"We should remember," writes Freud, "how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words, and how frequently the dream-work makes use of various ends of a reversal of the material. ..."

In Sio we taught a number of people to use tape recorders. They quickly learned to distort sound: magnify it, speed it up & slow it down, and especially to reverse it. They delighted in discovering both hidden resources in language & new dimensions in sound.

Several children imitated the reversed speech they heard when tapes were rewound. On their own initiative they recorded these imitations, then played them backward, successfully achieving intelligibility.

I've heard children in our own society do precisely this same thing with great success. The explanation lies, I think, in the sensory profiles of oral peoples, many of whom possess uncanny skill in miming sound patterns. One notices this in the ease with which they learn songs, including songs in alien languages.

Charlie Chaplin was able to mime reversed speech he heard on sound tracks. When these imitations were recorded & played back in reverse, whole phrases were intelligible. He also acted out film scenes in reverse. When the film was run backward, the scene became comprehensible, though his movements were strangely unnatural.

In the 17th century English witchcraft trials, it was commonly asserted that the Devil appeared in the form of a Dog - that is, God backward. The English still employ this same metathesis when they refer to a clergyman's collar as a "dog collar" instead of a "God collar."

The Black Mass of the Middle Ages was often no more than the Mass recited backward. Divorce was achieved by performing the marriage ceremony backward.

Boustrophedon, the ancient mode of writing alternate lines in opposite directions, added to the possibilities for reversed language.