The Greeks and the Irrational

by E R Dodds

  Aristides' experience is plainly subjective; but occasionally an objective factor may have come into play. We read in the Epidaurian Record of a man who fell asleep in the daytime outside the temple, when one of the god's tame snakes came and licked his sore toe; he awoke "cured," and said he had dreamed that a handsome young man put a dressing on his toe. This recalls the scene in Aristophanes' Plutus, where it is the snakes who administer the curative treatment after the patients have seen a vision of the god. We also read of cures performed by the temple dogs who come and lick the affected part while the patient is wide awake.64 There is nothing incredible here, if we do not insist on the permanence of the "cures"; the habits of dogs and the therapeutic virtues of saliva are well known. Both dogs and snakes were quite real. A fourth-century Athenian inscription commands an offering of cakes to the holy dogs, and we have Plutarch's story of the clever temple-dog who detected a thief stealing the votives and was rewarded with dinners at the public expense for the rest of his life.65 The temple snake figures in Herodas' mime: the visiting ladies remember to pop a little porridge "respectfully" into his hole.66

  In the morning, those who had been favoured with the god's nocturnal visitation told their experiences. And here we must make generous allowance for what Freud called "secondary elaboration," whose effect is, in Freud's words, "that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience."67 In this case the secondary elaboration will have operated, without conscious deception, to bring the dream or vision into closer conformity with the traditional culture-pattern. For example, in the dream of the man with the sore toe, the godlike beauty of the dream-figure is the sort of traditional68 trait which would easily be added at this stage. And beyond this I think we must assume in many cases a tertiary elaboration69 contributed by the priests, or more often perhaps by fellow-patients. Every rumour of a cure, bringing as it did fresh hope to the desperate, will have been seized on and magnified in that expectant community of suffering, which was bound together, as Aristides tells us, by a stronger sense of fellowship than a school or a ship's company.70 Aristophanes gets the psychology right when he describes the other patients crowding round Plutus to congratulate him on recovering his eyesight, and too much excited to go to sleep again.71 To this sort of milieu we should probably refer the folktale elements in the Record, as well as the tall stories of surgical operations performed by the god on sleeping patients. It is significant that Aristides knows of no contemporary surgical cures, but believes that they were frequent "in the time of the present priest's grandfather."72 Even at Epidaurus or Pergamum one had to give a story time to grow.

  A word, finally, about the medical aspect of the business. In the Record the cures are mostly represented as instantaneous,73 and possibly some of them were. It is irrelevant to ask how long the improvement lasted: it is enough that the patient "departed cured" Such cures need not have been numerous: as we see in the case of Lourdes, a healing shrine can maintain its reputation on a very low percentage of successes, provided a few of them are sensational. As for the dream-prescriptions, their quality naturally varied not only with the dreamer's medical knowledge, but with his unconscious attitude towards his own illness.74 In a few instances they are quite rational, though not exactly original, as when the Divine Wisdom prescribes gargling for a sore throat and vegetables for constipation. "Full of gratitude," says the recipient of this revelation, "I departed cured."75 More often the god's pharmacopoeia is purely magical; he makes his patients swallow snake-poison or ashes from the altar, or smear their eyes with the blood of a white cock.76 Edelstein has rightly pointed out that such remedies still played a biggish part in profane medicine too;77 but there remains the important difference that in the medical schools they were subject, in principle at least, to rational criticism, whereas in dreams, as Aristotle said, the element of judgement is absent.78

  The influence of the dreamer's unconscious attitude may be seen in Aristides' dream-prescriptions, many of which he has recorded. As he says himself, "They are the very opposite of what one would expect, and are indeed just the things which one would naturally most avoid." Their common characteristic is their painfulness: they range from emetics, river-bathing in midwinter, and running barefoot in the frost, to voluntary shipwreck and a demand for the sacrifice of one of his fingers79— a symbol whose significance Freud has explained. These dreams look like the expression of a deep-seated desire for self-punishment. Aristides always obeyed them (though in the matter of the finger his Unconscious so far relented as to let him dedicate a finger-ring as a surrogate). Nevertheless he somehow managed to survive the effects of his own prescriptions; as Professor Campbell Bonner has said, he must have had the iron constitution of the chronic invalid.80 Indeed, obedience to such dreams may well have procured a temporary abatement of neurotic symptoms. But plainly on a wider view there is little to be said for a system which placed the patient at the mercy of his own unconscious impulses, disguised as divine monitions. We may well accept the cool judgement of Cicero that "few patients owe their lives to Asclepius rather than Hippocrates";81 and we should not allow the modern reaction against rationalism to obscure the real debt that mankind owes to those early Greek physicians who laid down the principles of a rational therapy in the face of age-old superstitions like the one we have been considering.

  As I have mentioned self-induced visions in connection with the Asclepius cult, I may add a couple of general remarks on waking visions or hallucinations. It is likely that these were commoner in former times than they are to-day, since they seem to be relatively frequent among primitives; and even with us they are less rare than is often supposed.82 They have in general the same origin and psychological structure as dreams, and like dreams they tend to reflect traditional culture-patterns. Among the Greeks, by far the commonest type is the apparition of a god or the hearing of a divine voice which commands or forbids the performance of certain acts. This type figures, under the name of "spectaculum," in Chalcidius' classification of dreams and visions; his example is the daemonion of Socrates.83 When all allowance has been made for the influence of literary tradition in creating a stereotyped form, we should probably conclude that experiences of this kind had once been fairly frequent, and still occurred occasionally in historical times.84

  I believe with Professor Latte85 that when Hesiod tells us how the Muses spoke to him on Helicon86 this is not allegory or poetic ornament, but an attempt to express a real experience in literary terms. Again, we may reasonably accept as historical Philippides' vision of Pan before Marathon, which resulted in the establishment of a cult of Pan at Athens;87 and perhaps also Pindar's vision of the Mother of the Gods in the form of a stone statue, which is likewise said to have occasioned the establishment of a cult, though the authority in this case is not contemporary.88 These three experiences have an interesting point in common: they all occurred in lonely mountainous places, Hesiod's on Helicon, Philippides' on the savage pass of Mount Parthenion, Pindar's during a thunderstorm in the mountains. That is possibly not accidental. Explorers, mountaineers, and airmen sometimes have odd experiences even today: a well-known example is the presence that haunted Shackleton and his companions in the Antarctic.89 And one of the old Greek doctors in fact describes a pathological state into which a man may fall "if he is travelling on a lonely route and terror seizes him as a result of an apparition."90 We need to remember in this connection that most of Greece was, and is, a country of small and scattered settlements separated by wide stretches of desolate mountain solitude that dwarf to insignificance the occasional farms, the The psychological influence of that solitude should not be underrated.

  It remains to trace briefly the steps by which a handful of Greek intellectuals attained a more rational attitude to dream-experience. So far as our fragmentary knowledge goes, the first man who explicitly put the dream in its proper place was Heraclitus, with his observation that in sleep each of us retreats to a world of his own.91
Not only does that rule out the "objective" dream, but it seems by implication to deny validity to dream-experience in general, since Heraclitus' rule is "to follow what we have in common."92 And it would appear that Xenophanes too denied its validity, since he is said to have rejected all forms of divination, which must include the veridical dream.93 But these early sceptics did not offer to explain, so far as we know, how or why dreams occurred, and their view was slow to win acceptance. Two examples will serve to show how old ways of thinking, or at any rate old ways of speaking, persisted in the late fifth century. The sceptical Artabanus in Herodotus points out to Xerxes that most dreams are suggested by our waking preoccupations, yet he still talks of them in the old "objective" manner as "wandering about among men."94 And Democritus' atomist theory of dreams as eidola which continually emanate from persons and objects, and affect the dreamer's consciousness by penetrating the pores of his body, is plainly an attempt to provide a mechanistic basis for the objective dream; it even preserves Homer's word for the objective dream-image.95 This theory makes explicit provision for telepathic dreams by declaring that eidola carry representations of the mental activities of the beings from whom they originate.96

  We should expect, however, that by the end of the fifth century the traditional type of "divine dream," no longer nourished by a living faith in the traditional gods,97 would have declined in frequency and importance—the popular Asclepius cult being for good reasons an exception. And there are in fact indications that other ways of regarding the dream were becoming more fashionable about this time. Religious minds were now inclined to see in the significant dream evidence of the innate powers of the soul itself, which it could exercise when liberated by sleep from the gross importunities of the body. That development belongs to a context of ideas, commonly called "Orphic," which I shall consider in the next chapter.98 At the same time there is evidence of a lively interest in oneirocritice, the art of interpreting the private symbolic dream. A slave in Aristophanes talks of hiring a practitioner of this art for a couple of obols; a grandson of Aristides the Just is said to have made his living by it with the help of a or table of correspondences.99 Out of these developed the first Greek dreambooks, the earliest of which may belong to the late fifth century.100

  The Hippocratic treatise On Regimen which Jaeger has dated to about the middle of the fourth century,101 makes an interesting attempt to rationalise oneirocritice by relating large classes of dreams to the physiological state of the dreamer and treating them as symptoms important to the physician.102 This author admits also" precognitive "divine" dreams, and he likewise recognises that many dreams are undisguised wish-fulfilments.103 But the dreams which interest him as a doctor are those which express in symbolic form morbid physiological states. These he attributes to the medical clairvoyance exercised by the soul when in sleep it "becomes its own mistress" and is able to survey its bodily dwelling without distraction104 (here the influence of the "Orphic" view is evident). From this standpoint he proceeds to justify many of the traditional interpretations by a series of more or less fanciful analogies between the external world and the human body, macrocosm and microcosm. Thus earth stands for the dreamer's flesh, a river for his blood, a tree for his reproductive system; to dream of an earthquake is a symptom of physiological change, while dreams about the dead refer to the food one has eaten, "for from the dead come nourishment and growth and seed."105 He thus anticipates Freud's principle that the dream is always egocentric,106 though his application of it is too narrowly physiological. He claims no originality for his interpretations, some of which are known to be older;107 but he says that earlier interpreters lacked a rational basis for their views, and prescribed no treatment except prayer, which in his opinion is not enough.108

  Plato in the Timaeus offers a curious explanation of mantic dreams: they originate from the insight of the rational soul, but are perceived by the irrational soul as images reflected on the smooth surface of the liver; hence their obscure symbolic character, which makes interpretation necessary.109 He thus allows dream-experience an indirect relationship to reality, though it does not appear that he rated it very high. A much more important contribution was made by Aristotle in his two short essays On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep. His approach to the problem is coolly rational without being superficial, and he shows at times a brilliant insight, as in his recognition of a common origin for dreams, the hallucinations of the sick, and the illusions of the sane (e.g., when we mistake a stranger for the person we want to see).110 He denies that any dreams are godsent : if the gods wished to communicate knowledge to men, they would do so in the daytime, and they would choose the recipients more carefully.111 Yet dreams, though not divine, may be called daemonic, "for Nature is daemonic"—a remark which, as Freud said, contains deep meaning if it be correctly interpreted.112 On the subject of veridical dreams Aristotle in these essays is, like Freud, cautiously noncommittal. He no longer talks of the soul's innate powers of divination, as he had done in his romantic youth;113 and he rejects Democritus' theory of atomic eidola.114 Two kinds of dreams he accepts as intelligibly precognitive: dreams conveying foreknowledge of the dreamer's state of health, which are reasonably explained by the penetration to consciousness of symptoms ignored in waking hours; and those which bring about their own fulfilment by suggesting a course of action to the dreamer.115 Where dreams outside these classes prove to be veridical, he thinks it is probably coincidence ; alternatively, he suggests a theory of wave-borne stimuli, on the analogy of disturbances propagated in water or air.116 His whole approach to the problem is scientific, not religious; and one may in fact doubt whether in this matter modern science has advanced very far beyond him.

  Certainly later antiquity did not. The religious view of dreams was revived by the Stoics, and eventually accepted even by Peripatetics like Cicero's friend Cratippus.117 In the considered opinion of Cicero, the philosophers by this "patronage of dreams" had done much to keep alive a superstition whose only effect was to increase the burden of men's fears and anxieties.118 But his protest went unheeded: the dreambooks continued to multiply; the Emperor Marcus Aurelius thanked the gods for medical advice vouchsafed to him in sleep; Plutarch abstained from eating eggs because of certain dreams; Dio Cassius was inspired by a dream to write history; and even so enlightened a surgeon as Galen was prepared to perform an operation at the bidding of a dream.119 Whether from an intuitive apprehension that dreams are after all related to man's inmost life, or for the simpler reasons I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, antiquity to the end refused to content itself with the Gate of Ivory, but insisted that there was also, sometimes and somehow, a Gate of Horn.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

  V

  The Greek Shamans and the Origin of Puritanism

  That man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!

  Herman Melville

  In the preceding chapter we saw that, side by side with the old belief in objective divine messengers who communicate with man in dreams and visions, there appears in certain writers of the Classical Age a new belief which connects these experiences with an occult power innate in man himself. "Each man's body," says Pindar, "follows the call of overmastering death; yet still there is left alive an image of life for this alone is from the gods. It sleeps while the limbs are active; but while the man sleeps it often shows in dreams a decision of joy or adversity to come."1 Xenophon puts this doctrine into plain prose, and provides the logical links which poetry has the right to omit. "It is in sleep," says Xenophon, "that the soul (psyche) best shows its divine nature; it is in sleep that it enjoys a certain insight into the future; and this is, apparently, because it is freest in sleep." Then he goes on to argue that in death we may expect the psyche to be even freer; for sleep is the nearest approach to death in living experience.2 Similar statements appear in Plato, and in a fragment of an early work by Aristotle.3

  Opinions of this kind have long been recognised as elements in a new culture-pattern, e
xpressions of a new outlook on man's nature and destiny which is foreign to the older Greek writers. Discussion of the origin and history of this pattern, and its influence on ancient culture, could easily occupy an entire course of lectures or fill a volume by itself alone. All that I can do here is to consider briefly some aspects of it which crucially affected the Greek interpretation of nonrational factors in human experience. But in attempting even this, I shall have to traverse ground which has been churned to deep and slippery mud by the heavy feet of contending scholars; ground, also, where those in a hurry are liable to trip over the partially decayed remains of dead theories that have not yet been decently interred. We shall be wise, then, to move slowly, and to pick our steps rather carefully among the litter.