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