Chapter XLIX: Appendix: VIII

DISINTEGRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND REDUPLICATION OF PERSONALITY

In that period of extreme excitement the Greeks must have had frequent experience of the abnormal but by no means unusual psychical state in which a division of consciousness takes place and becomes apparent. The single personality splits up into two (or more) distinct centres of consciousness; and these give rise to two personalities (succeeding each other, or contemporaneous), with a double will and a double intellect appearing in one man. Even unprejudiced psychological observers of our own time are unable to describe such phenomena, which appear (spontaneously or produced experimentally) in certain neuropathic conditions, except as a reduplication or multiplication of personality. A second self comes into being, a second centre of consciousness following or by the side of the first and normal personality, which is generally unaware of the existence of its rival. (Probably the most complete and cautious account of these matters is that given by Pierre Janet in _L'automatisme psychologique_, Paris, 1889.) When such phenomena appear in conjunction with marked religious or spiritualistic tendencies they are naturally explained in accordance with these intellectual preconceptions. The appearance in a man or woman of an intelligent will, unguided or unperceived by the normally dominant personality, is conceived as the entrance of a foreign personality into the individual; or as the expulsion of the real soul of the individual by such a demonic or spiritual visitor. Nothing, however, is commoner, in all ages, than the religious or spiritualist preconceptions that lead to such an explanation; and so {596} what the Greeks called ~e/kstasis~ or ~kate/chesthai ek theou=~ has been a very frequent explanation of such mysterious occurrences from the earliest times (and in the present day). It has appealed just as much to the person affected by such "reduplication of personality" as to those round about him (unless they have been scientifically educated). The actual experience of such phenomena is generally a fact; fancy begins only with the explanation offered. For the Greeks the Pythia was always the best known example of such "possession" of a human being by a foreign will or spirit which seemed to enter violently and from outside into the human individual, having little correspondence (as it usually happened) with the character or the intellect of the "medium" in his or her normal state of consciousness. The Sibyls, Bakides, ~Ba/kchoi~, the seers and priests of purification, Epimenides, Aristeas, and so many others, were further cases of the ascent of the soul to the divine or the entrance of a god into the soul. It was inevitable that the idea of an immediate relation between the soul and the divine, and of the divine nature of the soul itself, should grow up in connexion with such cases as these, and seem to be authenticated in them more than in any other way. Greece is not the only place where this has happened.