Speaking in Tongues
The possessed who spoke strange languages, and what the tongues are.
In the Texts
The Rituale Romanum of 1614 gives three signs by which possession is known: speaking an unknown tongue or understanding one, knowledge of hidden and distant things, and strength beyond the person’s age and state. The tongue was the sign the exorcists prized, and the manuals are full of peasants who answered in Latin.
What Medicine Makes of It
Linguists have recorded the tongues of Pentecostal worshippers, of Haitian vodou, and of Siberian shamans, and found the same thing: a fluent stream of syllables drawn from the speaker’s own language, with its rhythm and intonation and none of its grammar. William Samarin called it a façade of language. Brain imaging of women speaking in tongues found the frontal lobes and the language areas quieter, not busier, consistent with their report that the speech was not theirs. The possessed of the seventeenth century, examined by the physicians of the Sorbonne at Loudun, produced Latin that the examiners found to be bad Latin, and no Greek or Hebrew at all. The 1999 rite no longer lists the tongue among the signs.
The Evidence
- Samarin (1972) analysed recordings from five countries and found speaking in tongues to be “a façade of language”: the sounds of the speaker’s own tongue, with rhythm and intonation but no grammar and no meaning.
- Newberg et al. (2006) imaged five women speaking in tongues and found decreased activity in the frontal lobes and the language areas, with the speaker’s sense of not being in control borne out by the scan.
- Francis and Robbins (2003) found Pentecostal tongue-speakers no more neurotic than other churchgoers, and somewhat more emotionally stable; the practice is learned, communal, and not a sign of illness.
- The tongues of the possessed in the manuals, the sign the exorcist most sought, were by the witnesses’ accounts Latin and Greek badly pronounced, or no language; the Rituale of 1614 lists speaking an unknown tongue as a sign, and the 1999 rite drops it.
- Glossolalia occurs in Haitian vodou, Japanese new religions, and Siberian shamanism as well as Pentecostalism (Goodman, 1972), with the same phonological pattern, which argues for a neurological rather than a linguistic basis.
Where They Part
The manuals took the sign for proof of a foreign mind; the clinic finds the speaker’s own mind, released from its grammar. Both agree the state is real and the speaker sincere, and neither has made a possessed person speak a language they had never heard.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Samarin, W. J. (1972). Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism. Macmillan.
- Newberg, A. B., et al. (2006). “The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia.” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148.
- Goodman, F. D. (1972). Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia. University of Chicago Press.
- Rituale Romanum (1614), De exorcizandis obsessis a daemonio, 3.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.