As a matter of cultural history, it is interesting to see how the ‘explanation’ of this universal and everlasting human phenomenon—what people ‘see’ and ‘hear’—has varied at different ages, in terms of the different Weltanschauungs which have been accepted at the moment. The idea of supernatural possession lasted from the time of Homer right through the Christian epoch until at least the seventeenth century. Then, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after the rise of spiritualism, many people regarded phenomena such as those produced by the Fox sisters in 1848 as due not to possession by supernatural beings but to possession by departed spirits.
In modern times, the explanations are in most cases very different. Like most people who have published books and have become to some extent public figures, I receive a great many unsolicited letters, some of which come from what I suppose is the lunatic fringe (sometimes one has the sense that the fringe is like that on a Spanish shawl—that there is more fringe than shawl). I have had in the last few years at least a dozen of these pathetic letters, and I am reminded of it because just the other day I received one from Sweden, from a gentleman who has written me as long ago as 1952 about the same problem.
In exactly the same way as in many of the other letters, he complains that he is being subjected to bombardment by some new kind of radio, which he says is in the hands of a group of (as he describes them) ‘homosexual-fascist-communists’ who are sending out messages and pumping them into his mind; and the poor man is in this terrible state and can get no relief because the Swedish police are in league with his enemies, and so on and so forth. This is a very common phenomenon. These experiences which are felt as invasion, and which would have been interpreted in the past as possession by supernatural beings, or possibly as possession by departed spirits, now appear to be possession by an electronic device. Nothing changes, but everything changes. The fundamental experiences remain the same, but the cultural frame of reference in which we explain them varies profoundly from age to age.
Now we have to go back again for a moment to Homer, to see what exactly is the nature of the self. We have talked about deep irrational drives which are produced (in Homer’s terms) by the intervention of supernatural beings. But what is the human personality on which these interventions take place? The interesting thing in Homer is that, as far as he is concerned, there is no such thing as a permanent soul. The word ‘psyche’ is used by him, but never in relation to the mind of a person during his lifetime.
It refers only to the thing which leaves the body at the last breath and which then becomes a ghost, like the ones seen by Ulysses in Hades. These ghosts are insubstantial—they are not personalities at all—and, if you remember, they can only communicate with Ulysses after he has fed them with blood. He makes a sacrifice and pours the blood into the trench; the ghosts drink a little of it, take on a little materiality, and are able to talk with him.
This is the only use of the word ‘psyche’ in Homer. For the rest, the personality is seen by Homer very much as many modern empirical psychologists see it, as a kind of bundle of symbiotic complexes. There is the ego, which is more or less equivalent to what he calls the noos, the rational side of man. Other forces within the personality include thumos, the organ of feeling, which is one of the most important; it is located in the chest and mounts up very often into the nostrils and the head. Then there is the midriff, the fren, which means mind, organ of passion, life. The belly also plays an important part, rather as in the Jewish tradition, where the bowels are the seat of compassion and the heart of affections.
Homer’s psychology is curiously like the psychology of early Buddhism, although Homer is not so incredibly and painfully systematic. The early Buddhist idea is that man is anatta, without a substantial soul. He consists of a group of skandhas, which are complexes, partly physiological, partly emotional, consisting partly of the appetitive and partly of the reflective and intellectual side of man. All the facts of human behaviour can be explained in terms of this skandhas, just as Homer thought that all the facts of human behaviour could be explained in terms of the thumos, fren, noos, ego, and so on.
One of the most interesting facts about Homeric psychology, in which it also resembles very much the older Indian psychology, is that there is virtually no reference to the will. It seems to us extremely strange that these older psychologists don’t talk about the will, but if you don’t have a unitary controlling soul, then the idea of will doesn’t seem to be so very important, and it seems to be possible to get on without it. In the marriage service, to the question ‘Dost thou take this woman to be thy wedded wife?’ we would answer ‘I will’; but the Homeric hero, if he was being fully logical, would say, ‘Well, my thumos and my fren are all for it, and in spite of the fact that my noos has certain reservations, I will go along with my viscera, all the more so as I can feel definitely the symptoms of possession by Aphrodite.’
The idea of a multiplicity of semi-independent forces loosely bound together within the mind-body, whose symbiosis constitutes the personality, has been commented upon by Professor Martin P. Nilsson, who wrote a few years ago in the Harvard Theological Review that ‘Pluralistic teaching about the soul is founded in the nature of things, and only our habits of thought make it surprising that man should have several “souls”.’ Homer was not a philosopher, but he was an extremely acute observer—what may be called a kind of palaeo-empiricist—and in a certain sense he anticipated the judgment of Hume on the nature of the human being. For Hume insisted that there is no observable self. All that we observe is a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’.
So much for the position of Homer, that man has no substantial, detachable soul, but is a bundle of semi-independent symbiotic forces, half physiological and half psychological. This was the current notion about 800 b.c. About 400 years later the Greek notion of the personality was entirely different. We find in Socrates and Plato that it is completely self-evident that man has a unitary soul and that this soul is detachable and can survive after the death of the body. The question arises, What is the reason for this profound change? It used to be fashionable to say that maybe there had been influences from India, but recent scholarship inclines to the belief that the important influences during that period were from the North. It was in the seventh century that the Greeks first began penetrating into the area of the Black Sea and founding colonies upon its shores. There they came into contact with the Scythians, who practised a form of shamanistic religion such as is still practised in Siberia and Central Asia—or was practised until the inhabitants of those parts of the world were converted to Marxism.
The shaman was a medicine man who established contact with the gods, but he did it in a way fundamentally different from the way in which the Delphic Oracle, the Pythia of Delphi, established her contact with the gods. The Pythia of Delphi was what the Greeks called entheos: she had the god inside her, she was filled with the god—from entheos comes our word ‘enthusiasm’—and the god spoke through her in the first person. Apollo, when he spoke through the Pythia, said ‘I’ in precisely the same way as the modern medium speaks with the voice of her control. The shaman, on the contrary, did something quite different. He didn’t wait for the god to come into him. He went out to look for the god. He practised what in modern mediumistic jargon is called ‘travelling clairvoyance’. He went into a trance and got out of himself and moved about the world and came in contact with divine beings and saw what was going on in other places.
Whether clairvoyance is a fact or not, I don’t know. But it is absolutely undoubted that certain people believe it to be a fact. They have a capacity for apparently going out of themselves, getting information from distant places, and getting into contact with what appear to be divine beings. They also seem to have the capacity of getting into contact with previous existences. One of the interesting things about the shamans is that they remembered their earlier existences as shamans of an earlier date, and the fact that they were reincarnations of people who had had the same power in the past was one of the things which gave them their power to be shamans in the present.
Modern scholarship inclines to believe that the rise of the Orphic holy men in Greece was essentially due to shamanistic influences from
