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tween attacks and recalling little of them. Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons.
The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon j he just talks like one.
Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet.
As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god.
12 I probably should not be making these cross-comparisons. But I am at least revealing my thinking. Is it possible that what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere always 'looks down' on Wernicke's area on the left? The references are to Exodus 4:24 and to Hesiod's Theogony, line 26, respectively.
350 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World The exorcist can be said to fit into the authorization element of the general bicameral paradigm, replacing the 'demon.' The cognitive imperatives of the belief system that determined the form of the illness in the first place determine the form of its cure.
The phenomenon does not depend on age, but sex differences, depending on the historical epoch, are pronounced, demonstrating its cultural expectancy basis. Of those possessed by 'demons'
whom Jesus or his disciples cured in the New Testament, the overwhelming majority were men. In the Middle Ages and thereafter, however, the overwhelming majority were women.
Also evidence for its basis in a collective cognitive imperative are its occasional epidemics, as in convents of nuns during the Middle Ages, in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, or those reported in the nineteenth century at Savoy in the Alps.
And occasionally today.
Now, again, with any alteration of mentality as striking as this, we cannot escape the neurological question. What is happening?
Are the speech areas of the right nondominant hemisphere activated in spontaneous possession, as I have suggested they were in the induced possession of the oracles? And are the contorted features due to the intrusion of right hemisphere control? The fact that the majority of instances (as well as most oracles and Sibyls) were women, and that women are (presently in our culture) less lateralized than men is somewhat suggestive.
At least some instances of possession begin with contortions on the left side of the body, which may indicate this is true. Here is one case reported at the beginning of this century. The patient was a forty-seven-year-old uneducated Japanese woman who would become possessed by what she called the fox, six or seven times a day, always with the same laterality phenomena. As it was then observed by her physicians:
At first there appeared slight twitchings of the mouth and arm on the left side. As these became stronger she violently
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struck with her fist her left side which was already swollen and red with similar blows, and said to me: “ A h , sir, here he is stirring again in my breast.” T h e n a strange and incisive voice issued from her mouth: “Yes, it is true, I am there. Did you think, stupid goose, that you could stop me?” Thereupon the woman addressed herself to us: “Oh dear, gentlemen, forgive me, I cannot help it!”
Continuing to strike her breast and contract the left side of her face . . . the woman threatened him, adjured him to be quiet, but after a short time he interrupted her and it was he alone who thought and spoke. T h e woman was now passive like an automaton, obviously no longer understanding what was said to her. It was the fox which answered maliciously instead. At the end of ten minutes the fox spoke in a more confused manner, the woman gradually came to herself and assumed back her normal state. She remembered the first part of the fit and begged us with tears to forgive her for the outrageous conduct of the fox.13
But this is one case. I have not found any other patient in which such distinct laterality phenomena were in evidence.
In puzzling about the neurology of negatory possession, it can be helpful, I think, to consider the contemporary illness known as Gilles de la Tourette’s Syndrome,14 or, occasionally, "foul-mouth disease." This bizarre group of symptoms usually begins in childhood at age five or sometimes earlier, with perhaps merely a repeated facial twitch or bad word out of context. This then develops into an uncontrollable emission of ripe obscenities, grunts, barks, or profanities in the middle of otherwise normal 13 E. Balz, Ueber Besessenheit (Leipzig, 1907), as translated by Oesterreich, Possession,, p. 227. Physicians attending her were astonished to see the cleverness of speech, the witty and ironic language, so unlike the patient's own, which the 'fox'
displayed.
14 For recent work on this subject as well as its history, see the references and data in A. K. Shapiro, E. Shapiro, H. L. Wayne, J. Clarkin, and R. D. Bruun,
"Tourette's Syndrome: summary of data on 34. patients," Psychosomatic Medicine, 973, 35:419-435.
352 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World conversation, as well as various facial tics, sticking out the tongue, etc. These often continue through adult life, much to the distress of the patient. Such persons often end up refusing to leave their homes because of their horror and embarrassment at their own intermittent uncontrollable vulgarity. In one case I knew of recently, the man invented a cover of having severe bladder problems requiring him to urinate often. Actually, every time he dashed to the Men’s Room while at a restaurant or to the bathroom in a house, it was the welling up of profanity that he went to relieve himself of by shouting it at toilet walls.15 To be profane myself, the linguistic feeling within him may not have been unlike the prophet Jeremiah’s fire shut up in his bones (see 11:6), although the semantic product was somewhat (but not altogether) different.
What is of interest here is that Tourette’s Syndrome so clearly resembles the initial phase of stress-produced possession as to force upon us the suspicion that they share a common physiological mechanism. And this may indeed be incomplete hemispheric dominance, in which the speech areas of the right hemisphere (perhaps stimulated by impulses from the basal ganglia) are periodically breaking through into language under conditions which would have produced an hallucination in bicameral man.