by E R Dodds
It has long been observed that the idea of possession is absent from Homer, and the inference is sometimes drawn that it was foreign to the oldest Greek culture. We can, however, find in the Odyssey traces of the vaguer belief that mental disease is of supernatural origin. The poet himself makes no reference to it, but he once or twice allows his characters to use language which betrays its existence. When Melantho jeeringly calls the disguised Odysseus "knocked out of his senses," i.e., crazy, she is using a phrase which in origin probably implied daemonic intervention, though on her lips it may mean no more than we mean when we describe someone as "a bit touched." A little later, one of the suitors is jeering at Odysseus, and calls him (from is not found elsewhere, and its meaning is disputed; but the sense "touched," i.e., crazy, given by some ancient scholars, is the most natural, and the one best suited to the context.17 Here again a supernatural "touch" is, I think, implied. And finally, when Polyphemus starts screaming, and the other Cyclopes, on asking what is the matter, are informed that "No-man is trying to kill him," they observe in response that "the sickness from great Zeus cannot be avoided," and piously recommend prayer.18They have concluded, I think, that he is mad: that is why they abandon him to his fate. In the light of these passages it seems fairly safe to say that the supernatural origin of mental disease was a commonplace of popular thought in Homer's time, and probably long before, though the epic poets had no particular interest in it and did not choose to commit themselves to its correctness; and one may add that it has remained a commonplace of popular thought in Greece down to our own day.19 In the Classical Age, intellectuals might limit the range of "divine madness" to certain specific types. A few, like the author of the late-fifth-century treatise de morbo sacro, might even go the length of denying that any sickness is more "divine" than any other, holding that every disease is "divine" as being part of the divine order, but every disease has also natural causes which human reason can discover— But it is unlikely that popular belief was much affected by all this, at any rate outside a few great cultural centres.21 Even at Athens, the mentally afflicted were still shunned by many, as being persons subject to a divine curse, contact with whom was dangerous: you threw stones at them to keep them away, or at least took the minimum precaution of spitting.22
Yet if the insane were shunned, they were also regarded (as indeed they still are in Greece)23 with a respect amounting to awe; for they were in contact with the supernatural world, and could on occasion display powers denied to common men. Ajax in his madness talks a sinister language "which no mortal taught him, but a daemon";24 Oedipus in a state of frenzy is guided by a daemon to the place where Jocasta's corpse awaits him.25 We see why Plato in the Timaeus mentions disease as one of the conditions which favour the emergence of supernatural powers.26 The dividing line between common insanity and prophetic madness is in fact hard to draw. And to prophetic madness we must now turn.
Plato (and Greek tradition in general) makes Apollo its patron; and out of the three examples which he gives, the inspiration of two—the Pythia and the Sibyl—was Apolline,27 the third instance being the priestesses of Zeus at Dodona. But if we are to believe Rohde28 in this matter—and many people still do29—Plato was entirely mistaken: prophetic madness was unknown in Greece before the coming of Dionysus, who forced the Pythia on Delphi; until then, Apolline religion had been, according to Rohde, "hostile to anything in the nature of ecstasy." Rohde had two reasons for thus rejecting the Greek tradition. One was the absence from Homer of any reference to inspired prophecy; the other was the impressive antithesis which his friend Nietzsche had drawn between the "rational" religion of Apollo and the "irrational" religion of Dionysus. But I think Rohde was wrong.
In the first place, he confused two things that Plato carefully distinguished—the Apolline mediumship which aims at knowledge, whether of the future or of the hidden present, and the Dionysiac experience which is pursued either for its own sake or as a means of mental healing, the mantic or mediumistic element being absent or quite subordinate.30 Mediumship is the rare gift of chosen individuals; Dionysiac experience is essentially collective or congregational— —and is so far from being a rare gift that it is highly infectious. And their methods are as different as their aims: the two great Dionysiac techniques—the use of wine and the use of the religious dance— have no part whatever in the induction of Apolline ecstasy. The two things are so distinct that the one seems most unlikely to be derived from the other.
Furthermore, we know that ecstatic prophecy was practised from an early date in western Asia. Its occurrence in Phoenicia is attested by an Egyptian document of the eleventh century; and three centuries earlier still we find the Hittite king Mursili II praying for a "divine man" to do what Delphi was so often asked to do—to reveal for what sins the people were afflicted with a plague.31 The latter example would become especially significant if we could accept, as Nilsson inclines to do, the guess of that Apollo, the sender and the healer of plague, is none other than a Hittite god Apulunas.32 But in any case it seems to me reasonably certain, from the evidence afforded by the Iliad, that Apollo was originally an Asiatic of some sort.33 And in Asia, no less than in Mainland Greece, we find ecstatic prophecy associated with his cult. His oracles at Claros near Colophon and at Branchidae outside Miletus are said to have existed before the colonisation of Ionia,34 and at both ecstatic prophecy appears to have been practised.35 It is true that our evidence on the latter point comes from late authors; but at Patara in Lycia—which is thought by some to be Apollo's original homeland, and was certainly an early centre of his cult—at Patara we know from Herodotus that the prophetess was locked into the temple at night, with a view to mystic union with the god. Apparently she was thought to be at once his medium and his bride, as Cassandra should have been, and as Cook and Latte conjecture the Pythia to have been originally.36 That points fairly plainly to ecstatic prophecy at Patara, and Delphic influence is here very unlikely.
I conclude that the prophetic madness is at least as old in Greece as the religion of Apollo. And it may well be older still. If the Greeks were right in connecting with — and most philologists think they were37—the association of prophecy and madness belongs to the Indo-European stock of ideas. Homer's silence affords no sound argument to the contrary; we have seen before that Homer could keep his mouth shut when he chose. We may notice, moreover, that in this matter as in others the Odyssey has a somewhat less exacting standard of seemliness, of epic dignity, than has the Iliad. The Iliad admits only inductive divination from omens, but the Odyssey-poet cannot resist introducing something more sensational—an example of what the Scots call second-sight.38 The symbolic vision of the Apolline hereditary seer Theoclymenus in Book 20 belongs to the same psychological category as the symbolic visions of Cassandra in the Agamemnon, and the vision of that Argive prophetess of Apollo who, as Plutarch tells, rushed one day into the streets, crying out that she saw the city filled with corpses and blood.39 This is one ancient type of prophetic madness. But it is not the usual oracular type; for its occurrence is spontaneous and incalculable.40
At Delphi, and apparently at most of his oracles, Apollo relied, not on visions like those of Theoclymenus, but on "enthusiasm" in its original and literal sense. The Pythia became entheos, plena deo:41 the god entered into her and used her vocal organs as if they were his own, exactly as the so-called "control" does in modern spirit-mediumship; that is why Apollo's Delphic utterances are always couched in the first person, never in the third. There were, indeed, in later times, those who held that it was beneath the dignity of a divine being to enter into a mortal body, and preferred to believe—like many psychical researchers in our own day—that all prophetic madness was due to an innate faculty of the soul itself, which it could exercise in certain conditions, when liberated by sleep, trance, or religious ritual both from bodily interference and from rational control. This opinion is found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch;42 and we shall see in the next chapter that it was used in the fift
h century to account for prophetic dreams. Like the other, it has abundant savage parallels; we may call it the "shamanistic" view, in contrast with the doctrine of possession.43 But as an explanation of the Pythia's powers it appears only as a learned theory, the product of philosophical or theological reflection; there can be little doubt that her gifts were originally attributed to possession, and that this remained the usual view throughout antiquity—it did not occur even to the Christian Fathers to question it.44
Nor was prophetic possession confined to official oracles. Not only were legendary figures like Cassandra, Bakis, and the Sibyl believed to have prophesied in a state of possession,45 but Plato refers frequently to inspired prophets as a familiar contemporary type.46 In particular, some sort of private mediumship was practised in the Classical Age, and for long afterwards, by the persons known as "belly-talkers," and later as "pythons."47 I should like to know more about these "belly-talkers," one of whom, a certain Eurycles, was famous enough to be mentioned both by Aristophanes and by Plato.48 But our direct information amounts only to this, that they had a second voice inside them which carried on a dialogue with them,49 predicted the future, and was believed to belong to a daemon. They were certainly not ventriloquists in the modern sense of the term, as is often assumed.50 A reference in Plutarch seems to imply that the voice of the daemon—presumably a hoarse "belly-voice"—-was heard speaking through their lips; on the other hand, a scholiast on Plato writes as if the voice were merely an inward monition.51 Scholars have overlooked, however, one piece of evidence which not only excludes ventriloquism but strongly suggests trance: an old Hippocratic casebook, the Epidemiae, compares the noisy breathing of a heart patient to that of "the women called belly-talkers." Ventriloquists do not breathe stertorously; modern "trance mediums" often do.52
Even on the psychological state of the Pythia our information is pretty scanty. One would like to be told how she was chosen in the first instance, and how prepared for her high office; but practically all we know with certainty is that the Pythia of Plutarch's day was the daughter of a poor farmer, a woman of honest upbringing and respectable life, but with little education or experience of the world.53 One would like, again, to know whether on coming out of trance she remembered what she had said in the trance state, in other words, whether her "possession" was of the somnambulistic or the lucid type.54 Of the priestesses of Zeus at Dodona it is definitely reported that they did not remember; but for the Pythia we have no decisive statement.55 We know, however, from Plutarch that she was not always affected in the same manner,56 and that occasionally things went badly wrong, as they have been known to do at modern seances. He reports the case of a recent Pythia who had gone into trance reluctantly and in a state of depression, the omens being unfavourable. From the outset she spoke in a hoarse voice, as if distressed, and appeared to be filled with "a dumb and evil spirit";57 finally she rushed screaming towards the door and fell to the ground, whereupon all those present, and even the Prophetes, fled in terror. When they came back to pick her up, they found her senses restored;58 but she died within a few days. There is no reason to doubt the substantial truth of this story, which has parallels in other cultures.59 Plutarch probably had it at first hand from the Prophetes Nicander, a personal friend of his, who was actually present at the horrid scene. It is important as showing both that the trance was still genuine in Plutarch's day, and that it could be witnessed not only by the Prophetes and some of the Hosioi, but by the enquirers.60 Incidentally, the change of voice is mentioned by Plutarch elsewhere as a common feature of "enthusiasm." It is no less common in later accounts of possession, and in modern spirit mediums.61
I take it as fairly certain that the Pythia's trance was auto-suggestively induced, like mediumistic trance to-day. It was preceded by a series of ritual acts: she bathed, probably in Castalia, and perhaps drank from a sacred spring; she established contact with the god through his sacred tree, the laurel, either by holding a laurel branch, as her predecessor Themis does in a fifth-century vase painting, or by fumigating herself with burnt laurel leaves, as Plutarch says she did, or perhaps sometimes by chewing the leaves, as Lucian asserts; and finally she seated herself on the tripod, thus creating a further contact with the god by occupying his ritual seat.62 All these are familiar magical procedures, and might well assist the autosuggestion; but none of them could have any physiological effect—Professor Oesterreich once chewed a large quantity of laurel leaves in the interests of science, and was disappointed to find himself no more inspired than usual.63 The same applies to what is known of the procedure at other Apolline oracles—drinking from a sacred spring at Claros and possibly at Branchidae, drinking the blood of the victim at Argos.64 As for the famous "vapours" to which the Pythia's inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention, as Wilamowitz was, I think, the first to point out.65 Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulties of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation. Less has been heard of this theory since the French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no "chasm" from which vapours could once have come.66 Explanations of this type are really quite needless; if one or two living scholars still cling to them,67 it is only because they ignore the evidence of anthropology and abnormal psychology.
Scholars who attributed the Pythia's trance to inhaling mephitic gases naturally concluded that her "ravings" bore little relation to the response eventually presented to the enquirer; the responses must on this view be products of conscious and deliberate fraud, and the reputation of the Oracle must have rested partly on an excellent intelligence service, partly on the wholesale forgery of oracles post eventum. There is one piece of evidence, however, which suggests, for what it is worth, that in early times the responses were really based on the Pythia's words: when Cleomenes suborned the Oracle to give the reply he wanted, the person whom his agent approached was, if we can trust Herodotus, not the Prophetes or one of the Hosioi, but the Pythia herself; and the desired result followed.68 And if in later days, as Plutarch implies, the enquirers were, on some occasions at least, able to hear the actual words of the entranced Pythia, her utterances could scarcely on such occasions be radically falsified by the Prophetes. Nevertheless, one cannot but agree with Professor Parke that "the history of Delphi shows sufficient traces of a consistent policy to convince one that human intelligence at some point could play a deciding part in the process."69 And the necessity of reducing the Pythia's words to order, relating them to the enquiry, and— sometimes, but not always70—putting them into verse, clearly did offer considerable scope for the intervention of human intelligence. We cannot see into the minds of the Delphic priesthood, but to ascribe such manipulations in general to conscious and cynical fraud is, I suspect, to oversimplify the picture. Anyone familiar with the history of modern spiritualism will realise what an amazing amount of virtual cheating can be done in perfectly good faith by convinced believers.
Be that as it may, the rarity of open scepticism about Delphi before the Roman period is very striking.71 The prestige of the Oracle must have been pretty deeply rooted to survive its scandalous behaviour during the Persian Wars. Apollo on that occasion showed neither prescience nor patriotism, yet his people did not turn away from him in disgust; on the contrary, his clumsy attempts to cover his tracks and eat his words appear to have been accepted without question.72 The explanation must, I think, be sought in the social and religious conditions described in the preceding chapter. In a guilt-culture, the need for supernatural assurance, for an authority transcending man's, appears to be overwhelmingly strong. But Greece had neither a Bible nor a Church;73 that is why Apollo, vicar on earth of the heavenly Father,74 came to fill the gap. Without Delphi, Greek society could scarcely have endured the tensions to which it was subjected in the Archaic Age. The crushing sense of human ignorance and human insecurity, the dread of d
ivine phthonos, the dread of miasma—the accumulated burden of these things would have been unendurable without the assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give, the assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and purpose. "I know the count of the sand grains and the measures of the sea"; or, as another god said to another people, "the very hairs of your head are all numbered." Out of his divine knowledge, Apollo would tell you what to do when you felt anxious or frightened; he knew the rules of the complicated game that the gods play with humanity; he was the supreme "Averter of Evil." The Greeks believed in their Oracle, not because they were superstitious fools, but because they could not do without believing in it. And when the importance of Delphi declined, as it did in Hellenistic times, the main reason was not, I suspect, that men had grown (as Cicero thought) more sceptical,75 but rather that other forms of religious reassurance were now available.
So much for prophetic madness. With Plato's other types I can deal more briefly. On what Plato meant by "telestic" or ritual madness, much light has recently been thrown in two important papers by Professor Linforth;76 and I need not repeat things which he has already said better than I could say them. Nor shall I repeat here what I have myself said in print77 about what I take to be the prototype of ritual madness, the Dionysiac or mountain dancing. I should like, however, to make some remarks of a more general character.
