Hearing voices when no source can be found or when no one else does is an ancient, multifaceted experience. It reaches back into the prehistoric archeological record and stretches forward to the present day. It appears in timeless religious texts that we read again and again, and in newspaper articles that we read once and then discard. It evokes insanity (to most people), but it also evokes poetry and God and the physics of sound. It occurs in cultures in all regions of the Earth and is an appropriate topic of study for an array of disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, neurology, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and linguistics.
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets takes many of these aspects of the experience into account. This was not something that I had originally planned. When I first began to read and think about voice-hearing—the convenient name that I will frequently use for the phenomenon throughout this book—all I knew was that it was a symptom of psychiatric illness. I soon learned that this was a simplistic understanding. Just below the popular interpretation there was a sea of voices clamoring for a hearing. The intention of this book is to provide one.
The book won’t do so thoroughly. It can’t. The experience is quite simply too diverse to cover in a single work, particularly one of modest length. The reader should therefore be aware that I have been selective. The most important cut I’ve made in the material is cultural. There is a fascinating anthropological literature on voice-hearing in African, Asian, and Native American societies, but I have limited myself to voices as they exist in the history of the West: North America and Western Europe. The only exceptions to this rule are those cases in which a cultural comparison or outside fact is useful in making a specific point or where the history of the West can be located only outside its geographical boundaries—as in the birth and growth of the world’s major monotheistic religions in the Near East.
I hope readers will enjoy discovering what I’ve chosen to include—inevitably a more fraught set of judgments—as they proceed, just as I have been cheered by the heterogeneity of the subject. Before they do so, however, it will be helpful for readers to know that this book itself is written in three different “voices.” This aspect of Muses, Madmen, and Prophets is due to what I perceived early on to be three different demands made upon me by the material.
The first demand was intellectual. The vast majority of the literature on voice-hearing is academic in tone. Voice-hearing is an unusual and mysterious experience: Why do people hear voices? What does it mean? Where does it come from? For centuries, these questions have led authors to dissect, probe, and categorize the experience in the hope of better understanding it. In order to synthesize and present this material to the reader, I’ve had to take something of a similar approach in several chapters.
The second demand was emotional. Much more than a “phenomenon,” voice-hearing is, as I’ve already referred to it, an experience. It accompanies people as they go about their everyday lives. It is woven into their sense of self, whether they want it to be or not. A full account of voice-hearing must pay its respects to this fact. Yet I do not hear voices and never have. In light of this problem, I decided early on to do what I could to gain a closer, more personal understanding of what it is like to hear voices. The chapters marked by the heading “Interlude” are narratives of my attempts. They are written in a much more casual mode than what surrounds them.
The third demand was moral. Voice-hearing is an experience of which society has always taken notice and offered interpretations. People who have had the experience live within a context that influences them and with which they have idiosyncratic relationships. To fully explore this aspect of the experience, this book concludes with three case studies. I chose the subjects of these chapters—Socrates, Joan of Arc, and the German psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber—because the documentation on their lives was particularly rich and because they are all figures who came into stark, tragic conflict with the culture of their times. I hope that these conflicts will yield some insights into the interplay of personal and public meaning that inevitably defines unusual experiences in human life.