by E R Dodds
Nevertheless, when all such allowances have been made, there is an important residue of differences which seem to represent, not different selections from a common culture, but genuine cultural changes. The development of some of these we can trace—scanty though our evidence is—within the limits of the Archaic Age itself. Even Pfister, for example, recognises "an undeniable growth of anxiety and dread in the evolution of Greek religion."89 It is true that the notions of pollution, of purification, of divine phthonos, may well be part of the original Indo-European inheritance. But it was the Archaic Age that recast the tales of Oedipus and Orestes as horror-stories of bloodguilt; that made purification a main concern of its greatest religious institution, the Oracle of Delphi; that magnified the importance of phthonos until it became for Herodotus the underlying pattern of all history. This is the sort of fact that we have to explain.
I may as well confess at once that I have no complete explanation to give; I can only guess at some partial answers. No doubt general social conditions account for a good deal.90 In Mainland Greece (and we are concerned here with Mainland tradition) the Archaic Age was a time of extreme personal insecurity. The tiny overpopulated states were just beginning to struggle up out of the misery and impoverishment left behind by the Dorian invasions, when fresh trouble arose: whole classes were ruined by the great economic crisis of the seventh century, and this in turn was followed by the great political conflicts of the sixth, which translated the economic crisis into terms of murderous class warfare. It is very possible that the resulting upheaval of social strata, by bringing into prominence submerged elements of the mixed population, encouraged the reappearance of old culture-patterns which the common folk had never wholly forgotten.91 Moreover, insecure conditions of life might in themselves favour the development of a belief in daemons, based on the sense of man's helpless dependence upon capricious Power; and this in turn might encourage an increased resort to magical procedures, if Malinowski92 was right in holding that the biological function of magic is to relieve pent-up and frustrated feelings which can find no rational outlet. It is also likely, as I suggested earlier, that in minds of a different type prolonged experience of human injustice-might give rise to the compensatory belief that there is justice in Heaven. It is doubtless no accident that the first Greek to preach divine justice was Hesiod—"the helots' poet," as King Cleomenes called him,93 and a man who had himself smarted under "crooked judgements." Nor is it accidental that in this age the doom overhanging the rich and powerful becomes so popular a theme with poets94—in striking contrast to Homer, for whom, as Murray has observed, the rich men are apt to be specially virtuous.95
With these safe generalities scholars more prudent than I am will rest content. So far as they go, I think they are valid. But as an explanation of the more specific developments in archaic religious feeling—particularly that growing sense of guilt—I cannot convince myself that they go the whole way. And I will risk the suggestion that they should be supplemented (but not replaced) by another sort of approach, which would start not from society at large but from the family. The family was the keystone of the archaic social structure, the first organised unit, the first domain of law. Its organisation, as in all Indo-European societies, was patriarchal; its law was patria potestas.96 The head of a household is its king, and his position is still described by Aristotle as analogous to that of a king.97 Over his children his authority is in early times unlimited: he is free to expose them in infancy, and in manhood to expel an erring or rebellious son from the community, as Theseus expelled Hippolytus, as Oeneus expelled Tydeus, as Strophios expelled Pylades, as Zeus himself cast out Hephaestos from Olympus for siding with his mother.98 In relation to his father, the son had duties but no rights; while his father lived, he was a perpetual minor—a state of affairs which lasted at Athens down to the sixth century, when Solon introduced certain safeguards.99 And indeed more than two centuries after Solon the tradition of family jurisdiction was still so strong that even Plato—who was certainly no admirer of the family— had to give it a place in his legislation.100
So long as the old sense of family solidarity was unshaken, the system presumably worked. The son gave the father the same unquestioning obedience which in due course he would receive from his own children. But with the relaxation of the family bond, with the growing claim of the individual to personal rights and personal responsibility, we should expect those internal tensions to develop which have so long characterised family life in Western societies. That they had in fact begun to show themselves overtly in the sixth century, we may infer from Solon's legislative intervention. But there is also a good deal of indirect testimony to their covert influence. The peculiar horror with which the Greeks viewed offences against a father, and the peculiar religious sanctions to which the offender was thought to be exposed, are in themselves suggestive of strong repressions.101 So are the many stories in which a father's curse produces terrible consequences—stories like those of Phoenix, of Hippolytus, of Pelops and his sons, of Oedipus and his sons—all of them, it would seem, products of a relatively late period,102 when the position of the father was no longer entirely secure. Suggestive in a different way is the barbarous tale of Kronos and Ouranos, which Archaic Greece may have borrowed from a Hittite source. There the mythological projection of unconscious desires is surely transparent— as Plato perhaps felt when he declared that this story was fit to be communicated only to a very few in some exceptional and should at all costs be kept from the young.103 But to the eye of the psychologist the most significant evidence is that afforded by certain passages in writers of the Classical Age. The typical example by which Aristophanes illustrates the pleasures of life in Cloudcuckooland, that dream-country of wish-fulfilment, is that if you up and thrash your father, people will admire you for it: it is instead of being And when Plato wants to illustrate what happens when rational controls are not functioning, his typical example is the Oedipus dream. His testimony is confirmed by Sophocles, who makes Jocasta declare that such dreams are common; and by Herodotus, who quotes one.105 It seems not unreasonable to argue from identical symptoms to some similarity in the cause, and conclude that the family situation in ancient Greece, like the family situation to-day, gave rise to infantile conflicts whose echoes lingered in the unconscious mind of the adult. With the rise of the Sophistic Movement, the conflict became in many households a fully conscious one: young men began to claim that they had a "natural right" to disobey their fathers.106 But it is a fair guess that such conflicts already existed at the unconscious level from a very much earlier date—that in fact they go back to the earliest unconfessed stirrings of individualism in a society where family solidarity was still universally taken for granted.
You see perhaps where all this is tending. The psychologists have taught us how potent a source of guilt-feelings is the pressure of unacknowledged desires, desires which are excluded from consciousness save in dreams or daydreams, yet are able to produce in the self a deep sense of moral uneasiness. This uneasiness often takes a religious form to-day; and if a similar feeling existed in Archaic Greece, this would be the natural form for it to take. For, to begin with, the human father had from the earliest times his heavenly counterpart: Zeus pater belongs to the Indo-European inheritance, as his Latin and Sanskrit equivalents indicate; and Calhoun has shown how closely the status and conduct of the Homeric Zeus is modelled on that of the Homeric paterfamilias,107 the In cult also Zeus appears as a supernatural Head of the Household: as Patroos he protects the family, as Herkeios its dwelling, as Ktesios its property. It was natural to project on to the heavenly Father those curious mixed feelings about the human one which the child dared not acknowledge even to himself. That would explain very nicely why in the Archaic Age Zeus appears by turns as the inscrutable source of good and evil gifts alike; as the jealous god who grudges his children their heart's desire;108 and finally as the awful judge, just but stern, who punishes inexorably the capital sin of self-assertion, the sin of hu
bris. (This last aspect corresponds to that phase in the development of family relations when the authority of the father is felt to need the support of a moral sanction; when "You will do it because I say so" gives place to "You will do it because it is right.") And secondly, the cultural inheritance which Archaic Greece shared with Italy and India109 included a set of ideas about ritual impurity which provided a natural explanation for guilt-feelings generated by repressed desires. An archaic Greek who suffered from such feelings was able to give them concrete form by telling himself that he must have been in contact with miasma, or that his burden was inherited from the religious offence of an ancestor. And, more important, he was able to relieve them by undergoing a cathartic ritual. Have we not here a possible clue to the part played in Greek culture by the idea of catharsis, and the gradual development from it, on the one hand of the notions of sin and atonement, on the other of Aristotle's psychological purgation, which relieves us of unwanted feelings through contemplating their projection in a work of art?110
I will not pursue these speculations further. They are clearly incapable of direct proof. At best, they may receive indirect confirmation if social psychology succeeds in establishing analogous developments in cultures more accessible to detailed study. Work on those lines is now being done,111 but it would be premature to generalise its results. In the meantime, I shall not complain if classical scholars shake their heads over the foregoing remarks. And, to avoid misunderstanding, I would in conclusion emphasise two things. First, I do not expect this particular key, or any key, to open all the doors. The evolution of a culture is too complex a thing to be explained without residue in terms of any simple formula, whether economic or psychological, begotten of Marx or begotten of Freud. We must resist the temptation to simplify what is not simple. And secondly, to explain origins is not to explain away values. We should beware of underrating the religious significance of the ideas I have discussed to-day, even where, like the doctrine of divine temptation, they are repugnant to our moral sense.112 Nor should we forget that out of this archaic guilt-culture there arose some of the profoundest tragic poetry that man has produced. It was above all Sophocles, the last great exponent of the archaic world-view, who expressed the full tragic significance of the old religious themes in their unsoftened, unmoralised forms—the overwhelming sense of human helplessness in face of the divine mystery, and of the ate that waits on all human achievement—and who made these thoughts part of the cultural inheritance of Western Man. Let me end this chapter by quoting a lyric from the Antigone which conveys far better than I could convey it the beauty and terror of the old beliefs.113
Blessed is he whose life has not tasted of evil.
When God has shaken a house, the winds of madness
Lash its breed till the breed is done:
Even so the deep-sea swell
Raked by wicked Thracian winds
Scours in its running the subaqueous darkness,
Churns the silt black from sea-bottom;
And the windy cliffs roar as they take its shock.
Here on the Labdacid house long we watched it piling,
Trouble on dead men's trouble: no generation
Frees the next from the stroke of God:
Deliverance does not come.
The final branch of Oedipus
Grew in his house, and a lightness hung above it:
To-day they reap it with Death's red sickle,
The unwise mouth and the tempter who sits in the brain.
The power of God man's arrogance shall not limit:
Sleep who takes all in his net takes not this,
Nor the unflagging months of Heaven—ageless the Master
Holds for ever the shimmering courts of Olympus.
For time approaching, and time hereafter,
And time forgotten, one rule stands:
That greatness never
Shall touch the life of man without destruction.
Hope goes fast and far: to many it carries comfort,
To many it is but the trick of light-witted desire—
Blind we walk, till the unseen flame has trapped our footsteps.
For old anonymous wisdom has left us a saying
"Of a mind that God leads to destruction
The sign is this—that in the end
Its good is evil."
Not long shall that mind evade destruction.
NOTES TO CHAPTER II
III
The Blessings of Madness
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.
E. M. Forster
"Our greatest blessings," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "come to us by way of madness": That is, of course, a conscious paradox. No doubt it startled the fourth-century Athenian reader hardly less than it startles us; for it is implied a little further on that most people in Plato's time regarded madness as something discreditable, an But the father of Western rationalism is not represented as maintaining the general proposition that it is better to be mad than sane, sick than sound. He qualifies his paradox with the words "provided the madness is given us by divine gift." And he proceeds to distinguish four types of this "divine madness," which are produced, he says, "by a divinely wrought change in our customary social norms" .3 The four types are:
1) Prophetic madness, whose patron god is Apollo.
2) Telestic or ritual madness, whose patron is Dionysus.
3) Poetic madness, inspired by the Muses.
4) Erotic madness, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros.4
About the last of these I shall have something to say in a later chapter;5 I do not propose to discuss it here. But it may be worth while to look afresh at the first three, not attempting any exhaustive survey of the evidence, but concentrating on what may help us to find answers to two specific questions. One is the historical question: how did the Greeks come by the beliefs which underlie Plato's classification, and how far did they modify them under the influence of advancing rationalism? The other question is psychological: how far can the mental states denoted by Plato's "prophetic" and "ritual" madness be recognised as identical with any states known to modern psychology and anthropology? Both questions are difficult, and on many points we may have to be content with a verdict of non liquet. But I think they are worth asking. In attempting to deal with them I shall of course be standing, as we all stand, on the shoulders of Rohde, who traversed most of this ground very thoroughly in his great book Psyche. Since that book is readily available, both in German and in English, I shall not recapitulate its arguments; I shall, however, indicate one or two points of disagreement.
1 For notes to chapter iii see pages 82-101.
Before approaching Plato's four "divine" types, I must first say something about his general distinction between "divine" madness and the ordinary kind which is caused by disease. The distinction is of course older than Plato. From Herodotus we learn that the madness of Cleomenes, in which most people saw the godsent punishment of sacrilege, was put down by his own countrymen to the effects of heavy drinking.6 And although Herodotus refuses to accept this prosaic explanation in Cleomenes' case, he is inclined to explain the madness of Cambyses as due to congenital epilepsy, and adds the very sensible remark that when the body is seriously deranged it is not surprising that the mind should be affected also.7 So that he recognises at least two types of madness, one which is supernatural in origin (though not beneficent) and another which is due to natural causes. Empedocles and his school are also said to have distinguished madness arising ex purgamento animae from the madness due to bodily ailments.8
This, however, is relatively advanced thinking. We may doubt if any such distinction was drawn in earlier times. It is the common belief of primitive peoples throughout the world that all types of mental disturbance are caused by supernatural interference. Nor is the universality of the belief very surprising. I suppose it to have orig
inated in, and to be maintained by, the statements of the sufferers themselves. Among the commonest symptoms of delusional insanity to-day is the patient's belief that he is in contact with, or even identified with, supernatural beings or forces, and we may presume that it was not otherwise in antiquity; indeed, one such case, that of the fourth-century physician Menecrates, who thought he was Zeus, has been recorded in some detail, and forms the subject of a brilliant study by Otto Weinreich.9 Epileptics, again, often have the sensation of being beaten with a cudgel by some invisible being; and the startling phenomena of the epileptic fit, the sudden falling down, the muscular contortions, the gnashing teeth and projecting tongue, have certainly played a part in forming the popular idea of possession.10 It is not surprising that to the Greeks epilepsy was the "sacred disease" par excellence, or that they called it which—like our words "stroke," "seizure," "attack"—suggests the intervention of a daemon.11 I should guess, however, that the idea of true possession, as distinct from mere psychic interference, derived ultimately from cases of secondary or alternating personality, like the famous Miss Beauchamp whom Morton Prince studied.12 For here a new personality, usually differing widely from the old one in character, in range of knowledge, and even in voice and facial expression, appears suddenly to take possession of the organism, speaking of itself in the first person and of the old personality in the third. Such cases, relatively rare in modern Europe and America, seem to be found more often among the less advanced peoples,13 and may well have been commoner in antiquity than they are to-day; I shall return to them later. From these cases the notion of possession would easily be extended to epileptics and paranoiacs; and eventually all types of mental disturbance, including such things as sleepwalking and the delirium of high fever,14 would be put down to daemonic agencies. And the belief, once accepted, naturally created fresh evidence in its own support by the operation of autosuggestion.15
