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inducing and terminating spirit possession. If a child wishes to become a medium, he is encouraged to do so and given special training, just as were the young country girls who became the oracles at Delphi and elsewhere. Indeed, some of the many Umbanda centers (there are 4000 in Sao Paulo alone) hold regular training sessions, where the procedures include various ways of making the novice dizzy in order to teach him or her the trance state, as well as techniques similar to those used in hypnosis. And in the trance state, the novice is taught how each of several possible spirits behaves. This fact of a differentiation of possessing spirits is important, and I wish to comment further on it and its function in culture. The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. That is, they should not be considered as isolated phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter around doing nothing but leaning on their own antique merits. Instead, they always live at the very heart of a culture or subculture, moving out and filling up the unspoken and the unrationalized. They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of excerption and the constraints on narratization and conciliation. Such vestiges of the bicameral mind as we are here considering are no exception. A possession religion such as the Umbanda functions as a powerful psychological support to the heterogeneous masses of its poor and uneducated and needy. It is pervaded with a feeling of caridade, or charity, which consoles and binds together this motley of political impotents, whose urbanization and ethnic diversity has stranded them without roots. And look at the pattern of particular neurological organizations that emerge as possessing divinities. They remind us of the presenting personal gods of Sumer and Babylon, interceders with those
