the crianças, spirits of dead children, whose mediums make playful suggestions;
the exus (demons) or, if female, pombagiras (turning pigeons), spirits of wicked foreigners, whose mediums make vulgar and aggressive suggestions.
Each of these four main types of possessor spirits represents a different ethnic group corresponding to the ethnic hybridism of the worshipers: Indian, African, Brazilian (the criangas are “like us”), and European, respectively. Each represents a different familial relationship to the petitioner: father, grandfather, sibling, and stranger respectively. And each represents a different area of decision: quick decisions for choices of action, comforting advice on personal problems, playful suggestions, and decisions in matters of aggression respectively. Even as the Greek gods were originally distinguished as areas of decision, so the spirits of the Umbanda. And the whole is like a network or metaphor matrix of four-way inner-related distinctiveness that binds the individuals together and holds them in a culture.
And all this, I suggest, is a vestige of the bicameral mind, as we go through these millennia of adjusting to a new mentality.
True possession, as described by Plato and others, has always been held to go on without consciousness, thus differentiating it from acting. But the training of the persons of oracles must have admitted of degrees and stages toward such a state. In the Brazilian possession religions, apparently, this is exactly what happens.
O F P R O P H E T S A N D P O S S E S S I O N
357
The young novice may begin by acting out possession in play, then proceed with his training until eventually he can separate what a spirit would say from what he himself would normally talk about. Then there occurs a stage of passing back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. And then with full possession, perhaps the connecting up of Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere with Broca's on the left, the much-desired state of unconsciousness, with no remembrance of what happens.
This, however, is true of only some mediums. And in any pseudobicameral practice as extensive as this, it is to be expected that there will be many different qualities and degrees of acting and trance even within the same individual.
Glossolalia
A final phenomenon that is weakly similar to induced possession is glossolalia, or what the apostle Paul called “speaking in tongues.” It consists of fluent speech in what sounds like a strange language which the speaker himself does not understand and usually does not remember saying. It seems to have begun with the early Christian Church17 in the asserted descent of the ghost of God into the assembled apostles. This event was regarded as the birthday of the Christian Church and is commemo-rated in the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter.18
Acts 2 describes what is probably its first instance in history as a great rushing wind roaring with cloven tongues of fire, in which all the apostles begin to speak as if drunk in languages they had never learned.
17 Old Testament references to Yahweh’s pouring out his spirit are sometimes put forth as references to glossolalia, but I find this utterly unconvincing. The phenomenon can be regarded as peculiarly of Christian origin, particularly in the writings of, or influenced by, Paul.
18 Today at Vatican celebrations of Pentecost, red is worn to symbolize the tongues of fire; and in Protestant churches, white, to symbolize the Holy Ghost, hence the English term Whitsuntide, around white Sunday.
358 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World This alteration of mentality happening to the likes of the apostles became its own authorization. The practice spread.
Soon early Christians were doing it everywhere. Paul even put it on a level with prophecy (I Corinthians 14:27, 29). From time to time in the centuries since Paul, glossolalia as a search for authorization after the breakdown of the bicameral mind has had its periods of fashion.
Its recent practice, not just by the sects that are theologically extremely conservative, but also by members of mainline Protestant churches, has pushed it into some scientific scrutiny with some interesting results. Glossolalia first happens always in groups and always in the context of religious services. I am stressing the group factor, since I think this strengthening of the collective cognitive imperative is necessary for a particularly deep type of trance. Often there will be what corresponds to an induction, particularly hymn singing of a rousing sort, followed by the exhortations of a charismatic leader: “If you feel your language change, don’t resist it, let it happen.”19
The worshiper, through repeated attendance at such meetings, watching others in glossolalia, first learns to enter into a deep-trance state of diminished or absent consciousness in which he is not responsive to exteroceptive stimuli. The trance in this case is almost an autonomic one: shakes, shivers, sweat, twitches, and tears. Then he or she may somehow learn to "let it happen."
And it does, loud and clear, each phrase ending in a groan: aria ariari isa, vena amiria as aria!20 The rhythm pounds, the way epic dactyls probably did to the hearers of the aoidoi. And this quality of regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables, so similar to that of the Homeric epics, as well as the rising and then downward intonation at the end of each phrase, does not — and this is astonishing — does not vary with the native 19 Felicitas D. Goodman, "Disturbances in the Apostolic Church: A Trance-Based Upheaval in Yucatan," in Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination, pp. 227-364.
20 From a tape of Dr. Goodman's of a male glossolalist of Mayan descent in Yucatan. Ibid., pp. 262-263.
O F P R O P H E T S A N D P O S S E S S I O N
359
language of the speaker. If the subject is English, Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, African, or Mayan, or wherever he is, the pattern of glossolalia is the same.21
After the glossolalia, the subject opens his eyes and slowly returns from these unconscious heights to dusty reality, remembering little of what happened. But he is told. He has been possessed by the Holy Spirit. He has been chosen by God as his puppet. His problems are stopped in hope and his sorrows torn with joy. It is the ultimate in authorization since the Holy Spirit is one with the highest source of all being. God has chosen to enter the lowly subject and has articulated his speech with the subject's own tongue. The individual has become a god —
briefly.
The cruel daylight of it all is less inspiring. While the phenomenon is not simply gibberish, nor can the average person duplicate the fluency and structure of what is spoken, it has no semantic meaning whatever. Tapes of glossolalia played before others in the same religious group are given utterly inconsistent interpretations.22 That the metered vocalizations are similar across the cultures and language of the speakers, probably indicates that rhythmical discharges from subcortical structures are coming into play, released by the trance state of lesser cortical control.23
The ability does not last. It attenuates. The more it is prac-21 The important result of Dr. Goodman's earlier study., Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
22 This is a generalization from the careful work of John P. Kildahl on twenty-six American glossolalists all belonging to major Protestant denominations. See his The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). He also gives a very complete bibliography on the matter.
23 "The surface structure of a non-linguistic deep structure," as Dr. Goodman says in structuralist terms (p. 151-152). But the idea of an energy discharge from subcortical structures under diminished consciousness has been sharply criticized, particularly by the linguist W. J. Samarin in his review of Goodman in Language, 1974, 50:207-212. See also his Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972). I am grateful to Ronald Baker of the University of Prince Edward Island for bringing this to my attention.