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Highlights and Notes
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?
It is the difference that will not go away,
Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.
There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are.
wonderful tapestry of inner experience
We are not trying to explain how we interact with our environment, but rather the particular experience that we have in introspecting.
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?
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.
that acrid pessimism that is sometimes curiously associated with really hard science.
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.
Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
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.
Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.
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.
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 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.
knew not what they did.
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.
Obviously, the second line was added by a later poet who in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was saying.
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.
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 left hand, in a sense the hand of the gods,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the famous Pyramid Texts around 2200 B.C., the dead are called “masters of their ka’s.”
Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him (“under-stands”).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
What we need is a paleontology of consciousness,
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.
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.
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.
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.
All illnesses, aches, and pains were ascribed to malevolent demons until medicine became exorcism.
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.
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.
this use of stars to obtain the intentions of the silent gods who now live among them has become our familiar horoscopes,
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,
exopsychic
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
Consciousness and morality are a single development.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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 city (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the Muses who, he tells us, always sing together with the same phrenes15 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rituals are behavioral metaphors, belief acted, divination foretold, exopsychic thinking.
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 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.
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.
Peyote, incidentally, was used by most Mesoamerican Indians when their bicamerality was breaking down. The exceptions were the Maya and they are the only ones to have any kind of writing. Is it possible that ‘reading’ or hallucinating from glyphs functioned for the Maya as did hallucinogenic peyote for others? [back]
I must ask the forbearance of professional scholars for my inconsistency in straining for the English here while keeping other terms such as elohim and nabi in the Hebrew My purpose is the defamiliarization which I feel is essential for my main point