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.