360 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World ticed, the more it becomes conscious, which destroys the trance.
An essential ingredient of the phenomenon, at least in more educated groups where the cognitive imperative would be weaker, is the presence of a charismatic leader who first teaches the phenomenon. And if tongue speaking is to be continued at all, and the resulting euphoria makes it a devoutly wished state of mind, the relationship with the authoritative leader must be continued. It is really this ability to abandon the conscious direction of one's speech controls in the presence of an authority figure regarded as benevolent that is the essential thing. As we might expect, glossolalists by the Thematic Apperception Test reveal themselves as more submissive, suggestible, and dependent in the presence of authority figures than those who cannot exhibit the phenomenon.24
It is, then, this pattern of essential ingredients, the strong cognitive imperative of religious belief in a cohesive group, the induction procedures of prayer and ritual, the narrowing of consciousness into a trance state, and the archaic authorization in the divine spirit and in the charismatic leader, which denotes this phenomenon as another instance of the general bicameral paradigm and therefore a vestige of the bicameral mind.
Aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria
Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos
My comparison of the sound of speaking in tongues with the sound of the Greek epics to their hearers (the second line above is the first line of the Iliad) is not just an ornature of my style. It is a very deliberate comparison. And one that I intend now as a lead-in to the next chapter. For we should not leave our inquiry into these cultural antiques without at least noting the oddity, the difference, the true profundity, and — ultimately — the question of and for poetry.
24 John P. Kildahl, The Final Progress Report: Glossolalia and Mental Health (for NIMH), privately circulated.
C H A P T E R 3
Of Poetry and Music
WHY HAS so much of the textual material we have used as evidence in earlier chapters been poetry? And why, particularly in times of stress, have a huge proportion of the readers of this page written poems? What unseen light leads us to such dark practice? And why does poetry flash with recognitions of thoughts we did not know we had, finding its unsure way to something in us that knows and has known all the time, something, I think, older than the present organization of our nature?
To charter a discussion down this optional and deserted topic at this point in what has hitherto been a fairly linear argument may seem an unwarranted indirection. But the chapters of Book III, in contrast to the previous two books, are not a consecutive procession. They are rather a selection of divergent trajectories out of our bicameral past into present times. And I think it will become obvious that the earlier argument, particularly as relating to the Greek epics, needs to be rounded out with the present chapter.
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.
362 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World The evidence is, of course, only inferential. It is that all of those individuals who remained bicameral into the conscious age, when speaking of or from the divine side of their minds, spoke in poetry. The great epics of Greece were of course heard and spoken by the aoidoi as poetry. The ancient writings of Mesopotamia and Egypt are darkened with our ignorance of how such languages were pronounced; but with such assurances in transliteration as we can muster, such writings when spoken were also poetry. In India, the oldest literature is the Veda, which were dictated by gods to the rishi or prophets; these too were poetry.
Oracles spoke poetry. From time to time, their utterances from Delphi and elsewhere were written down, and every one of them that survives as more than a simple phrase is in dactylic hexameter, just as were the epics. The Hebrew prophets also, when relaying the hallucinated utterance of Yahweh, were often poets, though their scribes did not in every case preserve such speech in verse.
As the bicameral mind recedes further into history, and the oracles reach their fifth term, there are exceptions. Poetic utterance by the oracles breaks down here and there. The oracle at Delphi, for example, in the first century A.D. evidently spoke in both verse and prose, the latter to be put into verse by poets in the service of the temples.1 But the very impulse to transpose oracular prose back into dactylic hexameters is, I suggest, a part of the nostalgia for the divine in this late period; it demonstrates again that metered verse had been the rule previously. Even later, some oracles still spoke exclusively in dactylic hexameters. Tacitus, for example, visited the oracle of Apollo at Claros about A.D.
1 Strabo, Geography, 9.3.5, or as translated by H. L. Jones in the Loeb edition, p. 353. This observation was made about A.D. 30. Plutarch's offhand suggestion in the second century a.d. that the raw prophetic outpouring of the oracle always had to be versified by inspired prophetes is contrary to all the earlier writings and evidence from the oracles themselves. See his The Oracles of Delphi in Vol. 5 of The Moralia, Loeb edition. I am not sure how seriously we should take Plutarch's rambling after-dinner conversation piece.
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100 and described how the entranced priest listened to his decision-seeking petitioners; he then
. . . swallows a draught of water from a mysterious spring and — though ignorant generally of writing and of meters —
delivers his response in set verses.2
Poetry then was divine knowledge. And after the breakdown of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization. Poetry commanded where prose could only ask. It felt good. In the wanderings of the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt, it was the sacred shrine that was carried before the multitude and followed by the people, but it was the poetry of Moses that determined when they would start and when stop, where they would go and where stay.3
The association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utterance with supernatural knowledge endures well into the later conscious period. Among the early Arabic peoples the word for poet was sha’ir, ‘the knower’, or a person endowed with knowledge by the spirits; his metered speech in recitation was the mark of its divine origin. The poet and divine seer have a long tradition of association in the ancient world, and several Indo-European languages have a common term for them. Rhyme and allitera-tion too were always the linguistic province of the gods and their prophets.4 In at least some instances of spontaneous possession, the demonic utterances are in meter.5 Even glossolalia today, as 2 Tacitus, Annals, 2:54, or as translated by John Jackson in the Loeb edition, p. 471.
3 Numbers 10:35, 36. My authority that these lines in Hebrew come under the rubric of poetry is Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrew and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938), p. 244.