest literature is the Veda, which were dictated by gods to the rishi or prophets; these too were poetry.

Oracles spoke poetry. From time to time, their utterances from Delphi and elsewhere were written down, and every one of them that survives as more than a simple phrase is in dactylic hexameter, just as were the epics. The Hebrew prophets also, when relaying the hallucinated utterance of Yahweh, were often poets, though their scribes did not in every case preserve such speech in verse.

As the bicameral mind recedes further into history, and the oracles reach their fifth term, there are exceptions. Poetic utterance by the oracles breaks down here and there. The oracle at Delphi, for example, in the first century A.D. evidently spoke in both verse and prose, the latter to be put into verse by poets in the service of the temples.1 But the very impulse to transpose oracular prose back into dactylic hexameters is, I suggest, a part of the nostalgia for the divine in this late period; it demonstrates again that metered verse had been the rule previously. Even later, some oracles still spoke exclusively in dactylic hexameters. Tacitus, for example, visited the oracle of Apollo at Claros about A.D.

1 Strabo, Geography, 9.3.5, or as translated by H. L. Jones in the Loeb edition, p. 353. This observation was made about A.D. 30. Plutarch's offhand suggestion in the second century a.d. that the raw prophetic outpouring of the oracle always had to be versified by inspired prophetes is contrary to all the earlier writings and evidence from the oracles themselves. See his The Oracles of Delphi in Vol. 5 of The Moralia, Loeb edition. I am not sure how seriously we should take Plutarch's rambling after-dinner conversation piece.

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100 and described how the entranced priest listened to his decision-seeking petitioners; he then

. . . swallows a draught of water from a mysterious spring and — though ignorant generally of writing and of meters —

delivers his response in set verses.2

Poetry then was divine knowledge. And after the breakdown of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization. Poetry commanded where prose could only ask. It felt good. In the wanderings of the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt, it was the sacred shrine that was carried before the multitude and followed by the people, but it was the poetry of Moses that determined when they would start and when stop, where they would go and where stay.3

The association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utterance with supernatural knowledge endures well into the later conscious period. Among the early Arabic peoples the word for poet was sha’ir, ‘the knower’, or a person endowed with knowledge by the spirits; his metered speech in recitation was the mark of its divine origin. The poet and divine seer have a long tradition of association in the ancient world, and several Indo-European languages have a common term for them. Rhyme and allitera-tion too were always the linguistic province of the gods and their prophets.4 In at least some instances of spontaneous possession, the demonic utterances are in meter.5 Even glossolalia today, as 2 Tacitus, Annals, 2:54, or as translated by John Jackson in the Loeb edition, p. 471.

3 Numbers 10:35, 36. My authority that these lines in Hebrew come under the rubric of poetry is Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrew and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938), p. 244.

4 Guillaume, p. 245.

5 A possessed woman in China at the beginning of this century, for example, would extemporize verses by the hour. "Everything she said was in measure verse, and was chanted to an unvarying tune . . . the rapid, perfectly uniform, and long continued utterances seemed to us such as could not possibly be counterfeited or premeditated."

J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes, p. 3 7f.

364 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World we have seen in III.2, wherever it is practiced, tends to fall into metrical patterns, particularly dactyls.

Poetry then was the language of gods.

Poetry and Song

All the above discussion is mere literary tradition and sounds more plea than proof. We should, therefore, ask if there is another way of approaching the matter to show the relationship of poetry to the bicameral mind more scientifically. There is, I think, if we look at the relation of poetry to music.

First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.

Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stress as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch.6 In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations

´,ˆ,ìmply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.

6 It was Thomas Day, whose new and syntactically vigorous translation of the Iliad is eagerly awaited, who first recited or rather sang epic Greek to me as it should be done. For the theory here, see W. B. Stanford, The Sound of Greek (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and play the record inserted in the back cover.

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Now how does all this relate to the bicameral mind? Speech, as has long been known, is a function primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere. But song, as we are presently discovering, is primarily a function of the right cerebral hemisphere. The evidence is various but consistent:

• It is common medical knowledge that many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak can still sing.

• The so-called Wada Test is sometimes performed in hospitals to find out a person’s cerebral dominance. Sodium amytal is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation but leaving the other awake and alert. When the injection is made on the left side so that the left hemisphere is sedated and only the right hemisphere is active, the person is unable to speak, but can still sing. When the injection is on the right so that only the left hemisphere is active, the person can speak but cannot sing.7

• Patients in whom the entire left hemisphere has been removed because of glioma can only manage a few words, if any, postoperatively. But at least some can sing.8 One such patient with only a speechless right hemisphere to his name “was able to sing ‘America’ and ‘Home on the Range,’ rarely missing a word and with nearly perfect enunciation.”9

• Electrical stimulation on the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to the posterior temporal lobe, particularly the anterior temporal lobe, often produces hallucinations of singing and music.

I have already described some of these patients in 1.5. And this in general is the area, corresponding to Wernicke’s area on the 7 H. W. Gordon and J. E. Bogen, “Hemispheric Lateralization of Singing after Intracarotid Sodium Ammo-barbitol,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 1974, 37: 727-739.

8 H. W. Gordon, “Auditory Specialization of Right and Left Hemispheres,” in M. Kinsbourne and W. Lynn Smith, eds. Hemispheric Disconnections and Cerebral Function (Springfield: Thomas, 1974), pp. 126-136.

9 Charles W. Burklund, “Cerebral Hemisphere Function in the Human,” in W. L. Smith ed., Drug, Development and Cerebral Function (Springfield: Thomas, 1972), p. 22.

366 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World left hemisphere, which I have hypothesized was where the auditory hallucinations of the bicameral mind were organized.

Singing and melody then are primarily right hemisphere activities. And since poetry in antiquity was sung rather than spoken, it was perhaps largely a right hemisphere function, as the theory of the bicameral mind in I.5 would predict. More specifically, ancient poetry involved the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, which I have suggested was responsible for organizing divine hallucinations, together with adjacent areas which even today are involved in music.

For those who are still skeptical, I have devised an experiment where they may even feel for themselves right now the truth of these matters. First, think of two topics, anything, personal or general, on which you would like to talk for a couple of paragraphs. Now, imagining you are with a friend, speak out loud on one of the topics. Next, imagining you are with a friend, sing out loud on the other topic. Do each for one full minute, demanding of yourself that you keep going. Compare introspectively. Why is the second so much more difficult? Why does the singing crumble into cliches? Or the melody erode into recitative? Why does the topic desert you in midmelody? What is the nature of your efforts to get your song back on the topic? Or rather — and I think this is more the feeling — to get your topic back to the song?

The answer is that your topic is ‘in’ Wernicke’s area on your left hemisphere, while your song is ‘in’ what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on your right hemisphere. Let me hasten to add that such a statement is an approximation neurologically. And by

‘topic’ and ‘song’ I am meaning their neural substrates. But such an approximation is true enough to make my point. It is as if volitional speech is jealous of the right hemisphere and wants you to itself, just as your song is jealous of the left hemisphere and wants you to leave your left hemisphere topic behind. To

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accomplish the improvised singing of a pre-decided topic feels as if we were jumping back and forth between hemispheres. And so in a sense 'we' are, deciding on the words in the left and then trying to get back to song with them on the right before some other words have got there first. And usually the latter happens, the words are not on the topic, careering off on their own, or not consecutively coherent or not there at all, and so we stop singing.

Of course we can learn to sing our verbal thoughts to a certain extent and musicians often do. And women, since they are less lateralized, may find it easier. If you practice it as an exercise twice a day for a month or a year or a lifetime, sincerely avoiding cliche and memorized material on the lyric side, and mere recitative on the melody side, I expect you will be more proficient at it.

If you are ten years old, such learning will probably be much easier and might even make a poet out of you. And if you should be unlucky enough to have some left hemisphere accident at some future time, your thought-singing might come in handy.

What is learned here is very probably a new relationship between the hemispheres, not entirely different from some of the learned phenomena in the previous chapter.

The Nature of Music

I wish to expand a little upon the role of instrumental music in all this. For we also hear and appreciate music with our right hemispheres.

Such lateralization of music can be seen even in very young infants. Six-month-old babies can be given EEG's while being held in the laps of their mothers. If the recording electrodes are placed directly over Wernicke's area on the left hemisphere and over what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right, then when tape recordings of speech are played, the left hemisphere will show the greatest activity. But when a tape of a music box is played or of someone singing, the activity will be greater over the

368 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World right hemisphere. In the experiment I am describing, not only did the children who were fidgeting or crying stop doing so at the sound of music, but also they smiled and looked straight ahead, turning away from the mother’s gaze,10 even acting as we do when we are trying to avoid distraction. This finding has an immense significance for the possibility that the brain is organized at birth to ‘obey’ stimulation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere, namely the music, and not be distracted from it, even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologically had to obey hallucinations from the same area. It also points to the great significance of lullabies in development, perhaps influencing a child's later creativity.

Or you can prove this laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will perceive and remember the music on the left earphone better.11 This is because the left ear has greater neural representation on the right hemisphere. The specific location here is probably the right anterior temporal lobe, for patients in which it has been removed from the right hemisphere find it very difficult to distinguish one melody from another. And, conversely, with left temporal lobectomies, patients postoperatively have no trouble with such tests.12

10 This is the interesting recent work of Martin Gardiner of the Boston Children's Hospital, personal communication. It is to be published as "EEG Indicators of Lateralization in Human Infants" in S. Hamad, R. Doty, L. Goldstein, J. Jaynes, and G. Krauthammer, eds., Lateralization in the Nervous System (New York: Academic Press, 1976).

11 The experiment was done with Vivaldi concertos by Doreen Kimura, “Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening,” Cortex, 1967, 3: 163—178.

But there is evidence that this is not true of musicians whose training has resulted in music’s being represented on both hemispheres. This was first discovered by R. C.

Oldfield, “Handedness and the Nature of Dominance,” Talk at Educational Testing Service, Princeton, September 1969. See also Thomas G. Bever and R. J. Chiarello,

"Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Non-Musicians," Science (1974), Vol. 185, pp. 137-139.

12 D. Shankweiler, “Effects of Temporal-Lobe Damage on Perception of Dichoti-cally Presented Melodies,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1966, 62 : 115—119.

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Now we know neurologically that there can be a spread of excitation from one point of the cortex to adjacent points. Thus it becomes likely that a buildup of excitation in those areas on the right hemisphere serving instrumental music should spread to those adjacent serving divine auditory hallucinations — or vice versa. And hence this close relationship between instrumental music and poetry, and both with the voices of gods. I am suggesting here that the invention of music may have been as a neural excitant to the hallucinations of gods for decision-making in the absence of consciousness.

It is thus no idle happenstance of history that the very name of music comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses. For music too begins in the bicameral mind.

We thus have some ground for saying that the use of the lyre among early poets was to spread excitation to the divine speech area, the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, from immediately adjacent areas. So also the function of flutes that accompanied the lyric and elegiac poets of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. And when such musical accompaniment is no longer used, as it is not in later Greek poetry, it is, I suggest, because the poem is no longer being sung from the right hemisphere where such spreading excitation would help. It is instead being recited from left hemispheric memory alone, rather than being recreated in the true prophetic trance.

This change in musical accompaniment is also reflected in the way poetry is referred to, although a large amount of historical overlap makes the case not quite so clear. But more early poetry is referred to as song (as in the Iliad and the Theogony, for example), while later poetry is often referred to as spoken or told. This change perhaps corresponds roughly to the change from the aoidoi with their lyres to the rhapsodes with their rhapdoi (light sticks, perhaps to beat the meter) that took place perhaps in the eighth or seventh centuries B.C. And behind these

370 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World particulars is the more profound psychological change from bicameral composition to conscious recitation, and from oral to written remembering. In much later poetry, however, the poet as singer and his poem as song are brought back metaphorically as a conscious archaism, yielding its own authorization to the now conscious poet.13

Poesy and Possession

A third way to examine this transformation of poetry during the rise and spread of consciousness is to look at the poet himself and his mentality. Specifically, were the relations of poets to the Muses the same as the relationship of the oracles to the greater gods?

For Plato at least, the matter was quite clear. Poetry was a divine madness. It was katokoche or possession by the Muses;

. . . all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed . . . there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him.14

Poets then, around 400 B.C., were comparable in mentality to the oracles of the same period, and went through similar psychological transformation when they performed.

Now we might be tempted to think with Plato that such possession characterized poetry all the way back into the epic tradition.

But the evidence does not warrant such a generalization. In the Iliad itself, so many centuries before the existence of katokoche is ever mentioned or observed, a good argument could be made that the primitive aoidos was not "out of his senses and the mind no 13 On this matter see T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 271f.

14 Plato, Io. 534.

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longer in him.” For in several places, the poem breaks off as the poet gets stuck and has to beg the Muses to go on (2:483, 11:218,14:508,16:112).

Let it be stressed parenthetically here that the Muses were not figments of anyone’s imagination. I would ask the reader to peruse the first pages of Hesiod’s Theogony and realize that all of it was probably seen and heard in hallucination, just as can happen today in schizophrenia or under certain drugs. Bicameral men did not imagine; they experienced. The beautiful Muses with their unison “lily-like” voice, dancing out of the thick mists of evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely enraptured shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hallucinatory sources of memory in late bicameral men, men who did not live in a frame of past happenings, who did not have

‘lifetimes’ in our sense, and who could not reminisce because they were not fully conscious. Indeed, this is put into mythology by their chosen medium, the shepherd of Helicon himself: the Muses who, he tells us, always sing together with the same phrenes 15 and in “unwearying flows” of song, this special group of divinities who, instead of telling men what to do, specialized in telling certain men what had been done, are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Titaness whose name later comes to mean memory — the first word with that meaning in the world.

Such appeals to the Muses then are identical in function with our appeals to memory, like tip-of-the-tongue struggles with recollection. They do not sound like a man out of his senses who doesn’t know what he is doing. In one instance in the Iliad, the poet begins to have difficulty and so begs the Muses, Say now to me, Muses, having Olympian homes, for you are goddesses, and are present and know all; but we hear report 15 The Greek for singing together is homophronas, in Hesiod, Theogony, line 60.

I know of no records of contemporary hallucinations that sound like a group of people in unison. Just why the Muses are plural is an interesting problem. See II. 4, note 2.

372 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World alone, neither do we know anything: tell me who were the leaders and rulers of the Greeks? ( 2 : 4 8 3 - 4 8 7 ) and then goes on to plead in his own person that he, the poet, cannot name them, though he had "ten tongues and ten mouths and an unbreakable voice," unless the Muses start singing the material to him. I have italicized a phrase in the quotation to underline their actuality to the poet.

Nor does possession seem to be occurring in Hesiod in his first meeting with them on the holy flanks of Mount Helicon while he was keeping watch over his sheep. He describes how the Muses

. . . breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they begged me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.16

Again, I think this should be believed literally as someone’s experience in exactly the same way that we believe in the experience of Hesiod's contemporary, Amos, in his meeting with Yahweh in the meadows of Tekoa while he too was keeping watch over his flock.17 Nor does it seem possession when the Muses’ Theogony stops (line 104) and Hesiod cries out again in his own voice, praising the Muses and pleading with them again to go on with the poem: “Tell me these things from the beginning, you Muses,” having just given a long list of the topics which the poet wants the poem to be about (line 114).

Nor does the stately and careful description of Demodocus in the Odyssey permit an interpretation of the poet as possessed.

Evidently Demodocus, if he was real, may have gone through 16 Hesiod, Theogony, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library.

Another reason for thinking that this Hesiod is not the author of Works and Days, as I suggested in II.5, is the last phrase above. Certainly the work I have ascribed to Perses is not true to this promise to sing only about the gods "both first and last."

17 Amos, too, was not in a state of possession since he too had dialogue with his god. See Amos 7: 5-8; 8: 1-2. In some of my phrasing I am trying to remind the reader of Luke 2: 8-14.

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some kind of cerebral accident which left him blind, but with the power to hear the Muses sing such enchanting poetry as could make an Odysseus drape his head and moan with tears (8:63-92). Indeed Odysseus himself understands that Demodocus of the disabled vision, who could not have witnessed the Trojan War, could sing about it only because the Muse, or Apollo, was actually telling it to him. His chant was hormetheis theou, constantly given by the god himself (81499).

The evidence, therefore, suggests that up to the eighth and probably the seventh century B.C., the poet was not out of his mind as he was later in Plato’s day. Rather, his creativity was perhaps much closer to what we have come to call bicameral.

The fact that such poets were “wretched things of shame, mere bellies,” as the Muses scornfully mocked their human adoring mediums,18 unskilled roughs who came from the more primitive and lonely levels of the social structure, such as shepherds, is in accord with such a suggestion. Mere bellies out in the fields had less opportunity to be changed by the new mentality. And loneli-ness can lead to hallucination.

But by the time of Solon in the sixth century B.C., something different is happening. The poet is no longer simply given his gifts j he has to have “learning in the gift of the Muses” (Fragment 13:51). And then, in the fifth century B.C., we hear the very first hint of poets’ being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. What a contrast to the calm and stately manner of the earlier aoidoi, Demodocus, for example! It is Democritus who insists that no one can be a great poet without being frenzied up into a state of fury (Fragment 18). And then in the fourth century B.C., the mad possessed poet “out of his senses” that Plato and I have already described. Just as the oracles had changed from the prophet who heard his hallucinations to the possessed person in a wild trance, so also had the poet.

Was this dramatic change because the collective cognitive im-18 Hesiod, Theogony, 1. 26.

374 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World perative had made the Muses less believable as real external entities? Or was it because the neurological reorganization of hemispheric relations brought on by developing consciousness prohibited such givenness; so that consciousness had to be out of the way to let poetry happen? Or was it Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere using Broca's area on the left, thus short-circuiting (as it were) normal consciousness? Or are these three hypotheses the same (as of course I presently think they are) ?

For whatever reasons, decline continues decline in the ensuing centuries. Just as the oracles sputtered out through their latter terms until possession was partial and erratic, so, I suggest, poets slowly changed until the fury and possession by the Muses was also partial and erratic. And then the Muses hush and freeze into myths. Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written by the poet himself, and written, it should be added, by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The Muses have become imaginary and invoked in their silence as a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind.

In summary, then, the theory of poetry I am trying to state in this scraggly collation of passages is similar to the theory I presented for oracles. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets. Some become institutionalized as oracles making decisions for the future. While others become specialized into poets, relating from the gods statements about the past.

Then, as the bicameral mind shrinks back from its impulsive-ness, and as perhaps a certain reticence falls upon the right hemisphere, poets who are to obtain this same state must learn to do it. As this becomes more difficult, the state becomes a fury, and then ecstatic possession, just as happened in the oracles.

And then indeed toward the end of the first millennium B.C., just as the oracles began to become prosaic and their statements

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versified consciously, so poetry also. Its givenness by the unison Muses has vanished. And conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine utterances.

Why as the gods retreated even further into their silent heavens or, in another linguistic mode, as auditory hallucinations shrank back from access by left hemisphere monitoring mechanisms, why did not the dialect of the gods simply disappear?

Why did not poets simply cease their rhapsodic practices as did the priests and priestesses of the great oracles? The answer is very clear. The continuance of poetry, its change from a divine given to a human craft is part of that nostalgia for the absolute.

The search for the relationship with the lost otherness of divine directives would not allow it to lapse. And hence the frequency even today with which poems are apostrophes to often unbelieved-in entities, prayers to unknown imaginings. And hence the opening paragraph of this treatise. The forms are still there, to be worked with now by the analog ‘I’ of a conscious poet. His task now is an imitation or mimesis19 of the former type of poetic utterance and the reality which it expressed. Mimesis in the bicameral sense of mimicking what was heard in hallucination has moved through the mimesis of Plato as representation of reality to mimesis as imitation with invention in its sullen service.

There have been some latter-day poets who have been very specific about actual auditory hallucinations. Milton referred to his "Celestial Patroness, who . . . unimplor'd . . . dictates to me my unpremeditated Verse," even as he, in his blindness, dictated it to his daughters.20 And Blake's extraordinary visions and auditory hallucinations — sometimes going on for days and sometimes against his will — as the source of his painting and 19 On the history of this word, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967), p. 57, n. 22, as well as Ch. 2.

20 Paradise Lost, 9: 21-24.

376 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World poetry are well known. And Rilke is said to have feverishly copied down a long sonnet sequence that he heard in hallucination.

But most of us are more ordinary, more with and of our time.

We no longer hear our poems directly in hallucination. It is instead the feeling of something being given and then nourished into being, of the poem happening to the poet, as well and as much as being created by him. Snatches of lines would “bubble up” for Housman after a beer and a walk “with sudden and unaccountable emotions” which then “had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain.” “The songs made me, not I them,”

said Goethe. “It is not I who think,” said Lamartine, “it is my ideas that think for me.” And dear Shelley said it plain: A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” T h e greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness . . . and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.21

Is the fading coal the left hemisphere and the inconstant wind the right, mapping vestigially the ancient relationship of men to gods?

Of course there is no universal rule in this matter. The nervous systems of poets come like shoes, in all types and sizes, though with a certain irreducible topology. We know that the relations of the hemispheres are not the same in everyone. Indeed, poetry can be written without even a nervous system. A vocabulary, some syntax, and a few rules of lexical fit and measure can be punched into a computer, which can then proceed to write quite inspired’ if surrealist verse. But that is simply a copy of what we, with two cerebral hemispheres and nervous systems, 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” in The Portable Romantic Reader, H. E. Hugo, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 536.

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already do. Computers or men can indeed write poetry without any vestigial bicameral inspiration. But when they do, they are imitating an older and a truer poesy out there in history. Poetry, once started in mankind, needs not the same means for its production. It began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.

And even today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the listener, however it is made, still retains that quality of the wholly other, of a diction and a message, a consolation and an inspiration, that was once our relationship to gods.

A Homily on Thamyris

I would like to end these rather clumsy suggestions on the biology of poetry with some homiletic sentiments on the true tragedy of Thamyris. He was a poet in the Iliad (2:594-600) who boasted he would conquer and control the Muses in his poetry. Gods, as they die away in the transition to consciousness, are jealous gods, as I have said earlier. And the Sacred Nine are no exception. They were enraged at the beautiful ambition of Thamyris. They crippled him (probably a paralysis on his left side), and deprived him forever of poetic expression, and made him forget his ability at harping.

Of course, we do not know if there even was a Thamyris, or exactly what reality is being pointed at by this story. But I suggest it was among the later accretions to the Iliad, and that its insertion may point to the difficulties in hemisphere cooperation in artistic expression at the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

The parable of Thamyris may be narratizing what is to us the feeling of losing consciousness in our inspiration and then losing that inspiration in our consciousness of that loss. Consciousness imitates the gods and is a jealous consciousness and will have no other executives of action before it.

I remember when I was younger, at least through my twenties, while walking in woods or along a beach, or climbing hills or

378 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World almost anything lonely, I would quite often suddenly become conscious that I was hearing in my head improvised symphonies of unambiguous beauty. But at the very moment of my becoming conscious of the fact, not loitering even for a measure! the music vanished. I would strain to call it back. But there would be nothing there. Nothing but a deepening silence. Since the music was undoubtedly being composed in my right hemisphere and heard somehow as a semi-hallucination, and since my analog ‘I’

with its verbalizations was probably, at that moment at least, a more left hemispheric function, I suggest that this opposition was very loosely like what is behind the story of Thamyris. ‘I’ strained too much. I have no left hemiplegia. But I do not hear my music anymore. I do not expect ever to hear it again.

The modern poet is in a similar quandary. Once, literary languages and archaic speech came somehow to his bold assistance in that otherness and grandeur of which true poetry is meant to speak. But the grinding tides of irreversible naturalism have swept the Muses even farther out into the night of the right hemisphere. Yet somehow, even helplessly in our search for authorization, we remain “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration.” And inspiration flees in attempted apprehension, until perhaps it was never there at all. We do not believe enough.

The cognitive imperative dissolves. History lays her finger carefully on the lips of the Muses. The bicameral mind, silent. And since

T h e god approached dissolves into the air,

Imagine then, by miracle, with me,

(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)

What could not possibly be there,

And learn a style from a despair.

C H A P T E R 4

Hypnosis

IF I ASK YOU to taste vinegar as champagne, to feel pleasure when I jab a pin in your arm, or to stare into darkness and contract the pupils of your eyes to an imagined light, or to willfully and really believe something you do not ordinarily believe, just anything, you would find these tasks difficult if not impossible.

But if I first put you through the induction procedures of hypnosis, you could accomplish all these things at my asking without any effort whatever.

Why? How can such supererogatory enabling even exist?

It seems a very different company we enter when we go from the familiarity of poetry to the strangeness of hypnosis. For hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems which constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories and carnivals and clinics and village halls like an unwanted anomaly.

It never seems to straighten up and resolve itself into the firmer proprieties of scientific theory. Indeed, its very possibility seems a denial of our immediate ideas about conscious self-control on the one hand, and our scientific idea about personality on the other. Yet it should be conspicuous that any theory of consciousness and its origin, if it is to be responsible, must face the difficulty of this deviant type of behavioral control.

I think my answer to the opening question is obvious: hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute control over behavior than is possible with consciousness.

380 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World In this chapter, I shall even go so far as to maintain that no theory other than the present one makes sense of the basic problem. For if our contemporary mentality is, as most people suppose, an immutable genetically determined characteristic evolved back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before, how can it be so altered as in hypnosis? And that alteration merely at some rather ridiculous ministrations of another person? It is only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating consciousness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly.

The central structure of this chapter, obviously, will be to show how well hypnosis fits the four aspects of the bicameral paradigm. But before I do so, I wish to bring out clearly a most important feature of how hypnosis began in the first place. This is what I have emphasized in I.2 and II.5, the generative force of metaphor in creating new mentality.

The Paraphrands of Newtonian Forces

Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the comparison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case.1

1 A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief History of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967). See also an historical paper by one of

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This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravitational attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. Therefore, since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism.

Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,”

thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits.

Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of magnetism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effective because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure. We should remember here that just as in ancient Assyria there was no concept of chance and so the casting of lots ‘had’ to be controlled the important experimenters in hypnosis, Theodore Sarbin‘s “Attempts to Understand Hypnotic Phenomena,” in Leo Postman, ed., Psychology in the Making (New York: Knopf, 1964), pp. 745-784.

382 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World by the gods, so in the eighteenth century there was no concept of suggestion and the result had to be due to the magnets.

Then when it was found that not only magnets, but cups, bread, wood, human beings, and animals to which a magnet had been touched were also efficacious (how false beliefs breed upon each other!), the whole matter jumped over into another metaphor (this is the fourth), that of static electricity, which — Ben-jamin Franklin's kite and all — was being so much studied at the time. Thus Mesmer thought there was a "magnetic material"

that could be transferred to a countless array of objects, just as static electricity can. Human beings in particular could store up and absorb magnetism, particularly Mesmer himself. Just as a carbon rod stroked with fur produces static electricity, so patients were to be stroked by Mesmer. He could now dispense with actual magnets and use his own animal magnetism. By stroking or making passes over the bodies of his patients, as if they were carbon rods, he produced the same results: convulsions, coiling twists of peculiar sensations, and the cure of what later were called hysterical illnesses.

Now it is critical here to realize and to understand what we might call the paraphrandic changes which were going on in the people involved, due to these metaphors. A paraphrand, you will remember, is the projection into a metaphrand of the associations or paraphiers of a metaphier. The metaphrand here is the influences between people. The metaphiers, or what these influences are being compared to, are the inexorable forces of gravitation, magnetism, and electricity. And their paraphiers of absolute compulsions between heavenly bodies, of unstoppable currents from masses of Ley den jars, or of irresistible oceanic tides of magnetism, all these projected back into the metaphrand of interpersonal relationships, actually changing them, changing the psychological nature of the persons involved, immersing them in a sea of uncontrollable control that emanated from the

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'magnetic fluids’ in the doctor's body, or in objects which had

'absorbed' such from him.

It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering was a different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a special education in childhood, a surrounding belief system, and isolation from the rest of us, possibly could have sustained itself as a society not based on ordinary consciousness, where metaphors of energy and irresistible control would assume some of the functions of consciousness.

How is this even possible? As I have mentioned already, I think Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization. I shall take up each in turn.

The Changing Nature of Hypnotic Man

That the phenomenon of hypnosis is under the control of a collective cognitive imperative or group belief system is clearly demonstrated by its continual changing in history. As beliefs about hypnosis changed, so also its very nature. A few decades after Mesmer, subjects no longer twisted with strange sensations and convulsions. Instead they began spontaneously to speak and reply to questions during their trance state. Nothing like this had happened before. Then, early in the nineteenth century, patients spontaneously began to forget what had happened during the trance,2 something never reported previously. Around 1825, for some unknown reason, persons under hypnosis started to spontaneously diagnose their own illnesses. In the middle of the century, phrenology, the mistaken idea that conformations of the skull indicate mental faculties, became so popular that it actually 2 As revealed in the important writings of A.-M.-J. Chastenet, Marquis de Puyseg-ur, " Memoires four Servir a L’Histoire et a L’Establissement du Magnetism Animate>" 2nd ed. (Paris, 1809).

384 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World engulfed hypnosis for a time. Pressure on the scalp over a phre-nological area during hypnosis caused the subject to express the faculty controlled by that area (yes, this actually happened), a phenomenon never seen before or since. When the scalp area over the part of the brain supposedly responsible for "veneration"

was pressed, the hypnotized subject sunk to his knees in prayer!3

This was so because it was believed to be so.

A little later, Charcot, the greatest psychiatrist of his time, demonstrated to large professional audiences at the Salpetriere that hypnosis was again quite different! Now it had three successive stages: catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism. These

"physical states" could be changed from one to another by manipulating muscles, or various pressures, or friction on the top of the head. Even rubbing the head over Broca's area produced aphasia! And then Binet, arriving at the Salpetriere to check on the findings of Charcot, promptly compounded the problem by returning to Mesmer's magnets and discovering even more bizarre behavior.4 Placing magnets on one side or the other of the body of a hypnotized person, he could flip-flop perceptions, hysterical paralyses, supposed hallucinations, and movements from one side to the other, as if such phenomena were so many iron filings. None of these absurd results was ever found before or since.

It is not simply that the operator, Mesmer or Charcot or whoever, was suggesting to the pliant patient what the operator believed hypnosis to be. Rather, there had been developed within 3 These demonstrations by Sir James Braid, otherwise the first cautions student of the subject, later embarrassed him. He never referred to such results after 1845 -— and probably never understood them. A detailed account of Braid's pivotal position in the history of hypnosis may be found in J. M. Bramwell, Hypnotism: Its History, Practice, and Theory (London: 19035 New York: Julian Press, 1956).

4 See Alfred Binet and C. Fere, Le Magnetisme Animate (Paris: Alcan, 1897).

This self-deluding work and the dispute with Delboeuf and the more correct Nancy School that followed, as well as Binet's later acknowledgment of his foolish error, are described in Theta Wolf's excellent biography Alfred Binet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 40-78.

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the group in which he worked a cognitive imperative as to what the phenomenon was 'known' to be. Such historical changes then clearly show that hypnosis is not a stable response to given stimuli, but changes as do the expectations and preconceptions of a particular age.

What is obvious in history can be shown in a more experimentally controlled way. Previously unheard-of manifestations of hypnosis can be found by simply informing subjects beforehand that such manifestations are expected in hypnosis, that is, are a part of the collective cognitive imperative about the matter.

For example, an introductory psychology class was casually told that under hypnosis a subject's dominant hand cannot be moved.

This had never occurred in hypnosis in any era. It was a lie.

Nevertheless, when members of the class at a later time were hypnotized, the majority, without any coaching or further suggestion, were unable to move their dominant hand. Out of such studies has come the notion of the "demand characteristics" of the hypnotic situation, that the hypnotized subject exhibits the phenomena which he thinks the hypnotist expects.5 But that expresses it too personally. It is rather what he thinks hypnosis is. And such "demand characteristics," taken in this way, are of precisely the same nature as what I am calling the collective cognitive imperative.

Another way of seeing the force of the collective imperative is to note its strengthening by crowds. Just as religious feeling and belief is enhanced by crowds in churches, or in oracles by the throngs that attended them, so hypnosis in theaters. It is well known that stage hypnotists with an audience packed to the 5 This is one of the important ideas in the history of hypnosis research. See the papers of Martin Orne, particularly, "Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence,"

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1959, 58: 277-299; in this connection David Rosenhan's important and sobering, "On the Social Psychology of Hypnosis Research" in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Psychology.

386 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World rafters, reinforcing the collective imperative or expectancy of hypnosis, can produce far more exotic hypnotic phenomena than are found in the isolation of laboratory or clinic.

The Induction

Secondly, the place of an induction procedure in hypnosis is obvious.6 And needs little comment. The variety of techniques in contemporary practice is enormous, but they all share the same narrowing of consciousness, similar to the induction procedures for oracles, or the relationship between a pelestike and a katochos which we looked at in the previous chapters. The subject may be seated or standing or lying down, may be stroked or not, stared at or not, asked to look at a small light or flame or gem, or perhaps a thumbtack on the wall, or at the thumbnail of his own clasped hands, or not — there are hundreds of variations. But always the operator is trying to confine the subject'; attention to his own voice. "All you hear is my voice and you are getting sleepier and sleepier, etc." is a common pattern, repeated until the subject, if hypnotized, is unable to open his clasped hands if the operator says he can't, for example, or cannot move his relaxed arm if the operator so suggests, or cannot remember his name if that is suggested. Such simple suggestions are often used as indications of the success of the hypnosis in its beginning stages.

If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this fashion, if he cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he remains in a state of consciousness of other considerations, such as the room and his relationship to the operator, if he is still narra-6 The best discussion of induction procedures is that of Perry London, "Hie Induction of Hypnosis," in J. E. Gordon, pp. 44-79. And for discussions of hypnosis in general that I have found helpful, see the papers of Ronald Shor, particularly his

"Hypnosis and the Concept of the Generalized Reality-Orientation," American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1959, 13: 582-602, and "Three Dimensions of Hypnotic Depth," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1962, 10: 23-38.

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tizing with his analog ‘I’ or 'seeing' his metaphor 'me' being hypnotized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful. But repeated attempts with such subjects often succeed, showing that the "narrowing"

of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned ability, learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have called the general bicameral paradigm. As we saw earlier that the ease with which a katochos can enter an hallucinatory trance improves with practice, so also in hypnosis: even in the most susceptible, the length of the induction and its substances can be radically reduced with repeated sessions.

Trance and Paralogic Compliance

Thirdly, the hypnotic trance is called just that. It is of course usually different from the kind of trance that goes on in other vestiges of the bicameral mind. Individuals do not have true auditory hallucinations, as in the trances of oracles or mediums.

That place in the paradigm is taken over by the operator. But there is the same diminution and then absence of normal consciousness. Narratization is severely restricted. The analog 'P is more or less effaced. The hypnotized subject is not living in a subjective world. He does not introspect as we do, does not know he is hypnotized, and is not constantly monitoring himself as, in an unhypnotized state, he does.

In recent times, the metaphor of submersion in water is almost invariably used to talk about the trance. Thus there are references to "going under" and to "deep" or "shallow" trances.

The hypnotist often tells a subject he is going "deeper and deeper." It is indeed possible that without the submersion metaphier, the whole phenomenon would be different, particularly in regard to post-hypnotic amnesia. The paraphiers of above and below the surface of water, with its different visual and tactual fields, could be creating a kind of two-world-ness resulting in something similar to state-dependent memory. And the sudden

388 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World appearance of spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia in the early nineteenth century may be due to this change from gravitational to submersion metaphors. In other words, spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia may have been a paraphrand of the submersion metaphor. (It is interesting to note that such spontaneous amnesia is presently disappearing from hypnotic phenomena.

Possibly, hypnosis has become so familiar as to become a thing in itself, its metaphorical basis wearing away with use, reducing the power of its paraphrands.)

It is in the "deeper" stages of the trance that the most interesting phenomena can be elicited. These are extremely important for any theory of mind to explain. Unless otherwise suggested, the subject is 'deaf' to all but the operator's voice; he does not

'hear' other people. Pain can be 'blocked' off, or enhanced above normal. So can sensory experience. Emotions can be totally structured by suggestion: told he is about to hear a funny joke, the subject will laugh uproariously at "grass is green." The subject can somehow control certain automatic responses better than in the normal state at the suggestion of the operator. His sense of identity can be radically changed. He can be made to act as if he were an animal, or an old man, or a child.

But it is an as-if with a suppression of an it-isn't. Some extrem-ists in hypnosis have sometimes claimed that when a subject in a trance is told he is now only five or six years old, that an actual regression to that age of childhood occurs. This is clearly untrue.

Let me cite one example. The subject had been born in Germany, and emigrated with his family to an English-speaking country at about age eight, at which time he learned English, forgetting most of his German. When the operator suggested to him under 'deep' hypnosis that he was only six years old, he displayed all kinds of childish mannerisms, even writing in childish print on a blackboard. Asked in English if he understood English, he childishly explained in English that he could not understand or speak English but only German! He even printed

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on the blackboard in English that he could not understand a word of English!7 The phenomenon is thus like play acting, not a true regression. It is an uncritical and illogical obedience to the operator and his expectations that is similar to the obedience of a bicameral man to a god.

Another common error made about hypnosis, even in the best modern textbooks, is to suppose that the operator can induce true hallucinations. Some unpublished observations of my own bear to the contrary. After a subject was in deep hypnosis, I went through the motions of giving him a nonexistent vase and asked him to place nonexistent flowers from a table into the vase, saying out loud the color of each one. This was easily done. It was play-acting. But giving him a nonexistent book, and asking him to hold it in his hands, to turn to page one and begin reading was a different matter. It could not be play-acted without more creativity than most of us can muster. The subject would readily go through the suggested motions of holding such a book, might stumble through some cliche first phrase or possibly a sentence, but then would complain that the print was blurry, or too difficult to read, or some similar rationalization. Or when asked to describe a picture (nonexistent) on a blank piece of paper, the subject would reply in a halting way if at all, giving only short answers when prodded by questions as to what he saw. If this had been a true hallucination, his eyes would have roamed over the paper and a full description would have been a simple matter — as it is when schizophrenics describe their visual hallucinations. There were great individual differences here, as might be expected, but the behavior is much more consistent with an as-if hesitant role-taking than with the effortless givenness with which true hallucinations are experienced.

This point is brought out by another experiment. If a hypnotized person is told to walk across the room, and a chair has been placed in his path, and he is told that there is no chair there, he 7 I am grateful to Martin Orne for this example.

390 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World does not hallucinate the chair out of existence. He simply walks around it. He behaves as if he did not notice it — which of course he did, since he walked around it. It is interesting here that if unhypnotized subjects are asked to simulate hypnosis in this particular situation, they promptly crash into the chair,8

since they are trying to be consistent with the erroneous view that hypnosis actually changes perceptions.

Hence the important concept of trance logic which has been brought forward to denote this difference.9 This is simply the bland response to absurd logical contradictions. But it is not any kind of logic really, nor simply a trance phenomenon. It is rather what I would prefer to dress up as paralogical compliance to verbally mediated reality. It is paralogic because the rules of logic (which we remember are an external standard of truth, not the way the mind works) are put aside to comply with assertions about reality that are not concretely true. It is a type of behavior found everywhere in the human condition from contemporary religious litanies to various superstitions of tribal societies. But it is particularly pronounced in and centrally characteristic of the mental state of hypnosis.

It is paralogic compliance that a subject walks around a chair he has been told is not there, rather than crashing into it (logical compliance), and finds nothing illogical in his actions. It is paralogical compliance when a subject says in English that he knows no English and finds nothing amiss in saying so. If our German subject had been simulating hypnosis, he would have shown logical compliance by talking only in what German he could remember or being mute.

It is paralogic compliance when a subject can accept that the same person is in two locations at the same time. If a hypnotized subject is told that person X is person Y, he will behave accord-8 The basic work in comparing hypnotized subjects with control subjects asked to simulate the hypnotic state has been done by Martin Orne. This ingeniously simple example is due to him.

9 Martin Orne, "The Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence."

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ingly. Then if the real person Y walks into the room, the subject finds it perfectly acceptable that both are person Y. This is similar to the paralogic compliance found today in another vestige of the bicameral mind, schizophrenia. Two patients in a ward may both believe themselves to be the same important or divine person without any feelings of illogicality.10 I suggest that a similar paralogic compliance was also evident in the bicameral era itself, as in treating unmoving idols as living and eating, or the same god as being in several places at one time, or in the multiples of jewel-eyed effigies of the same god-king found side-by-side in the pyramids. Like a bicameral man, the hypnotized subject does not recognize any peculiarities and inconsistencies in his behavior. He cannot ‘see’ contradictions because he cannot introspect in a completely conscious way.

The sense of time in a trance is also diminished, as we have seen it was in the bicameral mind. This is particularly evident in post-hypnotic amnesia. We, in our normal states, use the spatialized succession of conscious time as a substrate for successions of memories. Asked what we have done since breakfast, we commonly narratize a row of happenings that are what we can call

"time-tagged." But the subject in a hypnotic trance, like the schizophrenic patient or the bicameral man, has not such a schema of time in which events can be time-tagged. The before-and afterness of spatialized time is missing. Such events as can be remembered from the trance by a subject in post-hypnotic amnesia are vague isolated fragments, cuing off the self, rather than spatialized time as in normal remembering. Amnesic subjects can only report, if anything, "I clasped my hands, I sat in a chair," with no detail or sequencing, in a way that to me is reminiscent of Hammurabi or Achilles.11 What is significantly 10 For an extensive description of one example, see Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: Knopf, 1960).

11 I am grateful to John Kihlstrom of Harvard for discussions on these points. The distinct contrast between the language of amnesics and that of rememberers is from his study, soon to be published.

392 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World different about the contemporary hypnotic subject, however, is the fact that at the suggestion of the operator, the narratized sequential memories can often be brought back to the subject, showing that there has been some kind of parallel processing by consciousness outside of the trance.

Such facts make the hypnotic trance a fascinating complexity.

Parallel processing! While a subject is doing and saying one thing, his brain is processing his situation in at least two different ways, one more inclusive than the other. This conclusion can be demonstrated even more dramatically by the recent discovery that has been dubbed "the hidden observer." A hypnotized subject, after the suggestion that he will feel nothing when keeping his hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for a minute (a really painful, but benign experience!), may show no discomfort and say he felt nothing; but if it has previously been suggested that when and only when the operator touches his shoulder, he will say in another voice exactly what he really felt, that is what happens. At such a touch, the subject, often in a low guttural voice, may give full expression to his discomfiture, yet return immediately to his ordinary voice and to the anesthetized state when the operator's hand is lifted.12

Such evidence returns us to a once rejected notion of hypnosis known as dissociation that emerged from studies of multiple personality at the beginning of this century.13 The idea is that in hypnosis the totality of mind or reactivity is being separated into concurrent streams which can function independently of each other. What this means for the theory of consciousness and its origin as described in Book I is not immediately apparent. But 12 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation of Pain Reduction in Hypnosis," Psychological Review, 1973, 80: 396-411. I would like to record here my gratitude to Ernest Hilgard for a critical reading of the earlier chapters. His encouraging criticisms were extremely helpful.