Accordingly it is not surprising that almost all sufferers from Tourette's Syndrome have abnormal brain wave patterns, some central nervous system damage, and are usually left-handed (in the majority of left-handed persons there is mixed dominance), and that the symptoms begin around the age of five when the neurological development of hemispheric dominance in regard to language is being completed.
Now all of this says something important but unsettling about 15 Tourette’s Syndrome is often if not usually misdiagnosed as a form of insanity, which it definitely is not. Fortunately and interestingly, however, one of the new anti-psychotic tranquilizers, haloperidol, has been found to abolish the symptoms — which it did in the above-mentioned cases. I am grateful to Dr. Shapiro for discussion on these points.
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our nervous systems. For while I believe the neurological model in I.5 to be in the right direction, we are getting further and further away from it. It is very improbable that modern spirit possession is everywhere engaging right hemisphere speech centers for the articulated speech itself. Such an hypothesis is contrary to so many clinical facts as to rule it out except in highly unusual cases.
A more likely possibility, perhaps, is that the neurological difference between the bicameral mind and modern possession states is that in the former, hallucinations were indeed organized and heard from the right hemisphere; while in possession, the articulated speech is our normal left hemisphere speech but controlled or under the guidance of the right hemisphere. In other words, what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere is using Broca's area on the left hemisphere, the result being the trance state and its depersonalization. Such cross control could be the neurological substrate of the loss of normal consciousness.
Possession in the Modern World
I wish now to turn to induced possession in our own times to demonstrate with some conclusiveness that it is a learned phenomenon. The best example I have found is the Umbanda religion, the largest by far of the Afro-Brazilian religions practiced today by over half the population of Brazil. It is believed in as a source of decision by persons of all ethnic backgrounds and is certainly the most extensive occurrence of induced possession since the third century.
Let us look in on a typical gira or “turn around,” as an Umbanda session is so aptly called.16 It may be taking place at the present time in a room above a store or in an abandoned garage.
16 This entire section on the Umbanda is based on the extremely rich and definitive study of Esther Pressel, “Umbanda Trance and Possession in Sao Paulo, Brazil,” in Felicitas Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination (New York: Wiley, 1974.).
354 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World Perhaps a dozen or fewer mediums (70 percent are women), all dressed ceremoniously in white, come out from a tiring room in front of a white-draped altar crammed with flowers, candles, and statues and pictures of Christian saints, an audience of a hundred or so being beyond a railing on the other side of the room. The drummers beat and the audience sings, as the mediums begin to sway or dance. This swaying and dancing is always in a counter-clockwise motion, that is, beginning with motor impulses from the right hemisphere. There follows a Christian type of service.
Then drums are once more pounded furiously, everyone sings, and the mediums begin to call their spirits; some spin to the left like whirling dervishes, again exciting their right hemispheres.
There is the explicit metaphor here of the medium as a cavalo or horse. A particular spirit is supposed to lower himself into his cavalo. As this is happening, the head and chest of the cavalo, or medium, jerks back and forth in opposing directions like a bronco being ridden. The hair falls into disarray. Facial expressions become contorted, as in ancient examples I have cited.
Posture changes into the likeness of any of several possessing spirits. The possession accomplished, the ‘spirits’ may dance for a few minutes, may greet each other in the possessed state, may perform other actions suitable to the type of spirit, and then, when the drumming stops, go to preassigned places, and, curiously, as they wait for members of the audience to come forward for the consultas, they snap their fingers impatiently as their hands rest beside their bodies, palms outward. In the consultas the possessed medium may be asked for, and may give, decisions on any illness or personal problem, on getting or keeping a job, on financial business practices, family quarrels, love affairs, or even, among students, advice about scholastic grades.
Now the evidence that possession is a learned mentality is very clear in these Brazilian cults. In a bairro playground, one may occasionally see children in their play imitating the distinctive back-and-forth jerking of the head and chest that is used for
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inducing and terminating spirit possession. If a child wishes to become a medium, he is encouraged to do so and given special training, just as were the young country girls who became the oracles at Delphi and elsewhere. Indeed, some of the many Umbanda centers (there are 4000 in Sao Paulo alone) hold regular training sessions, where the procedures include various ways of making the novice dizzy in order to teach him or her the trance state, as well as techniques similar to those used in hypnosis.
And in the trance state, the novice is taught how each of several possible spirits behaves. This fact of a differentiation of possessing spirits is important, and I wish to comment further on it and its function in culture.
The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. That is, they should not be considered as isolated phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter around doing nothing but leaning on their own antique merits.
Instead, they always live at the very heart of a culture or subcul-ture, moving out and filling up the unspoken and the unrationalized. They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of excerption and the constraints on narratization and conciliation.
Such vestiges of the bicameral mind as we are here considering are no exception. A possession religion such as the Umbanda functions as a powerful psychological support to the heterogeneous masses of its poor and uneducated and needy. It is pervaded with a feeling of caridade, or charity, which consoles and binds together this motley of political impotents, whose urbaniza-tion and ethnic diversity has stranded them without roots. And look at the pattern of particular neurological organizations that emerge as possessing divinities. They remind us of the presenting personal gods of Sumer and Babylon, interceders with those
356 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World above them. Each medium on any particular night may be possessed by an individual spirit from any of four main groups.
They are, in order of frequency:
the caboclos, spirits of Brazilian-Indian warriors, who advise in situations requiring quick and decisive action, such as obtaining or maintaining a job;
the pretos velhos, spirits of old Afro-Brazilian slaves, adept at handling long drawn-out personal problems;