a founder of the codex

Glossolalia

Lalopneuma effundens·the Fervent Babble

From Greek lalein, to babble, and pneuma, breath and spirit, and Latin effundens, pouring out, a spirit poured out as sound.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Forceimage schema
Class: Outputits outpouring
Niche: Parasitethe mechanism of a host idea
Mode: Religionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Ritual

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Communication of Ideas · Wilkins, 1668: Discourse · WordNet, 1990: Communication · Llull, 1308: E · Man

Fervent Babble, the whole specimen — Plate XXVII. Lalopneuma effundens, the whole specimen.

Glossolalia is fluent speech in an invented tongue, built from the speaker's own sounds in the rise and fall of talk, and its fervour reaches hearers ahead of any meaning.

Sound can carry feeling ahead of meaning, and a voice let go can feel like another voice speaking through it.

behavior It gathers pressure in a crowd, bursts into a stream of bright sound, and quiets when the crowd disperses.

provocation

What does your voice say when you let it run ahead of your words?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its output, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Glossolalia — Fig. 1. Kernel
Intonation contour
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Sound can carry feeling apart from meaning. Syllables strung in the rise and fall of speech convey fervour, pleading or joy by sound alone.³
drawn as: intonation contour · view: exploded

Boundary of Glossolalia — Fig. 2. Boundary
New wine
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
Its hearers set it apart from drunken babble. At the first Pentecost some in the crowd mocked the speakers as full of new wine, while others heard their own languages.¹
drawn as: new wine · view: in situ

Intake of Glossolalia — Fig. 3. Intake
Imposition of hands
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It is received in company. Hands laid on in prayer, the urging of the group and the sound of others already speaking draw a newcomer to let the voice go.^{1, 3}
drawn as: imposition of hands · view: transparent

Mechanism of Glossolalia — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Frontal lobes
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Activity falls in the frontal lobes, which plan and steer speech, while the voice runs on, so the speech flows uncomposed.⁴
drawn as: frontal lobes · view: transparent

Output of Glossolalia — Fig. 5. Output
Outpouring
❦ dominant organ
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It gives the speaker a feeling of release and of being spoken through, and to the gathering it is a sign that the Spirit has come.^{1, 4}
drawn as: outpouring · view: exploded

Dispersal of Glossolalia — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Sound poem
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels by example from one fervent gathering to the next across the churches of the world, and into art as the sound poem, which Hugo Ball chanted in Zurich in 1916.^{5, 3}
drawn as: sound poem · view: magnified

Decay of Glossolalia — Fig. 7. Decay
Clanging cymbal
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It edifies the speaker alone unless someone interprets it. Paul ranked it below plain speech, and likened tongues spoken without love to a clanging cymbal.²
drawn as: clanging cymbal · view: series

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Echolalia, Pointillism, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Poetry

same kind in Wilkins Echolalia, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Tongue Horizon, Poetry

same kind in WordNet Chiaroscuro, Echolalia, Lullaby, Music, Prophecy, Syllable, Symbol, Babelhum, Poetry

same kind in Llull Echolalia, Love, Memory, Nostalgia, Oblivion, Placebo, Possession, Presence, Prophecy, Solitude, Threshold, Trance, Volition, Knowing Trust, Rushmaker, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Gazeroot (second reading), Commemorative Revision, The Shared Cell, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology

same phylum Diamond, Fear, Fire, Oblivion, Spring, Storm, Volition, Rushmaker, Self-Ending Order

same dominant organ Apophenia, Awakening, Chiaroscuro, Echolalia, Emergence, Erosion, Iridescence, Mimesis, Nostalgia, Placebo, Rain, Spring, Babelhum, Afterlistening, Tide of Days

Genome

sound also in Tongue Horizon
fervour
release also in Oblivion, Spring, Storm, Weightlessness
spirit also in Possession
babble

III In the world

Echoes

a Pentecostal prayer meeting
the first Pentecost in Jerusalem
Hugo Ball's Gadji beri bimba at the Cabaret Voltaire
a child babbling to itself before it has words

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 5, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	uranographia
symmetry	radial 8
organization	solitary
silhouette	fusiform
scale	hand
proportion	swollen latent
growth	budding
articulation	tethered latent
openness	spongy latent
skeleton	test latent
locomotion	gliding latent
pattern	speckled latent
coloration	warning latent
substance	paper
surface	crackled
palette	verdigris
luminosity	points
transparency	transparent latent
gesture	emits
unity	fragment latent
modality	necessary latent
causation	efficient
determinacy	unmarked latent
fusion	sprouting
anomaly	sideways
graft	lenses
technique	silverpoint
viewpoint	motion
value	chiaroscuro
balance	unmarked latent
density	intricate latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	vivid
appendages	valves, frills
anchor (body)	a bowerbird's bower, an avenue of sticks decorated with collected bright objects
anchor (detail)	a Chladni figure, sand gathered into the nodal lines of a vibrating plate

Sources

The Acts of the Apostles, 2:1-13 and 19:6
Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, chapters 13 and 14
William J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (1972)
Andrew B. Newberg and others, The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during Glossolalia: A Preliminary SPECT Study (Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2006)
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (1927), on the sound poems of 1916

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