The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
Preface

THE CENTRAL ideas of this inquiry were first summarized publicly in an

Invited Address to the American Psychological Association in Washington

in September 1969.
Since then, I have been something of an itinerant

lecturer, various parts of this work having been given at colloquia and

lectures at various places.
The resulting attention and discussion have been

very helpful.
Book I presents these ideas as I arrived at them.
Book II examines the historical evidence.
Book III makes deductions to explain some modern phenomena.
Originally, I had planned Books IV and V to complete the central

positions of the theory.
These will now become a separate volume, whose

working title is The Consequences of Consciousness, not yet scheduled for

publication.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1982







Introduction

The Problem of Consciousness

O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial

country of the mind!
What ineffable essences, these touchless

rememberings and unshowable reveries!
And the privacy of it all!
A secret

theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible

mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of

disappointments and discoveries.
A whole kingdom where each of us reigns

reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can.
A

hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we

have done and yet may do.
An introcosm that is more myself than anything

I can find in a mirror.
This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is

everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?
Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more perplexing

history than this, the problem of consciousness and its place in nature.
Despite centuries of pondering and experiment, of trying to get together two

supposed entities called mind and matter in one age, subject and object in

another, or soul and body in still others, despite endless discoursing on the

streams, states, or contents of consciousness, of distinguishing terms like

intuitions, sense data, the given, raw feels, the sensa, presentations and

representations, the sensations, images, and affections of structuralist

introspections, the evidential data of the scientific positivist,

phenomenological fields, the apparitions of Hobbes, the phenomena of

Kant, the appearances of the idealist, the elements of Mach, the phanera of

Peirce, or the category errors of Ryle, in spite of all of these, the problem of

consciousness is still with us.
Something about it keeps returning, not

taking a solution.
It is the difference that will not go away, the difference between what

others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that

sustain it.
The difference between the you-and-me of the shared behavioral

world and the unlocatable location of things thought about.
Our reflections and dreams, and the imaginary conversations we have with others, in which

never-to-be-known-by-anyone we excuse, defend, proclaim our hopes and

regrets, our futures and our pasts, all this thick fabric of fancy is so

absolutely different from handable, standable, kickable reality with its trees,

grass, tables, oceans, hands, stars—even brains!
How is this possible?
How

do these ephemeral existences of our lonely experience fit into the ordered

array of nature that somehow surrounds and engulfs this core of knowing?
Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since

consciousness began.
And each age has described consciousness in terms of

its own theme and concerns.
In the golden age of Greece, when men

traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as

free as that.
Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose

boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out.1

A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was

astonished at the “mountains and hills of my high imaginations,” “the plains

and caves and caverns of my memory” with its recesses of “manifold and

spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with unnumberable stores.”2

Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.
The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great

geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers

of the earth’s crust.
And this led to the popularization of the idea of

consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual,

there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be

read.
This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most

psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of

mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and

unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.3

In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as

the fashionable science, and consciousness from James Mill to Wundt and

his students, such as Titchener, was the compound structure that could be

analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings.
And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday

life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way

into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a

boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when

repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning

camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams.
There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that

that is precisely what they are.
Now originally, this search into the nature of consciousness was known

as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous philosophical

solutions.
But since the theory of evolution, it has bared itself into a more

scientific question.
It has become the problem of the origin of mind, or,

more specifically, the origin of consciousness in evolution.
Where can this

subjective experience which we introspect upon, this constant companion of

hosts of associations, hopes, fears, affections, knowledges, colors, smells,

toothaches, thrills, tickles, pleasures, distresses, and desires—where and

how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have

evolved?
How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter?
And if so,

when?
This problem has been at the very center of the thinking of the twentieth

century.
And it will be worthwhile here to briefly look at some of the

solutions that have been proposed.
I shall mention the eight that I think are

most important.
Consciousness as a Property of Matter

The most extensive possible solution is attractive mostly to physicists.
It

states that the succession of subjective states that we feel in introspection

has a continuity that stretches all the way back through phylogenetic

evolution and beyond into a fundamental property of interacting matter.
The

relationship of consciousness to what we are conscious of is not

fundamentally different from the relationship of a tree to the ground in

which it is rooted, or even of the gravitational relationship between two

celestial bodies.
This view was conspicuous in the first quarter of this

century.
What Alexander called compresence or Whitehead called

prehension provided the groundwork of a monism that moved on into a

flourishing school called Neo-Realism.
If a piece of chalk is dropped on the

lecture table, that interaction of chalk and table is different only in

complexity from the perceptions and knowledges that fill our minds.
The

chalk knows the table just as the table knows the chalk.
That is why the

chalk stops at the table.
This is something of a caricature of a very subtly worked out position,

but it nevertheless reveals that this difficult theory is answering quite the

wrong question.
We are not trying to explain how we interact with our

environment, but rather the particular experience that we have in

introspecting.
The attractiveness of this kind of neo-realism was really a

part of an historical epoch when the astonishing successes of particle

physics were being talked of everywhere.
The solidity of matter was being

dissolved into mere mathematical relationships in space, and this seemed

like the same unphysical quality as the relationship of individuals conscious

of each other.
Consciousness as a Property of Protoplasm

The next most extensive solution asserts that consciousness is not in

matter per se; rather it is the fundamental property of all living things.
It is

the very irritability of the smallest one-celled animals that has had a

continuous and glorious evolution up through coelenterates, the

protochordates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals to man.
A wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists, including

Charles Darwin and E.
B.
Titchener, found this thesis unquestionable,

initiating in the first part of this century a great deal of excellent observation

of lower organisms.
The search for rudimentary consciousnesses was on.
Books with titles such as The Animal Mind or The Psychic Life of Micro-

Organisms were eagerly written and eagerly read.
4 And anyone who

observes amoebas hunting food or responding to various stimuli, or

paramecia avoiding obstacles or conjugating, will know the almost

passionate temptation to apply human categories to such behavior.
And this brings us to a very important part of the problem—our

sympathy and identification with other living things.
Whatever conclusions

we may hold on the matter, it is certainly a part of our consciousness to

‘see’ into the consciousness of others, to identify with our friends and

families so as to imagine what they are thinking and feeling.
And so if

animals are behaving such as we would in similar situations, so well are we

trained in our human sympathies that it requires a particular vigor of mind

to suppress such identifications when they are not warranted.
The

explanation for our imputing consciousness to protozoa is simply that we

make this common and misleading identification.
Yet the explanation for

their behavior resides entirely in physical chemistry, not in introspective

psychology.
Even in animals with synaptic nervous systems, the tendency to read

consciousness into their behavior comes more from ourselves than from our

observations.
Most people will identify with a struggling worm.
But as

every boy who has baited a fish hook knows, if a worm is cut in two, the

front half with its primitive brain seems not to mind as much as the back

half, which writhes in ‘agony’.
5 But surely if the worm felt pain as we do,

surely it would be the part with the brain that would do the agonizing.
The agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm’s; its writhing is a

mechanical release phenomenon, the motor nerves in the tail end firing in

volleys at being disconnected from their normal inhibition by the cephalic

ganglion.
Consciousness as Learning

To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm leads, of course, to

a discussion of the criterion by which consciousness can be inferred.
And

hence a third solution, which states that consciousness began not with

matter, nor at the beginning of animal life, but at some specific time after

life had evolved.
It seemed obvious to almost all the active investigators of

the subject that the criterion of when and where in evolution consciousness

began was the appearance of associative memory or learning.
If an animal

could modify its behavior on the basis of its experience, it must be having

an experience; it must be conscious.
Thus, if one wished to study the

evolution of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning.
This was indeed how I began my search for the origin of consciousness.
My first experimental work was a youthful attempt to produce signal

learning (or a conditional response) in an especially long suffering mimosa

plant.
The signal was an intense light; the response was the drooping of a

leaf to a carefully calibrated tactile stimulus where it joined the stem.
After

over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my patient

plant was as green as ever.
It was not conscious.
That expected failure behind me, I moved on to protozoa, delicately

running individual paramecia in a T-maze engraved in wax on black

Bakelite, using direct current shock to punish the animal and spin it around

if it went to the incorrect side.
If paramecia could learn, I felt they had to be

conscious.
Moreover I was extremely interested in what would happen to

the learning (and the consciousness) when the animal divided.
A first

suggestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications.
After

other failures to find learning in the lower phyla, I moved on to species with

synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which

could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the

grand evolution of consciousness.
6

Ridiculous!
It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this

assumption makes no sense at all.
When we introspect, it is not upon any

bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning

denoted by conditioning and T-mazes.
Why then did so many worthies in

the lists of science equate consciousness and learning?
And why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them?
The reason was the presence of a kind of huge historical neurosis.
Psychology has many of them.
And one of the reasons that the history of

science is essential to the study of psychology is that it is the only way to

get out of and above such intellectual disorders.
The school of psychology

known as Associationism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had

been so attractively presented and so peopled with prestigious champions

that its basic error had become imbedded in common thought and language.
That error was, and still is, that consciousness is an actual space inhabited

by elements called sensations and ideas, and the association of these

elements because they are like each other, or because they have been made

by the external world to occur together, is indeed what learning is and what

the mind is all about.
So learning and consciousness are confused and

muddled up with that vaguest of terms, experience.
It is this confusion that lingered unseen behind my first struggles with the

problem, as well as the huge emphasis on animal learning in the first half of

the twentieth century.
But it is now absolutely clear that in evolution the

origin of learning and the origin of consciousness are two utterly separate

problems.
We shall be demonstrating this assertion with more evidence in

the next chapter.
Consciousness as a Metaphysical Imposition

All the theories I have so far mentioned begin in the assumption that

consciousness evolved biologically by simple natural selection.
But another

position denies that such an assumption is even possible.
Is this consciousness, it asks, this enormous influence of ideas,

principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal

behavior?
Alone of species, all alone!
we try to understand ourselves and

the world.
We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas.
We

build Chartres and computers, write poems and tensor equations, play chess

and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies—what

have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons?
The

continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very

suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology.
7 The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the

sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the

thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult

virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering—are these

really derivable from matter?
Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies

of speechless apes?
The chasm is awesome.
The emotional lives of men and of other

mammals are indeed marvelously similar.
But to focus upon the similarity

unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all.
The intellectual life of

man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from

anything else we know of in the universe.
That is fact.
It is as if all life

evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and

simply exploded in a different direction.
The appreciation of this discontinuity between the apes and speaking

civilized ethical intellectual men has led many scientists back to a

metaphysical view.
The interiority of consciousness just could not in any

sense be evolved by natural selection out of mere assemblages of molecules

and cells.
There has to be more to human evolution than mere matter,

chance, and survival.
Something must be added from outside of this closed

system to account for something so different as consciousness.
Such thinking began with the beginning of modern evolutionary theory,

particularly in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the

theory of natural selection.
Following their twin announcements of the

theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the

serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of

consciousness.
But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own

naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.
The

discontinuities were terrifying and absolute.
Man’s conscious faculties,

particularly, “could not possibly have been developed by means of the same

laws which have determined the progressive development of the organic

world in general, and also of man’s physical organism.” 8 He felt the

evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at

three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness,

and the beginning of civilized culture.
Indeed, it is partly because Wallace

insisted on spending the latter part of his life searching in vain among the

séances of spiritualists for evidence of such metaphysical imposition that

his name is not as well known as is Darwin’s as the discoverer of evolution

by natural selection.
Such endeavors were not acceptable to the scientific

Establishment.
To explain consciousness by metaphysical imposition

seemed to be stepping outside the rules of natural science.
And that indeed

was the problem, how to explain consciousness in terms of natural science

alone.
The Helpless Spectator Theory

In reaction to such metaphysical speculations, there grew up through this

early period of evolutionary thinking an increasingly materialist view.
It

was a position more consistent with straight natural selection.
It even had

inherent in it that acrid pessimism that is sometimes curiously associated

with really hard science.
This doctrine assures us consciousness does

nothing at all, and in fact can do nothing.
Many tough-minded

experimentalists still agree with Herbert Spencer that such a downgrading

of consciousness is the only view that is consistent with straight

evolutionary theory.
Animals are evolved; nervous systems and their

mechanical reflexes increase in complexity; when some unspecified degree

of nervous complexity is reached, consciousness appears, and so begins its

futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events.
What we do is completely controlled by the wiring diagram of the brain

and its reflexes to external stimuli.
Consciousness is not more than the heat

given off by the wires, a mere epiphenomenon.
Conscious feelings, as

Hodgson put it, are mere colors laid on the surface of a mosaic which is

held together by its stones, not by the colors.
9 Or as Huxley insisted in a

famous essay, “we are conscious automata.”10 Consciousness can no more modify the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the

whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes.
Moan as it will, the

tracks have long ago decided where the train will go.
Consciousness is the

melody that floats from the harp and cannot pluck its strings, the foam

struck raging from the river that cannot change its course, the shadow that

loyally walks step for step beside the pedestrian, but is quite unable to

influence his journey.
It is William James who has given the best discussion of the conscious

automaton theory.
11 His argument here is a little like Samuel Johnson’s downing philosophical idealism by kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it

thus!” It is just plain inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing

to do with a business which it so faithfully attends.
If consciousness is the

mere impotent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most

hesitant?
And why are we least conscious when doing something most

habitual?
Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and

actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain.
Emergent Evolution

The doctrine of emergent evolution was very specifically welcomed into

court to rescue consciousness from this undignified position as a mere

helpless spectator.
It was also designed to explain scientifically the

observed evolutionary discontinuities that had been the heart of the

metaphysical imposition argument.
And when I first began to study it some

time ago, I, too, felt with a shimmering flash how everything, the problem

of consciousness and all, seemed to shiveringly fall into accurate and

wonderful place.
Its main idea is a metaphor: Just as the property of wetness cannot be

derived from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone, so

consciousness emerged at some point in evolution in a way underivable

from its constituent parts.
While this simple idea goes back to John Stuart Mill and G.
H.
Lewes, it

was Lloyd Morgan’s version in his Emergent Evolution of 1923 that really

captured the cheering.
This book is a thoroughgoing scheme of emergent

evolution vigorously carried all the way back into the physical realm.
All

the properties of matter have emerged from some unspecified forerunner.
Those of complex chemical compounds have emerged from the conjunction

of simpler chemical components.
Properties distinctive of living things have

emerged from the conjunctions of these complex molecules.
And

consciousness emerged from living things.
New conjunctions bring about

new kinds of relatedness which bring about new emergents.
So the new

emergent properties are in each case effectively related to the systems from

which they emerge.
In fact, the new relations emergent at each higher level

guide and sustain the course of events distinctive of that level.
Consciousness, then, emerges as something genuinely new at a critical stage

of evolutionary advance.
When it has emerged, it guides the course of

events in the brain and has causal efficacy in bodily behavior.
The whoop with which this antireductionist doctrine was greeted by the

majority of prominent biological and comparative psychologists, frustrated

dualists all, was quite undignified.
Biologists called it a new Declaration of

Independence from physics and chemistry.
“No longer can the biologist be

bullied into suppressing observed results because they are not discovered

nor expected from work on the non-living.
Biology becomes a science in its

own right.” Prominent neurologists agreed that now we no longer had to

think of consciousness as merely dancing an assiduous but futile attendance

upon our brain processes.12 The origin of consciousness seemed to have been pointed at in such a way as to restore consciousness to its usurped

throne as the governor of behavior and even to promise new and

unpredictable emergents in the future.
But had it?
If consciousness emerged in evolution, when?
In what

species?
What kind of a nervous system is necessary?
And as the first flush

of a theoretical breakthrough waned, it was seen that nothing about the

problem had really changed.
It is these specifics that need to be answered.
What is wrong about emergent evolution is not the doctrine, but the release

back into old comfortable ways of thinking about consciousness and

behavior, the license that it gives to broad and vacuous generalities.
Historically, it is of interest here to note that all this dancing in the aisles

of biology over emergent evolution was going on at the same time that a

stronger, less-educated doctrine with a rigorous experimental campaign was

beginning its robust conquest of psychology.
Certainly one way of solving

the problem of consciousness and its place in nature is to deny that

consciousness exists at all.
Behaviorism

It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it

means to say that consciousness does not exist.
History has not recorded

whether or not this feat was attempted by the early behaviorists.
But it has

recorded everywhere and in large the enormous influence which the

doctrine that consciousness does not exist has had on psychology in this

century.
And this is behaviorism.
Its roots rummage far back into the musty

history of thought, to the so-called Epicureans of the eighteenth century and

before, to attempts to generalize tropisms from plants to animals to man, to

movements called Objectivism, or more particularly, Actionism.
For it was

Knight Dunlap’s attempt to teach the latter to an excellent but aweless

animal psychologist, John B.
Watson, that resulted in a new word,

Behaviorism.13 At first, it was very similar to the helpless spectator theory

we have already examined.
Consciousness just was not important in

animals.
But after a World War and a little invigorating opposition,

behaviorism charged out into the intellectual arena with the snorting

assertion that consciousness is nothing at all.
What a startling doctrine!
But the really surprising thing is that, starting

off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center

stage in psychology from about 1920 to 1960.
The external reasons for the

sustained triumph of such a peculiar position are both fascinating and

complex.
Psychology at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy

into a separate academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so.
The

immediate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was a

pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false analogy between

consciousness and chemistry.
The toppled idealism after World War I

created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies.
The intriguing

successes of physics and general technology presented both a model and a

means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism.
The world was

weary and wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact.
And in

America objective fact was pragmatic fact.
Behaviorism provided this in

psychology.
It allowed a new generation to sweep aside with one impatient

gesture all the worn-out complexities of the problem of consciousness and

its origin.
We would turn over a new leaf.
We would make a fresh start.
And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after another.
But the

single inherent reason for its success was not its truth, but its program.
And

what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was!
with its

gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducing all conduct to a handful of

reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing

the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to

the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of running

rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of

objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to

muscle twitches and personality to the woes of Little Albert.14 In all this

there was a heady excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove.
Complexity would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and

philosophy would be a thing of the past.
From the outside, this revolt against consciousness seemed to storm the

ancient citadels of human thought and set its arrogant banners up in one

university after another.
But having once been a part of its major school, I

confess it was not really what it seemed.
Off the printed page, behaviorism

was only a refusal to talk about consciousness.
Nobody really believed he

was not conscious.
And there was a very real hypocrisy abroad, as those

interested in its problems were forcibly excluded from academic

psychology, as text after text tried to smother the unwanted problem from

student view.
In essence, behaviorism was a method, not the theory that it

tried to be.
And as a method, it exorcised old ghosts.
It gave psychology a

thorough house cleaning.
And now the closets have been swept out and the

cupboards washed and aired, and we are ready to examine the problem

again.
Consciousness as the Reticular Activating System

But before doing so, one final approach, a wholly different approach, and

one that has occupied me most recently, the nervous system.
How often in

our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort

our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a

particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter!
It is a

temptation born of exasperation with the untestableness and vagueness of

all the above solutions.
Away with these verbal subtleties!
These esoteric

poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere

subterfuges to avoid the very material we are talking about!
Here we have

an animal—make him a man if you will—here he is on the table of our

analysis.
If he is conscious, it has to be here, right here in him, in the brain

in front of us, not in the presumptuous inklings of philosophy back in the

incapable past!
And today we at last have the techniques to explore the

nervous system directly, brain to brain.
Somewhere here in a mere three-

and-a-half pound lump of pinkish-gray matter, the answer has to be.
All we have to do is to find those parts of the brain that are responsible

for consciousness, then trace out their anatomical evolution, and we will

solve the problem of the origin of consciousness.
Moreover, if we study the

behavior of present-day species corresponding to various stages in the

development of these neurological structures, we will be able at last to

reveal with experimental exactness just what consciousness basically is.
Now this sounds like an excellent scientific program.
Ever since

Descartes chose the brain’s pineal body as the seat of consciousness and

was roundly refuted by the physiologists of his day, there has been a fervent

if often superficial search for where in the brain consciousness exists.
15 And

the search is still on.
At the present, a plausible nominee for the neural substrate of

consciousness is one of the most important neurological discoveries of our

time.
This is that tangle of tiny internuncial neurons called the reticular

formation, which has long lain hidden and unsuspected in the brainstem.
It

extends from the top of the spinal cord through the brainstem on up into the

thalamus and hypothalamus, attracting collaterals from sensory and motor

nerves, almost like a system of wire-tabs on the communication lines that

pass near it.
But this is not all.
It also has direct lines of command to half a

dozen major areas of the cortex and probably all the nuclei of the brainstem,

as well as sending fibers down the spinal cord where it influences the

peripheral sensory and motor systems.
Its function is to sensitize or

“awaken” selected nervous circuits and desensitize others, such that those

who pioneered in this work christened it “the waking brain.”16

The reticular formation is also often called by its functional name, the

reticular activating system.
It is the place where general anesthesia produces

its effect by deactivating its neurons.
Cutting it produces permanent sleep

and coma.
Stimulating it through an implanted electrode in most of its

regions wakes up a sleeping animal.
Moreover, it is capable of grading the

activity of most other parts of the brain, doing this as a reflection of its own

internal excitability and the titer of its neurochemistry.
There are

exceptions, too complicated for discussion here.
But they are not such as to

diminish the exciting idea that this disordered network of short neurons that

connect up with the entire brain, this central transactional core between the

strictly sensory and motor systems of classical neurology, is the long-sought

answer to the whole problem.
If we now look at the evolution of the reticular formation, asking if it

could be correlated with the evolution of consciousness, we find no

encouragement whatever.
It turns out to be one of the oldest parts of the

nervous system.
Indeed, a good case could be made that this is the very

oldest part of the nervous system, around which the more orderly, more

specific, and more highly evolved tracts and nuclei developed.
The little

that we at present know about the evolution of the reticular formation does

not seem to indicate that the problem of consciousness and its origin will be

solved by such a study.
Moreover, there is a delusion in such reasoning.
It is one that is all too

common and unspoken in our tendency to translate psychological

phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry.
We can only know in the

nervous system what we have known in behavior first.
Even if we had a

complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able

to answer our basic question.
Though we knew the connections of every

tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever

existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its

billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never—

not ever—from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained

a consciousness like our own.
We first have to start from the top, from some

conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is.
We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk

about its neurology.
We must therefore try to make a new beginning by stating what

consciousness is.
We have already seen that this is no easy matter, and that

the history of the subject is an enormous confusion of metaphor with

designation.
In any such situation, where something is so resistant to even

the beginnings of clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining what that

something is not.
And that is the task of the next chapter.
BOOK ONE



THE MIND OF MAN







Chapter 1



The Consciousness of Consciousness

WHEN ASKED the question, what is consciousness?
we become conscious of

consciousness.
And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to

be what consciousness is.
This is not true.
In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self-evident

thing imaginable.
We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states,

our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and

volitions.
We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of

concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is

so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us

to introspect on them and learn from them at will.
We are also quite

conscious that all this wonderful set of operations and contents that we call

consciousness is located somewhere in the head.
On critical examination, all of these statements are false.
They are the

costume that consciousness has been masquerading in for centuries.
They

are the misconceptions that have prevented a solution to the problem of the

origin of consciousness.
To demonstrate these errors and show what

consciousness is not, is the long but I hope adventurous task of this chapter.
The Extensiveness of Consciousness

To begin with, there are several uses of the word consciousness which we

may immediately discard as incorrect.
We have for example the phrase “to

lose consciousness” after receiving a blow on the head.
But if this were

correct, we would then have no word for those somnambulistic states

known in the clinical literature where an individual is clearly not conscious

and yet is responsive to things in a way in which a knocked-out person is

not.
Therefore, in the first instance we should say that the person suffering a

severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I am calling

reactivity, and they are therefore different things.
This distinction is also important in normal everyday life.
We are

constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time.
Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and

to my own posture, since if I wish to walk, I will quite unconsciously stand

up from the ground to do so.
Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely conscious even of

where I am.
In writing, I am reacting to a pencil in my hand since I hold on

to it, and am reacting to my writing pad since I hold it on my knees, and to

its lines since I write upon them, but I am only conscious of what I am

trying to say and whether or not I am being clear to you.
If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I

may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without

being conscious that I have done so.
In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of

in any way, while consciousness is something quite distinct and a far less

ubiquitous phenomenon.
We are conscious of what we are reacting to only

from time to time.
And whereas reactivity can be defined behaviorally and

neurologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.
But this distinction is much more far-reaching.
We are continually

reacting to things in ways that have no phenomenal component in

consciousness whatever.
Not at any time.
In seeing any object, our eyes and

therefore our retinal images are reacting to the object by shifting twenty

times a second, and yet we see an unshifting stable object with no

consciousness whatever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them together into the object.
An abnormally small retinal image of

something in the proper context is automatically seen as something at a

distance; we are not conscious of making the correction.
Color and light

contrast effects, and other perceptual constancies all go on every minute of

our waking and even dreaming experience without our being in the least

conscious of them.
And these instances are barely touching the multitude of

processes which by the older definitions of consciousness one might expect

to be conscious of, but which we definitely are not.
I am here thinking of

Titchener’s designation of consciousness as “the sum total of mental

processes occurring now.” We are now very far from such a position.
But let us go further.
Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental

life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we

are not conscious of.
How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate!
It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something

that does not have any light shining upon it.
The flashlight, since there is

light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is

light everywhere.
And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality

when actually it does not.
The timing of consciousness is also an interesting question.
When we are

awake, are we conscious all the time?
We think so.
In fact, we are sure so!
I

shut my eyes and even if I try not to think, consciousness still streams on, a

great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have

been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets,

wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of

exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware.
Always the continuity.
Certainly this is the feeling.
And whatever we’re doing, we feel that our

very self, our deepest of deep identity, is indeed this continuing flow that

only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams.
This is our experience.
And many thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to

start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no one can

doubt.
Cogito, ergo sum.
But what could this continuity mean?
If we think of a minute as being

sixty thousand milliseconds, are we conscious for every one of those

milliseconds?
If you still think so, go on dividing the time units,

remembering that the firing of neurons is of a finite order—although we

have no idea what that has to do with our sense of the continuity of

consciousness.
Few persons would wish to maintain that consciousness

somehow floats like a mist above and about the nervous system completely

ununited to any earthly necessities of neural refractory periods.
It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is

really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness

are.
In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on

only when it is on.
Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things

were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light

had been continuously on.
We are thus conscious less of the time than we

think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.
And

the feeling of a great uninterrupted stream of rich inner experiences, now

slowly gliding through dreamy moods, now tumbling in excited torrents

down gorges of precipitous insight, or surging evenly through our nobler

days, is what it is on this page, a metaphor for how subjective

consciousness seems to subjective consciousness.
But there is a better way to point this out.
If you close your left eye and

stare at the left margin of this page, you are not at all conscious of a large

gap in your vision about four inches to the right.
But, still staring with your

right eye only, take your finger and move it along a line of print from the

left margin to the right, and you will see the top of it disappear into this gap

and then reappear on the other side.
This is due to a two-millimeter gap on

the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered

together and leave the eye for the brain.
1 The interesting thing about this

gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-

spot.
A blind man sees his darkness.
2 But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way.
Just as the space

around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness

knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.
Examples of how little we are conscious of our everyday behavior can be

multiplied almost anywhere we look.
Playing the piano is a really

extraordinary example.3 Here a complex array of various tasks is

accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them

whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the

right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to

various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any

awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into

black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth

notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while

the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding

various other notes.
And all this time the performer, the conscious

performer, is in a seventh heaven of artistic rapture at the results of all this

tremendous business, or perchance lost in contemplation of the individual

who turns the leaves of the music book, justly persuaded he is showing her

his very soul!
Of course consciousness usually has a role in the learning of

such complex activities, but not necessarily in their performance, and that is

the only point I am trying to make here.
Consciousness is often not only unnecessary; it can be quite undesirable.
Our pianist suddenly conscious of his fingers during a furious set of

arpeggios would have to stop playing.
Nijinsky somewhere says that when

he danced, it was as if he were in the orchestra pit looking back at himself;

he was not conscious of every movement, but of how he was looking to

others.
A sprinter may be conscious of where he is relative to the others in

the race, but he is certainly not conscious of putting one leg in front of the

other; such consciousness might indeed cause him to trip.
And anyone who

plays tennis at my indifferent level knows the exasperation of having his

service suddenly ‘go to pieces’ and of serving consecutive double faults!
The more doubles, the more conscious one becomes of one’s motions (and

of one’s disposition!) and the worse things get.
4



Such phenomena of exertion are not to be explained away on the basis of

physical excitement, for the same phenomena in regard to consciousness

occur in less strenuous occupations.
Right at this moment, you are not

conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how

fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were.
And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or

even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their

meaning.
As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and

words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to

say, into meaning.
To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy

the intention of the speech.
And also on the production side.
Try speaking with a full consciousness

of your articulation as you do it.
You will simply stop speaking.
And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to the next line, does not

begin consecutive sentences in the same way, determines that we place a

question here, an exclamation there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in

what we are trying to express and the person we are addressing.
For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what we are

actually doing at the time.
Consciousness functions in the decision as to

what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say it, but then the orderly

and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow

done for us.
Consciousness Not a Copy of Experience

Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the writings

ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke thought of the mind

as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century that we have emphasized this

recording aspect of consciousness, and thus see it crowded with memories

that can be read over again in introspection.
If Locke had lived in our time,

he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate.
But the

idea is the same.
And most people would protest emphatically that the chief

function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera

does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.
So it seems.
But consider the following problems: Does the door of your

room open from the right or the left?
Which is your second longest finger?
At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top?
How many teeth do

you see when brushing your teeth?
What letters are associated with what

numbers on a telephone dial?
If you are in a familiar room, without turning

around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.
I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in

consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much

previous attentive experience.
If the familiar door suddenly opened the

other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were

differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made

differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you,

you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘ knew’, but not

consciously so.
Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between

recognition and recall.
What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to

the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.
Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a

storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought.
Only if you have at

some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at

some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things

countless times, can you remember.
Unless you have particularly noted

what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at

what you have left out.
And introspect upon the matter.
Did you not in each

of these instances ask what must be there?
Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image?
Conscious retrospection is not the

retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of

before, 5 and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible

patterns.
Let us demonstrate this in another way.
Think, if you will, of when you

entered the room you are now in and when you picked up this book.
Introspect upon it and then ask the question: are the images of which you

have copies the actual sensory fields as you came in and sat down and

began reading?
Don’t you have an image of yourself coming through one of

the doors, perhaps even a bird’s-eye view of one of the entrances, and then

perhaps vaguely see yourself sitting down and picking up the book?
Things

which you have never experienced except in this introspection!
And can

you retrieve the sound fields around the event?
Or the cutaneous sensations

as you sat, took the pressure off your feet, and opened this book?
Of course,

if you go on with your thinking you can also rearrange your imaginal

retrospection such that you do indeed ‘see’ entering the room just as it

might have been; and ‘hear’ the sound of the chair and the book opening,

and ‘feel’ the skin sensations.
But I suggest that this has a large element of

created imagery—what we shall call narratizing a little later—of what the

experience should be like, rather than what it actually was like.
Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an

image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when

it comes to yourself swimming, lo!
like Nijinsky in his dance, you are

seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all!
There

is precious little of the actual sensations of swimming, the particular

waterline across your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to

what extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to breathe.
6

Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of doors, went skating,

or—if all else fails—did something that you regretted in public, you tend

not to see, hear, or feel things as you actually experienced them, but rather

to re-create them in objective terms, seeing yourself in the setting as if you

were somebody else.
Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal

invention, seeing yourself as others see you.
Memory is the medium of the

must-have-been.
Though I have no doubt that in any of these instances you

could by inference invent a subjective view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the actual memory.
Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts

A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is

specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed.
This is a

very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and

then put the similar ones together into a concept.
This idea has even been

the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they

were thus studying concept formation.
Max Müller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century,

brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree?
“No one ever

saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree...
Tree,

therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the

senses.” 7 Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist.
Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an

extensive discussion.
But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no

necessary connection between them.
When Muller says no one has ever

seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object

itself.
Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree.
So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog.
The bee

has a concept of a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky ledge,

as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with

green leaves.
Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things.
Root concepts are prior to experience.
They are fundamental to the aptic

structures that allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Müller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree.
For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work

with them at all!
When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed

conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew

beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a

concept word stand for it as well.
In fact, one of the great functions of

language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do

in writing or speaking about conceptual material.
And we must do this

because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.
Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning

A third important misconception of consciousness is that it is the basis

for learning.
Particularly for the long and illustrious series of Associationist

psychologists through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, learning was

a matter of ideas in consciousness being grouped by similarity, contiguity,

or occasionally some other relationship.
Nor did it matter whether we were

speaking of a man or an animal; all learning was “profiting from

experience” or ideas coming together in consciousness—as I said in the

Introduction.
And so contemporary common knowledge, without realizing

quite why, has culturally inherited the notion that consciousness is

necessary for learning.
The matter is somewhat complex.
It is also unfortunately disfigured in

psychology by a sometimes forbidding jargon, which is really an

overgeneralization of the spinal-reflex terminology of the nineteenth

century.
But, for our purposes, we may consider the laboratory study of

learning to have been of three central kinds, the learning of signals, skills,

and solutions.
Let us take up each in turn, asking the question, is

consciousness necessary?
Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest

example.
If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a

rubber tube is directed at a person’s eye about ten times, the eyelid, which

previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light

signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed.
9

Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning

report that it has no conscious component whatever.
Indeed, consciousness,

in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the

signal learning, blocks it from occurring.
In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learning can be

shown to go on without any consciousness that it has occurred.
If a distinct

kind of music is played while you are eating a particularly delicious lunch,

the next time you hear the music you will like its sounds slightly more and

even have a little more saliva in your mouth.
The music has become a

signal for pleasure which mixes with your judgment.
And the same is true

for paintings.10 Subjects who have gone through this kind of test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or paintings better after

lunch, could not say.
They were not conscious they had learned anything.
But the really interesting thing here is that if you know about the

phenomenon beforehand and are conscious of the contingency between

food and the music or painting, the learning does not occur.
Again,

consciousness actually reduces our learning abilities of this type, let alone

not being necessary for them.
As we saw earlier in the performance of skills, so in the learning of skills,

consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, having little to do.
A

simple experiment will demonstrate this fact.
Take a coin in each hand and

toss them both, crossing them in the air in such a way that each coin is

caught by the opposite hand.
This you can learn in a dozen trials.
As you

do, ask, are you conscious of everything you do?
Is consciousness

necessary at all?
I think you will find that learning is much better described

as being ‘organic’ rather than conscious.
Consciousness takes you into the

task, giving you the goal to be reached.
But from then on, apart perhaps

from fleeting neurotic concerns about your abilities at such tasks, it is as if

the learning is done for you.
Yet the nineteenth century, taking

consciousness to be the whole architect of behavior, would have tried to

explain such a task as consciously recognizing the good and bad motions,

and by free choice repeating the former and dropping out the latter!
The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect.
Typewriting

has been extensively studied, it generally being agreed in the words of one

experimenter “that all adaptations and short cuts in methods were

unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally.
The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work

in a new and better way.” 11

In the coin-tossing experiment, you may have even discovered that

consciousness if present impeded your learning.
This is a very common

finding in the learning of skills, just as we saw it was in their performance.
Let the learning go on without your being too conscious of it, and it is all

done more smoothly and efficiently.
Sometimes too much so, for, in

complex skills like typing, one may learn to consistently type ‘hte’ for ‘the’.
The remedy is to reverse the process by consciously practicing the mistake

‘hte’, whereupon contrary to the usual idea of ‘practice makes perfect’, the mistake drops away—a phenomenon called negative practice.
In the common motor skills studied in the laboratory as well, such as

complex pursuit-rotor systems or mirror-tracing, the subjects who are asked

to be very conscious of their movements do worse.
12 And athletic trainers

whom I have interviewed are unwittingly following such laboratory-proven

principles when they urge their trainees not to think so much about what

they are doing.
The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit

on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and

releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what

he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from

the fingers at the proper time.
Solution learning (or instrumental learning or operant conditioning) is a

more complex case.
Usually when one is acquiring some solution to a

problem or some path to a goal, consciousness plays a very considerable

role in setting up the problem in a certain way.
But consciousness is not

necessary.
Instances can be shown in which a person has no consciousness

whatever of either the goal he is seeking or the solution he is finding to

achieve that goal.
Another simple experiment can demonstrate this.
Ask someone to sit

opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing

two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down.
If after

every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, or whatever you choose)

you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-hmip” or

smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or

whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words.
The

important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning

anything at all.
13 He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make

you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that

problem.
Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and

being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious

of it.
Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior.
Members

of a psychology class were asked to compliment any girl at the college

wearing red.
Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red (and

friendliness), and none of the girls was aware of being influenced.
Another

class, a week after being told about unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor.
Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture

hall, they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes.
It is reported that they

were almost able to train him right out the door, he remaining unaware of

anything unusual.
14

The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the subject

decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he would of course be

conscious of what he was learning to do.
One way to get around this is to

use a behavioral response which is imperceptible to the subject.
And this

has been done, using a very small muscle in the thumb whose movements

are imperceptible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording

apparatus.
The subjects were told that the experiments were concerned with

the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise combined with music upon

muscle tension.
Four electrodes were placed on their bodies, the only real

one being the one over the small thumb muscle, the other three being

dummy electrodes.
The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the

imperceptible thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the

unpleasant noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or

delayed for 15 seconds if was not turned on at the time of the twitch.
In all

subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that turned off the distressing

noise increased in rate without the subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious

that they were learning to turn off the unpleasant noise.15



Thus, consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning process, and

this is true whether it be the learning of signals, skills, or solutions.
There

is, of course, much more to say on this fascinating subject, for the whole

thrust of contemporary research in behavior modification is along these

lines.
But, for the present, we have simply established that the older

doctrine that conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly

and absolutely false.
At this point, we can at least conclude that it is

possible—possible I say—to conceive of human beings who are not

conscious and yet can learn and solve problems.
Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking

As we go from simple to more complicated aspects of mentality, we enter

vaguer and vaguer territory, where the terms we use become more difficult

to travel with.
Thinking is certainly one of these.
And to say that

consciousness is not necessary for thinking makes us immediately bristle

with protest.
Surely thinking is the very heart and bone of consciousness!
But let us go slowly here.
What we would be referring to would be that type

of free associating which might be called thinking-about or thinking-of,

which, indeed, always seems to be fully surrounded and immersed in the

image-peopled province of consciousness.
But the matter is really not that

clear at all.
Let us begin with the type of thinking that ends in a result to which may

be predicated the terms right or wrong.
This is what is commonly referred

to as making judgments, and is very similar to one extreme of solution

learning that we have just discussed.
A simple experiment, so simple as to seem trivial, will bring us directly

to the heart of the matter.
Take any two unequal objects, such as a pen and

pencil or two unequally filled glasses of water, and place them on the desk

in front of you.
Then, partly closing your eyes to increase your attention to

the task, pick up each one with the thumb and forefinger and judge which is

heavier.
Now introspect on everything you are doing.
You will find yourself

conscious of the feel of the objects against the skin of your fingers,

conscious of the slight downward pressure as you feel the weight of each,

conscious of any protuberances on the sides of the objects, and so forth.
And now the actual judging of which is heavier.
Where is that?
Lo!
the very

act of judgment that one object is heavier than the other is not conscious.
It

is somehow just given to you by your nervous system.
If we call that

process of judgment thinking, we are finding that such thinking is not

conscious at all.
A simple experiment, yes, but extremely important.
It

demolishes at once the entire tradition that such thought processes are the

structure of the conscious mind.
This type of experiment came to be studied extensively back at the

beginning of this century in what came to be known as the Wurzburg

School.
It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 1901, which was very

similar to the above, except that small weights were used.
16 The subject was asked to lift two weights in front of him, and place the one that was heavier

in front of the experimenter, who was facing him.
And it came as a startling

discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained

subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of

judgment itself was never conscious.
Physics and psychology always show

interesting contrasts, and it is one of the ironies of science that the Marbe

experiment, so simple as to seem silly, was to psychology what the so-

difficult-to-set-up Michaelson-Morley experiment was to physics.
Just as

the latter proved that the ether, that substance supposed to exist throughout

space, did not exist, so the weight-judgment experiment showed that

judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, did not exist in

consciousness at all.
But a complaint can be lodged here.
Maybe in lifting the objects the

judging was all happening so fast that we forgot it.
After all, in

introspecting we always have hundreds of words to describe what happens

in a few seconds.
(What an astonishing fact that is!) And our memory fades

as to what just happened even as we are trying to express it.
Perhaps this

was what was occurring in Marbe’s experiment, and that type of thinking

called judging could be found in consciousness, after all, if we could only

remember.
This was the problem as Watt faced it a few years after Marbe.
17 To solve it, he used a different method, word associations.
Nouns printed on cards

were shown to the subject, who was to reply by uttering an associate word

as quickly as he could.
It was not free association, but what is technically

called partially constrained: in different series the subject was required to

associate to the visual word a superordinate (e.g., oak-tree), coordinate

(oak-elm), or subordinate (oak-beam); or a whole (oak-forest), a part (oak-

acorn), or another part of a common whole (oak-path).
The nature of this

task of constrained associations made it possible to divide the

consciousness of it into four periods: the instructions as to which of the

constraints it was to be (e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the stimulus

noun (e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the spoken

reply (e.g., tree).
The introspecting observers were asked to confine



themselves first to one period and then to another, and thus get a more

accurate account of consciousness in each.
It was expected that the precision of this fractionation method would

prove Marbe’s conclusions wrong, and that the consciousness of thinking

would be found in Watt’s third period, the period of the search for the word

that would suit the particular constrained association.
But nothing of the

sort happened.
It was the third period that was introspectively blank.
What

seemed to be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really

conscious once a stimulus word had been given, and, previous to that, the

particular type of association demanded had been adequately understood by

the observer.
This was a remarkable result.
Another way of saying it is that

one does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
The

important part of the matter is the instruction, which allows the whole

business to go off automatically.
This I shall shorten to the term struction,

by which I mean it to have the connotation of both instruction and

construction.
18



Thinking, then, is not conscious.
Rather, it is an automatic process

following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.
But we do not have to stay with verbal associations; any type of problem

will do, even those closer to voluntary actions.
If I say to myself, I shall

think about an oak in summer, that is a struction, and what I call thinking

about is really a file of associated images cast up on the shores of my

consciousness out of an unknown sea, just like the constrained associations

in Watt’s experiment.
If we have the figures 6 and 2, divided by a vertical line, 6|2, the ideas

produced by such a stimulus will be eight, four, or three, according to

whether the struction prescribed is addition, subtraction, or division.
The

important thing is that the struction itself, the process of addition,

subtraction, or division, disappears into the nervous system once it is given.
But it is obviously there ‘in the mind’ since the same stimulus can result in

any of three different responses.
And that is something we are not in the

least aware of, once it is put in motion.
Suppose we have a series of figures such as the following:





What is the next figure in this series?
How did you arrive at your answer?
Once I have given you the struction, you automatically ‘see’ that it is to be

another triangle.
I submit that if you try to introspect on the process by

which you came up with the answer you are not truly retrieving the

processes involved, but inventing what you think they must have been by

giving yourself another struction to that effect.
In the task itself, all you

were really conscious of was the struction, the figures before you on the

page, and then the solution.
Nor is this different from the case of speech which I mentioned earlier.
When we speak, we are not really conscious either of the search for words,

or of putting the words together into phrases, or of putting the phrases into

sentences.
We are only conscious of the ongoing series of structions that we

give ourselves, which then, automatically, without any consciousness

whatever, result in speech.
The speech itself we can be conscious of as it is

produced if we wish, thus giving some feedback to result in further

structions.
So we arrive at the position that the actual process of thinking, so usually

thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that

only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously

perceived.
Consciousness Not Necessary for Reason

The long tradition of man as the rational animal, the tradition that

enthroned him as Homo sapiens, rests in all its pontifical generality on the

gracile assumption that consciousness is the seat of reason.
Any discussion

of such an assumption is embarrassed by the vagueness of the term reason

itself.
This vagueness is the legacy we have from an older ‘faculty’

psychology that spoke of a ‘faculty’ of reason, which was of course situated

‘in’ consciousness.
And this forced deposition of reason and consciousness

was further confused with ideas of truth, of how we ought to reason, or

logic—all quite different things.
And hence logic was supposed to be the

structure of conscious reason confounding generations of poor scholars who

knew perfectly well that syllogisms were not what was on their side of

introspection.
Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or—better

—as conduct is to morality.
Reasoning refers to a gamut of natural thought

processes in the everyday world.
Logic is how we ought to think if

objective truth is our goal—and the everyday world is very little concerned

with objective truth.
Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions

we have reached by natural reasoning.
My point here is that, for such

natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary.
The very reason

we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
Consider to begin with the many phenomena we have already established

as going on without consciousness which can be called elementary kinds of

reasoning.
Choosing paths, words, notes, motions, the perceptual

corrections in size and color constancies—all are primitive kinds of

reasoning that go on without any prod, nudge, or even glance of

consciousness.
Even the more standard types of reasoning can occur without

consciousness.
A boy, having observed on one or more past occasions that a

particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, will conclude directly

in a new instance that another piece of wood will float on another pond.
There is no collecting together of past instances in consciousness, and no

necessary conscious process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen

directly as floating on the new pond.
This is sometimes called reasoning

from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generalization.
Nothing particularly extraordinary.
It is an ability common to all the higher

vertebrates.
Such reasoning is the structure of the nervous system, not the

structure of consciousness.
But more complex reasoning without consciousness is continually going

on.
Our minds work much faster than consciousness can keep up with.
We

commonly make general assertions based on our past experiences in an

automatic way, and only as an afterthought are we sometimes able to

retrieve any of the past experiences on which an assertion is based.
How

often we reach sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them!
Because reasoning is not conscious.
And consider the kind of reasoning that

we do about others’ feelings and character, or in reasoning out the motives

of others from their actions.
These are clearly the result of automatic

inferences by our nervous systems in which consciousness is not only

unnecessary, but, as we have seen in the performance of motor skills, would

probably hinder the process.19



Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of

intellectual thought!
Surely there at last we will come to the very empire of

consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly

processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness.
But the truth has

no such grandeur.
The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems

and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn.
The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously.
Helmholtz

had his happy thoughts which “often enough crept quietly into my thinking

without my suspecting their importance...
in other cases they arrived

suddenly, without any effort on my part...
they liked especially to make

their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in

sunny weather!”20

And Gauss, referring to an arithmetical theorem which he had

unsuccessfully tried to prove for years, wrote how “like a sudden flash of

lightning, the riddle happened to be solved.
I myself cannot say what was

the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what

made my success possible.” 21

And the brilliant mathematician Poincaré was particularly interested in

the manner in which he came upon his own discoveries.
In a celebrated

lecture at the Société de Psychologie in Paris, he described how he set out

on a geologic excursion: “The incidents of the journey made me forget my

mathematical work.
Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to

go some place or other.
At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the

idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have

paved the way for it, the transformation I had used to define the Fuchsian

functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry!” 22

It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the materials

of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday experience, that

this business of sudden flooding insights is most obvious.
A close friend of

Einstein’s has told me that many of the physicist’s greatest ideas came to

him so suddenly while he was shaving that he had to move the blade of the

straight razor very carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise.
And a well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Köhler, “We

often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed.
That is where

the great discoveries are made in our science.”

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative

thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously

worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious

concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later

justified by logic.
The parallel between these important and complex

problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle

series is obvious.
The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a

complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on

which the struction is to work.
But then the actual process of reasoning, the

dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of

weights, has no representation in consciousness.
Indeed, it is sometimes

almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
The Location of Consciousness

The final fallacy which I wish to discuss is both important and

interesting, and I have left it for the last because I think it deals the coup de

grâce to the everyman theory of consciousness.
Where does consciousness

take place?
Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my head.
This is

because when we introspect, we seem to look inward on an inner space

somewhere behind our eyes.
But what on earth do we mean by ‘look’?
We

even close our eyes sometimes to introspect even more clearly.
Upon what?
Its spatial character seems unquestionable.
Moreover we seem to move or at

least ‘look’ in different directions.
And if we press ourselves too strongly to

further characterize this space (apart from its imagined contents), we feel a

vague irritation, as if there were something that did not want to be known,

some quality which to question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a

friendly place.
We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads.
We

also assume it is there in others’.
In talking with a friend, maintaining

periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-

eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always

assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking,

similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking

from.
And this is the very heartbeat of the matter.
For we know perfectly well

that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all!
There is nothing inside

my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another.
And the

fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant.
Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to.
It means that we

are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people’s heads,

knowing perfectly well that they don’t exist anatomically; and the location

of these ‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary.
The Aristotelian writings, 23 for

example, located consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above

the heart, believing the brain to be a mere cooling organ since it was

insensitive to touch or injury.
And some readers will not have found this

discussion valid since they locate their thinking selves somewhere in the

upper chest.
For most of us, however, the habit of locating consciousness in

the head is so ingrained that it is difficult to think otherwise.
But, actually,

you could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your

consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the

floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head.
Not really just as

well.
For there are very good reasons why it is better to imagine your mind-

space inside of you, reasons to do with volition and internal sensations, with

the relationship of your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as

we go on.
That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the

brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which

consciousness seems to be outside the body.
A friend who received a left

frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the

ceiling of a hospital ward looking down euphorically at himself on the cot

swathed in bandages.
Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide

commonly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, as

they are called.
Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything

metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an

arbitrary matter.
Let us not make a mistake.
When I am conscious, I am always and

definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head.
But so am I when

riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not go on inside my head.
The

cases are different of course, since bicycle riding has a definite geographical

location, while consciousness does not.
In reality, consciousness has no

location whatever except as we imagine it has.
Is Consciousness Necessary?
Let us review where we are, for we have just found our way through an

enormous amount of ramous material which may have seemed more

perplexing than clarifying.
We have been brought to the conclusion that

consciousness is not what we generally think it is.
It is not to be confused

with reactivity.
It is not involved in hosts of perceptual phenomena.
It is not

involved in the performance of skills and often hinders their execution.
It

need not be involved in speaking, writing, listening, or reading.
It does not

copy down experience, as most people think.
Consciousness is not at all

involved in signal learning, and need not be involved in the learning of

skills or solutions, which can go on without any consciousness whatever.
It

is not necessary for making judgments or in simple thinking.
It is not the

seat of reason, and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative

reasoning go on without any attending consciousness.
And it has no

location except an imaginary one!
The immediate question therefore is,

does consciousness exist at all?
But that is the problem of the next chapter.
Here it is only necessary to conclude that consciousness does not make all

that much difference to a lot of our activities.
If our reasonings have been

correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men

who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the

things that we do, but who were not conscious at all.
This is the important

and in some ways upsetting notion that we are forced to conclude at this

point.
Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on

this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization

without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows

unconvincing and paradoxical.
Chapter 2



Consciousness

THUS HAVING CHISELED away some of the major misconceptions about

consciousness, what then have we left?
If consciousness is not all these

things, if it is not so extensive as we think, not a copy of experience, or the

necessary locus of learning, judgment, or even thought, what is it?
And as

we stare into the dust and rubble of the last chapter, hoping Pygmalion-like

to see consciousness newly step forth pure and pristine out of the detritus,

let us ramble out and around the subject a little way as the dust settles,

talking of different things.
Metaphor and Language

Let us speak of metaphor.
The most fascinating property of language is

its capacity to make metaphors.
But what an understatement!
For metaphor

is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old

schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language.
I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for

one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between

them or between their relations to other things.
There are thus always two

terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which I shall call the

metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call

the metaphier.
A metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less

known metaphrand.
1 I have coined these hybrid terms simply to echo

multiplication where a multiplier operates on a multiplicand.
It is by metaphor that language grows.
The common reply to the question

“what is it?” is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, “well,

it is like—.” In laboratory studies, both children and adults describing

nonsense objects (or metaphrands) to others who cannot see them use

extended metaphiers that with repetition become contracted into labels.2

This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed.
The

grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language

as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex.
A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a dictionary

will demonstrate this assertion.
Or take the naming of various fauna and

flora in their Latin indicants, or even in their wonderful common English

names, such as stag beetle, lady’s-slipper, darning needle, Queen Anne’s

lace, or buttercup.
The human body is a particularly generative metaphier,

creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas.
The head

of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water;

the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the

leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on.
Or the foot of this page.
Or the leaf you will soon turn.
All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world

about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.
Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of

communication.
This is language moving out synchronically (or without reference to

time) into the space of the world to describe it and perceive it more and

more definitively.
But language also moves in another and more important

way, diachronically, or through time, and behind our experiences on the

basis of aptic structures in our nervous systems to create abstract concepts

whose referents are not observables except in a metaphorical sense.
And

these too are generated by metaphor.
This is indeed the nub (knob), heart,

pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc.
of my argument, which itself is a metaphor

and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ‘eye’.
In the abstractions of human relations, the skin becomes a particularly

important metaphier.
We get or stay ‘in touch’ with others who may be

‘thick-’ or ‘thin-skinned’ or perhaps ‘touchy’ in which case they have to be

‘handled’ carefully lest we ‘rub’ them the wrong way; we may have a

‘feeling’ for another person with whom we may have a ‘touching’

experience.3

The concepts of science are all of this kind, abstract concepts generated

by concrete metaphors.
In physics, we have force, acceleration (to increase

one’s steps), inertia (originally an indolent person), impedance, resistance,

fields, and now charm.
In physiology, the metaphier of a machine has been

at the very center of discovery.
We understand the brain by metaphors to

everything from batteries and telegraphy to computers and holograms.
Medical practice is sometimes dictated by metaphor.
In the eighteenth

century, the heart in fever was like a boiling pot, and so bloodletting was

prescribed to reduce its fuel.
And even today, a great deal of medicine is

based upon the military metaphor of defense of the body against attacks of

this or that.
The very concept of law in Greek derives from nomos, the word

for the foundations of a building.
To be liable, or bound in law, comes from

the Latin ligare, meaning to bind with cord.
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to

the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the

abstract on the bases of metaphors.
It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this allimportant

function.
But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in

phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own.
Even such an

unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a

metaphor.
It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while

the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the

Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the

irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time

when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that

something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.” 4 Of course we are not conscious

that the concept of being is thus generated from a metaphor about growing

and breathing.
Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in

the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.
Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastnesses of history,

we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a

granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor

which it is.
Indeed, if we consider the changes in vocabulary that have

occurred over the last few millennia, and project them several millennia

hence, an interesting paradox arises.
For if we ever achieve a language that

has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will no longer be

possible.
I would not say, in that case, my love is like a red, red rose, for

love would have exploded into terms for its thousands of nuances, and

applying the correct term would leave the rose metaphorically dead.
The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is

able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating

new circumstances thereby.
(Could consciousness be such a new creation?)



Understanding as Metaphor

We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying

to do when we try to understand anything?
Like children trying to describe

nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a

metaphor for that thing.
Not just any metaphor, but one with something

more familiar and easy to our attention.
Understanding a thing is to arrive at

a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us.
And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.
Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the

roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods.
We would have

reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle

sounds, for example.
Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various

supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination

of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise.
None

of these really exist as we picture them.
Our images of these events of

physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods.
Yet they act as the

metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the

thunderstorm.
So, in other areas of science, we say we understand an aspect of nature

when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model.
The terms

theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably.
But

really they should not be.
A theory is a relationship of the model to the

things the model is supposed to represent.
The Bohr model of the atom is

that of a proton surrounded by orbiting electrons.
It is something like the

pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its metaphoric sources.
Bohr’s theory was that all atoms were similar to his model.
The theory, with the more recent discovery of new particles and complicated interatomic

relationships, has turned out not to be true.
But the model remains.
A model

is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it

represents.
A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data.
And

understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated

data and a familiar model.
If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then

we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding

consciousness.
For it should be immediately apparent that there is not and

cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate

experience itself.
There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able

to understand consciousness in the same way that we can understand things

that we are conscious of.
Most of the errors about consciousness that we have been studying have

been errors of attempted metaphors.
We spoke of the notion of

consciousness being a copy of experience coming out of the explicit

metaphor of a schoolboy’s slate.
But of course no one really meant

consciousness copies experience; it was as if it did.
And we found on

analysis, of course, that it did no such thing.
And even the idea behind that last phrase, that consciousness does

anything at all, even that is a metaphor.
It is saying that consciousness is a

person behaving in physical space who does things, and this is true only if

‘does’ is a metaphor as well.
For to do things is some kind of behavior in a

physical world by a living body.
And also in what ‘space’ is the

metaphorical ‘doing’ being done?
(Some of the dust is beginning to settle.)

This ‘space’ too must be a metaphor of real space.
All of which is

reminiscent of our discussion of the location of consciousness, also a

metaphor.
Consciousness is being thought of as a thing, and so like other

things must have a location, which, as we saw earlier, it does not actually

have in the physical sense.
I realize that my argument here is becoming fairly dense.
But before

coming out into the clearing, I wish to describe what I shall mean by the

term analog.
An analog is a model, but a model of a special kind.
It is not

like a scientific model, whose source may be anything at all and whose

purpose is to ad as an hypothesis of explanation or understanding.
Instead,

an analog is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of.
A map

is a good example.
It is not a model in the scientific sense, not a

hypothetical model like the Bohr atom to explain something unknown.
Instead, it is constructed from something well known, if not completely

known.
Each region of a district of land is allotted a corresponding region

on the map, though the materials of land and map are absolutely different

and a large proportion of the features of the land have to be left out.
And the relation between an analog map and its land is a metaphor.
If I point to a

location on a map and say, “There is Mont Blanc and from Chamonix we

can reach the east face this way,” that is really a shorthand way of saying,

“The relations between the point labeled ‘Mont Blanc’ and other points is

similar to the actual Mont Blanc and its neighboring regions.”



The Metaphor Language of Mind

I think it is apparent now, at least dimly, what is emerging from the debris

of the previous chapter.
I do not now feel myself proving my thesis to you

step by step, so much as arranging in your mind certain notions so that, at

the very least, you will not be immediately estranged from the point I am

about to make.
My procedure here in what I realize is a difficult and overtly

diffuse part of this book is to simply state in general terms my conclusion

and then clarify what it implies.
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world.
It

is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors

or analogs of behavior in the physical world.
Its reality is of the same order

as mathematics.
It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at

more adequate decisions.
Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a

thing or repository.
And it is intimately bound up with volition and

decision.
Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes.
The most

prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual.
We

‘see’ solutions to problems, the best of which may be ‘brilliant’, and the

person ‘brighter’ and ‘clearheaded’ as opposed to ‘dull’, ‘fuzzy-minded’, or

‘obscure’ solutions.
These words are all metaphors and the mind-space to

which they apply is a metaphor of actual space.
In it we can ‘approach’ a

problem, perhaps from some ‘viewpoint’, and ‘grapple’ with its difficulties,

or seize together or ‘com-prehend’ parts of a problem, and so on, using

metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind-

space.
And the adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space are

analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mind-space when we

speak of our minds as being ‘quick,’ ‘slow’, ‘agitated’ (as when we cogitate

or co-agitate), ‘nimble-witted’, ‘strong-’ or ‘weak-minded.’ The mind-space

in which these metaphorical activities go on has its own group of

adjectives; we can be ‘broad-minded’, ‘deep’, ‘open’, or ‘narrow-minded’;

we can be ‘occupied’; we can ‘get something off our minds’, ‘put

something out of mind’, or we can ‘get it’, let something ‘penetrate’, or

‘bear’, ‘have’, ‘keep’, or ‘hold’ it in mind.
As with a real space, something can be at the ‘back’ of our mind, in its

‘inner recesses’, or ‘beyond’ our mind, or ‘out’ of our mind.
In argument

we try to ‘get things through’ to someone, to ‘reach’ their ‘understanding’

or find a ‘common ground’, or ‘point out’, etc., all actions in real space

taken over analogically into the space of the mind.
But what is it we are making a metaphor of?
We have seen that the usual

function of metaphor is a wish to designate a particular aspect of a thing or

to describe something for which words are not available.
That thing to be

designated, described, expressed, or lexically widened is what we have

called the metaphrand.
We operate upon this by some similar, more familiar

thing, called a metaphier.
Originally, of course, the purpose was intensely

practical, to designate an arm of the sea as a better place for shellfish, or to

put a head on a nail that it might better hold a board to a stanchion.
The

metaphiers here were arm and head, and the metaphrands a particular part

of the sea and particular end of the nail that already existed.
Now when we

say mind-space is a metaphor of real space, it is the real ‘external’ world

that is the metaphier.
But if metaphor generates consciousness rather than

simply describes it, what is the metaphrand?
Paraphiers and Paraphrands

If we look more carefully at the nature of metaphor (noticing all the

while the metaphorical nature of almost everything we are saying), we find

(even the verb “find”!) that it is composed of more than a metaphier and a

metaphrand.
There are also at the bottom of most complex metaphors

various associations or attributes of the metaphier which I am going to call

paraphiers.
And these paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what

I shall call the paraphrands of the metaphrand.
Jargon, yes, but absolutely

necessary if we are to be crystal clear about our referents.
Some examples will show that the unraveling of metaphor into these four

parts is really quite simple, as well as clarifying what otherwise we could

not speak about.
Consider the metaphor that the snow blankets the ground.
The

metaphrand is something about the completeness and even thickness with

which the ground is covered by snow.
The metaphier is a blanket on a bed.
But the pleasing nuances of this metaphor are in the paraphiers of the

metaphier, blanket.
These are something about warmth, protection, and

slumber until some period of awakening.
These associations of blanket then

automatically become the associations or paraphrands of the original

metaphrand, the way the snow covers the ground.
And we thus have created

by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow

cover until its awakening in spring.
All this is packed into the simple use of

the word ‘blanket’ to pertain to the way snow covers the ground.
Not all metaphors, of course, have such generative potential.
In that

often-cited one that a ship plows the sea, the metaphrand is the particular

action of the bow of the ship through the water, and the metaphier is

plowing action.
The correspondence is exact.
And that is the end of it.
But if I say the brook sings through the woods, the similarity of the

metaphrand of the brook’s bubbling and gurgling and the metaphier of

(presumably) a child singing is not at all exact.
It is the paraphiers of joy

and dancingness becoming the paraphrands of the brook that are of interest.
Or in the many-poemed comparison of love to a rose, it is not the tenuous

correspondence of metaphrand and metaphier but the paraphrands that

engage us, that love lives in the sun, smells sweet, has thorns when grasped, and blooms for a season only.
Or suppose I say less visually and so more

profoundly something quite opposite, that my love is like a tinsmith’s

scoop, sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin.5 The immediate correspondence

here of metaphrand and metaphier, of being out of casual sight, is trivial.
Instead, it is the paraphrands of this metaphor which create what could not

possibly be there, the enduring careful shape and hidden shiningness and

holdingness of a lasting love deep in the heavy manipulable softnesses of

mounding time, the whole simulating (and so paraphranding) sexual

intercourse from a male point of view.
Love has not such properties except

as we generate them by metaphor.
Of such poetry is consciousness made.
This can be seen if we return to

some of the metaphors of mind we have earlier looked at.
Suppose we are

trying to solve some simple problem such as the circle-triangle series in the

previous chapter.
And suppose we express the fact that we have obtained

the solution by exclaiming that at last we ‘see’ what the answer is, namely,

a triangle.
This metaphor may be analyzed just as the blanket of snow or the singing

brook.
The metaphrand is obtaining the solution, the metaphier is sight with

the eyes, and the paraphiers are all those things associated with vision that

then create paraphrands, such as the mind’s ‘eye’, ‘seeing the solution

clearly’ etc., and, most important, the paraphrand of a ‘space’ in which the

‘seeing’ is going on, or what I am calling mind-space, and ‘objects’ to ‘see.’

I do not mean this brief sketch to stand in for a real theory of how

consciousness was generated in the first place.
That problem we shall come

to in Book II.
Rather I intend only to suggest the possibility that I hope to

make plausible later, that consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor.
It

is spun out of the concrete metaphiers of expression and their paraphiers,

projecting paraphrands that exist only in the functional sense.
Moreover, it

goes on generating itself, each new paraphrand capable of being a

metaphrand on its own, resulting in new metaphiers with their paraphiers,

and so on.
Of course this process is not and cannot be as haphazard as I am making

it sound.
The world is organized, highly organized, and the concrete

metaphiers that are generating consciousness thus generate consciousness in

an organized way.
Hence the similarity of consciousness and the physical-

behavioral world we are conscious of.
And hence the structure of that world is echoed —though with certain differences—in the structure of

consciousness.
One last complication before going on.
A cardinal property of an analog

is that the way it is generated is not the way it is used—obviously.
The

map-maker and map-user are doing two different things.
For the map-

maker, the metaphrand is the blank piece of paper on which he operates

with the metaphier of the land he knows and has surveyed.
But for the map-

user, it is just the other way around.
The land is unknown; it is the land that

is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he is using, by

which he understands the land.
And so with consciousness.
Consciousness is the metaphrand when it is

being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions.
But the

functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey.
Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience,

constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions,

decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be.
And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then

understand the world.
What kinds of things can we say about that structure?
Here I shall briefly

allude to only the most important.
The Features of Consciousness

I.
Spatialization.
The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is

what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost

every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over

as the very habitat of it all.
If I ask you to think of your head, then your feet,

then the breakfast you had this morning, and then the Tower of London, and

then the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being

spatially separated; and it is this quality I am here referring to.
When we

introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this

metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and ‘enlarging’

with each new thing or relation consdousized.
In Chapter 1, we spoke of how we invent mind-space inside our own

heads as well as the heads of others.
The word invent is perhaps too strong

except in the ontological sense.
We rather assume these ‘spaces’ without

question.
They are a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to

assume consciousness in others.
Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a

spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness.
Otherwise we

cannot be conscious of them.
This we shall call spatialization.
Time is an obvious example.
If I ask you to think of the last hundred

years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the

succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right.
But of course

there is no left or right in time.
There is only before and after, and these do

not have any spatial properties whatever—except by analog.
You cannot,

absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it.
Consciousness is

always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the

synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in

side-by-sideness.
This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought.
If you are

now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my particular theory fits,

you are first habitually ‘turning’ to your mind-space where abstract things

can be ‘separated out’ and ‘put beside’ each other to be ‘looked at’—as

could never happen physically or in actuality.
You then make the metaphor

of theories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal suecession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the metaphor of the

characteristics of theories as physical characteristics, all of some degree so

they can be ‘arranged’ in a kind of order.
And you then make the further

expressive metaphor of ‘fit’.
The actual behavior of fitting, of which ‘fit’

here is the analog in consciousness, may vary from person to person or

from culture to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging

things in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, etc.
The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes very complicated,

and difficult to unravel.
But every conscious thought that you are having in

reading this book can by such an analysis be traced back to concrete actions

in a concrete world.
2.
Excerption.
In consciousness, we are never ‘seeing’ anything in its

entirety.
This is because such ‘seeing’ is an analog of actual behavior; and

in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at

any one moment.
And so in consciousness.
We excerpt from the collection

of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it.
And

this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our

actual behavior.
Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a

fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of

trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring.
Or, if you think of the

city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a

particular building or tower or crossroads.
Or if I ask you to think of

yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past,

believing you are then thinking of yourself.
In all these instances, we find

no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the

things themselves, although we talk as if they were.
Actually we are never

conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of

them.
The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much more thought

and study.
For on them the person’s whole consciousness of the world and

the persons with whom he is interacting depend.
Your excerptions of

someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him.
If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the

unpleasant.
The causation may be in either direction.
How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we

feel we are living in.
Take for example one’s relatives when one was a

child.
If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their

delusions, well, that is one thing.
But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in

their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world.
Writers and artists are

doing in a controlled way what happens ‘in’ consciousness more

haphazardly.
Excerption is distinct from memory.
An excerpt of a thing is in

consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories

adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories.
If I wish to remember what

I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned,

which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I

rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a

particular riverside.
And from there I associate around it and retrieve

memories about last summer.
This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it

is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of.
Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions.
Each so-called association in

consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something

frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality

and changing situational factors.
6



3.

The Analog ‘I’.
A most important ‘feature’ of this metaphor ‘world’ is

the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog ‘I’, which can ‘move about’

vicarially in our ‘imagination’, ‘doing’ things that we are not actually

doing.
There are of course many uses for such an analog ‘I’.
We imagine

‘ourselves’ ‘doing’ this or that, and thus ‘make’ decisions on the basis of

imagined ‘outcomes’ that would be impossible if we did not have an

imagined ‘self’ behaving in an imagined ‘world’.
In the example in the

section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self that was

trying to ‘see’ where my theory ‘fits’ into the array of alternative theories.
It

was your analog ‘I’.
If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we know

that one of them comes back to our destination after a much more circuitous

route, we can ‘traverse’ that longer route with our analog ‘I’ to see if its

vistas and ponds are worth the longer time it will take.
Without

consciousness with its vicarial analog ‘I’, we could not do this.
4.
The Metaphor ‘Me’.
The analog ‘I’ is, however, not simply that.
It is also a metaphor ‘me’ As we imagine ourselves strolling down the longer

path we indeed catch ‘glimpses’ of ‘ourselves’, as we did in the exercises of

Chapter 1, where we called them autoscopic images.
We can both look out

from within the imagined self at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a

bit and see ourselves perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a

particular brook.
There are of course quite profound problems here,

particularly in the relationship of the ‘I’ to the ‘me’.
But that is another

treatise.
And I am only indicating the nature of the problem.
5.
Narratization.
In consciousness, we are always seeing our vicarial

selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives.
In the above

illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walking along a wooded

path.
But it is not so obvious that we are constantly doing this whenever we

are being conscious, and this I call narratization.
Seated where I am, I am

writing a book and this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the

story of my life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years.
New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story,

perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least unremembered.
More important, situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing

story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I

am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise.
The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular

thing is all a part of narratization.
Such causes as reasons may be true or

false, neutral or ideal.
Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we

happen to find ourselves doing.
The thief narratizes his act as due to

poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth,

purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in

consciousness.
But it is not just our own analog ‘I’ that we are narratizing; it is

everything else in consciousness.
A stray fact is narratized to fit with some

other stray fact.
A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a

mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it.
A cat is up in a

tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there.
Or

the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness.
6.
Conciliation.
A final aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals.
It really

springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived

object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic

process sometimes called assimilation.
We assimilate a new stimulus into

our conception or schema about it, even though it is slightly different.
Since

we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the

same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on

all the time as we perceive our world.
We are putting things together into

recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we

have of them.
Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation.
A better term for it might

be compatibilization, but that seems something too rococo.
What I am

designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what

narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time.
It brings things together

as conscious objects just as narratization brings things together as a story.
And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according

to rules built up in experience.
In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with

each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal

conception are made to agree.
If we are narratizing ourselves as walking

along a wooded path, the succession of excerpts is automatically made

compatible with such a journey.
Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or

narratizations happen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or

conciliated.
If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time,

you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the

meadow.
But if I ask you to think of the mountain meadow and an ocean at

the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of

one and then the other.
You can only bring them together by a narratization.
Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such

principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world.
Let me summarize as a way of ‘seeing’ where we are and the direction in

which our discussion is going.
We have said that consciousness is an

operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function.
It operates by way

of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog ‘I’ that

can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it.
It operates on any

reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together

in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like

things in space.
Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental

acts are analogs of bodily acts.
Consciousness operates only on objectively

observable things.
Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke,

there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was

in behavior first.
This has been a difficult chapter.
But I hope I have sketched out with

some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a metaphor-generated

model of the world leads to some quite definite deductions, and that these

deductions are testable in our own everyday conscious experience.
It is

only, of course, a beginning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I

hope to develop in a future work.
But it is enough to return now to our

major inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the

nature of consciousness itself for later chapters.
If consciousness is this invention of an analog world on the basis of

language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of

mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we

say about its origin?
We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, and one that

is completely contradictory to all of the alternative solutions to the problem

of the origin of consciousness which we discussed in the introductory

chapter.
For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is

of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed.
Consciousness come after language!
The implications of such a position are

extremely serious.
Chapter 3



The Mind of Iliad

THERE IS an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having

come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of

confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out

into the sky for the outward curve down.
Such perhaps is the present moment.
For all the scientific alternatives

that we faced into in the Introduction, including my own prejudgments

about the matter, all assured us that consciousness was evolved by natural

selection back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before.
We felt

assured that at least some animals were conscious, assured that

consciousness was related in some important way to the evolution of the

brain and probably its cortex, assured certainly that early man was

conscious as he was learning language.
These assurances have now disappeared, and we seem thrust out into the

sky of a very new problem.
If our impressionistic development of a theory

of consciousness in the last chapter is even pointing in the right direction,

then consciousness can only have arisen in the human species, and that

development must have come after the development of language.
Now if human evolution were a simple continuity, our procedure at this

point would normally be to study the evolution of language, dating it as best

we could.
We would then try to trace out human mentality thereafter until

we reached the goal of our inquiry, where we could claim by some criterion

or other that here at last is the place and the date of the origin and beginning

of consciousness.
But human evolution is not a simple continuity.
Into human history

around 3000 B.C.
comes a curious and very remarkable practice.
It is a

transmutation of speech into little marks on stone or clay or papyrus (or

pages) so that speech can be seen rather than just heard, and seen by

anybody, not just those within earshot at the time.
So before pursuing the

program of the preceding paragraph, we should first try to date the origin of

consciousness either before or after the invention of such seen speech by

examining its earliest examples.
Our present question then is: what is the

mentality of the earliest writings of mankind?
As soon as we go back to the first written records of man to seek

evidence for the presence or absence of a subjective conscious mind, we are

immediately beset with innumerable technical problems.
The most

profound is that of translating writings that may have issued from a

mentality utterly different from our own.
And this is particularly

problematic in the very first human writings.
These are in hieroglyphics,

hieratic, and cuneiform, all—interestingly enough—beginning about 3000

B.C.
None of these is entirely understood.
When the subjects are concrete,

there is little difficulty.
But when the symbols are peculiar and

undetermined by context, the amount of necessary guesswork turns this

fascinating evidence of the past into a Rorschach test in which modern

scholars project their own subjectivity with little awareness of the

importance of their distortion.
The indications here as to whether

consciousness was present in the early Egyptian dynasties and in the

Mesopotamian cultures are thus too ambiguous for the kind of concerned

analysis which is required.
We shall return to these questions in Book II.
The first writing in human history in a language of which we have

enough certainty of translation to consider it in connection with my

hypothesis is the Iliad.
Modern scholarship regards this revenge story of

blood, sweat, and tears to have been developed by a tradition of bards or

aoidoi between about 1230 B.C.
when, according to inferences from some

recently found Hittite tablets,1 the events of the epic occurred and about 900

or 850 B.C., when it came to be written down.
I propose here to regard the

poem as a psychological document of immense importance.
And the

question we are to put to it is: What is mind in the Iliad?
The Language of the Iliad

The answer is disturbingly interesting.
There is in general no

consciousness in the Iliad.
I am saying ‘in general’ because I shall mention

some exceptions later.
And in general therefore, no words for consciousness

or mental acts.
The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean

mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete.
The word

psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-

substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche

onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp.
The thumos, which later

comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or

agitation.
When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs.
But it is

also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to

alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon,

Apollo hears his prayer and “casts strength in his thumos” (Iliad, 16:529).
The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight.
Diomedes says in one

place that Achilles will fight “when the thumos in his chest tells him to and

a god rouses him” (9:702f.).
But it is not really an organ and not always

localized; a raging ocean has thumos.
A word of somewhat similar use is

phren, which is always localized anatomically as the midriff, or sensations

in the midriff, and is usually used in the plural.
It is the phrenes of Hector

that recognize that his brother is not near him (22:296); this means what we

mean by “catching one’s breath in surprise”.
It is only centuries later that it

comes to mean mind or ‘heart’ in its figurative sense.
Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later

Greek, comes to mean conscious mind.
It comes from the word noeein, to

see.
Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or

recognition or field of vision.
Zeus “holds Odysseus in his noos.” He keeps

watch over him.
Another important word, which perhaps comes from the doubling of the

word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two parts.
This was made into a verb by adding the ending -tzo, the common suffix which can turn a noun

into a verb, the resulting word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts

about something.
Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary

quality in their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories

which are not true to the original.
Mermerizein is thus wrongly translated as

to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be troubled about, to try to

decide.
But essentially it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two

thoughts.
It is always behavioristic.
It is said several times of Zeus (20:17,

16:647), as well as of others.
The conflict is often said to go on in the

thumos, or sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos.
The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be

able to.
These words are in general, and with certain exceptions, the closest that

anyone, authors or characters or gods, usually get to having conscious

minds or thoughts.
We shall be entering the meaning of these words more

carefully in a later chapter.
There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing

curiously late in Greek thought.
Thus, Iliadic men have no will of their own

and certainly no notion of free will.
Indeed, the whole problem of volition,

so troubling, I think, to modern psychological theory, may have had its

difficulties because the words for such phenomena were invented so late.
A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in our sense.
The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C.
comes to mean body, is

always in the plural in Homer and means dead limbs or a corpse.
It is the

opposite of psyche.
There are several words which are used for various

parts of the body, and, in Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to,

and never the body as a whole.
2 So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated

limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost separated from the hips.
It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of

hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet,

sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.
Now this is all very peculiar.
If there is no subjective consciousness, no

mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then initiates behavior?
The Religion of the Early Greeks

There is an old and general idea that there was no true religion in Greece

before the fourth century B.C.
3 and that the gods in the Homeric poems are

merely a “gay invention of poets,” as it has been put by noted scholars.
4

The reason for this erroneous view is that religion is being thought of as a

system of ethics, as a kind of bowing down to external gods in an effort to

behave virtuously.
And indeed in this sense the scholars are right.
But to say

that the gods in the Iliad are merely the inventions of the authors of the epic

is to completely misread what is going on.
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do.
They

have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no

introspections.
It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate

what it was like.
When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his

mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him

not to strike Agamemnon (1 :197ff.).
It is a god who then rises out of the

gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black

ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick

longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus,

a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads

the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who

debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or

defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual

fields.
It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:4375.) that really

cause the war (3:1645.), and then plan its strategy (2:56ff.).
It is one god

who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to

go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven

and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans,

rousing in them ungovernable panic.
In fact, the gods take the place of

consciousness.
The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and

motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods.
To another, a man

seems to be the cause of his own behavior.
But not to the man himself.
When, toward the end of the war, Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he

robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, “Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness:

they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day when I

arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him, so what could I do?
Gods always

have their way.” (19:86–90).
And that this was no particular fiction of

Agamemnon’s to evade responsibility is clear in that this explanation is

fully accepted by Achilles, for Achilles also is obedient to his gods.
Scholars who in commenting on this passage say that Agamemnon’s

behavior has become “alien to his ego,” 5 do not go nearly far enough.
For

the question is indeed, what is the psychology of the Iliadic hero?
And I am

saying that he did not have any ego whatever.
Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense.
Its first three

words are Menin aedie Thea, Of wrath sing, O Goddess!
And the entire epic

which follows is the song of the goddess which the entranced bard ‘heard’

and chanted to his iron-age listeners among the ruins of Agamemnon’s

world.
If we erase all our preconceptions about poetry and act toward the poem

as if we had never heard of poetry before, the abnormal quality of the

speech would immediately arrest us.
We call it meter nowadays.
But what a

different thing, these steady hexameters of pitch stresses, from the looser

jumble of accents in ordinary dialogue!
The function of meter in poetry is to

drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the

normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener.
A similar thing

occurs when the voices of schizophrenics speak in scanning rhythms or

rhyme.
Except for its later accretions, then, the epic itself was neither

consciously composed nor consciously remembered, but was successively

and creatively changed with no more awareness than a pianist has of his

improvisation.
Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang

epics through their lips?
They were voices whose speech and directions

could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by

certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her

voices.
The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can

be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time,

amalgams of parental or admonitory images.
The god is a part of the man,

and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that the gods never step

outside of natural laws.
Greek gods cannot create anything out of nothing,

unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis.
In the relationship between the god and

the hero in their dialectic, there are the same courtesies, emotions,

persuasions as might occur between two people.
The Greek god never steps

forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the

outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be.
He simply leads,

advises, and orders.
Nor does the god occasion humility or even love, and

little gratitude.
Indeed, I suggest that the god-hero relationship was—by

being its progenitor—similar to the referent of the ego-superego

relationship of Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead.
The

strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amazement or

wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the solution of a particularly

difficult problem suddenly pops into our heads, or in the cry of eureka!
from Archimedes in his bath.
The gods are what we now call hallucinations.
Usually they are only seen

and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to.
Sometimes they

come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting

visual auras preceding them.
But at other times, they simply occur.
Usually

they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other

people closely related to the hero.
Apollo’s relation to Hector is particularly interesting in this regard.
In

Book 16, Apollo comes to Hector as his maternal uncle; then in Book 17 as

one of his allied leaders; and then later in the same book as his dearest

friend from abroad.
The denouement of the whole epic comes when it is

Athene who, after telling Achilles to kill Hector, then comes to Hector as

his dearest brother, Deïphobus.
Trusting in him as his second, Hector

challenges Achilles, demands of Deïphobus another spear, and turns to find

nothing is there.
We would say he has had an hallucination.
So has Achilles.
The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations.
And the soldiers who were

so directed were not at all like us.
They were noble automatons who knew

not what they did.
The Bicameral Mind

The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness.
We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their

fierce eyes as we do with each other.
Iliadic man did not have subjectivity

as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal

mind-space to introspect upon.
In distinction to our own subjective

conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral

mind.
Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness

whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language,

sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or

‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone.
The individual obeyed these

hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself.
The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have just proposed

is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad.
It is rather that the Iliad suggests the

hypothesis that in later chapters I shall attempt to prove or refute by

examining the remains of other civilizations of antiquity.
Nevertheless, it

would be persuasive at this time to bring up certain objections to the

preceding which will help clarify some of the issues before going on.
Objection: Is it not true that some scholars have considered the poem to

be entirely the invention of one man, Homer, with no historical basis

whatever, even doubting whether Troy ever existed at all, in spite of

Schliemann’s famous discoveries in the nineteenth century?
Reply: This doubt has recently been put to rest by the discovery of Hittite

tablets, dating from 1300 B.C., which clearly refer to the land of the

Achaeans and their king, Agamemnon.
The catalogue of Greek places that

send ships to Troy in Book 2 corresponds remarkably closely to the pattern

of settlement which archaeology has discovered.
The treasures of Mycenae,

once thought to be fairy tales in the imagination of a poet, have been dug

out of the silted ruins of the city.
Other details mentioned in the Iliad, the

manners of burial, the kinds of armor, such as the precisely described

boars’-tusk helmet, have been unearthed in sites relevant to the poem.
There

is thus no question of its historical substrate.
The Iliad is not imaginative

creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion.
It is history, webbed into the Mycenaean Aegean, to be examined by psychohistorical

scientists.
The problem of single or multiple authorship of the poem has been

endlessly debated by classical scholars for at least a century.
But this

establishment of an historical basis, even of artifacts mentioned in the

poem, must indicate that there were many intermediaries who verbally

transmitted whatever happened in the thirteenth century to succeeding ages.
It is thus more plausible to think of the creation of the poem as part of this

verbal transmission than as the work of a single man named Homer in the

ninth century B.C.
Homer, if he existed, may simply have been the first

aoidos to be transcribed.
Objection: Even if this is so, what basis is there to suppose that an epic

poem, whose earliest manuscript that we know of is a recension from

Alexandrian scholars of the fourth or third century B.C., which obviously

must have existed in many forms, and as we read it today was put together

out of them, how can a poem of this sort be regarded as indicative of what

the actual Mycenaeans of the thirteenth century B.C.
were like?
Reply: This very serious objection is made even stronger by certain

discrepancies between the descriptions in the poem and plausibility.
The

disappointing mounds of grassy rubble identified today by archaeologists as

the city of Priam cover but a few acres, while the Iliad counts its defenders

at 50,000 men.
Even the trivial is sometimes moved up by hyperbole into

impossibility: the shield of Ajax, if it were made of seven oxhides and a

layer of metal, would have weighed almost 300 pounds.
History has

definitely been altered.
The siege lasts ten years, an absolutely impossible

duration given the problems of supply on both sides.
There are two general periods during which such alterations of the

original history could have occurred: the verbal transmission period from

the Trojan War to the ninth century B.C., when the Greek alphabet comes

into existence and the epic is written down, and the literate period thereafter

up to the time of the scholars of Alexandria in the third and second

centuries B.C.
whose put-together recension is the version we have today.
As

to the second period, there can be no doubt that there would be differences

among various copies, and that extra parts and variations, even events

belonging to different times and places, could have been drawn into the

vortex of this one furious story.
But all these additions were probably kept

in check both by the transcribers’ reverence for the poem at this time, as is indicated in all other Greek literature, and by the requirements of public

performances.
These were held at various sites, but particularly at the

Panathenaea every four years at Athens, where the Iliad was devoutly

chanted along with the Odyssey to vast audiences by the so-called

rhapsodes.
It is probable therefore that with the exception of some episodes

which contemporary scholars believe are late additions (such as the

ambushing of Dolon and the references to Hades), the Iliad as we have it is

very similar to what was first written down in the ninth century B.C.
But further back in the dim obscurities of earlier time stand the shadowy

aoidoi.
And it is they certainly who successively altered the original history.
Oral poetry is a very different species from written poetry.
6 The way we read it and judge it must be completely different.
Composition and

performance are not separate; they are simultaneous.
And each new

composing of the Iliad down the swift generations was on the basis of

auditory memory and traditional bardic formulae, each aoidos with set

phrases of varying lengths filling out the unremembered hexameters and

with set turns of plot filling out unremembered action.
And this was over

the three or four centuries following the actual war.
The Iliad, then, is not so

much a reflection of the social life of Troy as it is of several stages of social

development from that time up to the literate period.
Treated as a

sociological document, the objection is sustained.
But as a psychological document, the case is quite different.
Whence

these gods?
And why their particular relationship to the individuals?
My

argument has stressed two things, the lack of mental language and the

initiation of action by the gods.
These are not archaeological matters.
Nor

are they matters likely to have been invented by the aoidoi.
And any theory

about them has to be a psychological theory about man himself.
The only

other alternative is the following.
Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might be merely

literary style?
That the gods are mere poetic devices of the aoidoi to make

the action vivid, devices which may indeed go back to the earliest bards of

Mycenae?
Reply: This is the well-known problem of the gods and their

overdetermination of the action.
The gods seem to us quite unnecessary.
Why are they there?
And the common solution is as above, that they are a

poetic device.
The divine machinery duplicates natural conscious causations

simply to present them in concrete pictorial form, because the aoidoi were without the refinements of language to express psychological matters.
Not only is there no reason to believe that the aoidoi had any conscious

psychology they were trying to express, such a notion is quite foreign to the

whole texture of the poem.
The Iliad is about action and it is full of action

—constant action.
It really is about Achilles’ acts and their consequences,

not about his mind.
And as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic

characters all agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world.
To

say the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that

Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid

to those who were about to condemn her.
It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation appear

first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods.
It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around.
And when

it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or

losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery

developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of

voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the

conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can

debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self

is the product of culture.
In a sense, we have become our own gods.
Objection: If the bicameral mind existed, one might expect utter chaos,

with everybody following his own private hallucinations.
The only possible

way in which there could be a bicameral civilization would be that of a

rigid hierarchy, with lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over

them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so on to the

kings and their peers hallucinating gods.
Yet the Iliad does not present any

such picture with its concentration on the heroic individual.
Reply: This is a very telling objection that puzzled me for a long time,

particularly as I studied the history of other bicameral civilizations in which

there was not the freedom for individual action that there was in the social

world of the Iliad.
The missing pieces in the puzzle turn out to be the well-known Linear B

Tablets from Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos.
They were written directly in

what I am calling the bicameral period.
They have long been known, yet

long resistant to the most arduous labors of cryptographers.
Recently,

however, they have been deciphered and shown to contain a syllabic script,

the earliest written Greek used only for record purposes.7 And it gives us an

outline picture of Mycenaean society much more in keeping with the

hypothesis of a bicameral mind: hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or

workers, inventories of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler and

particularly to gods.
The actual world of the Trojan War, then, was in

historical fact much closer to the rigid theocracy which the theory predicts

than to the free individuality of the poem.
Moreover, the very structure of the Mycenaean state is profoundly

different from the loose assemblage of warriors depicted in the Iliad.
It is

indeed quite similar to the contemporary divinely ruled kingdoms of

Mesopotamia (as described later in this essay, particularly in II.2 ).
These

records in Linear B call the head of the state the wanax, a word which in

later classical Greek is only used for gods.
Similarly, the records call the

land occupied by his state as his temenos, a word which later is used only

for land sacred to the gods.
The later Greek word for king is basileus, but

the term in these tablets denotes a much less important person.
He is more

or less the first servant of the wanax, just as in Mesopotamia the human

ruler was really the steward of the lands ‘owned’ by the god he heard in

hallucination—as we shall see in II.2.
The material from the Linear B

tablets is difficult to piece together, but they do reveal the hierarchical and

leveled nature of centralized palace civilizations which the succession of

poets who composed the Iliad in the oral tradition completely ignored.
This loosening of the social structure in the fully developed Iliad may in

part have been caused by the bringing together of other much later stories

into the main theme of the Trojan War.
One of the most telling pieces of

evidence that the Iliad is a composite of different compositions is the large

number of inconsistencies in the poem, some in very close proximity.
For

example, when Hector is withdrawing from the battle, one line (6:117) says,

“The black hide beat upon his neck and ankles.” This can only be the early

Mycenaean body-shield.
But the next line refers to “The rim which ran

round the outside of the bossed shield,” and this is a very different kind and

a much later type of shield.
Obviously, the second line was added by a later

poet who in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was

saying.
Further Qualifications

Indeed, since this is the chaotic period when the bicameral mind breaks

down and consciousness begins (as we shall see in a later chapter), we

might expect the poem to reflect both this breakdown of civil hierarchies as

well as more subjectification side by side with the older form of mentality.
As it is, I have in the previous pages omitted certain discrepancies to the

theory which I regard as such incursions.
These outcroppings of something

close to subjective consciousness occur in parts of the Iliad regarded by

scholars as later additions to the core poem.
8

Book 9, for example, which was written and added to the poem only after

the great migration of the Achaeans into Asia Minor, contains references to

human deception unlike any in the other books.
Most of these occur in the

great, long rhetorical reply of Achilles to Odysseus about Agamemnon’s

treatment of him (9:344, 371, and 375).
In particular is Achilles’ slur on

Agamemnon: “Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who hides

one thing in his heart and speaks another.” (9:312,3f.).
This is definitely an

indication of subjective consciousness.
So also may be the difficult-to-

translate optative constructions of Helen (3:173ff.; 6:344ff.) or the apparent

reminiscence of Nestor (1:260ff.).
There are also two extraordinary places in the text where first Agenor

(21:553) and then Hector (22:99) talk to themselves.
The fact that these two

speeches occur late in the poem, in close proximity, have highly

inappropriate content (they contradict the previous characterizations of the

speakers), and use some identical phrases and lines, all suggest that they are

formulaic insertions into the story by the same aoidos at a later time.9 But not much later.
For they are sufficiently unusual to surprise even their

speakers.
After these soliloquies, both heroes exclaim precisely the same

astonished words, “But wherefore does my life say this to me?” If, indeed,

such talks to oneself were common, as they would be if their speakers were

really conscious, there would be no cause for surprise.
We shall have

occasion to return to these instances when we discuss in more detail how

consciousness arose.
10



The main point of this chapter is that the earliest writing of men in a

language that we can really comprehend, when looked at objectively,

reveals a very different mentality from our own.
And this must, I think, be

accepted as true.
Such instances of narratization, analog behavior, or mind-

space as occasionally occur are regarded by scholars as of later authorship.
The bulk of the poem is consistent in its lack of analog consciousness and

points back to a very different kind of human nature.
Since we know that

Greek culture very quickly became a literature of consciousness, we may

regard the Iliad as standing at the great turning of the times, and a window

back into those unsubjective times when every kingdom was in essence a

theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel

situations occurred.
Chapter 4



The Bicameral Mind

WE ARE conscious human beings.
We are trying to understand human

nature.
The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous

chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part

called a god, and a follower part called a man.
Neither part was conscious.
This is almost incomprehensible to us.
And since we are conscious, and

wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our

experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chapter 2.
And

this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter.
THE BICAMERAL MAN

Very little can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to us, except

by referring back to the first chapter, to remember all the things we do

without the aid of consciousness.
But how unsatisfying is a list of nots!
Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles.
We still feel that there

must, there absolutely must be something he feels inside.
What we are

trying to do is to invent a mind-space and a world of analog behaviors in

him just as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries.
And this invention, I

say, is not valid for Greeks of this period.
Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful.
In

driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but

rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness.
1 In fact

my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a

conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking

about the origin of consciousness perhaps.
My hand, foot, and head

behavior, however, are almost in a different world.
In touching something, I

am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am

related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road

and not on the sidewalk.
And I am not conscious of any of this.
And

certainly not logical about it.
I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if

you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be

constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to

the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or

confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other

topics.
Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral

man would be like.
The world would happen to him and his action would be

an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever.
And

now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked

road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not

do what you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our

consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do.
He would

have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory

wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.
THE BICAMERAL GOD

But what were such auditory hallucinations like?
Some people find it

difficult to even imagine that there can be mental voices that are heard with

the same experiential quality as externally produced voices.
After all, there

is no mouth or larynx in the brain!
Whatever brain areas are utilized, it is absolutely certain that such voices

do exist and that experiencing them is just like hearing actual sound.
Further, it is highly probable that the bicameral voices of antiquity were in

quality very like such auditory hallucinations in contemporary people.
They

are heard by many completely normal people to varying degrees.
Often it is

in times of stress, when a parent’s comforting voice may be heard.
Or in the midst of some persisting problem.
In my late twenties, living

alone on Beacon Hill in Boston, I had for about a week been studying and

autistically pondering some of the problems in this book, particularly the

question of what knowledge is and how we can know anything at all.
My

convictions and misgivings had been circling about through the sometimes

precious fogs of epistemologies, finding nowhere to land.
One afternoon I

lay down in intellectual despair on a couch.
Suddenly, out of an absolute

quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which

said, “Include the knower in the known!” It lugged me to my feet absurdly

exclaiming, “Hello?
“ looking for whoever was in the room.
The voice had

had an exact location.
No one was there!
Not even behind the wall where I

sheepishly looked.
I do not take this nebulous profundity as divinely

inspired, but I do think that it is similar to what was heard by those who

have in the past claimed such special selection.
Such voices may be heard by perfectly normal people on a more

continuing basis.
After giving lectures on the theory in this book, I have

been surprised at members of the audience who have come up afterwards to

tell me of their voices.
One young biologist’s wife said that almost every

morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long,

informative, and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead

grandmother in which the grandmother’s voice was actually heard.
This

came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never

previously mentioned it, since “hearing voices” is generally supposed to be a sign of insanity.
Which, in distressed people, of course, it is.
But because

of the dread surrounding this disease, the actual incidence of auditory

hallucinations in normal people on such a continuing basis is not known.
The only extensive study was a poor one done in the last century in

England.2 Only hallucinations of normal people when they were in good

health were counted.
Of 7717 men, 7.8 percent had experienced

hallucinations at some time.
Among 7599 women, the figure was 12

percent.
Hallucinations were most frequent in subjects between twenty and

twenty-nine years of age, the same age incidentally at which schizophrenia

most commonly occurs.
There were twice as many visual hallucinations as

auditory.
National differences were also found.
Russians had twice as many

hallucinations as the average.
Brazilians had even more because of a very

high incidence of auditory hallucinations.
Just why is anyone’s conjecture.
One of the deficiencies of this study, however, is that in a country where

ghosts are exciting gossip, it is difficult to have accurate criteria of what is

actually seen and heard as an hallucination.
There is an important need for

further and better studies of this sort.
3



Hallucinations in Psychotics

It is of course in the distress of schizophrenia that auditory hallucinations

similar to bicameral voices are most common and best studied.
This is now

a difficult matter.
At a suspicion of hallucinations, distressed psychotics are

given some kind of chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically

eliminates hallucinations.
This procedure is at least questionable, and may

be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to eliminate

this rival control over the patient.
But it has never been shown that

hallucinating patients are more intractable than others.
Indeed, as judged by

other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more friendly, less

defensive, more likable, and have more positive expectancies toward others

in the hospital than nonhallucinating patients.4 And it is possible that even

when the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be helpful

to the healing process.
At any rate, since the advent of chemotherapy the incidence of

hallucinatory patients is much less than it once was.
Recent studies have

revealed a wide variation among different hospitals, ranging from 50

percent of psychotics in the Boston City Hospital, to 30 percent in a

hospital in Oregon5 and even lower in hospitals with long-term patients under considerable sedation.
Thus, in what follows, I am leaning more

heavily on some of the older literature in the psychoses, such as Bleuler’s

great classic, Dementia Praecox, in which the hallucinatory aspect of

schizophrenia in particular is more clearly seen.
6 This is important if we are

to have an idea of the nature and range of the bicameral voices heard in the

early civilizations.
The Character of the Voices

The voices in schizophrenia take any and every relationship to the

individual.
They converse, threaten, curse, criticize, consult, often in short

sentences.
They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply

announce everything that’s happening.
They yell, whine, sneer, and vary

from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout.
Often the voices take on

some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming,

or in rhythms, or even in foreign languages.
There may be one particular

voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many.
As in bicameral

civilizations, they are recognized as gods, angels, devils, enemies, or a

particular person or relative.
Or occasionally they are ascribed to some kind

of apparatus reminiscent of the statuary which we will see was important in

this regard in bicameral kingdoms.
Sometimes the voices bring patients to despair, commanding them to do

something and then viciously reproaching them after the command is

carried out.
Sometimes they are a dialogue, as of two people discussing the

patient.
Sometimes the roles of pro and con are taken over by the voices of

different people.
The voice of his daughter tells a patient: “He is going to be

burnt alive!” While his mother’s voice says: “He will not be burnt!” 7 In

other instances, there are several voices gabbling all at once, so that the

patient cannot follow them.
Their Locality and Function

In some cases, particularly the most serious, the voices are not localized.
But usually they are.
They call from one side or another, from the rear, from

above and below; only rarely do they come from directly in front of the

patient.
They may seem to come from walls, from the cellar and the roof,

from heaven and from hell, near or far, from parts of the body or parts of

the clothing.
And sometimes, as one patient put it, “they assume the nature

of all those objects through which they speak—whether they speak out of

walls, or from ventilators, or in the woods and fields.” 8 In some patients there is a tendency to associate the good consoling voices with the upper

right, while bad voices come from below and to the left.
In rare instances,

the voices seem to the patient to come from his own mouth, sometimes

feeling like foreign bodies bulging up in his mouth.
Sometimes the voices

are hypostasized in bizarre ways.
One patient claimed that a voice was

perched above each of his ears, one of which was a little larger than the

other, which is reminiscent of the ka’ s and the way they were depicted in

the statues of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, as we shall see in a subsequent

chapter.
Very often the voices criticize a patient’s thoughts and actions.
Sometimes they forbid him to do what he was just thinking of doing.
And

sometimes this occurs even before the patient is aware of his intention.
One

intelligent paranoid who came from the Swiss canton of Thurgau harbored

hostile feelings toward his personal attendant.
As the latter stepped into his

room, the voice said in its most reproachful tone before the patient had done

anything, “There you have it!
A Thurgauer beats up a perfectly decent

private attendant!” 9

Of immense importance here is the fact that the nervous system of a

patient makes simple perceptual judgments of which the patient’s ‘self’ is

not aware.
And these, as above, may then be transposed into voices that

seem prophetic.
A janitor coming down a hall may make a slight noise of

which the patient is not conscious.
But the patient hears his hallucinated

voice cry out, “Now someone is coming down the hall with a bucket of

water.” Then the door opens, and the prophecy is fulfilled.
Credence in the

prophetic character of the voices, just as perhaps in bicameral times, is thus built up and sustained.
The patient then follows his voices alone and is

defenseless against them.
Or else, if the voices are not clear, he waits,

catatonic and mute, to be shaped by them or, alternatively, by the voices and

hands of his attendants.
Usually the severity of schizophrenia oscillates during hospitalization

and often the voices come and go with the undulations of the illness.
Sometimes they occur only when the patients are doing certain things, or

only in certain environments.
And in many patients, before the present-day

chemotherapy, there was no single waking moment free from them.
When

the illness is most severe, the voices are loudest and come from outside;

when least severe, voices often tend to be internal whispers; and when

internally localized, their auditory qualities are sometimes vague.
A patient

might say, “They are not at all real voices but merely reproductions of the

voices of dead relatives.” Particularly intelligent patients in mild forms of

the illness are often not sure whether they are actually hearing the voices or

whether they are only compelled to think them, like “audible thoughts,” or

“soundless voices,” or “hallucinations of meanings.”



Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous system

underlying them.
We can see this clearly by studying the matter in those

who have been profoundly deaf since birth or very early childhood.
For

even they can—somehow—experience auditory hallucinations.
This is

commonly seen in deaf schizophrenics.
In one study, 16 out of 22

hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some

kind of communication.10 One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, who was full of self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, claimed she

heard accusations from God.
Another, a fifty-year-old congenitally deaf

woman, heard supernatural voices which proclaimed her to have occult

powers.
The Visual Component

Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but

sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness.
One of my schizophrenic

subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been sitting

in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend.
A blue car coming

along the road suddenly, oddly, slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge

gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared.
Her greater

alarm, however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing

extraordinary had happened.
Why?
Unless all of them were somehow in

league to hide their reactions from her.
And why should that be?
It is often

the narratization of such false events by consciousness, fitting the world in

around them in a rational way, that brings on other tragic symptoms.
It is interesting that profoundly deaf schizophrenics who do not have

auditory hallucinations often have visual hallucinations of sign language.
A

sixteen-year-old girl who became deaf at the age of eight months indulged

in bizarre communication with empty spaces and gesticulated to the walls.
An older, congenitally deaf woman communicated with her hallucinated

boyfriend in sign language.
Other deaf patients may appear to be in constant

communication with imaginary people using a word salad of signs and

finger spelling.
One thirty-five-year-old deaf woman, who lost her hearing

at the age of fourteen months, lived a life of unrestrained promiscuity

alternating with violent temper outbursts.
On admission, she explained in

sign language that every morning a spirit dressed in a white robe came to

her, saying things in sign language which were at times frightening and

which set the pace of her mood for the day.
Another deaf patient would spit

at empty space, saying that she was spitting at the angels who were lurking

there.
A thirty-year-old man, deaf since birth, more benignly, would see

little angels and Lilliputian people around him and believed he had a magic

wand with which he could achieve almost anything.
Occasionally, in what are called acute twilight states, whole scenes, often

of a religious nature, may be hallucinated even in broad daylight, the

heavens standing open with a god speaking to the patient.
Or sometimes

writing will appear before a patient as before Belshazzar.
A paranoid patient

saw the word poison in the air at the very moment when the attendant made him take his medicine.
In other instances, the visual hallucinations may be

fitted into the real environment, with figures walking about the ward, or

standing above the doctor’s head, even as I suggest Athene appeared to

Achilles.
More usually, when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they

are merely shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or

Yahweh to Moses.
The Release of the Gods

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are

similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some

common physiological instigation in both instances.
This, I suggest, is

simply stress.
In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold

for release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be over

our heads in trouble before we would hear voices.
But in psychosis-prone

persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only

anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary.
This is caused, I think, by

the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of stress-produced

adrenalin which the individual is, for genetical reasons, unable to pass

through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.
During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress

threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal

people or schizophrenics today.
The only stress necessary was that which

occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a

situation.
Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any

conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice

between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at

all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.
It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would

like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word

‘decision’) is precisely what stress is.
If rats have to cross an electric grid

each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers.11 Just shocking the rats does not do this to them.
There has to be the pause of

conflict or the decisionmaking stress of whether to cross a grid or not to

produce this effect.
If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way

that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds

to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys’ feet, within three or four weeks

the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally

shocked monkey will not.
12 It is the pause of unknowingness that is

important.
For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an

effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as they are often called, do not occur.
13

So Achilles, repulsed by Agamemnon, in decision-stress by the gray sea,

hallucinates Thetis out of the mists.
So Hector, faced with the decision-

suffering of whether to go outside the walls of Troy to fight Achilles or stay

within them, in the stress of the decision hallucinates the voice that tells

him to go out.
The divine voice ends the decision-stress before it has

reached any considerable level.
Had Achilles or Hector been modern

executives, living in a culture that repressed their stress-relieving gods, they

too might have collected their share of our psychosomatic diseases.
THE AUTHORITY OF SOUND

We must not leave this subject of the hallucinatory mechanism without

facing up to the more profound question of why such voices are believed,

why obeyed.
For believed as objectively real, they are, and obeyed as

objectively real in the face of all the evidence of experience and the

mountains of common sense.
Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more

real than the doctor’s voice.
He sometimes says so.
“If that is not a real

voice, then I can just as well say that even you are not now really talking to

me,” said one schizophrenic to his physicians.
And another when

questioned replied:



Yes, Sir.
I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us at this

moment.
It is more easy for me to listen to them than to you.
I can

more easily believe in their significance and actuality, and they do not

ask questions.14



That he alone hears the voices is not of much concern.
Sometimes he feels

he has been honored by this gift, singled out by divine forces, elected and

glorified, and this even when the voice reproaches him bitterly, even when

it is leading him to death.
He is somehow face to face with elemental

auditory powers, more real than wind or rain or fire, powers that deride and

threaten and console, powers that he cannot step back from and see

objectively.
One sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a deck chair

on the beach at Coney Island.
Suddenly, he heard a voice so loud and clear

that he looked about at his companions, certain that they too must have

heard the voice.
When they acted as if nothing had happened, he began to

feel strange and moved his chair away from them.
And then


...
suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before, the deep

voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and getting me tight

and shivery inside.
“Larry Jayson, I told you before you weren’t any

good.
Why are you sitting here making believe you are as good as

anyone else when you’re not?
Whom are you fooling?”



The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have heard it.
He

got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of the boardwalk to the

stretch of sand below.
He waited to see if the voice came back.
It did, its

words pounding in this time, not the way you hear any words, but deeper,


...
as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing

the words, and my legs, and my head too.
“You’re no good,” the voice

said slowly, in the same deep tones.
“You’ve never been any good or

use on earth.
There is the ocean.
You might just as well drown

yourself.
Just walk in, and keep walking.”

As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold command, I

had to obey it.
15



The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney Island heard his pounding

voices as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis along the misted shores of the

Aegean.
And even as Agamemnon “had to obey” the “cold command” of

Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus before Damascus, so Mr.
Jayson waded

into the Atlantic Ocean to drown.
Against the will of his voices, he was

saved by lifeguards and brought to Bellevue Hospital, where he recovered

to write of this bicameral experience.
In some less severe cases, the patients, when accustomed to the voices,

can learn to be objective toward them and to attenuate their authority.
But

almost all autobiographies of schizophrenic patients are consistent in

speaking of the unquestioning submission, at least at first, to the commands

of the voices.
Why should this be so?
Why should such voices have such

authority either in Argos, on the road to Damascus, or the shores of Coney

Island?
Sound is a very special modality.
We cannot handle it.
We cannot push it

away.
We cannot turn our backs to it.
We can close our eyes, hold our noses,

withdraw from touch, refuse to taste.
We cannot close our ears though we

can partly muffle them.
Sound is the least controllable of all sense

modalities, and it is this that is the medium of that most intricate of all

evolutionary achievements, language.
We are therefore looking at a

problem of considerable depth and complexity.
The Control of Obedience

Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us.
In a

certain sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him

become part of us for a brief second.
We suspend our own identities, after

which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said.
But

that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding

language; and if that language is a command, the identification of

understanding becomes the obedience.
To hear is actually a kind of

obedience.
Indeed, both words come from the same root and therefore were

probably the same word originally.
This is true in Greek, Latin, Hebrew,

French, German, Russian, as well as in English, where ‘obey’ comes from

the Latin obedire, which is a composite of ob + audire, to hear facing

someone.16

The problem is the control of such obedience.
This is done in two ways.
The first but less important is simply by spatial distance.
Think, if you

will, of what you do when hearing someone else talk to you.
You adjust

your distance to some culturally established standard.17 When the speaker is too close, it seems he is trying to control your thoughts too closely.
When

too far, he is not controlling them enough for you to understand him

comfortably.
If you are from an Arabian country, a face-to-face distance of

less than twelve inches is comfortable.
But in more northern countries, the

conversation distance most comfortable is almost twice that, a cultural

difference, which in social exchanges can result in a variety of international

misunderstandings.
To converse with someone at less than the usual

distance means at least an attempted mutuality of obedience and control, as,

for example, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face threatening of two

men about to fight.
To speak to someone within that distance is to attempt

to truly dominate him or her.
To be spoken to within that distance, and there

remain, results in the strong tendency to accept the authority of the person

who is speaking.
The second and more important way that we control other people’s voice-

authority over us is by our opinions of them.
Why are we forever judging,

forever criticizing, forever putting people in categories of faint praise or

reproof?
We constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts.
Our personal judgments of others are filters of influence.
If you wish to

allow another’s language power over you, simply hold him higher in your

own private scale of esteem.
And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods avail,

because there is no person there, no point of space from which the voice

emanates, a voice that you cannot back off from, as close to you as

everything you call you, when its presence eludes all boundaries, when no

escape is possible—flee and it flees with you—a voice unhindered by walls

or distances, undiminished by muffling one’s ears, nor drowned out with

anything, not even one’s own screaming—how helpless the hearer!
And if

one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices were recognized as at

the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you as gods, kings, majesties that

owned you, head, heart, and foot, the omniscient, omnipotent voices that

could not be categorized as beneath you, how obedient to them the

bicameral man!
The explanation of volition in subjective conscious men is still a

profound problem that has not reached any satisfactory solution.
But in

bicameral men, this was volition.
Another way to say it is that volition came

as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the

command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.
Chapter 5



The Double Brain

WHAT HAPPENS in the brain of a bicameral man?
Anything as important in

the history of our species as a completely different kind of mentality

existing only a hundred generations ago demands some statement of what is

going on physiologically.
How is it possible?
Given this profoundly subtle

structure of nerve cells and fibers inside our skulls, how could that structure

have been organized so that a bicameral mentality was possible?
This is the great question of the present chapter.
Our first approach to an answer is obvious.
Since the bicameral mind is

mediated by speech, the speech areas of the brain must be concerned in

some important way.
Now in discussing these areas, and throughout this chapter, and indeed in

the rest of this essay, I shall be using terms suitable only to right-handed

people, in order to avoid a certain clumsiness of expression.
Thus, it is the

left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, controlling the right side of the body,

which in righthanded people contains the speech areas.
It is therefore

commonly called the dominant hemisphere, while the right hemisphere,

controlling the left side of the body, is commonly called the nondominant.
I

shall be speaking as if the left hemisphere were dominant in all of us.
Actually, however, lefthanded persons have a variety of degrees of lateral

dominance, some being completely switched (the right hemisphere doing

what the left usually does), others not, and still others with mixed

dominance.
But being exceptional, only 5 percent of the population, they

can be left out of the present discussion.
The three speech areas of the left hemisphere have different functions and values.
The supplementary motor area is mostly involved in articulation; Broca’s area in articulation, vocabulary, inflection, and grammar; and Wernicke’s area in vocabulary, syntax, meaning, and understanding speech.
The speech areas then are three, all on the left hemisphere in the great

majority of mankind.1 They are: (1) the supplementary motor cortex, on the very top of the left frontal lobe, removal of which by surgery produces a

loss of speech which clears up in several weeks; (2) Broca’s area, lower

down at the back of the left frontal lobe, the removal of which produces a

loss of speech which is sometimes permanent and sometimes not; and (3)

Wernicke’s area, chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe with

parts of the parietal area, any large destruction of which after a certain age

produces a permanent loss of meaningful speech.
It is thus Wernicke’s area that is the most indispensable to normal speech.
As we might expect, the cortex in Wernicke’s area is quite thick with large,

widely spaced cells, indicating considerable internal and external

connections.
While there is some disagreement as to its precise boundaries, 2

there is none about its importance to meaningful communication.
Of course it is extremely hazardous thinking to isomorphize between a

conceptual analysis of a psychological phenomenon and its concomitant

brain structure, yet this is what we cannot avoid doing.
And among these

three areas on the left hemisphere, or even in their more subtle

interrelationships, it is difficult to imagine a duplication of some speech

function to the extent and separation which my theory of the bicameral

mind would demand.
Let us sit down with this problem a moment.
Speech areas all on the left

side.
Why?
One intriguing puzzle which has long fascinated me and anyone

else who has considered the evolution of all this is why language function should be represented in only one hemisphere.
Most other important

functions are bilaterally represented.
This redundancy in everything else is a

biological advantage to the animal, since, if one side is injured, the other

side can compensate.
Why then was not language?
Language, that most

urgent and significant of skills, the pre-emptory and exigent ground of

social action, the last communicant thread on which life itself in the post-

glacial millennia must often have depended!
Why was not this without-

which-nothing of human culture represented on both hemispheres?
The problem drifts off into even more mystery when we’remember that

the neurological structure necessary for language exists in the right

hemisphere as well as the left.
In a child, a major lesion of Wernicke’s area

on the left hemisphere, or of the underlying thalamus which connects it to

the brainstem, produces transfer of the whole speech mechanism to the right

hemisphere.
A very few ambidextrous people actually do have speech on

both hemispheres.
Thus the usually speechless right hemisphere can under

certain conditions become a language hemisphere, just like the left.
And a further range of the problem is what did happen in the right

hemisphere as the aptic structures for language were evolving in the left?
Just consider those areas on the right hemisphere corresponding to the

speech areas of the left: what is their function?
Or, more particularly, what

is their important function, since it must have been such to preclude its

development as an auxiliary speech area?
If we stimulate such areas on the

right hemisphere today, we do not get the usual “aphasic arrest” (simply the

stopping of ongoing speech) which occurs when the normal language areas

of the left hemisphere are stimulated.
And because of this apparent lack of

function, it has often been concluded that large portions of the right

hemisphere are simply unnecessary.
In fact, large amounts of right

hemisphere tissue, including what corresponds to Wernicke’s area, and even

in some instances the entire hemisphere, have been cut out in human

patients because of illness or injury, with surprisingly little deficit in mental

function.
The situation then is one where the areas on the right hemisphere that

correspond to the speech areas have seemingly no easily observable major

function.
Why this relatively less essential part of the brain?
Could it be that

these silent ‘speech’ areas on the right hemisphere had some function at an

earlier stage in man’s history that now they do not have?
The answer is clear if tentative.
The selective pressures of evolution

which could have brought about so mighty a result are those of the

bicameral civilizations.
The language of men was involved with only one

hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods.
In ancient times, what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere may have organized admonitory experience and coded it into ‘voices’ which were then ‘heard’ over the anterior commissure by the left or dominant hemisphere.
If so, we might expect that there would have to be certain tracts by which

the bicameral voices would relate between the right nondominant temporal

lobe and the left.
The major interconnection between the hemispheres is of

course the huge corpus callosum of over two million fibers.
But the

temporal lobes in men have their own private callosum, so to speak, the

much smaller anterior commissures.
In rats and dogs, the anterior

commissures connect the olfactory parts of the brain.
But in men, as seen in

my rather imprecise sketch, this transverse band of fibers collects from

most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the

temporal lobe included in Wernicke’s area, and then squeezes into a tract

only slightly more than one eighth of an inch in diameter as it plunges over

the amygdala across the top of the hypothalamus toward the other temporal

lobe.
Here then, I suggest, is the tiny bridge across which came the

directions which built our civilizations and founded the world’s religions,

where gods spoke to men and were obeyed because they were human

volition.3

There are two forms in which this hypothesis can be specified.
The stronger form, and the one I favor because it is simpler and more

specific (and thus more easily verified or disconfirmed by empirical

investigation), is that the speech of the gods was directly organized in what

corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere and ‘spoken’ or

‘heard’ over the anterior commissures to or by the auditory areas of the left

temporal lobe.
(Note how I can only express this metaphorically,

personifying the right temporal lobe as a person speaking or the left

temporal lobe as a person listening, both being equivalent and both literally

false.) Another reason I am inclined to this stronger form is its very

rationality in terms of getting processed information or thought from one

side of the brain to the other.
Consider the evolutionary problem: billions of

nerve cells processing complex experience on one side and needing to send

the results over to the other through the much smaller commissures.
Some

code would have to be used, some way of reducing very complicated

processing into a form that could be transmitted through the fewer neurons

particularly of the anterior commissures.
And what better code has ever

appeared in the evolution of animal nervous systems than human language?
Thus in the stronger form of our model, auditory hallucinations exist as

such in a linguistic manner because that is the most efficient method of

getting complicated cortical processing from one side of the brain to the

other.
The weaker form of the hypothesis is more vague.
It states that the

articulatory qualities of the hallucination were of left hemisphere origin like

the speech of the person himself, but that its sense and direction and

different relation to the person were due to right temporal lobe activity

sending excitation over the anterior commissures and probably the splenium

(the back part of the corpus callosum) to the speech areas of the left

hemisphere, and ‘heard’ from there.
At the present time, it does not really matter which form of the

hypothesis we take.
The central feature of both is that the amalgamating of

admonitory experience was a right hemisphere function and it was

excitation in what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere

that occasioned the voices of the gods.
The evidence to support this hypothesis may be brought together as five

observations: (1) that both hemispheres are able to understand language,

while normally only the left can speak; (2) that there is some vestigial

functioning of the right Wernicke’s area in a way similar to the voices of gods; (3) that the two hemispheres under certain conditions are able to act

almost as independent persons, their relationship corresponding to that of

the man-god relationship of bicameral times; (4) that contemporary

differences between the hemispheres in cognitive functions at least echo

such differences of function between man and god as seen in the literature

of bicameral man; and (5) that the brain is more capable of being organized

by the environment than we have hitherto supposed, and therefore could

have undergone such a change as from bicameral to conscious man mostly

on the basis of learning and culture.
The rest of this chapter will be devoted to these five observations.
1.
That Both Hemispheres Understand Language

The gods, I have said with some presumption, were amalgams of

admonitory experience, made up of meldings of whatever commands had

been given the individual.
Thus, while the divine areas would not have to be

involved in speech, they would have to be involved in hearing and in

understanding language.
And this is the case even today.
We do in fact

understand language with both hemispheres.
Stroke patients who have

hemorrhages on the left side of the cortex cannot speak, but still can

understand.4 If sodium amytal is injected into the left carotid artery leading to the left hemisphere (the Wada test), the entire hemisphere is anesthetized,

leaving only the right hemisphere working; but the subject still can follow

directions.
5 Tests on commissurotomized patients (which I shall describe more fully in a moment) demonstrate considerable understanding by the

right hemisphere.
6 Named objects can usually be retrieved by the left hand, and verbal commands obeyed by the left hand.
Even when the entire left

hemisphere, the speech hemisphere, remember, is removed in human

patients suffering from glioma, the remaining right hemisphere immediately

after the operation seems to understand the surgeon’s questions, though

unable to reply.7



2.

That There Exists Vestigial Godlike Function in the Right

Hemisphere

If the preceding model is correct, there might be some residual

indication, no matter how small, of the ancient divine function of the right

hemisphere.
We can, indeed, be more specific here.
Since the voices of the

gods did not, of course, entail articulate speech, did not entail the use of the

larynx and mouth, we can rule out what corresponds to Broca’s area and the

supplementary motor area, to a certain extent, and concentrate on what

corresponds to Wernicke’s area or the posterior part of the temporal lobe on

the right or so-called nondominant side.
If we stimulate it in this location,

would we hear then the voices of the gods as of yore?
Or some remnant of

them?
Something that would allow us to think that three thousand years ago

its function was that of the divine direction of human affairs?
We may recall that this was indeed the very area which had been

stimulated by Wilder Penfield in a famous series of studies a few years

ago.
8 Let me describe them in some detail.
These observations were made on some seventy patients with a diagnosis

of epilepsy caused by lesions somewhere in the temporal lobe.
As a

preliminary to the removal of the damaged brain tissue by surgery, various

points on the surface of the temporal lobe were stimulated with a gentle

electric current.
The intensity of the stimulation was approximately the least

current needed to excite tingling in the thumb by stimulation of the

appropriate motor area.
If it be objected that the phenomena resulting from

this stimulation are corrupted by the presence of some focal area of gliosis,

or sclerosis, or meningo-cerebral cicatrix, all typically found in such

patients, I think such objections would be dissipated by reviewing the

original report.
These abnormalities, when found, were circumscribed in

location and were not in any way influencing the responses of the subject as

they were being stimulated.
9 It can thus be assumed with some confidence that the results of these studies are representative of what would be found in

normal individuals.
In the great majority of these cases, it was the right temporal lobe that was stimulated, particularly the posterior part of the temporal lobe toward

its superior convolution, Wernicke’s area on the right side.
A remarkable

series of responses from the patients was obtained.
This is, to repeat myself,

the point at which we might expect to hear the gods of antiquity calling to

us again, as if from the other part of our bicameral minds.
Would these

patients hear some vestiges of the ancient divinities?
Here are some representative data.
When stimulated in this region, Case 7, a twenty-year-old college

student, cried out, “Again I hear voices, I sort of lost touch with reality.
Humming in my ears and a small feeling like a warning.” And when

stimulated again, “Voices, the same as before.
I was just losing touch with

reality again.” When asked, he replied that he could not understand what

the voices were saying.
They sounded “hazy.”

In the majority of cases, the voices were similarly hazy.
Case 8, a twenty-

six-year-old housewife, stimulated in approximately the same area, said

there seemed to be a voice a way, way off.
“It sounded like a voice saying

words but it was so faint I couldn’t get it.” Case 12, a twenty-four-year-old

woman, stimulated at successive points of the superior gyrus of the

posterior temporal lobe, said, “I could hear someone talking, murmuring or

something.” And then further on, “There was talking or murmuring, but I

cannot understand it.” And then stimulated about three quarters of an inch

along the gyrus, she was at first silent, and then gave a loud cry.
“I heard the

voices and then I screamed.
I had a feeling all over.” And then stimulated a

little back toward the first stimulations, she began to sob.
“That man’s voice

again!
The only thing I know is that my father frightens me a lot.” She did

not recognize the voice as her father’s; it only reminded her of him.
Some patients heard music, unrecognized melodies that could be

hummed to the surgeon (Cases 4 and 5).
Others heard relatives, particularly

their mothers.
Case 32, a twenty-two-year-old woman, heard her mother

and father talking and singing, and then stimulated on another point, her

mother “just yelling.”

Many patients heard the voices as emanating from strange and unknown

places.
Case 36, a twenty-six-year-old woman, stimulated somewhat

anteriorly on the superior gyrus of the right temporal lobe, said, “Yes, I

heard voices down along the river somewhere—a man’s voice and a

woman’s voice, calling.” When asked how she could tell it was down along

the river, she said, “I think I saw the river.” When asked what river, she said, “I do not know, it seems to be one I was visiting when I was a child.”

And at other stimulation points, she heard voices of people calling from

building to building somewhere.
And at an adjacent point, the voice of a

woman calling in a lumberyard, though she insisted that she had “never

been around any lumberyard.”

When the voices were located as coming from one side or the other, as

rarely happened, it was from the contralateral side.
Case 29, a twenty-five-

year-old man, stimulated in the middle of the right temporal gyrus, said,

“Someone telling me in my left ear, ‘Sylvère, Sylvère!’ It could have been

my brother.”

The voices and the music, whether garbled or recognized, were

experienced as actually heard, and the visual hallucinations were

experienced as-actually seen, just as Achilles experienced Thetis, or Moses

heard Yahweh out of the burning bush.
Case 29, the same as above, when

stimulated again, also saw “someone speaking to another and he mentioned

the name, but I could not understand it.” And when asked whether he saw

the person he replied, “It was just like a dream.” And when asked further if

the person was there, he said, “Yes, sir, about where the nurse with the

eyeglasses is sitting over there.”

In some slightly older patients, only exploratory stimulation produced an

hallucination.
A thirty-four-year-old French-Canadian, Case 24, after

previous stimulations had produced nothing, when stimulated on the

posterior part of the middle gyrus of the right temporal lobe, suddenly said,

“Wait a minute, I see someone!” And then about an inch higher, “Oui, la, la,

la!
It was he, he came, that fool!” And then stimulated somewhat higher

though still within what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the right side,

“There, there, j’entend!
It is just that somebody wanted to speak to me, and

he was going, ‘vite, vite, vite!’”

But at younger ages, there is a definite suggestion that hallucinations

caused by stimulating the right temporal lobe are more striking, vivid, and

admonitory.
A fourteen-year-old boy (Case 34) saw two men sitting in

armchairs singing at him.
A fourteen-year-old girl, Case 15, when

stimulated on the superior posterior gyrus of the right temporal lobe, cried

out, “Oh, everybody is shouting at me again, make them stop!” The

stimulus duration was two seconds; the voices lasted eleven seconds.
She

explained, “They are yelling at me for doing something wrong, everybody

is yelling.” At all stimulation points along the posterior temporal lobe of the right hemisphere, she heard yelling.
And even when stimulated an inch and

a half posterior to the first point, she cried out, “There they go, yelling at

me; stop them!” And the voices coming from just one stimulation lasted

twenty-one seconds.
I should not give the impression that it is all this simple.
I have selected

these cases.
In some patients, there was no response at all.
Occasionally

such experiences involved autoscopic illusions such as we referred to in I.2.
A further complication is that stimulation of corresponding points on the

left or usually dominant hemisphere may also result in similar

hallucinations.
In other words, such phenomena are not confined to the right

temporal lobe.
But the instances of response to stimulation on the left are

much less frequent and occur with less intensity.
The important thing about almost all these stimulation-caused

experiences is their otherness, their opposition from the self, rather than the

self’s own actions or own words.
With a few exceptions, the patients never

experienced eating, talking, sex, running, or playing.
In almost all instances,

the subject was passive and being acted upon, exactly as a bicameral man

was acted upon by his voices.
Being acted upon by what?
Penfield and Perot think it is simply past

experience, flashbacks to earlier days.
They try to explain the failure of

recognition so consistently observed as mere forgetfulness.
They assume

that these were actual specific memories that with more time during the

operation could have been pushed into full recognition.
In fact, their

questions to the patients during stimulation were guided by this hypothesis.
Sometimes, indeed, the patient did become specific in his replies.
But far

more representative of the data as a whole is the patients’ persistence under

questioning that these experiences could not be called memories.
Because of this, and because of the general absence of personal active

images, which are the usual kind of memories that we have, I suggest that

the conclusions of Penfield and Perot are incorrect.
These areas of the

temporal lobe are not “the brain’s record of auditory and visual experience,”

nor are they its retrieval, but combinations and amalgamations of certain

aspects of that experience.
The evidence does not, I think, warrant the

assertion that these areas “play in adult lives some role in the subconscious

recall of past experience, making it available for present interpretation.”

Rather the data lead away from this, to hallucinations that distill particularly admonition experiences, and perhaps become embodied or rationalized into

actual experiences in those patients who reported them on being questioned.
3.
That the Two Hemispheres Can Behave Independently

In our brain model of the bicameral mind, we have assumed that the god

part and the man part behaved and thought somewhat independently.
And if

we now say that the duality of this ancient mentality is represented in the

duality of the cerebral hemispheres, is this not personifying parts of the

brain without warrant?
Is it possible to think of the two hemispheres of the

brain almost as two individuals, only one of which can overtly speak, while

both can listen and both understand?
The evidence that this is plausible comes from another group of

epileptics.
These are the dozen or so neurosurgical patients who have

undergone complete commissurotomy, the cutting down the midline of all

interconnections between the two hemispheres.
10 This so-called split-brain

operation (which it is not—the deeper parts of the brain are still connected)

usually cures the otherwise untreatable epilepsy by preventing the spread of

abnormal neural excitation over the whole cortex.
Immediately after

operation, some patients lose speech for up to two months, while others

have no problem whatever—no one knows why.
Perhaps each of us has a

slightly different relationship between our hemispheres.
Recovery is

gradual, all patients showing short-term memory deficits (perhaps due to

the cutting of the small hippocampal commissures), some orientation

problems, and mental fatigue.
Now the astonishing thing is that such patients after a year or so of

recovery do not feel any different from the way they felt before the

operation.
They sense nothing wrong.
At the present time they are watching

television or reading the paper with no complaints about anything peculiar.
Nor does an observer notice anything different about them.
But under rigorous control of sensory input, fascinating and important

defects are revealed.
As you look at anything, say, the middle word of this line of print, all the

words to the left are seen only by the right hemisphere, and all the words to

the right only by the left.
With the connections between the hemispheres

intact, there is no particular problem in co-ordinating the two, although it

really is astonishing that we can read at all.
But if you had your hemispheric

connections cut, the matter would be very different.
Starting at the middle of this line, all the print to your right would be seen as before and you

would be able to read it off almost as usual.
But all the print and all the page

to your left would be a blank.
Not a blank really, but a nothing, an absolute

nothing, far more nothing than any nothing you can imagine.
So much

nothing that you would not even be conscious that there was nothing there,

strange as it seems.
Just as in the phenomenon of the blind spot, the

‘nothing’ is somehow ‘filled in’, ‘stitched together’, as if nothing were

wrong with nothing.
Actually, however, all that nothing would be in your

other hemisphere which would be seeing all that ‘you’ were not, all the

print to the left, and seeing it perfectly well.
But since it does not have

articulated speech, it cannot say that it sees anything.
It is as if ‘you’—

whatever that means—were ‘in’ your left hemisphere and now with the

commissures cut could never know or be conscious of what a quite different

person, once also ‘you’, in the other hemisphere was seeing or thinking

about.
Two persons in one head.
This is one of the ways these commissurotomized patients are tested.
The

patient fixates on the center of a translucent screen; photographic slides of

objects projected on the left side of the screen are thus seen only by the

right hemisphere and cannot be reported verbally, though the patient can use

his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to point to a matching

picture or search out the object among others, even while insisting vocally

that he did not see it.
11 Such stimuli seen by the right nondominant

hemisphere alone are there imprisoned, and cannot be ‘told’ to the left

hemisphere where the language areas are because the connections have

been cut.
The only way we know that the right hemisphere has this

information at all is to ask the right hemisphere to use its left hand to point

it out—which it can readily do.
If two different figures are flashed simultaneously to the right and left

visual fields, as, for example, a “dollar sign” on the left and a “question

mark” on the right, and the subject is asked to draw what he saw, using the

left hand out of sight under a screen, he draws the dollar sign.
But asked

what he has just drawn out of sight, he insists it was the question mark.
In

other words, the one hemisphere does not know what the other hemisphere

has been doing.
Again, if the name of some object, like the word ‘eraser’, is flashed to the

left visual field, the subject is then able to search out an eraser from among

a collection of objects behind a screen using only the left hand.
If the

subject is then asked what the item is behind the screen after it has been

selected correctly, ‘he’ in the left hemisphere cannot say what the dumb

‘he’ of the right hemisphere is holding in his left hand.
Similarly, the left

hand can do this if the word ‘eraser’ is spoken, but the talking hemisphere

does not know when the left hand has found the object.
This shows, of

course, what I have said earlier, that both hemispheres understand language,

but it has never been possible to find out the extent of language

understanding in the right hemisphere previously.
Further, we find that the right hemisphere is able to understand

complicated definitions.
Flashing “shaving instrument” onto the left visual

field and so into the right hemisphere, the left hand points to a razor, or with

“dirt remover” to soap, and with “inserted in slot machines” to a twenty-

five-cent piece.12

Moreover, the right hemisphere in these patients can respond emotionally

without the left talking hemisphere knowing what it is all about.
If among a

series of neutral geometric figures being flashed to the right and left visual

fields at random, which means respectively into the left and right

hemispheres, and then a picture of a nude girl by surprise is flashed on the

left side going into the right hemisphere, the patient (really the patient’s left

hemisphere) says that it saw nothing or just a flash of light.
But the

grinning, blushing, and giggling during the next minute contradicts what the

speech hemisphere has just said.
Asked what all the grinning is about, the

left or speech hemisphere replies that it has no idea.
13 These facial

expressions and blushings, incidentally, are not confined to one side of the

face, being mediated through the deep interconnections of the brainstem.
The expression of affect is not a cortical matter.
Similarly with other sensory modalities.
Odors presented to the right

nostril and so to the right hemisphere (olfactory fibers do not cross) in these

patients cannot be named by the talking hemisphere, though the latter can

say very well whether the smell is pleasant or unpleasant.
The patient may

even grunt, make aversive reactions, or exclaim “Phew!” to a stench, but

cannot say verbally whether it is garlic, cheese, or decayed matter.14 The

same odors presented to the left nostril can be named and described

perfectly well.
What this means is that the emotion of disgust gets across to

the speaking hemisphere through the intact limbic system and brainstem,

while the more specific information processed by the cortex does not.
Indeed, there is some indication that it is the right hemisphere that

commonly triggers the emotional reactions of displeasure from the limbic

system and brainstem.
In test situations, where the speechless right

hemisphere is made to know the correct answer, and then hears the left

dominant hemisphere making obvious verbal mistakes, the patient may

frown, wince, or shake his head.
It is not simply a way of speaking to say

that the right hemisphere is annoyed at the erroneous vocal responses of the

other.
And so perhaps the annoyance of Pallas Athene when she grasped

Achilles by his yellow hair and twisted him away from murdering his king

(Iliad, 1:197).
Or the annoyance of Yahweh with the iniquities of his people.
Of course there is a difference.
Bicameral man had all his commissures

intact.
But I shall suggest later that it is possible for the brain to be so

reorganized by environmental changes that the inferences of my

comparison here are not entirely foolish.
At any rate, the studies of these

commissurotomy patients demonstrate conclusively that the two

hemispheres can function so as to seem like two independent persons,

which in the bicameral period were, I suggest, the individual and his god.
4.
That Hemispheric Differences in Cognitive Function Echo

the Differences of God and Man

If this brain model of the bicameral mind is correct, it would predict

decided differences in cognitive function between the two hemispheres.
Specifically, we would expect that these functions necessary for the man-

side would be in the left or dominant hemisphere, and those functions

necessary to the gods would be more emphasized in the right hemisphere.
Moreover, there is no reason not to think that the residuals of these different

functions at least are present in the brain organization of contemporary man.
The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning of action

in novel situations.
The gods size up problems and organize action

according to an ongoing pattern or purpose, resulting in intricate bicameral

civilizations, fitting all the disparate parts together, planting times, harvest

times, the sorting out of commodities, all the vast putting together of things

in a grand design, and the giving of the directions to the neurological man

in his verbal analytical sanctuary in the left hemisphere.
We might thus

predict that one residual function of the right hemisphere today would be an

organizational one, that of sorting out the experiences of a civilization and

fitting them together into a pattern that could ‘tell’ the individual what to

do.
Perusal of various speeches of gods in the Iliad, the Old Testament, or

other ancient literatures is in agreement with this.
Different events, past and

future, are sorted out, categorized, synthesized into a new picture, often

with that ultimate synthesis of metaphor.
And these functions should,

therefore, characterize the right hemisphere.
Clinical observations are consistent with this hypothesis.
From the

commissurotomized patients of a few pages past, we know that the right

hemisphere with its left hand is excellent at sorting out and categorizing

shapes, sizes, and textures.
From braindamaged patients, we know that

damage to the right hemisphere interferes with spatial relations and with

gestalt, synthetic tasks.
15 Mazes are problems in which various elements of

a spatial pattern must be organized in learning.
Patients in whom the right

temporal lobe has been removed find learning the pathways of visual and

tactile mazes almost impossible, while patients with lesions of equal extent on the left temporal lobe have little difficulty.16

Another task involving the organization of parts into a spatial pattern is

Koh’s Block Test, commonly used in many intelligence tests.
The subject is

shown a simple geometric pattern, and asked to duplicate it with blocks that

have its elements painted on them.
Most of us can do it easily.
But patients

with brain lesions in the right hemisphere find this extremely difficult, so

much so that the test is used to diagnose right hemisphere damage.
In the

commissurotomy patients referred to earlier, the right hand often cannot

succeed at all in putting the design together with the blocks.
The left hand,

in a sense the hand of the gods, has no problem whatever.
In some of the

commissurotomy patients, the left hand had even to be held back by the

observer as it tried to help the right hand in its fumbling attempts at this

simple task.
17 The inference has thus been drawn from these and other

studies that the right hemisphere is more involved in synthetic and spatial-

constructive tasks while the left hemisphere is more analytic and verbal.
The right hemisphere, perhaps like the gods, sees parts as having a meaning

only within a context; it looks at wholes.
While the left or dominant

hemisphere, like the man side of the bicameral mind, looks at parts

themselves.
These clinical results have been confirmed in normal people in what

promises to be the first of many future studies.18 EEG electrodes were placed over the temporal and parietal lobes on both sides of normal subjects

who were then given various tests.
When asked to write various kinds of

letters involving verbal and analytic abilities, the EEG records show low-

voltage fast waves over the left hemisphere, denoting that the left

hemisphere is doing the work, while slow alpha waves (seen on both

hemispheres in a resting subject with the eyes closed) are seen over the

right hemisphere, indicating that it is not doing the work.
When such

subjects are given spatial synthetic tests, such as Koh’s Block Test as used

in the clinical studies above, the reverse is found.
It is now the right

hemisphere that is doing the work.
Further deductions can be made about what particular functions might be

residual in the right hemisphere by considering what it is that the divine

voices of the bicameral mind would have to do in particular situations.
To

sort out and synthesize experience into directives to action, the gods would

have to make certain kinds of recognitions.
Throughout the speeches of

gods in ancient literature, such recognitions are common.
I do not mean

recognitions of individuals in particular, but more generally of types of

people, of classifications, as well as of individuals.
One important judgment

for a human being of any century is the recognition of facial expression,

particularly in regard to friendly or unfriendly intent.
If a bicameral man

saw an unrecognized man coming toward him, it would be of considerable

survival value for the god-side of his mentality to decide if the person was

of friendly or unfriendly intent.
These faces are mirror images of each other.
Stare at the nose of each.
Which face is happier?
The adjoining figure is an experiment I designed about ten years ago out

of such a supposition.
The two faces are mirror images of each other.
I have

so far asked almost a thousand people which face looks happier.
Quite

consistently, about 80 percent of right-handed people chose the bottom face

with the smile going up on their left.
They were thus judging the face with

their right hemispheres, assuming, of course, that they were glancing at the

center of the face.
This result can be made stronger by tachistoscopic

presentation.
With the focal point in the center and flashed at one tenth of a

second, the bottom face always looks happier to right-handed persons.
An alternative hypothesis, of course, is that this tendency to judge facial

expression by the left visual field is a carry-over of reading from left to

right.
And in our cultures it certainly enhances the effect.
But that the

hemispheric explanation is at the bottom of it is suggested by the results for

left-handed people.
Fifty-five percent of left-handers chose the upper face

as happier, suggesting that it was the left hemisphere making the judgment.
And this cannot be understood on the reading-direction hypothesis.
Also, in

people who are completely left-lateralized, left-handed in every way, the

likelihodd of seeing the top face as happier seems to be much higher.
Recently we have made a similar finding, using photographs of an actor

expressing sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise.19 Our subjects,

carefully screened for right-handedness, first stared at the fixation point in a

tachistoscope, then were presented with one photograph flashed for a few

milliseconds in the central position, and then with another either in the right

or left visual field for the same duration.
The subjects were asked to say

whether the photographs were the same or different, and the time taken to

make this decision was recorded.
Most of the subjects were able to match

facial expressions more correctly and in less time when the face was

presented on the left and hence to the right hemisphere.
In a control

condition, scrambled pictures of the same facial expressions (which were

really nonsense patterns) also could be matched more quickly and correctly

when presented on the left, but not nearly as well as the facial expressions

themselves.
Recent clinical evidence is in clear agreement.
Failure to recognize faces,

not just facial expressions, is much more frequently associated with damage

to the right hemisphere than to the left.
In clinical testing, the patient is asked to match the frontal view of a face with three-quarter views of the

same face under different lighting conditions.
Patients with lesions in the

right hemisphere find this extremely difficult in comparison with normal

subjects or patients who have lesions in the left hemisphere.
20 Recognition

of both faces and facial expression is therefore primarily a right hemisphere

function.
And to tell friend from non-friend in novel situations was one of the

functions of a god.
6.
A New Look at the Brain

How, it may be argued, can such a system as this, a brain structured into

what I have called a bicameral mind, this substrate of human civilization for

thousands of years, involving such loci as we have mentioned in the model,

how can its function change over so short a period of time, such that the

admonitory voices are heard no more and that we have this new

organization called consciousness?
While the amount of genocide going on

in the world during these changes was enough to allow some natural

selection and evolution, I in no way wish to rest the case upon that.
Such

natural selection as did occur during these periods of the development of

consciousness certainly assisted in its perpetuation, but could not be said to

have evolved consciousness out of the bicameral mind in the sense that a

seal’s flipper is evolved out of an ancestral paw.
A true understanding of the situation requires a different view of the

brain from that which was usual a few decades ago.
Its emphasis is the

brain’s plasticity, its redundant representation of psychological capacities

within a specialized center or region, the multiple control of psychological

capacities by several centers either paired bilaterally or as what Hughlings

Jackson recognized as “rerepresentations” of a function lying at

successively higher and phylogenetically younger levels of the nervous

system.21 The organization of the mammalian brain in this fashion allows for those experimental phenomena brought together under the rubric of

“recovery of function.” Its emphasis gives a view of the brain much more

plastic than usual, with a dramatic surplus of neurons such that, for

example, 98 percent of the optic tracts can be cut in the cat, and brightness

and pattern discrimination will remain.22 The brain teems with redundant

centers, each of which may exert direct influence on a final common

pathway, or modulate the operation of others, or both, their arrangements

able to assume many forms and degrees of coupling between constituent

centers.
All this redundant representation in multiple control gives us the notion

of a much more changeable kind of brain than the earlier neurologists

described.
A particular behavior or group of behaviors engage a host of

similar neurons in a given center and may call into play several different centers arranged in various patterns of inhibition and facilitation, depending

upon their evolutionary status.
And the tightness of the coupling between

centers varies tremendously from one function to another.
23 In other words,

the amount of changeableness that the locus of cortical functions can

undergo is different among different functions, but that such

changeableness is a pronounced feature of the higher mammalian brain is

becoming more and more apparent.
The biological purpose or selective

advantage of such redundant representation and multiple control and its

resulting plasticity is twofold: it protects the organism against the effects of

brain damage, and, perhaps more important, it provides an organism of far

greater adaptability to the constantly changing environmental challenges.
I

am thinking here of such challenges as characterize the successive

glaciations of primate man’s existence, and, of course, that even greater

challenge of the breakdown of the bicameral mind to which man adapted

with consciousness.
But this does not mean just that adult man’s behavior is less rigid than his

forebear’s, though this is of course true.
More important, it provides an

organism where the early developmental history of the individual can make

a great difference in how the brain is organized.
Some years ago, an idea

such as this would have seemed very far-fetched indeed.
But the increasing

tide of research has eroded any rigid concept of the brain, and has

emphasized the remarkable degree to which the brain can compensate for

any structures missing either by injury or by congenital malformation.
Many studies show that brain injury to animals in infancy may make little

difference in adult behavior, while similar injury to adults may have

profound changes.
We have already noted that early injury to the left

hemisphere usually results in the switch of the entire speech mechanism to

the right hemisphere.
One of the most astonishing of the cases that demonstrate this resiliency

of the brain is that of a thirty-five-year-old man who died of an abdominal

malignancy.
At autopsy, it was revealed that he had a congenital absence of

the hippocampal fimbria, the fornix, septum pellucidum, and the mass

intermedia thalami, with an abnormally small hippocampus and abnormally

small hippocampal and dentate gyri.
In spite of these remarkable

abnormalities, the patient had always displayed an “easygoing” personality

and had even led his class in school!24

Thus, the growing nervous system compensates for genetic or

environmental damage by following other but less preferred developmental

paths which utilize intact tissue.
In adults, with development completed,

this is no longer possible.
The normally preferred modes of neural

organization have already been achieved.
It is only in early development

that such reorganization of the systems of multiple control can take place.
And this is definitely true of the relationship between the hemispheres so

central to this discussion.
25

With this as a background, I do not see the difficulty in considering that,

in the bicameral epochs, what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the right

nondominant hemisphere had its strict bicameral function, whereas after a

thousand years of psychological reorganization in which such bicamerality

was discouraged when it appeared in early development, such areas

function in a different way.
And similarly, it would be wrong to think that

whatever the neurology of consciousness now may be, it is set for all time.
The cases we have discussed indicate otherwise, that the function of brain

tissue is not inevitable, and that perhaps different organizations, given

different developmental programs, may be possible.
Chapter 6



The Origin of Civilization

BUT WHEREFORE should there be such a thing as the bicameral mind?
And

why are there gods?
What can be the origin of things divine?
And if the

organization of the brain in bicameral times was as I have suggested in the

previous chapter, what could the selective pressures in human evolution

have been to bring about so mighty a result?
The speculative thesis which I shall try to explain in this chapter—and it

is very speculative—is simply an obvious corollary from what has gone

before.
The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of

social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer

groups to large agricultural communities.
The bicameral mind with its

controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language.
And in this development lies the origin of civilization.
Let us begin by looking at what we mean by social control.
THE EVOLUTION OF GROUPS

Mammals in general show a wide variety of social groupings, all the way

from the solitariness of certain predatory animals to the very close social

cohesiveness of others.
The latter animals are the more preyed upon, and a

social group is itself a genetic adaptation for protection against predators.
The structure of herds in ungulates is relatively simple, utilizing precise

genetically given anatomical and behavioral signals that are all evolved for

group protection.
Primates have a similar vulnerability, and for the same

reason are evolved to live in close association with others.
In dense

protective forests, the social group may be as small as six, as in gibbons,

while on the more exposed terrains, the group may be up to eighty, as in the

Cape baboons.
1 In exceptional ecosystems, the group size may be even

larger.
It is the group then that evolves.
When dominant individuals give a

warning cry or run, others of the group flee without looking for the source

of danger.
It is thus the experience of one individual and his dominance that

is an advantage to the whole group.
Individuals do not generally respond

even to basic physiological needs except within the whole pattern of the

group’s activity.
A thirsty baboon, for example, does not leave the group

and go seeking water; it is the whole group that moves or none.
Thirst is

satisfied only within the patterned activity of the group.
And so it is with

other needs and situations.
The important thing for us here is that this social structure depends upon

the communication between the individuals.
Primates have therefore

evolved a tremendous variety of complex signals: tactile communication

ranging from mounting and grooming to various kinds of embracing,

nuzzling, and fingering; sounds ranging from assorted grunts, barks,

screeching, and yakking, all grading into each other; nonvocal signals such

as grinding teeth or beating branches;2 visual signals in a variety of facial

expressions, the threatening, direct eye-to-eye gaze, eyelid fluttering in

baboons in which the brows are raised and the lids are lowered to expose

their pale color against the darker background of the face, together with a

yawn that bares the teeth aggressively; various postural signals such as

lunging, head jerking, feinting with the hands, and all these in various

constellations.
3

This huge redundant complexity of signaling is essentially devoted to the

requisites of the group, its organization into patterns of dominance and

subordination, the maintenance of peace, reproduction, and care for the

young.
Except for signifying potential group danger, primate signals rarely

apply to events outside the group, such as the presence of food or water.
4

They are totally within group affairs and are not evolved to give

environmental information in the way human languages are.
Now this is what we start with.
Within a specific ecology, for most

species, it is this communication system that limits the size of the group.
Baboons are able to achieve groups as high as eighty or more because they

have a strict geographical structure as they move about on the open plains,

with dominant hierarchies being maintained within each circle of the group.
But in general the usual primate group does not exceed thirty or forty, a

limit determined by the communication necessary for the dominance

hierarchy to work.
In gorillas, for example, the dominant male, usually the largest silver-

backed male, together with all the females and young, occupies the central

core of each group of about twenty, the other males tending to be

peripheral.
The diameter of a group at any given moment rarely exceeds

200 feet, as every animal remains attentive to the movements of others in

the dense forest environment.5 The group moves when the dominant male

stands motionless with his legs spread and faces a certain direction.
The

other members of the group then crowd around him, and the troop moves

off on its leisurely day’s journey of about a third of a mile.
The important

thing here is that the complex channels of communication are open between

the top of the dominance hierarchy and all the rest.
There is no reason to think that early man from the beginning of the

genus Homo two million years ago lived any differently.
Such

archaeological evidence as has been obtained indicates the size of a group

to be about thirty.
6 This number, I suggest, was limited by the problem of social control and the degree of openness of the communication channels

between individuals.
7 And it is the problem of this limitation of group size

which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve.
But first we must consider the evolution of language as the necessary

condition for there to be gods at all.
THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

When Did Language Evolve?
It is commonly thought that language is such an inherent part of the

human constitution that it must go back somehow through the tribal

ancestry of man to the very origin of the genus Homo, that is, for almost

two million years.
Most contemporary linguists of my acquaintance would

like to persuade me that this is true.
But with this view, I wish to totally and

emphatically disagree.
If early man, through these two million years, had

even a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple

culture or technology?
For there is precious little archaeologically up to

40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools.
Sometimes the reaction to a denial that early man had speech is, how

then did man function or communicate?
The answer is very simple: just like

all other primates, with an abundance of visual and vocal signals which

were very far removed from the syntactical language that we practice today.
And when I even carry this speechlessness down through the Pleistocene

Age, when man developed various kinds of primitive pebble choppers and

hand axes, again my linguist friends lament my arrogant ignorance and

swear oaths that in order to transmit even such rudimentary skills from one

generation to another, there had to be language.
But consider that it is

almost impossible to describe chipping flints into choppers in language.
This art was transmitted solely by imitation, exactly the same way in which

chimpanzees transmit the trick of inserting straws into ant hills to get ants.
It is the same problem as the transmission of bicycle riding; does language

assist at all?
Because language must make dramatic changes in man’s attention to

things and persons, because it allows a transfer of information of enormous

scope, it must have developed over a period that shows archaeologically

that such changes occurred.
Such a one is the late Pleistocene, roughly from

70,000 B.C.
to 8000 B.C.
This period was characterized dimactically by wide variations in temperature, corresponding to the advance and retreat of

glacial conditions, and biologically by huge migrations of animals and man

caused by these changes in weather.
The hominid population exploded out

of the African heartland into the Eurasian subarctic and then into the

Americas and Australia.
The population around the Mediterranean reached

a new high and took the lead in cultural innovation, transferring man’s

cultural and biological focus from the tropics to the middle latitudes.
8 His fires, caves, and furs created for man a kind of transportable microclimate

that allowed these migrations to take place.
We are used to referring to these people as late Neander-thalers.
At one

time they were thought to be a separate species of man supplanted by Cro-

Magnon man around 35,000 B.C.
But the more recent view is that they were

part of the general human line, which had great variation, a variation that

allowed for an increasing pace of evolution, as man, taking his artificial

climate with him, spread into these new ecological niches.
More work

needs to be done to establish the true patterns of settlement, but the most

recent emphasis seems to be on its variation, some groups continually

moving, others making seasonal migrations, and others staying at a site all

the year round.9

I am emphasizing the climate changes during this last glacial age because

I believe these changes were the basis of the selective pressures behind the

development of language through several stages.
Calls, Modifiers, and Commands

The first stage and the sine qua non of language is the development out

of incidental calls of intentional calls, or those which tend to be repeated

unless turned off by a change in behavior of the recipient.
Previously in the

evolution of primates, it was only postural or visual signals such as threat

postures which were intentional.
Their evolution into auditory signals was

made necessary by the migration of man into northern climates, where there

was less light both in the environment and in the dark caves where man

made his abode, and where visual signals could not be seen as readily as on

the bright African savannahs.
This evolution may have begun as early as the

Third Glaciation Period or possibly even before.
But it is only as we are

approaching the increasing cold and darkness of the Fourth Glaciation in

northern climates that the presence of such vocal intentional signals gave a

pronounced selective advantage to those who possessed them.
I am here summarizing a theory of language evolution which I have

developed more fully and with more caution elsewhere.
10 It is not intended as a definitive statement of what occurred in evolution so much as a rough

working hypothesis to approach it.
Moreover, the stages of language

development that I shall describe are not meant to be necessarily discrete.
Nor are they always in the same order in different localities.
The central

assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally

created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and

attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the

archaeological record.
The first real elements of speech were the final sounds of intentional calls

differentiating on the basis of intensity.
For example, a danger call for

immediately present danger would be exclaimed with more intensity,

changing the ending phoneme.
An imminent tiger might result in ‘wahee!’

while a distant tiger might result in a cry of less intensity and so develop a

different ending such as ‘wahoo’.
It is these endings, then, that become the

first modifiers meaning ‘near’ and ‘far’.
And the next step was when these

endings, ‘hee’ and ‘hoo’, could be separated from the particular call that

generated them and attached to some other call with the same indication.
The crucial thing here is that the differentiation of vocal qualifiers had to precede the invention of the nouns which they modified, rather than the

reverse.
And what is more, this stage of speech had to remain for a long

period until such modifiers became stable.
This slow development was also

necessary so that the basic repertoire of the call system was kept intact to

perform its intentional functions.
This age of modifiers perhaps lasted up to

40,000 B.C., where we find archaeologically retouched hand axes and points.
The next stage might have been an age of commands, when modifiers,

separated from the calls they modify, now can modify men’s actions

themselves.
Particularly as men relied more and more on hunting in the

chilled climate, the selective pressure for such a group of hunters controlled

by vocal commands must have been immense.
And we may imagine that

the invention of a modifier meaning ‘sharper’ as an instructed command

could markedly advance the making of tools from flint and bone, resulting

in an explosion of new types of tools from 40,000 B.C.
up to 25,000 B.C.
Nouns

Once a tribe has a repertoire of modifiers and commands, the necessity of

keeping the integrity of the old primitive call system can be relaxed for the

first time, so as to indicate the referents of the modifiers or commands.
If

‘wahee!’ once meant an imminent danger, with more intensity

differentiation, we might have ‘wak ee!’ for an approaching tiger, or “wab

ee!’ for an approaching bear.
These would be the first sentences with a noun

subject and a predicative modifier, and they may have occurred somewhere

between 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.
These are not arbitrary speculations.
The succession from modifiers to

commands and, only when these become stable, to nouns is no arbitrary

succession.
Nor is the dating entirely arbitrary.
Just as the age of modifiers

coincides with the making of much superior tools, so the age of nouns for

animals coincides with the beginning of drawing animals on the walls of

caves or on horn implements.
The next stage is the development of thing nouns, really a carry-over

from the preceding.
And just as life nouns began animal drawings, so nouns

for things beget new things.
This period corresponds, I suggest, to the

invention of pottery, pendants, ornaments, and barbed harpoons and

spearheads, the last two tremendously important in spreading the human

species into more difficult climates.
From fossil evidence we know

factually that the brain, particularly the frontal lobe in front of the central

sulcus, was increasing with a rapidity that still astonishes the modern

evolutionist.
And by this time, perhaps what corresponds to the

Magdalenian culture, the language areas of the brain as we know them had

developed.
The Origin of Auditory Hallucinations

At this point, let us consider another problem in the origin of gods, the

origin of auditory hallucinations.
That there is a problem here comes from

the very fact of their undoubted existence in the contemporary world, and

their inferred existence in the bicameral period.
The most plausible

hypothesis is that verbal hallucinations were a side effect of language

comprehension which evolved by natural selection as a method of

behavioral control.
Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to set up a fish

weir far upstream from a campsite.
If he is not conscious, and cannot

therefore narratize the situation and so hold his analog ‘I’ in a spatialized

time with its consequences fully imagined, how does he do it?
It is only

language, I think, that can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon

work.
A Middle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing.
But

lingual man would have language to remind him, either repeated by

himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not think he was

then capable of, or, as seems more likely, by a repeated ‘internal’ verbal

hallucination telling him what to do.
To someone who has not fully understood the previous chapters, this type

of suggestion will sound extremely strange and farfetched.
But if one is

facing directly and conscientiously the problem of tracing out the

development of human mentality, such suggestions are necessary and

important, even though we cannot at the present time think how we can

substantiate them.
Behavior more closely based on aptic structures (or, in an

older terminology, more ‘instinctive’) needs no temporal priming.
But

learned activities with no consummatory closure do need to be maintained

by something outside of themselves.
This is what verbal hallucinations

would supply.
Similarly, in fashioning a tool, the hallucinated verbal command of

“sharper” enables nonconscious early man to keep at his task alone.
Or an

hallucinated term meaning “finer” for an individual grinding seeds on a

stone quern into flour.
It was indeed at this point in human history that I

believe articulate speech, under the selective pressures of enduring tasks,

began to become unilateral in the brain, to leave the other side free for these hallucinated voices that could maintain such behavior.
The Age of Names

This has been an all too brief sketch of what must have been involved in

the evolution of language.
But before there could be gods, one further step

had to be taken, the invention of that most important social phenomenon—

names.
It is somehow startling to realize that names were a particular invention

that must have come into human development at a particular time.
When?
What changes might this make in human culture?
It is, I suggest, as late as

the Mesolithic era, about 10,000 B.C.
to 8000 B.C.
when names first

occurred.
This is the period of man’s adaptation to the warmer postglacial

environment.
The vast sheet of ice has retreated to the latitude of

Copenhagen, and man keys in to specific environmental situations, to

grassland hunting, to life in the forest, to shellfish collecting, or to the

exploitation of marine resources combined with terrestrial hunting.
Such

living is characterized by a much greater stability of population, rather than

the necessary mobility of the hunting groups which preceded them with

their large mortality.
With these more fixed populations, with more fixed

relationships, longer life-spans, and probably larger numbers in the group

which had to be distinguished, it is not difficult to see both the need and the

likelihood of a carry-over of nouns into names for individual persons.
Now, once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a sense be

recreated in his absence.
‘He’ can be thought about, using ‘thought’ here in

a special nonconscious sense of fitting into language structures.
While there

had been earlier graves of a sort, occasionally somewhat elaborate, this is

the first age in which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice.
If

you think of someone close to you who has died, and then suppose that he

or she had no name, in what would your grief consist?
How long could it

last?
Previously, man, like other primates, had probably left his dead where

they fell, or else hidden them from view with stones, or in some instances

roasted and eaten them.11 But just as a noun for an animal makes that

relationship a much more intense one, so a name for a person.
And when

the person dies, the name still goes on, and hence the relationship, almost as

in life, and hence burial practices and mourning.
The Mesolithic midden-

dwellers of Morbihan, for example, buried their dead in skin cloaks

fastened by bone pins and sometimes crowned them with stag antlers and

protected them with stone slabs.
12 Other graves from the period show

burials with little crowns, or various ornaments, or possibly flowers in

carefully excavated places, all, I suggest, the result of the invention of

names.
But a further change occurs with names.
Up to this time auditory

hallucinations had probably been casually anonymous and not in any sense

a significant social interaction.
But once a specific hallucination is

recognized with a name, as a voice originating from a particular person, a

significantly different thing is occurring.
The hallucination is now a social

interaction with a much greater role in individual behavior.
And a further

problem here is just how hallucinated voices were recognized, as whom,

and if there were many, how sorted out.
Some light on these questions

comes from the autobiographical writings of schizophrenic patients.
But not

enough to pursue the matter here.
We are greatly in need of specific

research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us in understanding

Mesolithic man.
The Advent of Agriculture

We are now at the threshold of the bicameral period, for the mechanism

of social control which can organize large populations of men into a city is

at hand.
Everyone agrees that the change from a hunting and gathering

economy to a food-producing economy by the domestication of plants and

animals is the gigantic step that made civilization possible.
But there is

wide disagreement as to its causes and the means by which it came about.
The traditional theory emphasizes the fact that when the glaciers covered

most of Europe during the Late Pleistocene, the whole area from the

Atlantic coast across North Africa and the Near East to the Zagros

Mountains in Iran enjoyed such an abundant rainfall that it was indeed a

vast procreant Eden, luxuriant with plant life ample to support a wide range

of fauna, including Paleolithic man.
But the recession of the polar ice cap

moved these Atlantic rain-winds northward, and the entire Near East

became increasingly arid.
The wild food-plants and the game on which man

had preyed were no longer sufficient to allow him to live by simple food-

gathering, and the result was that many tribes emigrated out of the area into

Europe, while those who remained—in the words of Pumpelly, who

originated this hypothesis from his own excavations—”concentrating on the

oases and forced to conquer new means of support, began to utilize the

native plants; and from among these he learned to use seeds of different

grasses growing on the dry land and in marshes at the mouths of larger

streams on the desert.” 13 And this view has been followed by a series of

more recent authors, including Childe,14 as well as Toynbee,15 who called

this supposed desiccation of the Near East environment the “physical

challenge” to which agricultural civilization was the response.
Recent evidence16 shows that there was no such extensive desiccation,

and that agriculture was not economically ‘forced’ on anyone.
I have been

placing an overwhelming importance on language in the development of

human culture in Mesolithic times and I would do so here as well.
As we

saw in Chapter 3, language allows the metaphors of things to increase

perception and attention, and so to give new names to things of new

importance.
It is, I think, this added linguistic mentality, surrounded as it

was in the Near East by a fortuitous grouping of suitable domesticates, wild wheats and wild barley, whose native distribution overlaps with the much

broader habitats of the herd animals of southwestern Asia, goats, sheep,

cattle, and wild pigs, that resulted in agriculture.
THE FIRST GOD

Let us look more directly for a moment at the best defined and most fully

studied Mesolithic culture, the Natufian, named after the Wadi en-Natuf in

Israel, where the first of the sites was found.
In 10,000 B.C., like their

Paleolithic predecessors, the Natufians were hunters, about five feet tall,

often living in the mouths of caves, were skillful in working bone and antler

and in chipping retouched blades and burins out of flint, drew animals

almost as well as the artists of the cave drawings of Lascaux, and wore

perforated shells or animal teeth as ornaments.
By 9000 B.C., they are burying their dead in ceremonial graves and

adopting a more settled life.
The latter is indicated by the first signs of

structural building, such as the paving and walling of platforms with much

plaster, and cemeteries sometimes large enough for eighty-seven burials, a

size unknown in any previous age.
It is, as I have suggested, the age of

names, with all that it implies.
It is the open-air Natufian settlement at Eynan which shows this change

most dramatically.17 Discovered in 1959, this heavily investigated site is about a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee on a natural terrace

overlooking the swamps and pools of Lake Huleh.
Three successive

permanent towns dating from about 9000 B.C.
have been carefully

excavated.
Each town comprised about fifty round stone houses with reed

roofs, with diameters up to 23 feet.
The houses were arranged around an

open central area where many bell-shaped pits had been dug and plastered

for the storage of food.
Sometimes these pits were reused for burials.
Now here is a very significant change in human affairs.
Instead of a

nomadic tribe of about twenty hunters living in the mouths of caves, we

have a town with a population of at least 200 persons.
It was the advent of

agriculture, as attested by the abundance of sickle blades, pounders and

pestles, querns and mortars, recessed in the floor of each house, for the

reaping and preparation of cereals and legumes, that made such permanence

and population possible.
Agriculture at this time was exceedingly primitive

and only a supplement to the wide variety of animal fauna—wild goats,

gazelles, boars, fox, hare, rodents, birds, fish, tortoises, crustaceans,

mussels, and snails—which, as carbon-dated remains show, were the

significant part of the diet.
The Hallucinogenic King

A town!
Of course it is not impossible that one chief could dominate a

few hundred people.
But it would be a consuming task if such domination

had to be through face-to-face encounters repeated every so often with each

individual, as occurs in those primate groups that maintain strict

hierarchies.
I beg you to recall, as we try to picture the social life of Eynan, that these

Natufians were not conscious.
They could not narratize and had no analog

selves to ‘see’ themselves in relation to others.
They were what we could

call signal-bound, that is, responding each minute to cues in a stimulus-

response manner, and controlled by those cues.
And what were the cues for a social organization this large?
What signals

were the social control over its two or three hundred inhabitants?
I have suggested that auditory hallucinations may have evolved as a side

effect of language and operated to keep individuals persisting at the longer

tasks of tribal life.
Such hallucinations began in the individual’s hearing a

command from himself or from his chief.
There is thus a very simple

continuity between such a condition and the more complex auditory

hallucinations which I suggest were the cues of social control in Eynan and

which originated in the commands and speech of the king.
Now we must not make the error here of supposing that these auditory

hallucinations were like tape recordings of what the king had commanded.
Perhaps they began as such.
But after a time there is no reason not to

suppose that such voices could ‘think’ and solve problems, albeit, of course,

unconsciously.
The ‘voices’ heard by contemporary schizophrenics ‘think’

as much and often more than they do.
And thus the ‘voices’ which I am

supposing were heard by the Natufians could with time improvise and ‘say’

things that the king himself had never said.
Always, however, we may

suppose that all such novel hallucinations were strictly tied in consistency

to the person of the king himself.
This is not different from ourselves when

we inherently know what a friend is likely to say.
Thus each worker,

gathering shellfish or trapping small game or in a quarrel with a rival or

planting seed where the wild grain had previously been harvested, had

within him the voice of his king to assist the continuity and utility to the group of his labors.
The God-King

We have decided that the occasion of an hallucination was stress, as it is

in our contemporaries.
And if our reasonings have been correct, we may be

sure that the stress caused by a person’s death was far more than sufficient

to trigger his hallucinated voice.
Perhaps this is why, in so many early

cultures, the heads of the dead were often severed from the body, or why the

legs of the dead were broken or tied up, why food is so often in the graves,

or why there is evidence so often of a double burial of the same corpse, the

second being in a common grave after the voices have stopped.
If this were so for an ordinary individual, how much more so for a king

whose voice even while living ruled by hallucination.
We might therefore

expect a very special accordance given to the house of this unmoving man

whose voice is still the cohesion of the entire group.
At Eynan, still dating about 9000 B.C., the king’s tomb—the first such

ever found (so far)—is a quite remarkable affair.
The tomb itself, like all the

houses, was circular, about 16 feet in diameter.
Inside, two complete

skeletons lay in the center extended on their backs, with legs detached after

death and bent out of position.
One wore a headdress of dentalia shells and

was presumed to have been the king’s wife.
The other, an adult male,

presumably the king, was partly covered with stones and partly propped up

on stones, his upright head cradled in more stones, facing the snowy peaks

of Mount Hermon, thirty miles away.
At some later time, soon after or years later, we do not know, the entire

tomb was surrounded by a red-ochered wall or parapet.
Then, without

disturbing its two motionless inhabitants, large flat stones were paved over

the top, roofing them in.
Then, on the roof a hearth was built.
Another low

circular wall of stones was built still later around the roof-hearth, with more

paving stones on top of that, and three large stones surrounded by smaller

ones set in the center.
The first god: the dead king of Eynan propped up on a pillow of stones in about 9000 B.C., as discovered by excavations in 1959.
I am suggesting that the dead king, thus propped up on his pillow of

stones, was in the hallucinations of his people still giving forth his

commands, and that the red-painted parapet and its top tier of a hearth were

a response to the decomposition of the body, and that, for a time at least, the

very place, even the smoke from its holy fire, rising into visibility from

furlongs around, was, like the gray mists of the Aegean for Achilles, a

source of hallucinations and of the commands that controlled the Mesolithic

world of Eynan.
This was a paradigm of what was to happen in the next eight millennia.
The king dead is a living god.
The king’s tomb is the god’s house, the

beginning of the elaborate god-house or temples which we shall look at in

the next chapter.
Even the two-tiered formation of its structure is prescient

of the multitiered ziggurats, of the temples built on temples, as at Eridu, or

the gigantic pyramids by the Nile that time in its majesty will in several thousand years unfold.
We should not leave Eynan without at least mentioning the difficult

problem of succession.
Of course, we have next to nothing to go on in

Eynan.
But the fact that the royal tomb contained previous burials that had

been pushed aside for the dead king and his wife suggests that its former

occupants may have been earlier kings.
And the further fact that beside the

hearth on the second tier above the propped-up king was still another skull

suggests that it may have belonged to the first king’s successor, and that

gradually the hallucinated voice of the old king became fused with that of

the new.
The Osiris myth that was the power behind the majestic dynasties

of Egypt had perhaps begun.
The king’s tomb as the god’s house continues through the millennia as a

feature of many civilizations, particularly in Egypt.
But, more often, the

king’s-tomb part of the designation withers away.
This occurs as soon as a

successor to a king continues to hear the hallucinated voice of his

predecessor during his reign, and designates himself as the dead king’s

priest or servant, a pattern that is followed throughout Mesopotamia.
In

place of the tomb is simply a temple.
And in place of the corpse is a statue,

enjoying even more service and reverence, since it does not decompose.
We

shall be discussing these idols, or replacements for the corpses of kings,

more fully in the next two chapters.
They are important.
Like the queen in a

termite nest or a beehive, the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully

tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of

pheromones.
The Success of Civilization

Here then is the beginning of civilization.
Rather abruptly, archaeological

evidence for agriculture such as the sickle blades and pounding and milling

stones of Eynan appear more or less simultaneously in several other sites in

the Levant and Iraq around 9000 B.C., suggesting a very early diffusion of

agriculture in the Near Eastern highlands.
At first, this is as it was at Eynan,

a stage in which incipient agriculture and, later, animal domestication were

going on within a dominant food-collecting economy.
18

But by 7000 B.C., agriculture has become the primary subsistence of

farming settlements found in assorted sites in the Levant, the Zagros area,

and southwestern Anatolia.
The crops consisted of einkorn, emmer, and

barley, and the domesticated animals were sheep, goats, and sometimes

pigs.
By 6000 B.C., farming communities spread over much of the Near

East.
And by 5000 B.C., the agricultural colonization of the alluvial valleys

of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile was rapidly spreading, swelling

populations into an intensive cultural landscape.19 Cities of 10,000

inhabitants, as at Merinde on the western edge of the Nile delta, were not

uncommon.
20 The great dynasties of Ur and of Egypt begin their mighty

impact on history.
The date 5000 B.C., or perhaps five hundred years earlier,

is also the beginning of what is known to geologists as the Holocene

Thermal Maximum, lasting to approximately 3000 B.C., in which the

world’s climate, particularly as revealed by pollen studies, was considerably

warmer and moister than today, allowing even further agricultural dispersal

into Europe and northern Africa, as well as more productive agriculture in

the Near East.
And in this immensely complex civilizing of mankind, the

evidence, I think, suggests that the modus operandi of it all was the

bicameral mind.
It is to that evidence that we now turn.
BOOK TWO



THE WITNESS OF HISTORY







Chapter 1



Gods, Graves, and Idols

CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not

know everyone else.
Not a very inspiring definition, perhaps, but a true one.
We have hypothesized that it is the social organization provided by the

bicameral mind that made this possible.
In this and the ensuing chapter, I

am attempting to integrate without excessive particularization the

worldwide evidence that such a mentality did in fact exist wherever and

whenever civilization first began.
While the matter is in much current debate, the view I am adopting is that

civilization began independently in various sites in the Near East, as

described in the previous chapter, then spread along the valleys of the Tigris

and Euphrates rivers, into Anatolia and the valley of the Nile; then into

Cyprus, Thessaly, and Crete; and then somewhat later by diffusion into the

Indus River valley and beyond, and into the Ukraine and Central Asia; then,

partly by diffusion and partly spontaneously, along the Yangtze; then

independently in Mesoamerica; and again, partly by diffusion and partly

independently, in the Andean highlands.
In each of these areas, there was a

succession of kingdoms all with similar characteristics that, somewhat

prematurely, I shall call bicameral.
While there were certainly other

bicameral kingdoms in the history of the world, perhaps along the margins

of the Bay of Bengal or the Malay peninsular, in Europe, certainly in central

Africa by diffusion from Egypt, and possibly among the North American

Indians during the so-called Mississippi Period, too little has been

recovered of these civilizations to be of assistance in checking out the main

hypothesis.
Given the theory as I have outlined it, I suggest that there are several

outstanding archaeological features of ancient civilizations which can only

be understood on this basis.
These silent features are the subject of this

chapter, the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt being reserved

for the next.
THE HOUSES OF GODS

Let us imagine ourselves coming as strangers to an unknown land and

finding its settlements all organized on a similar plan: ordinary houses and

buildings grouped around one larger and more magnificent dwelling.
We

would immediately assume that the large magnificent dwelling was the

house of the prince who ruled there.
And we might be right.
But in the case

of older civilizations, we would not be right if we supposed such a ruler was

a person like a contemporary prince.
Rather he was an hallucinated

presence, or, in the more general case, a statue, often at one end of his

superior house, with a table in front of him where the ordinary could place

their offerings to him.
Now, whenever we encounter a town or city plan such as this, with a

central larger building that is not a dwelling and has no other practical use

as a granary or barn, for example, and particularly if the building contains

some kind of human effigy, we may take it as evidence of a bicameral

culture or of a culture derived from one.
This criterion may seem fatuous,

simply because it is the plan of many towns today.
We are so used to the

town plan of a church surrounded by lesser houses and shops that we see

nothing unusual.
But our contemporary religious and city architecture is

partly, I think, the residue of our bicameral past.
The church or temple or

mosque is still called the House of God.
In it, we still speak to the god, still

bring offerings to be placed on a table or altar before the god or his emblem.
My purpose in speaking in this objective fashion is to defamiliarize this

whole pattern, so that standing back and seeing civilized man against his

entire primate evolution, we can see that such a pattern of town structure is

unusual and not to be expected from our Neanderthal origins.
From Jericho to Ur

With but few exceptions, the plan of human group habitation from the

end of the Mesolithic up to relatively recent eras is of a god-house

surrounded by man-houses.
In the earliest villages, 1 such as the excavated

level of Jericho corresponding to the ninth millennium B.C., such a plan is

not entirely clear and is perhaps debatable.
But the larger god-house at

Jericho, surrounded by what were lesser dwellings, at a level corresponding

to the seventh millennium B.C., with its perhaps columned porchway leading

into a room with niches and curvilinear annexes, defies doubt as to its

purpose.
It is no longer the tomb of a dead king whose corpse is propped up

on stones.
The niches housed nearly life-sized effigies, heads modeled

naturalistically in clay and set on canes or bundles of reeds and painted red.
Of similar hallucinogenic function may have been the ten human skulls,

perhaps of dead kings, found at the same site, with features realistically

modeled in plaster and white cowrie shells inserted for eyes.
And the

Hacilar culture in Anatolia of about 7000 B.C.
also had human crania set up

on floors, suggesting similar bicameral control to hold the members of the

culture together in their food-producing and protection enterprise.
Plan of building-level VI B at Çatal Hüyük, about 6000 B.C.
Note that there is a shrine signified by S

in almost every household.
The largest Neolithic site in the Near East is the 32-acre Çatal Hüyük, of

which only one or two acres have been as yet excavated.
Here the

arrangement was slightly different.
Excavations at levels dating from about 6000 B.C.
show that almost every house had a series of four to five rooms

nestled around a god’s room.
Numerous groups of statues in stone or baked

clay have been found within these god’s rooms.
At Eridu, five centuries later, god-houses were set on mud-brick

platforms, which were the origin of ziggurats.
In a long central room, the

god-idol on a platform at one end looked at an offering table at the other.
And it is this Eridu sequence of sanctuaries up to the Ubaid culture in

southern Iraq which, spreading over the whole of Mesopotamia around

4300 B.C., lays the foundations of the Sumerian civilization and its

Babylonian successor which I consider in the next chapter.
With cities of

many thousands came the building of the huge monumental god-houses

which characterize and dominate cities from then on, perhaps being

hallucinogenic aids to everyone for miles around.
To stand even today

under such mountainous ziggurats as that of Ur, still heaving up above the

excavated ruins of its once bicameral civilization, with its ramps of

staircases rising to but half the height it once had, and to imagine its triple

tier of temples on top rising into the sun is to feel the grip such architecture

alone can have upon one’s mentality.
A Hittite Variation

The Hittites in the center of their capital, Hattusas, now Bŏghazköy in

central Turkey, 2 had four huge temples with great granite sanctuaries that projected beyond the main façades of the limestone walls to obtain lateral

lighting for some huge idols.
But, perhaps taking the place of a ziggurat, that is, of a high place that

could be seen wherever lands were being farmed, is the beautiful outdoor

mountain shrine of Yazilikaya just above the city, its sanctuary walls

streaming with reliefs of gods.3 That the mountains themselves were

hallucinatory to the Hittites is indicated by relief sculptures still clearly

visible on the rocks within the sanctuary, showing the usual stereotyped

drawings of mountains topped with the heads and headdresses used for

gods.
As the Psalmist sings, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence

cometh my help.”

On one of the faces of this mountain temple, the robed king is carved in

profile.
Just behind him in the stone relief towers a god with a much loftier

crown; the god’s right arm is outstretched, showing the king the way, while

the god’s left arm is hugged around the king’s neck and grasps the king’s

right wrist firmly.
It is testament to an emblem of the bicameral mind.
The depicting of gods in long files, unique I think to the Hittites, suggests

a solution to an old problem in Hittite research.
This is the translation of the

important word pankush.
Scholars originally interpreted it as signifying the

whole human community, perhaps some sort of national assembly.
But

other texts have forced a revision of this to some kind of an elite.
A further

possibility, I suggest, is that it indicates the whole community of these

many gods, and, particularly, the choice-decisions in which all the

bicameral voices were in agreement.
The fact that during the last century or

so of Hittite rule, from around 1300 B.C., no mention of the fankush appears

in any text could indicate their collective silence and the beginning of the

troublous change toward subjectivity.
Rock relief at Yazilikaya, about 1250 B.C.
The god Sharruma holds hit steward-king, Tudhaliyi, in his embrace.
The pretzellike hieroglyph for deity is been both as the head in the god’s ideogram on the upper left and repetitively on the god’s crown.
It it also seen in the king’s ideogram on the upper right, indicating, I think, that the king too was ‘heard’ in hallucination by his subjects.
Olmec and Maya

The earliest bicameral kingdoms of America are also characterized by

these huge, otherwise useless centrally located buildings: the queer-shaped

clumsy Olmec pyramid at La Venta of about 500 B.C.
with its corridor of

lesser mounds smothering mysterious jaguar-face mosaics; or the rash of

great temple pyramids constructed about 200 B.C.
4 The largest of them, the gigantic pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan (literally “Place of the Gods”)

has a greater cubic content than any in Egypt, being an eighth of a mile long

on each side, and higher than a twenty-story building.
5 A room for a god on

its summit was reached by systems of steep stairs.
And on top of the god-

room, tradition states, there was a gigantic statue of the sun.
A processional

way flanked by other pyramids leads toward it, and, for miles around on the

Mexican plateau, one can still see the remains of a great city, houses for

priests, numerous courtyards, and smaller buildings, all of one story so that

from anywhere in the city one could see the great pyramidal houses of

gods.6

Beginning somewhat later, but co-temporaneous with Teotihuacan, are

the many Maya cities in the Yucatan peninsula7 showing the same

bicameral architecture, each city centering upon steeply rising pyramids

topped with god-houses and richly decorated with Olmec-type jaguar masks

and other murals and carvings, in which an endless variety of dragons with

human faces crawl fiercely through the intricate stone decoration.
Exceptionally interesting is the fact that some of the pyramids contain

burials as in Egypt, perhaps indicating a phase in which the king was a god.
In front of these Mayan pyramids are usually stelae carved with the figures

of gods and glyphic inscriptions which have yet to be fully understood.
Since this kind of writing is always in connection with religious images, it

is possible that the hypothesis of the bicameral mind may assist in

unwinding their mysteries.
I also think that the curious unhospitable sites on which Mayan cities

were often built and their sudden appearance and disappearance can best be

explained on the basis that such sites and movements were commanded by

hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but

downright punishing—as was Jahweh sometimes to his- people, or Apollo

(through the Delphic Oracle) to his, by siding with the invaders of Greece

(see III.1 , III.2 , n.
12).
Occasionally, there are actual depictions of the bicameral act.
On two

stone reliefs from Santa Lucia Cotz umalhaupa, a non-Mayan site on the

Pacific slope of Guatemala, this is very clearly the case.
A man is shown

prostrate on the grass being spoken to by two divine figures, one half-

human, half-deer, and the other a death figure.
That this is an actual

bicameral scene is clear from modern observations of the so-called chilans

or prophets of the area.
Even today, they hallucinate voices while face down

in this identical posture, although it is thought by some that such

contemporary hallucinations are aided by eating peyote.
8



Andean Civilizations

The half dozen or so civilizations of the Andes that precede the Inca are

even more lost in the overgrowth of time.9 The earliest, Kotosh, dating before 1800 B.C., is centered about a rectangular god-house built on a

stepped platform 25 feet high on a large mound, where it was surrounded by

the remains of other buildings.
Its interior walls had a few tall rectangular

niches in each, in one of which was a pair of crossed hands modeled in

plaster, perhaps part of a larger idol, now dust.
How similar to Jericho five

millennia earlier!
While it is possible that Kotosh was the work of migrants from Mexico,

the next civilization, the Chavin, beginning about 1200 B.C., shows decided

Olmec features: the cultivation of maize, a number of pottery

characteristics, and the jaguar theme in its religious sculpture.
At Chavin

itself in the north highlands, a great platformlike temple, honeycombed with

passages, houses an impressive idol in the form of a prismatic mass of

granite carved in low relief to represent a human being with a jaguar head.10

Following them, the Mochicas,11 ruling the northern Peruvian desert from

A.D.
400 to 1000, built huge pyramids for their gods, towering in front of

walled enclosures which probably contained the cities, as can be seen today

in the Chicama valley near Trujillo.12

Then on the bleak uplands near Lake Titicaca from A.D.
1000 to 1300

came the great empire of Tiahuanaco, with an even larger stone-faced

pyramid, set about with giant pillarlike gods weeping tears (why?) of

condor heads and snake heads.
13

Then the Chimu, on an even vaster scale.
Its capital of ChanChan,

covering eleven square miles, was walled off into ten great compounds,

each a city in miniature with its own pyramid, its own palacelike structure,

its own irrigated areas, reservoirs, and cemeteries.
Precisely what these

neighboring separated walled compounds could mean in the light of the

bicameral hypothesis is a fascinating problem for research.
The Golden Realm of the Incas

And then the Incas themselves, like a synthesis of Egypt and Assyria.
At

least at the beginning of their power about A.D.
1200, their realm was

suggestive of a god-king type of bicameral kingdom.
But within a century,

the Incas had conquered all before them, perhaps thereby weakening their

own bicamerality, as did Assyria in another age and another clime.
The Inca empire at the time of its conquest by Pizarro was perhaps a

combination of things bicameral and things protosubjective.
This meeting

was probably the closest thing there is to a clash between the two

mentalities this essay is about.
On the subjective side was the vast empire

which, if we suppose it was administered with the horizontal and vertical

social mobility such an administration demands today,14 would be very

difficult to control in a purely bicameral fashion.
From hearsay reports, it is

believed that conquered chiefs were allowed to retain their titles, and their

sons sent to Cuzco for training and perhaps held as hostages, a difficult

conception in a bicameral world.
Conquered peoples seem to have retained

their own speech, although all officials had to learn the religious language,

Quechua.
But on the bicameral side, there are a large number of features which are

most certainly bicameral in origin, even though they may have been acted

out partially through the inertia of tradition, as the small city-state of Cuzco

on the upper reaches of the Amazon exploded into this Roman empire of

the Andes.
The Inca himself was the god-king, a pattern so similar to

Egypt’s that less conservative historians of American antiquity have felt

that there must have been some diffusion.
But I suggest that given man,

language, and cities organized on a bicameral basis, there are only certain

fixed patterns into which history can fit.
The king was divine, a descendant of the sun, the creator-god of land and

earth, of people, of the sun’s sweat (gold) and the moon’s tears (silver).
Before him, even his highest lords might tremble with such awe as to shake

them from their feet, 15 an awe that is impossible for modern psychology to appreciate.
His daily life was deep in elaborate ritual.
His shoulders were

mantled in quilts of fresh bat-webs, and his head circled with a fringe of red

tassels, like a curtain before his eyes to protect his lords from too awesome a view at his unwatchable divinity.
When the Inca died, his concubines and

personal servants first drank and danced, and then were eagerly strangled to

join him on his journey to the sun, just as had previously happened in

Egypt, Ur, and China.
The Inca’s body was mummified and placed in his

house, which thereafter became a temple.
A life-sized golden statue was

made of him sitting on his golden stool as in his life, and served daily with

food as in the kingdoms of the Near East.
While it is possible that the sixteenth-century Inca and his hereditary

aristocracy were walking through bicameral roles established in a much

earlier truly bicameral kingdom, even as perhaps the Emperor Hirohito, the

divine sun god of Japan, does to this day, the evidence suggests that it was

much more than this.
The closer an individual was to the Inca, the more it

seems his mentality was bicameral.
Even the gold and jeweled spools which

the top of the hierarchy, including the Inca, wore in their ears, sometimes

with images of the sun on them, may have indicated that those same ears

were hearing the voice of the sun.
But perhaps most suggestive of all is the manner in which this huge

empire was conquered.
16 The unsuspicious meekness of the surrender has

long been the most fascinating problem of the European invasions of

America.
The fact that it occurred is clear, but the record as to why is grimy

with supposition, even in the superstitious Conquistadors who later

recorded it.
How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the

civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150

Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?
It is possible that it was one of the few confrontations between subjective

and bicameral minds, that for things as unfamiliar as Inca Atahualpa was

confronted with—these rough, milkskinned men with hair drooling from

their chins instead of from their scalps so that their heads looked upside

down, clothed in metal, with avertive eyes, riding strange llamalike

creatures with silver hoofs, having arrived like gods in gigantic huampus

tiered like Mochican temples over the sea which to the Inca was unsailable

—that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming from the sun, or

from the golden statues of Cuzco in their dazzling towers.
Not subjectively

conscious, unable to deceive or to narratize out the deception of others, 17

the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons.
And as its

people mechanically watched, this shipload of subjective men stripped the

gold sheathing from the holy city, melted down its golden images and all

the treasures of the Golden Enclosure, its fields of golden corn with stems

and leaves all cunningly wrought in gold, murdered its living god and his

princes, raped its unprotesting women, and, narratizing their Spanish

futures, sailed away with the yellow metal into the subjective conscious

value system from which they had come.
It is a long way from Eynan.
THE LIVING DEAD

The burial of the important dead as if they still lived is common to almost

all these ancient cultures whose architecture we have just looked at.
This

practice has no clear explanation except that their voices were still being

heard by the living, and were perhaps demanding such accommodation.
As

I have suggested at Eynan in I.6 , these dead kings, propped up on stones,

whose voices were hallucinated by the living, were the first gods.
Then as these early cultures develop into bicameral kingdoms, the graves

of their important personages are more and more filled with weapons,

furniture, ornaments, and particularly vessels of food.
This is true of the

very first chamber tombs all over Europe and Asia after 7000 B.C.
and is

elaborated to an extraordinary degree as bicameral kingdoms develop both

in size and complexity.
The magnificent burials of Egyptian pharaohs in a

whole succession of intricately built pyramids are familiar to everyone (see

next chapter).
But similar emplacements, if less awesome, are found

elsewhere.
The kings of Ur, during the first half of the third millennium B.C.,

were entombed with their entire retinues buried, sometimes alive, in a

crouched position around them as for service.
Eighteen of such tombs have

been found, their vaulted subterranean rooms containing food and drink,

clothing, jewelry, weapons, bull-headed lyres, even sacrificed draft animals

yoked to ornate chariots.
18 Others, dating from slightly later periods, have been found at Kish and Ashur.
In Anatolia, at Alaca Hüyük, the royal

graves were roofed with whole carcasses of roasted oxen to ease the

sepulchral appetites of their motionless inhabitants.
Even the ordinary dead man in many cultures is treated as still living.
The very oldest inscriptions on funerary themes are Mesopotamian lists of

the monthly rations of bread and beer to be given to the common dead.
About 2500 B.C., in Lagash, a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer,

420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support,

and 1 bed.19 Some ancient Greek graves not only have the various

appurtenances of life, but actual feeding tubes which seem to indicate that

archaic Greeks poured broths and soups down into the livid jaws of a

moldering corpse.
20 And in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a

painted krater or mixing bowl (numbered 14.130.15) which dates from about 850 B.C.; it shows a boy seemingly tearing his hair with one hand as

with the other he stuffs food into the mouth of a corpse, probably his

mother’s.
This is difficult to appreciate unless the feeder was hallucinating

something from the dead at the time.
The evidence in the Indus civilizations21 is more fragmentary because of

the successive coverings of alluvium, the rotting away of all their writings

on papyrus, and the incompleteness of archaeological investigations.
But

the Indus sites so far excavated often have the cemetery next to the citadel

in a high place with fifteen or twenty food-pots per dead person, consistent

with the hypothesis that they were still felt to be living when buried.
And

the Neolithic burials of the Yang-Shao cultures of China22, wholly undated

except insofar as they precede the middle of the second millennium B.C.,

similarly show burials in plank-lined graves, the corpse accompanied by

pots of food and stone tools.
By 1200 B.C., the Shang dynasty has royal

tombs with slaughtered retinues and animals so similar to those of

Mesopotamia and Egypt a millennium earlier as to convince some scholars

that civilization came to China by diffusion from the West.
23

Similarly in Mesoamerica, Olmec burials from about 800 to 300 B.C.
were

richly furnished with pots of food.
In the Mayan kingdoms, the noble dead

were buried as if living in the plazas of temples.
A chieftain’s tomb recently

found under a temple at Palenque is as elaborately splendid as anything

found in the Old World.
24 At the site of Kaminal-juyu, dating A.D.
500, a chieftain was buried in a sitting position along with two adolescents, a

child, and a dog for his company.
Ordinary men were buried with their

mouths full of ground maize in the hard-mud floors of their houses, with

their tools and weapons, and with pots filled with drink and food, just as in

previous civilizations on the other side of the world.
Also I should mention

the portrait statues of Yucatan that held the ashes of a deceased chief, the

resculptured skulls of Mayapan, and the small catacombs for Andean

commoners bound in a sitting position in the midst of bowls of chicha and

the tools and things used in their lives.25 The dead were then called huaca or godlike, which I take to indicate that they were sources of hallucinated

voices.
And when it was reported by the Conquistadors that these people

declared that it is only a long time after death that the individual ‘dies,’ I

suggest that the proper interpretation is that it takes this time for the

hallucinated voice to finally fade away.
That the dead were the origin of gods is also found in the writings of

those bicameral civilizations that became literate.
In a bilingual incantation

text from Assyria, the dead are directly called Ilani or gods.
26 And on the other side of the world three millennia later, Sahagun, one of the earliest

reporters of the Mesoamerican scene, reported that the Aztecs “called the

place Teotihuacan, burial place of the kings; the ancients said: he who has

died became a god; or when someone said—he who has become a god,

meant to say—he has died.” 27

Even in the conscious period there was the tradition that gods were men

of a previous age who had died.
Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who

preceded his own generation and became the “holy demons upon the earth,

beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.”28 Similar references can be found up to four centuries later, as when Plato refers to heroes who

after death become the demons that tell people what to do.
29

I do not wish to give the impression that the presence of pots of food and

drink in the graves of these civilizations is universal throughout all these

eras; it is general.
But exceptions here often prove the rule.
For example,

Sir Leonard Woolley, when he first started excavating the personal graves at

Larsa in Mesopotamia (which date from about 1900 B.C.), was both

surprised and disappointed by the poverty of their contents.
Even the most

elaborately built vault would have no furnishings other than a couple of

clay pots at the tomb door perhaps, but nothing of the kind of thing found in

graves elsewhere.
The explanation came when he realized that these tombs

were always underneath particular houses, and that the dead man of the

Larsa Age needed no tomb furniture or large amounts of food because

everything in the house was still at his disposal.
The food and drink at the

tomb door may have been like an emergency measure, so that when the

dead man ‘mixed’ with the family, he came forth in a kindly mood.
Thus, from Mesopotamia to Peru, the great civilizations have at least

gone through a stage characterized by a kind of burial as if the individual

were still living.
And where writing could record it, the dead were often

called gods.
At the very least, this is consistent with the hypothesis that

their voices were still heard in hallucination.
But is this a necessary relationship?
Could not grief itself promote such

practices, a kind of refusal to accept the death of a loved one or a revered

leader, calling dead persons gods as a kind of endearment?
Possibly.
This

explanation, however, is not sufficient to account for the entire pattern of

the evidence, the pervasion of references to the dead as gods in different regions of the world, the vastness of some of the enterprise as in the great

pyramids, and even the contemporary vestiges in lore and literature of

ghosts returning from their graves with messages for the living.
IDOLS THAT SPEAK

A third feature of primitive civilization that I take to be indicative of

bicamerality is the enormous numbers and kinds of human effigies and their

obvious centrality to ancient life.
The first effigies in history were of course

the propped-up corpses of chiefs, or the remodeled skulls we have referred

to earlier.
But thereafter they have an astonishing development.
It is

difficult to understand their obvious importance to the cultures involved

with them apart from the supposition that they were aids in hallucinating

voices.
But this is far from a simple matter, and quite different principles

may be intertwined in the full explanation.
Figurines

The smallest of these effigies are figurines, which have been found in

almost all of the ancient kingdoms, beginning with the first stationary

settlements of man.
During the seventh and sixth millennia B.C , they are

extremely primitive, small stones with incised features or grotesque clay

figures.
Evidence of their importance in cultures of about 5600 B.C.
is

provided by the excavations at Hacilar in southwest Turkey.
Flat standing

female effigies, made of baked clay or stone with incised eyes, nose, hair,

and chin were found in each house,30 as if, I suggest, they were its

occupant’s hallucinatory controls.
The Amatrian and Gerzean cultures of

Egypt, about 3600 B.C., had carved tusks with bearded heads and black

‘targets’ for eyes, each about six to eight inches and suitable to be held in

the hand.
31 And these were so important that they were stood upright in the

grave of their owner when he died.
Figurines in huge numbers have been unearthed in most of the

Mesopotamian cultures, at Lagash, Uruk, Nippur, and Susa.
32 At Ur, clay figures painted in black and red were found in boxes of burned brick placed

under the floor against the walls but with one end opened, facing into the

center of the room.
The function of all these figurines, however, is as mysterious as anything

in all archaeology.
The most popular view goes back to the uncritical mania

with which ethnology, following Frazer, wished to find fertility cults at the

drop of a carved pebble.
But if such figurines indicate something about

Frazerian fertility, we should not find them where fertility was no problem.
But we do.
In the Olmec civilization of the most fertile part of Mexico, the

figurines are of an astonishing variety, often with open mouths and

exaggerated ears, as might be expected if they were fashioned as

embodiments of heard voices with whom dialogue could be carried on.
33

The explanation, however, is not simple.
Figurines seemed to go through

an evolution, just as did the culture of which they are a part.
The early

Olmec figurines, to stay with the same example, develop through their first

period an exaggerated prognathism until they look almost like animals.
And

then, in the period of Teotihuacan, they are more refined and delicate, with

huge hats and capes, painted with daubs of fugitive red, yellow, and white paint, looking much like Olmec priests.
A third period of Olmec figurines

has them more carefully modeled and realistic, some with jointed arms and

legs, some with hollow reliquaries in their torsos closed by a small square

lid and containing other minute figurines, perhaps denoting the confusion of

bicameral guidance that occurred just before the great Olmec civilization

collapsed.
For it was at the end of this period of a profusion of figurines, as

well as of huge new half-finished open-mouth statues, that the great city of

Teotihuacan was deliberately destroyed, its temples burned, its walls

leveled, and the city abandoned, around A.D.
700.
Had the voices ceased,

resulting in the increased effigy making?
Or had they multiplied into

confusion?
Because of their size and number, it is doubtful if the majority of

figurines occasioned auditory hallucinations.
Some indeed may have been

mnemonic devices, reminders to a nonconscious people who could not

voluntarily retrieve admonitory experience, perhaps functioning like the

quipu or knot-string literature of the Incas or the beads of rosaries of our

own culture.
For example, the Mesopotamian bronze foundation figurines

buried at the corners of new buildings and under thresholds of doors are of

three kinds: a kneeling god driving a peg into the ground, a basket carrier,

and a recumbent bull.
The current theory about them, that they are to pin

down evil spirits beneath the building, is scarcely sufficient.
Instead it is

possible that they were semi-hallucinatory mnemonic aids for a

nonconscious people in setting the posts straight, in carrying the materials,

or using oxen to pull the larger materials to the site.
One of many thousands of alabaster “eye idols” that can be held in the hand.
From about 3300 B.C., excavated at Brak on an upper tributary of the Euphrates.
The stag is the symbol of the goddess Ninhurug.
But some of these small objects, we may be confident, were capable of

assisting with the production of bicameral voices.
Consider the eye-idols in

black and white alabaster, thin crackerlike bodies surmounted by eyes once

tinted with malachite paint, which have been found in the thousands,

particularly at Brak on one of the upper branches of the Euphrates, that date

about 3000 B.C.
Like the earlier Amatrian and Gerzean tusk idols of Egypt,

they are suitable to be held in the hand.
Most have one pair of eyes, but

some have two; some wear crowns and some have markings clearly

indicating gods.
Larger eye-idols made of terra cotta have been found at

other sites, Ur, Mari, and Lagash; and, because the eyes are open loops,

have been called spectacle-idols.
Others, made of stone and placed on

podiums and altars,34 are like two cylindrical doughnuts positioned a

distance above an incised square platform that could be a mouth.
A Theory of Idols

Now this needs a little more psychologizing.
Eye-to-eye contact in

primates is extremely important.
Below humans, it is indicative of the

hierarchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away

grinning in many primate species.
But in humans, perhaps because of the

much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social

interaction of great importance.
An infant child, when its mother speaks to

it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips.
This response is automatic and

universal.
The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority

relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory

that has yet to be traced.
It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are

more likely to feel a superior’s authority when you and he are staring

straight into each other’s eyes.
There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness

about the experience, and withal something of a diminution of

consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it

would enhance the hallucination of divine speech.
The eyes thus become a prominent feature of most temple statuary

throughout the bicameral period.
The diameter of the human eye is about 10

percent of the height of the head, this proportion being what I shall call the

eye index of an idol.
The famous group of twelve statues discovered in the

Favissa of the temple of Abu at Tell Asmar, 35 the symbols carved on their bases indicating that they are gods, have eye indices of as high as 18

percent—huge globular eyes hypnotically staring out of the unrecorded past

of 5000 years ago with defiant authority.
Other idols from other sites show the same thing.
A particularly beautiful

and justly famous white marble head from Uruk36 has an eye index of over

20 percent, the sculpture showing that the eyes and the eyebrows were once

encrusted with dazzling gems, the face colored, the hair tinted, the head part

of a life- sized wooden statue now dust.
Around 2700 B.C.
alabaster and

calcite statues of fluffily skirted gods, rulers, and priests abounded in the

luxurious civilization on the middle Euphrates called Mari, their eyes up to

18 percent of the height of the head and heavily outlined with black paint.
In the main temple of Mari ruled the famous Goddess with the Flowering

Vase, her huge empty eye sockets having once contained hypnotic gems,

her hands holding a tilted aryballos.
A pipe from a tank going within the

idol allowed the aryballos to overflow with water which streamed down the

idol’s robe, clothing her lower parts with a translucent liquid veil, and

adding a sibilant sound suitable to be molded into hallucinated speech.
And

then the famous series of statues of the enigmatic Gudea, ruler of Lagash,

about 2100 B.C., carved in the hardest stone, with eye indices of

approximately 17 or 18 percent.
The eye indices of temple and tomb sculptures of pharaohs in Egypt are

sometimes as high as 20 percent.
The few wooden statues from Egypt that

have remained show than their enlarged eyes were once made of quarts and

crystal inserted in a copper surround.
As might be expected from its god-

king type of theocracy (see next chapter) idols in Egypt do not seem to have

played so prominent a role as in Mesopotamia.
Few examples of Indus stone sculpture survive, but these few show

pronounced eye indices of over 20 percent.
37 No idols are yet known from

the bicameral period of China.
But as civilization begins again in

Mesoamerica around 900 B.C., it is as if we were back in the Near East

several millennia earlier, though with certain unique prospects: huge heads

carved out of hard basalt, often eight feet tall, usually with a cap, sometimes

with large ear pads like a football helmet, resting bodiless on the ground

near La Venta and Tres Zapoltes (some of them now removed to Olmec

Park at Villahermosa).
The eye indices of these heads ranged from a normal

11 percent to over 19 percent.
Usually the mouth is half open as in speech.
There are also many Olmec ceramic idols of a strange sexless child, always

seated with legs spread-eagled as if to expose his sexlessness, and leaning

forward to stare intently through wide slits of eyes, the full-lipped mouth

half open as in speech.
The eye index, if the eyes were open, in the several

of them I have examined averaged 17 percent.
Figurines in the Olmec

culture were sometimes half life-sized with even larger eye indices; they are

often found in burials as at the Olmec-influenced site of Tlatilco, near

Mexico City, of about 500 B.C., as if the deceased was buried with his own

personal idol which still could tell him what to do.
The god Abu (right), with an unknown goddess (left).
Both were found in a temple at Tell Asmar near present-day Baghdad and are now in its museum.
From about 2600 B.C.
Mayan idols do not usually show such abnormal eye indices.
But in the

great cities of Yucatan, portrait statues were made of deceased leaders for, I

think, the same hallucinogenic purpose.
The back of the head was left

hollow and the cremated ashes of the dead placed in it.
And according to

Landa, who witnessed this practice in the sixteenth century, “they preserved

these statues with a great deal of veneration.”38





Mayan god, a stela about twelve feet high, from Copan in Honduras.
It was carved about 700 A.D.
The Cocoms that once ruled Mayapan, around A.D.
1200, repeated what

the Natufian culture of Jericho had done 9000 years earlier.
They

decapitated their dead “and after cooking the heads, they cleaned off the

flesh and then sawed off half the crown at the back, leaving entire the front

part with jaws and teeth.
Then they replaced the flesh...
with a kind of

bitumen \[and plaster] which gave them a natural and lifelike appearance...
these they kept in the oratories in their houses and on festive days offered

food to them...
they believed that their souls reposed within and that these

gifts were useful to them.”39 There is nothing here inconsistent with the notion that such prepared heads were so treated because they ‘contained’

the voices of their former owners.
Many other kinds of idols were also used by the Maya, and in such

profusion that when, in 1565, a Spanish mayor ordered the abolition of

idolatry in his city, he was aghast when “in my presence, upwards of a

million were brought.”40 Another type of Mayan idol was made of cedar

which the Maya called kuche or holy wood.
“And this they called to make

gods.” They were carved by fasting priests called chaks, in great fear and

trembling, shut into a little straw hut blessed with incense and prayer, the

god-carvers “frequently cutting their ears and with the blood anointing the

gods and burning incense to them.” When finished, the gods were lavishly

dressed and placed upon daises in small buildings, some of which by being

in more inaccessible places have escaped the ravages of Christianity or of

time, and are still being discovered.
According to a sixteenth-century

observer, “the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so

sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even men.”41, 42



The Speech of Idols

How can we know that such idols ‘spoke’ in the bicameral sense?
I have

tried to suggest that the very existence of statuary and figurines requires an

explanation in a way that has not previously been perceived.
The hypothesis

of the bicameral mind renders such an explanation.
The setting up of such

idols in religious places, the exaggerated eyes in the early stages of every

civilization, the practice of inserting gems of brilliant sorts into the eye

sockets in several civilizations, an elaborate ritual for the opening of the

mouth for new statues in the two most important early civilizations (as we

shall see in the next chapter), all these present a pattern of evidence at least.
Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking.
Even as late as

the early first millennium B.C., a royal letter reads:



I have taken note of the portents...
I had them recited in order

before Shamash...
the royal image \[a statue] of Akkad brought up

visions before me and cried out: “What pernicious portent have you

tolerated in the royal image?” Again it spoke: “Say to the Gardener...
\[and here the cuneiform becomes unreadable, but then goes on]...
it

made inquiry concerning Ningal-Iddina, Shamash-Ibni, and Na’id-

Marduk.
Concerning the rebellion in the land it said: “Take the wall

cities one after the other, that a cursed one will not be able to stand

before the Gardener.”43



The Old Testament also indicated that one of the types of idol there

referred to, the Terap, could speak.
Ezekiel, 21:21, describes the king of

Babylon as consulting with several of them.
Further direct evidence comes

from America.
The conquered Aztecs told the Spanish invaders how their

history began when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous

culture spoke to their leaders.
It commanded them to cross the lake from

where they were, and to carry its statue with them wherever they went,

directing them hither and thither, even as the unembodied bicameral voices

led Moses zigzagging across the Sinai desert.44

And finally the remarkable evidence from Peru.
All the first reports of

the conquest of Peru by the Inquisition-taught Spaniards are consistent in

regarding the Inca kingdom as one commanded by the Devil.
Their

evidence was that the Devil himself actually spoke to the Incas out of the

mouths of their statues.
To these coarse dogmatized Christians, coming

from one of the most ignorant counties of Spain, this caused little

astonishment.
The very first report back to Europe said, “in the temple \[of

Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark

room which was as dirty as he himself.” 45 And a later account reported that


...
it was a thing very common and approved at the Indies, that the

Devill spake and answered in these false sanctuaries...
It was

commonly in the night they entered backward to their idoll and so

went bending their bodies and head, after an uglie manner, and so they

consulted with him.
The answer he made, was commonly like unto a

fearefull hissing, or to a gnashing which did terrifie them; and all that

he did advertise or command them, was but the way to their perdition

and ruine.
46







Chapter 2





Literate Bicameral Theocracies

WHAT IS writing?
Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols

of phonetic events.
And that is an amazing transformation!
Writing of the

latter type, as on the present page, is meant to tell a reader something he

does not know.
But, the closer writing is to the former, the more it is

primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader

already has.
The protoliterate pictograms of Uruk, the iconography in the

early depictions of gods, the glyphics of the Maya, the picture codices of

the Aztecs, and, indeed, our own heraldry are all of this sort.
The

informations they are meant to release in those who look upon them may be

forever lost and the writing therefore forever untranslatable.
The two kinds of writing which fall between these two extremes, half

picture and half symbol, are those on which this chapter is based.
They are

Egyptian hieroglyphics with its abridged and somewhat cursive form,

hieratic, the terms meaning “writing of the gods,” and the more widely used

writing which later scholars called cuneiform from its wedge-shaped

characters.
The latter is for us the most important, and the remains we have of it, far

more extensive.
Thousands of tablets wait to be translated and more

thousands to be unburied.
It was used for at least four languages, Sumerian,

Akkadian, Hurrian, and later the Hittite.
Instead of an alphabet of twenty-

six letters, as in ours, or of twenty-two letters, as in the Aramaic (which

except for religious texts replaced cuneiform around 200 B.C.), it is a clumsy

and ambiguous communication system of over 600 signs.
Many of these are

ideographic, in which the same sign can be a syllable, an idea, a name, or a

word with more than one meaning, according to the class it belonged to,

this class irregularly being shown by a special mark.
Only by the context

are we able to unravel which it is.
For example, the sign

means

nine different things: when pronounced as šamšu it means sun; when

pronounced ūmu, it means day; when pisu it means white; and it also stands for the syllables ud, tu tam, pir, lah, and his.
The difficulties of being crystal clear in such a contextual mess were great enough in its own day.
But when we are exiled from the culture that the language describes by

4000 years, translation is an enormous and fascinating problem.
The same

is true in general for hieroglyphic and hieratic writing.
When the terms are concrete, as they usually are, for most of the

cuneiform literature is receipts or inventories or offerings for gods, there is

little doubt of the correctness of translation.
But as the terms tend to the

abstract, and particularly when a psychological interpretation is possible,

then we find well-meaning translators imposing modern categories to make

their translations comprehensible.
The popular and even the scholarly

literatures are full of such sugared emendations and palatablized glosses to

make ancient men seem like us, or at least talk like the King James Bible.
A

translator often reads in more than he reads out.
Many of those texts that

seem to be about decision-making, or so-called proverbs, or epics, or

teachings, should be reinterpreted with concrete behavioral precision if we

are to trust them as data for the psycho-archaeology of man.
And I am

warning the reader that the effect of this chapter is not in accord with

popular books on the subject.
With these cautions in mind, then, let us proceed.
When, in the third millennium B.C., writing, like a theater curtain going

up on these dazzling civilizations, lets us stare directly if imperfectly at

them, it is clear that for some time there have been two main forms of

theocracy: (1) the steward-king theocracy in which the chief or king is the

first deputy of the gods, or, more usually, a particular city’s god, the

manager and caretaker of his lands.
This was the most important and

widespread form of theocracy among bicameral kingdoms.
It was the

pattern in the many Mesopotamian bicameral city-states, of Mycenae as we

saw in I.3 , and, so far as we know, in India, China, and probably

Mesoamerica.
(2) the god-king theocracy in which the king himself is a

god.
The clearest examples of this form existed in Egypt and at least some

of the kingdoms of the Andes, and probably the earliest kingdom of Japan.
I

have earlier suggested in I.6 that both types developed out of the more

primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by obeying the

hallucinated voice of a dead king.
I shall take these up in turn in the two greatest ancient civilizations.
MESOPOTAMIA: THE GODS AS OWNERS

Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all

lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves.
Of this, the

cuneiform texts leave no doubt whatever.
1 Each city-state had its own principal god, and the king was described in the very earliest written

documents that we have as “the tenant farmer of the god.”

The god himself was a statue.
The statue was not of a god (as we would

say) but the god himself.
He had his own house, called by the Sumerians

the “great house.” It formed the center of a complex of temple buildings,

varying in size according to the importance of the god and the wealth of the

city.
The god was probably made of wood to be light enough to be carried

about on the shoulders of priests.
His face was inlaid with precious metals

and jewels.
He was clothed in dazzling raiment, and usually resided on a

pedestal in a niche in a central chamber of his house.
The larger and more

important god-houses had lesser courts surrounded by rooms for the use of

the steward-kings and subsidiary priests.
In most of the great city sites excavated in Mesopotamia, the house of a

chief god was the ziggurat, a great rectangular tower, rising by diminishing

stages to a shining summit on which there was a chapel.
In the center of the

ziggurat was the gigunu, a large chamber in which most scholars believe the

statue of the chief god resided, but which others believe was used only for

ritual purposes.
Such ziggurats or similar towering temple structures are

common to most of the bicameral kingdoms in some period.
Since the divine statue was the owner of the land and the people were his

tenants, the first duty of the steward-king was to serve the god not only in

the administration of the god’s estates but also in more personal ways.
The

gods, according to cuneiform texts, liked eating and drinking, music and

dancing; they required beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other god-

statues on connubial visits from time to time; they had to be washed and

dressed, and appeased with pleasant odors; they had to be taken out for

drives on state occasions; and all these things were done with increasing

ceremony and ritual as time went on.
The daily ritual of the temple included the washing, dressing, and feeding of the statues.
The washing was probably done through the sprinkling of

pure water by attendant priests, the origin, perhaps, of our christening and

anointing ceremonies.
The dressing was by enrobing the figure in various

ways.
In front of the god were tables, the origin of our altars, on one of

which flowers were placed, and on the other food and drink for the divine

hunger.
Such food consisted of bread and cakes, the flesh of bulls, sheep,

goats, deer, fish, and poultry.
According to some interpretations of the

cuneiform, the food was brought in and then the statue-god was left to

enjoy his meal alone.
Then, after a suitable period of time, the steward-king

entered the shrine room from a side entrance and ate what the god had left.
The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper.
This was called

“appeasing the liver” of the gods, and consisted in offerings of butter, fat,

honey, sweetmeats placed on the tables as with regular food.
Presumably, a

person whose bicameral voice was condemnatory and angry would come

bringing such offerings to the god’s house.
How is all this possible, continuing as it did in some form for thousands

of years as the central focus of life, unless we posit that the human beings

heard the statues speak to them even as the heroes of the Iliad heard their

gods or Joan of Arc heard hers?
And indeed had to hear them speak to

know what to do.
We can read this directly in the texts themselves.
The great Cylinder B of

Gudea (about 2100 B.C.) describes how in a new temple for his god

Ningirsu, the priestesses placed


...
the goddesses Zazaru, Impae, Urentaea, Khegirnunna, Kheshagga,

Guurmu, Zaarmu, who are the seven children of the brood of Bail that

were begotten by the lord Ningirsu, to utter favorable decisions by the

side of the lord Ningirsu.2



The particular decisions to be uttered here were about various aspects of

agriculture that the grain might “cover the banks of the holy field” and “all

the rich graineries of Lagash to make to overflow.” And a clay cone from

the dynasty of Larsa about 1700 B.C.
praises the goddess Ninegal as


...
counsellor, exceeding wise commander, princess of all the great gods, exalted speaker, whose utterance is unrivaled.
3



Everywhere in these texts, it is the speech of gods who decide what is to

be done.
A cone from Lagash reads:



Mesilin king of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the

plantation of that field set up a stele in that place.
Ush, patesi of

Umma, incantations to seize it formed; that stele he broke in pieces;

into the plain of Lagash he advanced.
Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil, by

his righteous command, upon Umma war made.
At the command of

Enlil his great net ensnared.
Their burial mound on the plain in that

place he erected.4



It is not the human beings who are the rulers, but the hallucinated voices of

the gods Kadi, Ningirsu, and Enlil.
Note that this passage is about a stele, or

stone column, engraved with a god’s words in cuneiform and set up in a

field to tell how that field was to be farmed.
That such stelae themselves

were epiphanous is suggested by the way they were attacked and defended

and smashed or carried away.
And that they were sources of auditory

hallucinations is suggested in other texts.
One particularly pertinent passage

from a different context describes reading a stele at night:



The polished surface of its side his hearing makes known; its writing

which is engraved his hearing makes known; the light of the torch

assists his hearing.5



Reading in the third millennium B.C.
may therefore have been a matter of

hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its

picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
The word for ‘hearing’ here is a Sumerian sign that transliterates GIŠ-TUG-

PI.
Many other royal inscriptions state how the king or other personage is

endowed by some god with this GIŠ-TUG-PI hearing which enables him to

great things.
Even as late as 1825 B.C., Warad-Sin, king of Larsa, claims in

an inscription on a clay cone that he rebuilt the city with GIŠ-TUG-PI DAGAL,

or “hearing everywhere” his god Enki.6



The Mouth-Washing Ceremonies

Further evidence that such statues were aids to the hallucinated voices is

found in other ceremonies all described precisely and concretely on

cuneiform tablets.
The statue-gods were made in the bit-mummu, a special

divine craftsman’s house.
Even the craftsmen were directed in their work by

a craftsman-god, Mummuy who ‘dictated’ how to make the statue.
Before

being installed in their shrines, the statues underwent mis-pi which means

mouth-washing, and the ritual of pit-pi or “opening of the mouth.”

Not only when the statue was being made, but also periodically,

particularly in the later bicameral era when the hallucinated voices may

have become less frequent, an elaborate washing-of-the-mouth ceremony

could renew the god’s speech.
The god with its face of inlaid jewels was

carried by dripping torchlight to the riverbank, and there, imbedded in

ceremonies and incantation, his wood mouth washed several times as the

god was faced east, west, north, and then south.
The holy water with which

the mouth was washed out was a solution of a multitude of exotic

ingredients: tamarisks, reeds of various kinds, sulphur, various gums, salts,

and oils, date honey, with various precious stones.
Then after more

incantations, the god was “led by the hand” back into the street with the

priest incanting “foot that advanceth, foot that advanceth...” At the gate of

the temple, another ceremony was performed.
The priest then took “the

hand” of the god and led him in to his throne in the niche, where a golden

canopy was set up and the statue’s mouth washed again.7

Bicameral kingdoms should not be thought of as everywhere the same or

as not undergoing considerable development through time.
The texts from

which the above information has come are from approximately the late third

millennium B.C.
They may therefore represent a late development of

bicamerality in which the very complexity of the culture could have been

making the hallucinated voices less clear and frequent, thus giving rise to

such a cleansing ritual in hope of rejuvenating the voice of the god.
The Personal God

But it is not to be supposed that the ordinary citizen heard directly the

voices of the great gods who owned the cities; such hallucinatory diversity

would have weakened the political fabric.
He served the owner gods,

worked their estates, took part in their festivals.
But he appealed to them

only in some great crisis, and then only through intermediaries.
This is

shown on countless cylinder seals.
A large proportion of the inventory type

of cuneiform tablets have impressions on the reverse side rolled from such

seals; commonly, they show a seated god and another minor divinity,

usually a goddess, conducting the owner of the tablet by the right hand into

the divine presence.
Such intermediaries were the personal gods.
Each individual, king or

serf, had his own personal god whose voice he heard and obeyed.8 In

almost every house excavated, there existed a shrine-room that probably

contained idols or figurines as the inhabitant’s personal gods.
Several late

cuneiform texts describe rituals for them similar to the mouth-washing

ceremonies for the great gods.9

These personal gods could be importuned to visit other gods higher up in

the divine hierarchy for some particular boon.
Or, in the other direction,

strange as it seems to us: when the owner gods had chosen a prince to be a

steward-king, the city-god informed the appointee’s personal god of the

decision first, and only then the individual himself.
According to my

discussion in I.
5, all this layering was going on in the right hemisphere and

I am well aware of the problem of authenticity and group acceptance of

such selection.
As elsewhere in antiquity, it was the personal god who was

responsible for what the king did, as it was for the commoner.
Other cuneiform texts state that a man lived in the shadow of his personal

god, his ili.
So inextricably were a man and his personal god bound together

that the composition of his personal name usually included the name of the

personal god, thus making obvious the bicameral nature of the man.
It is of

considerable interest when the name of the king is indicated as the personal

god: Rim-Sin-Ili, which means “Rim-Sin is my god,” Rim-Sin being a king

of Larsa, or, more simply, Sharru-Ili, “the king is my god.” 10 These

instances suggest that the steward-king himself could sometimes be

hallucinated.
When the King Becomes a God

This possibility shows that the distinction I have made between the

steward-king type of theocracy and the god-king is not an absolute one.
Moreover, on several cuneiform tablets, a number of the earlier

Mesopotamian kings have beside their names the eight-pointed star which

is the determinative sign indicating deity.
In one early text, eleven out of a

larger number of kings of Ur and Isin are given this or another divine

determinative.
A number of theories have been proposed as to what this

means, none of them very gripping.
The clues to look at are, I think, that the divine determinative is often

given to these kings only late in their reigns, and then only in certain of

their cities.
This may mean that the voice of a particularly powerful king

may have been heard in hallucination but only by a certain proportion of his

people, only after he had reigned for some time, and only in certain places.
Yet even in these instances, there seems throughout Mesopotamia a

significant and continuing distinction between such divine kings and the

gods proper.
11 But this is not at all true of Egypt, to which we now turn.
EGYPT: THE KINGS AS GODS

The great basin of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers looses its identity, feature

by feature, into the limitless deserts of Arabia and the gradual foothills of

the mountain chains of Persia and Armenia.
But Egypt, except in the south,

is clearly defined by bilaterally symmetrical immutable frontiers.
A pharaoh

extending his authority in the Nile Valley soon reached what he might raid

but never conquer.
And thus Egypt was always more uniform both

geographically and ethnologically, both in space and in time.
Its people

through the ages were also of a remarkably similar physique, as has been

shown from studies of remaining skulls.
12 It is this protected homogeneity, I suggest, which allowed the perpetuation of that more archaic form of

theocracy, the god-king.
The Memphite Theology

Let us begin with the famous “Memphite Theology.” 13 This is an eighth-

century B.C.
granite block on which a previous work (presumably a rotting

leather roll of around 3000 B.C.) was copied.
It begins with a reference to a

“creator” god Ptah, proceeds through the quarrels of the gods Horus and

Seth and their arbitration by Geb, describes the construction of the royal

god-house at Memphis, and then, in a famous final section, states that the

various gods are variations of Ptah’s voice or “tongue.”

Now when “tongue” here is translated as something like the “objectified

conceptions of his mind,” as it so often is, this is surely an imposing of

modern categories upon the texts.
14 Ideas such as objectified conceptions of a mind, or even the notion of something spiritual being manifested, are of

much later development.
It is generally agreed that the ancient Egyptian

language, like the Sumerian, was concrete from first to last.
To maintain

that it is expressing abstract thoughts would seem to me an intrusion of the

modern idea that men have always been the same.
Also, when the

Memphite Theology speaks of the tongue or voices as that from which

everything was created, I suspect that the very word “created” may also be

a modern imposition, and the more proper translation might be commanded.
This theology, then, is essentially a myth about language, and what Ptah is

really commanding is indeed the bicameral voices which began, controlled,

and directed Egyptian civilization.
Osiris, the Dead King’s Voice

There has been some astonishment that mythology and reality should be

so mixed that the heavenly contention of Horus and Seth is over real land,

and that the figure of Osiris in the last section has a real grave in Memphis,

and also that each king at death becomes Osiris, just as each king in life is

Horus.
If it is assumed that all of these figures are particular voice

hallucinations heard by kings and their next in rank, and that the voice of a

king could continue after his death and ‘be’ the guiding voice of the next,

and that the myths about various contentions and relationships with other

gods are attempted rationalizations of conflicting admonitory authoritative

voices mingled with the authoritative structure in the actuality of the

society, at least we are given a new way to look at the subject.
Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a “dying god,”

not “life caught in the spell of death,” or “a dead god,” as modern

interpreters have said.
He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose

admonitions could still carry weight.
And since he could still be heard,

there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once

came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing

life’s necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot.
There was no

mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice

which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which

could admonish or suggest even as it had before he stopped moving and

breathing.
And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of

waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief

that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his

mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile.
Further, the

relationship between Horus and Osiris, ‘embodied’ in each new king and

his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an

hallucinated advising voice into the king’s own voice, which then would be

repeated with the next generation.
Mansions for Voices

That the voice and therefore the power of a god-king lived on after his

body stopped moving and breathing is certainly suggested by the manner of

his burial.
Yet burial is the wrong word.
Such divine kings were not

morosely entombed, but gaily empalaced.
Once the art of building with

stone was mastered shortly after 3000 B.C., what once had been the stepped

matsaba tombs leap up into those playhouses of bicameral voices in

immortal life we call the pyramids: complexes of festive courts and

galleries merry with holy pictures and writing, often surrounded by acres of

the graves of the god’s servants, and dominated by the god’s pyramidal

house itself, soaring sunward like a shining ziggurat with an almost too

confident exterior austerity, and built with an integrity that did not scruple

to use the hardest of stones, polished basalts, granites, and diorites, as well

as alabaster and limestone.
The psychology of all this is yet to be uncovered.
So seriously has the

evidence been torn away by collectors of all ranks of guilt that the whole

question may be forever wrapped in unanswerableness.
For the unmoving

mummy of the god-king is often in a curiously plain sarcophagus, while the

gaudy effigies made of him are surrounded with a different reverence—

perhaps because it was from them that the hallucinations seemed to come.
Like the god-statues of Mesopotamia they were life-sized or larger,

sometimes elaborately painted, usually with jewels for eyes long since

hacked out of their sockets by conscious nonhallucinating robbers.
But

unlike their eastern cousins, they did not have to be moved and so were

finely chiseled out of limestone, slate, diorite, or other stone, and only in

certain eras carved from wood.
Usually, they were set permanently in

niches, some seated, some standing free, some in multiples of the god-king

in standing or seated rows, and some walled up in small chapels called

serdabs with two small eyeholes in front of the jewel-eyes so that the god

could see out into the room before him, where there were offerings of food

and treasure and we know not what else, so have these tombs been

plundered.
Occasionally the actual voices hallucinated from the deceased

god-king came to be written down as in “The Instructions which the

Majesty of King Amenemhet I justified, gave when he spoke in a dream-

revelation to his son.”

The commoner also was buried in a manner as if he still lived.
The

peasant since predynastic times had been buried with pots of food, tools,

and offerings for his continued life.
Those higher in the social hierachy

were given a funeral feast in which the corpse itself somehow took part.
Scenes showing the deceased eating at his own funerary table came to be

carved on slabs and set into a niche in the wall of the grave-mound or

mastaba.
Later graves elaborated this into stone-lined chambers with

painted reliefs and serdabs with statues and offerings as in the pyramids

proper.
Often, “true-of-voice” was an epithet added to the name of a dead person.
This is difficult to understand apart from the present theory.
“True-of-voice”

originally applied to Osiris and Horus with reference to their victories over

their opponents.
Letters too were written to the dead as if they still lived.
Probably this

occurred only after some time when the person so addressed could no

longer be ‘heard’ in hallucinations.
A man writes his dead mother asking

her to arbitrate between himself and his dead brother.
How is this possible

unless the living brother had been hearing his dead brother in hallucination?
Or a dead man is begged to awaken his ancestors to help his widow and

child.
These letters are private documents dealing with everyday matters,

and are free of official doctrine or make-believe.
A New Theory of the Ka

If we could say that ancient Egypt had a psychology, we would then have

to say that its fundamental notion is the ka, and the problem becomes what

the ka is.
Scholars struggling with the meaning of this particularly

disturbing concept, which we find constantly in Egyptian inscriptions, have

translated it in a litter of ways, as spirit, ghost, double, vital force, nature,

luck, destiny, and what have you.
It has been compared to the life-spirit of

the Semites and Greeks, as well as to the genius of the Romans.
But

obviously, these later concepts are the hand-me-downs of the bicameral

mind.
Nor can this slippery diversity of meanings be explained by positing

an Egyptian mentality in which words were used in several ways as

approaches to the same mysterious entity, or by assuming “the peculiar

quality of Egyptian thought which allows an object to be understood not by

a single and consistent definition, but by various and unrelated

approaches.”15 None of this is satisfactory.
The evidence from hieratic texts is confusing.
Each person has his ka and

speaks of it as we might of our will power.
Yet when one dies, one goes to

one’s ka.
In the famous Pyramid Texts around 2200 B.C., the dead are called

“masters of their ka’s.” The symbol in hieroglyphics for the ka is one of

admonishing: two arms uplifted with flat outspread hands, the whole placed

upon a stand which in hieroglyphics is only used to support the symbols of

divinities.
It is obvious from the preceding chapters that the ka requires a

reinterpretation as a bicameral voice.
It is, I believe, what the ili or personal

god was in Mesopotamia.
A man’s ka was his articulate directing voice

which he heard inwardly, perhaps in parental or authoritative accents, but

which when heard by his friends or relatives even after his own death, was,

of course, hallucinated as his own voice.
If we can here relax our insistence upon the unconsciousness of these

people, and, for a moment, imagine that they were something like

ourselves, we could imagine a worker out in the fields suddenly hearing the

ka or hallucinated voice of the vizier over him admonishing him in some

way.
If, after he returned to his city, he told the vizier that he had heard the

vizier’s ka (which in actuality there would be no reason for his doing), the vizier, were he conscious as are we, would assume that it was the same

voice that he himself heard and which directed his life.
Whereas in

actuality, to the worker in the fields, the vizier’s ka sounded like the vizier’s

own voice.
While to the vizier himself, his ka would speak in the voices of

authorities over him, or some amalgamation of them.
And, of course, the

discrepancy could never be discovered.
Consistent with this interpretation are several other aspects of the ka.
The

Egyptians’ attitude toward the ka is entirely passive.
Just as in the case of

the Greek gods, hearing it is tantamount to obeying it.
It empowers what it

commands.
Courtiers in some of their inscriptions referring to the king say,

“I did what his ka loved” or “I did that which his ka approved,”16 which may be interpreted as the courtier hearing the hallucinated voice of his king

approving his work.
In some texts it is said that the king makes a man’s ka, and some scholars

translate ka in this sense as fortune.17 Again, this is a modern imposition.
A concept such as fortune or success is impossible in the bicameral culture of

Egypt.
What is meant here according to my reading is that the man acquires

an admonitory hallucinated voice which then can direct him in his work.
Frequently the ka crops up in names of Egyptian officials as did the Hi with

Mesopotamian officials.
Kaininesut, “my ka belongs to the king,” or

Kainesut, “the king is my ka.”18 In the Cairo Museum, stela number 20538

says, “the king gives his servants Ka’s and feeds those who are faithful.”

The ka of the god-king is of particular interest.
It was heard, I suggest, by

the king in the accents of his own father.
But it was heard in the

hallucinations of his courtiers as the king’s own voice, which is the really

important thing.
Texts state that when a king sat at a meal and ate, his ka sat

and ate with him.
The pyramids are full of false doors, sometimes simply

painted on the limestone walls, through which the deceased god-king’s ka

could pass out into the world and be heard.
It is only the king’s ka which is

pictured on monuments, sometimes as a standard bearer holding the staff of

the king’s head and the feather, or as a bird perched behind the king’s head.
But most significant are the representations of the king’s ka as his twin in

birth scenes.
In one such scene, the god Khnum is shown forming the king

and his ka on his potter’s wheel.
They are identical small figures except that

the ka has his left hand pointing to his mouth, obviously suggesting that he

is what we might describe as a persona of speech.
19





The god Khnum forming the future king with the right hand and the king’s ka with the left on the potter’s wheel.
Note that the ka points with its left hand to its mouth, indicating its verbal function.
The lateralization throughout is in accordance with the neurological model presented in I.5.
Perhaps evidence for a growing complexity in all this are several texts

from the eighteenth dynasty or 1500 B.C.
onward, which casually say that

the king has fourteen ka’s!
This very perplexing statement may indicate that

the structure of the government had become so complicated that the king’s

hallucinated voice was heard as fourteen different voices, these being the

voices of intermediaries between the king and those who were carrying out

his orders directly.
The notion of the king having fourteen ka’s is

inexplicable by any other notion of what a ka is.
Each king then is Horus, his father dead becoming Osiris, and has his ka,

or in later ages, his several ka’s, which could best be translated now as

voice-persona.
An understanding of this is essential for the understanding of

the entire Egyptian culture since the relation of king, god, and people is

defined by means of the ka.
The king’s ka is, of course, the ka of a god,

operates as his messenger, to himself is the voice of his ancestors, and to his

underlings is the voice they hear telling them what to do.
And when a

subject in some of the texts says, “my ka derives from the king” or “the

king makes my ka” or “the king is my ka,” this should be interpreted as an

assimilation of the person’s inner directing voice, derived perhaps from his parents, with the voice or supposed voice of the king.
Another related concept in ancient Egyptian mentality is the ba.
But at

least in the Old Kingdom, the ba is not really on the same level as the ka.
It

is more like our common ghost, a visual manifestation of what auditorily is

the ka.
In funerary scenes, the ba is usually depicted as a small humanoid

bird, probably because visual hallucinations often have flitting and birdlike

movements.
It is usually drawn attendant on or in relationship to the actual

corpse or to statues of the person.
That after the fall of the more king-

dominated Old Kingdom, the ba takes on some of the bicameral functions

of the ka is indicated by a change in its hieroglyph from a small bird to one

beside a lamp (to lead the way), and by its auditory hallucinatory role in the

famous Papyrus Berlin 3024, which dates about 1900 B.C.
All translations of

this astounding text are full of modern mental impositions, ineluding the

most recent,20 otherwise a fascinating chore of scholarship.
And no

commentator has dared to take this “Dispute of a man with his Ba” at face

value, as a dialogue with an auditory hallucination, much like that of a

contemporary schizophrenic.
THE TEMPORAL CHANGES IN THEOCRACIES

In the previous chapter, I stressed the uniformities among bicameral

kingdoms, the large central worshiping places, treatment of the dead as if

they were still living, and the presence of idols.
But over and beyond these

grosser aspects of ancient civilizations are many subtleties which space has

not permitted me to mention.
For just as we know that cultures and

civilizations can be strikingly different, so we must not assume that the

bicameral mind resulted in precisely the same thing everywhere it occurred.
Differences in populations, ecologies, priests, hierarchies, idols, industries,

all would, I think, result in profound differences in the authority, frequency,

ubiquity, and affect of hallucinatory control.
In this chapter, on the other hand, I have been making my emphasis the

differences between the two greatest of such civilizations.
But I have been

speaking of them as if unchanging over time.
And this is untrue.
To give the

impression of a static stability through time and space of bicameral

theocracies is entirely mistaken.
And I would like to redress the balance in

this last section of this chapter by mentioning the changes and differences in

the structure of bicameral kingdoms.
The Complexities

The most obvious fact of theocracies is their success in a biological

sense.
Populations were continually increasing.
As they did so, problems of

social control by hallucinations called gods became more and more

complex.
The structuring of such control in a village of a few hundred back

at Eynan in the ninth millennium B.C.
is obviously enormously different

from what it was in the civilizations we have just discussed with their

hierarchical layer of gods, priests, and officers.
Indeed, I suggest that there is a built-in periodicity to bicameral

theocracies, that the complexities of hallucinatory control with their very

success increase until the civil state and civilized relations can no longer be

sustained, and the bicameral society collapses.
As I noted in the previous

chapter, this occurred many times in the pre-Columbian civilizations of

America, whole populations suddenly deserting their cities, with no external

cause, and anarchically melting back into tribal living in surrounding

terrain, but returning to their cities and their gods a century or so later.
In the millennia we have been looking at in this chapter, the complexities

were apparently mounting.
Many of the ceremonies and practices I have

described were initiated as ways of reducing this complexity.
Even in

writing, the first pictographs were to label and list and sort out.
And some

of the first syntactical writing speaks of the overpopulation.
The Sumerian

epic known to us as Atrahasis bursts open with the problem:



The people became numerous...
The god was depressed by their uproar

Enlil heard their noise,

He exclaimed to the great gods

The noise of mankind has become burdensome...21



as if the voices were having difficulty.
The epic goes on to describe how the

great gods send plagues, famines, and finally a great flood (the origin of the

story of the Biblical flood) to get rid of some of the “black headed ones” as

the Mesopotamian gods disparagingly referred to their human slaves.
The apparatus of divinity was becoming strained.
In the early millennia

of the bicameral age, life had been simpler, confined to a small area, with a

simpler political organization, and the needed gods were then few.
But as

we approach and continue through to the end of the third millennium B.C.,

the tempo and complexity of social organization demand a far greater

number of decisions in a far greater number of contexts in any week or

month.
And hence, the enormous proliferation of deities which could be

invoked in whatever situation a man might find himself.
From the great

god-houses of the Sumerian and Babylonian cities of the major gods, to the

personal gods enchapeled in each household, the world must have literally

swarmed with sources of hallucination, and hence the increasing need for

priests to order them into strict hierarchies.
There were gods for everything

one might do.
One finds, for example, the coming into existence of

obviously popular wayside shrines, such as the Pa-Sag Chapel where the

statue-god Pa-Sag helped in making decisions about journeys through the

desert.22



The response of these Near Eastern theocracies to this increasing

complexity is both different and extremely illuminating.
In Egypt, the older

god-king form of government is less resilient, less developing of human

potential, less allowing of innovation, of individuality among subordinate

domains.
Yet it stretched out for huge distances along the Nile.
Regardless

of what theory of civil cohesion one may hold, there is no doubt that in the

last century of the third millennium B.C., all authority in Egypt broke down.
There may have been a triggering cause in some geological catastrophe:

some ancient texts referring back to the period of 2100 B.C.
seem to speak of

the Nile becoming dry, of men crossing it on foot, of the sun being hidden,

of crops being diminished.
Whatever the immediate cause, the pyramid of

authority headed by the god-king at Memphis simply collapsed at about that

time.
Literary sources describe people fleeing towns, noblemen grubbing

for food in the fields, brothers fighting, men killing their parents, pyramids

and tombs ransacked.
Scholars are insistent that this total disappearance of

authority was due to no outside force but to some unfathomable internal

weakness.
And I suggest that this is indeed the weakness of the bicameral

mind, its fragility in the face of increasing complexity, and that the collapse

of authority in so absolute a manner can only be so understood.
Egypt at the

time had extremely important separated districts stretching from the delta to

the upper Nile that could have been self-sustaining.
But the very fact that in the midst of this anarchy there was no rebellion, no striving of these

sections for independence is, I think, indicative of a very different mentality

from our own.
This breakdown of the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate

Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan

civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population

melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
And just as the Maya cities

became inhabited again or new ones formed after a period of breakdown, so

Egypt after less then a century of breakdown has unified itself at the

beginning of the second millennium under a new god-king, beginning what

is called the Middle Kingdom.
The same breakdown occurred elsewhere in

the Near East from time to time, as in Assur about 1700 B.C., as we shall see

in the next chapter.
The Idea of Law

But nothing of this extent ever happens in southern Mesopotamia.
Of

course there are wars.
City-states fought each other over whose god and

therefore which steward was to rule over which fields.
But there was never

any total collapse of authority as occurred in Mesoamerica and in Egypt at

the end of the Old Kingdom.
One of the reasons, I think, was the greater resiliency of the steward-king

type of theocracy.
And another, not unconnected reason was the use to

which writing was put.
Unlike in Egypt, writing in Mesopotamia was early

put to civil use.
By 2100 B.C.
in Ur, the judgments of gods through their

steward mediums began to be recorded.
This is the beginning of the idea of

law.
Such written judgments could be in several places and be continuous

through time, thus allowing the cohesiveness of a larger society.
We know

of nothing similar in Egypt until almost a millennium later.
In 1792 B.C., the civil use of writing in this way breaks open an almost

new kind of government in that commanding figure of Mesopotamian

history, the greatest of all steward kings, Hammurabi, steward of Marduk,

the city god of Babylon.
His long stewardship, lasting to 1750 B.C., is a

pulling together of most of the city-states of Mesopotamia into an

hegemony under his god Marduk in Babylon.
This process of conquest and

influence is made possible by letters and tablets and stelae in an abundance

that had never been known before.
It is even thought that he was the first

literate king who did not need a scribe, since all his cuneiform letters are

apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand.
Writing was a new method

of civil direction, indeed the model that begins our own memo-

communicating government.
Without it such a unification of Mesopotamia

could not have been accomplished.
It is a method of social control which by

hindsight we know will soon supplant the bicameral mind.
His most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps

misnamed Code of Hammurabi.23 Originally, it was an eight-foot-high

black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly

idol of himself.
So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from

another would come to the steward’s statue, to “hear my words” (as the



stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the

previous judgments of the steward’s god are recorded.
His god, as I have

said, was Marduk, and the top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene

of judgment-giving.
The god is seated on a raised mound which in

Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain.
An aura of flames flashes

up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it

is Shamash, the sun-god).
Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just

below him (“under-stands”).
The god holds in his right hand the attributes

of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions.
With

these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward,

Hammurabi.
One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic

assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each

other, impassively majestic, the steward-king’s right hand held up between

us, the observers, and the plane of communication.
Here is no humility, no

begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later.
Hammurabi has

no subjective-self to narratize into such a relationship.
There is only

obedience.
And what is being dictated by Marduk are judgments on a series

of very specific cases.
Hammurabi hallucinating judgments from his god Marduk (or possibly Shamash) as carved on the top of a stele listing those judgments.
About 1750 B.C.
As written on the stele beneath this sculptured relief, the judgments of

Marduk are sandwiched in between an introduction and an epilogue by

Hammurabi himself.
Here with pomp and fury he boasts of his deeds, his

power, his intimacy with Marduk, describes the conquests he has made for

Marduk, the reason for the setting up of this stele, and ends with dire

implications as to the evil that will befall anyone who scratches out his

name.
In vainglory and naïveté both prologue and epilogue remind us of the

Iliad.
But in between are the 282 quiet pronouncements of the god.
They are

serenely reasoned decisions about the apportioning of commodities among

different occupations, how house slaves or thieves or unruly sons were

punished, the eye-for-an-eye-and-tooth-for-a-tooth kind of recompensing,

judgments about gifts and deaths and adopting children (which seems to

have been a considerable practice), and of marriage and servants and slaves

—all in a cold economy of words in contrast to the bellicose blustering of

the prologue and epilogue.
Indeed they sound like two very different ‘men’

and in the bicameral sense I think they were.
They were two separately

integrated organizations of Hammurabi’s nervous system, one of them in

the left hemisphere writing the prologue and epilogue and standing in effigy

at the side of the stele, and the other in the right hemisphere composing

judgments.
And neither of them was conscious in our sense.
While the stele itself is clearly evidence for the bicameral mind in some

form, the problems to which the god’s words are addressed are indeed

complex.
It is very difficult to imagine doing the things that these laws say

men did in the eighteenth century B.C.
without having a subjective

consciousness in which to plan and devise, deceive and hope.
But it should

be remembered how rudimentary all this was and how misleading our

modern words can be.
The word that is incorrectly translated as “money” or

even as “loan” is simply kaspu, meaning silver.
It cannot mean money in

our sense since no coins have ever been found.
Similarly, what has been

translated as rents is really tithing, an agreement marked on a clay tablet to

return a portion of the produce of a field to its owner.
Wine was not so

much purchased as exchanged, one measure of wine for one measure of

grain.
And the use of some modern banking terms in some translations is

downright inaccurate.
As I have mentioned before, in many translations of

cuneiform material, there is the constant attempt on the part of scholars to

impose modern categories of thought on these ancient cultures in order to make them more familiar and therefore supposedly more interesting to

modern readers.
These rules of the stele should not be thought of in the modern terms of

laws which are enforced by police, something unknown at that time.
Rather

they are lists of practices in Babylon itself, the statements of Marduk, which

needed no more enforcement than their authenticity on the stele itself.
The fact that they were written down and, more generally, the wide use of

visual writing for communication indicate, I think, a reduction in the

auditory hallucinatory control of the bicameral mind.
Together, they put

into motion cultural determinants which, coming together with other forces

a few centuries later, resulted in a change in the very structure of the mind

itself.
Let me summarize.
I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge

time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a

profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women

were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and

therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done

over these vast millennia of time; that instead each person had a part of his

nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any

slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and

empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated

voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.
The total pattern, I suggest, is in agreement with such a view.
It is, of

course, not conclusive.
However, the astonishing consistency from Egypt to

Peru, from Ur to Yucatan, wherever civilizations arose, of death practices

and idolatry, of divine government and hallucinated voices, all are witness

to the idea of a different mentality from our own.
But it would be an error, as I have tried to show, to regard the bicameral

mind as a static thing.
True, it developed from the ninth millennium B.C.
to

the second millennium B.C.
with the slowness that makes any single century

seem as static as its ziggurats and temples.
Millennia are its units of time.
But the tempo of development at least in the Near East picks up as we reach

the second millennium B.C.
The gods of Akkad, like the ka’s of Egypt, have

multiplied in complexity.
And as this complexity develops, there is the first

unsureness, the first need for personal gods to intercede with the higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief

millennium they will have disappeared.
From the royal corpse propped up on its stones under its red parapet in

Eynan, still ruling its Natufian village in the hallucinations of its subjects, to

the mighty beings that cause thunder and create worlds and finally

disappear into heavens, the gods were at the same time a mere side effect of

language evolution and the most remarkable feature of the evolution of life

since the development of Homo sapiens himself.
I do not mean this simply

as poetry.
The gods were in no sense ‘figments of the imagination’ of

anyone.
They were man’s volition.
They occupied his nervous system,

probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and

preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech

which then ‘told’ the man what to do.
That such internally heard speech

often needed to be primed with the props of the dead corpse of a chieftain

or the gilded body of a jewel-eyed statue in its holy house, of that I have

really said nothing.
It too requires an explanation.
I have by no means dared

the bottom of the matter, and it is only to be hoped that complete and more

correct translations of existing texts and the increasing tempo of

archaeological excavation will give us a truer understanding of these long

long millennia which civilized mankind.
Chapter 3



The Causes of Consciousness

AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make

your god happy.” 1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing,

we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective

mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between

hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.”

This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were

the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine

orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched

by major social disturbance.
But the second millennium B.C.
was not to last

that way.
Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes.
Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world.
Hierarchies crumpled.
And between the act and its divine source came the

shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods

unhappy, recriminatory, jealous.
Until, finally, the screening off of their

tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog

space with an analog ‘I’.
The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral

mind had been shaken into consciousness.
These are the momentous themes of the present chapter.
The Instability of Bicameral Kingdoms

In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments

with militarism and police repression.
This association should not be

applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era.
Militarism, police,

rule by fear, are all the desperate measures used to control a subjective

conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their

multitudinous privacies of hopes and hates.
In the bicameral era, the bicameral mind was the social control, not fear

or repression or even law.
There were no private ambitions, no private

grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral men

had no internal ‘space’ in which to be private, and no analog ‘I’ to be

private with.
All initiative was in the voices of gods.
And the gods needed

to be assisted by their divinely dictated laws only in the late federations of

states in the second millennium B.C.
Within each bicameral state, therefore, the people were probably more

peaceful and friendly than in any civilization since.
But at the interfaces

between different bicameral civilizations, the problems were complex and

quite different.
Let us consider a meeting between two individuals from two different

bicameral cultures.
Let us assume they do not know each other’s language

and are owned by different gods.
The manner of such meetings would be

dependent upon the kind of admonitions, warnings, and importunings with

which the individual had been reared.
In peaceful times, with the god of the city basking in prosperity, the

human tilling of his fields, thp harvesting, storing, and sorting out of his

produce all going on without hitch or question, as in a colony of ants, it

could be expected that his divine voice would be basically amicable, and

that indeed all man’s voice-visions would tend to be beautiful and peaceful,

exaggerating the very harmony this method of social control was evolved to

preserve.
Thus, if the bicameral theocracies of both individuals meeting have been

unthreatened for their generation, both their directive gods would be

composed of friendly voices.
The result may have been a tentative

exchange of gestural greetings and facial expressions that might grow to

friendship, or even an exchange of gifts.
For we can be very certain that the

relative rarity of each other’s possessions (coming from different cultures)

would make such an exchange mutually wished for.
This is probably how trade began.
The beginning of such exchanges goes

back to food sharing in the family group which grew into exchanges of

goods and produce within the same city.
Just as the harvested grain of the

first agricultural settlements had to be doled out by certain god-given rules,

so, as labor became more specialized, other products, wine, adornments,

clothes, and the building of houses, all had to have their god-set equivalents

to each other.
Trade between different peoples is simply the extension of such

exchanging of goods to another kingdom.
Texts from 2500 B.C.
found in

Sumer speak of such exchanging as far away as the Indus Valley.
And the

recent discovery of a new city site at Tepe Yahya, halfway between Sumer

and the Indus Valley, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, whose artifacts

clearly indicate that it was the main source of steatite or soapstone, used for

utensils extensively in Mesopotamia, establish it as a center of exchange

between these bicameral kingdoms.
2 Small two-inch-square tablets have

been found with counting marks on them which were probably simple

exchange rates.
All this was during a peaceful era in the middle of the third

millennium B.C.
I shall suggest later that extensive exchanging of goods

between bicameral theocracies may in itself have weakened the bicameral

structure that made civilization possible.
Now let us return to our two individuals from different cultures.
We have

been discussing what occurs in a peaceful world with peaceful gods.
But

what if the opposite were the.
case?
If both came from threatened cultures,

both would probably hear warlike hallucinated voices directing each to kill

the other, whereupon hostilities would follow.
But the same result would

happen if either came from a threatened culture, putting the other into a

posture of defense, as either the same god or another directed him as well to

engage in fighting.
There is thus no middle ground in intertheocracy relations.
Admonitory

voices echoing kings, viziers, parents, etc., are unlikely to command

individuals into acts of compromise.
Even today, our ideas of nobility are

largely residues of bicameral authority: it is not noble to whine, it is not

noble to plead, it is not noble to beg, even though these postures are really

the most moral of ways to settle differences.
And hence the instability of the bicameral world, and the fact that during the bicameral era boundary

relations would, I think, be more likely to end in all-out friendship or all-out

hostility than anything between these extremes.
Nor is this the bottom of the matter.
The smooth working of a bicameral

kingdom has to rest on its authoritarian hierarchy.
And once the priestly or

secular hierarchy is disputed or upset, its effects would be exaggerated in a

way that in a police state would not occur.
Once cities become a certain

size, as we have already seen, the bicameral control must be extremely

precarious.
The hierarchy of priests to sort out the various voices and give

them their recognitions must have become a major preoccupation as

bicameral cities grew in size.
One jar to this balance of human and

hallucinated authority, and, like a house of cards, the whole thing might

collapse.
As I have mentioned in both previous chapters, such theocracies

occasionally did indeed suddenly collapse without any known external

cause.
In comparison with conscious nations, then, bicameral nations were more

susceptible to collapse.
The directives of gods are limited.
If on top of this

inherent fragility, something really new occurred, such as a forced

intermingling of bicameral peoples, the gods would be hard pressed to sort

anything out in a peaceable way.
The Weakening of Divine Authority with Writing

These limitations of gods were both relieved and greatly exacerbated in

the second millennium B.C.
by the success of writing.
On the one hand,

writing could allow a civil structure such as that of Hammurabi to remain

stable.
But, on the other, it was gradually eroding the auditory authority of

the bicameral mind.
More and more, the accountings and messages of

government were placed in cuneiform tablets particularly.
Whole libraries

of them are still being discovered.
Letters of officials became a

commonplace.
By 1500 B.C., even miners high in the rocky wastes of Sinai

incised their names and their relationships to the goddess of the mine on its

walls.
3

The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was

auditory.
It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts

of the brain.
And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay

tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god’s commands or the king’s

directives could be turned to or avoided by one’s own efforts in a way that

auditory hallucinations never could be.
The word of a god had a

controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate

obedience.
This is extremely important.
The Failure of the Gods

This loosening of the god-man partnership perhaps by trade and certainly

by writing was the background of what happened.
But the immediate and

precipitate cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the wedge of

consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and

automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what

to do.
Or if they did, they led to death, or at the intimate least to an increase

in the stress that physiologically occasioned the voice in the first place, until

voices came in an unsolvable Babel of confusion.
The historical context of all this was enormous.
The second millennium

B.C.
was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes.
Vast

geological catastrophes occurred.
Civilizations perished.
Half the world’s

population became refugees.
And wars, previously sporadic, came with

hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunched

itself sickly into its dark and bloody close.
It is a complex picture, the variables evoking these changes multileveled,

the facts as we have them now not at all certain.
Almost yearly they are

revised as each new generation of archaeologists and ancient historians

finds fault with its predecessors.
As an approximation to these complexities,

let us look at the two major elements of these upheavals.
One was the mass

migrations and invasions of peoples all around the eastern Mediterranean

due to the volcanic eruption of Thera, and the other was the rise of Assyria,

in three great phases, warring its way reign by reign westward to Egypt,

northward to the Caspian, incorporating all of Mesopotamia, forming a very

different kind of empire from any that the world had known before.
The Assyrian Spring

Let us first look at the situation in northern Mesopotamia around the city

that belongs to the god Ashur, as the second millennium B.C.
opens.4

Originally a part of Akkad, and then of Old Babylonia two hundred miles

south, by 1950 B.C., this peaceful bicameral city on an upper reach of the

gentle Tigris has been left pretty much to itself.
Under the guidance of

Ashur’s chief human servant, Puzen-Ashur I, its benign influence and

wealth begin to expand.
More than in any nation before it, the feature of

that expansion is exchange of goods with other theocracies.
About two

hundred years later, the city owned by Ashur becomes Assyria, with

exchange posts as much as seven hundred miles by road away to the

northeast in Anatolia or present-day Turkey.
Exchange of goods between cities had been going on for some time.
But

it is doubtful if it was as extensive as that practiced by the Assyrians.
Recent excavations have revealed karums or, in smaller towns, ubartums,

the exchange posts just outside several Anatolian cities in which the trading

took place.
Particularly interesting excavations have been made of the

karum just outside Kültepe: small buildings whose walls have no windows,

stone and wooden shelves on which are cuneiform tablets yet to be

translated, and sometimes jars with what appear to be counters within

them.
5 The writing, indeed, is old Assyrian, and, presumably brought there by these traders, is the first writing known in Anatolia.
Such trade was not, however, a true market.
There were no prices under

the pressures of supply and demand, no buying and selling, and no money.
It was trade in the sense of equivalences established by divine decree.
There

is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the

cuneiform tablets that have so far been translated.
There are occasional

exceptions, even a suggestion of ‘inflation,’ perhaps during a famine year

when the exchanges became different, but they do not seriously impair

Polanyi’s view, which I am following here.
6

Let us consider these Assyrian merchants for a moment.
They were, we

may presume, merely agents, holding their position by descent and

apprenticeship, and carrying out exchanges much as their fathers had done

for centuries.
But there are so many questions that face the psychohistorian at this point.
What would happen to the bicameral voices of these merchants

as much as seven hundred miles from the source of their city-god’s voice,

and in daily contact and probably (though not necessarily) speaking the

language of bicameral men ruled by a different pantheon of voices?
Is it

possible that something like a protosubjective consciousness occurred in

these traders at the boundaries of different civilizations?
Did they, returning

periodically to Ashur, bring with them a weakened bicamerality that

perhaps spread to a new generation?
So that the bicameral tie between gods

and men was loosened?
The causes of consciousness are multiple, but at least I do not think it is a

coincidence that the key nation in this development should also have been

that nation most involved in exchanges of goods with others.
If it is true that

the power of the gods and particularly of Ashur were being weakened at

this time, it could account for the absolute collapse of his city in 1700 B.C.,

beginning the dark ages of Assyrian anarchy that lasted two hundred years.
For this event there is no explanation whatever.
No historian understands it.
And there is little hope of ever doing so, for not a single Assyrian

cuneiform inscription from this period has ever been found.
The reorganization of Assyria after its collapse had to wait upon other

events.
In 1450 B.C., Egypt pushed the Mitanni out of Syria right across the

Euphrates into lands between the two great rivers that had once been

Assyrian.
But a century later the Mitanni were conquered by the Hittites

from the north, thus making possible the rebuilding of an Assyrian empire

in 1380 B.C.
after two centuries of anarchic darkness.
And what an empire it is!
No nation had been so militaristic before.
Unlike any previous inscriptions anywhere, those of middie Assyria now

bristle with brutal campaigns.
The change is dramatic.
But the success of

the Assyrian invasions as they relentlessly savage their way toward world

domination is like a ratchet catching at the whorl of catastrophes of another

kind.
Eruption, Migration, Conquest

The collapse of the bicameral mind was certainly accelerated by the

collapse under the ocean of a good part of the Aegean people’s land.
This

followed an eruption or series of eruptions of the volcano on the island of

Thera, also called Santorini, now an Aegean tourist attraction, barely sixty-

two miles north of Crete.7 Then, it had been part of what Plato8 and later

legend called the lost continent of Atlantis, which with Crete made up the

Minoan empire.
The major part of it and perhaps parts of Crete as well were

suddenly 1000 feet underwater.
Most of the remaining land of Thera was

covered with a 150-foot-deep crust of volcanic ash and pumice.
Geologists have hypothesized that the black cloud caused by the eruption

darkened the sky for days and affected the atmosphere for years.
The air

shock waves have been estimated at 350 times more powerful than a

hydrogen bomb.
Thick poisonous vapors puffed out over the blue sea for

miles.
A tsunami or huge tidal wave followed.
Towering 700 feet high and

traveling at 350 miles per hour, it smashed into the fragile coasts of the

bicameral kingdoms along the Aegean mainland and its islands.
Everything

for two miles inland was destroyed.
A civilization and its gods had ended.
Just when it happened, whether it was a series of eruptions or a two-stage

affair with a year between the eruption and the collapse, will require better

scientific methods of dating volcanic ash and pumice.
Some believe it to

have occurred in 1470 B.C.9 Others have dated the collapse of Thera

between 1180 and 1170 B.C.
when the whole of the Mediterranean,

including Cyprus, the Nile delta, and the coast of Israel, suffered universal

calamity of a magnitude that dwarfed the 1470 B.C.
destruction.
10

Whenever it was, whether it was one or a series of eruptions, it set off a

huge procession of mass migrations and invasions which wrecked the

Hittite and Mycenaean empires, threw the world into a dark ages within

which came the dawn of consciousness.
Only Egypt seems to have retained

the elaboration of its civilized life, although the exodus of the Israelites

about the time of the Trojan War, perhaps 1230 B.C., is close enough to be

considered a part of this great world event.
The legend of the parting of the

Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.
The result is that, in the space of a single day, whole populations or what

survive of them are suddenly refugees.
Like files of dominoes, anarchy and

chaos ripple and lurch across the frightened land as neighbor invades

neighbor.
And what can the gods say in these ruins?
What can the gods say,

with hunger and death more strict than they, with strange people staring at

strange people, and strange language bellowed at uncomprehending ears?
The bicameral man was ruled in the trivial circumstance of everyday life by

unconscious habit, and in his encounters with anything new or out of the

ordinary in his own behavior or others’ by his voice-visions.
Ripped out of

context in the larger hierarchical group, where neither habit nor bicameral

voice could assist and direct him, he must have been a pitiable creature

indeed.
How could the storings up and distillings of admonitory experience

gained in the peaceful authoritarian ordering of a bicameral nation say

anything that would work now?
Huge migrations begin moving into Ionia and then south.
The coastal

lands of the Levant are invaded by land and sea by peoples from eastern

Europe, of whom the Philistines of the Old Testament were a part.
The

pressure of the refugees is so great in Anatolia that in 1200 B.C.
the puissant

Hittite empire collapses, driving the Hittites down into Syria where other

refugees are seeking new lands.
Assyria was inland and protected.
And the

chaos resulting from these invasions allowed the cruel Assyrian armies to

push all the way into Phrygia, Syria, Phoenicia, and even to the subjugation

of the mountain peoples of Armenia in the north and those of the Zagros

Mountains to the east.
Could Assyria do this on a strictly bicameral basis?
The most powerful king of this middle Assyria was Tiglath-Pileser I

(1115–1077 B.C.).
Note how he no longer joins the name of his god to his

name.
His exploits are well known from a large clay prism of monstrous

boasts.
His laws have come down to us in a collection of cruel tablets.
Scholars have called his policy “a policy of frightfulness.” 11 And so it was.
The Assyrians fell like butchers upon harmless villagers, enslaved what

refugees they could, and slaughtered others in thousands.
Bas-reliefs show

what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been stuck alive on

stakes running up through the groin and out the shoulders.
His laws meted

out the bloodiest penalties yet known in world history for even minor

misdemeanors.
They make a dramatic contrast to the juster admonishments

that the god of Babylon dictated to bicameral Hammurabi six centuries

earlier.
Why this harshness?
And for the first time in the history of civilization?
Unless the previous method of social control had absolutely broken down.
And that form of social control was the bicameral mind.
The very practice

of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of

subjective consciousness.
The chaos is widespread and continuing.
In Greece it is darkly known as

the Dorian invasions.
The Acropolis is in flames by the end of the thirteenth

century B.C.
Mycenae no longer exists by the end of the twelfth century B.C.
It has been ground out into legend and wonder.
And we can imagine the

first aoidos, still bicameral, wandering entranced from ruined camp to camp

of refugees, singing the bright goddess through his white lips of the wrath

of Achilles in a golden age that was and is no more.
Even from somewhere around the Black Sea, hordes that some called the

Mushku, known in the Old Testament as Meshech, thrust down into the

ruined Hittite kingdom.
Then twenty thousand of them drifted further south

invading the Assyrian province of Kummuh.
Hordes of Aramaeans

continuously pressed in on the Assyrian from the western deserts and

continued to do so up into the first millennium B.C.
In the south, more of these refugees, called in hieroglyphics the “People

from the Sea,” attempt to invade Egypt by the Nile delta at the beginning of

the eleventh century B.C.
Their defeat by Rameses III can still be seen on the

north wall of his funerary temple at Medinet Habu in western Thebes.12 The

invaders in ships, chariots, and on foot, with families and oxcarts of

possessions, stream through these murals in refugee fashion.
Had the

invasion been successful, it is possible that Egypt might have done for the

intellect what Greece was to do in the next millennium.
And so the People

from the Sea are pressed back eastward into the clutch of Assyrian

militarism.
And finally all these pressures become too great for even Assyrian

cruelty.
In the tenth century B.C., Assyria itself cannot control the situation

and shrivels back into poverty behind the Tigris.
But only to breathe.
For in

the very next century, the Assyrians begin their reconquest of the world

with unprecedented sadistic ferocity, butchering and terroring their way

back to their former empire and then beyond and all the way to Egypt and

up the fertile Nile to the holy sun-god himself, even as Pizarro was to take

the divine Inca captive two and a half millennia later on the opposite side of the earth.
And by this time, the great transilience in mentality had occurred.
Man had become conscious of himself and his world.
How Consciousness Began

So far, all our analysis has been about how and why the bicameral mind

collapsed.
It could indeed be asked at this point why man did not simply

revert to his previous condition.
Sometimes he did.
But the inertia of the

more complex cultures prevented the return to tribal life.
Man was trapped

in his own civilization.
Huge cities simply are there, and their ponderous

habits of working keep going even as their divine control lapses away.
Language too is a brake upon social change.
The bicameral mind was an

offshoot of the acquisition of language, and language by this time had a

vocabulary demanding such attention to a civilized environment as to make

a reversion to something of at least 5000 years earlier almost impossible.
The facts of the transition from the bicameral mind to the subjective

conscious mind are what I try to develop in the ensuing two chapters.
But

just how it happened is the consideration here, and this needs a great deal

more research.
What we need is a paleontology of consciousness, in which

we can discern stratum by stratum how this metaphored world we call

subjective consciousness was built up and under what particular social

pressures.
All that I can present here is a few suggestions.
I would also remind the reader of two things.
First, I am not talking here

of the metaphoric mechanisms by which consciousness was generated that I

discussed in I.3.
Here I am concerned with their origin in history, why those

features were generated by metaphors at a particular time.
Secondly, we are

speaking only about the Near East.
Once consciousness is established, there

are quite different reasons why it is so successful, and why it spreads to the

remaining bicameral peoples, problems which we shall take up in a later

chapter.
The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of

consciousness.
After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can

scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human

behavior during the disorder we have described.
We should remember that

in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less

of similar opinion and action.
But in the forced violent intermingling of

peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that

strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite

opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of

something inside of them that was different.
Indeed, this latter opinion has

come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts,

opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because

there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world.
It is thus a

possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he

unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers,

as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior.
In other

words, the tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of

inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around.
We may

first unconsciously (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our

own by generalization.
The Origin of Narratization in Epics

It sounds strange to speak about gods learning.
But occupying a good

part of the right temporal-parietal region (if the model of I.5 is correct),

they, too, like the left temporal-parietal region, or perhaps even more so,

would learn new abilities, storing up new experience, reworking their

admonitory function in new ways to meet new needs.
Narratization is a single word for an extremely complex set of patterning

abilities which have, I think, a multiple ancestry.
But the thing in its larger

patterning, such as lifetimes, histories, the past and future, may have been

learned by dominantly left-hemisphered men from a new kind of

functioning in the right hemisphere.
The new kind of functioning was

narratization, and it had previously been learned, I suggest, by the gods at a

certain period of history.
When could this have been?
It is doubtful if there can ever be a certain

answer, partly because there is no sharp boundary between the relation of an

event that has just happened and an epic.
Also our search into the past is

always confounded with the development of writing.
But it is interesting

that about the middle of the third millennium B.C., or just before, there

seems to arise a new feature of civilization in southern Mesopotamia.
Before what is known as the Early Dynastic II period, excavations show

that towns or cities in this area were not fortified, had no defenses.
But

thereafter, in the principal regions of urban development, walled cities arose

at a fairly constant distance from one another, the inhabitants farming the

intervening fields and occasionally fighting each other for control of them.
At about this same period came the first epics that we know of, such as the

several about Emmerkar, the builder of Uruk, and his relations with the

neighboring city-state of Aratta.
And their topics are precisely this

relationship between neighboring states.
My suggestion is that narratization arose as a codification of reports of

past events.
Writing up to this time—and it is only a few centuries since its

invention—had been primarily an inventory device, a way of recording the

stores and exchanges of a god’s estates.
Now it becomes a way of recording

god-commanded events, whose recitation after the fact becomes the

narratization of epics.
Since reading, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, may have been hallucinating from the cuneiform, it may, then, have

been a right temporal lobe function.
And since these were the recordings of

the past, it is the right hemisphere that becomes at least the temporary seat

of the reminiscence of gods.
We should note in passing how different the reading from stable

cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia was from the oral recomposing of the

epics in Greece by a succession of aoidoi: It is possible that the oral

tradition in Greece was an immense benefit in its demand that ‘Apollo’ or

the ‘Muses’ in the right hemisphere become the sources of memory and

learn how to narratize so as to keep the memories of Achilles together in the

epic pattern.
And then, in the chaos of transilience to consciousness, man

assimilates both this memory ability and the ability to narratize memories

into patterns.
The Origin of the Analog ‘I’ in Deceit

Deceit may also be a cause of consciousness.
But we must begin any

discussion of the topic by making a distinction between instrumental or

short-term deceit and long-term deceit, which might better be expressed as

treachery.
Several examples of the former have been described in

chimpanzees.
Female chimpanzees will ‘present’ in sexual posture to a

male to whisk away his banana when his prandial interest is thus distracted.
In another instance, a chimpanzee would fill his mouth with water, coax a

disliked keeper over to the cage bars, and spit the water in his face.
In both

such instances, the deceit involved is a case of instrumental learning, a

behavior pattern that is followed immediately by some rewarding state of

affairs.
And it needs no further explanation.
But the kind of deceit that is treachery is quite another matter.
It is

impossible for an animal or for a bicameral man.
Long-term deceit requires

the invention of an analog self that can ‘do’ or ‘be’ something quite

different from what the person actually does or is, as seen by his associates.
It is an easy matter to imagine how important for survival during these

centuries such an ability would be.
Overrun by some invader, and seeing his

wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately

strike out, and thus probably be killed.
But if a man could be one thing on

the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbor his hatred and

revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would

survive.
Or, in the more usual situation of being commanded by invading

strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey

superficially and have ‘within him’ another self with ‘thoughts’ contrary to

his disloyal actions, who could loathe the man he smiled at, would be much

more successful in perpetuating himself and his family in the new

millennium.
Natural Selection

My last comment brings up the possibility that natural selection may

have played a role in the beginning of consciousness.
But in putting up this

question, I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural

introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather

than any biological necessity.
But that it had and still has a survival value

suggests that the change to consciousness may have been assisted by a

certain amount of natural selection.
It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died

in these terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C.
I

suspect it was enormous.
And death would come soonest to those who

impulsively lived by their unconscious habits or who could not resist the

commandments of their gods to smite whatever strangers interfered with

them.
It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most

obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the

less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations.
And

again we may appeal to the principle of Baldwinian evolution as we did in

our discussion of language.
Consciousness must be learned by each new

generation, and those biologically most able to learn it would be those most

likely to survive.
There is even Biblical evidence, as we shall see in a future

chapter, that children obdurately bicameral were simply killed.
13



Conclusion

This chapter must not be construed as presenting any evidence about the

origin of consciousness.
That is the burden of several ensuing chapters.
My

purpose in this chapter has been descriptive and theoretical, to paint a

picture of plausibility, of how and why a huge alteration in human mentality

could have occurred toward the end of the second millennium B.C.
In summary, I have sketched out several factors at work in the great

transilience from the bicameral mind to consciousness: (1) the weakening

of the auditory by the advent of writing; (2) the inherent fragility of

hallucinatory control; (3) the unworkableness of gods in the chaos of

historical upheaval; (4) the positing of internal cause in the observation of

difference in others; (5) the acquisition of narratization from epics; (6) the

survival value of deceit; and (7) a modicum of natural selection.
I would conclude by bringing up the question of the strictness of all this.
Did consciousness really come de novo into the world only at this time?
Is

it not possible that certain individuals at least might have been conscious in

much earlier time?
Possibly yes.
As individuals differ in mentality today, so

in past ages it might have been possible that one man alone, or more

possibly a cult or clique, began to develop a metaphored space with analog

selves.
But such aberrant mentality in a bicameral theocracy would, I think,

be short-lived and scarcely what we mean by consciousness today.
It is the cultural norm that we are here concerned with, and the evidence

that that cultural norm underwent a dramatic change is the substance of the

following chapters.
The three areas of the world where this transilience can

be most easily observed are Mesopotamia, Greece, and among the

bicameral refugees.
We shall be discussing these in turn.
Chapter 4



A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia

ABOUT 1230 B.C., Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria, had a stone altar

made that is dramatically different from anything that preceded it in the

history of the world.
In the carving on its face, Tukulti is shown twice, first

as he approaches the throne of his god, and then as he kneels before it.
The

very double image fairly shouts aloud about this beggarly posture unheard

of in a king before in history.
As our eyes descend from the standing king to

the kneeling king just in front of him, it is as emphatic as a moving picture,

in itself a quite remarkable artistic discovery.
But far more remarkable is the

fact that the throne before which this first of the cruel Assyrian conquerors

grovels is empty.
No king before in history is ever shown kneeling.
No scene before in

history ever indicates an absent god.
The bicameral mind had broken down.
Hammurabi, as we have seen in II.2 , is always carved standing and

listening intently to a very present god.
And countless cylinder seals from

his period show other personages listening eye to eye or being presented to

the just-as-real figures of humanshaped gods.
The Ashur altar of Tukulti is

in shocking contrast to all previous depictions of the relations of gods and

men.
Nor is it simply some artistic idiosyncrasy.
Other altar scenes of

Tukulti are similarly devoid of gods.
And cylinder seals of Tukulti’s period

also show the king approaching other nonpresent divinities, sometimes

represented by a symbol.
Such comparisons strongly suggest that the time

of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia is some time

between Hammurabi and Tukulti.
Carving on the front of the Tukulti Altar now in the Berlin Museum.
Tukulti stands and then kneels before the empty throne of his god.
Note the emphasis of the pointing forefinger.
This hypothesis is confirmed in the cuneiform remains of Tukulti and his

period.
What is known as the Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta1 is the next clearly

dated and well-preserved cuneiform document of note after Hammurabi.
In

the latter’s time there is no doubt of the gods’ eternal undeviant presence

among men, directing them in their activities.
But at the beginning of

Tukulti’s somewhat propagandalike epic, the gods of the Babylonian cities

are angry with the Babylonian king for his inattention to them.
They

therefore forsake their cities, leaving the inhabitants without divine

guidance, so that the victory of Tukulti’s Assyrian armies is assured.
This

conception of gods forsaking their human slaves under any circumstances

whatever is impossible in the Babylon of Hammurabi.
It is something new

in the world.
Moreover, it is found throughout whatever literature remains of the last

three centuries of the second millennium B.C.
One who has no god, as he walks along the street,

Headache envelops him like a garment.
So one cuneiform tablet from about the reign of Tukulti.
If the breakdown of the bicameral mind involved the involuntary

inhibition of temporal lobe areas of the right hemisphere, as we have

conjectured earlier, this statement takes on an added interest.
Also from about the same period come the famous three tablets and a

questionable fourth named for its first words, Ludlul bel nemeqi, usually

translated as “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” “Wisdom” here is an

unwarranted modern imposition.
The translation should be something closer

to ‘skill’ or ‘ability to control misfortune,’ the lord here being Marduk, the

highest god of Babylon.
The first completely readable lines of the damaged

first tablet are:



My god has forsaken me and disappeared,

My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.
This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
The speaker is one

Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the third tablet), a feudal lord

possibly under Tukulti.
He goes on to describe how, with the departure of

his gods, his king becomes irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal

position of ruling a city is taken away, how he thus becomes a social

outcast.
The second tablet describes how, in this godless state, he is the

target of all disease and misfortune.
Why have the gods left him?
And he

catalogs the prostrations, the prayers, and the sacrifices which have not

brought them back.
Priests and omen-readers are consulted, but still



My god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand,

Nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side.
In the third tablet, he realizes that it is the almighty Marduk who is behind

all that is happening to him.
In dreams, the angels of Marduk appear to him

in bicameral fashion, and speak messages of consolation and promises of

prosperity from Marduk himself.
At this assurance, Shubshi is then

delivered from his toils and illnesses and goes to the temple of Marduk to

give thanks to the great god who “made the wind bear away my offenses.”



The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the

first time.
Why have the gods left us?
Like friends who depart from us, they

must be offended.
Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses.
We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven.
And then find

redemption in some return of the word of a god.
These aspects of present-

day religion find an explanation in the theory of the bicameral mind and its breakdown during this period.
The world had long known rules and dues.
They were divinely ordained

and humanly obeyed.
But the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good

man and of redemption from sin and divine forgiveness only begin in this

uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances can no longer be

heard.
The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets

known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue between a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails

with the same pleas.
Why have the gods left us?
And since they control

everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us?
The poem also

shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an

analog self denoting a new consciousness.
It ends with the cry which has

echoed through all later history:



May the gods who have thrown me off give help,

May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.
From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey.
There

is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I

am describing here.
The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from

human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different

levels.
One thing is the confusion of authority itself.
What is authority?
Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure.
They turn to omens

and divination, which we shall take up shortly.
And as I have mentioned

earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes

his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations.
Even

the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable.
Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.
Indeed this new kind of rebellion is what happened to Tukulti himself.
He had founded a whole new capital for Assyria across the Tigris from

Ashur, naming it godlessly after himself—Kar-Tukultininurta.
But, led by

his own son and successor, his more conservative nobles imprisoned him in

his new city, put it to the torch, and burned it to the ground, his fiery death

leading his reign into legend.
(He glimmers in the murky history of the Old Testament as Nimrod3 \[Genesis:10] and in Greek myths as King Ninos.4 )

Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before.
But such a

premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the

god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.
But of much greater importance are the beginnings of some new cultural

themes which are responses to this breakdown of the bicameral mind and its

divine authority.
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but

rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
And

these new aspects of human history in response to the loss of divine

authority are all developments and emphases out of the bicameral age.
Prayer

In the classical bicameral mind, that is, before its weakening by writing

about 2500 B.C., I suggest that there was no hesitancy in the hallucinated

voice and no occasion for prayer.
A novel situation or stress, and a voice

told you what to do.
Certainly this is so in contemporary schizophrenic

patients who are hallucinating.
They do not beg to hear their voices; it is

unnecessary.
In those few patients where this does happen, it is during

recovery when the voices are no longer heard with the same frequency.
But

as civilizations and their interrelationships become more complex toward

the end of the third millennium B.C., the gods are occasionally asked to

respond to various requests.
Usually, however, such requests are not what

we think of as prayer.
They consist of several stylized imprecations, such as

the common ending of statue inscriptions:



Whoever this image shall deface may Enlil his name destroy and his

weapon break!5



or the kind of praising which Gudea bestows on his gods in the great

cylinder inscriptions from Lagash.
A notable exception, however, are the

very real prayers of Gudea in Cylinder A to his divine mother, asking her to

explain the meaning of a dream.
But this, like so much else with the

enigmatic Gudea, is exceptional.
Prayers as the central important act of

divine worship only become prominent after the gods are no longer

speaking to man “face to face” (as Deuteronomy 34:10 expresses it).
What

was new in the time of Tukulti becomes everyday during the first

millennium B.C., all, I suggest, as a result of the breakdown of the bicameral

mind.
A typical prayer begins:



O lord, the strong one, the famous one, the one who knows all,

splendid one, self-renewing one, perfect one, first-begotten of Marduk
...
and so on for many more lines of titles and attributes,



the one who holds cult-centers firm, the one who gathers to himself all

cults...
perhaps indicating the chaos of the hierarchy of divinities when they could

no longer be heard,



you watch over all men, you accept their supplications...
The suppliant then introduces himself and his petition:



I, Balasu, son of his god, whose god is Nabu, whose goddess is

Tashmeturn...
I am one who is weary, disturbed, whose body is very

sick, I bow before thee...
O lord, Wise One of the gods, by thy mouth

command good for me; O Nabu, Wise One of the gods, by thy mouth

may I come forth alive.
6



The general form of prayer, beginning with emphatic praise of the god and

ending with a personal petition, has not really changed since Mesopotamian

times.
The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine

worship, is in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of

god and man a thousand years earlier.
An Origin of Angels

In the so-called Neo-Sumerian period, at the end of the third millennium

B.C., graphics, particularly cylinder seals, are full of ‘presentation’ scenes: a

minor god, often female, introduces an individual, presumably the owner of

the seal, to a major god.
This is entirely consistent with what we have

suggested was likely in a bicameral kingdom, namely that each individual

had his personal god who seemed to intercede with higher gods on the

person’s behalf.
And this type of presentation or intercession scene

continues well into the second millennium B.C.
But then a dramatic change occurs.
First, the major gods disappear from

such scenes, even as from the altar of Tukulti-Ninurta.
There then occurs a

period where the individual’s personal god is shown presenting him to the

god’s symbol only.
And then, at the end of the second millennium B.C., we

have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries

and messengers between the vanished gods and their forlorn followers.
Such messengers were always part bird and part human, sometimes like a

bearded man with two sets of wings, crowned like a god, and often holding

a kind of purse supposedly containing ingredients for a purification

ceremony.
These supposed personnel of the celestial courts are found with

increasing frequency in Assyrian cylinder seals and carvings.
In early

instances, such angels, or genii, as Assyriologists more often call them, are

seen introducing an individual to the symbol of a god as in the old

presentation scenes.
But soon even this is abandoned.
And by the beginning

of the first millennium B.C., we find such angels in a countless diversity of

scenes, sometimes with humans, sometimes in various struggles with other

hybrid beings.
Sometimes they have the heads of birds.
Or they are winged

bulls or winged lions with human heads to act as wardens for such palaces

as that at Nimrud in the ninth century or guarding the gates of Khorsabad in

the eighth century B.C.
Or, hawkheaded and broad-winged, they may be seen

following around behind a king, with a cone which has been dipped in a

small pail, as in a wall carving of Assurnasirpal in the ninth century B.C., a

scene like the anointing of baptism.
In none of these depictions does the

angel seem to be speaking or the human listening.
It is a silent visual scene

in which the auditory actuality of the earlier bicameral act is becoming a supposed and assumed silent relationship.
It becomes what we would call

mythological.
Demons

But angels were not enough to fill in the initiative vacuum left by the

retreating gods.
And besides, being messengers from the great gods, they

were usually associated with the king and his lords.
For the common

people, whose personal gods no longer help them, a very different kind of

semidivine being now casts a terrible shadow over everyday life.
Why should malevolent demons have entered human history at this

particular time?
Speech, even if incomprehensible, is man’s chief way of

greeting others.
And if the other does not reply to an initiated greeting, a

readiness for the other’s hostility will follow.
Because the personal gods are

silent, they must be angry and hostile.
Such logic is the origin of the idea of

evil which first appears in the history of mankind during the breakdown of

the bicameral mind.
Since there is no doubt whatever that the gods rule over

us as they will, what can we do to appease their wishes to harm us, and

propitiate them into friendship once again?
Thus the prayer and sacrifice

that we have referred to earlier in this chapter, and thus the virtue of

humility before a god.
As the gods recede into special people called prophets or oracles, or are

reduced to darkly communicating with men in angels and omen, there

whooshes into this power vacuum a belief in demons.
The very air of

Mesopotamia became darkened with them.
Natural phenomena took on

their characteristics of hostility toward men, a raging demon in the

sandstorm sweeping the desert, a demon of fire, scorpion-men guarding the

rising sun beyond the mountains, Pazuzu the monstrous wind demon, the

evil Croucher, plague demons, and the horrible Asapper demons that could

be warded off by dogs.
Demons stood ready to seize a man or woman in

lonely places, while sleeping or eating or drinking, or particularly at

childbirth.
They attached themselves to men as all the illnesses of mankind.
Even the gods could be attacked by demons, and this sometimes explained

their absence from the control of human affairs.
Protection against these evil divinities—something inconceivable in the

bicameral age—took many forms.
Dating from early in the first millennium

B.C.
are many thousands of prophylactic amulets, to be worn around the

neck or wrist.
They usually depict the particular demon whose power is to be inhibited, surmounted perhaps by gesticulating priests shooing the evil

away, and often underwritten with an incantation invoking the great gods

against the threatened horror, such as:



Incantation.
That one that has approached the house scares me from

my bed, rends me, makes me see nightmares.
To the god Bine,

gatekeeper of the underworld, may they appoint him, by the decree of

Ninurta prince of the underworld.
By the decree of Marduk who

dwells in Esagilia in Babylon.
Let door and bolt know that I am under

the protection of the two Lords.
Incantation.
7



Innumerable rituals were devoutly mumbled and mimed all over

Mesopotamia throughout the first millennium B.C.
to counteract these

malign forces.
The higher gods were beseeched to intercede.
All illnesses,

aches, and pains were ascribed to malevolent demons until medicine

became exorcism.
Most of our knowledge of these antidemoniac practices

and their extent comes from the huge collection made about 630 B.C.
by

Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.
Literally thousands of extant tablets from this

library describe such exorcisms, and thousands more list omen after omen,

depicting a decaying civilization as black with demons as a piece of rotting

meat with flies.
A New Heaven

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the gods customarily had locations,

even though their voices were ubiquitously heard by their servants.
These

were often dwellings such as ziggurats or household shrines.
And while

some gods could be associated with celestial bodies such as the sun, moon,

or stars, and the greatest, such as Anu, lived in the sky, the majority of gods

were earth-dwellers along with men.
All this changes as we enter the first millennium B.C., when, as we are

proposing, the gods’ voices are no longer heard.
As the earth has been left

to angels and demons, so it seems to be accepted that the dwelling place of

the now absent gods is with Anu in the sky.
And this is why the forms of

angels are always winged: they are messengers from the sky where the gods

live.
8

The use of the word for sky or heaven in conjunction with gods becomes

more and more common in Assyrian-literature.
And when the story of the

great flood (the origin of the Biblical story) is added into the Gilgamesh

stories in the seventh century B.C., it is used as a rationalization for the

departure of the gods from earth:



Even the gods were terror-stricken at the deluge.
They fled and ascended to the heaven of Anu.
9



This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by an

important change in the building of ziggurats.
As we saw in II.2 , the

original ziggurats of Mesopotamian history were built around a central

great hall called the gigunu where the statue of the god ‘lived’ in the rituals

of his human slaves.
But by the end of the second millennium B.C., the

entire concept of the ziggurat seems to have become altered.
It now has no

central room whatever and the statues of the major gods are less and less

the centers of elaborate ritual.
For the sacred tower of the ziggurat was now

a landing stage to facilitate the gods’ descent to earth from the heaven to

which they had vanished.
This is definitely known from texts of the first

millennium B.C., which even make references to the “boat of heaven.” The

exact date at which this change took place is a difficult matter, for the extant ziggurats have been badly damaged and, even worse, sometimes ‘restored’.
But I suggest that all of the many ziggurats which the Assyrians built

beginning with the reign of Tulkulti-Ninurta were of this sort, huge

pedestals for the return of the gods from heaven and not houses for earthly

gods as before.
The ziggurat built by Sargon in the eighth century B.C.
for his huge new

city of Khorsabad is calculated from recent excavations to have surged up

in seven stages 140 feet above the surrounding city, its summit shining with

a temple dedicated to Ashur, still the owning, if unheard, god of Assyria.
There is no other temple to Ashur at Khorsabad.
Descending from the

temple was no ordinary stairway as in previous ziggurats, but a long spiral

ramp winding around the core of the tower down which Ashur could walk,

when or if he ever landed and did return to the city.
Similarly, the Ziggurat of Neo-Babylon, the Biblical Tower of Babel, was

no god’s house as in the truly bicameral age, but a heavenly landing for the

now celestialized gods.
Built in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., it

soared 300 feet high, again with seven stages, pinnacling in a brilliant blue-

glazed temple for Marduk.
Its very name indicates this use: E-temen-an-ki,

temple (E) of the receiving platform ( temen) between heaven ( an) and earth ( ki).10 The otherwise senseless passage of Genesis (II:29) is certainly a rewrite of some Neo-Babylonian legend of just such a landing by Yahweh

who in the company of other gods “come down to see the city and the

tower,” and thereupon “confound their language that they may not

understand one another’s speech.” The latter may be a narratization of the

garbling of hallucinated voices in their decline.
The tirelessly curious Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.
trudged up the

steep stairs and spiraling ramps of Etemenanki to see if there was a god or

idol at the top: as in the altar-face of Tukulti, there was nothing but an

empty throne.
11



DIVINATION

So far, we have just looked at the evidence for the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
This evidence is, I feel, fairly substantial.
The absence of

gods in bas-reliefs and cylinder seals, the cries about lost gods that wail out

of the silent cuneiforms, the emphasis on prayer, the introduction of new

kinds of silent divinities, angels and demons, the new idea of heaven, all

strongly indicate that the hallucinated voices called gods are no longer the

guiding companions of men.
What then takes over their function?
How is action initiated?
If

hallucinated voices are no longer adequate to the escalating complexities of

behavior, how can decisions be made?
Subjective consciousness, that is, the development on the basis of

linguistic metaphors of an operation space in which an ‘I’ could narratize

out alternative actions to their consequences, was of course the-great world

result of this dilemma.
But a more primitive solution, and one that antedates

consciousness as well as paralleling it through history, is that complex of

behaviors known as divination.
These attempts to divine the speech of the now silent gods work out into

an astonishing variety and complexity.
But I suggest that this variety is best

understood as four main types, which can be ordered in terms of their

historical beginning and which can be interpreted as successive approaches

toward consciousness.
These four are omens, sortilege, augury, and

spontaneous divination.
Omen and Omen Texts

The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will

of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important

events.
In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive.
It is

simply an extension of something common to all mammalian nervous

systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a

tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs.
Since omens are really a

particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the

origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture

per se.
Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were

probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times.
But they had

little importance.
Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences,

since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel

situations.
There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever.
While

the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really

only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second

millennium B.C.
that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out

to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable.
By the first millennium B.C.,

huge collections of them are made.
In the library of King Ashurbanipal at

Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand

tablets come into the category of omen literature.
Each entry in these

tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by

a then-clause or apodosis.
And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial

omens dealing with everyday life:



If a town is set on a hill, it will not

be good for the dweller within that town.
If black ants are seen on the foundations

which have been laid, that house will get

built; the owner of that house will live to

grow old.
If a horse enters a man’s house, and bites

either an ass or a man, the owner of the

house will die and his household will be

scattered.
If a fox runs into the public square,

that town will be devastated.
If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard

and kills it, he will prevail over his

adversary.
12



And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous

age would have been under the guidance of gods.
They can be construed as

a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what

consciousness does in a more complex way.
Rarely are we able to see any

logical dependency of prediction on portent, the connection often being as

simple as word associations or connotations.
There were also teratological omens beginning, “If a foetus, etc.,”

dealing with abnormal births both human and animal.13 The science of

medicine is actually founded in medical omens, a series of texts that begin,

“When the conjuration priest comes to the house of a sick man,” and follow

with more or less reasonable prognoses correlated with various

symptoms.
14 And omens based on the appearance of facial and bodily

characteristics in the client or in persons he encounters, which, incidentally,

give us the best description we have of what these people looked like.
15

And omens in the time dimension: menologies which stated which months

were favorable or unfavorable for given undertakings, and hemerologies

that concerned themselves with propitious or unpropitious days of each

month.
And omens that are the beginning of meteorology and astronomy,

whole series of tablets being devoted to phenomena of the sun, the planets,

the stars and the moon, their times and circumstances of disappearance,

eclipses, omens connected with halos, strange cloud formations, the divine

meaning of thunder and rain, hail and earthquakes as predictions of peace

and war, harvest and flood, or the movement of planets, particularly Venus,

among the fixed stars.
By the fifth century B.C., this use of stars to obtain the

intentions of the silent gods who now live among them has become our

familiar horoscopes, in which the conjunction of the stars at birth results in

predictions of the future and personality of the child.
History also begins, if

vaguely, in omen texts, the apodoses or “then-clauses” of some early texts

perhaps preserving some faint historical information in a unique and

characteristically Mesopotamian variety of historiography.
16 Mankind

deprived of his gods, like a child separated from his mother, is having to

learn about his world in fear and trembling.
Dream omens became (as they still are) a major source of divination.17

Particularly in the late Assyrian period during the first millennium B.C.,

dream omens were collected into dream books such as the Ziqiqu where

some associative principle between the dream event and its apodosis is

apparent, e.g., a dream of the loss of one’s cylinder seal portends the death

of a son.
But omens of whatever type can only decide so much.
One has to

wait for the portent to occur.
Novel situations do not wait.
Sortilege

Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and

designed to provoke the gods’ answers to specific questions in novel

situations.
It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans

upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing

such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out.
Sometimes it was to

answer yes or no, at other times to choose one out of a group of men, plots,

or alternatives.
But this simplicity—even triviality to us—should not blind

us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as

appreciating its remarkable historical importance.
We are so used to the

huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all

of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it

difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically.
It

is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until

very recent times.
Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a

discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground

was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind.
For, because

there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose

intentions were being divined.
As to the psychology of sortilege, I would call your attention to two

points of interest.
First, this practice is very specifically invented in culture

to supplement right hemisphere function when that function, following the

breakdown of the bicameral mind, is no longer as accessible as when it was

coded linguistically in the voices of gods.
We know from laboratory studies

that it is the right hemisphere that predominately processes spatial and

pattern information.
It is better at fitting parts of things into patterns as in

Koh’s Block Test, at perceiving the location and quantity of dots in a pattern

or of patterns of sound such as melodies.
18 Now the problem that sortilege

is trying to solve is something of the same kind, that of ordering parts of the

pattern, of choosing who is to do what, or what piece of land goes to which

person.
Originally, I suggest, in simpler societies, such decisions were

easily made by the hallucinated voices called gods, which were involved

primarily with the right hemisphere.
And when the gods no longer

accomplished this function, perhaps because of the increasing complication of such decisions, sortilege came into history as a substitute for this right

hemisphere function.
The second point of psychological interest is that the throwing of lots,

like consciousness itself, has metaphor as its basis.
In the language of I.2 ,

the unexpressed commands of the gods compose the metaphrand which is

to be lexically widened, and the metaphier is the pair or assembly of lots, be

they sticks, beans, or stones.
The paraphiers are the distinguishing marks or

words on the lots which then project back into the metaphrand as the

command of the particular god invoked.
What is important here is to

understand provoked divination such as sortilege as involving the same

kind of generative processes that develop consciousness, but in an

exopsychic nonsubjective manner.
As with omen texts, the roots of sortilege go back into the bicameral age.
The earliest mention of throwing lots appears to be in legal tablets dating

from the middle of the second millennium B.C., but it is only toward its end

that the practice becomes widespread in important decisions: to assign

shares of an estate among the sons (as at Susa), or shares of temple income

to certain officials of the sanctuary, to establish a sequence among persons

of equal status for various purposes.
This was not simply for practical

purposes, as it would be with us, but always to find out the commands of a

god.
Around 833 B.C., the new year in Assyria was always named after

some high official.
The particular official to be so honored was chosen by

means of a clay die on the faces of which the names of the various high

officials were inscribed, the various sides of the cube being inscribed with

prayers to Ashur to make that particular side turn up.
19 While many

Assyrian texts from this time on refer to various types of sortilege, it is

difficult to estimate just how widespread the practice was in decision-

making, and whether it was used by the ordinary people in more mundane

decisions.
We know that it became common among the Hittites, and its

occurrence in the Old Testament will be referred to in a later chapter.
Augury

A third type of divination and one that is closer to the structure of

consciousness is what I shall call qualitative augury.
Sortilege is ordinal,

ordering by rank a set of given possibilities.
But the many methods of

qualitative augury are designed to divine a great deal more information

from the unspeaking gods.
It is the difference between a digital and an

analog computer.
Its first form, as described in three cuneiform texts dating

from about the middle of the second millennium B.C., consisted of pouring

oil into a bowl of water held in the lap, the movement of the oil in relation

to the surface or to the rim of the bowl portending the gods’ intentions

concerning peace or prosperity, health or disease.
Here the metaphrand is

the intention or even action of a god, not just his words as in sortilege.
The

metaphier is the oil moving about the surface of the water, to which the

movements and commands of the gods are similar.
The paraphiers are the

specific shapes and proximities of the oil whose paraphrands are the

contours of the gods’ decisions and actions.
Augury in Mesopotamia always has a cultic status.
It was performed by a

special priest called the baru, surrounded with ritual, and preceded by a

prayer to the god to reveal his intentions through the oil or whatever

medium.
20 And as we enter the first millennium B.C., the methods and

techniques of the baru break out into an astonishing diversity of metaphiers

for the gods’ intentions: Not only oil but the movements of smoke rising

from a censer of incense held in the lap of the diviner, 21 or the form of hot

wax dropped into water, or the patterns of dots made at random, or the

shapes and patterns of ashes, and then sacrificed animals.
Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called,

becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first

millennium B.C.
The idea of sacrifice itself, of course, originated in the

feeding of the hallucinogenic idols as we saw in II.2.
With the breakdown

of the bicameral mind, the idols lost their hallucinogenic properties and

became mere statues, but the feeding ceremonies now addressed to absent

gods remained in the various ceremonies as sacrifices.
It is thus not

surprising that animals rather than oil, wax, smoke, etc., became the more important media of communication with the gods.
Extispicy differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly

not the speech or actions of gods, but their writing.
The baru first addressed

the gods Shamash and Adad with requests that they “write” their message

upon the entrails of the animal,22 or occasionally whispered this request into its ears before it was killed.
He then investigated in traditional sequence the

animal’s organs—windpipe, lungs, liver, gall bladder, how the coils of the

intestines were arranged—looking for deviations from the normal state,

shape, and coloring.
Any atrophy, hypertrophy, displacement, special

markings, or other abnormalities, particularly of the liver, was a divine

message metaphorically related to divine action.
The corpus of texts dealing

with extispicy outnumbers all other kinds of augury texts and deserves

much more careful study.
From its earliest and very cursory mention in the

second millennium, to the extensive collections of the Seleucid period

around 250 B.C., the history and local development of extispicy as a means

of exopsychic thought is an area where the tablets are simply awaiting the

ordering of proper research.
Of particular interest is that in the late period

the markings and discolorations are described in an arcane technical

terminology similar to what occurred among medieval alchemists.
23 Parts

of the exta of the sacrificed animal are referred to as “door of the palace,”

“path,” “yoke,” and “embankment” and symbolize these locations and

objects, creating a metaphor world from which to read out what to do.
Some

of the late tablets even have diagrams of the coils of the intestines and their

meaning.
Clay and bronze models of the liver and lungs, sometimes

elaborate, sometimes crude, have been unearthed in various sites; some

were probably used for instructional purposes.
But since the raw organs

themselves were sometimes sent to the king as proof of a particular divine

message, such models may also have served as a less redolent way of

reporting an actual observation.
24

Please remember the metaphorical nature of all such activity, for the

actual functions here are similar to though on a different level from the very

inner workings of consciousness.
That the size and shape of the liver or

other organ is a metaphier of the size and shape of the intentions of a god is,

on an ultrasimple level, similar to what we do in consciousness in making

metaphor spaces ‘containing’ metaphor objects and actions.
Spontaneous Divination

Spontaneous divination differs from the three preceding types only by

being unconstrained and free from any particular medium.
It is really a

generalization of all types.
As before, the gods’ commands, intentions, or

purposes are the metaphrand while the metaphier is anything that might be

seen at the moment and related to the concern of the diviner.
The outcomes

of undertakings or the intentions of a god are thus read out from whatever

object the diviner happens to see or hear.
The reader may try it for himself.
Think of some problem or concern in a

vague kind of way.
Then look out the window suddenly or around where

you are and take the first thing your eye lights upon, and try to ‘read’ out of

it something about your problem.
Sometimes nothing will happen.
But at

other times the message will simply flash into your mind.
I have just done

this as I write and from my north window see a television aerial against a

twilight sky.
I may divine this as meaning I am being much too speculative,

picking up fleeting suggestions from flimsy air—an unfortunate truth if I

am to face these matters at all.
I again think vaguely of my concerns and,

walking about, suddenly cast my eyes on the floor of an adjoining room

where an assistant has been building an apparatus, and see a frayed wire

with several strands at the end.
I divine that my problem in this chapter is to

tie together several different strands and loose ends of evidence.
And so on.
I have not come upon this type of divining in a Mesopotamian text.
Yet I

feel sure that it must have become a common practice, if only because

spontaneous divination is both common and important in the Old

Testament, as we shall see in a future chapter.
And it remains a common

method among many types of seers well into the Middle Ages.
25



These then are the four main types of divination, omens, sortilege,

augury, and spontaneous divination.
And I would draw to your attention

that they can be considered as exopsychic methods of thought or decision-

making, and that they are successively closer and closer proximations to the

structure of consciousness.
The fact that all of them have roots that go back

far into the bicameral period should not detract from the force of the

generalization that they became the important media of decision only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind as described in the first part of this

chapter.
THE EDGE OF SUBJECTIVITY

So far in this heterogeneous chapter, we have been dealing with the

breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia, and the responses to this

alteration in human mentality, the effort to find out what to do by other

means when voices are no longer heard in hallucination.
That a further

method for finding out what to do was consciousness, and that it first occurs

in the history of this planet here in Mesopotamia toward the end of the

second millennium B.C.
is a much more difficult proposition.
The reasons

are chiefly in our inability to translate cuneiform with the same exactness

with which we can translate Greek or Hebrew, and to proceed with the kind

of analysis which I attempt in the next chapter.
The very words in

cuneiform that might be relevant to tracing the metaphorical buildup of

consciousness and mind-space are precisely those that are extremely

difficult to translate with precision.
Let me state categorically that a truly

definitive study of changes in Mesopotamian mentality over this second

millenium B.C.
will have to wait for another level of scholarship in

cuneiform studies.
Such a task will include tracing out the changes in

referent and frequency of words that later come to describe events which

we call conscious.
One, for example, is Sha (also transliterated as Shab or Shag), a word in Akkadian, whose basic meaning seems to be “in” or

“inside.” Prefixed to the name of a city, it means “in the city.” Prefixed to

the name of a man, it means “in the man,” possibly a beginning of the

interiorization of attribution.
I hope to be forgiven for saying rather tritely that these questions and so

many others must remain for further research.
So swiftly are new sites

being discovered and new texts translated, that even ten years from now we

shall have a much clearer picture, particularly if the data are looked at from

the point of view of this chapter.
The most I feel I can establish here at this

time is simply a few comparisons of a literary kind which suggest that such

a psychological change as consciousness actually took place.
These

comparisons will be among letters, building inscriptions, and versions of

Gilgamesh.
Assyrian and Old Babylonian Letters Compared

My first comparison to suggest this change from bicamerality to

subjectivity is between the cuneiform tablet letters of the seventh century

B.C., Assyria, and those of the old Babylonian kings a millennium earlier.
The letters of Hammurabi and his era are factual, concrete, behavioristic,

formalistic, commanding, and without greeting.
They are not addressed to

the recipient, but actually to the tablet itself, and always begin: unto A say,

thus says B.
And then follows what B has to say to A.
We should remember

here what I have suggested elsewhere, that reading, having developed from

hallucinating from idols and then from pictographs, had become during

later bicameral times a matter of hearing the cuneiform.
And hence the

addressee of the tablets.
The subjects of Old Babylonian letters are always objective.
Hammurabi’s letters, for example (all possibly written by Hammurabi

himself since they are cut by the same hand), are written for vassal kings

and officers in his hegemony about sending such a person to him, or

directing so much lumber to Babylon, specifying in one instance, “only

vigorous trunks shall they cut down,” or regulating the exchanges of corn

for cattle, or where workmen should be sent.
Rarely are reasons given.
Purposes never.
Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi.
I wrote you telling you

to send Enubi-Marduk to me.
Why, then, haven’t you sent him?
When

you see this tablet, send Enubi-Marduk into my presence.
See that he

travels night and day, that he may arrive swiftly.
26



And the letters rarely go beyond this in complication of ‘thought’ or

relationship.
A more interesting letter is a command to bring several conquered idols

to Babylon:



Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi.
I am sending now Zikir-

ilisu the officer, and Hammarabi-bani the Dugab-officer to bring the

goddesses of Emutbalum.
Let the goddesses travel in a processional

boat as in a shrine as they come to Babylon.
And the temple-women

shall follow after them.
For the food of the goddesses, you shall

provide sheep...
Let them not delay, but swiftly reach Babylon.
27



This letter is interesting in showing the everyday nature of the relationship

of god and man in Old Babylon, as well as the fact that the deities are

somehow expected to eat on their trip.
Going from Hammurabi’s letters to the state letters of Assyria of the

seventh century B.C.
is like leaving a thoughtless tedium of undisobeyable

directives and entering a rich sensitive frightened grasping recalcitrant

aware world not all that different from our own.
The letters are addressed to

people, not tablets, and probably were not heard, but had to be read aloud.
The subjects discussed have changed in a thousand years to a far more

extensive list of human activities.
But they are also imbedded in a texture of

deceit and divination, speaking of police investigations, complaints of

lapsing ritual, paranoid fears, bribery, and pathetic appeals of imprisoned

officers, all things unknown, unmentioned, and impossible in the world of

Hammurabi.
Even sarcasm, as in a letter from an Assyrian king to his

restive acculturated deputies in conquered Babylon about 670 B.C.:



Word of the king to the pseudo-Babylonians.
I am well...
So you, so

help you heaven, have turned yourselves into Babylonians!
And you

keep bringing up against my servants charges—false charges,—which

you and your master have concocted...
The document (nothing but

windy words and importunities!) which you have sent me, I am

returning to you, after replacing it into its seals.
Of course you will say,

“What is he sending back to us?” From the Babylonians, my servants

and my friends are writing me: When I open and read, behold, the

goodness of the shrines, birds of sin...
28



And then the tablet is broken off.
A further interesting difference is their depiction of an Assyrian king.
The Babylonian kings of the early second millennium were confident and

fearless, and probably did not have to be too militaristic.
The cruel Assyrian

kings, whose palaces are virile with muscular depictions of lion hunts and

grappling with clawing beasts, are in their letters indecisive frightened

creatures appealing to their astrologers and diviners to contact the gods and tell them what to do and when to do it.
These kings are told by their

diviners that they are beggars or that their sins are making a god angry; they

are told what to wear, or what to eat, or not to eat until further notice:29

“Something is happening in the skies; have you noticed?
As far as I am

concerned, my eyes are fixed.
I say, ‘What phenomenon have I failed to see,

or failed to report to the king?
Have I failed to observe something that does

not pertain to his lot?’...
As to that eclipse of the sun of which the king

spoke, the eclipse did not take place.
On the 27th I shall look again and

send in a report.
From whom does the lord my king fear misfortune?
I have

no information whatsoever.”30

Does a comparison of these letters, a thousand years apart, demonstrate

the alteration of mentality with which we are here concerned?
Of course, a

great deal of discussion could follow such a question.
And research: content

analyses, comparisons of syntax, uses of pronouns, questions, and future

tenses, as well as specific words which appear to indicate subjectivity in the

Assyrian letters and which are absent in the Old Babylonian.
But such is

our knowledge of cuneiform at present that a thorough analysis is not

possible at this time.
Even the translations I have used are hedged in favor

of smooth English and familiar syntax and so are not to be completely

trusted.
Only an impressionist comparison is possible, and the result, I

think, is clear: that the letters of the seventh century B.C.
are far more similar

to our own consciousness than those of Hammurabi a thousand years

earlier.
The Spatialization of Time

A second literary comparison can be made about the sense of time as

shown in building inscriptions.
In I.2 , I suggested that one of the essential

properties of consciousness was the metaphor of time as a space that could

be regionized such that events and persons can be located therein, giving

that sense of past, present, and future in which narratization is possible.
The beginning of this characteristic of consciousness can be dated with at

least a modicum of conviction at about 1300 B.C.
We have just seen how the

development of omens and augury suggests this inferentially.
But more

exact evidence is found in the inscriptions on buildings.
In the typical

inscription previous to this date, the king gave his name and titles, lavished

praise on his particular god or gods, mentioned briefly the season and

circumstances when the building was started, and then described something

of the building operation itself.
After 1300 B.C., there is not only a mention

of the event immediately preceding the building, but also a summary of all

the king’s past military exploits to date.
And in the next centuries, this

information comes to be arranged systematically according to the yearly

campaigns, and ultimately bursts out into the elaborate annal form that is

almost universal in the records of the Assyrian rulers of the first millennium

B.C.
Such annals continue to swell beyond the recountal of raw fact into

statements of motive, criticisms of courses of action, appraisals of character.
And then further to include political changes, campaign strategies, historical

notes on particular regions—all evidence, I insist, of the invention of

consciousness.
None of these characteristics is seen in the earlier

inscriptions.
This is, of course, the invention of history as well, commencing exactly

in the development of these royal inscriptions.31 How strange it seems to think of the idea of history having to be invented!
Herodotus, usually famed

as “the father of history,” wrote his history only after a visit through

Mesopotamia in the fifth century B.C., and may have picked up the very idea

of history from these Assyrian sources.
What is interesting to me in this

speculation is the possibility that as consciousness develops, it can develop

in slightly different ways, and the importance of the writing of Herodotus to

the later development of Greek consciousness would make an interesting

project.
My essential point here, however, is that history is impossible

without the spatialization of time that is characteristic of consciousness.
Gilgamesh

And finally a comparison from this best-known example of Assyrian

literature.
The Epic of Gilgamesh proper is a series of twelve numbered

tablets found in Nineveh among the ruins of the temple library of the god

Nabu and the palace library of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal.
It was

written for the king out of previous stories in about 650 B.C., and its hero is a

demi-god, Gilgamesh, whom his father, Esarhaddon, had worshiped.
Certainly the name Gilgamesh goes far back into Mesopotamian history.
And numerous other tablets have been found which relate to him and to this

series in some way.
Prominent among them are three apparently older tablets which parallel

some of the Assyrian tablets.
Where they were found and their

archaeological contexts are not at all clear.
They were not found by

archaeologists, but were bought by private buyers from a dealer in

Baghdad.
Their dating and provenance therefore are a questionable matter.
From internal evidence I would place them at about the same time as some

Hittite and Hurrian fragments about Gilgamesh, perhaps 1200 B.C.
The more

usual date given them is 1700 B.C.
But whatever their date, there is certainly

no warrant to suppose, as have some popularizers of the epic, that the

seventh century B.C.
rendering of the story of Gilgamesh goes back to the

Old Babylonian era.
What we are interested in are the changes which have been made

between the few older tablets and their Assyrian versions of 650 B.C.32 The most interesting comparison is in Tablet X.
In the older version (called the

Yale Tablet because of its present location), the divine Gilgamesh,

mourning the death of his mortal friend Enkidu, has a dialogue with the god

Shamash, and then with the goddess Siduri.
The latter, called the divine

barmaid, tells Gilgamesh that death for mortals is inevitable.
These

dialogues are nonsubjective.
But in the later Assyrian version, the dialogue

with Shamash is not even included, and the barmaid is described in very

human earthly terms, even as self-consciously wearing a veil.
To our

conscious minds, the story has become humanized.
At one point in the later

Assyrian tablet, the barmaid sees Gilgamesh approaching.
She is described

as looking out into the distance and speaking to her own heart, saying to herself, “Surely this man is a murderer!
Whither is he bound?” This is

subjective thinking.
And it is not in the older tablet at all.
The Assyrian tablet goes on with great elaboration (as well as with great

beauty) to bring out the subjective sadness in the heart of Gilgamesh at the

loss of his friend.
One of the literary devices here (at least as translators

have restored a damaged part) is repeated questions that describe the

outward demeanor of Gilgamesh rhetorically, asking why his appearance

and behavior are thus and so, so that the reader is constantly imagining the

interior ‘space’ and analog ‘I’ of the hero.
Why is thy heart so sad, and why are thy features so distorted?
Why is there woe in thy heart?
And why is thy face like unto one who has made a far journey?
None of this psalmlike concern is in the old version of Tablet X.
Another

character is the god Utnapishtim, the Distant, who is mentioned only briefly

in the old version of Tablet X.
But, in the 650 B.C.
version, he is looking into

the distance and speaking words to his heart, asking it questions and

coming to his own conclusions.
Conclusion

The evidence we have just examined is strong in some areas and weak in

others.
The literature on the loss of the gods is an unquestionable change in

the history of Mesopotamia, unlike anything that preceded it.
It is indeed

the birth of modern religious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the

very psalmlike yearnings for religious certainty that are expressed in the

literature from the time of Tukulti up into the first millennium B.C.
The sudden flourishing of all kinds of divination and its huge importance

in both political and private life is also an unquestionable historical fact.
And while these practices date back to earlier time, perhaps even suggesting

that as civilization became more complicated toward the end of the third

millennium B.C., the bicameral gods needed some auxiliary method of

decision-making, they only achieve their dominance and universal position

in civilized life after the breakdown of the gods.
It is also unquestionable that the very nature of divinities was altered in

these times, and that the belief in a world darkened with hostile demons,

causing disease and misfortune, can only be understood as an expression of

the deep and irreversible uncertainty which followed the loss of the

hallucinated decisions of the bicameral mind.
What is weak in our survey is indeed the evidence of consciousness

itself.
There is something unsatisfying in my saltatory comparisons among

questionable translations of cuneiform tablets of various ages.
What we

would like is to see in front of us a continuous literature wherein we could

watch more carefully the unfolding of subjective mind-space and its

operator function in initiating decision.
This is indeed what occurs in

Greece a few centuries later, and it is to that analysis that we now turn.
Chapter 5



The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece

THEY HAVE CALLED IT the Dorian invasions.
And classicists will tell you that

indeed they could have called it anything or everything, so groping our

knowledge, and so dark these particular profundities of past time.
But

continuities in pottery designs from one archaeological site to another do

fetch a few candles into this vast and silent darkness, and they reveal, albeit

in flickering fashion, the huge jagged outlines of complex successions of

migrations and displacements that lasted from 1200 to 1000 B.C.
1 That much is fact.
The rest is inference.
Even who the so-called Dorians were is unclear.
In

an earlier chapter, I have suggested that the beginning of all this chaos may

have been the Thera eruption and its consequences.
As Thucydides at the

last edge of a verbal tradition describes it, “migrations were a frequent

occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the

pressure of superior numbers.” Palaces and villages that once held fealty to

Agamemnon and his gods were looted and burned by other bicameral

peoples who, following their own admonitory visions, probably could not

communicate with nor have pity on the natives.
Survivors were slaves or

refugees, and refugees conquered or died.
Our greatest certainties are

negative.
For all that the Mycaenaean world had produced with such

remarkable uniformity everywhere—the massive stone architecture of its

god-ordered palaces and fortifications, its undulant frescoes of delicate

clarity, its shaft-graves with their elaborate contents, the megaron plan of its

houses, the terra-cotta idols and figurines, the death masks of beaten gold,

the bronze and ivory work and distinctive pottery—all stopped and was

never known thereafter.
This ruin is the bitter soil for the growth of subjective consciousness in

Greece.
And the difference here from the huge Assyrian cities stumbling on

into a fumbling demon-ridden consciousness out of their own momentum is

important.
In contrast, Mycaenae had been a loose and spread-out system of

divinely commanded cities of smaller size.
The breakdown of the bicameral

mind resulted in an even greater dispersion as all society broke down.
It is even plausible that all this political havoc was the very challenge to

which the great epics were a defiant response, and that the long narrative

chants of the aoidoi from refugee camp to camp worked out into an eager

unity with the cohesive past on the part of a newly nomadic people reaching

at lost certainties.
Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in

inadequate minds.
Artd this unique factor, this importance of poetry in a

devastating social chaos, is the reason why Greek consciousness

specifically fluoresces into that brilliant intellectual light which is still

illuminating our world.
What I shall do in this chapter is to conduct you on a tour through all the

early extant literature of Greece.
It is unfortunately a short list of texts.
Beginning with the Iliad, we shall travel consecutively up through the

Odyssey and the Boeotian poems ascribed to Hesiod, and then into the

fragments of the lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh century B.C.
and a

little beyond.
In doing so, I shall not be giving you any running description

of the scenery we are passing through.
The several good histories of early

Greek poetry can do that better than I.
Instead I shall be directing your

attention to selected things as we pass by that are of particular interest from

the point of view of our theory of consciousness.
But before we do so, we must make a few preliminary excursions,

particularly into a more thorough analysis of mindlike terms in the Iliad.
LOOKING FORWARD THROUGH THE ILIAD

In an earlier chapter, I made the statement that the Iliad was our window

upon the immediate bicameral past.
Here, I propose that we stand on the

other side of that window and peer forward into the distant conscious

future, regarding this great mysterious paean to anger, not so much as the

end point of the verbal tradition that preceded it, but rather as the very

beginning of the new mentality to come.
In I.3 , we saw that the words which in later Greek indicate aspects of

conscious functioning have in the Iliad more concrete and bodily referents.
But the very fact that these words come to have mental meanings later

suggests that they may be some kind of key to understanding the manner in

which Greek consciousness is developed.
The words we shall look at here are seven: thumos, phrenes, noos, and

psyche, all of them variously translated as mind, spirit, or soul, and kradie, her, and etor, often translated as heart or sometimes as mind or spirit.
The translation of any of these seven as mind or anything similar is entirely

mistaken and without any warrant whatever in the Iliad.
Simply, and

without equivocation, they are to be thought of as objective parts of the

environment or of the body.
We shall discuss these terms fully in a moment.
Now the first question to ask is why these entities are in the poem at all.
I

have earlier stressed the fact that the major instigations to action here are in

the voices of the gods, not in the thumos, phrenes, etor, et al.
The latter are

entirely redundant.
In fact they often seem to get in the way of the simple

command-obedience relation between god and man, like a wedge between

the two sides of the bicameral mind.
Why then are they there?
Let us examine more closely what would have happened at the beginning

of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
In I.4 , we found that the

physiological cuing of an hallucinated voice, whether in a bicameral man or

in a contemporary schizophrenic, is the stress of some decision or conflict.
Now, as the voices of gods become more inadequate and suppressed during

this social chaos, we may suppose that the amount of that stress necessary

to occasion an hallucinated voice would be raised.
It is quite likely, then, that as the bicameral organization of mind began to diminish, the decision-stress in novel situations would be much greater than

previously, and both the degree and duration of that stress would have to

become progressively more intense before the hallucination of a god would

occur.
And such increased stress would be accompanied by a variety of

physiological concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning

sensations, abrupt changes in breathing, a pounding or fluttering heart, etc.,

responses which in the Iliad are called thumos, phrenes, and kradie

respectively.
And this is what these words mean, not mind or anything like

it.
As the gods are heard progressively less and less, these internal response-

stimuli of progressively greater stress are associated more and more with

men’s subsequent actions, whatever they may be, even coming to take on

the godlike function of seeming to initiate action themselves.
The evidence that we are on the right track in these suppositions can be

found in the Iliad itself.
At the very beginning, Agamemnon, king of men

but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briséis away

from Achilles, who had captured her.
As he does so, the response of

Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where

he is in conflict or put into two parts ( mermerizo) whether to obey his

thumos, the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory

king or not.
It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly

sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his mighty sword,

that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming

goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action (I:188ff.) and tells

Achilles what to do.
I mean to suggest here that the degree and extent of these internal

sensations were neither so evident nor so named in the true bicameral

period.
If we may propose that there was an Ur-Iliad, or the verbal epic as it

came from the lips of the first several generations of aoidoi, then we can

expect that it had no such interval, no etor or thumos preceding the voice of the god, and that the use and, as we shall see, the increasing use of these

words in this way reflects the alteration of mentality, the wedge between

god and man which results in consciousness.
Preconscious Hypostases

We may call these mind-words that later come to mean something like

conscious functioning, the preconscious hypostases.
The latter term means

in Greek what is caused to stand under something.
The preconscious

hypostases are the assumed causes of action when other causes are no

longer apparent.
In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a

man who acts, but one of the preconscious hypostases which causes him to

act.
They are thus seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the

transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness.
What we

shall see is that the frequency and the meaning of these terms gradually

change as we go from text to text from about 850 to 600 B.C., and how in

the sixth century B.C.
their referents join together in what we would call the

subjective conscious mind.
2

I would like here to translate and expand what I have just said into a

clearer statement by suggesting that this temporal development of the

preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases:



Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms

referred to simple external observations.
Phase II: Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean

things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations.
Phase III: Subjective: When these terms refer to processes that we

would call mental; they have moved from internal stimuli supposedly

causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may

occur.
Phase IV: Synthetic: When the various hypostases unite into one

conscious self capable of introspection.
The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate

phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of

transition between these phases.
The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the

breakdown period.
It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of

gods and their hallucinated directions.
The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such

stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only

external perception.
The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more complicated

matter.
And much more interesting.
It is due to the paraphrand generator of

metaphor described in I.2.
In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of

metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which

is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known

metaphier which is similar to it in some way.
Usually there are simple

associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then

project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates

being called paraphrands.
Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that

they are new in their association with the metaphrand.
And this is how we

are able to generate the kind of ‘space’ which we introspect upon and which

is the necessary substrate of consciousness.
This is really quite simple as we

shall see shortly.
And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary

consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also.
I suggest that as the

subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al.
become

established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations

wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the

basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as ‘containers’ or ‘persons.’ But this

synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be

called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of

individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted

in a new concept of self.
Before looking at the evidence for these matters, let us first investigate

the preconscious hypostases and their Iliadic meanings in these phases with

more detail.
In the general order of their importance in the Iliad, they are:



Thumos

This is by far the most common and important hypostatic word in the whole

poem.
It occurs three times as often as any other.
Originally, in the

Objective Phase, I suggest, it meant simply activity as externally perceived.
And nothing internal about it.
This Mycaenaean usage is found frequently

in the Iliad, particularly in the battle scenes, where a warrior aiming a spear

in the right place causes the thumos or activity of another to cease.
The internal Phase II, as we have seen in Achilles’ wrath occurs in a

novel stressful situation during the breakdown period when the stress

threshold for the hallucinated voice was higher.
Thumos then refers to a

mass of internal sensations in response to environmental crises.
It was, I

suggest, a pattern of stimulation familiar to modern physiology, the so-

called stress or emergency response of the sympathetic nervous system and

its liberation of adrenalin and noradrenalin from the adrenal glands.
This

includes the dilation of the blood vessels in striate muscles and in the heart,

an increase in tremor of striate muscles, a burst of blood pressure, the

constriction of blood vessels in the abdominal viscera and in the skin, the

relaxing of smooth muscles, and the sudden increased energy from the

sugar released into the blood from the liver, and possible perceptual

changes with the dilation of the pupil of the eye.
This complex was, then,

the internal pattern of sensation that preceded particularly violent activity in

a critical situation.
And by doing so repeatedly, the pattern of sensation

begins to take on the term for the activity itself.
Thereafter, it is the thumos

which gives strength to a warrior in battle, etc.
All the references to thumos

in the Iliad as an internal sensation are consistent with this interpretation.
Now the important transition to the subjective Phase III is already

beginning even in the Iliad, although not in a very conspicuous way.
We see

it in the unvoiced metaphor of the thumos as like a container: in several

passages, menos or vigor is ‘put’ in someone’s thumos (16: 5-8; 17: 451;

22: 312).
The thumos is also implicitly compared to a person: it is not Ajax

who is zealous to fight but his thumos (13: 73); nor is it Aeneas who

rejoices but his thumos (13: 494; see also 14: 156).
If not a god, it is the

thumos that most often ‘urges’ a man into action.
And as if it were another

person, a man may speak to his thumos (u: 403), and may hear from it what he is to say (7: 68), or have it reply to him even as a god (9: 702).
All these metaphors are extremely important.
Saying that the internal

sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which

strength can be put is to generate an imagined ‘space,’ here located always

in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary

consciousness.
And to compare the function of that sensation to that of

another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor

processes that will later become the analog ‘I’.
Phrenes

The second most common hypostasis in the Iliad is the phrenes.
Its

Objective Phase origin is more questionable.
But the fact that it is almost

always plural may indicate that the phrenes objectively referred to the lungs

and perhaps were associated with phrasis or speech.
In the Internal Phase, phrenes become the temporal pattern of sensations

associated with respiratory changes.
These come from the diaphragm, the

intercostal muscles of the rib-cage, and the smooth muscles surrounding the

bronchial tubes which regulate their bore and so the resistance of them to

the passage of air, this mechanism being controlled by the sympathetic

nervous system.
We should remember here how extremely responsive our

breathing is to various types of environmental stimulation.
A sudden

stimulus, and we ‘catch our breath’.
Sobbing and laughing have obvious

distinct internal stimulation from the diaphragm and intercostals.
In great

activity or excitement, there is an increase in both the rate and depth of

breathing with the resulting internal stimulation.
Either pleasantness or

unpleasantness usually shows increased breathing.
Momentary attention is

clearly correlated with partial or complete inhibition of breathing.
A

surprise, and our rate of breathing increases and becomes irregular.
Apart from rate, there are also unique changes in the proportion of time

occupied by inspiration and by expiration in a single breath cycle.
This is

best measured by determining the percent of the duration of the breath cycle

taken up by inspiration.
This is about 16 percent in speech, 23 percent in

laughter, 30 percent in attentive mental work, 43 percent when at rest, 60

percent or more in excitement, 71 percent in subjects imagining a

wonderful or surprising situation, and 75 percent in sudden fright.
3

The point I am trying to make here is that our phrenes or respiratory

apparatus can almost be looked at as recording everything we do in quite

distinct and distinguishable ways.
It is at least possible that this internal

mirror of behavior loomed much larger in the total stimulus world of the

preconscious mind than it does in ourselves.
And certainly its changing

pattern of internal stimulation makes us understand why the phrenes are so

important during the transition to consciousness, and why the term is used

in so many functionally different ways in the poetry we are examining in

this chapter.
In the Iliad, it can often be translated amply as lungs.
Agamemnon’s

black phrenes fill with anger (1:103) and we can visualize the king’s deep

breathing as his fury mounts.
Auto-medon fills his dark phrenes with valor

and strength, or takes deep breaths (17:499).
Frightened fawns have no

strength in their phrenes after running; they are out of breath (4:245).
In

weeping, grief ‘comes to’ the phrenes (1:362; 8:124) or the respiratory

phrenes can ‘hold’ fear (10:10), or joy (9:186).
Even these statements are

partly metaphoric, and thus associate a kind of container space in the

phrenes.
A very few instances are more clearly in Phase III in the sense of inner

mind-space.
These are where the phrenes are said to ‘contain’ and perhaps

‘retain’ information.
Sometimes this information comes from a god (1:55)

or at other times from another human (1:297).
Laboratory studies have demonstrated that even simple sensory

experience of an object, its recognition, and the recall of the name

associated with it, all can be observed in recordings of respiration taken

simultaneously.4 It is thus not surprising that when some internal sensation is first connected to such functions as recognition and recall, it is located in

the phrenes.
Once it is said that the phrenes can recognize events (22:296), it is making a metaphor of the phrenes with a person, and the paraphrands

of ‘person,’ that is, something that can act in a space projects back into the

phrenes to make it metaphorically spatial and capable of other human

activities metaphorically.
Similarly we find that like a person the phrenes of

a man can occasionally ‘be persuaded’ by another man (7:120), or even by

a god (4:104).
The phrenes can perhaps even ‘speak’ like a god, as when

Agamemnon says he obeyed his baneful phrenes (9:119).
These instances

are quite rare in the Iliad, but they do point toward what will develop into

consciousness over the next two centuries.
Kradie

This term, which later comes to be spelled kardia, and results in our

familiar adjective ‘cardiac,’ is not quite so important or mysterious as other

hypostases.
It refers to the heart.
In fact, it is the most common hypostasis

still in use.
When we in the twentieth century wish to be sincere, we still

speak out of our hearts, not out of our consciousness.
It is in our hearts that

we have our most profound thoughts and cherish our closest beliefs.
And

we love with our hearts.
It is curious that the lungs or phrenes have never

maintained their hypostatic role as has the kradie.
Originally, I suggest, it simply meant quivering, coming from the verb

kroteo, to beat.
Kradie even means in some passages of early Greek a

quivering branch.
Then, in the internalization of Phase II that went on

during the Dorian invasions, the quivering that was seen with the eye and

felt with the hand externally becomes the name of the internal sensation of

the heartbeat in response to external situations.
With few exceptions, this is

its referent in the Iliad.
No one believes anything in his heart as yet.
Again I would remind you of the extensive modern literature on the

responsiveness of our hearts to how we perceive the world.
Like respiration

or the action of the sympathetic nervous system, the cardiac system is

extremely sensitive to particular aspects of the environment.
At least one

recent commentator has introduced the concept of the cardiac mind, calling

the heart a specific sense organ for anxiety, as the eyes are the sense organ

for sight.
5 Anxiety in this view is not any of the poetic homologues which we in our consciousness might use to describe it.
Rather it is an inner tactile

sensation in the sensory nerve endings of cardiac tissue which reads the

environment for its anxiety potential.
While this notion is doubtful as it stands, it is good Homeric psychology.
A coward in the Iliad is not someone who is afraid, but someone whose

kradie beats loudly (13:282).
The only remedy is for Athene to ‘put’

strength in the kradie (2:452), or for Apollo to ‘put’ boldness in it (21:547).
The metaphier of a container here is building a ‘space’ into the heart in

which later men may believe, feel, and ponder things deeply.
Etor

Philologists usually translate both kradie and etor as heart.
And certainly a word can have synonyms.
But in instances so important as the assigning of

particular locations of sensations and forces of action, I would demur on a

priori grounds, and insist that to the ancient Greek these terms had to

represent different locations and sensations.
Sometimes they are even

clearly distinct in the text (20:169).
I have thus the temerity to suggest that

etor in Phase I came from the noun etron = belly, and that in Phase II, it becomes internalized into sensations of the gastro-intestinal tract,

particularly the stomach.
Indeed, there is even evidence for this in the Iliad,

where it is precisely stated that food and drink are taken to satisfy the etor

(19:307).
6 This translation is also more apt in other situations, as when a warrior loses his etor or guts in the front ranks of the battle by being

disemboweled (5:215).
But more important is the stimulus field it provides for mental

functioning.
We know that the gastro-intestinal tract has a wide repertoire of

responses to human situations.
Everyone knows the sinking feeling on

receiving bad news, or the epigastric cramp before a near automobile

accident.
The intestine is equally responsive to emotional stimuli of lesser

degree, and these responses can be easily seen on the fluoroscopic screen.
7

Stomach contractions and peristalsis stop at an unpleasant stimulus, and

may even be reversed if the unpleasantness is increased.
The secretory

activity of the stomach is also extremely susceptible to emotional

experience.
The stomach is indeed one of the most responsive organs in the

body, reacting in its spasms and emptying and contractions and secretory

activity to almost every emotion and sensation.
And this is the reason why

illnesses of the gastro-intestinal system were the first to be thought of as

psychosomatic.
It is therefore plausible that this spectrum of gastro-intestinal sensations

was what was being referred to by the etor.
When Andromache hears the

groaning Hecuba, her etor heaves up in her throat; she is close to vomiting

(22:452).
8 When Lycaon’s plea to live is mocked by Achilles, it is Lycaon’s etor along with his knees that are ‘loosened’ and made weak (21:114).
We

would say he has a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
And when the gods themselves join in the battle, it is the etor of Zeus that laughs with joy,

or what we would call a belly-laugh (21:389).
The container metaphor is not used as with the other hypostases,

probably because the stomach already contains food.
For this very reason

we will see that it does not grow into an important part of any conscious

mentality in the literature to follow.
I think it is obvious to the medical reader that these matters we are

discussing under the topic of the preconscious hypostases have a

considerable bearing on any theory of psychosomatic disease.
In the

thumos, phrenes, kradie, and etory we have covered the four major target systems of such illness.
And that they compose the very groundwork of

consciousness, a primitive partial type of consciousizing, has important

consequences in medical theory.
I shall only indicate the ker in passing, partly because it plays a

diminishing role in this story of consciousness, but also because its

derivation and significance is somewhat cloudy.
While it is possible that it

could have come from cheir and then become somatized into trembling

hands and limbs, it is more probably from the same root as kardia in a

different dialect.
Certainly the passage in the Odyssey which states that a

warrior is wounded where the phrenes or lungs are set close about the

throbbing ker (16:481) leaves little doubt.
It is almost always referred to as

the organ of grief and is of limited importance.
But of utmost importance is the next hypostasis.
Let it be immediately

stated that it is an uncommon term in the Iliad—so uncommon as to make

us suspect that it could have been added by the later generations of aoidoi.
But starting from such small beginnings in the Iliad, it soon comes into the

very center of our topic.
And this is



Noos

Up to now, we have been dealing with large, ummistakable internal

sensations that only needed to be named in times of turmoil and crisis, and

which then took their names from objective external perception.
Noos,

deriving from noeo = to see, is perception itself.
And in coming to it we are

in a much more powerful region in our intellectual travels.
For, as we saw in an earlier chapter, the great majority of the terms we

use to describe our conscious lives are visual.
We ‘see’ with the mind’s

‘eye’ solutions which may be ‘brilliant’ or ‘obscure,’ and so on.
Vision is

our distance receptor par excellence.
It is our sense of space in a way that

no other modality can even approach.
And it is that spatial quality, as we

have seen, that is the very ground and fabric of consciousness.
It is interesting to note parenthetically that there is no hypostasis for

hearing as there is for sight.
Even today, we do not hear with the mind’s ear

as we see with the mind’s eye.
Nor do we refer to intelligent minds as loud,

in the same way we say they are bright.
This is probably because hearing

was the very essence of the bicameral mind, and as such has those

differences from vision which I discussed in I.4.
The coming of

consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an

auditory mind to a visual mind.
This shift is first seen somewhat fitfully in the Iliad.
The Mycenaean

objective origin of the term is present in objective statements about seeing,

or in noos as a sight or show.
In urging his men into battle, a warrior may

say there is no better noos than a hand-to-hand battle with the enemy

(15:510).
And Zeus keeps Hector in his noos (15 ¡461).
But the second phase of internalization of noos is also evident in the

Iliad.
It is located in the chest (3:63).
How curious to us that it was not

placed in the eyes!
Perhaps this is because in its new role it was becoming

melded with the thumos.
Indeed, noos takes on adjectives more suitable to the thumos, such as fearless (3:63) and strong (16:688).
And Odysseus

dissuades the Achaeans from putting their ships to sea by telling them that

they do not yet know what sort of noos is in Agamemnon (2:192).
And one

of the most modern-sounding instances occurs in the very first episode,

when Thetis, consoling the sobbing Achilles, asks him, “Why has grief

come upon your phrenes?
Speak, conceal not in noos, so that we both may

know” (1:363).
9 Apart from this, there is no other subjectification in the Iliad.
No one makes any decisions in his noos.
Thinking does not go on in

the noos, or even memory.
These are still in the voices of those

organizations of the right temporal lobe that are called gods.
The precise causes of this internalization of sight into a container in

which the seeing can be ‘held’ will require a much more careful study than

we can go into here.
Perhaps it was simply the generalization of

internalization which I suggest had occurred earlier in those internalizations

correlated with large internal sensations.
Or it may have been that the

observation of external difference in the mingling of refugees, as mentioned

in II.3 , demanded the positing of this visual hypostasis, which could be

different in different men, making them see different things.
Psyche

And so finally to the word that gives psychology its name.
Probably

coming from the term psychein = to breathe, it has become internalized into

life substances in its main usage in the Iliad.
Most often, psyche seems to be

used in just the way we would use life.
But this can be very misleading.
For

‘life’ to us means something about a period of time, a span between birth

and death, full of events and developments of a certain character.
There is

absolutely nothing of this sort in the Iliad.
When a spear strikes the heart of

a warrior, and his psyche dissolves (5:296), is destroyed (22:325), or simply

leaves him (16:453), or is coughed out through the mouth (9:409), or bled

out through a wound (14:518; 16:505), there is nothing whatever about time

or about the end of anything.
There is in one part of Book 23 a different

meaning of psyche, a discussion of which is deferred to the end of this

chapter.
But generally, it is very simply a property that can be taken away,

and is similar to the taking away, under the same conditions, of thumos or

activity, a word with which psyche is often coupled.
In trying to understand these terms, we must refrain from our conscious

habit of building space into them before this has happened historically.
In a

sense, psyche is the most primitive of these preconscious hypostases; it is

simply the property of breathing or bleeding or what not in that physical

object over there called a man or an animal, a property which can be taken

from him like a prize (22:161) by a spear in the right place.
And in general,

that is, with the exceptions I discuss at the end of this chapter, the main use

of psyche in the Iliad does not progress beyond that.
No one in any way

ever sees, decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything in his

psyche.
These then are the supposed substantives inside the body that by literary

metaphor, by being compared to containers and persons, accrue to

themselves spatial and behavioral qualities which in later literature develop

into the unified mind-space with its analog ‘I’ that we have come to call

consciousness.
But in pointing out these beginnings in the Iliad, let me

remind you that the contours of the main actions of the poem are as divinely

dictated and as nonconscious as I have insisted in I.3.
These preconscious hypostases do not enter into any major decisions.
But they are definitely

there playing a subsidiary role.
It is indeed as if the unitary conscious mind

of the later age is here in the Iliad beginning as seven different entities, each

with a slightly different function and a distinction from the others which is

almost impossible for us to appreciate today.
THE WILES OF THE ODYSSEY

After the Iliad, the Odyssey.
And anyone reading these poems freshly and

consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is!
There are of

course some scholars who still like to think of these two huge epics as being

written down and even composed by one man named Homer, the first in his

youth and the second in his maturity.
The more reasonable view, I think, is

that the Odyssey followed the Iliad by at least a century or more, and, like

its predecessor, was the work of a succession of aoidoi rather than any one

man.
But, unlike its predecessor, the Odyssey is not one epic but a series of

them.
The originals were probably about different heroes, and brought

together around Odysseus at a later time.
Why this happened is not hard to

unravel.
Odysseus, at least in some parts of Greece, had become the center

of a cult that enabled conquered peoples to survive.
He becomes “wily

Odysseus” and later aoidoi perhaps inserted this epithet into the Iliad to

remind their listeners of the Odyssey.
Archaeological evidence indicates

important dedications made to Odysseus some time after 1000 B.C.
and

definitely before 800 B.C.
10 These were sometimes of bronze tripod caldrons

curiously connected with the cult.
They were such dedications as formerly

would have been to a god.
Contests in worship of him were held in Ithaca at

least from the ninth century B.C., even as that island was about to be overrun

again by new invasions from Corinth.
In a word, Odysseus of the many

devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and

god-weakened world.
The Odyssey announces this in its very fifth word, polutropon = much

turning.
It is a journey of deviousness.
It is the very discovery of guile, its

invention and celebration.
It sings of indirections and disguises and

subterfuges, transformations and recognitions, drugs and forgetfulness, of

people in other people’s places, of stories within stories, and men within

men.
The contrast with the Iliad is astonishing.
Both in word and deed and

character, the Odyssey describes a new and different world inhabited by

new and different beings.
The bicameral gods of the Iliad, in crossing over

to the Odyssey, have become defensive and feeble.
They disguise

themselves more and even indulge in magic wands.
The bicameral mind by

its very definition directs much less of the action.
The gods have less to do,

and like receding ghosts talk more to each other—and that so tediously!
The initiatives move from them, even against them, toward the work of the

more conscious human characters, though overseen by a Zeus who in losing

his absolute power has acquired a Lear-like interest in justice.
Seers and

omens, these hallmarks of the breakdown of bicamerality, are more

common.
Semi-gods, dehumanizing witches, one-eyed giants, and sirens,

reminiscent of the genii that we saw marked the breakdown of bicamerality

in Assyrian bas-reliefs a few centuries earlier, are evidence of a profound

alteration in mentality.
And the huge Odysseyan themes of homeless

wanderings, of kidnapings and enslavements, of things hidden, things

regained, are surely echoes of the social breakdown following the Dorian

invasions when subjective consciousness in Greece first took its mark.
Technically, the first thing to note is the change in the frequency with

which the preconscious hypostases are used.
Such data can be compiled

easily from concordances of the Iliad and Odyssey, and the results are

dramatic in showing a very definite rise in frequency for phrenes, noos, and

psyche, and a striking drop in the use of the word thumos.
Of course we can say that the decrease for thumos from the Iliad to the Odyssey is due to

what the poem is about.
But that is begging the question.
For the very

change in theme is indeed a part of this whole transition in the very nature

of man.
The other hypostases are passive.
Thumos, the adrenalin-produced

emergency reaction of the sympathetic nervous system to novel situations,

is the antithesis of anything passive.
The kind of metaphors that can be built

up around this metaphrand of a sudden surge of energy are not the passive

visual ones that are more conducive to solving problems.
In contrast, over this period, phrenes doubles in frequency, while both

noos and psyche triple in frequency.
Again, the point could be made that the increase in the use of these words is simply an echo of the change in topics.
And again that is precisely the point.
Poetry, from describing external

events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal

conscious expression.
But it is not just their frequency that we are interested in.
It is also the change in their inherent meanings and the metaphiers used for them.
As the

gods decrease in their direction of human affairs, the preconscious

hypostases take over some of their divine function, moving them closer to

consciousness.
Thumos, though decreased, is still the most common

hypostatic word.
And its function is different.
It has reached the subjective

phase and is like another person.
It is the thumos of the swineherd that

‘commands’ him to return to Telemachus (16:466).
In the Iliad, it would

have been a god speaking.
In the earlier epic, a god can ‘place’ menos or

vigor into the ‘container’ of the thumos; but in the Odyssey, it is an entire

recognition that can be ‘placed’ therein.
Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus

under his disguise by his scar because a god has ‘put’ that recognition in her

thumos (19:485).
(Note that she has recognition but not recall.) And the

servants of Penelope have knowledge of her son’s departure in their thumos

(4:730).
Phrenes too has acquired the spatial qualities of Phase III.
Even the

description of a possible future event can be put in the phrenes, as when

Telemachus, as a pretext for depriving the suitors of weapons, is asked to

claim that a daimon (it would have at least been a god in the Iliad) has put

fears of quarrels among them into his phrenes (19:10).
There are no secrets

in the Iliad.
But the Odyssey has many of them, and they are ‘held’ in the

phrenes (16:459).
Whereas in the Iliad the preconscious hypostases were

almost always clearly located, their increasingly metaphorical nature is

muddling up their anatomical distinction in the Odyssey.
Even the thumos is

at one point located inside the lungs or phrenes (22:38).
But there is another and even more important use of phrenes, this word

that originally referred to the lungs and then to the complex sensations in

breathing.
And this is in the first beginnings of morality.
No one is moral

among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad.
Good and evil do not exist.
But in the Odyssey, Clytaemnestra is able to resist Aegisthus because her

phrenes are agathai, which may have been derived from roots that would

make it mean ‘very like a god’.
And in another place, it is the agathai,

godly, or good phrenes of Eumaeus which has him remember to make

offerings to the gods (14:421).
And similarly it is the agathai or good

phrenes that are responsible for Penelope’s chastity and loyalty to the

absent Odysseus (12:194).
It is not yet Penelope who is agathe, only the

metaphor-space in her lungs.
And similarly with the other preconscious hypostases.
Warnings of

destruction are ‘heard’ from the kradie or pounding heart of Odysseus when

he is wrecked and thrown into tempestuous seas (5:389).
And it is his ker,

again his trembling heart or perhaps his trembling hands, that makes plans

for the suitors’ downfall (18:344).
In the Iliad, these would have been gods

speaking.
Noos, while being referred to more frequently, is sometimes not

changed.
But more often it is also in Phase III of subjectification.
At one

point, Odysseus is deceiving Athene (unthinkable in the Iliad!) and looks at

her ever revolving in his noos thoughts of great cunning (13:255).
Or noos

can be like a person who is glad (8:78) or cruel (18:381) or not to be fooled

(10:329) or learned about (1:3).
Psyche again usually means life, but

perhaps with more sense of a time span.
Some very important exceptions to

this will be referred to later.
Not only is the growth toward subjective consciousness in the Odyssey

seen in the increasing use and spatial interiority and personification of its

preconscious hypostases, but even more clearly in its incidents and social

interrelationships.
These include the emphasis on deceit and guile which I

have already referred to.
In the Iliad, time is referred to sloppily and

inaccurately, if at all.
But the Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of

time in its use of time words, such as begin, hesitate, quickly, endure, etc.,

and the more frequent reference to the future.
There is also an increased

ratio of abstract terms to concrete, particularly of what in English would be

nouns ending in ‘ness’.
And with this, as might be expected, a marked drop

in similes: there is less need for them.
Both the frequency and the manner

with which Odysseus refers to himself is on a different level altogether from

instances of self-reference in the Iliad.
All this is relevant to the growth of a

new mentality.
Let me close this necessarily short entry on a toweringly important poem

by calling your attention to a mystery.
This is that the overall contour of the

story itself is a myth of the very matter with which we are concerned.
It is a

story of identity, of a voyage to the self that is being created in the

breakdown of the bicameral mind.
I am not pretending here to be answering

the profound question of why this should be so, of why the muses, those

patternings of the right temporal lobe, who are singing this epic through the

aoidoi, should be narratizing their own downfall, their own fading away

into subjective thought, and celebrating the rise of a new mentality that will

overwhelm the very act of their song.
For this seems to be what is

happening.
I am saying—and finding it work to believe myself—that all this highly

patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a metaphor of the huge

transilience toward consciousness, was not composed, planned, and put

together by poets conscious of what they were doing.
It is as if the god-side

of the bicameral man was approaching consciousness before the man-side,

the right hemisphere before the left.
And if belief does stick here, and we

are inclined to ask scoffingly and rhetorically, how could an epic that may

itself be a kind of drive toward consciousness be composed by

nonconscious men?
We can also ask with the same rhetorical fervor, how

could it have been composed by conscious men?
And have the same silence

follow.
We do not know the answer to either question.
But so it is.
And as this series of stories sweeps from its lost hero sobbing

on an alien shore in bicameral thrall to his beautiful goddess Calypso,

winding through its world of demigods, testings, and deceits, to his defiant

war whoops in a rival-routed home, from trance through disguise to

recognition, from sea to land, east to west, defeat to prerogative, the whole

long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant

acknowledgment out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past.
From a

will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth,

Odysseus becomes ‘Odysseus’.
FOOLISH PERSES

Some of the chronologically next group of poems I shall merely gloss over.
Among these are the so-called Homeric Hymns, most of which have turned

out to be of a much later date.
There are also the poems that originated in

Boeotia northeast of Athens in the eighth century B.C., many of which were

once ascribed to a cult figure named Hesiod.
Unfortunately, their extant

texts are often mixtures of parts of poems from obviously different sources,

badly emended.
Most of them contribute little to our present concern.
The

often tedious recital of the relationships of gods in the Theogony is usually

dated shortly after the Odyssey, but its hypostatic words are fewer and

without development.
Its chief interest is that its concern with the intimate

lives of gods is perhaps a result of their silence, another expression of the

nostalgia for the Golden Age before the Dorian invasions.
But of much greater interest is the fascinating problem presented by the

text ascribed to Hesiod known as the Works and Days.
11 It is obviously a

hodgepodge of various things, a kind of Shepherd’s Calendar for a Boeotian

farmer, and a very poor and scrubbing farmer at that.
Its world is worlds

away from the world of the great Homeric epics.
Instead of a hero at the

command of his gods working through a narrative of grandeur, we have

instruction to the countryman, who may or may not obey his gods, on ways

of work, which days are lucky, and a very interesting new sense of justice.
On the surface, this medley of scruffy detail of farm life and nostalgia for

the Golden Age that is no more seems to be written by a farmer whom

scholars take to be Hesiod.
He is supposedly railing at his brother, Perses,

over the unfairness of a judgment dividing their father’s farm, curiously

giving Perses advice on everything from morality to marriage, on how to

treat slaves to the problems of planting and sewage disposal.
It is full of

such things as:



Foolish Perses!
Work the work which the gods ordained for men, lest

in bitter anguish of thumos, you with your wife and children seek your

livelihood amongst your neighbors.
(397ff.)



At least this is what most scholars take the poem to be.
But another

interpretation is at least possible.
This is that the older portions of the poem

may actually have been written not by Hesiod, who is never mentioned in

the poem, but by none other than the hand of foolish Perses himself, and

that these main parts of the poem are the admonitions of his divine

bicameral voice advising him what to do.
If this jolts your sense of

possibility, I would remind you of the schizophrenic patients who all day

may hear similarly authoritative critical voices constantly admonishing

them in a similar vein.
Perhaps I should not say written.
More probably the poem was dictated to

a scribe, even as were the bicameral admonitions of Perses’ contemporary,

Amos, the herdsman of Israel.
And I should also have said a previous

recension of the main poem, and that the protest lodged in the crucial lines

37-39 were added later (even as everyone since Plutarch has agreed that

654–662 were).
It is also possible that these lines originally referred to

some kind of bicameral struggle for the control of Perses’ too subjective

and therefore (at this time) unprofitable behavior.
The preconscious hypostases in the Works and Days occur in

approximately the same frequencies as in the Odyssey.
Thumos is the most

common and in about half of its eighteen occurrences it is a simple Phase II

internal impulse to some activity or locus of joy or sorrow.
But the rest of

the time, it is a Phase III space in which information (27), advice (297,

491), sights (296), or mischief (499) can be ‘put’, ‘kept’, or ‘held’.
The

phrenes also are like a cupboard, where the advice that is constantly given

in the poem (107, 274) is to be laid up, and where foolish Perses is to ‘look’

at it carefully (688).
The kradie has the metaphier of a person more than a

container, and can be gracious (340), vexed (451), or can like and dislike

things (681).
But psyche (686) and etor (360, 593) are undeveloped and are simply life and belly respectively.
Noos in the Works and Days is interesting because, in all four of its

instances, it is like a person relating to moral conduct.
In two instances (67,

714. it has shame or not, and in another, it is adikon, without good direction

(260).
A proper study of the matter would point out in detail the particular

development of the term dike.
Its original meaning was to point (from

which comes the original meaning of digit, as a finger), and in the Iliad its

most parsimonious translation is as “direction,” in the sense of pointing out

what to do.
Sarpedon guarded Lycia by his dike (Iliad 16:542).
But in the Works and Days, it has come to mean god-given right directions or justice,

perhaps as a replacement for the god’s voice.
12 It is a silent Zeus, son of a

now spatialized time, who here for the first time dispenses dike or justice

more or less as we know it in later Greek literature.
(See for example

267ff.).
How absolutely alien to the amoral world of the Iliad, that a whole

city can suffer for one evil man (240)!
Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time.
Justice is a

phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial

succession is its very essence.
And this is possible only in a spatial

metaphor of time.
Instances of this increased spatialization are common.
Committing violence at one time begets a punishment at some time to

follow (245f.).
Long and steep is the path to goodness (290).
A good man is

he who sees what will be better afterward (294).
Add little to little and it

will become great (362).
Work with work upon work to gain wealth (382).
These notions are impossible unless the before and after of time are

metaphored into a spatial succession.
This basic ingredient of

consciousness, which began in Assyrian building inscriptions in 1300 B.C.
(see the previous chapter), has indeed come a long way.
It is important here to understand how closely coupled this new sense of

time and justice is to what can be called the secularization of attention.
By

this I mean the shift in attention toward the everyday problems of making a

living, something that is totally foreign to the mighty god-devised epics

which preceded it.
Whether the poem itself is divinely inspired, or, as the

majority of scholars think, the sulky exhortations of Perses’ brother Hesiod,

it is a dramatic turning point in the direction of human concern.
Instead of

grand impersonal narrative, we have a detailed personal expression.
Instead

of an ageless past, we have a vivid expression of a present wedged in

between a past and a future.
And it is a present of grim harshness that

described the post-Dorian rural reality, full of petty strife and the struggle of

wresting a living from the land, while around its edges hovers the nostalgia

for the mighty golden world of bicameral Mycaenae, whose people were a

race


...
which was more lawful and more righteous, a god-like race of

hero-men who are called half-gods, the race before our own,

throughout the boundless earth.
(158ff.).
LYRIC AND ELEGY FROM 700 TO 600 B.C.
I was about to write that Greek consciousness is nearing completion in the

Works and Days.
But that is a very misleading metaphor, that consciousness

is a thing that is built, formed, shaped into something that has a completion.
There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
What I would have been indicating was that the basic metaphors of time

with space, of internal hypostases as persons in a mental space have begun

to work themselves into the guides and guardians of everyday life.
Against this development, the Greek poetry of the seventh century B.C.,

which follows chronologically, is something of an anticlimax.
But this is

because so little of these elegiac and lyric poets has escaped the eager

ravages of time.
If we take only those who have at least a dozen lines

extant, there are only seven poets to be considered.
The first thing to say about them is that they are not simply poets, as we

regard the term.
As a group, they are something like their contemporaries,

the prophets of Israel, holy teachers of men, called by kings to settle

disputes and to lead armies, resembling in some of their functions the

shamans of contemporary tribal cultures.
At the beginning of the century,

they were probably still associated with holy dancing.
But gradually the

dance and its religious aura are lost in a secularity that is chanted to the lyre

or the sounds of flutes.
These artistic changes, however, are merely

coincident to changes of a much more important kind.
The Works and Days expressed the present.
The new poetry expresses the

person in that present, the particular individual and how he is different from

others.
And celebrates that difference.
And as it does so, we can trace a

progressive filling out and stretching of the earlier preconscious hypostases

into the mind-space of consciousness.
In the first part of the century is Terpander, the inventor of drinking

songs, according to Pindar, one of whose thirteen extant lines cries out over

the centuries:



Of the Far-flinging Lord come sing to me, O Phrenes!13





This is interesting.
The Lord here is Apollo.
But note that while the poem

itself is to be a nostalgic poem to a lost god, it is not a god or a muse who is

invoked to compose it.
In the Odyssey, a god puts songs into the phrenes

which the minstrel then sings as if he were reading the music (22:347).
But

for Terpander, who hears no gods, it is his own phrenes that are begged to

compose a song just as if they were a god.
And this implicit comparison, I

suggest, with its associated paraphrands of a space in which the deiform

phrenes could exist, is well on the way to creating the mind-space with its

analog ‘I’ of consciousness.
It is not just in such word usages that this transition in the seventh

century is apparent, but also in the subject matter.
For the secularization and

personalization of content begun in the Works and Days fairly explodes in

midcentury in the angry iambics of Archilochus, the wandering soldier-poet

of Paros.
According to the inscription of his tomb, it was he who “first dipt

a bitter Muse in snake-venom and stained gentle Helicon with blood,” a

reference to the story that he could provoke suicides with the power of his

iambic abuse.
14 Even using poetry this way, to engage in personal vendettas and state personal preferences, is a new thing to the world.
And so close to

modern reflective consciousness do some of these fragments come, that the

loss of most of Archilochus’ work opens one of the greatest gaps in ancient

literature.
But the gods, though never heard by Archilochus, still control the world.
“The ends of victory are among the gods” (Fragment 55).
And the

hypostases remain.
The bad effects of drink (Fragment 77) or of old age

(Fragment 94) occur in the phrenes; and when he is troubled, it is his

thumos which is thrown down like a weak warrior and is told to “look up

and defend yourself against your enemies” (Fragment 66).
Archilochus

talks to his thumos as to another person, the implicit comparison and its

paraphrands of space and self-’observed’ ‘self’ being a further step toward

the consciousness of the next century.
Chronologically next come two other soldier-poets, Tyrtaeus and

Callinus, whose remaining fragments are of little interest.
Their most

common hypostasis is thumos, and they do little more than urge us to keep an unfaltering thumos in battle.
And then, about 630 B.C., two poets of a different kind, Aleman and

Mimnermus.
They urge nothing, but celebrate their own subjective feelings

in a way that had never been done before.
“Who may report the noos of

another?” (Fragment 55) asks the former, making the metaphor of noos as a

happening with its obvious paraphrand consequences.
And Mimnermus

complains of the ill cares that wear and wear his phrenes (Fragment 1) and

of the “sorrows that rise in the thumos” (Fragment 2).
This is a long way

from the simple hypostases of the Homeric epics.
At the end of this presageful century come the poems of Alcaeus and,

particularly, the empty-armed passions of virile Sappho, the tenth muse as

Plato calls her.
Both these poets of Lesbos say the usual things about their

thumos and phrenes, using both about equally.
Sappho even sings about the

theloi or arrangements of her thumos which become our desires and

volitions (Fragment 36:3).
And she practically invents love in its romantic

modern sense.
Love wrings her thumos with anguish (Fragment 43) and

shakes her phrenes as a hurricane shakes an oak tree (Fragment 54).
But more important is the development of the term noema.
By the late

seventh century, it is clear that noema has come to mean a composite of

what we mean by thoughts, wishes, intents, etc., and joining up with the

theloi of the thumos.
Alcaeus says, “If Zeus will accomplish what is our

noema” (Fragment 43).
He describes a speaker as not “prevaricating (or

excusing) his noema at all” (Fragment 144).
In those shards of Sappho that

remain, the word is used three times: toward those she loves, “my noema

can never change” (Fragment 14); her “tioema is not so softly disposed to

the anger of a child” (Fragment 35); and in her complaint, “I know not what

to do; my noemata are in two parts...” (Fragment 52).
This puts the

emphasis on the imagined internal metaphor-thing that is hypostasized into

a thought.
It is love that is teaching mankind to introspect.
And there is

even another word in Sappho, sunoida, whose roots would indicate that it

means to know together, which, when Latinized, becomes the word

‘conscious’ (Fragment 15).
In these seven poets of the seventh century, then, we find a remarkable

development, that, as the subject matter changed from martial exhortations

to personal expressions of love, the manner in which the mental hypostases

are used and their contexts become much more what we think of as

subjective consciousness.
These are murky historical waters, and we may be sure that these seven

poets, with their few fragments bobbing in the extant surface of the seventh

century B.C., are but an indication of the many that probably then existed

and helped develop the new mentality we are calling consciousness.
SOLON’S MIND

I particularly feel that these seven cannot be representative of the time, for

the very next poet chronologically that we know of is dramatically different

from any of them.
He is the morning star of the Greek intellect, the man

who alone, so far as we know, really filled out the idea of human justice.
This is Solon of Athens, who stands at the beginning of the great sixth

century B.C., the century of Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras.
It is the

century where, for the first time, we can feel mentally at home among

persons who think in somewhat the way we do.
The swiftness of the unfolding of these greatnesses of Greek culture is

astonishing.
And if for no other reason, Solon, at the beginning of all this, is

astonishing for his use of the word noos.
The word is rarely used by any of

the poets we have previously looked at.
But in the mere 280

(approximately) lines that have come down to us, he uses noos eight times.
This is an extremely high frequency of 44 per 10,000 words.
It indicates

Phase IV, in which the several hypostases are joining into one.
Thumos is

used only twice, and phrenes and etor once each.
But it is also the way he speaks about the noos that is the first real

statement of the subjective conscious mind.
He speaks of those whose noos

is not artios, which means intact or whole (Fragment 6).
How impossible to

say of a recognition!
It is the noos that is wrong in a bad leader (Fragment

4).
The Homeric meaning of noos could not take moral epithets.
At about

age forty-two, “a man’s noos is trained in all things.” Certainly this is not

his visual perception.
And in his fifties, he is “at his best in noos and

tongue” (Fragment 27).
Another fragment describes the true beginning of personal responsibility,

where he warns his fellow Athenians not to blame the gods for their

misfortunes, but themselves.
How contrary to the mind of the Iliad!
And

then adds,



Each one of you walks with the steps of a fox; the noos of all of you is

chaunos \[porous, spongy, or loose-grained as in wood]: for you look to

a man’s tongue and rapidly shifting speech, and never to the deed he

does.
(Fragment 10).
Not Achilles nor artful Odysseus nor even foolish Perses (or his brother)

could have ‘understood’ this admonition.
Consciousness and morality are a single development.
For without gods,

morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell

men what to do.
The dike or justice of the Works and Days is developed

even further in Solon.
It is now moral right that must be fitted together with

might in government (Fragment 36) and which is the basis of law and

lawful action.
Sometimes attributed to Solon are certain other injunctions, such as his

exhortation to “moderation in all things.” But more germane to the present

topic is the famous “Know thyself,” which is often ascribed to him but may

have come from one of his contemporaries.
This again was something

inconceivable to the Homeric heroes.
How can one know oneself?
By

initiating by oneself memories of one’s actions and feelings and looking at

them together with an analog ‘I’, conceptualizing them, sorting them out

into characteristics, and narratizing so as to know what one is likely to do.
One must ‘see’ ‘oneself’ as in an imaginary ‘space,’ indeed what we were

calling autoscopic illusions back in an early chapter.
Suddenly, then, we are in the modern subjective age.
We can only regret

that the literature of the seventh century B.C.
is so shredded and scant as to

make this almost full appearance of subjective consciousness in Solon

almost implausible, if we’regard him as simply a part of the Greek tradition.
But the legends about Solon are many.
And several of them insist that he

was widely traveled, having visited countries of Asia Minor before

returning to Athens to live out his life and write most of his poems.
It is

thus certainly a suggestion that his particular use of the word noos and his

reification of the term into the imaginary mind-space of consciousness was

due to the influence of these more developed nations.
With Solon, partly because he was the political leader of his time, the

operator of consciousness is firmly established in Greece.
He has a mind-

space called a noos in which an analog of himself can narratize out what is

dike or right for his people to do.
Once established, once a man can ‘know

himself,’ as Solon advised, can place ‘times’ together in the side-by-

sideness of mind-space, can ‘see’ into himself and his world with the ‘eye’

of his noos, the divine voices are unnecessary, at least to everyday life.
They have been pushed aside into special places called temples or special

persons called oracles.
And that the new unitary nous (as it came to be

spelled), absorbing the functions of the other hypostases, was successful is

attested by all the literature that followed, as well as the reorganization of

behavior and society.
But we are somewhat ahead of our story.
For there is another

development in this important sixth century B.C., and one which is a huge

complication for the future.
It is an old term, psyche, used in an

unpredictably new way.
In time it comes to parallel and then to become

interchangeable with nous, while at the same time it engenders that

consciousness of consciousness which was held up as false at the beginning

of Book I.
Moreover, I shall suggest that this new concept is an almost

artifactual result of a meeting between Greek and Egyptian cultures.
THE INVENTION OF THE SOUL

Psyche is the last of these words to come to have ‘space’ inside it.
This is

due, I think, to the fact that psyche or livingness did not lend itself to a

container-type metaphor until the conscious spatialization of time had so far

developed that a man had a life in the sense of a time span, rather than just

in the sense of breath and blood.
But the progress of psyche toward the

concept of soul is not that clear at all.
For, more than the other hypostases, psyche is sometimes used in

confusing ways that seem on the surface to defy a chronological ordering.
Its primary use is always for life, as I have stated.
After the Homeric poems,

Tyrtaeus, for example, uses psyche in that sense (Fragments 10 and n), as

does Alcaeus (Fragment 77B).
And even as late as the fifth century B.C.,

Euripides uses the phrase “to be fond of one’s psyche” in the sense of

clinging to life ( Iphigenia at Aulis, 1385).
Some of the Aristotelian writings

also use psyche as life, and this usage even extends into much of the New

Testament.
“I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his psyche

for his sheep” (John, 10:11).
Jesus did not mean his mind or soul.
But in Achilles’ dream at the beginning of Book 23 of the Iliad, the

psyche of the dead Patroclus visits him, and when he tries to hug it in his arms, it sinks gibbering into the earth.
The grizzly scenes in Hades in Books

11 and 24.
of the Odyssey use psyche in a similar way.
The term in these

instances has an almost opposite sense from its meaning in the rest of both

Iliad and Odyssey.
Not life, but that which exists after life has ceased.
Not

what is bled out of one’s veins in battle, but the soul or ghost that goes to

Hades, a concept that is otherwise unheard of in Greek literature until

Pindar, around 500 B.C.
In all the intervening writers we have been looking

at through the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., psyche is never the ghost-

soul, but always has its original meaning of life or livingness.
Now, no amount of twisting about in semantic origins can reconcile these

two gratingly different significations for psyche, one relating to life and the

other to death.
The obvious suggestion here is that these alien incongruities

in Homer are interpolations of a period much later than the ostensible

period of the poems.
And indeed this is what the majority of scholars are

sure of on much more ample grounds than we can go into here.
Since this

meaning of psyche does not appear until Pindar, we may be fairly confident

that these passages about Hades and the souls of the dead abiding there in

its shades were added into the Homeric poems shortly before Pindar,

sometime in the sixth century B.C.
The problem then is how and why did this dramatically different concept

of psyche come about?
And let us be clear here that the only thing we are

talking about is the application of the old word for life to what survives

after death and its separability from the body.
The actual survival, as we

have seen in previous chapters, is not in doubt.
According to the theory of

the bicameral mind, hallucinations of a person in some authority could

continue after death as an everyday matter.
And hence the almost universal

custom of feeding the corpses after death, and burying them with the

appurtenances of life.
I am unable to suggest a truly satisfactory solution.
But certainly a part of

it is the influence of that towering legend-laden figure of antiquity,

Pythagoras.
Flourishing around the middle of the sixth century B.C., he is

thought to have traveled, as did Solon, to several countries of Asia Minor,

particularly Egypt.
He then returned and established a kind of mystical

secret society in Crotona in southern Italy.
They practiced mathematics,

vegetarianism, and a firm illiteracy—to write things down was a source of

error.
Among these teachings, as we have them at least at third hand from

later writers, was the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.
After death, a

man’s soul enters the body of a newborn infant or animal and so lives

another life.
Herodotus has been flouted for saying Pythagoras learned this in Egypt.
But if one agrees with the theory of the bicameral mind, the origin of soul

transmigration in Egyptian ideas is not difficult to trace.
I suggest it was a

Greek misunderstanding of the functions of the ba, which, as we saw in

II.2 , was often the seeming physical embodiment of the ka, or hallucinated

voice after death.
Often the ba had the form of a bird.
Greek, however, had

no word for ka (other than a god—clearly inappropriate), or for ba, indeed

no word for a ‘life’ which could be transferred from one material body to

another.
Hence psyche was pressed into this service.
All references to this

Pythagorean teaching use psyche in this new sense, as a clearly separable

soul that can migrate from one body to another as could an hallucinated

voice in Egypt.
Now this does not really solve our problem.
For there is nothing here of

dead strengthless souls wailing about in a netherworld, guzzling hot blood

to get their strength back—which is the lively scene added into the Odyssey

as Book 11.
But the psyche here is somewhat the same, a something of a

man which leaves the body at death.
And what the Hades view of psyche

may be is a composite of the Pythagorean teaching with the older view of

the buried dead in Greek antiquity.
All this curious development of the sixth century B.C.
is extremely

important for psychology.
For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to

psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner

tensions of a lexicon always do.
The word soma had meant corpse or

deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness.
So now, as psyche becomes

soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body.
And dualism, the

supposed separation of soul and body, has begun.
But the matter does not stop there.
In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others

around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce.
It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body.
Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche

and soma.
It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious

experience, thus reinforcing its very existence.
The conscious psyche is

imprisoned in the body as in a tomb.
It becomes an object of wide-eyed

controversy.
Where is it?
And the locations in the body or outside it vary.
What is it made of?
Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath

(Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in

a morass of pseudoquestions.
So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness,

begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the

firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great

religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of

the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.
This has been a long and technical chapter that can be briefly

summarized in a metaphor.
At the beginning, we noted that archaeologists,

by brushing the dust of the ages from around the broken shards of pottery

from the period of the Dorian invasions, have been able to reveal

continuities and changes from site to site, and so to prove that a complex series of migrations was occurring.
In a sense, we have been doing the same

thing with language throughout this chapter.
We have taken broken-off bits

of vocabulary, those that came to refer to some kind of mental function, and

by their contexts from text to text, attempted to demonstrate that a huge

complex series of changes in mentality was going on during these obscure

periods that followed the Dorian invasions in Greece.
Let no one think these are just word changes.
Word changes are concept

changes and concept changes are behavioral changes.
The entire history of

religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that.
Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human

condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes.
And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases,

which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries

unite into the operator of consciousness.
I have now completed that part of the story of Greek consciousness that I

intended to tell.
More of it could be told, how the two nonstimulus-bound

hypostases come to overshadow the rest, how nous and psyche come to be

almost interchangeable in later writers, such as Parmenides and Democritus,

and take on even new metaphor depths with the invention of logos, and of

the forms of truth, virtue, and beauty.
But that is another task.
The Greek subjective conscious mind, quite apart

from its pseudostructure of soul, has been born out of song and poetry.
From here it moves out into its own history, into the narratizing

introspections of a Socrates and the spatialized classifications and analyses

of an Aristotle, and from there into Hebrew, Alexandrian, and Roman

thought.
And then into the history of a world which, because of it, will

never be the same again.
Chapter 6



The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru

THE THIRD great area where we can look at the development of

consciousness is certainly the most interesting and profound.
All through

the Middle East toward the end of the second millennium B.C., there were

large amorphous masses of half-nomadic peoples with no fixed dira or

grazing ground.
Some were the refugees from the Thera destruction and the

terrible Dorian invasions which followed.
One cuneiform tablet specifically

speaks of migrations pouring down through the Lebanon.
Others were

probably refugees from the Assyrian invasions and were joined by the

Hittite refugees when that empire fell to a further invasion from the north.
And still others may have been the resistant bicameral individuals of the

cities who could not silence the gods so easily, and who, if not killed, would

be progressively sifted out into the desert wilderness.
A mixture of men, then, coming together precariously for a time, and

then separating out, some perishing, others organizing into unstable tribes;

some raiding more settled lands, or fighting over water holes; or sometimes,

perhaps, caught like exhausted animals and made to do their captor’s will,

or, in the desperation of hunger, bartering control over their lives for bread

and seed, as described on some fifteenth-century B.C.
tablets unearthed at

Nuzi, as well as in Genesis 47:18-26.
Some perhaps were still trying to

follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging to the edge of settled land,

fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others,

having struggled unsuccessfully to mingle with more settled peoples, then

pushed out into the open desert where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in

precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god,

some new city or promised land.
To the established city-states, these refugees were the desperate outcasts

of the desert wilderness.
The city people thought of them collectively as

robbers and vagrants.
And so they often were, either singly, as miserable

homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers

scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their

cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today.
The

word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so

these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets.1 And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes hebrew.
The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in

what has come down to us as the Old Testament.
The thesis to which we

shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of

history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall

contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its

replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C.
We are immediately, however, presented with an orthological problem of

immense proportions.
For much of the Old Testament, particularly the first

books, so important to our thesis, are, as is well known, forgeries of the

seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries B.C., brilliant workings of brightly colored

strands gathered from a scatter of places and periods.2 In Genesis, for

example, the first and second chapters tell different creation stories; the

story of the flood is a monotheistic rewrite of old Sumerian inscriptions; 3

the story of Jacob may well date to before 1000 B.C., but that of Joseph, his

supposed son, on the very next pages comes from at least 500 years later.
4 It

had all begun with the discovery of the manuscript of Deuteronomy in

Jerusalem in 621 B.C.
by King Josiah, after he ordered the temple cleaned

and cleared of its remaining bicameral rites.
And Khabiru history, like a

nomad staggering into a huge inheritance, put on these rich clothes, some

not its own, and belted it all together with some imaginative ancestry.
It is

thus a question whether the use of this variegated material as evidence for

any theory of mind whatever is even permissible.
Amos and Ecclesiastes Compared

Let me first address such skeptics.
As I have said, most of the books of

the Old Testament were woven together from various sources from various

centuries.
But some of the books are considered pure in the sense of not

being compilations, but being pretty much all of one piece, mostly what

they say they are, and to these a thoroughly accurate date can be attached.
If

we confine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the

oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic comparison

which should give us evidence one way or another.
Among these pure

books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the eighth century B.C., and the most

recent is Ecclesiastes, from the second century B.C.
They are both short

books, and I hope that you will turn to them before reading on, that you

may for yourself sense authentically this difference between an almost

bicameral man and a subjective conscious man.
For this evidence is dramatically in agreement with the hypothesis.
Amos

is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an illiterate desert herdsman, and

dictated to a scribe.
In Ecclesiastes, in contrast, god is rarely mentioned, let

alone ever speaking to its educated author.
And even these mentions are

considered by some scholars to be later interpolations, to allow this

magnificent writing into the canon.
In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or understand or

anything similar whatever; Amos never ponders anything in his heart; he

can’t; he would not know what it meant.
In the few times he refers to

himself, he is abrupt and informative without qualification; he is no

prophet, but a mere “gatherer of sycamore fruit”; he does not consciously

think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought

is done for him.
He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes

those about him with a “Thus speaks the Lord!” and follows with an angry

forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.
Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points.
He ponders things as deep

in the paraphrands of his hypostatic heart as is possible.
And who but a very

subjective man could say, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” (1:2), or say

that he sees that wisdom excels folly (2:13).
One has to have an analog ‘I’

surveying a mind-space to so see.
And the famous third chapter, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven...
is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in mind-space, so

characteristic of consciousness as we saw in I.2.
Ecclesiastes thinks,

considers, is constantly comparing one thing and another, and making

brilliant metaphors as he does so.
Amos uses external divination,

Ecclesiastes never.
Amos is fiercely righteous, absolutely assured, nobly

rude, speaking a blustering god-speech with the unconscious rhetoric of an

Achilles or a Hammurabi.
Ecclesiastes would be an excellent fireside

friend, mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way

that would have been impossible for Amos.
These then are the extremes in the Old Testament.
Similar comparisons

can be made with other early and late books, or early and late parts of the

same book, all revealing the same pattern, which is difficult to account for

apart from the theory of the bicameral mind.
Some Observations on the Pentateuch

We are so used to the wonderful stories of the first five books specifically

that it is almost impossible for us to see them freshly for what they are.
Indeed, in trying to do so, whatever our religious backgrounds, we feel, if

not blasphemous, at least disrespectful to the profoundest meanings of

others.
Such disrespect is certainly not my intention, but it is only by a cold

unworshipful reading of these powerful pages that we can appreciate the

magnitude of the mental struggle that followed the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
Why were these books put together?
The first thing to realize is that the

very motive behind their composition around Deuteronomy at this time was

the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality of a subjectively conscious

people.
This is what religion is.
And it was done just as the voice of

Yahweh in particular was not being heard with any great clarity or

frequency.
Whatever their sources, the stories themselves, as they have been

arranged, reflect human psychologies from the ninth century up to the fifth

century B.C., the period during which there is progressively less and less

bicamerality.
The Elohim.
Another observation I would like to make concerns that very

important word which governs the whole first chapter of Genesis, elohim.
It

is usually incorrectly translated in the singular as God.
‘Elohim’ is a plural

form; it can be used collectively taking a.
singular verb, or as a regular

plural taking a plural verb.
It comes from the root of ‘to be powerful’, and

better translations of ‘elohim’ might be the great ones, the prominent ones,

the majesties, the judges, the mighty ones, etc.
From the point of view of the present theory, it is clear that elohim is a

general term referring to the voice-visions of the bicameral mind.
The

creation story of the first chapter of Genesis is thus a rationalization of the

bicameral voices at the edge of subjectivity.
“In the beginning the voices

created heaven and earth.” Taken as such, it becomes a more general myth

that could have been indigenous to all of the ancient bicameral civilizations.
He-who-is.
At the particular time in history that we pick up the story as

the Pentateuch has put it together, there are only a few remaining elohim in

contrast to the large number that probably previously existed.
The most

important is one recognized as Yahweh, which among several possibilities

is most often translated as He-who-is.
5 Evidently one particular group of the

Khabiru, as the prophetic subjective age was approaching, was following

only the voice of He-who-is, and rewrote the elohim creation story in a

much warmer and more human way, making He-who-is the only real

elohah.
And this becomes the creation story as told from Genesis 2:4 et seq.
And these two stories then interweave with other elements from other

sources to form the first books of the Bible.
Other elohim are occasionally mentioned throughout the older parts of

the Old Testament.
The most important of them is Ba’al, usually translated

as the Owner.
In the Canaan of the times, there were many Owners, one to

each village, in the same way that many Catholic cities today have their

own Virgin Marys, and yet they are all the same one.
Paradise Lost.
A further observation could be made upon the story of the

Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
The Hebrew arum, meaning crafty or deceitful, surely a

conscious subjective word, is only used three or four times throughout the

entire Old Testament.
It is here used to describe the source of the

temptation.
The ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of

consciousness.
The serpent promises that “you shall be like the elohim

themselves, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only

subjective conscious man is capable of.
And when these first humans had

eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly “the eyes of them both were

opened,” their analog eyes in their metaphored mind-space, “and they knew

that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were

narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them.
6 And so is their sorrow

“greatly multipled” (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden

where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man.
As a narratization of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the

coming of consciousness, the story should be rationalistically contrasted

with the Odyssey as discussed in the previous chapter.
But the problems are

similar, as is thé awe we should feel toward its unknown composition.
The Nabiim who naba.
The Hebrew word nabi, 7 which has been

misleadingly translated by the Greek designation of ‘prophet’, presents an

extremely interesting difficulty.
To prophesy in its modern connotations is

to foretell the future, but this is not what is indicated by the verb naba,

whose practitioners were the nabiim (plural of nabi).
These terms come

from a group of cognate words which have nothing to do with time, but

rather with flowing and becoming bright.
Thus we may think of a nabi as

one who metaphorically was flowing forth or welling up with speech and

visions.
They were transitional men, partly subjective and partly bicameral.
And once the bright torrent was released and the call came, the nabi must

deliver his bicameral message, however unsuspecting (Amos 7:14-15),

however unworthy the nabi felt (Exodus 3:11; Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1:6),

however distrustful at times of his own hearing (Jeremiah 20:710).
What

does it feel like to be a nabi at the beginning of one of his bicameral

periods?
Like a red hot coal in one’s mouth (Isaiah 6:7) or a raging fire shut

up in one’s bones that cannot be contained (Jeremiah 20:9) and that only the

flowing forth of divine speech can quench.
The story of the nabiim can be told in two ways.
One is external, tracing

out their early role and the acceptance of their leadership to their massacre

and total suppression in about the fourth century B.C.
But as evidence for the

theory in this book, it is more instructive to look at the matter from the

internal point of view, the changes in the bicameral experience itself.
These

changes are: the gradual loss of the visual component, the growing

inconsistency of the voices in different persons, and the increasing

inconsistency within the same person, until the voices of the elohim vanish

from history.
I shall take each of these up in turn.
The Loss of the Visual Component

In the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual component to the

hallucinated voice, either itself hallucinated or as the statue in front of

which one listened.
The quality and frequency of the visual component

certainly varied from one culture to another, as can be indicated by the

presence of hallucinogenic statuary in some cultures and not in others.
If only because its sources are so chronologically diverse, it is somewhat

astonishing to find the Pentateuch consistently and successively describing

the loss of this visual component.
In the beginning, He-who-is is a visual

physical presence, the duplicate of his creation.
He walks in his garden at

the cool of the day, talking to his recent creation, Adam.
He is present and

visible at the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah’s Ark with

his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sichem, Bethel, and Hebron, and

scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.
But by the time of Moses, the visual component is very different.
Only in

a single instance does Moses speak with He-who-is “face to face, as a man

speaketh to his friend” (Exodus 33:11).
And another time, there is a group

hallucination when Moses and the seventy elders all see He-who-is at a

distance standing on sapphire pavement (Exodus 24:9-10).
But in all the

other instances, the hallucinated meetings are less intimate.
Visually, He-

who-is is a burning bush, or a cloud, or a huge pillar of fire.
And as visually

the bicameral experience recedes into the thick darkness, where thunders

and lightnings and driving clouds of dense blackness crowd in on the

inaccessible heights of Sinai, we are approaching the greatest teaching of

the entire Old Testament, that, as this last of the elohim loses his

hallucinatory properties, and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the

nervous system of a few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something

written upon tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable

by all, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, universal

and transcendent.
Moses himself reacts to this loss of the visual quality by hiding his face

from a supposed brilliance.
At other times, his bicameral voice itself

rationalizes the loss of its visual hallucinatory components by saying to

Moses, “No man shall see me and live...
I will put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away

mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen”

(Exodus 33:20–23).
The very conception of a cupboard called the ark, for some tablets of

written word as a replacement for an hallucinogenic image of a more usual

kind, like a golden calf, is illustrative of the same point.
The importance of

writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously

important.
What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to

be taken in visually.
After the Pentateuch, the bicameral voice retreats even further.
When the

writer of Deuteronomy (34:10) says that no nabi has been like Moses

“whom He-who-is knew face to face,” he is indicating the loss of the

bicameral mind.
The voices are heard less frequently and less

conversationally.
Joshua is more spoken to by his voice than speaking with

it; and, halfway between bicamerality and subjectivity, he has to draw lots

to make decisions.
Inconsistency Between Persons

In the bicameral period, the strict hierarchy of society, the settled

geography of its limits, its ziggurats, temples, and statuary, and the common

upbringing of its citizens, all co-operated in the organization of different

men’s bicameral voices into a stable hierarchy.
Whose bicameral voice was

the correct one was immediately decided by that hierarchy, and the

recognition signals as to which god was speaking were known by everyone

and reinforced by priests.
But with the breakdown of bicamerality, particularly when a previously

bicameral people has become nomadic as in the Exodus, the voices will

begin to say different things to different people and the problem of authority

becomes a considerable difficulty.
Something of the sort might be referred

to in Numbers 12:1–2, where Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, who all hear the

voice of He-who-is, are not sure which is the most authentic.
But the problem is much more acute in the later books, particularly in the

competition between the remaining bicameral voices.
Joash has a bicameral

voice that he recognizes as the Owner to whom he builds an altar ; but his

son Gideon hears a voice he recognizes as He-who-is which tells him to tear

down his father’s altar to the Owner and build another to himself (Judges

6:25–26).
The jealousy of the remaining elohim is the direct and necessary

result of social disorganization.
Such a dissonance of bicameral voices in this unorganized breakdown

period inaugurates the importance of signs or magical proofs as to which

voice is valid.
Thus Moses is constantly compelled to produce magical

proofs of his mission.
Such signs, of course, continue all through the first

millennium even into present times.
The miracles that today are required as

criteria of sainthood are of precisely the same order as when Moses

hallucinates his rod into a serpent and back again, or his healthy hand into a

leprous one and back (Exodus 4:1–7).
Some of our present-day enjoyment of magic and prestidigitation is

possibly a holdover from this desire for signs, in which in some part of

ourselves we are enjoying the thrill of recognizing the magician as a

possible bicameral authority.
And if there are no signs, what then?
In the seventh century B.C., this is particularly the problem of Jeremiah, the illiterate wailer at the wall of

Israel’s iniquity.
Even though he has had the sign of the hand of He-who-is

upon him (1:9; 25:17) has heard the word of He-who-is continually like a

fire in his bones, and has been sent (23:21, 32, etc.), yet still he is unsure:

whose voice is the right one?
“Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar?”

Jeremiah mistrustfully jabs back at his bicameral voice (15:19).
But on this

point, it is sure in its answering.
It breaks down what authority Jeremiah’s

rational consciousness may have had, and commands him to denounce all

other voices.
Chapter 28 is a particular example, with the somewhat

ridiculous competition between Hananiah and Jeremiah as to whose

bicameral voice is the right one.
And it was only the death of Hananiah two

months later that was the sign of which to choose.
Had Jeremiah died, we

would probably have had the Book of Hananiah instead of his competitor’s.
Inconsistency Within Persons

In the absence of a social hierarchy that provides stability and

recognitions, the bicameral voices not only become inconsistent among

persons, but inconsistent within the same person as well.
Particularly in the

Pentateuch, the bicameral voice is often as petty and foot-stampingly

petulant as any human tyrant under questioning.
“I will be gracious to

whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show

mercy.” (Exodus 33:19).
There is no question of virtue or of justice.
So He-

who-is prefers Abel to Cain, slays Er, the first-born of Judah, having taken a

dislike to him, first tells Abraham to beget a son, and then later orders him

to kill the son, even as criminal psychotics might be directed today.
Similarly, the bicameral voice of Moses possibly has a sudden impulse to

kill him (Exodus 4:24) for no reason at all.
This same inconsistency is found in the non-Israelite prophet, Balaam.
His bicameral voice first tells him not to go with the princes of Moab

(Numbers 22:12), then reverses itself (22:20).
Then when Balaam obeys, it

is furious.
Then a visual-auditory hallucination out to kill Balaam blocks his

way, but then this too reverses its commands (Numbers 22:35).
Also in the

self-recriminating category is the self-punishing voice of the ashfaced nabi

who tries to get passersby to punch him because his voice commands him to

(I Kings 20:35–38).
And also, the “nabi from Judah” whose bicameral voice

drives him out of the city and tries to starve him (I Kings 13, 9–17).
All of

these inconsistent voices are coming close to the voices heard by

schizophrenics which we noted in Chapter 4 of Book I.
Divination by Gods

The deciding things by casting gorals or lots, probably throwing dice,

bones, or beans, runs through much of the Old Testament.
As we saw in II.4

of this essay, it is the making of an analog god.
The goral by metaphor

becomes the word of god deciding lands and tribes, what to do or whom to

destroy, taking the place of the older bicameral authority.
As mentioned

earlier, it is a help in appreciating how authoritative such practices could be

when we realize that there was no concept of chance until well into the

subjective eras.
But of much greater interest is the occurrence of the spontaneous

divination from immediate sensory experience that in the end becomes the

subjective conscious mind.
Its interest here is because it begins not in the

man-side of the bicameral mind but in the bicameral voices themselves.
It is, then, another way that the bicameral voices show their uncertainty

when they too, like men, turn to divination, and need to be primed or

instigated.
In the ninth century B.C., the voice of one of the nabiim before

Ahab divines by metaphor from a pair of horns how an army may be

defeated (I Kings 22:11).
The bicameral voice of Jeremiah several times

takes what he, Jeremiah, is looking at and divines from it what to say.
When

he sees a boiling wind-blown pot facing north, He-who-is metaphorizes it

into an evil invasion blowing down from the north, consuming all before it

like a fire driven by the wind (Jeremiah 1:13–15).
When he sees two

baskets of figs, one good and one bad, his right hemisphere has He-who-is

speaking about picking good and bad people (Jeremiah 24:1–10).
And when

Amos sees a builder judging the straightness of a wall by holding a plumb

line to it, his mind hallucinates the builder into He-who-is, who then

metaphorizes the act into judging people by their righteousness (Amos 7:8).
Particularly when spontaneous divinations are being made by gods (who

after all cannot perform other types of divination), puns may ‘seed’ the

analogy.
Thus, when Amos stands looking at a basket of summer fruit, his

bicameral voice puns over on the Hebrew qayits (summer fruit) to qets

(end) and starts talking about the end of Israel (Amos 8:1–2).
Or when

Jeremiah sees an almond branch ( shaqed), his bicameral voice says it will

watch over him ( shaqad) because the Hebrew words for the two are similar (Jeremiah 1:11–12).
The Book of I Samuel

The Book of I Samuel is an instructive register of all this, and a reading

of it gives one the feeling of what it was like in this partly bicameral, partly

subjective world as the first millennium B.C.
moved into consciousness.
Represented across its intriguing chapters is almost the entire spectrum of

transition mentalities in what is perhaps the first written tragedy in

literature.
Bicamerality in a rather decadent form is represented in the wild

gangs of nabiim, the winnowed-out bicameral chaff of the Khabiru that we

spoke of earlier in this chapter, roaming outside the cities in the hills,

speaking the voices they hear within themselves but believe to come from

outside them, answering the voices, using music and drums to increase their

excitement.
Partly bicameral is the boy Samuel, prodded from sleep by a voice he is

taught is the voice of He-who-is, encouraged at the critical age and trained

into the bicameral mode by the old priest Eli, and then acknowledged from

Dan to Beersheba as the medium of He-who-is.
Though even Samuel must

at times stoop to divining, as he does from his own torn garment (15:27–

29).
Next in bicamerality is David, whom Samuel chooses from all the sons of

Jesse in a bicameral manner, and who is only so bicameral as to obtain short

sharp “Go up”s from He-who-is.
His subjective consciousness is

demonstrated in his ability to deceive Achish (I Samuel 21:12).
And then

Jonathan, subjectively able to deceive his father, but having to rely on

cledonomancy, or divining by first words spoken by someone, for military

decisions (14:8–13).
That idols were common in the period is shown by the

casual reference to what must have been a life-sized “image” that, with the

help of some goat hair, is made to resemble David in bed (19:13).
The

casual presence of such an idol in David’s house may point to some

common hallucinogenic practice of the time that has been suppressed from

the text.
And finally, the subjective Saul, the gaunt bewildered country boy

whisked into politics at the irrational behest of Samuel’s bicameral voice,

trying to be bicameral himself by joining a band of the wild nabiim until he,

too, to the throbbing of drums and strumming zithers, feels he hears the

divine voices (10:5).
But so unconvincing are these to his consciousness

that, even with the three confirmed signs, he tries to hide from his destiny.
Subjective Saul seeks wildly about him for what to do.
A new situation, as

when the irresponsible Samuel does not keep an appointment, with the

Israelites hoveled up in caves, the Philistines knotting together against him,

and he tries to force a voice with burnt offerings (13:12), only to be called

foolish by the tardy Samuel.
And Saul building an altar to He-who-is,

whom he has never heard, to ask it questions in vain (14:37).
Why doesn’t

the god speak to him?
Saul, divining by lot the supposed culprit that must

be the cause of the divine silence, and, obedient to his divination, even

though it is his own son, condemning him to death.
But even that must be

wrong, because his people rebel and refuse to carry out the execution—a

behavior impossible in bicameral times.
And Saul, too consciously kind to

his enemies for Samuel’s archaic hallucination.
And when Saul’s jealousy

of David and of his son’s love for David reaches its extremity, suddenly

losing his conscious mind, becoming bicameral, stripping off his clothes,

naba-ing with the bicameral men of the hills (19:23–24).
But then when

such nabiim cannot tell him what to do, driving them along with other

bicameral wizards out of the dty (28:3), seeking some divine certainty in

dreams or in gazing into crystal (if we may translate urim as such) (28:6).
And despairing Saul, at the end of his consciousness, disguising himself,

something only a subjective man could do, and consulting at night that last

resort, the Witch of Endor, or rather the bicameral voice that takes

possession of her, as confounded conscious Saul grovels before it, crying

that he knows not what to do, and then hears from the weird woman’s lips

what he takes to be the dead Samuel’s words, that he will die and Israel will

fall (28:19).
And then, when the Philistines have all but captured the

remnant of Israel’s army, his sons and hopes all slain, the committing of that

most terrible subjective act, the first in history—suicide, to be followed

immediately by the second, that of his armor bearer.
The date of the story is the eleventh century B.C.; of the writing of it, the

sixth century B.C.; of the psychology of it, therefore, perhaps the eighth

century B.C.
The Idols of the Khabiru

As holdovers from the bicameral period are the hallucinogenic statuary

that are mentioned throughout the Old Testament.
As might be expected in

this late stage of civilization, there are many kinds.
While there are some

general terms for idols, such as the elil, which is Isaiah’s word for them, or

matstsebah for anything set up on a pillar or altar, it is the more specific

words which are of greater interest.
The most important type of idol was the tselem, a cast or molten statue

usually fashioned with a graving tool, often of gold or silver, made by a

founder from melted money (Judges 17:4) or melted jewelry (Exodus 32:4),

and sometimes expensively dressed (Ezekiel 16:17).
Isaiah scoffingly

describes their construction in Judah around 700 B.C.
(44:12).
They could be

images either of animals or of men.
Sometimes the tselem may have been

just a head placed high on a pedestal or high altar (II Chronicles 14:3) or

even the huge golden tselem which Nebuchadnezzar placed upon a pillar 90

feet high (Daniel 3:1).
More often, they seemed to have been placed in an

asherah, probably one of the wooden shrines hung with rich fabric that the

King James scholars translated as “groves.”

Next in importance seems to be the carved statue or pesel, of which very

little is known.
It was probably chiseled out of wood and was the same as

the atsob, which is what the Philistines, who destroyed Saul’s army,

worshiped.
After Saul’s death and the defeat of Israel, the Philistines run to

tell their atsabim first of their victory and then their people (I Samuel 31:9;

I Chronicles 10:9).
That they were painted gold or silver is indicated by

several references in the Psalms, and that they were of wood by the fact that

David in wreaking his revenge on the Philistines makes a bonfire out of

them (II Samuel 5:21).
There were also some kind of sun idols of unknown

shape called chammanim, which seem also to have been set up on pedestals,

since they are ordered cut down by Leviticus (26:30), Isaiah (27:9), and

Ezekiel (6:6).
If not the most important, perhaps the most common hallucinogenic idol

was the terap.
We are told directly that a terap could seem to speak, since

the king of Babylon at one point consults with several of them (Ezekiel

21:21).
Sometimes they were probably small figurines, since Rachel can

steal a group of prized teraphim (to use the Hebrew plural) from her furious

father and hide them (Genesis 31:19).
They also could be lifesized, since it

is a terap that is substituted for the sleeping David (I Samuel 19:13).
As we

have already seen, the very casualness of this last reference seems to

indicate that such teraphim were common enough around the houses of

leaders.
But in the hills, such idols must have been rare and highly prized.
In Judges we are told of Micah, who builds a house of elohim containing a

tselem, a pesel, a terap, and an ephod, the latter being usually an ornate

ritual robe which, perhaps put over a frame, could be made into an idol.
And these he calls his elohim, which are then stolen by the children of Dan

(Judges: 17 and 18 passim).
We would probably have more archaeological

evidence of these hallucinogenic idols of the Hebrews today had not King

Josiah had them all destroyed in 641 B.C.
(II Chronicles 34: 3–7).
A further vestige from the bicameral era is the word ob, often translated

as a “familiar spirit.” “A man also or woman that have an ob...
shall

surely be put to death,” says Leviticus (20:27).
And similarly Saul drives

out from Israel all those that had an ob (I Samuel 28:3).
Even though an ob

is something that one consults with (Deuteronomy, 18:11), it probably had

no physical embodiment.
It is always bracketed with wizards or witches,

and thus probably refers to some bicameral voice that was not recognized

by the Old Testament writers as religious.
This word has so puzzled

translators that when they found it in Job 32:19, they translated it absurdly

as “bottle,” when clearly the context is that of the young frustrated Elihu,

who feels as if he had a bicameral voice about to burst forth into impatient

speech like an overfull wineskin.
The Last of the Nabiim

We began this chapter with a consideration of the refugee situation in the

Near East around the latter part of the second millennium B.C., and of the

roving tribes uprooted from their lands by various catastrophes, some of

them certainly bicameral and unable to move toward subjective

consciousness.
Probably in the editing of the historical books of the Old

Testament, and the fitting of it together into one story in the sixth or fifth

century B.C., a great deal has been suppressed.
And among such items of

information that we would like is a clear account of what happened to these

last communities of bicameral men.
Here and there through the Old

Testament, they appear like sudden glimpses of a strange other world during

these periods which historians have paid too little attention to.
Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall of the

Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other tribes or with any

organization to their hallucinated voices in the form of gods, we don’t

know.
They are often referred to as the “sons of nabiim,” indicating that

there was probably a strong genetic basis for this type of remaining

bicamerality.
It is, I think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as

part of the etiology of schizophrenia.
Edgy kings consulted them.
Ahab, king of Israel in 835 B.C., rounded up

400 of them like cattle to listen to their hue and clamor (I Kings 22:6).
Later, in all his robes, he and the king of Judah sit on thrones just outside

the gates of Samaria, and have hundreds of these poor bicameral men

herded up to them, raving and copying each other even as schizophrenics in

a back ward (I Kings 22:10).
What happened to them?
From time to time, they were hunted down and

exterminated like unwanted animals.
Such a massacre in the ninth century

B.C.
seems to be referred to in I Kings 18:4, where out of some unknown,

much larger number, Obadiah took a hundred nabiim and hid them in caves,

and brought them bread and water until the massacre was over.
Another

such massacre is organized by Elijah a few years later (I Kings 18:40).
We hear no more of these bicameral groups thereafter.
What remained for

a few centuries more are the individual nabiim, men whose voices do not

need the group support of other hallucinating men, men who can be partly

subjective and yet still hear the bicameral voice.
These are the famous

nabiim whose bicameral messages we have already selectively touched

upon: Amos, the gatherer of sycamore fruit, Jeremiah, staggering under his

yoke from village to village, Ezekiel with his visions of lofty thrones on

wheels moving through the clouds, the several nabiim whose religious

agonies are ascribed to Isaiah.
These of course merely represent the handful

of that much larger number whose bicameral voices seemed to be most

consistent with Deuteronomy.
And then the voices are as a rule no longer

actually heard.
In their place is the considered subjective thought of moral teachers.
Men

still dreamed visions and heard dark speech perhaps.
But Ecclesiastes and

Ezra seek wisdom, not a god.
They study the law.
They do not roam out

into the wilderness “inquiring of Yahweh.” By 400 B.C., bicameral prophecy

is dead.
“The nabiim shall be ashamed everyone of his visions.” If parents

catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are

to kill them on the spot (Zechariah 13, 3–4).
8 That is a severe injunction.
If it was carried out, it is an evolutionary selection which helped move the

gene pool of humanity toward subjectivity.
Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of

prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism.
They have suggested that the

nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them.
Or they

have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult.
Others that it

was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this

time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be.
All

of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of

prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the

world, the loss of the bicameral mind.
Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the

entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth

pangs of our subjective consciousness.
No other literature has recorded this

absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness.
Chinese

literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little

before it.
Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective

Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times.
Greek

literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and

across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete.
And Egypt is relatively silent.
While

the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of

accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the

transition period was like.
It is essentially the story of the loss of the

bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the

confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in

vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action.
But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on

lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for

divine volition and service is with us still.
As the stag pants after the waterbrooks,

So pants my mind after you, O gods!
My mind thirsts for gods!
for living gods!
When shall I come face to face with gods?
—Psalm 42







BOOK THREE



VESTIGES OF THE BICAMERAL MIND IN THE MODERN

WORLD







Chapter 1



The Quest for Authorization

WE ARE NOW at last in a position where we can look back and see the history

of mankind on this planet in its proper values for the first time and

understand some of the chief features of the last three millennia as vestiges

of a previous mentality.
Our view of human history here must be that of a

furthest grandeur.
We must try to see man against his entire evolutionary

background, where his civilizations, including our own, are but as mountain

peaks in a particular range against the sky, and from which we must force

ourselves into an intellectual distance so that we see its contours aright.
And

from this prospect, a millennium is an exceedingly short period of time for

so fundamental a change as from bicamerality to consciousness.
We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in

this transition to a new mentality.
And all about us lie the remnants of our

recent bicameral past.
We have our houses of gods which record our births,

define us, marry us, and bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with

the gods to forgive us our trespasses.
Our laws are based upon values which

without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforceable.
Our

national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine invocations.
Our

kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the

now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard

them.
The most obvious and important carry-over from the previous mentality

is thus our religious heritage in all its labyrinthine beauty and variety of

forms.
The overwhelming importance of religion both in general world

history and in the history of the average world individual is of course very

clear from any objective standpoint, even though a scientific view of man

often seems embarrassed at acknowledging this most obvious fact.
For in

spite of all that rationalist materialist science has implied since the

Scientific Revolution, mankind as a whole has not, does not, and perhaps

cannot relinquish his fascination with some human type of relationship to a

greater and wholly other, some mysterium tremendum with powers and

intelligences beyond all left hemispheric categories, something necessarily

indefinite and unclear, to be approached and felt in awe and wonder and

almost speechless worship, rather than in clear conception, something that

for modern religious people communicates in truths of feeling, rather than in what can be verbalized by the left hemisphere, and so what in our time

can be more truly felt when least named, a patterning of self and numinous

other from which, in times of our darkest distress, none of us can escape—

even as the infinitely milder distress of decision-making brought out that

relationship three millennia ago.
There are many things that could be said at this point—many.
A full

discussion here would specify how the attempted reformation of Judaism by

Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new religion for conscious men

rather than bicameral men.
Behavior now must be changed from within the

new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from

without.
Sin and penance are now within conscious desire and conscious

contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the

penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment.
The divine

kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical.
It is metaphorical not

literal.
It is ‘within’ not in extenso.
But even the history of Christianity does not and cannot remain true to its

originator.
The development of the Christian Church returns again and

again to this same longing for bicameral absolutes, away from the difficult

inner kingdoms of agape to an external hierarchy reaching through a cloud

of miracle and infallibility to an archaic authorization in an extended

heaven.
In previous chapters I have often paused to point out various

parallels between ancient bicameral practices and modern religious ones,

and I shall not labor such comparisons here.
Also beyond the purview of the present book is a full exploration of the

way that the more secular developments of the last three millennia are

related to their emergence from a different mentality.
I am thinking here of

the history of logic and conscious reasoning from the Greek development of

Logos to modern computers, and of the spectacular historical pageant of

philosophy, with its efforts to find a metaphor of all existence in which we

may find some conscious familiarity and so feel at home in the universe.
I

am thinking too of our struggles toward systems of ethics, of attempting

with rational consciousness to find substitutes for our previous divine

volition which could carry with them that obligation which at least could

simulate our earlier obedience to hallucinated voices.
And too of the cyclic

history of politics, the gyres of our wavering attempts to make governments

out of men instead of gods, secular systems of laws to perform that

formerly divine function of binding us together into an order, a stability, and

a commonweal.
These larger questions are the important ones.
But here, in this chapter, I

wish to introduce the issues of Book III by considering a handful of more

ancient topics of lesser importance that are precise and clear carry-overs

from the earlier mentality.
My reason for doing so here is that these

historical phenomena shed a needed and clarifying light back into some of

the darker problems of Books I and II.
One distinguishing characteristic of such vestiges is that they are more

obvious against the complexity of history the closer we are to the

breakdown of the bicameral mind.
The reason for this is quite clear.
While

the universal characteristics of the new consciousness, such as self-

reference, mind-space, and narratization, can develop swiftly on the heels of

new language construction, the larger contours of civilization, the huge

landscape of culture against which this happens, can only change with

geological slowness.
The matter and technic of earlier ages of civilizations

survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them the older outworn

forms in which the new mentality must live.
But living also in these forms is a fervent search for what I shall call

archaic authorization.
After the collapse of the bicameral mind, the world is

still in a sense governed by gods, by statements and laws and prescriptions

carved on stelae or written on papyrus or remembered by old men, and

dating back to bicameral times.
But the dissonance is there.
Why are the

gods no longer heard and seen?
The Psalms cry out for answers.
And more

assurances are needed than the relics of history or the paid insistences of

priests.
Something palpable, something direct, something immediate!
Some

sensible assurance that we are not alone, that the gods are just silent, not

dead, that behind all this hesitant subjective groping about for signs of

certainty, there is a certainty to be had.
Thus, as the slow withdrawing tide of divine voices and presences

strands more and more of each population on the sands of subjective

uncertainties, the variety of technique by which man attempts to make

contact with his lost ocean of authority becomes extended.
Prophets, poets,

oracles, diviners, statue cults, mediums, astrologers, inspired saints, demon

possession, tarot cards, Ouija boards, popes, and peyote all are the residue

of bicamerality that was progressively narrowed down as uncertainties piled upon uncertainties.
In this chapter and the next we shall examine some of

these more archaic vestiges of the bicameral mind.
ORACLES

The most immediate carry-over of bicamerality is simply its perpetuation in

certain persons, particularly itinerant prophets, which I have discussed in

II.6 , or those institutionalized as oracles, which I shall describe here.
While

there is a series of cuneiform tablets describing Assyrian oracles1 dating from the seventh century B.C., and the even earlier oracle of Amon of

Thebes in Egypt, it is really in Greece that we know this institution best.
Greek oracles were the central method of making important decisions for

over a thousand years after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
This fact

is usually obscured by the strident rationalism of modern historians.
Oracles

were subjectivity’s umbilical cord reaching back into the sustaining

unsubjective past.
The Oracle at Delphi

Coincidental with my metaphor is the fact that at the most famous oracle,

that of Apollo at Delphi, there was a queer conelike stone structure called

the omphalos or navel.
It stood at the reputed center of the earth.
Here

presided on certain days, or in some centuries every day throughout the

year, a supreme priestess, or sometimes two or three in rotation, selected so

far as we know on no particular basis (in Plutarch’s day, in the first century

B.C., she was the daughter of a poor farmer).
2 She first bathed and drank

from a sacred brook, and then established contact with the god through his

sacred tree, the laurel, much as conscious Assyrian kings are depicted being

smeared by tree-cones in the hands of genii.
She did this either by holding a

laurel branch, or by inhaling and fumigating herself with burnt laurel leaves

(as Plutarch said), or perhaps by chewing the leaves (as Lucian insisted).
The replies to questions were given at once, without any reflection, and

uninterruptedly.
The exact manner of her announcements is still debated, 3

whether she was seated on a tripod, regarded as Apollo’s ritual seat, or

simply stood at an entrance to a cave.
But the archaic references to her,

from the fifth century on, all agree with the statement of Heraclitus that she

spoke “from her frenzied mouth and with various contortions of her body.”

She was entheos, plena deo.
Speaking through his priestess, but always in the first person, answering king or freeman, ‘Apollo’ commanded sites for

new colonies (as he did for present-day Istanbul), decreed which nations

were friends, which rulers best, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues

or famines, the best trade routes, which of the proliferation of new cults, or

music, or art should be recognized as agreeable to Apollo—all decided by

these girls with their frenzied mouths.
Truly, this is astonishing!
We have known of the Delphic Oracle so long

from school texts that we coat it over with a shrugging usualness when we

should not.
How is it conceivable that simple rural girls could be trained to

put themselves into a psychological state such that they could make

decisions at once that ruled the world?
The obdurate rationalist simply scoffs plena deo indeed!
Just as the mediums of our own times have always been exposed as frauds, so these

so-called oracles were really performances manipulated by others in front

of an illiterate peasantry for political or monetary ends.
But such a realpolitik attitude is doctrinaire at best.
Possibly there was

some chicanery in the oracle’s last days, perhaps some bribery of the

prophetes, those subsidiary priests or priestesses who interpreted what the

oracle meant.
But earlier, to sustain so massive a fraud for an entire

millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had

yet known is impossible, just impossible.
Nor can it gibe with the complete

absence of criticism of the oracle until the Roman period.
Nor with the

politically wise and often cynical Plato reverently calling Delphi “the

interpreter of religion to all mankind.”4

Another kind of explanation, really a quasi-explanation, still busied about

with in the popular and sometimes professional literature, is biochemical.
The trances were real, it says, but caused by vapors of some sort rising from

a casium beneath the floor of the cave.
But the French excavations of 1903

and more recent ones have shown distinctly that no such casium existed.
5

Or else there might be a drug in the laurel that could have produced such

an Apollonian effect.
To test this, I have crushed laurel leaves and smoked

quantities of them in a pipe and felt somewhat sick but no more inspired

than usual.
And chewed them as well for over an hour, and very distinctly

felt more and more Jaynesian, alas, than Apollonian.
6 The glee with which external explanations are sought out for such phenomena simply indicates

the resistance in some quarters to admitting that psychological phenomena

of this type exist at all.
Rather, I suggest a quite different explanation.
And for that purpose, I

shall introduce here the notion of



The General Bicameral Paradigm

By this phrase, I mean an hypothesized structure behind a large class of

phenomena of diminished consciousness which I am interpreting as partial

holdovers from our earlier mentality.
The paradigm has four aspects:



the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally

agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the particular form

of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out within that form;

an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function is the

narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of

preoccupations;

the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, characterized by a

lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing of the analog ‘I,’

or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, tolerated, or encouraged

by the group; and

the archaic authorization to which the trance is directed or related

to, usually a god, but sometimes a person who is accepted by the

individual and his culture as an authority over the individual, and who

by the collective cognitive imperative is prescribed to be responsible

for controlling the trance state.
Now, I do not mean these four aspects of the general bicameral paradigm

to be considered as a temporal succession necessarily, although the

induction and trance usually do follow each other.
But the cognitive

imperative and the archaic authorization pervade the whole thing.
Moreover, there is a kind of balance or summation among these elements,

such that when one of them is weak the others must be strong for the

phenomena to occur.
Thus, as through time, particularly in the millennium

following the beginning of consciousness, the collective cognitive

imperative becomes weaker (that is, the general population tends toward

skepticism about the archaic authorization), we find a rising emphasis on

and complication of the induction procedures, as well as the trance state

itself becoming more profound.
By calling the general bicameral paradigm a structure, I not only mean a

logical structure into which these phenomena can be analyzed, but also

some presently unspecified neurological structure or relationships between

areas of the brain, perhaps something like the model for the bicameral mind

presented in I.5.
We might thus expect that all of the phenomena mentioned

in Book III in some way involve right hemispheric function in a way that is

different from ordinary conscious life.
It is even possible that in some of

these phenomena we have a partial periodic right hemisphere dominance

that can be considered as the neurological residue of nine millennia of

selection for the bicameral mind.
The application of this general bicameral paradigm to the oracle at

Delphi is obvious: the elaborate induction procedures, the trance in which

consciousness is lost, the ardently pursued authorization of Apollo.
But it is

the collective cognitive imperative or group belief or cultural prescription

or expectancy (all of these terms indicating my meaning) which I wish to

emphasize.
The immensity of the cultural demand upon the entranced

priestess cannot be overemphasized.
The whole Greek world believed, and

had for almost a millennium.
As many as thirty-five thousand people a day

from every part of the Mediterranean world might struggle by sea through

the tiny port of Itéa that snuggles the receptive coast just below Delphi.
And

they, too, went through induction procedures, purifying themselves in the

Castalian spring, making offerings to Apollo and other gods as they

persisted up the Sacred Way.
In the latter centuries of the oracle, more than

four thousand votive statues crowded this 220-yard-long climb up the side

of Mount Parnassus to the temple of the oracle.
It was, I suggest, this

confluence of huge social prescription and expectancy, closer to definition

than mere belief, which can account for the psychology of the oracle, for

the at-once-ness of her answers.
It was something before which any

skepticism would be as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a

radio originates in a studio that we cannot see.
And it is something before

which modern psychology must stand in awe.
To this causative expectancy should be added something about the

natural scene itself.
Oracles begin in localities with a specific awesomeness,

natural formations of mountain or gorge, of hallucinogenic wind or waves,

of symbolic gleamings and vistas, which I suggest are more conducive to

occasioning right hemisphere activity than the analytic planes of everyday

life.
Perhaps we can say that the geography of the bicameral mind in the

first part of the first millennium B.C.
was shrinking down into sites of awe and beauty where the voices of gods could still be heard.
Certainly the vast cliffs of Delphi move into such a suggestion and fill it

fully: a towering caldron of blasted rock over which the sea winds howl and

the salt mists cling, as if dreaming nature were twisting herself awake at

awkward angles, falling away into a blue surf of shimmering olive leaves

and the gray immortal sea.
(It is, however, difficult for us to appreciate such scenic awe today, so

clouded is the purity of our response to landscape with our conscious

‘inner’ worlds and our experience with swift geographical change.
Moreover, Delphi today is not quite as it was.
Its five acres of broken

columns, cheerful graffiti, camera-clicking tourists, and stumps of white

marble over which heedless ants crawl indecisively, are not exactly the stuff

of divine inspiration.)



Other Oracles

Particularly recommending such a cultural explanation of Delphi is the

fact that there were similar if less important oracles throughout the civilized

world at the time.
Apollo had others: at Ptoa in Boeotia and at Branchidae

and Patara in Asia Minor.
At the latter, the Prophetess, as part of the

induction, was locked into the temple at night for connubial union with her

hallucinated god that she might better be his medium.
7 The great oracle at

Claros had priests as mediums whose frenzies were visited by Tacitus in the

first century A.D.8 Pan had an oracle at Acacesium, but it became defunct early.9 The golden oracle at Ephesus, famous for its enormous wealth, had

tranced eunuchs as the mouthpieces of the goddess Artemis.10 (The style of their vestments, incidentally, is still used today by the Greek Orthodox

Church.) And the abnormal dancing on the tips of the toes of modern

ballerinas is thought to derive from the dances before the altar of the

goddess.
11 Anything opposite to the everyday can serve as a cue for the

engagement of the general bicameral paradigm.
The voice of Zeus at Dodona must have been one of the oldest oracles,

since Odysseus visited it to hear whether to return to Ithaca openly or by

stealth.
12 It was at that time probably just a huge sacred oak tree and the

Olympian voice was hallucinated from the wind trembling in its leaves,

making one wonder if something similar took place among the Druids who

held the oak holy.
It is only in the fifth century B.C.
that Zeus is no longer

heard directly, and Dodona has a temple and a priestess who speaks for him

in unconscious trances, 13 again conforming to the temporal sequence the

bicameral theory would predict.
Not only the voices of gods, but also of dead kings, could still be heard

bicamerally, as we have earlier suggested was the origin of gods

themselves.
Amphiaraus had been the heroic prince of Argos who had

plunged to his death in a chasm in Boeotia, supposedly at the nudge of an

angry Zeus.
His voice was ‘heard’ from the chasm for centuries after,

answering the problems of his petitioners.
But again as centuries passed, the

‘voice’ came to be hallucinated only by certain entranced priestesses who

lived there.
At that later time they did not so much answer questions as

interpret the dreams of those who consulted the voice.14

In some ways the most interesting, however, from the hypothesis of the

bicameral mind is the hallucinated voice of Trophonius at Lebadea, twenty

miles east of Delphi.
For it is the longest lasting of the direct ‘voices’

without intermediary priests or priestesses.
The locale of the oracle even

today bears some remnants of its ancient awesomeness, a meeting of three

soaring precipices, of murmuring springs easing strongly out of the solemn

ground and crawling submissively away into stony ravines.
And up a little,

where one ravine begins to wind into the heart of the mountain, there was

once a carved-out cell-like pit in the rock that squeezed down into an

ovenlike shrine over an underground flume.
When the collective imperative of the general bicameral paradigm is less,

when belief and trust in such phenomena are waning with rationalism, and

particularly when it is being applied not to a trained priestess but to any

suppliant, the induction is longer and more intricate to compensate.
And

this is what occurred at Lebadea.
Pausanias, the Roman traveler, described

the elaborate induction procedure that he found there in A.D.
150.
15 After

days of waiting and purification and omens and expectancy, he tells us how

he was abruptly taken one night and bathed and anointed by two holy boys,

then drank from Lethe’s spring to forget who he was (the loss of the analog

‘I’), then made to sip at the spring of Mnemosyne so as to remember later

what was to be revealed (like a post-hypnotic suggestion).
Then he was

made to worship a secret image, then was dressed in holy linen, girded with

sacred ribbons, and shod with special boots, and then only after more

omens, if favorable, was finally inserted down an impassive ladder into the

devout pit with its dark torrent where the divine message grew swiftly

articulate.
The Six Oracular Terms

As the Greek mind moves from the universally bicameral to the

universally conscious, these oracular vestiges of the bicameral world and

their authority change until they become more and more precarious and

difficult to obtain.
There is, I suggest, a loose pattern in all this, and that

over the thousand years of their existence, oracles were in a continuing

decadence which can be understood as six terms.
These can be regarded as

six steps down from the bicameral mind as its collective cognitive

imperative grew weaker and weaker.
1.
The locality oracle.
Oracles began simply as specific locations where,

because of some awesomeness of the surroundings, or some important

incident or some hallucinogenic sound, waves, waters, or wind,

suppliants, any suppliants, could still ‘hear’ a bicameral voice directly.
Lebadea remained at this term, probably because of its remarkable

induction.
2.
The prophet oracle.
Usually there then occurred a term where only

certain persons, priests, or priestesses, could ‘hear’ the voice of the

god at the locality.
3.
The trained prophet oracle, when such persons, priests, or priestesses,

could ‘hear’ only after long training and elaborate inductions.
Up to

this term, the person was still ‘himself and relayed the god’s voice to

others.
4.
The possessed oracle.
Then, from at least the fifth century B.C., came

the term of possession, of the frenzied mouth and contorted body after

even more training and more elaborate inductions.
5.
The interpreted possessed oracle.
As the cognitive imperative

weakened, the words became garbled and had to be interpreted by

auxiliary priests or priestesses who themselves had gone through

induction procedures.
6.
The erratic oracle.
And then even this became difficult.
The voices

became fitful, the possessed prophet erratic, the interpretations

impossible, and the oracle ended.
The oracle of Delphi endured longest.
It is striking evidence for its

supreme importance to the god-nostalgic subjectivity of Greece in its

golden age that it lasted so long, particularly when it is recalled that in

almost every invasion it sided with the invader: with Xerxes I in the early

fifth century B.C., with Philip II in the fourth century B.C., and even in the

Peloponnesian Wars, it spoke on the side of Sparta.
Such the strength of

bicameral phenomena in the forces of history.
It even lived out its sad,

hilarious, patriotic mocking by Euripides in the amphitheaters.
But by the first century A.D., Delphi had come to its sixth term.
Bicamerality having receded further and further into the unremembered

past, skepticism had overgrown belief.
The mighty cultural cognitive

imperative of the oracular was played out and shattered, and the thing with

increasing frequency would not work.
One such instance at Delphi is told

by Plutarch in A.D.
60.
The prophetess reluctantly attempted a trance, the

omens being dreadful.
She began to speak in a hoarse voice as if distressed,

then appeared filled with a “dumb and evil spirit,” and then ran screaming

toward the entrance and fell down.
Everyone else, including her prophetes,

fled in terror.
The report goes on that they found her partly recovered when

they returned, but that she died within a few days.
16 As this was probably

observed by a prophetes who was a personal friend of Plutarch’s, we have

no reason to doubt its authenticity.17

Yet even with these neurotic failures, Delphi was still consulted by the

tradition-hungry Greece-haunted Romans.
The last to do so was my

namesake, the Emperor Julian who, following his namesake Julianus (who

had written down from hallucinated gods his Chaldaean Oracles), was

attempting to revive the ancient gods.
As part of this personal quest for

authorization, he tried to rehabilitate Delphi in A.D.
363, three years after it

had been ransacked by Constantine.
Through his remaining priestess,

Apollo prophesied that he would never prophesy again.
And the prophecy

came true.
The bicameral mind had come to one of its many ends.
Sibyls

The Age of Oracles occupies the entire millennium after the breakdown

of the bicameral mind.
And as it slowly dies away, there appear here and

there what might be called amateur oracles, untrained and

uninstitutionalized persons who spontaneously felt themselves possessed by

gods.
Of course some simply spoke schizophrenic nonsense.
Probably most.
But others had an authenticity that could command belief.
Among such

were those few but unknown number of weird and wonderful women

known as the Sibyls (from the Aeolic sios = god + boide = advice).
In the

first century B.C., Varro could count at least ten at one time around the

Mediterranean world.
But there were certainly others in more remote

regions.
They lived in solitude, sometimes in reverenced mountain shrines

that were built for them, or in tufaceous subterranean caverns near the groan

of the ocean, as did the great Cumaean Sibyl.
Virgil had probably

personally visited the latter around 40 B.C., when he described her frenzied

laboring with a possessing Apollo in Book VI of the Aeneid.
Like oracles, the Sibyls were asked to make decisions on matters high

and low up to the third century A.D.
So gristled with moral fervor were their

replies that even the early Christian Fathers and Hellenistic Jews bowed to

them as prophets on a level with those of the Old Testament.
The early

Christian Church, in particular, used their prophecies (often forged) to

buttress its own divine authenticity.
Even a thousand years later, at the

Vatican, four of the Sibyls were painted into prominent niches on the ceiling

of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.
And even centuries later, copies of

these muscular ladies with their oracular books open used to look down on

the wondering present writer in a Unitarian Sunday school in New England.
Such is the thirst of our institutions after authorization.
And when they too had ceased, when the gods no longer would inhabit

living human forms in prophecy and oracle, mankind searches for other

ways of taking up the slack, as it were, between heaven and earth.
There are

new religions, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Neo-Platonism.
There are new

orders of conduct to relate god-shorn men to the enormous conscious

landscape of a now spatialized time, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism.
There is an institutionalization and elaboration of divination beyond

anything in Assyria, divination built into the political state officially to

generate decisions on important matters.
As the Greek civilizations had

been anchored into the divine by oracles, so the Roman now is by auspices

and augurers.
A Revival of Idols

But even these cannot fill the need of the common man for

transcendence.
Following the failure of oracles and prophets as if to replace

them is an attempted revival of idols similar to those of bicameral times.
The great bicameral civilizations had, as we have seen, used a wide

variety of effigies to help hallucinate bicameral voices.
But when those

voices ceased in the adjustment to subjective consciousness, all this was

darkened.
Most idols were destroyed.
Late bicameral kingdoms at the

behest of their jealous gods had always smashed and burned the idols of

opposing gods or kings.
And the practice accelerated when the idols were

no longer heard and worshiped.
King Josiah, in the seventh century B.C.,

ordered all idols in his domain destroyed.
The Old Testament is full of the

destruction of idols, as well as imprecations on the heads of those who

make new ones.
By the middle of the first millennium B.C., idolatry is only

here and there, fitful and unimportant.
Curiously, there is at this time a very minor cult of hallucinating from

severed heads.
Herodotus (4:26) speaks of the practice in the obscure

Issedones of gilding a head and sacrificing to it.
Cleomenes of Sparta is said

to have preserved the head of Archonides in honey and consulted it before

undertaking any important task.
Several vases of the fourth century B.C.
in

Etruria depict scenes of persons interrogating oracular heads.18 And the severed head of the rustic Carians which continues to ‘speak’ is mentioned

derisively by Aristotle.
19 And this is about all.
Thus, after subjective

consciousness is firmly established, the practice of hallucinating from idols

is only sporadically present.
But as we approach the beginning of the Christian era, with the oracles

mocked into silence, we have a very true revival of idolatry.
The temples

that whitened the hills and cities of decadent Greece and ascendant Rome

were now crammed with more and more statues of gods.
By the first

century A.D., the Apostle Paul despairingly found Athens full of idols (Acts

17), and Pausanias, whom we met a few pages ago at Lebadea, described

them as being simply everywhere on his travels and of every conceivable

sort: marble and ivory, gilded and painted, life-sized and some two or three stories high.
Did such idols ‘speak’ to their worshipers?
There is no doubt that this

sometimes occurred, just as in bicameral times.
But in general in the

subjective era, it seems very doubtful that this happened spontaneously very

often.
For otherwise there would not have been the rising attention to

artificial means, magical and chemical, for obtaining hallucinated messages

from stone and ivory gods.
And here again we see the entrance into history

of the general bicameral paradigm: collective cognitive imperative,

induction, trance, and archaic authorization.
In Egypt, where the breaking point between bicamerality and subjectivity

is far less sharp than in more volatile nations, there was the development of

the so-called Hermetic literature.
This is a series of papyri describing

various induction procedures that came into being at the edge of bicameral

certainty and spread over the conscious world.
In one of them, there is a

dialogue called the Asclepius (after the Greek god of healing) that describes

the art of imprisoning the souls of demons or of angels in statues with the

help of herbs, gems, and odors, such that the statue could speak and

prophesy.
20 In other papyri, there are still other recipes for constructing such images and animating them, such as when images are to be hollow so

as to enclose a magic name inscribed on gold leaf.
By the first century A.D., this practice had spread over most of the

civilized world.
In Greece, rumors broke into legends over the miraculous

behavior of public cult statues.
In Rome, Nero prized a statue which warned

him of conspiracies.21 Apuleius was accused of possessing one.
22 So common were hallucinogenic idols by the second century A.D.
that Lucian in

his Philopseudes satirized the belief in them.
And Iamblichus, the Neo-

Platonist apostle of theurgy, as it was called in his Peri agalmaton, tried to prove “that idols are divine and filled with the divine presence,”

establishing a vogue for such idols against the fuming execration of

Christian critics.
His disciples obtained omens of every sort and distinction

from idols.
One hallucinator boasted he could make a statue of Hecate

laugh and cause the torches in her hand to light up.
And another feels he

can tell whether a statue is animate or inanimate by the sensation it gives

him.
Even Cyprian, the good gray Bishop of Carthage, complained in the

third century of the “spirits that lurk under statues and consecrated

images.
23 The whole civilized world, in this effort to recall the bicameral

mind after the failure of oracles and prophecy, was filled with epiphanies of statues of every sort and description in this remarkable revival of idolatry.
How was all this believable?
Since this is well into the subjective era,

when men prided themselves on reason and common sense, and at last

knew there were such experiences as false hallucinations, how was it

possible that they could actually believe that statues embodied real gods?
And really spoke?
Let us recall the almost universal belief of these centuries in an absolute

dualism of mind and matter.
Mind or soul or spirit or consciousness (all

these were confused together) was a thing imposed from heaven on the

bodily matter to give it life.
All the newer religions of this era were allied

about this point.
And if a soul can be imposed on so fragile a thing as flesh

to make it live, on a hurtable carcass that has to have vegetable and animal

matter stuffed in one end and stenchfully excreted at another, a sense-

pocked sinful vessel that the years wrinkle and the winds chafe and diseases

cruelly hound, and that can be sliced off in a trice from the soul it holds by

the same act that stabs an onion, how much more possible for life, divine

life, to be imposed by heaven upon a statue of unbleeding beauty with a

faultless and immaculate body of unwrinkling marble or diseaseless gold!
Here is Callistratus, for example, in the fourth century A.D., writing about an

ivory and gold statue of the god Asclepius:



Shall we admit that the divine spirit descends into human bodies,

there to be even defiled by passions, and nevertheless not believe it in

a case where there is no attendant engendering of evil?...
for see how

an image, after Art has portrayed in it a god, even passes over into the

god himself!
Matter though it is, it gives forth divine intelligence.24



And he and most of the world believed it.
The evidence for all this would be much more obvious today, had not

Constantine in the fourth century, even like King Josiah in Israel one

millennium earlier, sent his armies of Christian converts out with sledge

hammers through the once bicameral world to smash all its physical

vestiges in sight.
Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
But even this destruction could not abolish idolatrous practice, so vital is it to have some kind of authorization for our behavior.
Medieval Italy and

Byzantium believed in enchanted idols who had power to avert disaster.
The notorious Knights Templars were at least accused of taking orders from

a gold head called Baphomet.
So common had hallucinogenic idols become

in the late Middle Ages that a bull of Pope John XXII in 1326 denounced

those who by magic imprison demons in images or other objects,

interrogate them, and obtain answers.
Even up to the Reformation,

monasteries and churches vied with each other to attract pilgrims (and their

offerings) by miracle-producing statuary.
In some epochs, perhaps when the cognitive imperatives for such neo-

bicameral experiences began to wither under the sunlight of rationalism, the

belief in statue animation was occasionally sustained by the use of

fraudulent contrivances.
25 In one instance of many, a life-sized medieval rood of the crucified Jesus at Boxley, which rolled its eyes at penitents, shed

tears, and foamed at the mouth, was found in the sixteenth century to have

“certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back of the

same.” 26 But we shouldn’t cynicize too deeply here.
While such artificial animation often functioned as chicanery to fool the miracle-hungry pilgrim,

it may also have been meant as an enticement to the god to body itself in a

more lifelike statue.
As a fourteenth-century tract on the matter explained,

“God’s power in working of his miracles loweth down in one image more

than in another.”27 Animated idols in some contemporary tribes are

explained by their worshipers in the same way.
Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force—its original function.
Our parks

and public gardens are still the beflowered homes of heroic effigies of past

leaders.
While few of us can hallucinate their speech, we still on

appropriate occasions might give them gifts of wreaths, even as greater gifts

were given in the gigunus of Ur.
In churches, temples, and shrines the world

over, religious statues are still being carved, painted, and prayed to.
Figurines of a Queen of Heaven dangle protectively from the mirrors of

American windshields.
Teen-age girls I have interviewed, living in deeply

religious convents, often sneak down to the chapel in the dead of night and

have mentioned to me their excitement at being able to ‘hear’ the statue of

the Virgin Mary speak, and ‘see’ her lips move or her head bow or—

sometimes—her eyes weep.
Gentle idols of Jesus, Mary, and the saints

throughout much of the Catholic world are still being bathed, dressed,

incensed, flowered, jeweled, and launched shoulder-high and glorious out

of bell-bellowing churches on outings through towns and countrysides on

feast days.
Placing special foods in front of them or dancing and bowing

before them still generates its numinous excitement.
28 Such devotions differ from similar divine outings in bicameral Mesopotamia 4000 years ago

mostly in the idol’s relative silence.
Chapter 2



Of Prophets and Possession

IN THE FOREGOING theory of oracles, I am sure that the reader has seen the

profound gap that I have jumped over in my argument.
I have called the

general bicameral paradigm a vestige of the bicameral mind.
And yet the

trance state of narrowed or absent consciousness is not, at least from the

fourth oracular term and thereafter, a duplicate of the bicameral mind.
Instead we have for the rest of the oracle’s existence a complete domination

of the person and his speech by the god-side, a domination which speaks

through the person but does not allow him to remember what has happened

afterwards.
This phenomenon is known as possession.
The problem it presents is not confined to far-off ancient oracles.
It

occurs today.
It has occurred through history.
It has a negatory form that

seems to have been one of the most common maladies in the Galilee of the

New Testament.
And a good case could be made that at least some of the

wandering prophets of Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, and elsewhere did not

simply relay to listeners something they were hearing in hallucination;

rather that the divine message was coming directly from the prophet’s vocal

apparatus without any cognition on ‘his’ part during the speech or memory

of it after.
And if we call this a loss of consciousness, and I shall, such a

statement is quite problematic.
Is it not also possible to say that it is not the

loss of consciousness so much as its replacement by a new and different

conscious ness?
But what can that mean?
Or is that linguistic organization

which speaks from the supposed possessed person not conscious at all in

the sense of narratizing in a mind-space as described in I.2 ?
These questions are not solved by simple answers.
The fact that we may

regard possession by metaphysical essences as ontological nonsense should

not blind us from the psychological and historical insights that examination

of such idiosyncrasies of history and belief can give us.
Indeed, any theory

of consciousness and its origin in time must face such obscurities.
And I do

suggest that the theory in this book is a better torch for such dark corners of

time and mind than any alternative theory.
For if we still hold to a purely

biological evolution of consciousness back somewhere among the lower

vertebrates, how can we approach such phenomena or begin to understand

their historically and culturally segregated nature?
It is only if

consciousness is learned at the mercy of a collective cognitive imperative that we can take hold of these questions in any way.
Our first step in understanding any mental phenomenon must be to

delimit its existence in historical time.
When did it first occur?
The answer in Greece, at least, is very clear.
There is no such thing as

possession or any hint of anything similar throughout the Iliad or Odyssey

or other early poetry.
No ‘god’ speaks through human lips in the truly

bicameral age.
Yet by 400 B.C., it is apparently as common as churches are

with us, both in the many oracles scattered about Greece as well as in

private individuals.
The bicameral mind has vanished and possession is its

trace.
Plato, in the fourth century B.C., has Socrates casually say in the midst of

a political discussion that “God-possessed men speak much truth, but know

nothing of what they say,”1 as if such prophets could be heard every day around the streets of Athens.
And he was very clear about the loss of

consciousness in the oracles of his time:


...
for prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the

priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great

benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their

senses few or none.2



And so in the centuries that follow, supposed possession is the

obliteration of ordinary consciousness.
Four hundred years after Plato, in

the first century A.D., Philo Judaeus categorically states,



When he (a prophet) is inspired he becomes unconscious; thought

vanishes away and leaves the fortress of the soul; but the divine spirit

has entered there and taken up its abode; and this later makes all the

organs resound so that the man gives clear expression to what the spirit

gives him to say.3



And so also in the century after that, as in Aristides’ saying that the

priestesses at the oracle of Dodona


...
do not know, before being seized by the spirits, what they are

going to say, any more than after having recovered their natural senses

they remember what they have said, so that everyone knows what they

say except themselves.4



And Iamblichus, the leading Neo-Platonist at the beginning of the third

century, insisted that divine possession “participated” in divinity, had a

“common energy” with a god, and “comprehends indeed everything in us

but exterminates our own proper consciousness and motion.”5 Such

possession, then, is not a return to the bicameral mind properly speaking.
For when Achilles heard Athene a millennium earlier, he certainly did know

what was said to him; that was the function of the bicameral mind.
This then is the very core of the problem.
The speech of possessed

prophets is not an hallucination proper, not something heard by a conscious,

semi-conscious, or even nonconscious man as in the bicameral mind proper.
It is articulated externally and heard by others.
It occurs only in normally

conscious men and is coincident with a loss of that consciousness.
What

justification then do we have for saying that the two phenomena, the

hallucinations of the bicameral mind and the speech of the possessed, are

related?
I do not have a truly robust answer.
I can only meekly maintain that they

are related (1) because they are serving the same social function, (2)

because they yield similar communications of authorization, and (3)

because the little evidence we have on the early history of oracles indicates

that possession in a few institutionalized persons at certain locations is a

gradual outgrowth from the hallucinations of gods by anyone at those

locations.
We can therefore at least suggest that possession is a

transformation of a particular sort, a derivative of bicamerality in which the

rituals of induction and the different collective cognitive imperatives and

trained expectancies result in the ostensive possession of the particular

person by the god-side of the bicameral mind.
Perhaps we could say that, to

retrieve the older mentality, developing consciousness more and more had

to be obliterated, inhibiting the man-side with it, leaving the god-side in

control of speech itself.
And what of the neurology of such a mentality?
From the model I have

presented in I.5 , we must naturally hypothesize that in possession there is

some kind of disturbance of normal hemispheric dominance relations, in

which the right hemisphere is somewhat more active than in the normal

state.
In other words, if we could have placed electrodes on the scalp of a

Delphic oracle in her frenzy, would we have found a relatively faster EEG

(and therefore greater activity) over her right hemisphere, correlating with

her possession?
And particularly over her right temporal lobe?
I suggest that we would.
There is at least a possibility that the dominance

relations of the two hemispheres would be changed, and that the early

training of the oracle was indeed that of engaging a higher ratio of right

hemisphere activity in relation to the left as a response to the complex

stimulus of the induction procedures.
Such a hypothesis might also explain

the contorted features, the appearance of frenzy and the nystagmic eyes, as

an abnormal right hemisphere interference or release from inhibition by the

left hemisphere.6

And a comment can be added here about sexual differences.
It is now

well known that women are biologically somewhat less lateralized in brain

function than men.
This means simply that psychological functions in

women are not localized into one or the other hemisphere of the brain to the

same degree as in men.
Mental abilities in women are more spread over

both hemispheres.
Even by age six, for example, a boy can recognize

objects in his left hand by feel alone better than in his right hand.
In girls

both hands are equal.
This shows that haptic recognition (as it is called) has

already been primarily localized in the right hemisphere in boys but not in

girls.7 And it is common knowledge that elderly men with a stroke or

hemorrhage in the left hemisphere are more speechless than elderly women

with a similar diagnosis.
Accordingly we might expect more residual

language function in the right hemisphere of women, making it easier for

women to learn to be oracles.
And indeed the majority of oracles and

Sibyls, at least in European cultures, were women.
Induced Possession

Institutionalized unconscious speaking in the prophets of oracles as if by

a god becomes, as we have seen in III.I , erratic and silent toward the first

centuries of the Christian era.
It falls to a siege of rationalism, to volleys of

criticism and ramming irreverence in comic drama and literature.
Such

public (indeed urban) suppression of a general cultural characteristic often

results in pushing it into private practice, into abstruse sects and esoteric

cults where its cognitive imperative is protected from such criticism.
And

so with induced possession.
With the oracles mocked into silence, such the

quest for authorization that there is a widespread attempt in private groups

to bring back the gods and have them speak through almost anyone.
The second century A.D.
saw a growing number of such cults.
Their

seances were sometimes in official shrines, but increasingly more often in

private circles.
Usually one person called a pelestike or operator tried to

incarnate the god temporarily in another called a katochos, or more

specially a docheus, or what in contemporary lore is called a medium.
8 It was soon found that if the phenomenon was to work, the katochos should

come from a simple unsophisticated background, something that runs

through all the literature on possession.
Iamblichus in the early third

century, the real apostle of all this, states that the most suitable mediums are

“young and simple persons.” And so, we remember, were the uneducated

country girls chosen to train as priestesses for the oracle at Delphi.
Other

writings mention adolescents such as the boy Aedesius, who “had only to

put on the garland and look at the sun, when he immediately produces

reliable oracles in the best inspirational style.” Presumptively, this was due

to careful training.
That such induced bicameral possession has to be

learned is known from the training of oracles as well as a comment of

Pythagoras of Rhodes in the third century, that the gods come at first

reluctantly, then more easily when they have formed the habit of entering

the same person.
What was learned, I suggest, was a state approaching the bicameral mind

as a response to the induction.
This is important.
We do not ordinarily think

of learning a new unconscious mentality, perhaps a whole new relationship between our cerebral hemispheres, as we think of learning to ride a bicycle.
Since this is the learning of a now difficult neurological state, so different

from ordinary life, it is not surprising that the cues of the induction had to

be wildly distinctive and have an extreme difference from ordinary life.
And they certainly were different: anything odd, anything strange:

bathing in smoke or sacred water, dressing in enchanted chitons with

magical girdles, wearing weird garlands or mysterious symbols, standing in

a charmed magic circle as medieval magicians did, or upon charakteres as

Faust did to hallucinate Mephistopheles, or smearing the eyes with

strychnine to procure visions as was done in Egypt, or washing in brimstone

(sulphur) and seawater, a very old method which began in Greece, as

Porphyry said in the second century A.D., to prepare the anima spiritalis for

the reception of a higher being.
All these of course did nothing except as

they were believed to do something—just as we in this latter age have no

‘free will’ unless we believe we have.
And what was done, this ‘reception of the god’, was not psychologically

different from the other forms of possession we have examined.
Consciousness as well as normal reactivity in the katochos was usually in

complete suspension so that it was necessary to have others look after him.
And in such a deep trance, the ‘god’ would supposedly reveal past or future,

or answer questions and make decisions, as in the older Greek oracles.
How was it to be explained when these gods were incorrect?
Well, evil

spirits might have been invoked instead of true gods, or other intrusive

spirits might have occupied the medium.
Iamblichus himself claims to have

unmasked in his medium an alleged Apollo who was only the ghost of a

gladiator.
Such excuses reverberate throughout the subsequent decadent

literature of spiritualism.
And when the séance did not seem to be working, the operator as well

often went through an induction of purifying rites that put him into a

hallucinatory state, such that he might ‘see’ more clearly or ‘hear’ from the

unconscious medium something that perhaps the medium did not even say.
This kind of doubling-up is similar to the prophetes’ relationship to their

oracles, and explains various reported levitations, elongations, or dilations

of the medium’s body.9



By the end of the third century, Christianity had suddenly flooded the

pagan world with its own claims to authorization and began to dissolve into

itself many of the then existing pagan practices.
The idea of possession was

one of those.
But it was absorbed in a transcendental way.
At almost the

same time that Iamblichus was teaching the induction of gods into statues,

or young illiterate katochoi to “participate” in divinity and have “a common

energy” with a god, Athanasius, the competitive Bishop of Alexandria,

began claiming the same thing for the illiterate Jesus.
The Christian

Messiah had heretofore been regarded as like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps,

half human, half divine, reflecting his supposed parentage.
But Athanasius

persuaded Constantine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity

thereafter, that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the Bicameral Word made Flesh.
I think we can say then that the growing

church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated the subjective

phenomenon of possession into an objective theological dogma.
It did so to

assert an even greater claim to an absolute authorization.
For Athanasian

Christians the actual gods had indeed returned to earth and would return

again.
Curiously, neither the oracle at Delphi nor the Sibyls were doubted as

contacting a heavenly reality by this expanding Christian Church.
But such

pagan séances as induced divine possession in simple boys seemed

theologically rowdy, the mischief of devils and shady spirits.
And so as the

church arches up into political authority over the Middle Ages, voluntary

induced possession disappears at least from public notice.
It goes even

further underground into witchcraft and assorted necromancies, emerging

into notice only from time to time.
Its contemporary practice I shall come to in a moment.
But first we

should examine a cultural side effect of induced possession, a disturbing

phenomenon I shall call



Negatory Possession

There is another side to this vigorously strange vestige of the bicameral

mind.
And it is different from other topics in this chapter.
For it is not a

response to a ritual induction for the purpose of retrieving the bicameral

mind.
It is an illness in response to stress.
In effect, emotional stress takes

the place of the induction in the general bicameral paradigm just as in

antiquity.
And when it does, the authorization is of a different kind.
The difference presents a fascinating problem.
In the New Testament,

where we first hear of such spontaneous possession, it is called in Greek

daemonizomai, or demonization.
10 And from that time to the present,

instances of the phenomenon most often have that negatory quality

connoted by the term.
The why of the negatory quality is at present unclear.
In an earlier chapter (II.4 ) I have tried to suggest the origin of ‘evil’ in the

volitional emptiness of the silent bicameral voices.
And that this took place

in Mesopotamia and particularly in Babylon, to which the Jews were exiled

in the sixth century B.C., might account for the prevalence of this quality in

the world of Jesus at the start of this syndrome.
But whatever the reasons, they must in the individual be similar to the

reasons behind the predominantly negatory quality of schizophrenic

hallucinations.
And indeed the relationship of this type of possession to

schizophrenia seems obvious.
Like schizophrenia, negatory possession usually begins with some kind

of an hallucination.
11 It is often a castigating ‘voice’ of a ‘demon’ or other being which is ‘heard’ after a considerable stressful period.
But then, unlike

schizophrenia, probably because of the strong collective cognitive

imperative of a particular group or religion, the voice develops into a

secondary system of personality, the subject then losing control and

periodically entering into trance states in which consciousness is lost, and

the ‘demon’ side of the personality takes over.
Always the patients are uneducated, usually illiterate, and all believe

heartily in spirits or demons or similar beings and live in a society which

does.
The attacks usually last from several minutes to an hour or two, the

patient being relatively normal between attacks and recalling little of them.
Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct.
In all the cases I have studied, it is

rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons.
The stricken

individual does not run off and behave like a demon; he just talks like one.
Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-ings as in

induced possession.
The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries,

groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods

of the period.
Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person

seems the opposite of his or her usual self.
‘He’ may name himself a god,

demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often ‘the fox’), may

demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if

these are withheld.
‘He’ commonly describes his natural self in the third

person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his

prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets.12 And ‘he’ often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as

Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet.
As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others,

and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with

observers, such as a promise that ‘he’ will leave the patient if such and such

is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the ‘demon’ as the

sometimes similar covenants of Yahweh in the Old Testament.
Somehow

related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for

spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from

New Testament days to the present.
It is simply by the command of an

authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the

name of a more powerful god.
The exorcist can be said to fit into the

authorization element of the general bicameral paradigm, replacing the

‘demon.’ The cognitive imperatives of the belief system that determined the

form of the illness in the first place determine the form of its cure.
The phenomenon does not depend on age, but sex differences, depending

on the historical epoch, are pronounced, demonstrating its cultural

expectancy basis.
Of those possessed by ‘demons’ whom Jesus or his

disciples cured in the New Testament, the overwhelming majority were

men.
In the Middle Ages and thereafter, however, the overwhelming

majority were women.
Also evidence for its basis in a collective cognitive

imperative are its occasional epidemics, as in convents of nuns during the

Middle Ages, in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, or those

reported in the nineteenth century at Savoy in the Alps.
And occasionally today.
Now, again, with any alteration of mentality as striking as this, we cannot

escape the neurological question.
What is happening?
Are the speech areas

of the right nondominant hemisphere activated in spontaneous possession,

as I have suggested they were in the induced possession of the oracles?
And

are the contorted features due to the intrusion of right hemisphere control?
The fact that the majority of instances (as well as most oracles and Sibyls)

were women, and that women are (presently in our culture) less lateralized

than men is somewhat suggestive.
At least some instances of possession begin with contortions on the left

side of the body, which may indicate this is true.
Here is one case reported

at the beginning of this century.
The patient was a forty-seven-year-old

uneducated Japanese woman who would become possessed by what she

called the fox, six or seven times a day, always with the same laterality

phenomena.
As it was then observed by her physicians:



At first there appeared slight twitchings of the mouth and arm on the

left side.
As these became stronger she violently struck with her fist

her left side which was already swollen and red with similar blows,

and said to me: “Ah, sir, here he is stirring again in my breast.” Then a

strange and incisive voice issued from her mouth: “Yes, it is true, I am

there.
Did you think, stupid goose, that you could stop me?”

Thereupon the woman addressed herself to us: “Oh dear, gentlemen,

forgive me, I cannot help it!”

Continuing to strike her breast and contract the left side of her face
...
the woman threatened him, adjured him to be quiet, but after a

short time he interrupted her and it was he alone who thought and

spoke.
The woman was now passive like an automaton, obviously no

longer understanding what was said to her.
It was the fox which

answered maliciously instead.
At the end of ten minutes the fox spoke

in a more confused manner, the woman gradually came to herself and

assumed back her normal state.
She remembered the first part of the fit

and begged us with tears to forgive her for the outrageous conduct of

the fox.
13



But this is one case.
I have not found any other patient in which such

distinct laterality phenomena were in evidence.
In puzzling about the neurology of negatory possession, it can be helpful,

I think, to consider the contemporary illness known as Gilles de la

Tourette’s Syndrome, 14 or, occasionally, “foul-mouth disease.” This bizarre group of symptoms usually begins in childhood at age five or sometimes

earlier, with perhaps merely a repeated facial twitch or bad word out of

context.
This then develops into an uncontrollable emission of ripe

obscenities, grunts, barks, or profanities in the middle of otherwise normal

conversation, as well as various facial tics, sticking out the tongue, etc.
These often continue through adult life, much to the distress of the patient.
Such persons often end up refusing to leave their homes because of their

horror and embarrassment at their own intermittent uncontrollable vulgarity.
In one case I knew of recently, the man invented a cover of having severe

bladder problems requiring him to urinate often.
Actually, every time he

dashed to the Men’s Room while at a restaurant or to the bathroom in a

house, it was the welling up of profanity that he went to relieve himself of

by shouting it at toilet walls.15 To be profane myself, the linguistic feeling within him may not have been unlike the prophet Jeremiah’s fire shut up in

his bones (see 11:6), although the semantic product was somewhat (but not

altogether) different.
What is of interest here is that Tourette’s Syndrome so clearly resembles

the initial phase of stress-produced possession as to force upon us the

suspicion that they share a common physiological mechanism.
And this

may indeed be incomplete hemispheric dominance, in which the speech

areas of the right hemisphere (perhaps stimulated by impulses from the

basal ganglia) are periodically breaking through into language under

conditions which would have produced an hallucination in bicameral man.
Accordingly it is not surprising that almost all sufferers from Tourette’s

Syndrome have abnormal brain wave patterns, some central nervous system

damage, and are usually left-handed (in the majority of left-handed persons

there is mixed dominance), and that the symptoms begin around the age of

five when the neurological development of hemispheric dominance in

regard to language is being completed.
Now all of this says something important but unsettling about our

nervous systems.
For while I believe the neurological model in I.5 to be in

the right direction, we are getting further and further away from it.
It is very

improbable that modern spirit possession is everywhere engaging right

hemisphere speech centers for the articulated speech itself.
Such an

hypothesis is contrary to so many clinical facts as to rule it out except in

highly unusual cases.
A more likely possibility, perhaps, is that the neurological difference

between the bicameral mind and modern possession states is that in the

former, hallucinations were indeed organized and heard from the right

hemisphere; while in possession, the articulated speech is our normal left

hemisphere speech but controlled or under the guidance of the right

hemisphere.
In other words, what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on the

right hemisphere is using Broca’s area on the left hemisphere, the result

being the trance state and its depersonalization.
Such cross control could be

the neurological substrate of the loss of normal consciousness.
Possession in the Modern World

I wish now to turn to induced possession in our own times to demonstrate

with some conclusiveness that it is a learned phenomenon.
The best

example I have found is the Umbanda religion, the largest by far of the

Afro-Brazilian religions practiced today by over half the population of

Brazil.
It is believed in as a source of decision by persons of all ethnic

backgrounds and is certainly the most extensive occurrence of induced

possession since the third century.
Let us look in on a typical giro or “turn around,” as an Umbanda session

is so aptly called.
16 It may be taking place at the present time in a room

above a store or in an abandoned garage.
Perhaps a dozen or fewer

mediums (70 percent are women), all dressed ceremoniously in white, come

out from a tiring room in front of a white-draped altar crammed with

flowers, candles, and statues and pictures of Christian saints, an audience of

a hundred or so being beyond a railing on the other side of the room.
The

drummers beat and the audience sings, as the mediums begin to sway or

dance.
This swaying and dancing is always in a counterclockwise motion,

that is, beginning with motor impulses from the right hemisphere.
There

follows a Christian type of service.
Then drums are once more pounded

furiously, everyone sings, and the mediums begin to call their spirits; some

spin to the left like whirling dervishes, again exciting their right

hemispheres.
There is the explicit metaphor here of the medium as a cavalo

or horse.
A particular spirit is supposed to lower himself into his cavalo.
As

this is happening, the head and chest of the cavalo, or medium, jerks back

and forth in opposing directions like a bronco being ridden.
The hair falls

into disarray.
Facial expressions become contorted, as in ancient examples I

have cited.
Posture changes into the likeness of any of several possessing

spirits.
The possession accomplished, the ‘spirits’ may dance for a few

minutes, may greet each other in the possessed state, may perform other

actions suitable to the type of spirit, and then, when the drumming stops, go

to preassigned places, and, curiously, as they wait for members of the

audience to come forward for the consultas, they snap their fingers

impatiently as their hands rest beside their bodies, palms outward.
In the

consultas the possessed medium may be asked for, and may give, decisions

on any illness or personal problem, on getting or keeping a job, on financial

business practices, family quarrels, love affairs, or even, among students,

advice about scholastic grades.
Now the evidence that possession is a learned mentality is very clear in

these Brazilian cults.
In a bairro playground, one may occasionally see

children in their play imitating the distinctive back-and-forth jerking of the

head and chest that is used for inducing and terminating spirit possession.
If

a child wishes to become a medium, he is encouraged to do so and given

special training, just as were the young country girls who became the

oracles at Delphi and elsewhere.
Indeed, some of the many Umbanda

centers (there are 4000 in Sao Paulo alone) hold regular training sessions,

where the procedures include various ways of making the novice dizzy in

order to teach him or her the trance state, as well as techniques similar to

those used in hypnosis.
And in the trance state, the novice is taught how

each of several possible spirits behaves.
This fact of a differentiation of

possessing spirits is important, and I wish to comment further on it and its

function in culture.
The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty

psychological space.
That is, they should not be considered as isolated

phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter around doing nothing

but leaning on their own antique merits.
Instead, they always live at the

very heart of a culture or subculture, moving out and filling up the

unspoken and the unrationalized.
They become indeed the irrational and

unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture.
And the

culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the

metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of excerption

and the constraints on narratization and conciliation.
Such vestiges of the bicameral mind as we are here considering are no

exception.
A possession religion such as the Umbanda functions as a

powerful psychological support to the heterogeneous masses of its poor and

uneducated and needy.
It is pervaded with a feeling of caridade, or charity,

which consoles and binds together this motley of political impotents, whose

urbanization and ethnic diversity has stranded them without roots.
And look

at the pattern of particular neurological organizations that emerge as

possessing divinities.
They remind us of the presenting personal gods of

Sumer and Babylon, interceders with those above them.
Each medium on

any particular night may be possessed by an individual spirit from any of

four main groups.
They are, in order of frequency:



the caboclos, spirits of Brazilian-Indian warriors, who advise in

situations requiring quick and decisive action, such as obtaining or

maintaining a job;

the pretos velhos, spirits of old Afro-Brazilian slaves, adept at

handling long drawn-out personal problems;

the crianças, spirits of dead children, whose mediums make playful

suggestions;

the exus (demons) or, if female, fombagiras (turning pigeons),

spirits of wicked foreigners, whose mediums make vulgar and

aggressive suggestions.
Each of these four main types of possessor spirits represents a different

ethnic group corresponding to the ethnic hybridism of the worshipers:

Indian, African, Brazilian (the crianfas are “like us”), and European,

respectively.
Each represents a different familial relationship to the

petitioner: father, grandfather, sibling, and stranger respectively.
And each

represents a different area of decision: quick decisions for choices of action,

comforting advice on personal problems, playful suggestions, and decisions

in matters of aggression respectively.
Even as the Greek gods were

originally distinguished as areas of decision, so the spirits of the Umbanda.
And the whole is like a network or metaphor matrix of four-way inner-

related distinctiveness that binds the individuals together and holds them in

a culture.
And all this, I suggest, is a vestige of the bicameral mind, as we go

through these millennia of adjusting to a new mentality.
True possession, as described by Plato and others, has always been held

to go on without consciousness, thus differentiating it from acting.
But the

training of the persons of oracles must have admitted of degrees and stages

toward such a state.
In the Brazilian possession religions, apparently, this is

exactly what happens.
The young novice may begin by acting out

possession in play, then proceed with his training until eventually he can

separate what a spirit would say from what he himself would normally talk

about.
Then there occurs a stage of passing back and forth between

consciousness and unconsciousness.
And then with full possession, perhaps the connecting up of Wernicke’s area on the right hemisphere with Broca’s

on the left, the much-desired state of unconsciousness, with no

remembrance of what happens.
This, however, is true of only some

mediums.
And in any pseudobicameral practice as extensive as this, it is to

be expected that there will be many different qualities and degrees of acting

and trance even within the same individual.
Glossolalia

A final phenomenon that is weakly similar to induced possession is

glossolalia, or what the apostle Paul called “speaking in tongues.” It

consists of fluent speech in what sounds like a strange language which the

speaker himself does not understand and usually does not remember saying.
It seems to have begun with the early Christian Church17 in the asserted

descent of the ghost of God into the assembled apostles.
This event was

regarded as the birthday of the Christian Church and is commemorated in

the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter.
18 Acts 2 describes

what is probably its first instance in history as a great rushing wind roaring

with cloven tongues of fire, in which all the apostles begin to speak as if

drunk in languages they had never learned.
This alteration of mentality happening to the likes of the apostles became

its own authorization.
The practice spread.
Soon early Christians were

doing it everywhere.
Paul even put it on a level with prophecy (I

Corinthians 14:27, 29).
From time to time in the centuries since Paul,

glossolalia as a search for authorization after the breakdown of the

bicameral mind has had its periods of fashion.
Its recent practice, not just by the sects that are theologically extremely

conservative, but also by members of mainline Protestant churches, has

pushed it into some scientific scrutiny with some interesting results.
Glossolalia first happens always in groups and always in the context of

religious services.
I am stressing the group factor, since I think this

strengthening of the collective cognitive imperative is necessary for a

particularly deep type of trance.
Often there will be what corresponds to an

induction, particularly hymn singing of a rousing sort, followed by the

exhortations of a charismatic leader: “If you feel your language change,

don’t resist it, let it happen.” 19

The worshiper, through repeated attendance at such meetings, watching

others in glossolalia, first learns to enter into a deep-trance state of

diminished or absent consciousness in which he is not responsive to

exteroceptive stimuli.
The trance in this case is almost an autonomic one:

shakes, shivers, sweat, twitches, and tears.
Then he or she may somehow

learn to “let it happen.” And it does, loud and clear, each phrase ending in a groan: aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria!20 The rhythm pounds, the way

epic dactyls probably did to the hearers of the aoidoi.
And this quality of

regular alternation of accented and unaccented syllables, so similar to that

of the Homeric epics, as well as the rising and then downward intonation at

the end of each phrase, does not—and this is astonishing—does not vary

with the native language of the speaker.
If the subject is English,

Portuguese, Spanish, Indonesian, African, or Mayan, or wherever he is, the

pattern of glossolalia is the same.21

After the glossolalia, the subject opens his eyes and slowly returns from

these unconscious heights to dusty reality, remembering little of what

happened.
But he is told.
He has been possessed by the Holy Spirit.
He has

been chosen by God as his puppet.
His problems are stopped in hope and

his sorrows torn with joy.
It is the ultimate in authorization since the Holy

Spirit is one with the highest source of all being.
God has chosen to enter

the lowly subject and has articulated his speech with the subject’s own

tongue.
The individual has become a god—briefly.
The cruel daylight of it all is less inspiring.
While the phenomenon is not

simply gibberish, nor can the average person duplicate the fluency and

structure of what is spoken, it has no semantic meaning whatever.
Tapes of

glossolalia played before others in the same religious group are given

utterly inconsistent interpretations.
22 That the metered vocalizations are

similar across the cultures and language of the speakers, probably indicates

that rhythmical discharges from subcortical structures are coming into play,

released by the trance state of lesser cortical control.23

The ability does not last.
It attenuates.
The more it is practiced, the more

it becomes conscious, which destroys the trance.
An essential ingredient of

the phenomenon, at least in more educated groups where the cognitive

imperative would be weaker, is the presence of a charismatic leader who

first teaches the phenomenon.
And if tongue speaking is to be continued at

all, and the resulting euphoria makes it a devoutly wished state of mind, the

relationship with the authoritative leader must be continued.
It is really this

ability to abandon the conscious direction of one’s speech controls in the

presence of an authority figure regarded as benevolent that is the essential

thing.
As we might expect, glossolalists by the Thematic Apperception Test

reveal themselves as more submissive, suggestible, and dependent in the

presence of authority figures than those who cannot exhibit the

phenomenon.24

It is, then, this pattern of essential ingredients, the strong cognitive

imperative of religious belief in a cohesive group, the induction procedures

of prayer and ritual, the narrowing of consciousness into a trance state, and

the archaic authorization in the divine spirit and in the charismatic leader,

which denotes this phenomenon as another instance of the general

bicameral paradigm and therefore a vestige of the bicameral mind.
Aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos



My comparison of the sound of speaking in tongues with the sound of the

Greek epics to their hearers (the second line above is the first line of the

Iliad) is not just an ornature of my style.
It is a very deliberate comparison.
And one that I intend now as a lead-in to the next chapter.
For we should

not leave our inquiry into these cultural antiques without at least noting the

oddity, the difference, the true profundity, and—ultimately—the question of

and for poetry.
Chapter 3



Of Poetry and Music

WHY HAS so much of the textual material we have used as evidence in

earlier chapters been poetry?
And why, particularly in times of stress, have

a huge proportion of the readers of this page written poems?
What unseen

light leads us to such dark practice?
And why does poetry flash with

recognitions of thoughts we did not know we had, finding its unsure way to

something in us that knows and has known all the time, something, I think,

older than the present organization of our nature?
To charter a discussion down this optional and deserted topic at this point

in what has hitherto been a fairly linear argument may seem an unwarranted

indirection.
But the chapters of Book III, in contrast to the previous two

books, are not a consecutive procession.
They are rather a selection of

divergent trajectories out of our bicameral past into present times.
And I

think it will become obvious that the earlier argument, particularly as

relating to the Greek epics, needs to be rounded out with the present

chapter.
I shall state my thesis plain.
The first poets were gods.
Poetry began with

the bicameral mind.
The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a

certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse.
This

means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry

(of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.
The evidence is, of course, only inferential.
It is that all of those

individuals who remained bicameral into the conscious age, when speaking

of or from the divine side of their minds, spoke in poetry.
The great epics of

Greece were of course heard and spoken by the aoidoi as poetry.
The

ancient writings of Mesopotamia and Egypt are darkened with our

ignorance of how such languages were pronounced; but with such

assurances in transliteration as we can muster, such writings when spoken

were also poetry.
In India, the oldest literature is the Veda, which were

dictated by gods to the rishi or prophets; these too were poetry.
Oracles

spoke poetry.
From time to time, their utterances from Delphi and

elsewhere were written down, and every one of them that survives as more

than a simple phrase is in dactylic hexameter, just as were the epics.
The

Hebrew prophets also, when relaying the hallucinated utterance of Yahweh, were often poets, though their scribes did not in every case preserve such

speech in verse.
As the bicameral mind recedes further into history, and the oracles reach

their fifth term, there are exceptions.
Poetic utterance by the oracles breaks

down here and there.
The oracle at Delphi, for example, in the first century

A.D.
evidently spoke in both verse and prose, the latter to be put into verse

by poets in the service of the temples.
1 But the very impulse to transpose

oracular prose back into dactylic hexameters is, I suggest, a part of the

nostalgia for the divine in this late period; it demonstrates again that

metered verse had been the rule previously.
Even later, some oracles still

spoke exclusively in dactylic hexameters.
Tacitus, for example, visited the

oracle of Apollo at Claros about A.D.
100 and described how the entranced

priest listened to his decision-seeking petitioners; he then


...
swallows a draught of water from a mysterious spring and—though

ignorant generally of writing and of meters—delivers his response in

set verses.
2



Poetry then was divine knowledge.
And after the breakdown of the

bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization.
Poetry

commanded where prose could only ask.
It felt good.
In the wanderings of

the Hebrews after the exodus from Egypt, it was the sacred shrine that was

carried before the multitude and followed by the people, but it was the

poetry of Moses that determined when they would start and when stop,

where they would go and where stay.
3

The association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utterance with

supernatural knowledge endures well into the later conscious period.
Among the early Arabic peoples the word for poet was sha’ir, ‘the knower’,

or a person endowed with knowledge by the spirits; his metered speech in

recitation was the mark of its divine origin.
The poet and divine seer have a

long tradition of association in the ancient world, and several Indo-

European languages have a common term for them.
Rhyme and alliteration

too were always the linguistic province of the gods and their prophets.
4 In at least some instances of spontaneous possession, the demonic utterances are

in meter.
5 Even glossolalia today, as we have seen in III.2 , wherever it is practiced, tends to fall into metrical patterns, particularly dactyls.
Poetry then was the language of gods.
Poetry and Song

All the above discussion is mere literary tradition and sounds more plea

than proof.
We should, therefore, ask if there is another way of approaching

the matter to show the relationship of poetry to the bicameral mind more

scientifically.
There is, I think, if we look at the relation of poetry to music.
First of all, early poetry was song.
The difference between song and

speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch.
In ordinary speech, we are

constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable.
But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous.
Speech reels

around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a

fifth).
Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more

extended range.
Modern poetry is a hybrid.
It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch

glissandos of speech.
But ancient poetry is much closer to song.
Accents

were not by intensity stress as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch.
6 In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a

fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale,

dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G.
Moreover,

the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their

notations

imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and

falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively.
The result was

a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave

it beautiful variety.
Now how does all this relate to the bicameral mind?
Speech, as has long

been known, is a function primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere.
But

song, as we are presently discovering, is primarily a function of the right

cerebral hemisphere.
The evidence is various but consistent:

It is common medical knowledge that many elderly patients who have

suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they

cannot speak can still sing.
The so-called Wada Test is sometimes performed in hospitals to find

out a person’s cerebral dominance.
Sodium amytal is injected into the

carotid artery on one side, putting the corresponding hemisphere under

heavy sedation but leaving the other awake and alert.
When the

injection is made on the left side so that the left hemisphere is sedated

and only the right hemisphere is active, the person is unable to speak,

but can still sing.
When the injection is on the right so that only the left

hemisphere is active, the person can speak but cannot sing.
7

Patients in whom the entire left hemisphere has been removed because

of glioma can only manage a few words, if any, postoperatively.
But at

least some can sing.
8 One such patient with only a speechless right

hemisphere to his name “was able to sing ‘America’ and ‘Home on the

Range,’ rarely missing a word and with nearly perfect enunciation.”9

Electrical stimulation on the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to

the posterior temporal lobe, particularly the anterior temporal lobe,

often produces hallucinations of singing and music.
I have already

described some of these patients in I.5.
And this in general is the area,

corresponding to Wernicke’s area on the left hemisphere, which I have

hypothesized was where the auditory hallucinations of the bicameral

mind were organized.
Singing and melody then are primarily right hemisphere activities.
And

since poetry in antiquity was sung rather than spoken, it was perhaps largely

a right hemisphere function, as the theory of the bicameral mind in I.5

would predict.
More specifically, ancient poetry involved the posterior part

of the right temporal lobe, which I have suggested was responsible for

organizing divine hallucinations, together with adjacent areas which even

today are involved in music.
For those who are still skeptical, I have devised an experiment where

they may even feel for themselves right now the truth of these matters.
First, think of two topics, anything, personal or general, on which you

would like to talk for a couple of paragraphs.
Now, imagining you are with

a friend, speak out loud on one of the topics.
Next, imagining you are with a

friend, sing out loud on the other topic.
Do each for one full minute,

demanding of yourself that you keep going.
Compare introspectively.
Why

is the second so much more difficult?
Why does the singing crumble into

clichés?
Or the melody erode into recitative?
Why does the topic desert you in midmelody?
What is the nature of your efforts to get your song back on

the topic?
Or rather—and I think this is more the feeling—to get your topic

back to the song?
The answer is that your topic is ‘in’ Wernicke’s area on your left

hemisphere, while your song is ‘in’ what corresponds to Wernicke’s area on

your right hemisphere.
Let me hasten to add that such a statement is an

approximation neurologically.
And by ‘topic’ and ‘song’ I am meaning their

neural substrates.
But such an approximation is true enough to make my

point.
It is as if volitional speech is jealous of the right hemisphere and

wants you to itself, just as your song is jealous of the left hemisphere and

wants you to leave your left hemisphere topic behind.
To accomplish the

improvised singing of a pre-decided topic feels as if we were jumping back

and forth between hemispheres.
And so in a sense ‘we’ are, deciding on the

words in the left and then trying to get back to song with them on the right

before some other words have got there first.
And usually the latter

happens, the words are not on the topic, careering off on their own, or not

consecutively coherent or not there at all, and so we stop singing.
Of course we can learn to sing our verbal thoughts to a certain extent and

musicians often do.
And women, since they are less lateralized, may find it

easier.
If you practice it as an exercise twice a day for a month or a year or a

lifetime, sincerely avoiding cliché and memorized material on the lyric side,

and mere recitative on the melody side, I expect you will be more proficient

at it.
If you are ten years old, such learning will probably be much easier

and might even make a poet out of you.
And if you should be unlucky

enough to have some left hemisphere accident at some future time, your

thought-singing might come in handy.
What is learned here is very probably

a new relationship between the hemispheres, not entirely different from

some of the learned phenomena in the previous chapter.
The Nature of Music

I wish to expand a little upon the role of instrumental music in all this.
For we also hear and appreciate music with our right hemispheres.
Such lateralization of music can be seen even in very young infants.
Six-

month-old babies can be given EEG’s while being held in the laps of their

mothers.
If the recording electrodes are placed directly over Wernicke’s

area on the left hemisphere and over what corresponds to Wernicke’s area

on the right, then when tape recordings of speech are played, the left

hemisphere will show the greatest activity.
But when a tape of a music box

is played or of someone singing, the activity will be greater over the right

hemisphere.
In the experiment I am describing, not only did the children

who were fidgeting or crying stop doing so at the sound of music, but also

they smiled and looked straight ahead, turning away from the mother’s

gaze,10 even acting as we do when we are trying to avoid distraction.
This finding has an immense significance for the possibility that the brain is

organized at birth to ‘obey’ stimulation in what corresponds to Wernicke’s

area on the right hemisphere, namely the music, and not be distracted from

it, even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologically had to obey

hallucinations from the same area.
It also points to the great significance of

lullabies in development, perhaps influencing a child’s later creativity.
Or you can prove this laterality of music yourself.
Try hearing different

musics on two earphones at the same intensity.
You will perceive and

remember the music on the left earphone better.
11 This is because the left ear has greater neural representation on the right hemisphere.
The specific

location here is probably the right anterior temporal lobe, for patients in

which it has been removed from the right hemisphere find it very difficult

to distinguish one melody from another.
And, conversely, with left temporal

lobectomies, patients postoperatively have no trouble with such tests.12

Now we know neurologically that there can be a spread of excitation

from one point of the cortex to adjacent points.
Thus it becomes likely that

a buildup of excitation in those areas on the right hemisphere serving

instrumental music should spread to those adjacent serving divine auditory

hallucinations—or vice versa.
And hence this close relationship between

instrumental music and poetry, and both with the voices of gods.
I am

suggesting here that the invention of music may have been as a neural

excitant to the hallucinations of gods for decision-making in the absence of

consciousness.
It is thus no idle happenstance of history that the very name of music

comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses.
For music too begins in the

bicameral mind.
We thus have some ground for saying that the use of the lyre among early

poets was to spread excitation to the divine speech area, the posterior part

of the right temporal lobe, from immediately adjacent areas.
So also the

function of flutes that accompanied the lyric and elegiac poets of the eighth

and seventh centuries B.C.
And when such musical accompaniment is no

longer used, as it is not in later Greek poetry, it is, I suggest, because the

poem is no longer being sung from the right hemisphere where such

spreading excitation would help.
It is instead being recited from left

hemispheric memory alone, rather than being recreated in the true prophetic

trance.
This change in musical accompaniment is also reflected in the way

poetry is referred to, although a large amount of historical overlap makes

the case not quite so clear.
But more early poetry is referred to as song (as

in the Iliad and the Theogony, for example), while later poetry is often

referred to as spoken or told.
This change perhaps corresponds roughly to

the change from the aoidoi with their lyres to the rhapsodes with their

rhapdoi (light sticks, perhaps to beat the meter) that took place perhaps in

the eighth or seventh centuries B.C.
And behind these particulars is the more

profound psychological change from bicameral composition to conscious

recitation, and from oral to written remembering.
In much later poetry,

however, the poet as singer and his poem as song are brought back

metaphorically as a conscious archaism, yielding its own authorization to

the now conscious poet.
13



Poesy and Possession

A third way to examine this transformation of poetry during the rise and

spread of consciousness is to look at the poet himself and his mentality.
Specifically, were the relations of poets to the Muses the same as the

relationship of the oracles to the greater gods?
For Plato at least, the matter was quite clear.
Poetry was a divine

madness.
It was katokoche or possession by the Muses;


...
all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful

poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed...
there

is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his

senses and the mind is no longer in him.
14



Poets then, around 400 B.C., were comparable in mentality to the oracles of

the same period, and went through similar psychological transformation

when they performed.
Now we might be tempted to think with Plato that such possession

characterized poetry all the way back into the epic tradition.
But the

evidence does not warrant such a generalization.
In the Iliad itself, so many

centuries before the existence of katokoche is ever mentioned or observed, a

good argument could be made that the primitive aoidos was not “out of his

senses and the mind no longer in him.” For in several places, the poem

breaks off as the poet gets stuck and has to beg the Muses to go on (2:483,

11:218, 14:508, 16:112).
Let it be stressed parenthetically here that the Muses were not figments

of anyone’s imagination.
I would ask the reader to peruse the first pages of

Hesiod’s Theogony and realize that all of it was probably seen and heard in

hallucination, just as can happen today in schizophrenia or under certain

drugs.
Bicameral men did not imagine; they experienced.
The beautiful

Muses with their unison “lily-like” voice, dancing out of the thick mists of

evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely enraptured

shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hallucinatory sources of

memory in late bicameral men, men who did not live in a frame of past

happenings, who did not have ‘lifetimes’ in our sense, and who could not

reminisce because they were not fully conscious.
Indeed, this is put into

mythology by their chosen medium, the shepherd of Helicon himself: the

Muses who, he tells us, always sing together with the same phrenes 15 and in

“unwearying flows” of song, this special group of divinities who, instead of

telling men what to do, specialized in telling certain men what had been

done, are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Titaness whose name later

comes to mean memory —the first word with that meaning in the world.
Such appeals to the Muses then are identical in function with our appeals

to memory, like tip-of-the-tongue struggles with recollection.
They do not

sound like a man out of his senses who doesn’t know what he is doing.
In

one instance in the Iliad, the poet begins to have difficulty and so begs the

Muses,



Say now to me, Muses, having Olympian homes, for you are

goddesses, and are present and know all; but we hear report alone,

neither do we know anything: tell me who were the leaders and rulers

of the Greeks?
(2:483–487)



and then goes on to plead in his own person that he, the poet, cannot name

them, though he had “ten tongues and ten mouths and an unbreakable

voice,” unless the Muses start singing the material to him.
I have italicized a

phrase in the quotation to underline their actuality to the poet.
Nor does possession seem to be occurring in Hesiod in his first meeting

with them on the holy flanks of Mount Helicon while he was keeping watch

over his sheep.
He describes how the Muses


...
breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and

things that were aforetime; and they begged me sing of the race of the

blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first

and last.
16



Again, I think this should be believed literally as someone’s experience in

exactly the same way that we believe in the experience of Hesiod’s

contemporary, Amos, in his meeting with Yahweh in the meadows of Tekoa

while he too was keeping watch over his flock.
17 Nor does it seem

possession when the Muses’ Theogony stops (line 104) and Hesiod cries out

again in his own voice, praising the Muses and pleading with them again to go on with the poem: “Tell me these things from the beginning, you

Muses,” having just given a long list of the topics which the poet wants the

poem to be about (line 114).
Nor does the stately and careful description of Demodocus in the

Odyssey permit an interpretation of the poet as possessed.
Evidently

Demodocus, if he was real, may have gone through some kind of cerebral

accident which left him blind, but with the power to hear the Muses sing

such enchanting poetry as could make an Odysseus drape his head and

moan with tears (8:6392).
Indeed Odysseus himself understands that

Demodocus of the disabled vision, who could not have witnessed the Trojan

War, could sing about it only because the Muse, or Apollo, was actually

telling it to him.
His chant was hormetheis theou, constantly given by the

god himself (8 ¡499).
The evidence, therefore, suggests that up to the eighth and probably the

seventh century B.C., the poet was not out of his mind as he was later in

Plato’s day.
Rather, his creativity was perhaps much closer to what we have

come to call bicameral.
The fact that such poets were “wretched things of

shame, mere bellies,” as the Muses scornfully mocked their human adoring

mediums, 18 unskilled roughs who came from the more primitive and lonely

levels of the social structure, such as shepherds, is in accord with such a

suggestion.
Mere bellies out in the fields had less opportunity to be changed

by the new mentality.
And loneliness can lead to hallucination.
But by the time of Solon in the sixth century B.C., something different is

happening.
The poet is no longer simply given his gifts; he has to have

“learning in the gift of the Muses” (Fragment 13:51).
And then, in the fifth

century B.C., we hear the very first hint of poets’ being peculiar with poetic

ecstasy.
What a contrast to the calm and stately manner of the earlier aoidoi,

Demodocus, for example!
It is Democritus who insists that no one can be a

great poet without being frenzied up into a state of fury (Fragment 18).
And

then in the fourth century B.C., the mad possessed poet “out of his senses”

that Plato and I have already described.
Just as the oracles had changed

from the prophet who heard his hallucinations to the possessed person in a

wild trance, so also had the poet.
Was this dramatic change because the collective cognitive imperative had

made the Muses less believable as real external entities?
Or was it because

the neurological reorganization of hemispheric relations brought on by

developing consciousness prohibited such givenness; so that consciousness

had to be out of the way to let poetry happen?
Or was it Wernicke’s area on

the right hemisphere using Broca’s area on the left, thus short-circuiting (as

it were) normal consciousness?
Or are these three hypotheses the same (as

of course I presently think they are)?
For whatever reasons, decline continues decline in the ensuing centuries.
Just as the oracles sputtered out through their latter terms until possession

was partial and erratic, so, I suggest, poets slowly changed until the fury

and possession by the Muses was also partial and erratic.
And then the

Muses hush and freeze into myths.
Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more.
Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and

dies into invention.
The oral becomes written by the poet himself, and

written, it should be added, by his right hand, worked by his left

hemisphere.
The Muses have become imaginary and invoked in their

silence as a part of man’s nostalgia for the bicameral mind.
In summary, then, the theory of poetry I am trying to state in this

scraggly collation of passages is similar to the theory I presented for

oracles.
Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.
Then, as

the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
Some become

institutionalized as oracles making decisions for the future.
While others

become specialized into poets, relating from the gods statements about the

past.
Then, as the bicameral mind shrinks back from its impulsiveness, and

as perhaps a certain reticence falls upon the right hemisphere, poets who are

to obtain this same state must learn to do it.
As this becomes more difficult,

the state becomes a fury, and then ecstatic possession, just as happened in

the oracles.
And then indeed toward the end of the first millennium B.C.,

just as the oracles began to become prosaic and their statements versified

consciously, so poetry also.
Its givenness by the unison Muses has

vanished.
And conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and

rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine

utterances.
Why as the gods retreated even further into their silent heavens or, in

another linguistic mode, as auditory hallucinations shrank back from access

by left hemisphere monitoring mechanisms, why did not the dialect of the

gods simply disappear?
Why did not poets simply cease their rhapsodic

practices as did the priests and priestesses of the great oracles?
The answer is very clear.
The continuance of poetry, its change from a divine given to a

human craft is part of that nostalgia for the absolute.
The search for the

relationship with the lost otherness of divine directives would not allow it to

lapse.
And hence the frequency even today with which poems are

apostrophes to often unbelieved-in entities, prayers to unknown imaginings.
And hence the opening paragraph of this treatise.
The forms are still there,

to be worked with now by the analog ‘I’ of a conscious poet.
His task now

is an imitation or mimesis19 of the former type of poetic utterance and the reality which it expressed.
Mimesis in the bicameral sense of mimicking

what was heard in hallucination has moved through the mimesis of Plato as

representation of reality to mimesis as imitation with invention in its sullen

service.
There have been some latter-day poets who have been very specific about

actual auditory hallucinations.
Milton referred to his “Celestial Patroness,

who...
unimplor’d...
dictates to me my unpremeditated Verse,” even as

he, in his blindness, dictated it to his daughters.20 And Blake’s

extraordinary visions and auditory hallucinations—sometimes going on for

days and sometimes against his will—as the source of his painting and

poetry are well known.
And Rilke is said to have feverishly copied down a

long sonnet sequence that he heard in hallucination.
But most of us are more ordinary, more with and of our time.
We no

longer hear our poems directly in hallucination.
It is instead the feeling of

something being given and then nourished into being, of the poem

happening to the poet, as well and as much as being created by him.
Snatches of lines would “bubble up” for Housman after a beer and a walk

“with sudden and unaccountable emotions” which then “had to be taken in

hand and completed by the brain.” “The songs made me, not I them,” said

Goethe.
“It is not I who think,” said Lamartine, “it is my ideas that think for

me.” And dear Shelley said it plain:



A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even

cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some

invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory

brightness...
and the conscious portions of our natures are

unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
21



Is the fading coal the left hemisphere and the inconstant wind the right,

mapping vestigially the ancient relationship of men to gods?
Of course there is no universal rule in this matter.
The nervous systems of

poets come like shoes, in all types and sizes, though with a certain

irreducible topology.
We know that the relations of the hemispheres are not

the same in everyone.
Indeed, poetry can be written without even a nervous

system.
A vocabulary, some syntax, and a few rules of lexical fit and

measure can be punched into a computer, which can then proceed to write

quite ‘inspired’ if surrealist verse.
But that is simply a copy of what we,

with two cerebral hemispheres and nervous systems, already do.
Computers

or men can indeed write poetry without any vestigial bicameral inspiration.
But when they do, they are imitating an older and a truer poesy out there in

history.
Poetry, once started in mankind, needs not the same means for its

production.
It began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.
And even

today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the listener, however it is

made, still retains that quality of the wholly other, of a diction and a

message, a consolation and an inspiration, that was once our relationship to

gods.
A Homily on Thamyris

I would like to end these rather clumsy suggestions on the biology of

poetry with some homiletic sentiments on the true tragedy of Thamyris.
He

was a poet in the Iliad (2:594–600) who boasted he would conquer and

control the Muses in his poetry.
Gods, as they die away in the transition to

consciousness, are jealous gods, as I have said earlier.
And the Sacred Nine

are no exception.
They were enraged at the beautiful ambition of Thamyris.
They crippled him (probably a paralysis on his left side), and deprived him

forever of poetic expression, and made him forget his ability at harping.
Of course, we do not know if there even was a Thamyris, or exactly what

reality is being pointed at by this story.
But I suggest it was among the later

accretions to the Iliad, and that its insertion may point to the difficulties in

hemisphere cooperation in artistic expression at the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
The parable of Thamyris may be narratizing what is to us

the feeling of losing consciousness in our inspiration and then losing that

inspiration in our consciousness of that loss.
Consciousness imitates the

gods and is a jealous consciousness and will have no other executives of

action before it.
I remember when I was younger, at least through my twenties, while

walking in woods or along a beach, or climbing hills or almost anything

lonely, I would quite often suddenly become conscious that I was hearing in

my head improvised symphonies of unambiguous beauty.
But at the very

moment of my becoming conscious of the fact, not loitering even for a

measure!
the music vanished.
I would strain to call it back.
But there would

be nothing there.
Nothing but a deepening silence.
Since the music was

undoubtedly being composed in my right hemisphere and heard somehow

as a semi-hallucination, and since my analog ‘I’ with its verbalizations was

probably, at that moment at least, a more left hemispheric function, I

suggest that this opposition was very loosely like what is behind the story of

Thamyris.
‘I’ strained too much.
I have no left hemiplegia.
But I do not hear

my music anymore.
I do not expect ever to hear it again.
The modern poet is in a similar quandary.
Once, literary languages and

archaic speech came somehow to his bold assistance in that otherness and

grandeur of which true poetry is meant to speak.
But the grinding tides of irreversible naturalism have swept the Muses even farther out into the night

of the right hemisphere.
Yet somehow, even helplessly in our search for

authorization, we remain “the hierophants of an unapprehended

inspiration.” And inspiration flees in attempted apprehension, until perhaps

it was never there at all.
We do not believe enough.
The cognitive

imperative dissolves.
History lays her finger carefully on the lips of the

Muses.
The bicameral mind, silent.
And since



The god approached dissolves into the air,



Imagine then, by miracle, with me,

(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)

What could not possibly be there,

And learn a style from a despair.
Chapter 4



Hypnosis

IF I ASK YOU to taste vinegar as champagne, to feel pleasure when I jab a pin

in your arm, or to stare into darkness and contract the pupils of your eyes to

an imagined light, or to willfully and really believe something you do not

ordinarily believe, just anything, you would find these tasks difficult if not

impossible.
But if I first put you through the induction procedures of

hypnosis, you could accomplish all these things at my asking without any

effort whatever.
Why?
How can such supererogatory enabling even exist?
It seems a very different company we enter when we go from the

familiarity of poetry to the strangeness of hypnosis.
For hypnosis is the

black sheep of the family of problems which constitute psychology.
It

wanders in and out of laboratories and carnivals and clinics and village

halls like an unwanted anomaly.
It never seems to straighten up and resolve

itself into the firmer proprieties of scientific theory.
Indeed, its very

possibility seems a denial of our immediate ideas about conscious self-

control on the one hand, and our scientific idea about personality on the

other.
Yet it should be conspicuous that any theory of consciousness and its

origin, if it is to be responsible, must face the difficulty of this deviant type

of behavioral control.
I think my answer to the opening question is obvious: hypnosis can cause

this extra enabling because it engages the general bicameral paradigm

which allows a more absolute control over behavior than is possible with

consciousness.
In this chapter, I shall even go so far as to maintain that no theory other

than the present one makes sense of the basic problem.
For if our

contemporary mentality is, as most people suppose, an immutable

genetically determined characteristic evolved back somewhere in

mammalian evolution or before, how can it be so altered as in hypnosis?
And that alteration merely at some rather ridiculous ministrations of another

person?
It is only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating

consciousness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an

earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly.
The central structure of this chapter, obviously, will be to show how well

hypnosis fits the four aspects of the bicameral paradigm.
But before I do so,

I wish to bring out clearly a most important feature of how hypnosis began

in the first place.
This is what I have emphasized in I.2 and II.5 , the

generative force of metaphor in creating new mentality.
The Paraphrands of Newtonian Forces

Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the

paraphrands of a few new metaphors.
The first of these metaphors followed

Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his

use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon.
The

mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were

then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences.
And the comparison

resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of

attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal

gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case.
1

This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton

admirer of Newton’s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all.
And then

came another metaphor, or rather two.
Gravitational attraction is similar to

magnetic attraction.
Therefore, since (in Mesmer’s rhetorical thought) two

things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is

like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism.
Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way.
To demonstrate

the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things

similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various

hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing

iron so that the magnetism might work better.
And it did!
The result could

not be doubted with the knowledge of his day.
Convulsive attacks were

produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer’s words “an artificial ebb and

flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal

distribution of the nervous fluid’s confused movement,” thus producing a

“harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces

between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits.
Of course he hadn’t proved anything about any kind of magnetism

whatever.
He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of

sleep later called hypnosis.
The cures were effective because he had

explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction.
The

violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of

magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would

happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating

‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure.
We should

remember here that just as in ancient Assyria there was no concept of

chance and so the casting of lots ‘had’ to be controlled by the gods, so in

the eighteenth century there was no concept of suggestion and the result

had to be due to the magnets.
Then when it was found that not only magnets, but cups, bread, wood,

human beings, and animals to which a magnet had been touched were also

efficacious (how false beliefs breed upon each other!), the whole matter

jumped over into another metaphor (this is the fourth), that of static

electricity, which—Benjamin Franklin’s kite and all—was being so much

studied at the time.
Thus Mesmer thought there was a “magnetic material”

that could be transferred to a countless array of objects, just as static

electricity can.
Human beings in particular could store up and absorb

magnetism, particularly Mesmer himself.
Just as a carbon rod stroked with

fur produces static electricity, so patients were to be stroked by Mesmer.
He

could now dispense with actual magnets and use his own animal

magnetism.
By stroking or making passes over the bodies of his patients, as

if they were carbon rods, he produced the same results: convulsions, coiling

twists of peculiar sensations, and the cure of what later were called

hysterical illnesses.
Now it is critical here to realize and to understand what we might call the

paraphrandic changes which were going on in the people involved, due to

these metaphors.
A paraphrand, you will remember, is the projection into a

metaphrand of the associations or paraphiers of a metaphier.
The

metaphrand here is the influences between people.
The metaphiers, or what

these influences are being compared to, are the inexorable forces of

gravitation, magnetism, and electricity.
And their paraphiers of absolute

compulsions between heavenly bodies, of unstoppable currents from masses

of Leyden jars, or of irresistible oceanic tides of magnetism, all these

projected back into the metaphrand of interpersonal relationships, actually

changing them, changing the psychological nature of the persons involved,

immersing them in a sea of uncontrollable control that emanated from the

‘magnetic fluids’ in the doctor’s body, or in objects which had ‘absorbed’

such from him.
It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering was a

different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a special education in

childhood, a surrounding belief system, and isolation from the rest of us,

possibly could have sustained itself as a society not based on ordinary

consciousness, where metaphors of energy and irresistible control would

assume some of the functions of consciousness.
How is this even possible?
As I have mentioned already, I think Mesmer

was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological

patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four

aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic

authorization.
I shall take up each in turn.
The Changing Nature of Hypnotic Man

That the phenomenon of hypnosis is under the control of a collective

cognitive imperative or group belief system is clearly demonstrated by its

continual changing in history.
As beliefs about hypnosis changed, so also its

very nature.
A few decades after Mesmer, subjects no longer twisted with

strange sensations and convulsions.
Instead they began spontaneously to

speak and reply to questions during their trance state.
Nothing like this had

happened before.
Then, early in the nineteenth century, patients

spontaneously began to forget what had happened during the trance, 2

something never reported previously.
Around 1825, for some unknown

reason, persons under hypnosis started to spontaneously diagnose their own

illnesses.
In the middle of the century, phrenology, the mistaken idea that

conformations of the skull indicate mental faculties, became so popular that

it actually engulfed hypnosis for a time.
Pressure on the scalp over a

phrenological area during hypnosis caused the subject to express the faculty

controlled by that area (yes, this actually happened), a phenomenon never

seen before or since.
When the scalp area over the part of the brain

supposedly responsible for “veneration” was pressed, the hypnotized

subject sunk to his knees in prayer!
3 This was so because it was believed to be so.
A little later, Charcot, the greatest psychiatrist of his time, demonstrated

to large professional audiences at the Salpetriere that hypnosis was again

quite different!
Now it had three successive stages: catalepsy, lethargy, and

somnambulism.
These “physical states” could be changed from one to

another by manipulating muscles, or various pressures, or friction on the top

of the head.
Even rubbing the head over Broca’s area produced aphasia!
And then Binet, arriving at the Salpetriere to check on the findings of

Charcot, promptly compounded the problem by returning to Mesmer’s

magnets and discovering even more bizarre behavior.
4 Placing magnets on one side or the other of the body of a hypnotized person, he could flip-flop

perceptions, hysterical paralyses, supposed hallucinations, and movements

from one side to the other, as if such phenomena were so many iron filings.
None of these absurd results was ever found before or since.
It is not simply that the operator, Mesmer or Charcot or whoever, was

suggesting to the pliant patient what the operator believed hypnosis to be.
Rather, there had been developed within the group in which he worked a

cognitive imperative as to what the phenomenon was ‘known’ to be.
Such

historical changes then clearly show that hypnosis is not a stable response

to given stimuli, but changes as do the expectations and preconceptions of a

particular age.
What is obvious in history can be shown in a more experimentally

controlled way.
Previously unheard-of manifestations of hypnosis can be

found by simply informing subjects beforehand that such manifestations are

expected in hypnosis, that is, are a part of the collective cognitive

imperative about the matter.
For example, an introductory psychology class

was casually told that under hypnosis a subject’s dominant hand cannot be

moved.
This had never occurred in hypnosis in any era.
It was a lie.
Nevertheless, when members of the class at a later time were hypnotized,

the majority, without any coaching or further suggestion, were unable to

move their dominant hand.
Out of such studies has come the notion of the

“demand characteristics” of the hypnotic situation, that the hypnotized

subject exhibits the phenomena which he thinks the hypnotist expects.
5 But that expresses it too personally.
It is rather what he thinks hypnosis is.
And

such “demand characteristics,” taken in this way, are of precisely the same

nature as what I am calling the collective cognitive imperative.
Another way of seeing the force of the collective imperative is to note its

strengthening by crowds.
Just as religious feeling and belief is enhanced by

crowds in churches, or in oracles by the throngs that attended them, so

hypnosis in theaters.
It is well known that stage hypnotists with an audience

packed to the rafters, reinforcing the collective imperative or expectancy of

hypnosis, can produce far more exotic hypnotic phenomena than are found

in the isolation of laboratory or clinic.
The Induction

Secondly, the place of an induction procedure in hypnosis is obvious.
6

And needs little comment.
The variety of techniques in contemporary

practice is enormous, but they all share the same narrowing of

consciousness, similar to the induction procedures for oracles, or the

relationship between a pelestike and a katochos which we looked at in the

previous chapters.
The subject may be seated or standing or lying down,

may be stroked or not, stared at or not, asked to look at a small light or

flame or gem, or perhaps a thumbtack on the wall, or at the thumbnail of his

own clasped hands, or not—there are hundreds of variations.
But always the

operator is trying to confine the subject’.› attention to his own voice.
“All

you hear is my voice and you are getting sleepier and sleepier, etc.” is a

common pattern, repeated until the subject, if hypnotized, is unable to open

his clasped hands if the operator says he can’t, for example, or cannot move

his relaxed arm if the operator so suggests, or cannot remember his name if

that is suggested.
Such simple suggestions are often used as indications of

the success of the hypnosis in its beginning stages.
If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this fashion, if he

cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he remains in a state of

consciousness of other considerations, such as the room and his relationship

to the operator, if he is still narratizing with his analog ‘I’ or ‘seeing’ his

metaphor ‘me’ being hypnotized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful.
But

repeated attempts with such subjects often succeed, showing that the

“narrowing” of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned

ability, learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have called

the general bicameral paradigm.
As we saw earlier that the ease with which

a katochos can enter an hallucinatory trance improves with practice, so also

in hypnosis: even in the most susceptible, the length of the induction and its

substances can be radically reduced with repeated sessions.
Trance and Paralogic Compliance

Thirdly, the hypnotic trance is called just that.
It is of course usually

different from the kind of trance that goes on in other vestiges of the

bicameral mind.
Individuals do not have true auditory hallucinations, as in

the trances of oracles or mediums.
That place in the paradigm is taken over

by the operator.
But there is the same diminution and then absence of

normal consciousness.
Narratization is severely restricted.
The analog ‘I’ is

more or less effaced.
The hypnotized subject is not living in a subjective

world.
He does not introspect as we do, does not know he is hypnotized,

and is not constantly monitoring himself as, in an unhypnotized state, he

does.
In recent times, the metaphor of submersion in water is almost invariably

used to talk about the trance.
Thus there are references to “going under” and

to “deep” or “shallow” trances.
The hypnotist often tells a subject he is

going “deeper and deeper.” It is indeed possible that without the submersion

metaphier, the whole phenomenon would be different, particularly in regard

to post-hypnotic amnesia.
The paraphiers of above and below the surface of

water, with its different visual and tactual fields, could be creating a kind of

two-world-ness resulting in something similar to state-dependent memory.
And the sudden appearance of spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia in the

early nineteenth century may be due to this change from gravitational to

submersion metaphors.
In other words, spontaneous posthypnotic amnesia

may have been a paraphrand of the submersion metaphor.
(It is interesting

to note that such spontaneous amnesia is presently disappearing from

hypnotic phenomena.
Possibly, hypnosis has become so familiar as to

become a thing in itself, its metaphorical basis wearing away with use,

reducing the power of its paraphrands.)

It is in the “deeper” stages of the trance that the most interesting

phenomena can be elicited.
These are extremely important for any theory of

mind to explain.
Unless otherwise suggested, the subject is ‘deaf’ to all but

the operator’s voice; he does not ‘hear’ other people.
Pain can be ‘blocked’

off, or enhanced above normal.
So can sensory experience.
Emotions can be

totally structured by suggestion: told he is about to hear a funny joke, the

subject will laugh uproariously at “grass is green.” The subject can

somehow control certain automatic responses better than in the normal state

at the suggestion of the operator.
His sense of identity can be radically

changed.
He can be made to act as if he were an animal, or an old man, or a

child.
But it is an as-if with a suppression of an it-isn’t.
Some extremists in

hypnosis have sometimes claimed that when a subject in a trance is told he

is now only five or six years old, that an actual regression to that age of

childhood occurs.
This is clearly untrue.
Let me cite one example.
The

subject had been born in Germany, and emigrated with his family to an

English-speaking country at about age eight, at which time he learned

English, forgetting most of his German.
When the operator suggested to

him under ‘deep’ hypnosis that he was only six years old, he displayed all

kinds of childish mannerisms, even writing in childish print on a

blackboard.
Asked in English if he understood English, he childishly

explained in English that he could not understand or speak English but only

German!
He even printed on the blackboard in English that he could not

understand a word of English!
7 The phenomenon is thus like play acting, not a true regression.
It is an uncritical and illogical obedience to the

operator and his expectations that is similar to the obedience of a bicameral

man to a god.
Another common error made about hypnosis, even in the best modern

textbooks, is to suppose that the operator can induce true hallucinations.
Some unpublished observations of my own bear to the contrary.
After a

subject was in deep hypnosis, I went through the motions of giving him a

nonexistent vase and asked him to place nonexistent flowers from a table

into the vase, saying out loud the color of each one.
This was easily done.
It

was playacting.
But giving him a nonexistent book, and asking him to hold

it in his hands, to turn to page one and begin reading was a different matter.
It could not be play-acted without more creativity than most of us can

muster.
The subject would readily go through the suggested motions of

holding such a book, might stumble through some cliché first phrase or

possibly a sentence, but then would complain that the print was blurry, or

too difficult to read, or some similar rationalization.
Or when asked to

describe a picture (nonexistent) on a blank piece of paper, the subject would

reply in a halting way if at all, giving only short answers when prodded by

questions as to what he saw.
If this had been a true hallucination, his eyes

would have roamed over the paper and a full description would have been a simple matter—as it is when schizophrenics describe their visual

hallucinations.
There were great individual differences here, as might be

expected, but the behavior is much more consistent with an as-if hesitant

role-taking than with the effortless givenness with which true hallucinations

are experienced.
This point is brought out by another experiment.
If a hypnotized person is

told to walk across the room, and a chair has been placed in his path, and he

is told that there is no chair there, he does not hallucinate the chair out of

existence.
He simply walks around it.
He behaves as if he did not notice it

—which of course he did, since he walked around it.
It is interesting here

that if unhypnotized subjects are asked to simulate hypnosis in this

particular situation, they promptly crash into the chair,8 since they are trying to be consistent with the erroneous view that hypnosis actually changes

perceptions.
Hence the important concept of trance logic which has been brought

forward to denote this difference.9 This is simply the bland response to absurd logical contradictions.
But it is not any kind of logic really, nor

simply a trance phenomenon.
It is rather what I would prefer to dress up as

paralogical compliance to verbally mediated reality.
It is paralogic because

the rules of logic (which we remember are an external standard of truth, not

the way the mind works) are put aside to comply with assertions about

reality that are not concretely true.
It is a type of behavior found

everywhere in the human condition from contemporary religious litanies to

various superstitions of tribal societies.
But it is particularly pronounced in

and centrally characteristic of the mental state of hypnosis.
It is paralogic compliance that a subject walks around a chair he has been

told is not there, rather than crashing into it (logical compliance), and finds

nothing illogical in his actions.
It is paralogical compliance when a subject

says in English that he knows no English and finds nothing amiss in saying

so.
If our German subject had been simulating hypnosis, he would have

shown logical compliance by talking only in what German he could

remember or being mute.
It is paralogic compliance when a subject can accept that the same person

is in two locations at the same time.
If a hypnotized subject is told that

person X is person Y, he will behave accordingly.
Then if the real person Y

walks into the room, the subject finds it perfectly acceptable that both are

person Y.
This is similar to the paralogic compliance found today in another vestige of the bicameral mind, schizophrenia.
Two patients in a ward may

both believe themselves to be the same important or divine person without

any feelings of illogicality.
10 I suggest that a similar paralogic compliance

was also evident in the bicameral era itself, as in treating unmoving idols as

living and eating, or the same god as being in several places at one time, or

in the multiples of jewel-eyed effigies of the same god-king found side-by-

side in the pyramids.
Like a bicameral man, the hypnotized subject does not

recognize any peculiarities and inconsistencies in his behavior.
He cannot

‘see’ contradictions because he cannot introspect in a completely conscious

way.
The sense of time in a trance is also diminished, as we have seen it was in

the bicameral mind.
This is particularly evident in post-hypnotic amnesia.
We, in our normal states, use the spatialized succession of conscious time as

a substrate for successions of memories.
Asked what we have done since

breakfast, we commonly narratize a row of happenings that are what we can

call “time-tagged.” But the subject in a hypnotic trance, like the

schizophrenic patient or the bicameral man, has not such a schema of time

in which events can be time-tagged.
The before-and afterness of spatialized

time is missing.
Such events as can be remembered from the trance by a

subject in post-hypnotic amnesia are vague isolated fragments, cuing off the

self, rather than spatialized time as in normal remembering.
Amnesic

subjects can only report, if anything, “I clasped my hands, I sat in a chair,”

with no detail or sequencing, in a way that to me is reminiscent of

Hammurabi or Achilles.11 What is significantly different about the

contemporary hypnotic subject, however, is the fact that at the suggestion of

the operator, the narratized sequential memories can often be brought back

to the subject, showing that there has been some kind of parallel processing

by consciousness outside of the trance.
Such facts make the hypnotic trance a fascinating complexity.
Parallel

processing!
While a subject is doing and saying one thing, his brain is

processing his situation in at least two different ways, one more inclusive

than the other.
This conclusion can be demonstrated even more dramatically

by the recent discovery that has been dubbed “the hidden observer.” A

hypnotized subject, after the suggestion that he will feel nothing when

keeping his hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for a minute (a really painful,

but benign experience!), may show no discomfort and say he felt nothing}

but if it has previously been suggested that when and only when the

operator touches his shoulder, he will say in another voice exactly what he

really felt, that is what happens.
At such a touch, the subject, often in a low

guttural voice, may give full expression to his discomfiture, yet return

immediately to his ordinary voice and to the anesthetized state when the

operator’s hand is lifted.12

Such evidence returns us to a once rejected notion of hypnosis known as

dissociation that emerged from studies of multiple personality at the

beginning of this century.13 The idea is that in hypnosis the totality of mind or reactivity is being separated into concurrent streams which can function

independently of each other.
What this means for the theory of

consciousness and its origin as described in Book I is not immediately

apparent.
But such dissociated processing is certainly reminiscent of the

bicameral organization of mind itself, as well as the kind of nonconscious

problem solving discussed in I.I.
Perhaps the least discussed aspect of hypnosis is the difference in the

nature of the trance among persons who have never seen or known much

about hypnosis before.
Usually, of course, the trance is in our time a passive

and suggestible state.
But some subjects really do go to sleep.
Others are

always partly conscious and yet peculiarly suggestible until who can judge

between acting and reality?
Others tremble so severely that the subject has

to be ‘awakened’.
And so on.
That such individual differences are due to differences in the belief or

collective cognitive imperative of the individual is suggested by a recent

study.
Subjects were asked to describe in writing what happens in hypnosis.
They were later hypnotized, and the results compared with their

expectation.
One ‘awoke’ from the trance each time she was given a task

for which she had to see.
A later perusal of her paper showed she had

written, “A person’s eyes must be closed in order to be in a hypnotic

trance.” Another could only be hypnotized on a second attempt.
He had

written, “Most people cannot be hypnotized the first time.” And another

could not perform tasks under hypnosis when standing.
She had written,

“The subject has to be reclining or sitting.” 14 But the more hypnosis is

talked about, even as on these pages, the more standardized the cognitive

imperative and hence the trance becomes.
The Hypnotist as Authorization

And so, fourthly, a very particular kind of archaic authorization which

also determines in part the different nature of the trance.
For here, instead of

the authorization being an hallucinated or possessing god, it is the operator

himself.
He is manifestly an authority figure to the subject.
And if he is not,

the subject will be less hypnotizable, or will require a much longer

induction or a much greater belief in the phenomenon to begin with (a

stronger cognitive imperative).
Indeed, most students of the subject insist that there must be developed a

special kind of trust relationship between the subject and the operator.
15

One common test of the susceptibility to hypnosis is to stand behind the

prospective subject and ask him to permit himself to fall voluntarily to see

what it feels like to ‘let go’.
If the subject steps back to break his fall, some

part of him lacking confidence that he will be caught, he almost invariably

turns out to be a poor hypnotic subject for that particular operator.16

Such trust explains the difference between hypnosis in the clinic and in

the laboratory.
The hypnotic phenomena found in a medical psychiatric

setting are commonly more profound, because, I suggest, a psychiatrist is a

more godlike figure to his patient than is an investigator to his subject.
And

a similar explanation can be made for the age at which hypnosis is most

easily done.
Hypnotic susceptibility is at its peak between the ages of eight

and ten.
17 Children look up to adults with a vastly greater sense of adult

omnipotence and omniscience, and this thus increases the potentiality of the

operator in fulfilling the fourth element of the paradigm.
The more godlike

the operator is to the subject, the more easily is the bicameral paradigm

activated.
Evidence for the Bicameral Theory of Hypnosis

If it is true that the relationship of subject to operator in hypnosis is a

vestige of an earlier relationship to a bicameral voice, several interesting

questions arise.
If the neurological model outlined in I.5 is in the right

direction, then we might expect some kind of laterality phenomenon in

hypnosis.
Our theory predicts that in EEG’s of a subject under hypnosis, the

ratio of brain activity in the right hemisphere would be increased over that

of the left, although this is complicated by the fact that it is the left

hemisphere that to some extent must understand the operator.
But at least

we would expect proportionally more right hemisphere involvement than in

ordinary consciousness.
At the present time we have no clear idea about even a usual EEG under

hypnosis, such the conflicting findings of researchers.
But there are other

lines of evidence, even if they are unfortunately more correlational and

indirect.
They are:

Individuals can be categorized by whether they use the right or left

hemisphere relatively more than others.
A simple way of doing this is

to face a person and ask questions and note which way his eyes move

as he thinks of an answer.
(As in I.5 , we are speaking only of right-

handed people.) If to his right, he is using his left hemisphere

relatively more, and if to the left, his right hemisphere—since

activation of the frontal eye fields of either hemisphere turns the eyes

to the contralateral side.
It has been recently reported that people who,

in answering questions face to face, turn their eyes to the left, who are

thus using their right hemisphere more than most others, are much

more susceptible to hypnosis.18 This can be interpreted as indicating

that hypnosis may involve the right hemisphere in very special ways,

that the more easily hypnotized person is the one who can ‘listen to’

and ‘rely on’ the right hemisphere more than others.
As we saw in I.5 , the right hemisphere, which we have presumed to

have been the source of divine hallucinations in earlier millennia, is

presently considered to be the more creative, spatial, and responsible

for vivid imagery.
Several recent studies have found that individuals

who manifest these characteristics more than others are indeed more

susceptible to hypnosis.
19 These findings are consistent with the

hypothesis that hypnosis is a reliance on right hemisphere categories,

just as a bicameral man relied on his divine guidance.
If calling hypnosis a vestige of the bicameral mind is valid, we might

also expect that those most susceptible to being hypnotized would be

those most susceptible to other instances of the general bicameral

paradigm.
In regard to religious involvement, this appears to be true.
Persons who have attended church regularly since childhood are more

susceptible to hypnosis, while those who have had less religious

involvement tend to be less susceptible.
At least some investigators of

hypnosis that I know seek their subjects in theological colleges

because they have found such students to be more susceptible.
The phenomenon of imaginary companions in childhood is something

I shall have more to say about in a future work.
But it too can be

regarded as another vestige of the bicameral mind.
At least half of

those whom I have interviewed remembered distinctly that hearing

their companions speak was the same quality of experience as hearing

the question as I asked it.
True hallucination.
The incidence of

imaginary companions occurs mostly between the ages of three and

seven, just preceding what I would regard as the full development of

consciousness in children.
My thinking here is that, either by some

innate or environmental predisposition to have imaginary companions,

the neurological structure of the general bicameral paradigm is (to use

a metaphor) exercised.
If the hypothesis of this chapter is correct, we

might then expect such persons to be more susceptible to the

engagement of that paradigm later in life—as in hypnosis.
And they

are.
Those who have had imaginary companions in childhood are

easier to hypnotize than those who have not.
Again it is a case where

hypnotizability is correlated with another vestige of the bicameral

mind.
If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of instilling an

enhanced relationship to authority, hence training some of those

neurological relationships that were once the bicameral mind, we

might expect this to increase hypnotic susceptibility.
And this is true.
Careful studies show that those who have experienced severe

punishment in childhood and come from a disciplined home are more

easily hypnotized, while those who were rarely punished or not

punished at all tend to be less susceptible to hypnosis.
These laboratory findings are only suggestive, and there are quite

different ways of understanding them, for which I refer the reader to the

original reports.
But together they do form a pattern which lends support to

the hypothesis that hypnosis is in part a vestige of a preconscious mentality.
Placing the phenomena of hypnosis against the broad historical background

of mankind in this way gives them certain contours that they would not

otherwise have.
If one has a very definite biological notion of

consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mammalian

nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be

understood at all, not one speck of it.
But if we fully realize that

consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed

vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part,

can be culturally unlearned or arrested.
Learned features, such as analog ‘I,’

can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different

initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis.
The reason that

that different initiative works in conjunction with the other factors of the

diminishing consciousness of the induction and trance is that in some way it

engages a paradigm of an older mentality than subjective consciousness.
Objection: Does Hypnosis Exist?
Finally, I should briefly refer to possible alternative interpretations.
But

presently there are not so much theories of hypnosis as points of view, each

correct as far as it goes.
One view insists that imagination and concentration

on what the hypnotist suggests, and the tendency of such an imagination to

result in conforming action, are important.20 They are.
Another, that it is

condition of monomotivation that counts.21 Of course, that is a description.
Another states that the basic phenomenon is simply the ability to enact

different roles, the as-if nature of most hypnotic performances.
22 This certainly is true.
Another correctly stresses the dissociation.
23 Another that

hypnosis is a regression to a childlike relation to a parent.24 And indeed this is often how any vestige of the bicameral mind appears, since the bicameral

mind itself is based on such admonitory experience.
But the main theoretical controversy—and it is a continuing one, and the

one that is most important for us here—is whether or not hypnosis is really

anything different from what happens every day in the normal state.
For if

this view is final, my interpretation in this chapter of a different mentality is

utterly wrong.
Hypnosis cannot be a vestige of anything since it does not

really exist.
All the manifestations of hypnosis, this position insists, can be

shown to be simply exaggerations of normal phenomena.
We can tick them

off:

As for the kind of obedience to the operator, all of us do the same thing

without thinking in situations that are so defined, as with a teacher or a

traffic policeman, or perhaps the caller at a square dance.
As to such phenomena as suggested deafness, everyone has had the

experience of ‘listening’ carefully to another person and yet not hearing a

word.
And so the mother who sleeps through a thunderstorm and yet hears

and wakes to the cry of her baby is not engaging a different mechanism

from that of the hypnotized subject who hears only the hypnotist’s voice

and is asleep to all else.
As for the induced amnesia which so astonishes an observer, who can

remember what he was thinking five minutes ago?
You must suggest to

yourself a set or struction to remember at the time.
And this the operator of

the present day can do or not do, negating or enhancing the paraphrand of submersion, so that the subject does or does not remember.
As for the suggested paralysis under hypnosis, who has not been in

discussion with a friend during a walk until, becoming more and more

absorbed, both walk more slowly until you are standing still?
Concentrated

attention has meant arrest of movement.
As for hypnotic anesthesia, that most remarkable of hypnotic phenomena,

who has not seen a hurt child distracted by a toy until the crying stops and

the pain is forgotten?
Or known of victims of accidents bleeding from unfelt

wounds?
And acupuncture may indeed be a related phenomenon.
And as for the “hidden observer,” this kind of parallel processing goes on

all the time.
In ordinary conversation, we listen to someone and plan what

we are going to say at the same time.
And actors do this constantly, always

acting as their own hidden observers; Stanislavski to the contrary, they are

always able to criticize their performances.
And many of the examples of

nonconscious thought in I.I , or my description of driving a car and

conversing which opened I.4 , are further instances.
And as for the startling success of post-hypnotic suggestion, we all

sometimes decide to react to some event in a certain way and then do so,

even forgetting our prior reason.
It is really not different from ‘pre-hypnotic

suggestion’, as in the supposed paralysis of the dominant hand a few pages

ago.
It is a structuring of the collective cognitive imperative that can

predetermine our reactions in very specific ways.
And so for other remarkable feats performed under hypnosis; all are

exaggerations of everyday phenomena.
Hypnosis, the argument runs, just

seems different to an observer.
The trance behavior is simply intense

concentration as in the proverbial “absent-minded professor.” Indeed a host

of recent experiments have been aimed at showing that all hypnotic

phenomena can be duplicated in waking subjects by simple suggestion.
25



My reply, and it is the reply of others as well, is that this is not explaining

hypnosis.
It is explaining it away.
Even though all of the phenomena of

hypnosis can be duplicated in ordinary life (and I do not think they can),

hypnosis can still be defined by distinct procedures, distinct susceptibilities

which correlate with other experiences as well as other vestiges of the

bicameral mind, and by huge differences in the ease with which hypnotic

phenomena can be reproduced with and without hypnotic induction.
In any

speculation about possible future changes in our mentality, this latter

difference is extremely important.
That is why I began this chapter as I did.
If we are asked to be animals, five-year-olds, painless when pricked, color-

blind, cataleptic, or show nystagmus to imagined whirlings of the visual

field, 26 or to taste vinegar as champagne—it is enormously more difficult to do in our normal state of consciousness than when ordinary

consciousness is absent under hypnosis.
Such feats without rapport with an

operator require grotesque efforts of persuasion and massive burdens of

concentration.
The full consciousness of the waking state seems itself like a

huge wilderness of distracting closenesses that cannot easily be crossed to

catch into such immediate control.
Try looking out the window and

pretending to be red-green colorblind to such an extent that those colors

really do look like shades of gray.
27 It can be done to a certain extent, but it

is much easier under hypnosis.
Or get up now from where you are sitting

and act like a bird, flapping your arms and emitting strange calls for for the

next fifteen minutes, something easy to do under hypnosis.
But there is not

one reader of that last sentence who can do it—if he is alone.
Whatever

those sweaty feelings of foolishness or silliness are, the why-should-I’s and

the this-is-absurd’s, they crowd in like careful tyrants jealous as a god of

such a performance; you need the permission of a group, the authorization

of a collective imperative as well as the coiftmand of an operator—or a god

—to achieve such obedience.
Or put your hands on the table in front of you

and make one of them distinctly redder; possible for you to do now, but

much easier under hypnosis.
Or raise both your hands for fifteen minutes

without feeling any discomfort, a simple task under hypnosis but onerous

without it.
What is it then that hypnosis supplies that does this extraordinary

enabling, that allows us to do things we cannot ordinarily do except with

great difficulty?
Or is it ‘we’ that do them?
Indeed, in hypnosis it is as if

someone else were doing things through us.
And why is this so?
And why is

this easier?
Is it that we have to lose our conscious selves to gain such

control, which cannot then be by us?
On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above

ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be?
If

under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by

ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a

connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master

and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a

subject?
The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned consciousness

in this present millennium.
We need some vestige of the bicameral mind,

our former method of control, to help us.
With consciousness we have given

up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behavior which

characterized the bicameral mind.
We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and

wherefores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-

routed adventures of our analog ‘I’s.
And this constant spinning out of

possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save us from behavior of too

impulsive z sort.
The analog ‘I’ and the metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at

the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives.
We know too

much to command ourselves very far.
Those who through what theologians call the “gift of faith” can center

and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different

collective cognitive imperatives.
They can indeed change themselves

through prayer and its expectancies much as in post-hypnotic suggestion.
It

is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through

some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways.
Anyone who

has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that

both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such

untouchable hands.
But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and

skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control.
We are learned in

self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and

tomorrowing our resolves.
And so we become practiced in powerless

resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted.
At least that

happens to some of us.
And then to rise above this noise of knowings and

really change ourselves, we need an authorization that ‘we’ do not have.
Hypnosis does not work for everyone.
There are many reasons why.
But

in one particular group who find hypnosis difficult, the reason is

neurological and partly genetic.
In such people, I think that the inherited

neurological basis of the general bicameral paradigm is organized slightly

differently.
It is as if they cannot readily accept the external authorization of

an operator because that part of the bicameral paradigm is already occupied.
Indeed, they often seem to the rest of us as if they were already hypnotized,

particularly when confined in hospitals as they commonly are from time to time.
Some theorists have even speculated that that is precisely their

condition—a continuous state of self hypnosis.
But I think such a position is

a dreadful misuse of the term hypnosis, and that the behavior of

schizophrenics, as we call them, should be looked at in another way—

which is what we shall do in the next chapter.
Chapter 5



Schizophrenia

MOST OF US spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual

bicameral mind at some part of our lives.
For some of us, it is only a few

episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices.
But for others of us, with

overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down

the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a

much more harrowing experience—if it can be called an experience at all.
We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to

do.
At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves.
Time

crumbles.
We behave without knowing it.
Our mental space begins to

vanish.
We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us.
There is no us.
It

is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere.
And in that

nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being

manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a

place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is

schizophrenia.
In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind.
At least that is a provocative if oversimplified and exaggerated way of

introducing an hypothesis that has been obvious in earlier parts of this

essay.
For it has been quite apparent that the views presented here suggest a

new conception for that most common and resistant of mental illnesses,

schizophrenia.
This suggestion is that, like the phenomena discussed in the

preceding chapters, schizophrenia, at least in part, is a vestige of

bicamerality, a partial relapse to the bicameral mind.
The present chapter is

a discussion of this possibility.
The Evidence in History

Let us begin with a glance, a mere side-glance, at the earliest history of

this disease.
If our hypothesis is correct, there should first of all be no

evidence of individuals set apart as insane prior to the breakdown of the

bicameral mind.
And this is true, even though it makes an extremely weak

case, since the evidence is so indirect.
But in the sculptures, literature,

murals, and other artifacts of the great bicameral civilizations, there is never

any depiction or mention of a kind of behavior which marked an individual

out as different from others in the way in which insanity does.
Idiocy, yes,

but madness, no.
1 There is, for example, no idea of insanity in the Iliad.2 I am emphasizing individuals set apart from others as ill, because, according

to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C.,

everyone was schizophrenic.
Secondly, we should expect on the basis of the above hypothesis that

when insanity is first referred to in the conscious period, it is referred to in

definitely bicameral terms.
And this makes a much stronger case.
In the

Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity “a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest

blessings granted to men.”3 And this passage preludes one of the most

beautiful and soaring passages in all the Dialogues in which four types of

insanity are distinguished: prophetic madness due to Apollo, ritual madness

due to Dionysus, the poetic madness “of those who are possessed by the

Muses, which taking hold of the delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring

frenzy, awaken lyrical and all other numbers,” and, finally, erotic madness

due to Eros and Aphrodite.
Even the word for prophetic, manlike, and the

word for psychotically mad, manike, were for the young Plato the same

word, the letter t being for him “only a modern and tasteless insertion.”4

The point I am trying to make here is that there is no doubt whatever of the

early association of forms of what we call schizophrenia with the

phenomena that we have come to call bicameral.
This correspondence is also brought out in another ancient Greek word

for insanity, paranoia, which, coming from para + nous, literally meant having another mind alongside one’s own, descriptive both of the

hallucinatory state of schizophrenia and of what we have described as the

bicameral mind.
This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with the

modern and etymologically incorrect usage of this term, with its quite

different meaning of persecutory delusions, which is of nineteenth-century

origin.
Paranoia, as the ancient general term for insanity, lasted along with

the other vestiges of bicamerality described in the previous chapter, and

then linguistically died with them about the second century A.D.
But even in Plato’s own time, a time of war, famine, and plague, the four

divine insanities were gradually shifting into the realm of the wise man’s

poetry and the plain man’s superstition.
The sickness aspect of

schizophrenia comes to the fore.
In later dialogues, the elderly Plato is more

skeptical, referring to what we call schizophrenia as a perpetual dreaming in

which some men believe “that they are gods, and others that they can fly,”5

in which case the family of those so afflicted should keep them at home

under penalty of a fine.
6

The insane are now to be shunned.
Even in the exotic farces of

Aristophanes, stones are thrown at them to keep them away.
What we now call schizophrenia, then, begins in human history as a

relationship to the divine, and only around 400 B.C.
comes to be regarded as

the incapacitating illness we know today.
This development is difficult to

understand apart from the theory of a change in mentality which this essay

is about.
The Difficulties of the Problem

Before looking at its contemporary symptoms from the same point of

view, I would make a few preliminary observations of a very general sort.
As anyone knows who has worked in the literature on the subject, there is

today a rather vague panorama of dispute as to what schizophrenia is,

whether it is one disease or many, or the final common path of multiple

etiologies, whether there exist two basic patterns variously called process

and reactive, or acute and chronic, or quick-onset and slow-onset

schizophrenia.
The reason for this disagreement and its vagueness is

because research in the area is as obstinate a tangle of control difficulties as

can be found anywhere.
How may we study schizophrenia and at the same

time eliminate the effects of hospitalization, of drugs, of prior therapy, of

cultural expectancy, of various learned reactions to bizarre experiences, or

of differences in obtaining accurate data about the situational crises of

patients who, through the trauma of hospitalization, find it frightening to

communicate?
It is beyond my effort here to sort out a way through these difficulties to

any definitive position.
Rather I intend to step around them with some

simplicities on which there is wide agreement.
These are, that there does

exist a syndrome that can be called schizophrenia, that at least in the florid

state it is easily recognized in the clinic, and that it is found in all civilized

societies the world over.7 Moreover, for the truth of this chapter, it is not really important whether I am speaking of all patients with this diagnosis.
8

Nor of the illness as it first appears, or as it develops subsequent to

hospitalization.
My thesis is something less, that some of the fundamental,

most characteristic, and most commonly observed symptoms of florid

unmedicated schizophrenia are uniquely consistent with the description I

have given on previous pages of the bicameral mind.
These symptoms are primarily the presence of auditory hallucinations as

described in I:4, and the deterioration of consciousness as defined in I:2,

namely the loss of the analog ‘I’, the erosion of mind-space, and an inability

to narratize.
Let us look at these symptoms in turn.
Hallucinations

Again, hallucinations.
And what I shall say here is merely adjunctory to

my earlier discussion.
If we confine ourselves to florid unmedicated schizophrenics, we can

state that hallucinations are absent only in exceptional cases.
Usually they

predominate, crowding in persistently and massively, making the patient

appear confused, particularly when they are changing rapidly.
In very acute

cases, visual hallucinations accompany the voices.
But in more ordinary

cases, the patient hears a voice or many voices, a saint or a devil, a band of

men under his window who want to catch him, burn him, behead him.
They

lie in wait for him, threaten to enter through the walls, climb up and hide

under his bed or above him in the ventilators.
And then there are other

voices who want to help him.
Sometimes God is a protector, at other times

one of the persecutors.
At the persecuting voices, the patients may flee,

defend themselves, or attack.
With helpful consoling hallucinations, the

patient may listen intently, enjoy them like a festivity, even weeping at

hearing the voices of heaven.
Some patients may go through all sorts of

hallucinated experiences while lying under the blankets in their beds, while

others climb around, talk loudly or softly to their voices, making all kinds

of incomprehensible gestures and motions.
Even during conversation or

reading, patients may be constantly answering their hallucinations softly or

whispering asides to their voices every few seconds.
Now one of the most interesting and important aspects of all this in

respect to the parallel with the bicameral mind is the following: auditory

hallucinations in general are not even slightly under the control of the

individual himself, but they are extremely susceptible to even the most

innocuous suggestion from the total social circumstances of which the

individual is a part.
In other words, such schizophrenic symptoms are

influenced by a collective cognitive imperative just as in the case of

hypnosis.
A recent study demonstrates this very clearly.9 Forty-five hallucinating

male patients were divided into three groups.
One group wore on their belts

a small box with a lever which when pressed administered a shock.
They

were instructed to thus shock themselves whenever they began to hear

voices.
A second group wore similar boxes, were given similar instructions,

but pressing the lever did not give the patient a shock.
A third group were

given similar interviews and evaluation, but had no boxes.
The boxes,

incidentally, contained counters which recorded the number of lever

presses, the frequency ranging from 19 to 2362 times over the fortnight of

the experiment.
But the important thing is that all three groups were

casually led to expect that the frequency of hallucinations might diminish.
It was of course predicted on the basis of learning theory that the shocked

group alone would improve.
But alas for learning theory, all three groups

heard significantly fewer voices.
In some cases the voices vanished

completely.
And no group was superior to another in this respect, showing

clearly the huge role of expectation and belief in this aspect of mental

organization.
A further observation is a related one, that hallucinations are dependent

on the teachings and expectations of childhood—as we have postulated was

true in bicameral times.
In contemporary cultures where an orthodox

excessive personal relationship to God is a part of the child’s education,

individuals that become schizophrenic tend to hear strict religious

hallucinations more than others.
On the British island of Tortola in the West Indies, for example, children

are taught that God literally controls each detail of their life.
The name of

the Deity is invoked in threats and punishment.
Churchgoing is the major

social activity.
When the natives of this island require any psychiatric care

whatever, they invariably describe experiences of hearing commands from

God and Jesus, feelings of burning in hell or hallucinations of loud praying

and hymn-singing, or sometimes a combination of prayer and profanity.10

When the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia have no particular

religious basis they are still playing essentially the same role as I have

suggested was true for the bicameral mind, that of initiating and guiding the

patient’s behavior.
Occasionally the voices are recognized as authorities

even within the hospital.
One woman heard voices that were mainly

beneficial which she believed were created by the Public Health Service to

provide psychotherapy.
Would that psychotherapy could always be so easily

accomplished!
They constantly gave her advice, including, incidentally, not

to tell the psychiatrist that she heard voices.
They advised her on difficult pronunciations, or gave her hints on sewing and cooking.
As she described

it,



When I am making a cake, she gets too impatient with me.
I try to

figure it out all by myself.
I am trying to make a clothspin apron and

she is right there with me trying to tell me what to do.11



Some psychiatric investigators, particularly of a psychoanalytic persuasion,

wish to infer by the associations the patient uses that the voices can “in all

instances...
be traced to persons who were formerly significant in the

patients’ lives, especially their parents.” 12 It is supposed that because such

figures if recognized would produce anxiety, they are therefore

unconsciously distorted and disguised by the patients.
But why should that

be so?
It is more parsimonious to think that it is the patient’s experiences

with his parents (or other loved authorities) that become the core around

which the hallucinated voice is structured, even as I have suggested was the

case with the gods in the bicameral era.
I do not mean that parents do not figure in hallucinations.
They often do,

particularly in younger patients.
But otherwise, the voice-figures of

schizophrenia are not parents in disguise; they are authority figures created

by the nervous system out of the patient’s admonitory experience and his

cultural expectations, his parents of course being an important part of that

admonitory experience.
One of the most interesting problems in hallucinations is their relation to

conscious thought.
If schizophrenia is partly a return to the bicameral mind,

and if this is antithetical to ordinary consciousness (which it need not be in

all cases), one might expect hallucinations to be the replacement of

‘thoughts.’

In some patients at least, this is how hallucinations first appear.
Sometimes, the voices seem to begin as thoughts which then transform

themselves into vague whispers, which then gradually become louder and

more authoritative.
In other cases, patients feel the beginning of voices “as

if their thoughts were dividing.” In mild cases, the voices may even be

under the control of conscious attention as are ‘thoughts.’ As one

nondeluded patient described it:



Here I have been in this ward for two years and a half and almost

every day and every hour of the day I hear voices about me, sometimes

sounding from the wind, sometimes from footsteps, sometimes rattling

dishes, from the rustling trees, or from the wheels of passing trains and

vehicles.
I hear the voices only if I attend to them, but hear them I do.
The voices are words that tell me one story or another, just as if they

were not thoughts in my head, but were recounting past deeds—yet

only when I think of them.
The whole day through they keep on telling

truly my daily history of head and heart.
13



Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories and

knowledge than the patient himself—even as did the gods of antiquity.
It is

not uncommon to hear patients at certain stages of their illness complain

that the voices express their thoughts before they have a chance to think

them themselves.
This process of having one’s thoughts anticipated and

expressed aloud to one is called in the clinical literature

Gedankenlautwerden and is approaching closely the bicameral mind.
Some

say they never get a chance to think for themselves; it is always done for

them and the thought is given to them.
As they try to read, the voices read

in advance to them.
Trying to speak, they hear their thoughts spoken in

advance to them.
Another patient told his physician that: “Thinking hurts

him, for he can not think for himself.
Whenever he begins to think, all his

thoughts are dictated to him.
He is at pains to change the train of thought,

but again his thinking is done for him...
In church he not infrequently

hears a voice singing, anticipating what the choir sings...
If he walks

down the street and sees, say, a sign, the voice reads out to him whatever is

on it...
If he sees an acquaintance in the distance, the voice calls out to

him, ‘Look, there goes so and so,’ usually before he begins to think of the

person.
Occasionally, though he has not the least intention of noticing

passersby, the voice compels him to attend to them by its remarks about

them.” 14

It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallucinations in

the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is important to consider.
Why are they present?
And why is “hearing voices” universal throughout

all cultures, unless there is some usually suppressed structure of the brain

which is activated in the stress of this illness?
And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often have a

dramatic authority, particularly religious?
I find that the only notion which

provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the

bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these

hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings,

and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the

bicameral mind.
Religious hallucinations are particularly common in the so- called

twilight states, which are a kind of waking dream in many patients, varying

in time from a few minutes to a few years, six months’ duration being quite

common.
Invariably such states are characterized by religious visions,

posturing, ceremony, and worship, a patient living with hallucinations just

as in the bicameral state, except that the environment itself may be

hallucinated and the hospital surroundings blotted out.
The patient may be

in contact with the saints in heaven.
Or he may recognize doctors or nurses

around him for what they are, but believe that they will prove to be gods or

angels in disguise.
Such patients may even cry with joy at talking directly

with the inhabitants of heaven, may continually cross themselves as they

converse with the divine voices or even with the stars, calling to them out of

the night.
Often the paranoid, after a lengthy period of difficulties in getting on

with people, may begin the schizophrenic aspect of his illness with an

hallucinated religious experience in which an angel, Christ, or God speaks

to the patient bicamerally, showing him some new way.
15 He becomes

convinced therefore of his own special relationship to the powers of the

universe, and the pathological self-reference of all the occurrences around

him then becomes elaborated into delusional ideas which may be pursued

for years without the patient’s being able to discuss it.
Particularly illustrative of the tendency toward religious hallucinations is

the famous case of Schreber, a brilliant German jurist around the close of

the nineteenth century.
16 His own extremely literate retrospective account of his hallucinations while ill with schizophrenia is remarkable from the

point of view of their similarity to the relationships of ancient men to their

gods.
His disease began with a severe anxiety attack during which he

hallucinated a crackling in the walls of his house.
Then one night, the

cracklings suddenly became voices which he immediately recognized as

divine communications and “which since then have spoken to me

incessantly.” The voices were continuous “for a period of seven years,

except during sleep, and would persist undeterred even when I was

speaking with other people.” 17 He saw rays of light like “long-drawn-out

filaments approaching my head from some vast distant spot on the horizon
...
Or from the sun or other distant stars that do not come towards me in a

straight line, but in a kind of circle or parabola.” 18 And these were the

carriers of the divine voices, and could form into the physical beings of

gods themselves.
As his illness progressed, it is of particular interest how the divine voices

soon organized themselves into a hierarchy of upper and lower gods, as

may be supposed to have occurred in bicameral times.
And then, streaming

down their rays from the gods, the voices seemed to be trying to “suffocate

me and eventually to rob me of my reason.” They were committing “soul-

murder,” and were progressively “unmanning” him, that is, taking away his

own initiative or eroding his analog ‘I’.
Later in his illness, during more

conscious periods, he narratized this into the delusion of being bodily

turned into a woman.
Freud, I think, overemphasized this particular

narratization in his famous analysis of these memoirs, making the entire

illness the result of repressed homosexuality that was erupting from the

unconscious.
19 But such an interpretation, while possibly related to the

original etiology of the stress that began the illness, is not very powerful in

explaining the case as a whole.
Now, can we have the temerity to draw a parallel with such phenomena

of mental illness and the organization of gods in antiquity?
That Schreber

also had voice-visions of “little men” is suggestive of the figurines found in

so many early civilizations.
And the fact that, as he slowly recuperated, the

tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an

indistinct hissing20 is reminiscent of how idols sounded to the Incas after

the conquest.
A further suggestive parallel is the fact that the sun as the world’s

brightest light takes on a particular significance in many unmedicated

patients, as it did in the theocracies of bicameral civilizations.
Schreber, for

example, after hearing his “upper God (Ormuzd)” for some time, finally

saw him as “the sun...
surrounded by a silver sea of rays...
21 And a more contemporary patient wrote:



The sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me.
It seemed to be

charged with all power; not merely to symbolize God but actually to be

God.
Phrases like: “Light of the World,” “The Sun of Righteousness

that Setteth Nevermore,” etc., ran through my head without ceasing,

and the mere sight of the sun was sufficient greatly to intensify this

manic excitement under which I was laboring.
I was impelled to

address the sun as a personal god, and to evolve from it a ritual sun

worship.22



In no sense am I thinking here that there is innate sun-worship or innate

gods in the nervous system that are released under the mental

reorganization of psychosis.
The reasons that hallucinations take the

particular form they do lie partly in the physical nature of the world, but

mostly in education and a familiarity with gods and religious history.
But I do mean to suggest



(1) that there are in the brain aptic structures for the very existence of

such hallucinations,

(2) that these structures develop in civilized societies such that they

determine the general religious quality and authority of such

hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize them into hierarchies,

(3) that the paradigms behind these aptic structures were evolved into

the brain by natural and human selection during the early civilizing of

mankind, and

(4) are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry

in many cases of schizophrenia and particularized into experience.
There is a great deal more to say about these very real phenomena of

hallucination in schizophrenia.
And the need for more research here cannot

be overstressed.
We would like to know the life history of hallucinations

and how this relates to the life history of the patient’s illness; of this hardly

anything is known.
We would like to know more of how the particular

hallucinatory experiences relate to the individual’s upbringing.
Why do

some patients have benevolent voices, while others have voices so

relentlessly persecuting that they flee or defend themselves or attack

someone or something in an attempt to end them?
And why do still others

have voices so ecstatically religious and inspiring that the patient enjoys

them like a festivity?
And what are the language characteristics of the

voices?
Do they use the same syntax and lexicon as the patient’s own

speech?
Or are they more patterned as we might expect from III.3 ?
All

these are problems that can be resolved empirically.
When they are, they

may indeed give us more insight into the bicameral beginnings of

civilization.
The Erosion of the Analog ‘I’

Of what transcending importance is this analog we have of ourselves in our

metaphored mind-space, the very thing with which we narratize out

solutions to problems of personal action, and see where we are going, and

who we are!
And when in schizophrenia it begins to diminish, and the space

in which it exists begins to collapse, how terrifying the experience must be!
Florid schizophrenic patients all have this symptom in some degree:



When I am ill I lose the sense of where I am.
I feel ‘I’ can sit in the

chair, and yet my body is hurtling out and somersaulting about 3 feet

in front of me.
It is really very hard to keep conversations with others because I

can’t be sure if others are really talking or not and if I am really talking

back.23



Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself is in me,

and how much is already in others.
I am a conglomeration, a

monstrosity, modeled anew each day.
24



My ability to think and decide and will to do, is torn apart by itself.
Finally, it is thrown out where it mingles with every other part of the

day and judges what it has left behind.
Instead of wishing to do things,

they are done by something that seems mechanical and frightening...
the feeling that should dwell within a person is outside longing to

come back and yet having taken with it the power to return.25



Many are the ways in which this loss of ego is described by patients who

are able to describe it at all.
Another patient has to sit still for hours at a

time “in order to find her thoughts again.” Another feels as if “he died

away.” Schreber, as we have seen, talked of “soul-murder.” One very

intelligent patient needs hours of strenuous effort “to find her own ego for a

few brief moments.” Or the self feels it is being absorbed by all that is

around it by cosmic powers, forces of evil or of good, or by God himself.
Indeed, the very term schizophrenia was coined by Bleuler to point to this

central experience as the identifying mark of schizophrenia.
It is the feeling

of ‘losing one’s mind’, of the self ‘breaking off’ until it ceases to exist or

seems to be unconnected with action or life in the usual way, resulting in

many of the more obvious descriptive symptoms, such as “lack of affect” or

abulia.
Another way in which this erosion of the analog ‘I’ shows itself is in the

relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person.
It is, of course, a

somewhat tenuous assumption to say that when we draw a person on paper,

that drawing is dependent upon an intact metaphor of the self that we have

called the analog ‘I’.
But so consistent has this result been that it has

become what is called the Draw-A-Person Test (DAP), now routinely

administered as an indicator of schizophrenia.26 Not all schizophrenic

patients find such drawings difficult.
But when they do, it is extremely

diagnostic.
They leave out obvious anatomical parts, like hands or eyes;

they use blurred and unconnected lines; sexuality is often undifferentiated;

the figure itself is often distorted and befuddled.
But the generalization that this inability to draw a person is a reflecting of

the erosion of the analog ‘I’ should be taken with some circumspection.
It

has been found that older people sometimes show the same fragmented and

primitive drawings as do these schizophrenics, and it should also be noticed

that there is a considerable inconsistency with this result and the hypothesis

being examined in this chapter.
We have stated in an earlier chapter that the

analog ‘I’ came into being toward the end of the second millennium B.C.
If

the ability to draw a person is dependent upon the drawer having an analog

‘I’, then we would expect no coherent pictures of humans before that time.
And this most definitely is not the case.
It is obvious that there are ways of

explaining this discrepancy, but I prefer to simply record the anomaly at this

time.
We should not leave this discussion of the erosion of the analog ‘I’

without mentioning the tremendous anxiety in our own culture that

accompanies it, and the attempt, sometimes successful, sometimes

unsuccessful, to arrest this terrifying fading-off of that most important part

of our interior selves, the almost sacramental center of conscious decision.
In fact, much of the behavior that has nothing to do with any reversion to a bicameral mind can be construed as an effort to combat this loss of the

analog ‘I’.
Sometimes, for example, there is what is called the “I am” symptom.
The

patient in trying to keep some control over his behavior repeats over and

over to himself “I am,” or “I am the one present in everything,” or “I am the

mind, not the body.” Another patient may use only single words like

“strength” or “life” to try to anchor himself against the dissolution of his

consciousness.
27



The Dissolution of Mind-Space

A schizophrenic not only begins to lose his ‘F but also his mind-space,

the pure paraphrand that we have of the world and its objects that is made to

seem like a space when we introspect.
To the patient it feels like losing his

thoughts, or “thought deprivation,” a phrase which elicits immediate

recognition from the schizophrenic.
The effect of this is so bound up with

the erosion of the analog ‘I’ as to be inseparable from it.
Patients cannot

easily think of themselves in the places that they are in and so they are

unable to utilize information to prepare in advance for things that may

happen to them.
One way this can be experimentally observed is in reactiontime studies.
All schizophrenics of every type are much less capable than normally

conscious people when they attempt to respond to stimuli presented to them

at intervals of varying lengths.
The schizophrenic, lacking an intact analog

‘P and a mind-space in which to picture himself doing something, is unable

to “get ready” to respond, and, once responding, is unable to vary the

response as the task demands.
28 A patient who has been sorting blocks on

the basis of form may be unable to shift to sorting them for color when

instructed to sort in a different way.
Similarly, the loss of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space results in the loss

of as-if behaviors.
Because he cannot imagine in the usual conscious way,

he cannot play-act, or engage in make-believe actions, or speak of make-

believe events.
He cannot, for example, pretend to drink water out of a glass

if there is no water in it.
Or asked what he would do if he were the doctor,

he might reply that he is not a doctor.
Or if an unmarried patient is asked

what he would do if he were married, he might answer that he is not

married.
And hence his difficulty with the as-if behavior of hypnosis, as I

mentioned at the end of the previous chapter.
Another way the dissolving of mind-space shows itself is in the

disorientation in respect to time so common in the schizophrenic.
We can

only be conscious of time as we can arrange it into a spatial succession, and

the diminishing of mind-space in schizophrenia makes this difficult or

impossible.
For example, patients may complain that “time has stopped,” or

that everything seems to be “slowed down” or “suspended,” or more simply

that they have “trouble with time.” As one former patient remembered it

after he was well:



For a long time no days seemed to me like a day and no night

seemed like a night.
But this in particular has no shape in my memory.
I used to tell time by my meals, but as I believed we were served sets

of meals in each real day—about half a dozen sets of breakfast, lunch,

tea, and dinner in each twelve hours—this was not much help.
29



On the face of it, this may seem inconsistent with the hypothesis that

schizophrenia is a partial relapse to the bicameral mind.
For bicameral man

certainly knew the hours of the day and the seasons of the year.
But this

knowing was, I suggest, a very different knowing from the narratization in a

spatially successive time which we who are conscious are constantly doing.
Bicameral man had behavioral knowing, responding to the cues for rising

and sleeping, for planting and harvesting, cues so important that they were

worshiped, as at Stonehenge, and were probably hallucinogenic in

themselves.
For someone coming from a culture where attention to such

cues has been superseded by a different sense of time, the loss of that

spatial successiveness leaves the patient in a relatively timeless world.
It is

interesting in this connection that when it is suggested to normal hypnotic

subjects that time does not exist, a schizophrenic form reaction results.
30



The Failure of Narratization

With the erosion of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space, narratization

becomes impossible.
It is as if all that was narratized in the normal state

shatters into associations subordinated to some general thing perhaps, but

unrelated to any unifying conceptive purpose or goal, as occurs in normal

narratization.
Logical reasons cannot be given for behaviors, and verbal

answers to questions do not originate in any interior mind-space, but in

simple associations or in the external circumstances of a conversation.
The

whole idea that a person can explain himself, something which in the

bicameral era was distinctly the function of gods, can no longer occur.
With the loss of the analog ‘I’, its mind-space, and the ability to narratize,

behavior is either responding to hallucinated directions, or continues on by

habit.
The remnant of the self feels like a commanded automaton, as if

someone else were moving the body about.
Even without hallucinated

orders, a patient may have the feeling of being commanded in ways in

which he must obey.
He may shake hands normally with a visitor, but,

asked about this, reply, “I don’t do it, the hand proffers itself.” Or a patient

may feel that somebody else is moving his tongue in speech, particularly as

in coprolalia, when scatalogical or obscene words are substituted for others.
Even in early stages of schizophrenia, the patient feels memories, music, or

emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which seem to be forced upon him

from some alien source, and, therefore, over which ‘he’ has no control.
This

symptom is extremely common and diagnostic.
And these alien influences

often then develop into the full-blown hallucinations I have discussed

earlier.
According to Bleuler, “conscious feelings rarely accompany the

automatisms which are psychic manifestations split off from the personality.
The patients can dance and laugh without feeling happy; can commit

murder without hating; do away with themselves without being

disappointed with life...
the patients realize that they are not their own

masters.” 31

Many patients simply allow such automatisms to take place.
Others, still

able to narratize marginally, invent protective devices against such foreign

control of their actions.
Negativism itself, even, I think, in neurotics, is such.
One of Bleuler’s patients, for example, who was inwardly driven to

sing, managed to get hold of a small block of wood which he would cram

into his mouth in order to stop his mouth from singing.
At present we do

not know whether such automatisms and inner commands are always the

result of articulate voices directing the patient in his actions, as a relapse to

the bicameral mind would suggest.
It may indeed be impossible to know,

since the split-off fragment of the personality that is still responding to the

physician may have suppressed the bicameral commands which are being

‘heard’ by other parts of the nervous system.
In many patients this appears as the symptom called Command

Automatism.
The patient obeys any and every suggestion and command

coming from the outside.
He is incapable of not obeying authoritative short

orders, even when otherwise negativistic.
Such orders must deal with

simple activities and cannot apply to a long complicated task.
The well-

known waxy flexibility of catatonics may fall under this heading; the

patient is really obeying the physician by remaining in any position in

which he is placed.
While not all such phenomena are, of course,

characteristic of what we have called the bicameral mind, the underlying

principle is.
An interesting hypothesis would be that patients with such

Command Automatism are those in whom auditory hallucinations are

absent, and the external voice of the physician is taking its place.
Consistent with such an hypothesis is the symptom known as echolalia.
When no hallucinations are present, the patient repeats back the speech,

cries, or expressions of others.
But when hallucinations are present, this

becomes hallucinatory echolalia, where the patient must repeat out loud all

that his voices say to him, rather than those of his environmental

surroundings.
Hallucinatory echolalia is, I suggest, essentially the same

mental organization that we have seen in the prophets of the Old Testament,

as well as the aoidoi of the Homeric poems.
Body Image Boundary Disturbance

It is possible that the erosion of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space also

results in what is called Boundary Loss in Rorschach studies of

schizophrenia.
This is a score for the proportion of images seen in the ink

blots that have poorly defined, fuzzy, or inexistent boundaries or edges.
Most interesting from our point of view here is that this measure is strongly

correlated with the presence of vivid hallucinatory experiences.
A patient

high in Boundary Loss often describes it as a feeling of disintegration.
When I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway in order

not to be trampled on.
Everything is flying away from me.
In the

doorway I can gather together the pieces of my body.
It is as if

something is thrown in me, bursts me asunder.
Why do I divide myself

in different pieces?
I feel that I am without poise, that my personality

is melting and that my ego disappears and that I do not exist anymore.
Everything pulls me apart...
The skin is the only possible means of

keeping the different pieces together.
There is no connection between

the different parts of my body...
32



In one study on Boundary Loss, the Rorschach was given to 80

schizophrenic patients.
Boundary definiteness scores were significantly

lower than in the group of normals and neurotics matched for age and

socio-economic status.
Such patients would commonly see in the ink blots

mutilated bodies, animal or human.33 This mirrors the breaking up of the analog self, or the metaphor picture that we have of ourselves in

consciousness.
In another study of 604 patients in Worcester State Hospital,

it was specifically found that Boundary Loss, including, we may presume,

the loss of the analog ‘I’, is a factor in the development of hallucinations.
Patients who had more hallucinations were those who were less successful

in establishing “boundaries between the self and the world.”34

Along the same line of thought, chronic schizophrenic patients are

sometimes unable to identify themselves in a photograph, or may

misidentify themselves, whether they are photographed individually or in a group.
The Advantages of Schizophrenia

A curious heading, certainly, for how can we say there are advantages of

so terrifying an illness?
But I mean such advantages in the light of all

human history.
Very clearly, there is a genetic inherited basis to the

biochemistry underlying this radically different reaction to stress.
And a

question that must be asked of such a genetic disposition to something

occurring so early in our reproductive years is, what biological advantage

did it once have?
Why, in the slang of the evolutionist, was it selected for?
And at what period long, long ago, since such genetic disposition is present

all over the world?
The answer, of course, is one of the themes I have stated so often before

in this essay.
The selective advantage of such genes was the bicameral mind

evolved by natural and human selection over the millennia of our early

civilizations.
The genes involved, whether causing what to conscious men

is an enzyme deficiency or other, are the genes that were in the background

of the prophets and the ‘sons of the nabiim’ and bicameral man before

them.
Another advantage of schizophrenia, perhaps evolutionary, is

tirelessness.
While a few schizophrenics complain of generalized fatigue,

particularly in the early stages of the illness, most patients do not.
In fact,

they show less fatigue than normal persons and are capable of tremendous

feats of endurance.
They are not fatigued by examinations lasting many

hours.
They may move about day and night, or work endlessly without any

sign of being tired.
Catatonics may hold an awkward position for days that

the reader could not hold for more than a few minutes.
This suggests that

much fatigue is a product of the subjective conscious mind, and that

bicameral man, building the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggurats of Sumer, or

the gigantic temples at Teotihuacan with only hand labor, could do so far

more easily than could conscious self-reflective men.
A further thing that schizophrenics do ‘better’ than the rest of us—

although it certainly is no advantage in our abstractly complicated world—

is simple sensory perception.
They are more alert to visual stimuli, as might

be expected if we think of them as not having to strain such stimuli through

a buffer of consciousness.
This is seen in their ability to block EEG alpha waves more quickly than normal persons following an abrupt stimulus, and

to recognize projected visual scenes coming into focus considerably better

than the normal.35 Indeed, schizophrenics are almost drowning in sensory data.
Unable to narratize or conciliate, they see every tree and never the

forest.
They seem to have a more immediate and absolute involvement with

their physical environment, a greater in-the-world-ness.
Such an

interpretation, at least, could be put on the fact that schizophrenics fitted

with prism glasses that deform visual perception learn to adjust more easily

than the rest of us, since they do not overcompensate as much.36



The Neurology of Schizophrenia

If schizophrenia is in part a relapse to the bicameral mind, and if our

earlier analyses have any merit, then we should find some kind of

neurological changes that are consistent with the neurological model

suggested in I.5.
There I proposed that the hallucinated voices of the

bicameral mind were amalgams of stored admonitory experiences that were

somehow organized in the right temporal lobe and conveyed to the left or

dominant hemisphere over the anterior commissures and perhaps the corpus

callosum.
Further, I have suggested that the advent of consciousness necessitated an

inhibition of these auditory hallucinations originating in the right temporal

cortex.
But what precisely this means in a neuro-anatomical sense is far

from clear.
We definitely know that there are specific areas of the brain that

are inhibitory to others, that the brain in a very general way is always in a

kind of complicated tension (or balance) between excitation and inhibition,

and also that inhibition can occur in a number of different ways.
One way is

an inhibition of an area in one hemisphere by excitation of an area in the

other.
The frontal eye fields, for example, are mutually inhibitory, such that

stimulation of the frontal eye field on one hemisphere inhibits the other.
37

And we may suppose that some proportion of the fibers of the corpus

callosum which connects the frontal eye fields are inhibitory themselves, or

else excite inhibitory centers on the opposite hemisphere.
In behavior, this

means that looking in any direction is programmed as the vector resultant of

the opposing excitation of the two frontal eye fields.
38 And this mutual

inhibition of the hemispheres can be presumed to operate in various other

bilateral functions.
But to generalize this reciprocal inhibition to asymmetrical unilateral

functions is a more daring matter.
Can we suppose, for example, that some

mental process on the left hemisphere is paired in reciprocal inhibition with

some different function on the right, so that some of the so-called higher

mental processes could be the resultants of the two opposing hemispheres?
At any rate, the first step in bringing some credence to these ideas about the relationship of schizophrenia to the bicameral mind and its neurological

model is to look for some kind of laterality differences in schizophrenics.
Do such patients have different right-hemispheric activity from the rest of

us?
Research on this hypothesis is only beginning, but the following very

recent studies are at least suggestive:

In most of us, the total EEG over a long time period shows slightly

greater activity in the dominant left hemisphere than in the right

hemisphere.
But the reverse tends to occur in schizophrenia: slightly

more activity in the right.39

This increased right hemisphere activity in schizophrenia is much

more pronounced after several minutes of sensory deprivation, the

same condition that causes hallucinations in normal persons.
If we arrange our EEG machine so that we can tell which hemisphere

is more active every few seconds, we find that in most of us this

measure switches back and forth between the hemispheres about once

a minute.
But in those schizophrenics so far tested, the switching

occurs only about every four minutes, an astonishing lag.
This may be

part of the explanation of the “segmental set” I have previously

referred to, that schizophrenics tend to “get stuck” on one hemisphere

or the other and so cannot shift from one mode of information

processing to another as fast as the rest of us.
Hence their confusion

and often illogical speech and behavior in interaction with us, who

switch back and forth at a faster rate.
40

It is possible that the explanation of this slower switching in

schizophrenia is anatomical.
A series of autopsies of long-term

schizophrenics have, surprisingly, shown that the corpus callosum

which connects the two hemispheres is 1 mm.
thicker than in normal

brains.
This is a statistically reliable result.
Such a difference may

mean more mutual inhibition of the hemispheres in schizophrenics.
41

The anterior commissures in this study were not measured.
If our theory is true, any extensive dysfunction of the left temporal

cortex due to disease, circulatory changes, or stress-induced alteration

of its neurochemistry should release the right temporal cortex from its

normal inhibitory control.
When temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by a

lesion on the left temporal lobe (or on both the left and right), thus

(presumably) releasing the right from its normal inhibition, a full 90

percent of the patients develop paranoid schizophrenia with massive

auditory hallucinations.
When the lesion is on the right temporal lobe

alone, fewer than 10 percent develop such symptoms.
In fact this latter

group tend to develop a manic-depressive psychosis.
42

These findings need to be confirmed and explored further.
But together

they indicate without doubt and for the first time significant laterality

effects in schizophrenia.
And the direction of these effects can be

interpreted as partial evidence that schizophrenia may be related to an

earlier organization of the human brain which I have called the bicameral

mind.
In Conclusion

Schizophrenia is one of our most morally prominent problems of

research, such the agony of heart that it spreads both in those afflicted and

in those who love them.
Recent decades have watched with gratitude a

strong and accelerating improvement in the way this illness is treated.
But

this has come about not under the banners of new and sometimes

flamboyant theories such as mine, but rather in the down-to-earth practical

aspects of day-to-day therapy.
Indeed, theories of schizophrenia—and they are legion—because they

have too often been the hobbyhorses of competing perspectives, have

largely defeated themselves.
Each discipline construes the findings of others

as secondary to the factors in its own area.
The socio-environmental

researcher sees the schizophrenic as the product of a stressful environment.
The biochemist insists that the stressful environment has its effect only

because of an abnormal biochemistry in the patient.
Those who speak in

terms of information processing say that a deficit in this area leads directly

to stress and counterstress defenses.
The defense-mechanism psychologist

views the impaired information processing as a self-motivated withdrawal

from contact with reality.
The geneticist makes hereditary interpretations

from family history data.
While others might develop interpretations about

the role of schizophrenogenic parental influence from the same data.
And

so on.
As one critic has expressed it, “Like riding the merry-go-round, one

chooses his horse.
One can make believe his horse leads the rest.
Then

when a particular ride is finished, one must step off only to observe that the

horse has really gone nowhere.
43

It is thus with some presumption that I add yet one more loading to this

heavy roster.
But I have felt impelled to do so, if only out of responsibility

in completing and clarifying the suggestiveness of earlier parts of this book.
For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage

practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier

were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind.
The presence of

auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative

quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog ‘I’, and of the mind-space in

which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.
But there are great differences as well.
If there is any truth to this

hypothesis, the relapse is only partial.
The learnings that make up a

subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed.
And

thus the terror and the fury, the agony and the despair.
The anxiety attendant

upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of

interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for

the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to

defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is

flooding all before it—produce a social withdrawal that is a far different

thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral

societies.
The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find

‘himself’ and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation.
And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with

hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around

him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-

owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.
The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture.
But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that

struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to

establish some kind of control in the middle of a mental organization in

which the hallucination ought to do the controlling.
In effect, he is a mind

bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world.
Chapter 6



The Auguries of Science

I HAVE TRIED in these few heterogeneous chapters of Book III to explain as

well as I could how certain features of our recent world, namely, the social

institutions of oracles and religions, and the psychological phenomena of

possession, hypnosis, and schizophrenia, as well as artistic practices such as

poetry and music, how all these can be interpreted in part as vestiges of an

earlier organization of human nature.
These are not in any sense a complete

catalogue of the present possible projections from our earlier mentality.
They are simply some of the most obvious.
And the study of their

interaction with the developing consciousness continually laying siege to

them allows us an understanding that we would not otherwise have.
In this final chapter, I wish to turn to science itself and point out that it

too, and even my entire essay, can be read as a response to the breakdown

of the bicameral mind.
For what is the nature of this blessing of certainty

that science so devoutly demands in its very Jacob-like wrestling with

nature?
Why should we demand that the universe make itself clear to us?
Why do we care?
To be sure, a part of the impulse to science is simple curiosity, to hold the

unheld and watch the unwatched.
We are all children in the unknown.
It is

no reaction to the loss of an earlier mentality to delight in the revelations of

the electron miscroscope or in quarks or in negative gravity in black holes

among the stars.
Technology is a second and even more sustaining source of

the scientific ritual, carrying its scientific basis forward on its own

increasing and uncontrollable momentum through history.
And perhaps a

deep aptic structure for hunting, for bringing a problem to bay, adds its

motivational effluence to the pursuit of truth.
But over and behind these and other causes of science has been

something more universal, something in this age of specialization often

unspoken.
It is something about understanding the totality of existence, the

essential defining reality of things, the entire universe and man’s place in it.
It is a groping among stars for final answers, a wandering the infinitesimal

for the infinitely general, a deeper and deeper pilgrimage into the unknown.
It is a direction whose far beginning in the mists of history can be distantly

seen in the search for lost directives in the breakdown of the bicameral

mind.
It is a search that is obvious in the omen literature of Assyria where, as

we saw in II.4 , science begins.
It is also obvious a mere half millennium

later when Pythagoras in Greece is seeking the lost invariants of life in a

theology of divine numbers and their relationships, thus beginning the

science of mathematics.
And so through two millennia, until, with a

motivation not different, Galileo calls mathematics the speech of God, or

Pascal and Leibnitz echo him, saying they hear God in the awesome

rectitudes of mathematics.
We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest

exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always

been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions.
But this effort

at special identity is loudly false.
It is not religion but the church and

science that were hostile to each other.
And it was rivalry, not

contravention.
Both were religious.
They were two giants fuming at each

other over the same ground.
Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine

revelation.
It was a competition that first came into absolute focus with the late

Renaissance, particularly in the imprisonment of Galileo in 1633.
The

stated and superficial reason was that his publications had not been first

stamped with papal approval.
But the true argument, I am sure, was no such

trivial surface event.
For the writings in question were simply the

Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system which had been

published a century earlier by a churchman without any fuss whatever.
The

real division was more profound and can, I think, only be understood as a

part of the urgency behind mankind’s yearning for divine certainties.
The

real chasm was between the political authority of the church and the

individual authority of experience.
And the real question was whether we

are to find our lost authorization through an apostolic succession from

ancient prophets who heard divine voices, or through searching the heavens

of our own experience right now in the objective world without any priestly

intercession.
As we all know, the latter became Protestantism and, in its

rationalist aspect, what we have come to call the Scientific Revolution.
If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should

always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search

for hidden divinity.
As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
In the late seventeenth century, to choose an obvious

example, it is three English Protestants, all amateur theologians and

fervently devout, who build the foundations for physics, psychology, and

biology: the paranoiac Isaac Newton writing down God’s speech in the

great universal laws of celestial gravitation; the gaunt and literal John

Locke knowing his Most Knowing Being in the riches of knowing

experience; and the peripatetic John Ray, an unkempt ecclesiastic out of a

pulpit, joyfully limning the Word of his Creator in the perfection of the

design of animal and plant life.
Without this religious motivation, science

would have been mere technology, limping along on economic necessity.
The next century is complicated by the rationalism of the Enlightenment,

whose main force I shall come to in a moment.
But in the great shadow of

the Enlightenment, science continued to be bound up in this spell of the

search for divine authorship.
Its most explicit statement came in what was

called Deism, or in Germany, Vernunftreligion.
It threw away the church’s

“Word,” despised its priests, mocked altar and sacrament, and earnestly

preached the reaching of God through reason and science.
The whole

universe is an epiphany!
God is right out here in Nature under the stars to

be talked with and heard brilliantly in all the grandeur of reason, rather than

behind the rood screens of ignorance in the murky mutterings of costumed

priests.
Not that such scientific deists were in universal agreement.
For some,

like the apostle-hating Reimarus, the modern founder of the science of

animal behavior, animal triebe or drives were actually the thoughts of God

and their perfect variety his very mind.
Whereas for others, like the

physicist.
Maupertuis, God cared little about any such meaningless variety

of phenomena; he lived only in pure abstractions, in the great general laws

of Nature which human reason, with the fine devotions of mathematics,

could discern behind such variety.1 Indeed, the tough-minded materialist

scientist today will feel uncomfortable with the fact that science in such

divergent and various directions only two centuries ago was a religious

endeavor, sharing the same striving as the ancient psalms, the effort to once

again see the elohim “face to face.”



This drama, this immense scenario in which humanity has been

performing on this planet over the last 4000 years, is clear when we take the

large view of the central intellectual tendency of world history.
In the

second millennium B.C., we stopped hearing the voices of gods.
In the first

millennium B.C., those of us who still heard the voices, our oracles and

prophets, they too died away.
In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings

and hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost

divinities.
And in the second millennium A.D., these writings lose their

authority.
The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to

discover the lost authorization in Nature.
What we have been through in

these last four millennia is the slow inexorable profaning of our species.
And in the last part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently

becoming complete.
It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest

endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of

the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have

been so mistaken.
This secularization of science, which is now a plain fact, is certainly

rooted in the French Enlightenment which I have just alluded to.
But it

became rough and earnest in 1842 in Germany in a famous manifesto by

four brilliant young physiologists.
They signed it like pirates, actually in

their own blood.
Fed up with Hegelian idealism and its pseudoreligious

interpretations of material matters, they angrily resolved that no forces other

than common physicochemical ones would be considered in their scientific

activity.
No spiritual entities.
No divine substances.
No vital forces.
This

was the most coherent and shrill statement of scientific materialism up to

that time.
And enormously influential.
Five years later, one of their group, the famous physicist and

psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz, proclaimed his Principle of the

Conservation of Energy.
Joule had said it more kindly, that “the Great

Agents of Nature are indestructible,” that sea and sun and coal and thunder

and heat and wind are one energy and eternal.
But Helmholtz abhorred the

mush of the Romantic.
His mathematical treatment of the principle coldly

placed the emphasis where it has been ever since: there are no outside

forces in our closed world of energy transformations.
There is no comer in

the stars for any god, no crack in this closed universe of matter for any

divine influence to seep through, none whatever.
All this might have respectfully stayed back simply as a mere working

tenet for Science, had it not been for an even more stunning profaning of

the idea of the holy in human affairs that followed immediately.
It was

particularly stunning because it came from within the very ranks of

religiously motivated science.
In Britain since the seventeenth century, the

study of what was called “natural history” was commonly the consoling joy

of finding the perfections of a benevolent Creator in nature.
What more

devastation could be heaped upon these tender motivations and consolations

than the twin announcement by two of their own midst, Darwin and

Wallace, both amateur naturalists in the grand manner, that it was evolution,

not a divine intelligence, that has created all nature.
This too had been put

earlier in a kindlier way by others, such as Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus

Darwin, or Lamarck, or Robert Chambers, or even in the exaltations of an

Emerson or a Goethe.
But the new emphasis was dazzling strong and

unrelieving.
Cold Un calculating Chance, by making some able to survive

better in this wrestle for life, and so to reproduce more, generation after

generation, has blindly, even cruelly, carved this human species out of

matter, mere matter.
When combined with German materialism, as it was in

the wantonly abrasive Huxley, as we saw in the Introduction to this essay,

the theory of evolution by natural selection was the hollowing knell of all

that ennobling tradition of man as the purposed creation of Majestic

Greatnesses, the elohim, that goes straight back into the unconscious depths

of the Bicameral Age.
It said in a word that there is no authorization from

outside.
Behold!
there is nothing there.
What we must do must come from

ourselves.
The king at Eynan can stop staring at Mount Hermon; the dead

king can die at last.
We, we fragile human species at the end of the second

millennium A.D., we must become our own authorization.
And here at the

end of the second millennium and about to enter the third, we are

surrounded with this problem.
It is one that the new millennium will be

working out, perhaps slowly, perhaps swiftly, perhaps even with some

further changes in our mentality.
The erosion of the religious view of man in these last years of the second

millennium is still a part of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
It is

slowly working serious changes in every fold and field of life.
In the

competition for membership among religious bodies today, it is the older

orthodox positions, ritually closer to the long apostolic succession into the

bicameral past, that are most diminished by conscious logic.
The changes in

the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of

this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of

consciousness into the human species.
The decay of religious collective

cognitive imperatives under the pressures of rationalist science, provoking,

as it does, revision after revision of traditional theological concepts, cannot

sustain the metaphoric meaning behind ritual.
Rituals are behavioral

metaphors, belief acted, divination foretold, exopsychic thinking.
Rituals

are mnemonic devices for the great narratizations at the heart of church life.
And when they are emptied out into cults of spontaneity and drained of

their high seriousness, when they are acted unfelt and reasoned at with

irresponsible objectivity, the center is gone and the widening gyres begin.
The result in this age of communications has been worldwide: liturgy

loosened into the casual, awe softening in relevance, and the washing out of

that identity-giving historical definition that told man what he was and what

he should be.
These sad temporizings, often begun by a bewildered clergy, 2

do but encourage the great historical tide they are designed to deflect.
Our

paralogical compliance to verbally mediated reality is diminished: we crash

into chairs in our way, not go around them; we will be mute rather than say

we do not understand our speech; we will insist on simple location.
It is the

divine tragedy or the profane comedy depending on whether we would be

purged of the past or quickened into the future.
What happens in this modern dissolution of ecclesiastical authorization

reminds us a little of what happened long ago after the breakdown of the

bicameral mind itself.
Everywhere in the contemporary world there are

substitutes, other methods of authorization.
Some are revivals of ancient

ones: the popularity of possession religions in South America, where the

church had once been so strong; extreme religious absolutism ego-based on

“the Spirit,” which is really the ascension of Paul over Jesus; an alarming

rise in the serious acceptance of astrology, that direct heritage from the

period of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in the Near East; or the

more minor divination of the I Ching, also a direct heritage from the period

just after the breakdown in China.
There are also the huge commercial and

sometimes psychological successes of various meditation procedures,

sensitivity training groups, mind control, and group encounter practices.
Other persuasions often seem like escapes from a new boredom of unbelief,

but are also characterized by this search for authorization: faiths in various

pseudosciences, as in Scientology, or in unidentified flying objects bringing

authority from other parts of our universe, or that gods were at one time actually such visitors; or the stubborn muddled fascination with

extrasensory perception as a supposed demonstration of a spiritual surround

of our lives whence some authorization might come; or the use of

psychotropic drugs as ways of contacting profounder realities, as they were

for most of the American native Indian civilizations in the breakdown of

their bicameral mind.
Just as we saw in III.2 that the collapse of the

institutionalized oracles resulted in smaller cults of induced possession, so

the waning of institutional religions is resulting in these smaller, more

private religions of every description.
And this historical process can be

expected to increase the rest of this century.
Nor can we say that modern science itself is exempt from a similar

patterning.
For the modern intellectual landscape is informed with the same

needs, and often in its larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious

gestures, though in a slightly disguised form.
These scientisms, as I shall

call them, are clusters of scientific ideas which come together and almost

surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific mythologies which fill

the very felt void left by the divorce of science and religion in our time.3

They differ from classical science and its common debates in the way they

evoke the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant.
And they share with religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a

rational splendor that explains everything, a charismatic leader or

succession of leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism, a series

of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of scientific

criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a

requirement of total commitment.
In return the adherent receives what the

religions had once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of

importances, and an auguring place where he may find out what to do and

think, in short, a total explanation of man.
And this totality is obtained not

by actually explaining everything, but by an encasement of its activity, a

severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that is not

explained is not in view.
The materialism I have just mentioned was one of the first such

scientisms.
Scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century were almost

numbed with excitement by dramatic discoveries of how nutrition could

change the bodies and minds of men.
And so it became a movement called

Medical Materialism, identified with relieving poverty and pain, taking to itself some of the forms and all of the fervor of the religions eroding around

it.
It captured the most exciting minds of its generation, and its program

sounds distantly familiar: education, not prayers; nutrition, not communion;

medicine, not love; and politics, not preaching.
Distantly familiar because Medical Materialism, still haunted with Hegel,

matured in Marx and Engels into dialectical materialism, gathering to itself

even more of the ecclesiastical forms of the outworn faiths around it.
Its

central superstition then, as now, is that of the class struggle, a kind of

divination which gives a total explanation of the past and predecides what

to do in every office and alarm of life.
And even though ethnicism,

nationalism, and unionism, those collective identity markers of modern

man, have long ago showed the mythical character of the class struggle, still

Marxism today is joining armies of millions into battle to erect the most

authoritarian states the world has ever seen.
In the medical sciences, the most prominent scientism, I think, has been

psychoanalysis.
Its central superstition is repressed childhood sexuality.
The

handful of early cases of hysteria which could be so interpreted become the

metaphiers by which to understand all personality and art, all civilization

and its discontents.
And it too, like Marxism, demands total commitment,

initiation procedures, a worshipful relation to its canonical texts, and gives

in return that same assistance in decision and direction in life which a few

centuries ago was the province of religion.
And, to take an example closer to my own tradition, I will add

behaviorism.
For it too has its central auguring place in a handful of rat and

pigeon experiments, making them the metaphiers of all behavior and

history.
It too gives to the individual adherent the talisman of control by

reinforcement contingencies by which he is to meet his world and

understand its vagaries.
And even though the radical environmentalism

behind it, of belief in a tabula rasa organism that can be built up into

anything by reinforcement has long been known to be questionable, given

the biologically evolved aptic structuring of each organism, these principles

still draw adherents into the hope of a new society based upon such control.
Of course these scientisms about man begin with something that is true.
That nutrition can improve health both of mind and body is true.
The class

struggle as Marx studied it in the France of Louis Napoleon was a fact.
The

relief of hysterical symptoms in a few patients by analysis of sexual

memories probably happened.
And hungry animals or anxious men

certainly will learn instrumental responses for food or approbation.
These

are true facts.
But so is the shape of a liver of a sacrificed animal a true fact.
And so the Ascendants and Midheavens of astrologers, or the shape of oil

on water.
Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts

become superstitions.
A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown

wild to serve a need to know.
Like the entrails of animals or the flights of

birds, such scientistic superstitions become the preserved ritualized places

where we may read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers

that can authorize our actions.
Science then, for all its pomp of factness, is not unlike some of the more

easily disparaged outbreaks of pseudoreligions.
In this period of transition

from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of

astrology, or a hundred other irrationalisms, the same nostalgia for the Final

Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause.
In the frustrations and sweat of

laboratories, it feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did

the Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry Sinais of

parched fact for some rich and brave significance flowing with truth and

exaltation.
And all of this, my metaphor and all, is a part of this transitional

period after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
And this essay is no exception.
Curiously, none of these contemporary movements tells us anything

about what we are supposed to be like after the wrinkles in our nutrition

have been ironed smooth, or “the withering away of the state” has occurred,

or our libidos have been properly cathected, or the chaos of reinforcements

has been made straight.
Instead their allusion is mostly backward, telling us

what has gone wrong, hinting of some cosmic disgrace, some earlier

stunting of our potential.
It is, I think, yet another characteristic of the

religious form which such movements have taken over in the emptiness

caused by the retreat of ecclesiastical certainty—that of a supposed fall of

man.
This strange and, I think, spurious idea of a lost innocence takes its mark

precisely in the breakdown of the bicameral mind as the first great

conscious narratization of mankind.
It is the song of the Assyrian psalms,

the wail of the Hebrew hymns, the myth of Eden, the fundamental fall from

divine favor that is the source and first premise of the world’s great

religions.
I interpret this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine

voices and assurances in a chaos of human directive and selfish privacies.
We see this theme of lost certainty and splendor not only stated by all the

religions of man throughout history, but also again and again even in

nonreligious intellectual history.
It is there from the reminiscence theory of

the Platonic Dialogues, that everything new is really a recalling of a lost

better world, all the way to Rousseau’s complaint of the corruption of

natural man by the artificialities of civilization.
And we see it also in the

modern scientisms I have mentioned: in Marx’s assumption of a lost “social

childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in complete beauty,” so

clearly stated in his earlier writings, an innocence corrupted by money, a

paradise to be regained.
Or in the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness

of neurosis in civilization and of dreadful primordial acts and wishes in

both our racial and individual pasts; and by inference a previous innocence,

quite unspecified, to which we return through psychoanalysis.
Or in

behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented faith that it is the

chaotic reinforcements of development and the social process that must be

controlled and ordered to return man to a quite unspecified ideal before

these reinforcements had twisted his true nature awry.
I therefore believe that these and many other movements of our time are

in the great long picture of our civilizations related to the loss of an earlier

organization of human natures.
They are attempts to return to what is no

longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are

characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are imbedded.
I do not mean that the individual thinker, the reader of this page or its

writer, or Galileo or Marx, is so abject a creature as to have any conscious

articulate willing to reach either the absolutes of gods or to return to a

preconscious innocence.
Such terms are meaningless applied to individual

lives and removed from the larger context of history.
It is only if we make

generations our persons and centuries hours that the pattern is clear.
As individuals we are at the mercies of our own collective imperatives.
We see over our everyday attentions, our gardens and politics, and children,

into the forms of our culture darkly.
And our culture is our history.
In our

attempts to communicate or to persuade or simply interest others, we are

using and moving about through cultural models among whose differences

we may select, but from whose totality we cannot escape.
And it is in this sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or appreciation or

praise for ourselves or for our ideas, that our communications are shaped

into these historical patterns, these grooves of persuasion which are even in

the act of communication an inherent part of what is communicated.
And

this essay is no exception.
No exception at all.
It began in what seemed in my personal

narratizations as an individual choice of a problem with which I have had

an intense involvement for most of my life: the problem of the nature and

origin of all this invisible country of touchless rememberings and

unshowable reveries, this introcosm that is more myself than anything I can

find in any mirror.
But was this impulse to discover the source of

consciousness what it appeared to me?
The very notion of truth is a

culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier

certainty.
The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness of

principle out there that can be sought for through the world as might an

Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of history, a direct

outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first two millennia after the

decline of the bicameral mind.
What was then an augury for direction of

action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an

innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.
Afterword

IT IS NOW more than a decade since this essay first appeared in book form,

and my publishers have encouraged me to add a postscript in which I might

discuss the general reaction to this book as well as changes I might make if

I were to rewrite it.
A favorite practice of some professional intellectuals when at first faced

with a theory as large as the one I have presented is to search for that loose

thread which, when pulled, will unravel all the rest.
And rightly so.
It is part

of the discipline of scientific thinking.
In any work covering so much of the

terrain of human nature and history, hustling into territories jealously

guarded by myriad aggressive specialists, there are bound to be such

errancies, sometimes of fact but I fear more often of tone.
But that the

knitting of this book is such that a tug on such a bad stitch will unravel all

the rest is more of a hope on the part of the orthodox than a fact in the

scientific pursuit of truth.
The book is not a single hypothesis.
There are four main hypotheses in Books I and II.
I welcome this

opportunity to add some comments to each of them.
1.
Consciousness is based on language.
Such a statement is of course

contradictory to the usual and I think superficial views of consciousness

that are embedded both in popular belief and in language.
But there can be

no progress in the science of consciousness until careful distinctions have

been made between what is intro-spectable and all the hosts of other neural

abilities we have come to call cognition.
Consciousness is not the same as

cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it.
The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to

confuse consciousness with perception.
Recently, at a meeting of the

Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a well-known and prestigious

philosopher stood up to object vociferously on this point.
Looking at me

directly, he exclaimed, “I am perceiving you at this moment.
Are you trying

to say that I am not conscious of you at this moment?” A collective

cognitive imperative in him was proclaiming in the affirmative.
But actually

he was being conscious of the rhetorical argument he was making.
He could

have better been conscious of me if he had turned away from me or had

closed his eyes.
This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand

Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” 1 And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to

see it any other way.
And in a later book Russell uses as an example of

consciousness “I see a table.”2 But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed.
Nor would a radical behaviorist

like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean

sense perception.
Just as in the case I mentioned above, I suggest Russell was not being

conscious of the table, but of the argument he was writing about.
In my own

notation, I would diagram the situation as

‘I’ → (I see a table).
Russell thought his consciousness was the second term, but in reality it was

the entire expression.
He should have found a more ethologically valid

example that was really true of his consciousness, that had really happened,

such as, “I think I will rewrite the Principia now that Whitehead’s dead” or

“How can I afford the alimony for another Lady Russell?” He would then

have come to other conclusions.
Such examples are consciousness in action.
“I see a table” is not.
Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately.
And this

can happen on a nonconscious level, as I have tried to describe in driving a

car.
Another way to look at the problem is to remember the behavior of

white blood cells, which certainly perceive bacteria and respond

appropriately by devouring them.
To equate consciousness with perception

is thus tantamount to saying that we have six thousand conscious entities

per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in our circulatory system—

which I think is a reductio ad absurdum.
Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and accessed

by it.
And when we begin to untease the fine reticulation of how language

generates consciousness we are on a very difficult level of theorizing.
The

primordial mechanisms by which this happens in history I have outlined

briefly and then in II:5 tried to show how this worked out in the

development of consciousness in Greece.
Consciousness then becomes

embedded in language and so is learned easily by children.
The general rule is: there is no operation in consciousness that did not occur in behavior first.
To briefly review, if we refer to the circle triangle problem on \[>], in

solving this struction we say, “I ‘see’ it’s a triangle,” though of course we

are not actually seeing anything.
In the struction of finding how to express

this solving of the problem, the metaphor of actual seeing pops into our

minds.
Perhaps there could be other metaphiers3 leading to a different texture of consciousness, but in Western culture ‘seeing’ and the other

words with which we try to anchor mental events are indeed visual.
And by

using this word ‘see’, we bring with it its paraphiers, or associates of actual

seeing.
In this way the spatial quality of the world around us is being driven into

the psychological fact of solving a problem (which as we remember needs

no consciousness).
And it is this associated spatial quality that, as a result of

the language we use to describe such psychological events, becomes with

constant repetitions this functional space of our consciousness, or mind-

space.
Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness.
It is the

space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this very

moment.
But who does the ‘seeing’?
Who does the introspecting?
Here we

introduce analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the similarity is

between relationships rather than between things or actions.
As the body

with its sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing, so there

develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to relate to this mental kind of ‘seeing’

in mind-space.
The analog ‘I’ is the second most important feature of

consciousness.
It is not to be confused with the self, which is an object of

consciousness in later development.
The analog ‘I’ is contentless, related I

think to Kant’s transcendental ego.
As the bodily I can move about in its

environment looking at this or that, so the analog ‘I’ learns to ‘move about’

in mind-space, ‘attending to’ or concentrating on one thing or another.
All the procedures of consciousness are based on such metaphors and

analogies with behavior, constructing a careful matrix of considerable

stability.
And so we narratize the analogic simulation of actual behavior, an

obvious aspect of consciousness which seems to have escaped previous

synchronic discussions of consciousness.
Consciousness is constantly

fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event.
This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a

physical world with its spatial successiveness which becomes the

successiveness of time in mind-space.
And this results in the conscious

conception of time which is a spatialized time in which we locate events

and indeed our lives.
It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other

way than as a space.
The basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog ‘I’

narratizing in a functional mind-space.
The denotative definition is, as it

was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable.
My list of features is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.
Nor are

they meant to be universal aspects of consciousness everywhere.
Given the

great cultural differences in the world today, just as in the world’s past, it

seems to me unreasonable to think that the features and emphases of

consciousness would be everywhere the same.
As it stands, the list I have given is I think incomplete.
At least two other

features should be added: concentration, which is the analog of sensory

attention, 4 and suppression, by which we stop being conscious of annoying thoughts, the behavioral analog of repugnance, disgust, or simply turning

away from annoyances in the physical world.
I would also take this opportunity of commenting on what is called in this

book conciliation or compatibilization, which have perplexed some readers.
At the risk of even more confusion, I would change this word to

consilience, which is Whewell’s better term for my intended meaning of

mental processes that make things compatible with each other.5 While this is not so obvious in waking life, it becomes extremely important in dreams.
Originally, I had written two chapters on dreams to go in the present

volume, but my publishers suggested that because of the length of the book,

it seemed more reasonable to save them for the next volume, which I hope

will appear in several years.6

Psychologists are sometimes justly accused of the habit of reinventing

the wheel and making it square and then calling it a first approximation.
I

would demur from agreement that that is true in the development that I have

just outlined, but I would indeed like to call it a first approximation.
Consciousness is not a simple matter and it should not be spoken of as if it

were.
Nor have I mentioned the different modes of conscious narratization

such as verbal (having imaginary conversations—certainly the most

common mode in myself), perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral

(imagining ourselves doing something), physiological (monitoring our

fatigue or discomfort or appetite), or musical (imagining music), all of

which seem quite distinct, with properties of their own.
Such modes have

obviously different neural substrates, indicating the complexity of any

possible neurology of consciousness.
2.
The bicameral mind.
The second main hypothesis is that preceding

consciousness there was a different mentality based on verbal

hallucinations.
For this I think the evidence is overwhelming.
Wherever we

look in antiquity, there is some kind of evidence that supports it, either in

literary texts or in archeological artifacts.
Apart from this theory, why are

there gods?
Why religions?
Why does all ancient literature seem to be about

gods and usually heard from gods?
And why do we have verbal hallucinations at all?
Before the publication

of this book, verbal hallucinations were not paid much attention to, except

as the primary indicator of schizophrenia.
But since that time, a flurry of

studies have shown that the incidence of verbal hallucinations is far more

widespread than was thought previously.
Roughly one third of normal

people hear hallucinated voices at some time.
Children hear voices from

their imaginary or we should say hallucinated playmates.
It has recently

been discovered that congenital quadriplegics who have never in their lives

spoken or moved, and are often regarded as “vegetables,” not only

understand language perfectly but also hear voices they regard as God.
7 The

importance I put on these studies taken together is that they clearly indicate

to me that there is a genetic basis for such hallucinations in us all, and that it

was probably evolved into the human genome back in the late Pleistocene,

and then became the basis (or the bicameral mind.
3.
The dating.
The third general hypothesis is that consciousness was

learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
I believe this is

true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from

the loss of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the

invention of a new mentality to replace the old one.
But actually there are two possibilities here.
A weak form of the theory

would state that, yes, consciousness is based on language, but instead of its

being so recent, it began back at the beginning of language, perhaps even

before civilization, say, about 12,000 B.C., at about the time of the beginning

of the bicameral mentality of hearing voices.
Both systems of mind then

could have gone on together until the bicameral mind became unwieldy and

was sloughed off, leaving consciousness on its own as the medium of

human decisions.
This is an extremely weak position because it could then explain almost anything and is almost undisprovable.
The strong form is of greater interest and is as I have stated it in

introducing the concept of the bicameral mind.
It sets an astonishingly

recent date for the introduction into the world of this remarkable privacy of

covert events which we call consciousness.
The date is slightly different in

different parts of the world, but in the Middle East, where bicameral

civilization began, the date is roughly 1000 B.C.
This dating I think can be seen in the evidence from Mesopotamia, where

the breakdown of the bicameral mind, beginning about 1200 B.C., is quite

clear.
It was due to chaotic social disorganizations, to overpopulation, and

probably to the success of writing in replacing the auditory mode of

command.
This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call

religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g.,

prayer, religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I

have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly

returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.
I would not now make as much of the Thera explosion as I did in II.3.
But that it did cause the disruption of theocracy in the Near East and hence

the conditions for the learning of a non-halludnatory mentality is I think

valid.
But in the general case, I would rather emphasize that the success of a

theocratic agricultural civilization brings with it overpopulation and thus the

seeds of its own breakdown.
This is suggested at least among the

civilizations of Mesoamerica, where the relative rapidity of the rise and fall

of civilizations with the consequent desertion of temple complexes contrasts

with the millennia-long civilizations in the older parts of the world.
But is this consciousness or the concept of consciousness?
This is the

well-known use-mention criticism which has been applied to Hobbes and

others as well as to the present theory.
Are we not confusing here the

concept of consciousness with consciousness itself?
My reply is that we are

fusing them, that they are the same.
As Dan Dennett has pointed out in a

recent discussion of the theory, 8 there are many instances of mention and

use being identical.
The concept of baseball and baseball are the same

thing.
Or of money, or law, or good and evil.
Or the concept of this book.
4.
The double brain.
When in any discussion or even in our thinking we

can use spatial terms, as in “locating” a problem or “situating” a difficulty

in an argument, as if everything in existence were spread out like land

before us, we seem to get a feeling of clarity.
This pseudo-clarity, as it should be called, is because of the spatial nature of consciousness.
So in

locating functions in different parts of the brain we seem to get an extra

surge of clarity about them—justified or not.
At the time I was writing that part of the book in the 1960s, there was

little interest in the right hemisphere.
Even as late as 1964, some leading

neuroscientists were saying that the right hemisphere did nothing,

suggesting it was like a spare tire.
But since then we have seen an explosion

of findings about right hemisphere function, leading, I am afraid, to a

popularization that verges on some of the shrill excesses of similar

discussions of asymmetrical hemisphere function in the latter part of the

nineteenth century9 and also in the twentieth century.
10

But the main results, even conservatively treated, are generally in

agreement with what we might expect to find in the right hemisphere on the

basis of the bicameral hypothesis.
The most significant such finding is that

the right hemisphere is the hemisphere which processes information in a

synthetic manner.
It is now well known from even more studies that the

right hemisphere is far superior to the left in fitting together block designs

(Kohs Block Design Test), parts of faces, or musical chords,11 and such

synthetic functions were indeed those of the admonitory gods in fitting

together civilizations.
The reader has by now guessed that a somewhat crucial experiment is

possible.
Since I have supposed that the verbal hallucinations heard by

schizophrenics and others are similar to those once heard by bicameral

people, could we not test out this cerebral location in the right temporal

lobe of the voices by one of the new brain imaging techniques, using

patients as they are hallucinating?
This has recently been tried using

cerebral glucography with positron tomography, a very difficult procedure.
Indeed, the results demonstrated that there was more glucose uptake

(showing more activity) in the right temporal lobe when the patient was

hearing voices.
12

I wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable.
The last, for

example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified version I have

presented) and the others true.
The two hemispheres of the brain are not the

bicameral mind but its present neurological model.
The bicameral mind is

an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity.
The last line of Book III sounds indeed like a ponderous finality of

judgment.
It is.
But it is also the beginning, the opening up of human nature

as we know it and feel it profoundly because consciously in ourselves, with

all its vicissitudes, clarities, and obscurities.
Because of the documentation,

we can see this most clearly in Greece in the first half of the first

millennium B.C., where the change can truly be called



The Cognitive Explosion.
With consciousness comes an increased importance of the spatialization

of time and new words for that spatialization, like chronos.
But that is to put

it too mildly.
It is a cognitive explosion with the interaction of

consciousness and the rest of cognition producing new abilities.
Whereas

bicameral beings knew what followed what and where they were, and had

behavioral expectancies and sensory recognitions just as all mammals do,

now conscious, humans can ‘look’ into an imagined future with all its

potential of terror, joy, hope, or ambition, just as if it were already real, and

into a past moody with what might have been, or savoring what did, the

past emerging through the metaphier of a space through whose long

shadows we may move in a new and magical process called remembrance

or reminiscence.
Reminiscent memory (or episodic memory, as it is sometimes called), 13

in sharp contrast to habit retention (or semantic memory), is new to the

world with consciousness.
And because a physical space in the world can

always be returned to, so we feel irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly

certain, that we should be able to return again to some often unfinished

relationship, some childhood scene or situation or regretted outburst of love

or temper or to undo some tragic chance action back in the imagined

inexistent space of the past.
We thus have conscious lives and lifetimes and can peer through the

murk of tomorrow toward our own dying.
With the prodding of Heraclitus

in the sixth century B.C., 14 we invent new words or really modifications of

old words to name processes or symbolize actions over time by adding the

suffix sis and so be conscious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a

knowing; genesis, a beginning; emphasis, a showing in; analysis, a loosening up; or particularly phronesis, which is variously translated as

intellection, thinking, understanding, or consciousness.
These words and the

processes they refer to are new in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C.
15



The Self

Along this new lifetime, putting together similar occurrences or excerpts

of them—inferences from what others tell us we are and from what we can

tell ourselves on the basis of our own consciousness of what we have done

—we come to construct or invent, on a continuing basis, in ourselves and in

others, a self.
The advantage of an idea of your self is to help you know

what you can or can’t do or should or should not do.
Bicameral individuals

had stable identities, names to which they or others could attach epithets,

but such verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the

consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that

shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.
Particularly with regard to the self, but also in all of the treacherous

terminology of mind, we must beware of the perils of polysemy or

homonymic or multireferential confusion, as I have called it elsewhere.
This results from the historical growth and inner alterations of most mental

terms; the referrent of a term changes usually with the addition of new

conscious referrents until the term is really multireferential.
“Self” is a good

example.
Originally, the word (or corresponding word in whatever

language) probably was simply used as an identity marker as in all its many

compounds: self-employed, self-discipline, etc.
Or as when we say a fly

washes itself.
But with the fractal-like proliferation and intensification of

consciousness through history, particularly since the twelfth century A.D., a

very different referrent of “self” came into existence.
It is the answer to the

question “Who am I?” Most social psychologists accept that denotation of

self.
Thus, as John Locke somewhere says, 16 if we cut off a finger, we have not diminished the self.
The body is not the self.
An early critic of my book

pointed to the well-known fact that mirrors were used far back into

antiquity17 and therefore such ancient peoples were conscious.
But we don’t see our selves in mirrors, although we say so; we see our faces.
The face is

not the self.
Because of the importance of this confusion and its frequency in

misunderstanding my book, I would like here to describe a few other

studies briefly.
When presented with mirrors, most fish, birds, or mammals react with complete disinterest or else engage in social or aggressive

displays or attack their mirror images.
But humans and chimpanzees are

different: they like mirrors.
Human children go through four stages of

behavior with respect to their mirror images.
At first there is little reaction,

then smiling, touching, vocalizing as if it were another child, then a stage of

testing or repetitive activity while observing the mirror image intently, and

then, when the child is almost two years old, the adult reaction to the image

as if it were its own.
18 The test for this final stage has been to smear rouge

on the child’s nose and then have the child look in a mirror and see if the

child touches its nose—which it readily does by age two.19

But the real interest in this phenomenon began when Gallup showed that

the same effect could be obtained with chimpanzees.
20 Chimpanzees after extensive experience with mirrors were put under deep anesthesia.
Then a

conspicuous spot of red dye was daubed on the brow or top half of an ear.
Upon awakening, the chimpanzees paid no attention to the markings,

showing that no local tactile stimulation was present.
But when a mirror

was provided, the chimpanzees, who by now were very familiar with their

mirror images, immediately reached for the color spot to rub or pick it off,

showing they knew the mirror images of themselves.
Other chimpanzees

that had had no experience with mirrors did not react in this way.
Hence it

was claimed that chimpanzees have selves and self-recognition.
Or, in the

words of one of the major senior figures in animal behavior, “the results

provide dear evidence of self-awareness in chimpanzees.”21

This conclusion is incorrect.
Self-awareness usually means the

consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our

hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others.
We

do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may

become the emblem of the self in many cases.
The chimpanzees in this

experiment and the two-year-old child learned a point-to-point relation

between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is.
Rubbing a spot

noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed

on the body without a mirror.
The animal is not shown to be imagining

himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting in

any sense—all signs of a conscious self.
This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made even clearer

by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner’s laboratory.
22 Essentially the

same paradigm was followed with pigeons, except that it required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, whereas the chimpanzee or child in the

earlier experiments was, of course, self-trained.
But after about fifteen

hours of such training when the contingencies were carefully controlled, it

was found that a pigeon also could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its

body which it could not see directly, though it had never been explicitly

trained to do so.
I do not think that a pigeon because it can be so trained has

a self-concept.
From Affect to Emotion

The new spatialized time in which events and experiences could be

located, remembered, and anticipated results not only in the conscious

construction of a self, but also in a dramatic alteration of our emotions.
We

share with other mammals a not very orderly repertoire of affects whose

neural substrate was evolved long ago by natural selection into the limbic

system deep in the brain.
I wish here to mention three: fear, shame, and

mating.
And in doing so I wish to forewarn the reader that terminology is

again a problem, particularly in this area—even the word affect, which I do

not like to use because it is so often confused with effect and sounds strange

to the nonprofessional.
By affect, psychology means to designate a

biologically organized behavior that has a specific anatomical expression

and a specific biochemistry, one that dissipates with time.
But with

consciousness, all this is changed.
I shall call this consciousness of a past or future affect an emotion, as that

is how we describe it.
And what I am proposing here is a two-tiered theory

of emotions for modern human beings as distinguished from bicameral man

and other animals.23 There are the basic affects of mammalian life and then our emotions, which are the consciousness of such affects located inside an

identity in a lifetime, past or future, and which, be it noted, have no

biologically evolved mechanisms of stopping.
From Fear to Anxiety

In fear, there are a class of stimuli, usually abrupt and menacing, which

stop the animal or person from ongoing behavior, provoke flight, and in

most social mammals produce specific bodily expressions and internally a

rise in the level of catecholamines in the blood, such as adrenalin and

noradrenalin.
This is the well-known emergency response, which dissipates

after a few minutes if the frightening object or situation is removed.
But with consciousness in a modern human being, when we reminisce

about previous fears or imagine future ones, fear becomes mixed with the

feeling of anxiety.
If we wish to make echoes here of the James-Lange

theory of the emotions, we would call anxiety the knowledge of our fear.
We see a bear, run away in fear, and have anxiety.
But anxiety as a rehearsal

of actual fear partially occasions the emergency response at least weakly.
It

is man’s new capacity for conscious imagery that can keep an analog of the

frightening situation in consciousness with a continuing response to it.
And

how to turn off this response with its biochemical basis was and I think still

is a problem for conscious human beings, particularly with the resulting

increase in catecholamine levels and all its long-term effects.
I would ask

you here to consider what it was like for an individual back in the first

millennium B.C.
to have these anxieties that did not have their own built-in

mechanism of cessation and before human beings learned conscious

mechanisms of thought for doing so.
This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by Herodotus of

the very first tragedy performed in Athens.
It was performed only once.
The

play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing the sack of that

Ionian city by the Persians in 494 B.C., a disaster that had happened the

previous year.
The reaction of the audience was so extreme that all Athens

could not function for several days.
Phrynicus was banished, never to be

heard of again, and his tragedy burnt.
From Shame to Guilt

The second biological affect I wish to consider here is shame.
Because it

is a socially evoked affect, it has rarely been studied experimentally, in

either animals or humans.
It is a complicated affect whose occasioning

stimuli often have to do with maintaining hierarchical relationships in

highly social animals, and is the submissive response to rejection by the

hierarchical group.
While such biological shame is apparent as a controlling

mechanism in carnivore groups, it is much more obvious among the

primates, and particularly in human beings.
We seem to be ashamed to talk

about shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by shame in

the past, so confined to a narrow band of socially acceptable behavior, that

it is rarely occasioned.
But when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throbbing

trauma of being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of inappropriately

crossing over from the private domain into the public countenance, the

agony when we do, particularly in relation to sexual and excretory

functions, toilet accidents of others or ourselves, but also in a milder form,

in wanting to be dressed the same as other children, to receive as many

valentines, and to be promoted with the rest, or have parents equal in

wealth, health, or promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten up or

teased by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when one is

really superior—anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk deeply into

one’s cohort—these are some of the most powerful and profound influences

on our development.
We should remember here that as we grow older, our

cohort is less and less our immediate peer group and more and more our

family tradition, race, religion, union, or profession, et cetera.
The physiological expression of shame or humiliation involves of course

blushing, dropping of the eyes and of the head, and the behavioral one of

simply hiding from the group.
Unfortunately, nothing is known about its

biochemical or neurological basis.
If you wish to feel shame in its pure form, this stepping outside what is

expected of you, simply stand out in a busy street and shout out the time in

minutes and seconds over the heads of everyone who passes by, and do it

for five minutes—or until you are taken away.
This is shame, but not guilt, because you have done nothing your society has taught you to call wrong.
And now consider what conscious reminiscence and imagery of the

future bring to this affect.
And particularly consider this in the milieu of

ethical right and wrong that developed as markers for behavior after the

breakdown of the bicameral mind with its certainty of gods’ directives.
Wrongs, or by another word, sins, or indeed anything that would eject us

from society if it were known or seem to eject us from society can be

reminisced about out of the past and worried about for the future.
And this

we call guilt.
No one before 1000 B.C.
ever felt guilt, even while shame was

the way groups and societies were held together.
To indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new emotion

at this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one that is well

known.24 This is the story of Oedipus.
It is referred to in two lines of the Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I think we can take as indicating

the true story, as it came down from bicameral times.
The story seems to be

about a man who killed his father and then unwittingly married his mother

and so became King of Thebes, proceeding to have several children-siblings

by his mother, then discovering what he had done, certainly feeling shame

since incest had always been a taboo, but evidently recovering from that

shame, living a happy life thereafter with his wife-mother, and dying with

royal honors sometime later.
This was written down around 800 B.C., but the

story comes from several centuries before that.
And then, only four hundred years later, we have the great trilogy of

Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, guilt so extreme that

a whole city is in famine because of it, so convulsive that the culprit when

he discovers his guilt is not worthy to look upon the world again and stabs

his eyes into darkness with the brooches clutched from his mother-wife’s

breasts, and is led away by his sister-daughters into a mystical death at

Colonus.
And again, there is no biological mechanism for getting rid of guilt.
How

to get rid of guilt is a problem which a host of learned social rituals of

reacceptance are now developed: scapegoat ceremonies among the Hebrews

(the word for sending away translates now as “forgiveness”), the similar

pharmakos among the Greeks (again the word aphesis for sending the

pharmakos away becomes the Greek for “forgiveness”), “purification”

ceremonies of many sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the

tashlik, the mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins of the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this).
Even

changing the nature of God to a forgiving father.
And I would also have you note here that while the affects are usually

discrete, and evoked in very specific kinds of situations for specific kinds of

responses, the emotions in consciousness are not discrete, can meld and

evoke each other.
I’ve just said that in guilt we can have worry about future

shameful experiences, which indeed is anxiety, and we thus have two

emotions, anxiety and guilt, coming together as an even more powerful

emotion.
From Mating to “Sex”

The third example I would consider here is the affect of mating.
It is

similar in some respects to other affects but in other ways quite distinct.
Animal studies show that mating, contrary to what the popular mind thinks,

is not a necessary drive that builds up like hunger or thirst (although it

seems so because of consciousness), but an elaborate behavior pattern

waiting to be triggered off by very specific stimuli.
Mating in most animals

is thus confined to certain appropriate times of the year or day as well as to

certain appropriate sets of stimuli as in another’s behavior, or pheromones,

light conditions, privacy, security, and many other variables.
These include

the enormous variety of extremely complicated courtship procedures that

for rather subtle evolutionary advantages seem in many animals almost

designed to prevent mating rather than to encourage it, as one might expect

from an oversimplified idea of the workings of natural selection.
Among

the anthropoid apes, in contrast to other primates, mating is so rare in the

natural habitat as to have baffled early ethologists as to how these most

human-like species reproduced at all.
So too perhaps with bicameral man.
But when human beings can be conscious about their mating behavior,

can reminisce about it in the past and imagine it in the future, we are in a

very different world, indeed, one that seems more familiar to us.
Try to

imagine what your “sexual life” would be if you could not fantasize about

sex.
What is the evidence for this change?
Scholars of the ancient world, I

think, would agree that the murals and sculptures of what I’m calling the

bicameral world, that is, before 1000B.C., are chaste; depictions with sexual

references are scarcely existent, although there are exceptions.
The modest,

innocent murals from bicameral Thera now on the second floor of the

National Museum in Athens are good examples.
But with the coming of consciousness, particularly in Greece, where the

evidence is most clear, the remains of these early Greek societies are

anything but chaste.25 Beginning with seventh century B.C.
vase paintings, with the depictions of ithyphallic satyrs, new, semidivine beings, sex seems

indeed a prominent concern.
And I mean to use the word concern, for it

does not at first seem to be simply pornographic excitement.
For example, on one island in the Aegean, Delos, is a temple of huge phallic erections.
Boundary stones all over Attica were in the form of what are called

herms: square stone posts about four feet high, topped with a sculptured

head usually of Hermes and, at the appropriate height, the only other

sculptured feature of the post, a penile erection.
Not only were these herms

not laughter-producing, as they certainly would be to children of today, they

were regarded as serious and important, since in Plato’s Symposium “the

mutilation of the herms” by the drunken general Alcibiades, in which he

evidently knocked off these protuberances with his sword around the city of

Athens, is regarded as a sacrilege.
Erect phalli of stone or other material have been found in large numbers

in the course of excavations.
There were amulets of phalli.
Vase paintings

show naked female dancers swinging a phallus in a Dionysian cult.
One

inscription describes the measures to be taken even in times of war to make

sure that the phallus procession should be led safely into the city.
Colonies

were obliged to send phalli to Athens for the great Dionysian festivals.
Even Aristotle refers to phallic farces or satyr plays which generally

followed the ritual performances of the great tragedies.
If this were all, we might be able to agree with older Victorian

interpretations that this phallicism was merely an objective fertility rite.
But

the evidence from actual sexual behavior following the advent of conscious

fantasy speaks otherwise.
Brothels, supposedly instituted by Solon, were

everywhere and of every kind by the fourth century B.C.
Vase paintings

depict every possible sexual behavior from masturbation to bestiality to

human threesomes, as well as homosexuality in every possible form.
The latter indeed began only at this time, due, I suggest, in part to the

new human ability to fantasize.
Homosexuality is utterly absent from the

Homeric poems.
This is contrary to what some recent Freudian

interpretations and even classical references of this period (particularly after

its proscription by Plato in The Laws as being contrary to physis, or nature), seeking authorization for homosexuality in Homer, having projected into

the strong bonding between Achilles and Patroclus.
And again I would have you consider the problem twenty-five hundred

years ago, when human beings were first conscious and could first fantasize

about sex, of how they learned to control sexual behavior to achieve a

stable society.
Particularly because erectile tissue in the male is more

prominent than in the female, and that feedback from even partial erections would promote the continuance of sexual fantasy (a process called

recruitment), we might expect that this was much more of a male problem

than a female one.
Perhaps the social customs that came into being for such

control resulted in the greater social separation of the sexes (which was

certainly obvious by the time of Plato) as well as an enhanced male

dominance.
We can think of modern orthodox Muslim societies in this

respect, in which an exposed female ankle or lock of hair is punishable by

law.
I certainly will admit that there are large vacant places in the evidence for

what I am saying.
And of course there are other affects, like anger

becoming our hatred, or more positive ones like excitement with the

magical touch of consciousness becoming joy, or affiliation consciousized

into love.
I have chosen anxiety, guilt, and sex as the most socially

important.
Readers of a Freudian persuasion will note that their theorizing

could begin here.
I hope that these hypotheses can provide historians more

competent than myself with a new way of looking at this extremely

important period of human history, when so much of what we regard as

modern psychology and personality was being formed for the first time.
There is so much more to do, so many more bays and inlets of history

and theory to explore.
The tracking of ancient mentalities is an ongoing

process that is leading to new insights and discoveries.
Since I do not know

Chinese, I could not address that part of the data in the book.
But I am

pleased that my associate Michael Carr, an expert in ancient Chinese texts,

is making up for that lack in a series of definitive papers.
26 The dating here

is approximately the same as in Greece, which has led some historians to

call this period the “axial age.”

Several scholars have explored the ramifications of the theory in

literature, particularly Judith Weissman, whose book with the working title

of Vision, Madness, and Morality, Poetry and the Theory of the Bicameral

Mind is being completed as I am writing.27 Thomas Posey is continuing his studies of verbal halludnations, Ross Maxwell is doing further historical

studies, and many others, such as D.
C.
Stove,28 I also thank for their

support and encouragement.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1990

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