The Evil Hours (11 page)

 

“PTSD is a disease of time,” anthropologist Allan Young tells us in his history of modern trauma,
Harmony of Illusions
.
While Young was speaking of the personal experience of trauma, his idea of trauma as something that disrupts the normal flow of time touches on one of the central problems of attempting to write a history of trauma; namely, where should it begin? One possible beginning is at the dawn of time itself, in this case the prehistorical hunter-gatherers of Siberia and the Huichol people of central Mexico, as both belong to a grouping of cultures thought by anthropologists to be shamanic in character.
These and other prehistorical groups have at the center of their cultures a figure known as the shaman, what one researcher described as a sort of “sacred politician.” These types of societies, some of which still exist today, are apt to look at crisis journeys and traumatic passages—near-fatal accidents, severe illnesses, extreme exposure to the elements—as being part of a larger cycle of human life, essentially flipping the contemporary disease model of trauma on its head.

The shaman, a figure who emerged during the Upper Paleolithic period, had a broad, loosely defined role within tribal society.
Anthropologist Joan Halifax, describing shamans in her book
Shamanic Voices
, saw them as “healers, seers, and visionaries who have mastered death.” Initiation into this sacred caste required that applicants survive a direct experience of death or passage through an extreme terrain of the psyche. Such boundary crossings or experiences of being “catapulted into the territory of death” were thought to grant the potential shaman special knowledge of “the inner workings of human crisis,” a knowledge which could be applied to the treatment of other sufferers. This view of trauma not only formed the bedrock of tribal medicine but also gave shape to the traditions of wisdom that guided such societies. In the late 1800s, during the golden age of polar exploration, a Caribou shaman known as Igjugarjuk told the Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes; and is only to be attained through suffering. Privation and suffering are the only things that can open the mind of man to those things which are hidden from others.” In other words, trauma, which obviously leads to great pain, can also lead to deeper knowledge about human existence.

Such ideas do not directly inform our modern understanding of trauma, but this vision of it as a transformative life experience, a source of supernatural knowledge, exists as a sort of rarely verbalized undercurrent to the prevailing view of terrible events. Our current understanding of trauma, along with the secret suspicion that survivors are somehow tainted or poisoned by sexual violation and violence, traces its origins to another ancient river of knowledge, which is best exemplified by early Jewish law and its paranoia of free-flowing blood, which included menstrual blood and any blood spilled on the battlefield, as seen in the Old Testament in Numbers 31:19, which commanded, “All of you who have killed anyone or touched anyone who was killed must stay outside the camp seven days.”

Because such shamanic societies existed (and in some cases still exist) in their own cycle of time, apart from the normal course of Western history, and pass their traditions orally in the form of mythic tales, it is difficult to place them within a normal historical context or to determine the extent of their influence on us today. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to consider how these societies, whose cultures were free of the influence of technology and Judeo-Christian beliefs, essentially invert our contemporary view of trauma: it is the survivors of trauma, not the “normals,” who are considered to be the possessors of special knowledge. It is the traumatized who are the doctors and the untraumatized who are the patients. This conversion of traumatic knowledge into a kind of religious commodity is less surprising the more you think about it: What could be more mystical than visions of old wounds that you cannot escape much less put into words? It is the boundless blackness, the Void, the forever unknown that lies at the edges of human consciousness, and early man, lacking any other insights into the mind or nature or the universe, might have understandably accounted for the nightmares and frights of post-traumatic experience by converting them into a sort of religious medical tradition.

Now, at this point, I should be clear, I am not arguing that such an arrangement is preferable to the current way of dealing with trauma. I am not, for instance, suggesting that psychologically scarred veterans would be better served by being told that they possess mystical powers and can heal the sick. And now is probably a good time to point out that these same ancient cultures also tended to look upon neurological disorders, such as epilepsy, as being somehow blessed or sacred as well. (Epilepsy was, in fact, often referred to as the “sacred disease” during the time of Hippocrates, a characterization he ridiculed.)
However, it's worth considering the distinctive way that some ancient societies chose to frame the narrative of the survivor and their ability to see that, as an experience at the boundary between life and death, trauma holds within it the potential for wisdom, a formulation one almost never hears today. War equals trauma equals loss equals pity and nothing else. As one well-spoken Iraq veteran told me recently, “Sometimes, it feels as if the American civilian population has pathologized the entire veteran experience. Somebody said to me the other day, ‘I can't see how anyone could go to Iraq and
not
come back with PTSD.'”

Interesting, also, is the degree to which these mythic shamanic journeys seem to parallel the cycle of death and rebirth that so many traumatic survivors describe today. (Recall Alice Sebold's feeling her life had ended after her rape, only to feel “reborn” later.) Thinking about the question of trauma mythically for a moment, it is tempting to wonder if, on a certain level, what we call PTSD doesn't represent an incomplete passage from the underworld of death and darkness back to a more fully realized consciousness of one's role in the universe, a knowledge of the hugeness of existence and of the value of safety and comfort and social connectedness. Modern medicine, like any other culture, has its mythologies, and who's to say that this mythology doesn't have its blind spots, its failures of imagination, its false gods, just as the Huichol mythology does?

The soldier turned writer is something of a cliché in American culture (Norman Mailer, for instance, complained that everyone in his World War II rifle company was working on a novel), but most of the veterans I know, in addition to finding major parts of their war surpassingly awful, also found a lot of it to be sublime, and more than a few of them woke up after being home for a few months and were suddenly
consumed
by a need for answers to life's great questions. It was as if the war had deeply unsettled them, forcing them to confront aspects of themselves that had been ignored for too long. This contemporary yet ancient way of looking at trauma is almost completely absent in the clinical literature on the subject.

 

War is always ironic, the literary historian Paul Fussell observed, and something similar is probably true of trauma, because the first glimpse we get of post-traumatic stress in the historical record comes from the land of Sumer, an ancient civilization that existed for around a thousand years in a place that we today refer to as Iraq. Four thousand years before the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly because of weapons of mass destruction, two converging armies, those of the Ilamites and the Subarians, invaded the Sumerian city of Ur looking for booty. (Some scholars think that the land of Ur, or Uruk, is where we get the place-name “Iraq.”) The aftermath of this event is recorded on stone tablets in an anonymous account known as the
Lamentation of Ur
.

 

The city they make into ruins; the people groan.

Its lady cries: “Alas for my city,” cries: “Alas for my house.”

In its lofty gates, where they were wont to promenade, dead bodies were lying about;

In its boulevards, where the feasts were celebrated, scattered they lay.

. . . At night a bitter lament having been raised unto me
,

I, although, for that night I tremble, fled not before that night's violence.

The storm's cyclone like destruction—verily its terror has filled me full.

Because of its affliction in my nightly sleeping place
,

In my nightly sleeping place verily there is no peace for me.

 

Obviously, the author of this account isn't available to be interviewed about the nature of this “affliction” and why exactly there was no peace in their “nightly sleeping place,” but it's fascinating to note that the author of the
Lamentation of Ur
did, apparently, see a relatively direct cause and effect relationship between “terror” and subsequent “affliction,” linking such an event with a lack of sleep. Today, encountering such an ancient fragment, it is tempting to look at it as a case study in the history of science—one gets the sense that one is observing the birth of the clinical mindset, the ability to observe a phenomenon in the abstract, connecting a physical event to a resultant pattern of symptoms. At the very least, from this archaic example we gain proof of the existence of perhaps the most vexing of post-traumatic symptoms, insomnia, which is a problem that remains largely unchanged today. As one VA psychologist, who has treated hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, told me recently, “Sleep is one of the last areas to resolve in PTSD.”

The Greeks, by contrast, took a notably unclinical approach to war's effect on the psyche.
Some contemporary researchers have even gone so far as to look at the ancient Greeks, with their encompassing mythology, as representing something of a dark age in the study of trauma. And yet, as with so many things relating to the mysteries of life, the ancient Greeks have a lot to teach us about terror and loss. In his pioneering studies on
The
Iliad
and
The
Odyssey
, books which helped launch a renaissance in classical trauma studies, retired VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argues that “Homer saw things that we in psychiatry and psychology had more or less missed.”
Homer's epic poems are virtual warehouses of knowledge about war-born psychological injury, yet as the poet himself proclaims in the opening lines of
The Odyssey
, his intent is to celebrate, to sing of the deeds of Odysseus, not to educate or to provide a clinical taxonomy of any kind. For the Greeks, the heroic ideal was literally a religion, and Homer's works focused on combat and the clashing of spears in a way that might seem juvenile to some today were it not for his very Greek insistence upon depicting the losers of such contests in great detail. (As the legendary Oxford classicist C. M. Bowra put it, “The Greeks thought victory glorious and a defeat heroically endured only a shade less glorious.”)
Strife, and one could say terror, were at the heart of the Greek worldview, a belief system that is so pervasive in their writing that it is likely they viewed war in a way that is similar, in a moral sense, to the way natural disasters are viewed today—as events outside the realm of human agency, as acts of God or, in this case, acts of the gods. The poet Heraclitus described how conflict defined the age:

 

Justice in our minds is strife.

We cannot help but see

War makes us as we are.

 

To die nobly in battle was the surest route to fame and honor in Greek society, and while
The
Odyssey
delves unflinchingly into the costs of heroism and the aftermath of war, the idea of linking such tribulations even tangentially to madness would likely have been at odds with the basic Greek view of life.

Curiously, the Greeks had a rather sophisticated view of other forms of mental illness, such as depression. Medicine at that time was based upon humoral theory, which viewed character as a balancing act between four basic elements: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. The ancient physician Empedocles, for instance, thought that depression was caused by too much black bile (the Greek words for black bile are
melaina chole
, which is where we get the word “melancholy”).
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, held a surprisingly biological view of mental illness. “It is the brain which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absentmindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit.” This divide between the philosophical/religious view of madness and the psychological costs of war and disaster was clear and inviolate, which helps explain why trauma remained outside the circle of medicine for millennia. It was, for lack of a better word, a matter of politics. To treat venerated warriors like the insane would have been unthinkable to the Greeks.

Similarly, the rather brutish politics of the ancient world help to explain why there are comparatively few accounts of rape in the historical record. Women in antiquity were treated as something like property, and while incidents of rape do appear in ancient literature, they were often recorded in the manner that one might record the theft of livestock or the damage caused by a passing storm. (Or, as in the case of the rape of Lucretia, described by Livy in the
History of Rome
, the victim announces that she has been dishonored and commits suicide in front of her husband and father.) To make an obvious point, rape victims were not treated as heroic survivors worthy of veneration in antiquity. In fact, in one notable instance of rape in ancient literature, the writer seems to dwell on the lamentable weakness of women as something needing correction. We see this in the Roman poet Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, in which the victim, a mortal named Caenis, is raped by the god Neptune.
Afterward, Neptune asks what he might do to please her, to which she responds: “What I want is not to be ravished again, ever . . . I have a serious prayer that matches the serious wrong you have just now done me. I want you to make me a man so that nothing like this can happen again.” Neptune grants her prayer. And as she spoke, “her voice began to resonate deeper and fuller . . . Her body was turning to that of a male and, to make it an even better gift, Neptune allowed it the further favor—that never should swords or weapons wound it. Caenis, renewed as Caeneus . . .” Thus was rape transformed into a boon in the ancient world.