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.