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.
T H E Q U E S T F O R A U T H O R I Z A T I O N
323
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.