‘lifetimes’ in our sense, and who could not reminisce because they were not fully conscious. Indeed, this is put into mythology by their chosen medium, the shepherd of Helicon himself: the Muses who, he tells us, always sing together with the same phrenes 15 and in “unwearying flows” of song, this special group of divinities who, instead of telling men what to do, specialized in telling certain men what had been done, are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Titaness whose name later comes to mean memory — the first word with that meaning in the world.
Such appeals to the Muses then are identical in function with our appeals to memory, like tip-of-the-tongue struggles with recollection. They do not sound like a man out of his senses who doesn’t know what he is doing. In one instance in the Iliad, the poet begins to have difficulty and so begs the Muses, Say now to me, Muses, having Olympian homes, for you are goddesses, and are present and know all; but we hear report 15 The Greek for singing together is homophronas, in Hesiod, Theogony, line 60.
I know of no records of contemporary hallucinations that sound like a group of people in unison. Just why the Muses are plural is an interesting problem. See II. 4, note 2.
372 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World alone, neither do we know anything: tell me who were the leaders and rulers of the Greeks? ( 2 : 4 8 3 - 4 8 7 ) and then goes on to plead in his own person that he, the poet, cannot name them, though he had "ten tongues and ten mouths and an unbreakable voice," unless the Muses start singing the material to him. I have italicized a phrase in the quotation to underline their actuality to the poet.
Nor does possession seem to be occurring in Hesiod in his first meeting with them on the holy flanks of Mount Helicon while he was keeping watch over his sheep. He describes how the Muses
. . . breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they begged me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.16
Again, I think this should be believed literally as someone’s experience in exactly the same way that we believe in the experience of Hesiod's contemporary, Amos, in his meeting with Yahweh in the meadows of Tekoa while he too was keeping watch over his flock.17 Nor does it seem possession when the Muses’ Theogony stops (line 104) and Hesiod cries out again in his own voice, praising the Muses and pleading with them again to go on with the poem: “Tell me these things from the beginning, you Muses,” having just given a long list of the topics which the poet wants the poem to be about (line 114).
Nor does the stately and careful description of Demodocus in the Odyssey permit an interpretation of the poet as possessed.
Evidently Demodocus, if he was real, may have gone through 16 Hesiod, Theogony, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library.
Another reason for thinking that this Hesiod is not the author of Works and Days, as I suggested in II.5, is the last phrase above. Certainly the work I have ascribed to Perses is not true to this promise to sing only about the gods "both first and last."
17 Amos, too, was not in a state of possession since he too had dialogue with his god. See Amos 7: 5-8; 8: 1-2. In some of my phrasing I am trying to remind the reader of Luke 2: 8-14.
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some kind of cerebral accident which left him blind, but with the power to hear the Muses sing such enchanting poetry as could make an Odysseus drape his head and moan with tears (8:63-92). Indeed Odysseus himself understands that Demodocus of the disabled vision, who could not have witnessed the Trojan War, could sing about it only because the Muse, or Apollo, was actually telling it to him. His chant was hormetheis theou, constantly given by the god himself (81499).
The evidence, therefore, suggests that up to the eighth and probably the seventh century B.C., the poet was not out of his mind as he was later in Plato’s day. Rather, his creativity was perhaps much closer to what we have come to call bicameral.
The fact that such poets were “wretched things of shame, mere bellies,” as the Muses scornfully mocked their human adoring mediums,18 unskilled roughs who came from the more primitive and lonely levels of the social structure, such as shepherds, is in accord with such a suggestion. Mere bellies out in the fields had less opportunity to be changed by the new mentality. And loneli-ness can lead to hallucination.
But by the time of Solon in the sixth century B.C., something different is happening. The poet is no longer simply given his gifts j he has to have “learning in the gift of the Muses” (Fragment 13:51). And then, in the fifth century B.C., we hear the very first hint of poets’ being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. What a contrast to the calm and stately manner of the earlier aoidoi, Demodocus, for example! It is Democritus who insists that no one can be a great poet without being frenzied up into a state of fury (Fragment 18). And then in the fourth century B.C., the mad possessed poet “out of his senses” that Plato and I have already described. Just as the oracles had changed from the prophet who heard his hallucinations to the possessed person in a wild trance, so also had the poet.
Was this dramatic change because the collective cognitive im-18 Hesiod, Theogony, 1. 26.
374 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World perative had made the Muses less believable as real external entities? Or was it because the neurological reorganization of hemispheric relations brought on by developing consciousness prohibited such givenness; so that consciousness had to be out of the way to let poetry happen? Or was it Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere using Broca's area on the left, thus short-circuiting (as it were) normal consciousness? Or are these three hypotheses the same (as of course I presently think they are) ?
For whatever reasons, decline continues decline in the ensuing centuries. Just as the oracles sputtered out through their latter terms until possession was partial and erratic, so, I suggest, poets slowly changed until the fury and possession by the Muses was also partial and erratic. And then the Muses hush and freeze into myths. Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written by the poet himself, and written, it should be added, by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The Muses have become imaginary and invoked in their silence as a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind.
In summary, then, the theory of poetry I am trying to state in this scraggly collation of passages is similar to the theory I presented for oracles. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets. Some become institutionalized as oracles making decisions for the future. While others become specialized into poets, relating from the gods statements about the past.
Then, as the bicameral mind shrinks back from its impulsive-ness, and as perhaps a certain reticence falls upon the right hemisphere, poets who are to obtain this same state must learn to do it. As this becomes more difficult, the state becomes a fury, and then ecstatic possession, just as happened in the oracles.