ng."
As soon as the voice was through, I k n e w 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 life-guards 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 submis-sion, 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 15 L. N. Jayson, Mania (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1937), pp. 1-3.
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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 16 Straus, p. 229.
17 For those interested in pursuing this subject, see Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), which stresses the cultural differences, and Robert Sommer's Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), which examines spatial behavior in depth.
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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 solu-
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tion. 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.
C H A P T E R 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 clumsi-ness of expression. Thus, it is the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, controlling the right side of the body, which in right-handed 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, left-handed 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
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T h e three speech areas of the left hemisphere have different functions and values. T h e 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.
mixed dominance. But being exceptional, only 5 percent of the population, they can be left out of the present discussion.
The speech areas then are three, all on the left hemisphere in the great majority of mankind.1 They are: (I) 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 1 I am here following the late Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts, Speech and Brain-Mechanisms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), the traditional authority although some of it is out of date in the present explosion of knowledge in this area.
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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 postglacial millennia must often have depended! W h y 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 2 Joseph Bogen with his usual helpfulness has taken the time to point out to me the slipperiness of the evidence for just what regions are to be included in Wernicke's area. I am also indebted to my former student, Stevan Hamad, for invaluable discussion on many of these issues.
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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
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involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods.
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 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 l e f t or dominant hemisphere.
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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 3 I do not mean to imply that the bicameral transmission was the only function of the anterior commissure. This commissure interconnects most of the two temporal lobes, including a good part of the posterior portion of the inferior temporal convolution. This region is fed by a strong system of fibers sweeping down from the occipital lobe and is centrally important to visual gnostic functions. See E. G. Ettlinger, Functions of the Corpus Callosum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965).
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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: (I) 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
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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 4 Thi s is a general observation — true of cases I have interviewed personally.
5 T h e Wad a test is presently part of presurgical procedures before brain surgery in the Montreal Neurological Institute. See J. Wada and T. Rasmussen, "Intracarotid Injection of Sodium Amytal for the Lateralization of Cerebral Speech Dominance,"
Journal of Neurosurgery, 1960, 17: 266-282.
6 M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, R. W. Sperry, "Laterality effects in somesthesis following cerebral commissurotomy in man," Neuropsychologia, 1: 209-215. See also Stuart Dimond's excellent discussion of the problem in his The Double Brain (Edinburgh and London: Churchill Livingstone, 1 9 7 2 ) , p. 84.
7 Aaron Smith, "Speech and other functions after left (dominant) hemispherec-tomy," Journal of Neurology Neurosurgical Psychiatry, 29 : 4 6 7 - 4 7 1 .
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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 8 Wilder Penfield and Phanor Perot, "The brain's record of auditory and visual experience: a final summary and discussion," Brain, 1963, 86: 595—702.
9 Though presumably the particular aura of the epilepsy had been occasioned by the spread of cortical excitation from the lesion to these same areas.
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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
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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, ‘Sylvere, Sylvere!’ 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
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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
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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
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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.
10 The literature on these patients of Joseph E. Bogen is still expanding. I would recommend his classical papers, particularly "The other side of the brain, II: An appositional mind," Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society, 1969, 34 (3) : 135-162. For a discussion by one of the pioneers in hemispheric research, R. W.
Sperry, "Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness," American Psychologist, 1968, 23: 723-733. And for a readable account by the man whose in-genuity devised ways of testing these patients, read Michael Gazzaniga's The Bisected Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970).
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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 nondomi-11 M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry, "Observations on visual perception after disconnection of the cerebral hemispheres in man," Brain, 8: 221-236, 1965.
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nant 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 12 M. S. Gazzaniga and R. W. Sperry, “Language after section of the cerebral commissures,” Brain, 1967, 90.131-148.
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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 13 R. W. Sperry, "Hemisphere Deconnection."
14 H. W. Gordon and R. W. Sperry, "Olfaction following surgical disconnection of the hemisphere in man," Proceedings of the Psychonomic Society, 1968.
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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
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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 brain-damaged 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 15 H. Hecaen, "Clinical Symptomatology in Right and Left Hemispheric Lesions,"
in Inter hemispheric Relations and Cerebral Dominance, V. B. Mountcastle, ed.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962).
16 Brenda Milner, "Visually guided maze learning in man: effects of bilateral, frontal, and unilateral cerebral lesions," Neuropsychologia, 1965, 3: 317-338.
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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 E E G
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 E E G 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 17 R. W. Sperry, Film presented at Princeton, February 1971.
18 David Galin and R. E. Ornstein, "Lateral specialization of cognitive mode: an EEG study," Psychofhysiology, 1972, 9: 412-418.
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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.
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
These faces are mirror images of
going up on their left. They were thus judg—
each other. Stare at the nose of
ing the face with their right hemispheres, as—
each. Which face is happier?
suming, 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.
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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 likeliho6d 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 19 These experiments were done by Jack Shannon. We are both grateful to Stevan Harnad for his criticism and suggestions.
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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 seaPs 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 "representations" of a function lying at successively higher 20 H. Hecaen and R. Angelergues, "Agnosia for Faces (Prosopagnosia)," Archives of Neurology 7: 92-100, 1962; A. L. Benton and M. W. Allen, "Impairment in Facial Recognition in Patients with Cerebral Disease," Cortex, 1968, 4: 345-358.
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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 21 Hughlings Jackson, "Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System," in Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, J. Taylor, ed. (London: Staples Press, 1958), 2: 45-75.
22 R. Galambos, T. T. Norton, and G. P. Fromer, "Optic tract lesions sparing pattern vision in cats," Experimental Neurology, 1967, 18: 18-25.
23 I am paraphrasing the superb recent review of this problem by Burton Rosner,
"Brain functions," Annual Review of Psychology, 1970, 21: 555-594.
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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 de-24 P. W. Nathan and M. C. Smith, "Normal mentality associated with a malde-veloped Rhinencephalon," Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 1950, 13: 191—197, as cited in Rosner.
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velopmental 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.
25 R. E. Saul and R. W. Sperry, "Absence of commissurotomy symptoms with agenesis of the corpus callosum," Neurology, 1968, 18: 307; D. L. Reeves and C. B. Carville, "Complete agenesis of corpus callosum: report of four cases," Bulletin of Los Angeles Neurological Society, 1938, 3 : 169—181.
C H A P T E R 6
T h e 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.
T H E E V O L U T I O N O F G R O U P S
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
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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 yak-king, 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 1 Irven DeVore and K, R. L. Hall, "Baboon Ecology, " Ch. 2 in Primate Behavior, I. DeVore, ed. (New Y o r k : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 20—52.
2 K. R. L. Hall , " T h e sexual, agonistic, and derived social behaviour patterns of the wild chacma baboon, Pafio ursinus" Proceedings of the Zoological Society, London, 1962, 139: 283—327.
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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 motion-3 Peter Marler, "Communication in monkeys and apes," Ch. 16, in Primate Behavior.
4 As is known in some birds. See M. Konishi, "The role of auditory feedback in the vocal behavior of the domestic fowl," Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 1963, 20: 349-367.
5 G. Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
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less 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 open-ness 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.
T H E E V O L U T I O N O F L A N G U A G E
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
*6 Glynn L. Isaac, “Traces of Pleistocene Hunters: An East African Example,” in Man the Hunter, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1968).
7 This group size is approximately the same for modern tribal hunters when they are nomadic. But the case is not the same. See Joseph B. Birdsell, “On population structure in generalized hunting and collecting populations,” Evolution, 1958, 12: 189-205.
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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 climactically 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 lati-
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tudes.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 8 See J. D. Clark, “Human ecology during the Pleistocene and later times in Africa south of the Sahara,” Current Anthropology, 1960, 1: 307-324.
9 See Karl W. Butzer, Environment and Archaeology: An Introduction to Pleistocene Geography (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1964), p. 378.
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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!5 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 quali-fiers 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 10 Julian Jaynes, "The evolution of language in the Late Pleistocene," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 280, 1976, in press.
T H E O R I G I N O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N 1 3 3
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!5 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.
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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, pen-dants, 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 far-
T H E O R I G I N O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N 1 3 5
fetched. 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
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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 'thought5 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 11 As at Choukoutien during the Middle Pleistocene and later in the Croatian cave of Krapina. See Grahame Clark and Stewart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 61.
12 Grahame Clark, The Stone Age Hunters (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 105.
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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, lux-uriant 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
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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.
T H E F I R S T G O D
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 13 R. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan: Expedition of 1904: Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1908), pp. 65-66.
14 V. G. Childe, The Most Ancient East, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).
15 A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 304—305.
16 Butzer, p. 416.
T H E O R I G I N O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N 1 3 9
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 17 See J. Perrot, "Excavations at Eynan, 1959 season," Israel Exploration Journal}
1961, 10: ij James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), Ch. 2; Clark and Piggott, p. 15 off.
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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'
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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 ex-
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tended 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.
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 T h e first god: the dead king of
Eynan propped up on a pillow of
stones in about 9000 B.C., as discovered by excavations in 1 9 5 9 .
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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.
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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 subsis-tence 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., 18 See R. J. Braidwood, "Levels in pre-history: A model for the consideration of the evidence," in Evolution After Darwin, S. Tax, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, i960), Vol. 2, pp. 143-15 1.
19 Butzer, p. 464.
20 See K. W. Butzer, "Archaeology and geology in ancient Egypt," Science, 1960, 132: 1617—1624.
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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
C H A P T E R 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
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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.
T H E H O U S E S O F G O D S
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
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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.
1 General sources consulted here include Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1965); James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); and Grahame Clark, World Prehistory: A New Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
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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 heav-ing up above the excavated ruins of its once bicameral civiliza-
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tion, 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 Boghazkoy in central Turkey,2 had four huge temples with great granite sanctuaries that projected beyond the main fagades 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 Hit-2 The Hittites may be an example of a group of nomadic tribes learning’ a bicameral civilization from their neighbors. It is the sudden intrusion of brightly decorated polychrome pottery among the burnished monochrome pottery of the Cappadocian plateau in the archaelogical record dating about 2100 b.c. that is taken to be the indication of their arrival, probably from the steppes of southern Russia.
3 Good photographs of Yazilikaya may be seen in Ch. 3 of Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). An explanatory discussion may be found in Ekron Akurgal, Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey (Istanbul, 1969).
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Rock relief at Yazilikaya, about
1250 B.C. The god Sharruma
holds his steward-king, Tudha—
liys, in his embrace. The pretzel—
like hieroglyph for deity is seen
both as the head in the god's
ideogram on the upper left and
repetitively on the god's crown.
It is 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.
tites, 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 pankush appears in any text could indicate their collective silence and the beginning of the troublous change toward subjectivity.
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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 4 See in this connection C. A. Burland, The Gods of Mexico (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967) ; and also G. H. S. Bushnell, The First Americans: The Pre-Columbian Civilizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
5 It was constructed of nearly 3 million tons of clay adobes, thus requiring* a tremendous number of man-hours. For a way of understanding such hand labor (Mesoamerica did not have the wheel), see p. 427.
6 See S. Linne, Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico (Stockholm: Ethnographic Museum of Sweden, 1934); also Miguel Covarrubias, Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (New York: Knopf, 1957).
7 See Victor W. von Hagen, World of the Maya (New York: New American Library, 1960).
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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, 8 J. Erik S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 186. 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?
9 This is partly due to the fact that a new bicameral civilization in an area tends to obliterate the remains of its predecessor. Bicameral gods are jealous gods.
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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. IOOQ
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 Chan-10 The next culture, the Paracas, from about 400 B.C. to a.d. 400, is a mysterious anomaly. They left no building sites, only 400 or so brightly robed mummies in deep subterranean caverns on the Paracas peninsular.
11 So-called. As in all these early civilizations we have no idea what they called themselves.
12 Aerial views of their cities look very similar to those of Mesopotamia in the bicameral period. Other cultures, such as the lea Nazca, also existed at the same time to the south. Little, however, remains except the mysterious lines and figures, some running for miles in length in the dry valleys of Nazca, and gigantic bird or insect outlines, acres in area, for which no one can suggest an explanation.
13 So complete and swift was their collapse around a.d. 1300, perhaps due to over-expansion (see II.3 for reasons why bicameral kingdoms are unstable), that 250
years later, after the European invasion, no one had heard anything about them.
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Chan, 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 14 J. H. Rowe, "Inca Culture at the time of the Spanish Conquest," in J. H.
Steward, Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1946-50).
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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.
15 As reported by Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of the Conquistador, quoted by V. W.
von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 113.
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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, milk-skinned 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.
16 For a detailed readable recent account, see John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
17 There were no thieves in Cuzco and no doors: a stick crosswise in front of the open doorway was a sign that the owner was not in and nobody would enter.
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T H E L I V I N G D E A D
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 1.6, 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 Hliyiik, 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 18 See C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations, Vol. 2 (London and Philadelphia, 1934).
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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.
19 This information is given on a cone by Urukagina, king of Lagash, who proceeded to reduce these amounts somewhat. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 151.
20 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 21 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), and, more extensively, his The Indus Civilization, 2nd ed., supplementary volume to The Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
22 See William Watson, Early Civilization in China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966)-, and also Chang Kwang-Chih, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
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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 23 Chariot burials complete with slaughtered horses and charioteers become more frequent toward the end of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century b.c. and continue into the Chou dynasty of the eighth century b.c. when they cease. Why all this? Unless the dead kings were thought to still live and need their chariots and servants because their speech was still heard?
24 Von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 109.
25 Von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 121.
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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 'mixed5 with the family, he came forth in a kindly mood.
26 Heidel, The Gilgamesh E f i c , pp. 153, 196.
27 Quoted by Covarrubias, p. 123.
28 Hesiod, Works and Days, 12 of.
29 Republic, 469A; and also Cratylus, 398.
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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.
I D O L S T H A T S P E A K
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
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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 fash-30 Mellaart, p. 106; see also Clark and Piggott, p. 204.
31 See Flinders Petrie, Prehistoric Egypt (London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1920), pp. 27, 36. Even gods are sometimes shown using hand-held idols.
An Anatolian example may be found in Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 51; and a Mayan example on the north face of Stela F in A. P. Maudslay, Archaeology in Biologia Centrali-Americana (New York: Arte Primitivo, 1975), Vol. II, Plate 36.
32 For later rituals of giving them supernatural power, see H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), pp. 301-303.
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ioned 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 prog-nathism 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 reli-quaries 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, 33 See Burland, The Gods of Mexico, p. 22f.; Bushnell, The First Americans, p. 37f.
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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.
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 cracker-like 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 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. T h e stag is the symbol
of the goddess Ninhursag.
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.
34 See M. E. L. Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia and Iran (New York : McGraw-Hill) 1965, Ch. 2.
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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 superiors 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 un-recorded 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-35 Illustrated in many general texts including Mallowan, pp. 43, 45.
36 See Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia, p. 55.
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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 that
their enlarged eyes were once made of quartz
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
37 See, for example, the illustrations in Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley.
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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 3 they are often found in burials as at the Olmec-influenced site of Tlatilco, near Mexico City, of about T h e god Abu, with an unknown
goddess on facing page. Both
were found in a temple at T e l l
Asmar near present-day Baghdad
and are now in its museum.
From about 2600 B.C.
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500 B.C., as if the deceased was buried with his own personal idol which still could tell him
what to do.
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
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 Mayan god, a stela about twelve
with the notion that such prepared heads were
feet high, from Copan in Hon—
duras. It was carved about so treated because they 'contained' the voices 700 A.D.
of their former owners.
38 As quoted by von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 109.
39 Landa as quoted by von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 110.
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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 40 Von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 32.
41 All quotations here are from Landa, a Spaniard who was describing what he saw in the sixteenth century as quoted by J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion, pp. 189—91.
42 The Incas too had a variety of idols that they called gods, some life-sized, cast of gold or silver, others of stone crowned and dressed in robes, all these found by Spaniards in outlying temples of the Inca empire. See von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, pp. 134, 152.
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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: " W h a t pernicious portent have you tolerated in the royal i m a g e ? " 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: " T a k e 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 43 R. H. Pfeiffer, State Letters of Assyria (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1935), p. 174.
44 C. A. Burland, The Gods of Mexico, p. 47.
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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. T h e 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
45 Anonymous, The Conquest of Peru, with a translation and annotations by J. H. Sinclair (New York: New York Public Library, 1929), p. 37f.
46 Father Joseph De Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (London : Hakluyt Society, 1880), 2: 325f.
C H A P T E R 2
Literate Bicameral Theocracies
WHAT is writing? Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events. And that is an amaz-ing 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
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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 samsu 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
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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.
M E S O P O T A M I A : T H E G O D S
A S O W N E R S
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 1 Most of this material is well known and may be found in a number of excellent works, including H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962); The Cambridge Ancient History, Vols. 1-3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); George Roux, Ancient Iraq (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966); and A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
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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
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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 Bau 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 field5' and "all the rich graineries of Lagash to make to 2 Column 11, lines 4-14, as in George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of burner and Akkad (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1929). Italics mine as in quotations following.
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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 s p eaker, 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 en-snared. 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 perti-nent passage from a different context describes reading a stele at night:
T h e 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?
3 Ibid., p. 327.
4 Ibid p. 61. Inim-ma is here translated as "incantations."
5 Ibid., p. 47.
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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, 6 Ibid., p. 320.
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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 7 See the translation of this text by Sidney Smith in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January 1925, as quoted by S. H. Hooke, Babylonian and Assyrian Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), pp. 118-121.
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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 Hi. 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 8 Thorkild Jacobsen has felt that the personal god "appears as the personification of a man's luck and success." I am insisting that this is an unwarranted modern imposition. See his "Mesopotamia," in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, H. Frankfort, et al., eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 203.
9 Saggs, p. 301f.
10 Frankfort et al., p. 306.
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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.
E G Y P T : T H E K I N G S A S G O D S
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 al-11 Saggs, p. 343f.
12 G. M. Morant, "Study of Egyptian craniology from prehistoric to Roman times,"
Biometrika, 1925, 17: 1-52.
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lowed 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.
13 In addition to texts otherwise cited, I have used for this part of the chapter John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); W. W. Hallo and W. K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
14 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 28.
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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.
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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 empal-aced. 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 unanswer-ableness. 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 offer-
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ings 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
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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 15 Ibid., p. 61.
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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 ili 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 16 Ibid., p. 68.
17 But see Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (Oxford, 1957), p. 172, note 12.
18 Frankfort, p. 68; cf. also John A. Wilson, "Egypt: the values of life," Ch. 4
in Frankfort, et al., p. 97.
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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
Perhaps evidence for a growing complexity in all this are several texts from the eighteenth dynasty or 1500 B.C. onward, 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.
19 Illustrated in Figure 23 in Frankfort.
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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, in-
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eluding 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.
T H E T E M P O R A L C H A N G E S I N
T H E O C R A C I E S
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, in-dustries, 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 20 Hans Goedicke, The Report About the Dispute of a Man with his Ba, Papyrus Berlin 3024 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970).
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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: T h e people became numerous . . .
T h e god was depressed by their uproar
Enlil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
T h e 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.
21 Quoted by Saggs, Greatness That Was Babylon, pp. 384-385.
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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 22 According to cuneiform tablets found by Sir Leonard Woolley in association with Pa-Sag's rather poorly carved limestone effigy. See C. L. Woolley, Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years Work (London: Benn, 1954), pp. 190-192.
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that time. Literary sources describe people fleeing towns, noble-men 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
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