3.2. 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 consciousness? 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 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 conferred 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,
When 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 consciousness 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 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 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 irreverence 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 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.
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 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 …