The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

B.C., as we shall see in the next chapter.

The Idea of Law

But nothing of this extent ever happens in southern Mesopotamia. Of course there are wars. City-states fought each other over whose god and therefore which steward was to rule over which fields. But there was never any total collapse of authority as occurred in Mesoamerica and in Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom.

One of the reasons, I think, was the greater resiliency of the

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steward-king type of theocracy. And another, not unconnected reason was the use to which writing was put. Unlike in Egypt, writing in Mesopotamia was early put to civil use. By 2100 B.C.

in Ur, the judgments of gods through their steward mediums began to be recorded. This is the beginning of the idea of law.

Such written judgments could be in several places and be continuous through time, thus allowing the cohesiveness of a larger society. We know of nothing similar in Egypt until almost a millennium later.

In 1792 B.C., the civil use of writing in this way breaks open an almost new kind of government in that commanding figure of Mesopotamian history, the greatest of all steward kings, Hammurabi, steward of Marduk, the city god of Babylon. His long stewardship, lasting to 1750 B.C., is a pulling together of most of the city-states of Mesopotamia into an hegemony under his god Marduk in Babylon. This process of conquest and influence is made possible by letters and tablets and stelae in an abundance that had never been known before. It is even thought that he was the first literate king who did not need a scribe, since all his cuneiform letters are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand. Writing was a new method of civil direction, indeed the model that begins our own memo-communicating government.

Without it such a unification of Mesopotamia could not have been accomplished. It is a method of social control which by hindsight we know will soon supplant the bicameral mind.

His most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps misnamed Code of Hammurabi.23 Originally, it was an eight-foot-high black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly idol of himself. So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward's statue, to "hear my words" (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previ-23 For a translation I have used Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904).

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Hammurabi hallucinating judgments from his god Marduk (or possibly Shamash) as carved on the top of a stele listing those judgments. About 1750 B.C.

ous judgments of the steward's god are recorded. His god, as I have said, was Marduk, and the top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene of judgment-giving. The god is seated on a raised mound which in Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain. An aura of flames flashes up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it is Shamash, the sun-god). Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him ("understands"). The god holds in his right hand the attributes of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions. With these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward, Hammurabi. One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each other, impassively majestic, the steward-king's right hand held up between us, the observers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. Ham-

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murabi has no subjective-self to narratize into such a relationship. There is only obedience. And what is being dictated by Marduk are judgments on a series of very specific cases.

As written on the stele beneath this sculptured relief, the judgments of Marduk are sandwiched in between an introduction and an epilogue by Hammurabi himself. Here with pomp and fury he boasts of his deeds, his power, his intimacy with Marduk, describes the conquests he has made for Marduk, the reason for the setting up of this stele, and ends with dire implications as to the evil that will befall anyone who scratches out his name. In vainglory and naivete both prologue and epilogue remind us of the Iliad.

But in between are the 282 quiet pronouncements of the god.

They are serenely reasoned decisions about the apportioning of commodities among different occupations, how house slaves or thieves or unruly sons were punished, the eye-for-an-eye-and-tooth-for-a-tooth kind of recompensing, judgments about gifts and deaths and adopting children (which seems to have been a considerable practice), and of marriage and servants and slaves

— all in a cold economy of words in contrast to the bellicose blustering of the prologue and epilogue. Indeed they sound like two very different 'men' and in the bicameral sense I think they were. They were two separately integrated organizations of Hammurabi's nervous system, one of them in the left hemisphere writing the prologue and epilogue and standing in effigy at the side of the stele, and the other in the right hemisphere composing judgments. And neither of them was conscious in our sense.

While the stele itself is clearly evidence for the bicameral mind in some form, the problems to which the god's words are addressed are indeed complex. It is very difficult to imagine doing the things that these laws say men did in the eighteenth century B.C. without having a subjective consciousness in which to plan and devise, deceive and hope. But it should be remembered how rudimentary all this was and how misleading our

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modern words can be. The word that is incorrectly translated as

"money" or even as "loan" is simply kaspu, meaning silver. It cannot mean money in our sense since no coins have ever been found. Similarly, what has been translated as rents is really tithing, an agreement marked on a clay tablet to return a portion of the produce of a field to its owner. Wine was not so much purchased as exchanged, one measure of wine for one measure of grain. And the use of some modern banking terms in some translations is downright inaccurate. As I have mentioned before, in many translations of cuneiform material, there is the constant attempt on the part of scholars to impose modern categories of thought on these ancient cultures in order to make them more familiar and therefore supposedly more interesting to modern readers.

These rules of the stele should not be thought of in the modern terms of laws which are enforced by police, something unknown at that time. Rather they are lists of practices in Babylon itself, the statements of Marduk, which needed no more enforcement than their authenticity on the stele itself.

The fact that they were written down and, more generally, the wide use of visual writing for communication indicate, I think, a reduction in the auditory hallucinatory control of the bicameral mind. Together, they put into motion cultural determinants which, coming together with other forces a few centuries later, resulted in a change in the very structure of the mind itself.

Let me summarize.

I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time; that instead each person had a part of his

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nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.

The total pattern, I suggest, is in agreement with such a view.

It is, of course, not conclusive. However, the astonishing consistency from Egypt to Peru, from Ur to Yucatan, wherever civilizations arose, of death practices and idolatry, of divine government and hallucinated voices, all are witness to the idea of a different mentality from our own.

But it would be an error, as I have tried to show, to regard the bicameral mind as a static thing. True, it developed from the ninth millennium B.C. to the second millennium B.C. with the slowness that makes any single century seem as static as its ziggurats and temples. Millennia are its units of time. But the tempo of development at least in the Near East picks up as we reach the second millennium B.C. The gods of Akkad, like the ka's of Egypt, have multiplied in complexity. And as this complexity develops, there is the first unsureness, the first need for personal gods to intercede with the higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared.

From the royal corpse propped up on its stones under its red parapet in Eynan, still ruling its Natufian village in the hallucinations of its subjects, to the mighty beings that cause thunder and create worlds and finally disappear into heavens, the gods were at the same time a mere side effect of language evolution and the most remarkable feature of the evolution of life since the development of Homo sapiens himself. I do not mean this simply as poetry. The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experi-

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ence into articulated speech which then 'told' the man what to do.

That such internally heard speech often needed to be primed with the props of the dead corpse of a chieftain or the gilded body of a jewel-eyed statue in its holy house, of that I have really said nothing. It too requires an explanation. I have by no means dared the bottom of the matter, and it is only to be hoped that complete and more correct translations of existing texts and the increasing tempo of archaeological excavation will give us a truer understanding of these long long millennia which civilized mankind.

C H A P T E R 3

The Causes of Consciousness

AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.”

This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance.

But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes.

Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world.

Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.

These are the momentous themes of the present chapter.

1 Proverb 1:145 in Edmund I. Gordon,

Sumerian Proverbs

(Philadelphia: University Museum, 1959), p. 113.

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The Instability of Bicameral Kingdoms

In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments with militarism and police repression. This association should not be applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era. Militarism, police, rule by fear, are all the desper-ate measures used to control a subjective conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their multitudi-nous privacies of hopes and hates.

In the bicameral era, the bicameral mind was the social control, not fear or repression or even law. There were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral men had no internal ‘space’ in which to be private, and no analog to be private with. All initiative was in the voices of gods. And the gods needed to be assisted by their divinely dictated laws only in the late federations of states in the second millennium B.C.

Within each bicameral state, therefore, the people were probably more peaceful and friendly than in any civilization since.

But at the interfaces between different bicameral civilizations, the problems were complex and quite different.

Let us consider a meeting between two individuals from two different bicameral cultures. Let us assume they do not know each other’s language and are owned by different gods. The manner of such meetings would be dependent upon the kind of admonitions, warnings, and importunings with which the individual had been reared.

In peaceful times, with the god of the city basking in prosperity, the human tilling of his fields, the harvesting, storing, and sorting out of his produce all going on without hitch or question, as in a colony of ants, it could be expected that his divine voice would be basically amicable, and that indeed all man’s voice-visions would tend to be beautiful and peaceful, exaggerating the very harmony this method of social control was evolved to preserve.

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Thus, if the bicameral theocracies of both individuals meeting have been unthreatened for their generation, both their directive gods would be composed of friendly voices. The result may have been a tentative exchange of gestural greetings and facial expressions that might grow to friendship, or even an exchange of gifts.

For we can be very certain that the relative rarity of each other's possessions (coming from different cultures) would make such an exchange mutually wished for.

This is probably how trade began. The beginning of such exchanges goes back to food sharing in the family group which grew into exchanges of goods and produce within the same city.

Just as the harvested grain of the first agricultural settlements had to be doled out by certain god-given rules, so, as labor became more specialized, other products, wine, adornments, clothes, and the building of houses, all had to have their god-set equivalents to each other.

Trade between different peoples is simply the extension of such exchanging of goods to another kingdom. Texts from 2500

B.C. found in Sumer speak of such exchanging as far away as the Indus Valley. And the recent discovery of a new city site at Tepe Yahya, halfway between Sumer and the Indus Valley, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, whose artifacts clearly indicate that it was the main source of steatite or soapstone, used for utensils extensively in Mesopotamia, establish it as a center of exchange between these bicameral kingdoms.2 Small two-inch-square tablets have been found with counting marks on them which were probably simple exchange rates. All this was during a peaceful era in the middle of the third millennium B.C. I shall suggest later that extensive exchanging of goods between bicameral theocracies may in itself have weakened the bicameral structure that made civilization possible.

Now let us return to our two individuals from different cultures. We have been discussing what occurs in a peaceful world 2 New York Times, December 20, 1970, p. 53.

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with peaceful gods. But what if the opposite were the case? If both came from threatened cultures, both would probably hear warlike hallucinated voices directing each to kill the other, whereupon hostilities would follow. But the same result would happen if either came from a threatened culture, putting the other into a posture of defense, as either the same god or another directed him as well to engage in fighting.

There is thus no middle ground in intertheocracy relations.

Admonitory voices echoing kings, viziers, parents, etc., are unlikely to command individuals into acts of compromise. Even today, our ideas of nobility are largely residues of bicameral authority: it is not noble to whine, it is not noble to plead, it is not noble to beg, even though these postures are really the most moral of ways to settle differences. And hence the instability of the bicameral world, and the fact that during the bicameral era boundary relations would, I think, be more likely to end in all-out friendship or all-out hostility than anything between these extremes.

Nor is this the bottom of the matter. The smooth working of a bicameral kingdom has to rest on its authoritarian hierarchy.

And once the priestly or secular hierarchy is disputed or upset, its effects would be exaggerated in a way that in a police state would not occur. Once cities become a certain size, as we have already seen, the bicameral control must be extremely precarious. The hierarchy of priests to sort out the various voices and give them their recognitions must have become a major preoccupation as bicameral cities grew in size. One jar to this balance of human and hallucinated authority, and, like a house of cards, the whole thing might collapse. As I have mentioned in both previous chapters, such theocracies occasionally did indeed suddenly collapse without any known external cause.

In comparison with conscious nations, then, bicameral nations were more susceptible to collapse. The directives of gods are limited. If on top of this inherent fragility, something really new

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occurred, such as a forced intermingling of bicameral peoples, the gods would be hard pressed to sort anything out in a peace-able way.

The Weakening of Divine Authority with Writing These limitations of gods were both relieved and greatly exacerbated in the second millennium B.C. by the success of writing. On the one hand, writing could allow a civil structure such as that of Hammurabi to remain stable. But, on the other, it was gradually eroding the auditory authority of the bicameral mind. More and more, the accountings and messages of government were placed in cuneiform tablets particularly. Whole libraries of them are still being discovered. Letters of officials became a commonplace. By 1500 B.C., even miners high in the rocky wastes of Sinai incised their names and their relationships to the goddess of the mine on its walls.3

The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts of the brain. And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god's commands or the king's directives could be turned to or avoided by one's own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of a god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience. This is extremely important.

The Failure of the Gods

This loosening of the god-man partnership perhaps by trade and certainly by writing was the background of what happened.

But the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the 3 Romain F. Butin, "The Sarabit Expedition of 1930: IV, The Protosinaitic Inscriptions." Harvard Theological Review, 1932, 25, pp. 130-204.

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bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do. Or if they did, they led to death, or at the intimate least to an increase in the stress that physiologically occasioned the voice in the first place, until voices came in an unsolvable Babel of confusion.

The historical context of all this was enormous. The second millennium B.C. was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes occurred. Civilizations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunched itself sickly into its dark and bloody close.

It is a complex picture, the variables evoking these changes multileveled, the facts as we have them now not at all certain.

Almost yearly they are revised as each new generation of archaeologists and ancient historians finds fault with its predecessors.

As an approximation to these complexities, let us look at the two major elements of these upheavals. One was the mass migrations and invasions of peoples all around the eastern Mediterranean due to the volcanic eruption of Thera, and the other was the rise of Assyria, in three great phases, warring its way reign by reign westward to Egypt, northward to the Caspian, incorporat-ing all of Mesopotamia, forming a very different kind of empire from any that the world had known before.

The Assyrian Spring

Let us first look at the situation in northern Mesopotamia around the city that belongs to the god Ashur, as the second millennium B.C. opens.4 Originally a part of Akkad, and then of Old Babylonia two hundred miles south, by 1950 B.C., this peace-4 For the overall contours of Assyrian history I have relied on various authorities, but particularly H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962) ; and various articles by William F. Albright.

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ful bicameral city on an upper reach of the gentle Tigris has been left pretty much to itself. Under the guidance of Ashur's chief human servant, Puzen-Ashur I, its benign influence and wealth begin to expand. More than in any nation before it, the feature of that expansion is exchange of goods with other theocracies.

About two hundred years later, the city owned by Ashur becomes Assyria, with exchange posts as much as seven hundred miles by road away to the northeast in Anatolia or present-day Turkey.

Exchange of goods between cities had been going on for some time. But it is doubtful if it was as extensive as that practiced by the Assyrians. Recent excavations have revealed karums or, in smaller towns, ubartums, the exchange posts just outside several Anatolian cities in which the trading took place. Particularly interesting excavations have been made of the karum just outside Kiiltepe: small buildings whose walls have no windows, stone and wooden shelves on which are cuneiform tablets yet to be translated, and sometimes jars with what appear to be counters within them.5 The writing, indeed, is old Assyrian, and, presumably brought there by these traders, is the first writing known in Anatolia.

Such trade was not, however, a true market. There were no prices under the pressures of supply and demand, no buying and selling, and no money. It was trade in the sense of equivalences established by divine decree. There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have so far been translated. There are occasional exceptions, even a suggestion of 'inflation,' perhaps during a famine year when the exchanges became different, but they do not seriously impair Polanyi's view, which I am following here.6

Let us consider these Assyrian merchants for a moment. They 5 Nimet Osguc, "Assyrian trade colonies in Anatolia," Archeology, 1965, 4: 250-255.

6 Karl Polanyi, Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe: Free Press, I957).

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were, we may presume, merely agents, holding their position by descent and apprenticeship, and carrying out exchanges much as their fathers had done for centuries. But there are so many questions that face the psychohistorian at this point. What would happen to the bicameral voices of these merchants as much as seven hundred miles from the source of their city-god’s voice, and in daily contact and probably (though not necessarily) speaking the language of bicameral men ruled by a different pantheon of voices? Is it possible that something like a protosubjective consciousness occurred in these traders at the boundaries of different civilizations? Did they, returning periodically to Ashur, bring with them a weakened bicamerality that perhaps spread to a new generation? So that the bicameral tie between gods and men was loosened?

The causes of consciousness are multiple, but at least I do not think it is a coincidence that the key nation in this development should also have been that nation most involved in exchanges of goods with others. If it is true that the power of the gods and particularly of Ashur were being weakened at this time, it could account for the absolute collapse of his city in 1700 B.C., beginning the dark ages of Assyrian anarchy that lasted two hundred years. For this event there is no explanation whatever. No historian understands it. And there is little hope of ever doing so, for not a single Assyrian cuneiform inscription from this period has ever been found.

The reorganization of Assyria after its collapse had to wait upon other events. In 1450 B.C., Egypt pushed the Mitanni out of Syria right across the Euphrates into lands between the two great rivers that had once been Assyrian. But a century later the Mitanni were conquered by the Hittites from the north, thus making possible the rebuilding of an Assyrian empire in 1380

B.C. after two centuries of anarchic darkness.

And what an empire it is! No nation had been so militaristic before. Unlike any previous inscriptions anywhere, those of mid-

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die Assyria now bristle with brutal campaigns. The change is dramatic. But the success of the Assyrian invasions as they relentlessly savage their way toward world domination is like a ratchet catching at the whorl of catastrophes of another kind.

Eruption, Migration, Conquest

The collapse of the bicameral mind was certainly accelerated by the collapse under the ocean of a good part of the Aegean people's land. This followed an eruption or series of eruptions of the volcano on the island of Thera, also called Santorini, now an Aegean tourist attraction, barely sixty-two miles north of Crete.7

Then, it had been part of what Plato8 and later legend called the lost continent of Atlantis, which with Crete made up the Minoan empire. The major part of it and perhaps parts of Crete as well were suddenly 1ooo feet underwater. Most of the remaining land of Thera was covered with a 150-foot-deep crust of volcanic ash and pumice.

Geologists have hypothesized that the black cloud caused by the eruption darkened the sky for days and affected the atmo-sphere for years. The air shock waves have been estimated at 350 times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb. Thick poisonous vapors puffed out over the blue sea for miles. A tsunami or huge tidal wave followed. Towering 700 feet high and traveling at 350

miles per hour, it smashed into the fragile coasts of the bicameral kingdoms along the Aegean mainland and its islands. Everything for two miles inland was destroyed. A civilization and its gods had ended.

Just when it happened, whether it was a series of eruptions or a two-stage affair with a year between the eruption and the collapse, will require better scientific methods of dating volcanic 7 See Jerome J. Pollit, "Atlantis and Minoan Civilization: An archeological nexus"; and Robert S. Brumbaugh, "Plato's Atlantis,'' both in the Yale Alumni Magazine, 1970, 33, 20-29.

8 See particularly Critias, 1o8e-119e, passim.

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ash and pumice. Some believe it to have occurred in 1470 B.C.9

Others have dated the collapse of Thera between 1180 and 1170

B.C. when the whole of the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, the Nile delta, and the coast of Israel, suffered universal calamity of a magnitude that dwarfed the 1470 B.C. destruction.10

Whenever it was, whether it was one or a series of eruptions, it set off a huge procession of mass migrations and invasions which wrecked the Hittite and Mycenaean empires, threw the world into a dark ages within which came the dawn of consciousness. Only Egypt seems to have retained the elaboration of its civilized life, although the exodus of the Israelites about the time of the Trojan War, perhaps 1230 B.C., is close enough to be considered a part of this great world event. The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.

The result is that, in the space of a single day, whole populations or what survive of them are suddenly refugees. Like files of dominoes, anarchy and chaos ripple and lurch across the frightened land as neighbor invades neighbor. And what can the gods say in these ruins? What can the gods say, with hunger and death more strict than they, with strange people staring at strange people, and strange language bellowed at uncomprehend-ing ears? The bicameral man was ruled in the trivial circumstance of everyday life by unconscious habit, and in his encounters with anything new or out of the ordinary in his own behavior or others' by his voice-visions. Ripped out of context in the larger hierarchical group, where neither habit nor bicameral voice could assist and direct him, he must have been a pitiable creature indeed. How could the storings up and distillings of admonitory experience gained in the peaceful authoritarian ordering of a bicameral nation say anything that would work now?

Huge migrations begin moving into Ionia and then south. The 9 S. Marinatos, Crete and Mycaenae (New York: Abrams, 1960).

10 New York Times, Sept. 28, 1966, p. 34.

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coastal lands of the Levant are invaded by land and sea by peoples from eastern Europe, of whom the Philistines of the Old Testament were a part. The pressure of the refugees is so great in Anatolia that in 1200 B.C. the puissant Hittite empire collapses, driving the Hittites down into Syria where other refugees are seeking new lands. Assyria was inland and protected. And the chaos resulting from these invasions allowed the cruel Assyrian armies to push all the way into Phrygia, Syria, Phoenicia, and even to the subjugation of the mountain peoples of Armenia in the north and those of the Zagros Mountains to the east. Could Assyria do this on a strictly bicameral basis?

The most powerful king of this middle Assyria was Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 B.C.). Note how he no longer joins the name of his god to his name. His exploits are well known from a large clay prism of monstrous boasts. His laws have come down to us in a collection of cruel tablets. Scholars have called his policy "a policy of frightfulness."11 And so it was. The Assyrians fell like butchers upon harmless villagers, enslaved what refugees they could, and slaughtered others in thousands. Bas-reliefs show what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out the shoulders. His laws meted out the bloodiest penalties yet known in world history for even minor misdemeanors. They make a dramatic contrast to the juster admonishments that the god of Babylon dictated to bicameral Hammurabi six centuries earlier.

W h y this harshness? And for the first time in the history of civilization? Unless the previous method of social control had absolutely broken down. And that form of social control was the bicameral mind. The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of subjective consciousness.

The chaos is widespread and continuing. In Greece it is darkly known as the Dorian invasions. The Acropolis is in flames by the 11 H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), p. 101.

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end of the thirteenth century B.C. Mycenae no longer exists by the end of the twelfth century B.C. It has been ground out into legend and wonder. And we can imagine the first aoidos, still bicameral, wandering entranced from ruined camp to camp of refugees, singing the bright goddess through his white lips of the wrath of Achilles in a golden age that was and is no more.

Even from somewhere around the Black Sea, hordes that some called the Mushku, known in the Old Testament as Meshech, thrust down into the ruined Hittite kingdom. Then twenty thousand of them drifted further south invading the Assyrian province of Kummuh. Hordes of Aramaeans continuously pressed in on the Assyrian from the western deserts and continued to do so up into the first millennium B.C.

In the south, more of these refugees, called in hieroglyphics the “People from the Sea,” attempt to invade Egypt by the Nile delta at the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. Their defeat by Rameses III can still be seen on the north wall of his funerary temple at Medinet Habu in western Thebes.12 The invaders in ships, chariots, and on foot, with families and oxcarts of possessions, stream through these murals in refugee fashion. Had the invasion been successful, it is possible that Egypt might have done for the intellect what Greece was to do in the next millennium. And so the People from the Sea are pressed back east-ward into the clutch of Assyrian militarism.

And finally all these pressures become too great for even Assyrian cruelty. In the tenth century B.C., Assyria itself cannot control the situation and shrivels back into poverty behind the Tigris. But only to breathe. For in the very next century, the Assyrians begin their reconquest of the world with unprecedented sadistic ferocity, butchering and terroring their way back to their former empire and then beyond and all the way to Egypt and up the fertile Nile to the holy sun-god himself, even as Pizarro was 12 For illustrations of these see William Stevenson Smith, Interconnections in the Ancient Near East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 220-221.

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to take the divine Inca captive two and a half millennia later on the opposite side of the earth. And by this time, the great transilience in mentality had occurred. Man had become conscious of himself and his world.

How Consciousness Began

So far, all our analysis has been about how and why the bicameral mind collapsed. It could indeed be asked at this point why man did not simply revert to his previous condition. Sometimes he did. But the inertia of the more complex cultures prevented the return to tribal life. Man was trapped in his own civilization. Huge cities simply are there, and their ponderous habits of working keep going even as their divine control lapses away. Language too is a brake upon social change. The bicameral mind was an offshoot of the acquisition of language, and language by this time had a vocabulary demanding such attention to a civilized environment as to make a reversion to something of at least 5000 years earlier almost impossible.

The facts of the transition from the bicameral mind to the subjective conscious mind are what I try to develop in the ensuing two chapters. But just how it happened is the consideration here, and this needs a great deal more research. What we need is a paleontology of consciousness, in which we can discern stratum by stratum how this metaphored world we call subjective consciousness was built up and under what particular social pressures. All that I can present here is a few suggestions.

I would also remind the reader of two things. First, I am not talking here of the metaphoric mechanisms by which consciousness was generated that I discussed in I.3. Here I am concerned with their origin in history, why those features were generated by metaphors at a particular time. Secondly, we are speaking only about the Near East. Once consciousness is established, there are quite different reasons why it is so successful, and why it spreads

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to the remaining bicameral peoples, problems which we shall take up in a later chapter.

The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opinion and action. But in the forced violent intermingling of peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of something inside of them that was different. Indeed, this latter opinion has come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts, opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world. It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior. In other words, the tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around. We may first unconsciously (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.

The Origin of Narratization in Epics

It sounds strange to speak about gods learning. But occupying a good part of the right temporal-parietal region (if the model of I.5 is correct), they, too, like the left temporal-parietal region, or perhaps even more so, would learn new abilities, storing up new experience, reworking their admonitory function in new ways to meet new needs.

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Narratization is a single word for an extremely complex set of patterning abilities which have, I think, a multiple ancestry. But the thing in its larger patterning, such as lifetimes, histories, the past and future, may have been learned by dominantly left-hemisphered men from a new kind of functioning in the right hemisphere. The new kind of functioning was narratization, and it had previously been learned, I suggest, by the gods at a certain period of history.

When could this have been? It is doubtful if there can ever be a certain answer, partly because there is no sharp boundary between the relation of an event that has just happened and an epic. Also our search into the past is always confounded with the development of writing. But it is interesting that about the middle of the third millennium B.C., or just before, there seems to arise a new feature of civilization in southern Mesopotamia. Before what is known as the Early Dynastic II period, excavations show that towns or cities in this area were not fortified, had no defenses. But thereafter, in the principal regions of urban development, walled cities arose at a fairly constant distance from one another, the inhabitants farming the intervening fields and occasionally fighting each other for control of them. At about this same period came the first epics that we know of, such as the several about Emmerkar, the builder of Uruk, and his relations with the neighboring city-state of Aratta. And their topics are precisely this relationship between neighboring states.

My suggestion is that narratization arose as a codification of reports of past events. Writing up to this time — and it is only a few centuries since its invention —- had been primarily an inventory device, a way of recording the stores and exchanges of a god's estates. Now it becomes a way of recording god-commanded events, whose recitation after the fact becomes the narratization of epics. Since reading, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, may have been hallucinating from the cuneiform, it may, then, have been a right temporal lobe function.

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And since these were the recordings of the past, it is the right hemisphere that becomes at least the temporary seat of the reminiscence of gods.

We should note in passing how different the reading from stable cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia was from the oral re-composing of the epics in Greece by a succession of aoidoi: It is possible that the oral tradition in Greece was an immense benefit in its demand that ‘Apollo’ or the ‘Muses’ in the right hemisphere become the sources of memory and learn how to narratize so as to keep the memories of Achilles together in the epic pattern.

And then, in the chaos of transilience to consciousness, man assimilates both this memory ability and the ability to narratize memories into patterns.

The Origin of the Analog ‘I’ in Deceit

Deceit may also be a cause of consciousness. But we must begin any discussion of the topic by making a distinction between instrumental or short-term deceit and long-term deceit, which might better be expressed as treachery. Several examples of the former have been described in chimpanzees. Female chimpanzees will ‘present5 in sexual posture to a male to whisk away his banana when his prandial interest is thus distracted. In another instance, a chimpanzee would fill his mouth with water, coax a disliked keeper over to the cage bars, and spit the water in his face. In both such instances, the deceit involved is a case of instrumental learning, a behavior pattern that is followed immediately by some rewarding state of affairs. And it needs no further explanation.

But the kind of deceit that is treachery is quite another matter.

It is impossible for an animal or for a bicameral man. Long-term deceit requires the invention of an analog self that can ‘do’ or ‘be’

something quite different from what the person actually does or is, as seen by his associates. It is an easy matter to imagine how

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important for survival during these centuries such an ability would be. Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbor his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive. Or, in the more usual situation of being commanded by invading strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey superficially and have

'within him' another self with 'thoughts' contrary to his disloyal actions, who could loathe the man he smiled at, would be much more successful in perpetuating himself and his family in the new millennium.

Natural Selection

My last comment brings up the possibility that natural selection may have played a role in the beginning of consciousness.

But in putting up this question, I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather than any biological necessity. But that it had and still has a survival value suggests that the change to consciousness may have been assisted by a certain amount of natural selection.

It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died in these terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C. I suspect it was enormous. And death would come soonest to those who impulsively lived by their unconscious habits or who could not resist the commandments of their gods to smite whatever strangers interfered with them. It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations. And again we may appeal to the principle

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of Baldwinian evolution as we did in our discussion of language.

Consciousness must be learned by each new generation, and those biologically most able to learn it would be those most likely to survive. There is even Biblical evidence, as we shall see in a future chapter, that children obdurately bicameral were simply killed.13

Conclusion

This chapter must not be construed as presenting any evidence about the origin of consciousness. That is the burden of several ensuing chapters. My purpose in this chapter has been descriptive and theoretical, to paint a picture of plausibility, of how and why a huge alteration in human mentality could have occurred toward the end of the second millennium B.C.

In summary, I have sketched out several factors at work in the great transilience from the bicameral mind to consciousness: (1) the weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing; (2) the inherent fragility of hallucinatory control; (3) the unwork-ableness of gods in the chaos of historical upheaval; (4) the positing of internal cause in the observation of difference in others; (5) the acquisition of narratization from epics; (6) the survival value of deceit; and (7) a modicum of natural selection.

I would conclude by bringing up the question of the strictness of all this. Did consciousness really come de novo into the world only at this time? Is it not possible that certain individuals at least might have been conscious in much earlier time? Possibly yes. As individuals differ in mentality today, so in past ages it might have been possible that one man alone, or more possibly a cult or clique, began to develop a metaphored space with analog selves. But such aberrant mentality in a bicameral theocracy 13 Zechariah, 13 : 3-4.

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would, I think, be short-lived and scarcely what we mean by consciousness today.

It is the cultural norm that we are here concerned with, and the evidence that that cultural norm underwent a dramatic change is the substance of the following chapters. The three areas of the world where this transilience can be most easily observed are Mesopotamia, Greece, and among the bicameral refugees. We shall be discussing these in turn.

C H A P T E R 4

A Change of Mind in

Mesopotamia

ABOUT 1230 B.C., Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria, had a stone altar made that is dramatically different from anything that preceded it in the history of the world. In the carving on its face, Tukulti is shown twice, first as he approaches the throne of his god, and then as he kneels before it. The very double image fairly shouts aloud about this beggarly posture unheard of in a king before in history. As our eyes descend from the standing king to the kneeling king just in front of him, it is as emphatic as a moving picture, in itself a quite remarkable artistic discovery.

But far more remarkable is the fact that the throne before which this first of the cruel Assyrian conquerors grovels is empty.

No king before in history is ever shown kneeling. No scene before in history ever indicates an absent god. The bicameral mind had broken down.

Hammurabi, as we have seen in II.2, is always carved standing and listening intently to a very present god. And countless cylinder seals from his period show other personages listening eye to eye or being presented to the just-as-real figures of human-shaped gods. The Ashur altar of Tukulti is in shocking contrast to all previous depictions of the relations of gods and men. Nor is it simply some artistic idiosyncrasy. Other altar scenes of Tukulti are similarly devoid of gods. And cylinder seals of Tukulti's period also show the king approaching other nonpresent divinities, sometimes represented by a symbol. Such comparisons

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Carving on the front of the Tukulti Altar now in the Berlin Museum. Tukulti stands and then kneels before the empty throne of his god. Note the emphasis of the pointing forefinger.

strongly suggest that the time of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia is some time between Hammurabi and Tukulti.

This hypothesis is confirmed in the cuneiform remains of Tukulti and his period. What is known as the Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta 1 is the next clearly dated and well-preserved cuneiform document of note after Hammurabi. In the latter's time there is no doubt of the gods' eternal undeviant presence among men, directing them in their activities. But at the beginning of Tukulti's somewhat propagandalike epic, the gods of the Babylonian cities are angry with the Babylonian king for his inattention to them. They therefore forsake their cities, leaving the inhabitants 1 Translations of this and the other texts discussed in this section can be found in W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

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without divine guidance, so that the victory of Tukulti's Assyrian armies is assured. This conception of gods forsaking their human slaves under any circumstances whatever is impossible in the Babylon of Hammurabi. It is something new in the world.

Moreover, it is found throughout whatever literature remains of the last three centuries of the second millennium B.C.

One who has no god, as he walks along the street, Headache envelops him like a garment.

So one cuneiform tablet from about the reign of Tukulti.

If the breakdown of the bicameral mind involved the involuntary inhibition of temporal lobe areas of the right hemisphere, as we have conjectured earlier, this statement takes on an added interest.

Also from about the same period come the famous three tablets and a questionable fourth named for its first words, Ludlul bel nemeqiy usually translated as "I will praise the lord of wisdom."

"Wisdom" here is an unwarranted modern imposition. The translation should be something closer to 'skill' or 'ability to control misfortune,' the lord here being Marduk, the highest god of Babylon. The first completely readable lines of the damaged first tablet are:

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,

My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.

T h e good angel who walked beside me has departed.

This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The speaker is one Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the third tablet), a feudal lord possibly under Tukulti. He goes on to describe how, with the departure of his gods, his king becomes irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal position of ruling a

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city is taken away, how he thus becomes a social outcast. The second tablet describes how, in this godless state, he is the target of all disease and misfortune. Why have the gods left him? And he catalogs the prostrations, the prayers, and the sacrifices which have not brought them back. Priests and omen-readers are consulted, but still

My god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand, Nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side.

In the third tablet, he realizes that it is the almighty Marduk who is behind all that is happening to him. In dreams, the angels of Marduk appear to him in bicameral fashion, and speak messages of consolation and promises of prosperity from Marduk himself.

At this assurance, Shubshi is then delivered from his toils and illnesses and goes to the temple of Marduk to give thanks to the great god who "made the wind bear away my offenses."

The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time. Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god. These aspects of present-day religion find an explanation in the theory of the bicameral mind and its breakdown during this period.

The world had long known rules and dues. They were divinely ordained and humanly obeyed. But the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good man and of redemption from sin and divine forgiveness only begin in this uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances can no longer be heard.

The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue be-2 A fascinating problem is why the reference to gods at this time becomes plural even when it takes a singular verb. This occurs in contexts which in previous literature would have meant it was the personal god. This occurs in both the Ludlul,

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tween a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails with the same pleas. Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? The poem also shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an analog self denoting a new consciousness. It ends with the cry which has echoed through all later history:

May the gods who have thrown me off give help, May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.

From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey. There is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I am describing here.

The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different levels. One thing is the confusion of authority itself. What is authority? Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination, which we shall take up shortly. And as I have mentioned earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations. Even the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable. Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.

Indeed this new kind of rebellion is what happened to Tukulti himself. He had founded a whole new capital for Assyria across the Tigris from Ashur, naming it godlessly after himself — Kar-Tukultininurta. But, led by his own son and successor, his more conservative nobles imprisoned him in his new city, put it to the torch, and burned it to the ground, his fiery death leading his reign II:12, 25, 33, as well as through the Theodicy, and later in the plural elohim of the Eloist contributions to the Old Testament. One should remember here the Muses of the Greeks and possibly the p ankush of Hittite tablets. Do and did hallucinations sound like choirs as their reliability is being neurologically weakened?

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into legend. (He glimmers in the murky history of the Old Testament as Nimrod3 [Genesis:1o] and in Greek myths as King Ninos.4) Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before. But such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.

But of much greater importance are the beginnings of some new cultural themes which are responses to this breakdown of the bicameral mind and its divine authority. History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past. And these new aspects of human history in response to the loss of divine authority are all developments and emphases out of the bicameral age.

Prayer

In the classical bicameral mind, that is, before its weakening by writing about 2500 B.C., I suggest that there was no hesitancy in the hallucinated voice and no occasion for prayer. A novel situation or stress, and a voice told you what to do. Certainly this is so in contemporary schizophrenic patients who are hallucinating. They do not beg to hear their voices; it is unnecessary. In those few patients where this does happen, it is during recovery when the voices are no longer heard with the same frequency.

But as civilizations and their interrelationships become more complex toward the end of the third millennium B.C., the gods are occasionally asked to respond to various requests. Usually, however, such requests are not what we think of as prayer. They consist of several stylized imprecations, such as the common ending of statue inscriptions:

3 E. A. Speiser, "In Search of Nimrod," in Oriental and Biblical Studies, Collected Writings of E. A. Sfeiser, J. J. Finkelstein and Mosh Greenberg, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967), pp. 41-52.

4 H. Lewy, "Nitokoris-Naqi'a," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1952, 11, 264-286.

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Whoever this image shall deface may Enlil his name destroy and his weapon break!5

or the kind of praising which Gudea bestows on his gods in the great cylinder inscriptions from Lagash. A notable exception, however, are the very real prayers of Gudea in Cylinder A to his divine mother, asking her to explain the meaning of a dream.

But this, like so much else with the enigmatic Gudea, is exceptional. Prayers as the central important act of divine worship only become prominent after the gods are no longer speaking to man “face to face” (as Deuteronomy 34:10 expresses it). What was new in the time of Tukulti becomes everyday during the first millennium B.C., all, I suggest, as a result of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. A typical prayer begins:

O lord, the strong one, the famous one, the one who knows all, splendid one, self-renewing one, perfect one, first-begotten of Marduk . . .

and so on for many more lines of titles and attributes, the one who holds cult-centers firm, the one who gathers to himself all cults . . .

perhaps indicating the chaos of the hierarchy of divinities when they could no longer be heard,

you watch over all men, you accept their supplications . . .

The suppliant then introduces himself and his petition: I, Balasu, son of his god, whose god is Nabu, whose goddess is Tashmeturn . . . I am one who is weary, disturbed, whose body is very sick, I bow before thee . . . O lord, Wise One 5 George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), p. 113.

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of the gods, by thy mouth command good for me; O Nabu, Wise O n e of the gods, by thy mouth may I come forth alive.6

The general form of prayer, beginning with emphatic praise of the god and ending with a personal petition, has not really changed since Mesopotamian times. The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a thousand years earlier.

An Origin of Angels

In the so-called Neo-Sumerian period, at the end of the third millennium B.C., graphics, particularly cylinder seals, are full of

'presentation' scenes: a minor god, often female, introduces an individual, presumably the owner of the seal, to a major god.

This is entirely consistent with what we have suggested was likely in a bicameral kingdom, namely that each individual had his personal god who seemed to intercede with higher gods on the person's behalf. And this type of presentation or intercession scene continues well into the second millennium B.C.

But then a dramatic change occurs. First, the major gods disappear from such scenes, even as from the altar of Tukulti-Ninurta. There then occurs a period where the individual's personal god is shown presenting him to the god's symbol only. And then, at the end of the second millennium B.C., we have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the vanished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human, sometimes like a bearded man with two sets of wings, crowned like a god, and often holding a kind of purse supposedly containing ingredients for a purification ceremony. These supposed personnel of the celestial courts are found with increasing 6 Translated by H. W. F. Saggs in his The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), p. 312.

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frequency in Assyrian cylinder seals and carvings. In early instances, such angels, or genii, as Assyriologists more often call them, are seen introducing an individual to the symbol of a god as in the old presentation scenes. But soon even this is abandoned.

And by the beginning of the first millennium B.C., we find such angels in a countless diversity of scenes, sometimes with humans, sometimes in various struggles with other hybrid beings.

Sometimes they have the heads of birds. Or they are winged bulls or winged lions with human heads to act as wardens for such palaces as that at Nimrud in the ninth century or guarding the gates of Khorsabad in the eighth century B.C. Or, hawk-headed and broad-winged, they may be seen following around behind a king, with a cone which has been dipped in a small pail, as in a wall carving of Assurnasirpal in the ninth century B.C., a scene like the anointing of baptism. In none of these depictions does the angel seem to be speaking or the human listening. It is a silent visual scene in which the auditory actuality of the earlier bicameral act is becoming a supposed and assumed silent relationship. It becomes what we would call mythological.

Demons

But angels were not enough to fill in the initiative vacuum left by the retreating gods. And besides, being messengers from the great gods, they were usually associated with the king and his lords. For the common people, whose personal gods no longer help them, a very different kind of semidivine being now casts a terrible shadow over everyday life.

Why should malevolent demons have entered human history at this particular time? Speech, even if incomprehensible, is man’s chief way of greeting others. And if the other does not reply to an initiated greeting, a readiness for the other’s hostility will follow. Because the personal gods are silent, they must be angry and hostile. Such logic is the origin of the idea of evil

232 The Witness of History which first appears in the history of mankind during the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Since there is no doubt whatever that the gods rule over us as they will, what can we do to appease their wishes to harm us, and propitiate them into friendship once again? Thus the prayer and sacrifice that we have referred to earlier in this chapter, and thus the virtue of humility before a god.

As the gods recede into special people called prophets or oracles, or are reduced to darkly communicating with men in angels and omen, there whooshes into this power vacuum a belief in demons. The very air of Mesopotamia became darkened with them. Natural phenomena took on their characteristics of hostility toward men, a raging demon in the sandstorm sweeping the desert, a demon of fire, scorpion-men guarding the rising sun beyond the mountains, Pazuzu the monstrous wind demon, the evil Croucher, plague demons, and the horrible Asapper demons that could be warded off by dogs. Demons stood ready to seize a man or woman in lonely places, while sleeping or eating or drinking, or particularly at childbirth. They attached themselves to men as all the illnesses of mankind. Even the gods could be attacked by demons, and this sometimes explained their absence from the control of human affairs.

Protection against these evil divinities — something inconceivable in the bicameral age — took many forms. Dating from early in the first millennium B.C. are many thousands of prophylactic amulets, to be worn around the neck or wrist. They usually depict the particular demon whose power is to be inhibited, surmounted perhaps by gesticulating priests shooing the evil away, and often underwritten with an incantation invoking the great gods against the threatened horror, such as:

Incantation. That one that has approached the house scares me from my bed, rends me, makes me see nightmares. To the god Bine, gatekeeper of the underworld, may they appoint him,

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by the decree of Ninurta prince of the underworld. By the decree of Marduk who dwells in Esagilia in Babylon. Let door and bolt know that I am under the protection of the two Lords.

Incantation.7

Innumerable rituals were devoutly mumbled and mimed all over Mesopotamia throughout the first millennium B.C. to counteract these malign forces. The higher gods were beseeched to intercede. All illnesses, aches, and pains were ascribed to malevolent demons until medicine became exorcism. Most of our knowledge of these antidemoniac practices and their extent comes from the huge collection made about 630 B.C. by Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.

Literally thousands of extant tablets from this library describe such exorcisms, and thousands more list omen after omen, depicting a decaying civilization as black with demons as a piece of rotting meat with flies.

A New Heaven

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the gods customarily had locations, even though their voices were ubiquitously heard by their servants. These were often dwellings such as ziggurats or household shrines. And while some gods could be associated with celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, or stars, and the greatest, such as Anu, lived in the sky, the majority of gods were earth-dwellers along with men.

All this changes as we enter the first millennium B.C., when, as we are proposing, the gods’ voices are no longer heard. As the earth has been left to angels and demons, so it seems to be accepted that the dwelling place of the now absent gods is with Anu in the sky. And this is why the forms of angels are always winged: they are messengers from the sky where the gods live.8

7 Translate d by Saggs , p. 291 .

8 If later copies of the well-know n Enuma Eli sh, the Neo-Babylonia n name fo r the epic of creation, are to be taken on their face value, this celestialization of the

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The use of the word for sky or heaven in conjunction with gods becomes more and more common in Assyrian-literature. And when the story of the great flood (the origin of the Biblical story) is added into the Gilgamesh stories in the seventh century B.C., it is used as a rationalization for the departure of the gods from earth:

Even the gods were terror-stricken at the deluge.

T h e y fled and ascended to the heaven of Anu.9

This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by an important change in the building of ziggurats. As we saw in 11.2, the original ziggurats of Mesopotamian history were built around a central great hall called the gigunu where the statue of the god 'lived' in the rituals of his human slaves. But by the end of the second millennium B.C., the entire concept of the ziggurat seems to have become altered. It now has no central room whatever and the statues of the major gods are less and less the centers of elaborate ritual. For the sacred tower of the ziggurat was now a landing stage to facilitate the gods' descent to earth from the heaven to which they had vanished. This is definitely known from texts of the first millennium B.C., which even make references to the "boat of heaven." The exact date at which this change took place is a difficult matter, for the extant ziggurats have been badly damaged and, even worse, sometimes 'restored'.

But I suggest that all of the many ziggurats which the Assyrians built beginning with the reign of Tulkulti-Ninurta were of this major gods began as early as the latter half of the second millennium b.c. See the translation by E. A. Speiser in Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, J. B. Pritchard, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). Its title is its first two words and means "When on high . . Like so much else, it was discovered in the great library of Ashurbanipal of the seventh century b.c. It is a copy, and the originals may have dated back to the second millennium b.c.

9 Gilgamesh, Tablet II, lines 113-114, in Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

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sort, huge pedestals for the return of the gods from heaven and not houses for earthly gods as before.

The ziggurat built by Sargon in the eighth century B.C. for his huge new city of Khorsabad is calculated from recent excavations to have surged up in seven stages 140 feet above the surrounding city, its summit shining with a temple dedicated to Ashur, still the owning, if unheard, god of Assyria. There is no other temple to Ashur at Khorsabad. Descending from the temple was no ordinary stairway as in previous ziggurats, but a long spiral ramp winding around the core of the tower down which Ashur could walk, when or if he ever landed and did return to the city.

Similarly, the Ziggurat of Neo-Babylon, the Biblical Tower of Babel, was no god’s house as in the truly bicameral age, but a heavenly landing for the now celestialized gods. Built in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., it soared 300 feet high, again with seven stages, pinnacling in a brilliant blue-glazed temple for Marduk. Its very name indicates this use: E-temen-an-ki, temple ( E ) of the receiving platform ( temen) between heaven (an) and earth ( ki).10 The otherwise senseless passage of Genesis (11:2-9) is certainly a rewrite of some Neo-Babylonian legend of just such a landing by Yahweh who in the company of other gods

“come down to see the city and the tower,” and thereupon “confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” The latter may be a narratization of the garbling of hallucinated voices in their decline.

The tirelessly curious Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.

trudged up the steep stairs and spiraling ramps of Etemenanki to see if there was a god or idol at the top: as in the altar-face of Tukulti, there was nothing but an empty throne.11

*

10 For my translation of

temen

and possible alternatives, see James B. Nies’ glos-sary in

Ur Dynasty Tablets

(Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920), p. 171.

11 Histories, 1: 181. Another empty throne scene is shown on Stela 91027 in the British Museum with Esarhaddon in a pose similar to Tukulti’s.

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D I V I N A T I O N

So far, we have just looked at the evidence for the breakdown of the bicameral mind. This evidence is, I feel, fairly substantial.

The absence of gods in bas-reliefs and cylinder seals, the cries about lost gods that wail out of the silent cuneiforms, the emphasis on prayer, the introduction of new kinds of silent divinities, angels and demons, the new idea of heaven, all strongly indicate that the hallucinated voices called gods are no longer the guiding companions of men.

What then takes over their function? How is action initiated?

If hallucinated voices are no longer adequate to the escalating complexities of behavior, how can decisions be made?

Subjective consciousness, that is, the development on the basis of linguistic metaphors of an operation space in which an ‘I’ could narratize out alternative actions to their consequences, was of course the-great world result of this dilemma. But a more primitive solution, and one that antedates consciousness as well as paralleling it through history, is that complex of behaviors known as divination.

These attempts to divine the speech of the now silent gods work out into an astonishing variety and complexity. But I suggest that this variety is best understood as four main types, which can be ordered in terms of their historical beginning and which can be interpreted as successive approaches toward consciousness. These four are omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous divination.

Omen and Omen Texts

The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of

A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 237

something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se.

Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not

be good for the dweller within that town.

If black ants are seen on the foundations

which have been laid, that house will get

built; the owner of that house will live to

grow old.

If a horse enters a man's house, and bites

either an ass or a man, the owner of the

house will die and his household will be

scattered.

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If a fox runs into the public square,

that town will be devastated.

If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard

and kills it, he will prevail over his

adversary.12

And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way. Rarely are we able to see any logical dependency of prediction on portent, the connection often being as simple as word associations or connotations.

There were also teratological omens beginning, "If a foetus, etc.," dealing with abnormal births both human and animal.13

The science of medicine is actually founded in medical omens, a series of texts that begin, "When the conjuration priest comes to the house of a sick man," and follow with more or less reasonable prognoses correlated with various symptoms.14 And omens based on the appearance of facial and bodily characteristics in the client or in persons he encounters, which, incidentally, give us the best description we have of what these people looked like.15 And omens in the time dimension: menologies which stated which months were favorable or unfavorable for given undertakings, and hemerologies that concerned themselves with propitious or unpropitious days of each month. And omens that are the beginning of meteorology and astronomy, whole series of tablets being devoted, to phenomena of the sun, the planets, the stars and the moon, their times and circumstances of disappearance, eclipses, omens connected with halos, strange cloud forma-12 These illustrations are all taken from Saggs, pp. 308-309.

13 Erie Leichty, "Teratological omens," La Divination en Mesopotamie Ancienne et dans les Regions Voisines, pp. 131-139.

14 J. V. Kinnier Wilson, "Two medical texts from Nimrud," Iraq, 1956, 18: 1 3 0 - 4 6 .

15 J. V. Kinnier Wilson, "The Nimrud catalog of medical and physiognomical omina," Iraq, 1962, 24: 52-62.

A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 239

tions, the divine meaning of thunder and rain, hail and earth-quakes as predictions of peace and war, harvest and flood, or the movement of planets, particularly Venus, among the fixed stars.

By the fifth century B.C., this use of stars to obtain the intentions of the silent gods who now live among them has become our familiar horoscopes, in which the conjunction of the stars at birth results in predictions of the future and personality of the child.

History also begins, if vaguely, in omen texts, the apodoses or

"then-clauses" of some early texts perhaps preserving some faint historical information in a unique and characteristically Mesopotamian variety of historiography.16 Mankind deprived of his gods, like a child separated from his mother, is having to learn about his world in fear and trembling.

Dream omens became (as they still are) a major source of divination.17 Particularly in the late Assyrian period during the first millennium B.C., dream omens were collected into dream books such as the Ziqiqu where some associative principle between the dream event and its apodosis is apparent, e.g., a dream of the loss of one's cylinder seal portends the death of a son. But omens of whatever type can only decide so much. One has to wait for the portent to occur. Novel situations do not wait.

Sortilege

Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and designed to provoke the gods' answers to specific questions in novel situations. It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out. Sometimes it was to answer yes or no, at other 16 See J. J. Finkelstein, uMesopotamian historiography," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1963, pp. 461-472.

17 See A. Leo Oppenheim, "Mantic dreams in the Ancient Near East," in G. E.

von Grunbaum and Roger Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 341-350.

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times to choose one out of a group of men, plots, or alternatives.

But this simplicity — even triviality to us — should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We are so used to the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For, because there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined.

As to the psychology of sortilege, I would call your attention to two points of interest. First, this practice is very specifically invented in culture to supplement right hemisphere function when that function, following the breakdown of the bicameral mind, is no longer as accessible as when it was coded linguistically in the voices of gods. We know from laboratory studies that it is the right hemisphere that predominately processes spatial and pattern information. It is better at fitting parts of things into patterns as in Koh's Block Test, at perceiving the location and quantity of dots in a pattern or of patterns of sound such as melodies.18 Now the problem that sortilege is trying to solve is something of the same kind, that of ordering parts of the pattern, of choosing who is to do what, or what piece of land goes to which person. Originally, I suggest, in simpler societies, such decisions were easily made by the hallucinated voices called gods, which were involved primarily with the right hemisphere. And when the gods no longer accomplished this function, perhaps because of the increasing complication of such decisions, sorti-18 D. Kimura, "Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening," Cortex, 1967, 3: 163. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1971, 23: 46.

A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 241

lege came into history as a substitute for this right hemisphere function.

The second point of psychological interest is that the throwing of lots, like consciousness itself, has metaphor as its basis. In the language of I.2, the unexpressed commands of the gods compose the metaphrand which is to be lexically widened, and the metaphier is the pair or assembly of lots, be they sticks, beans, or stones. The paraphiers are the distinguishing marks or words on the lots which then project back into the metaphrand as the command of the particular god invoked. What is important here is to understand provoked divination such as sortilege as involving the same kind of generative processes that develop consciousness, but in an exopsychic nonsubjective manner.

As with omen texts, the roots of sortilege go back into the bicameral age. The earliest mention of throwing lots appears to be in legal tablets dating from the middle of the second millennium B.C., but it is only toward its end that the practice becomes widespread in important decisions: to assign shares of an estate among the sons (as at Susa), or shares of temple income to certain officials of the sanctuary, to establish a sequence among persons of equal status for various purposes. This was not simply for practical purposes, as it would be with us, but always to find out the commands of a god. Around 833 B.C., the new year in Assyria was always named after some high official. The particular official to be so honored was chosen by means of a clay die on the faces of which the names of the various high officials were inscribed, the various sides of the cube being inscribed with prayers to Ashur to make that particular side turn up.19 While many Assyrian texts from this time on refer to various types of sortilege, it is difficult to estimate just how widespread the practice was in decision-making, and whether it was used by the 19 An illustration of this may be found in W. W. Hallo and W. K. Simpson, Ancient Near East (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p, 150; see also Oppenheim, p. 100.

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ordinary people in more mundane decisions. We know that it became common among the Hittites, and its occurrence in the Old Testament will be referred to in a later chapter.

Augury

A third type of divination and one that is closer to the structure of consciousness is what I shall call qualitative augury. Sortilege is ordinal, ordering by rank a set of given possibilities. But the many methods of qualitative augury are designed to divine a great deal more information from the unspeaking gods. It is the difference between a digital and an analog computer. Its first form, as described in three cuneiform texts dating from about the middle of the second millennium B.C., consisted of pouring oil into a bowl of water held in the lap, the movement of the oil in relation to the surface or to the rim of the bowl portending the gods' intentions concerning peace or prosperity, health or disease.

Here the metaphrand is the intention or even action of a god, not just his words as in sortilege. The metaphier is the oil moving about the surface of the water, to which the movements and commands of the gods are similar. The paraphiers are the specific shapes and proximities of the oil whose paraphrands are the contours of the gods' decisions and actions.

Augury in Mesopotamia always has a cultic status. It was performed by a special priest called the baru, surrounded with ritual, and preceded by a prayer to the god to reveal his intentions through the oil or whatever medium.20 And as we enter the first millennium B.C., the methods and techniques of the baru break out into an astonishing diversity of metaphiers for the gods' intentions: Not only oil but the movements of smoke rising from a censer of incense held in the lap of the diviner,21 or the form of 20 See Oppenheim, pp. 208, 212.

21 A lack of later cuneiform tablets referring to oil on water suggests this practice went out of use fairly early. An exception is the reference of Joseph in Genesis-44:5

to the precious silver cup which he uses for drinking and for private divining, the date of this being about 600 B.C. See my II.6, note 4.

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hot wax dropped into water, or the patterns of dots made at random, or the shapes and patterns of ashes, and then sacrificed animals.

Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called, becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first millennium B.C. The idea of sacrifice itself, of course, originated in the feeding of the hallucinogenic idols as we saw in II.2. With the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the idols lost their hallucinogenic properties and became mere statues, but the feeding ceremonies now addressed to absent gods remained in the various ceremonies as sacrifices. It is thus not surprising that animals rather than oil, wax, smoke, etc., became the more important media of communication with the gods.

Extispicy differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly not the speech or actions of gods, but their writing. The baru first addressed the gods Shamash and Adad with requests that they "write" their message upon the entrails of the animal,22

or occasionally whispered this request into its ears before it was killed. He then investigated in traditional sequence the animal's organs — windpipe, lungs, liver, gall bladder, how the coils of the intestines were arranged — looking for deviations from the normal state, shape, and coloring. Any atrophy, hypertrophy, displacement, special markings, or other abnormalities, particularly of the liver, was a divine message metaphorically related to divine action. The corpus of texts dealing with extispicy outnum-bers all other kinds of augury texts and deserves much more careful study. From its earliest and very cursory mention in the second millennium, to the extensive collections of the Seleucid period around 250 B.C., the history and local development of extispicy as a means of exopsychic thought is an area where the tablets are simply awaiting the ordering of proper research. Of particular interest is that in the late period the markings and 22 See J. Nougayrol "Presages medicaux de Tharuspicine babylonierine," Semittca, 1956, 6, 5-14.

244 The Witness of History discolorations are described in an arcane technical terminology similar to what occurred among medieval alchemists.23 Parts of the exta of the sacrificed animal are referred to as "door of the palace," "path," "yoke," and "embankment" and symbolize these locations and objects, creating a metaphor world from which to read out what to do. Some of the late tablets even have diagrams of the coils of the intestines and their meaning. Clay and bronze models of the liver and lungs, sometimes elaborate, sometimes crude, have been unearthed in various sites; some were probably used for instructional purposes. But since the raw organs themselves were sometimes sent to the king as proof of a particular divine message, such models may also have served as a less redolent way of reporting an actual observation.24

Please remember the metaphorical nature of all such activity, for the actual functions here are similar to though on a different level from the very inner workings of consciousness. That the size and shape of the liver or other organ is a metaphier of the size and shape of the intentions of a god is, on an ultrasimple level, similar to what we do in consciousness in making metaphor spaces Containing' metaphor obj ects and actions.

Spontaneous Divination

Spontaneous divination differs from the three preceding types only by being unconstrained and free from any particular medium. It is really a generalization of all types. As before, the gods' commands, intentions, or purposes are the metaphrand while the metaphier is anything that might be seen at the moment and related to the concern of the diviner. The outcomes of undertakings or the intentions of a god are thus read out from whatever object the diviner happens to see or hear.

23 See Mary I. Hussey, "Anatomical nomenclature in an Akaadian omen text,"

Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1948, 2: 21-32, as mentioned by Oppenheim on p. 216.

24 Robert H. Pfeiffer, State Letters of Assyria (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1935), Letter 335.

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The reader may try it for himself. Think of some problem or concern in a vague kind of way. Then look out the window suddenly or around where you are and take the first thing your eye lights upon, and try to 'read' out of it something about your problem. Sometimes nothing will happen. But at other times the message will simply flash into your mind. I have just done this as I write and from my north window see a television aerial against a twilight sky. I may divine this as meaning I am being much too speculative, picking up fleeting suggestions from flimsy air — an unfortunate truth if I am to face these matters at all. I again think vaguely of my concerns and, walking about, suddenly cast my eyes on the floor of an adjoining room where an assistant has been building an apparatus, and see a frayed wire with several strands at the end. I divine that my problem in this chapter is to tie together several different strands and loose ends of evidence.

And so on.

I have not come upon this type of divining in a Mesopotamian text. Yet I feel sure that it must have become a common practice, if only because spontaneous divination is both common and important in the Old Testament, as we shall see in a future chapter.

And it remains a common method among many types of seers well into the Middle Ages.25

These then are the four main types of divination, omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous divination. And I would draw to your attention that they can be considered as exopsychic methods of thought or decision-making, and that they are successively closer and closer proximations to the structure of consciousness.

The fact that all of them have roots that go back far into the bicameral period should not detract from the force of the general-25 Spontaneous divination was commonly used by Bedouin prognosticators around A.D. 1ooo, for example. See Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination Among the Hebrews and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938), p. 127. It is indeed an ingredient of everyday thought processes as well as prominent in intellectual discovery.

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ization that they became the important media of decision only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind as described in the first part of this chapter.

T H E E D G E O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y

So far in this heterogeneous chapter, we have been dealing with the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia, and the responses to this alteration in human mentality, the effort to find out what to do by other means when voices are no longer heard in hallucination. That a further method for finding out what to do was consciousness, and that it first occurs in the history of this planet here in Mesopotamia toward the end of the second millennium B.C. is a much more difficult proposition. The reasons are chiefly in our inability to translate cuneiform with the same exactness with which we can translate Greek or Hebrew, and to proceed with the kind of analysis which I attempt in the next chapter. The very words in cuneiform that might be relevant to tracing the metaphorical buildup of consciousness and mind-space are precisely those that are extremely difficult to translate with precision. Let me state categorically that a truly definitive study of changes in Mesopotamian mentality over this second millenium B.C. will have to wait for another level of scholarship in cuneiform studies. Such a task will include tracing out the changes in referent and frequency of words that later come to describe events which we call conscious. One, for example, is Sha (also transliterated as Shah or Shag), a word in Akkadian, whose basic meaning seems to be "in" or "inside." Prefixed to the name of a city, it means "in the city." Prefixed to the name of a man, it means "in the man," possibly a beginning of the interiorization of attribution.

I hope to be forgiven for saying rather tritely that these questions and so many others must remain for further research. So

A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 247

swiftly are new sites being discovered and new texts translated, that even ten years frarn now we shall have a much clearer picture, particularly if the data are looked at from the point of view of this chapter. The most I feel I can establish here at this time is simply a few comparisons of a literary kind which suggest that such a psychological change as consciousness actually took place.

These comparisons will be among letters, building inscriptions, and versions of Gilgamesh.

Assyrian and Old Babylonian betters Compared My first comparison to suggest this change from bicamerality to subjectivity is between the cuneiform tablet letters of the seventh century B.C., Assyria, and those of the old Babylonian kings a millennium earlier. The letters of Hammurabi and his era are factual, concrete, behavioristic, formalistic, commanding, and without greeting. They are not addressed to the recipient, but actually to the tablet itself, and always begin: unto A say, thus says B. And then follows what B has to say to A. We should remember here what I have suggested elsewhere, that reading, having developed from hallucinating from idols and then from pictographs, had become during later bicameral times a matter of hearing the cuneiform. And hence the addressee of the tablets.

The subjects of Old Babylonian letters are always objective.

Hammurabi's letters, for example (all possibly written by Hammurabi himself since they are cut by the same hand), are written for vassal kings and officers in his hegemony about sending such a person to him, or directing so much lumber to Babylon, specify-ing in one instance, "only vigorous trunks shall they cut down," or regulating the exchanges of corn for cattle, or where workmen should be sent. Rarely are reasons given. Purposes never.

Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi. I wrote you telling you to send Enubi-Marduk to me. W h y , then, haven't

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you sent him? W h e n you see this tablet, send Enubi-Marduk into my presence. See that he travels night and day, that he may arrive swiftly.26

And the letters rarely go beyond this in complication of 'thought'

or relationship.

A more interesting letter is a command to bring several conquered idols to Babylon:

Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi. I am sending now Zikir-ilisu the officer, and Hammarabi-bani the Dugab-officer to bring the goddesses of Emutbalum. Let the goddesses travel in a processional boat as in a shrine as they come to Babylon. And the temple-women shall follow after them. For the food of the goddesses, you shall provide sheep . . . Let them not delay, but swiftly reach Babylon.27

This letter is interesting in showing the everyday nature of the relationship of god and man in Old Babylon, as well as the fact that the deities are somehow expected to eat on their trip.

Going from Hammurabi's letters to the state letters of Assyria of the seventh century B.C. is like leaving a thoughtless tedium of undisobeyable directives and entering a rich sensitive frightened grasping recalcitrant aware world not all that different from our own. The letters are addressed to people, not tablets, and probably were not heard, but had to be read aloud. The subjects discussed have changed in a thousand years to a far more extensive list of human activities. But they are also imbedded in a texture of deceit and divination, speaking of police investigations, complaints of lapsing ritual, paranoid fears, bribery, and pathetic appeals of imprisoned officers, all things unknown, unmentioned, and impossible in the world of Hammurabi. Even sarcasm, as in 26 Transliterated and translated by L. W. King in Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi (London: Luzac, 1900), Vol. 3, Letter 46, p. 9+f.

27 Ibid., Vol. 3, Letter 2 p. 6f.

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a letter from an Assyrian king to his restive acculturated deputies in conquered Babylon about 670 B.C. :

W o r d of the king to the pseudo-Babylonians. I am well . . .

So you, so help you heaven, have turned yourselves into Babylonians! And you keep bringing up against my servants charges

— false charges, — which you and your master have concocted

. . . T h e document (nothing but windy words and importunities! ) which you have sent me, I am returning to you, after replacing it into its seals. Of course you will say, " W h a t is he sending back to us?" From the Babylonians, my servants and my friends are writing me: W h e n I open and read, behold, the goodness of the shrines, birds of sin . . ,28

And then the tablet is broken off.

A further interesting difference is their depiction of an Assyrian king. The Babylonian kings of the early second millennium were confident and fearless, and probably did not have to be too militaristic. The cruel Assyrian kings, whose palaces are virile with muscular depictions of lion hunts and grappling with claw-ing beasts, are in their letters indecisive frightened creatures appealing to their astrologers and diviners to contact the gods and tell them what to do and when to do it. These kings are told by their diviners that they are beggars or that their sins are making a god angry; they are told what to wear, or what to eat, or not to eat until further notice:29 "Something is happening in the skies $

have you noticed? As far as I am concerned, my eyes are fixed. I say, 'What phenomenon have I failed to see, or failed to report to the king? Have I failed to observe something that does not pertain to his lot?' . . . As to that eclipse of the sun of which the king spoke, the eclipse did not take place. On the 27th I shall look again and send in a report. From whom does the lord my king fear misfortune? I have no information whatsoever."30

28 Pfeiffer, Letter 80.

29 Pfeiffer, Letters 265, 439, and 553.

30 Pfeiffer, Letter 315.

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Does a comparison of these letters, a thousand years apart, demonstrate the alteration of mentality with which we are here concerned? Of course, a great deal of discussion could follow such a question. And research: content analyses, comparisons of syntax, uses of pronouns, questions, and future tenses, as well as specific words which appear to indicate subjectivity in the Assyrian letters and which are absent in the Old Babylonian. But such is our knowledge of cuneiform at present that a thorough analysis is not possible at this time. Even the translations I have used are hedged in favor of smooth English and familiar syntax and so are not to be completely trusted. Only an impressionist comparison is possible, and the result, I think, is clear: that the letters of the seventh century B.C. are far more similar to our own consciousness than those of Hammurabi a thousand years earlier.

The Serialization of Time

A second literary comparison can be made about the sense of time as shown in building inscriptions. In 1.2, I suggested that one of the essential properties of consciousness was the metaphor of time as a space that could be regionized such that events and persons can be located therein, giving that sense of past, present, and future in which narratization is possible.

The beginning of this characteristic of consciousness can be dated with at least a modicum of conviction at about 1300 B.C.

We have just seen how the development of omens and augury suggests this inferentially. But more exact evidence is found in the inscriptions on buildings. In the typical inscription previous to this date, the king gave his name and titles, lavished praise on his particular god or gods, mentioned briefly the season and circumstances when the building was started, and then described something of the building operation itself. After 1300 B.C., there is not only a mention of the event immediately preceding the building, but also a summary of all the king's past military ex-

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ploits to date. And in the next centuries, this information comes to be arranged systematically according to the yearly campaigns, and ultimately bursts out into the elaborate annal form that is almost universal in the records of the Assyrian rulers of the first millennium B.C. Such annals continue to swell beyond the recountal of raw fact into statements of motive, criticisms of courses of action, appraisals of character. And then further to include political changes, campaign strategies, historical notes on particular regions — all evidence, I insist, of the invention of consciousness. None of these characteristics is seen in the earlier inscriptions.

This is, of course, the invention of history as well, commencing exactly in the development of these royal inscriptions.31 How strange it seems to think of the idea of history having to be invented! Herodotus, usually famed as "the father of history,"

wrote his history only after a visit through Mesopotamia in the fifth century B.C., and may have picked up the very idea of history from these Assyrian sources. What is interesting to me in this speculation is the possibility that as consciousness develops, it can develop in slightly different ways, and the importance of the writing of Herodotus to the later development of Greek consciousness would make an interesting project. My essential point here, however, is that history is impossible without the spatialization of time that is characteristic of consciousness.

Gilgamesh

And finally a comparison from this best-known example of Assyrian literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh proper is a series of twelve numbered tablets found in Nineveh among the ruins of the temple library of the god Nabu and the palace library of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. It was written for the king out of previous stories in about 650 B.C., and its hero is a demigod, 31 See Saggs, p. 47 2f.

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Gilgamesh, whom his father, Esarhaddon, had worshiped. Certainly the name Gilgamesh goes far back into Mesopotamian history. And numerous other tablets have been found which relate to him and to this series in some way.

Prominent among them are three apparently older tablets which parallel some of the Assyrian tablets. Where they were found and their archaeological contexts are not at all clear. They were not found by archaeologists, but were bought by private buyers from a dealer in Baghdad. Their dating and provenance therefore are a questionable matter. From internal evidence I would place them at about the same time as some Hittite and Hurrian fragments about Gilgamesh, perhaps 1200 B.C. The more usual date given them is 1700 B.C. But whatever their date, there is certainly no warrant to suppose, as have some popularizers of the epic, that the seventh century B.C. rendering of the story of Gilgamesh goes back to the Old Babylonian era.

What we are interested in are the changes which have been made between the few older tablets and their Assyrian versions of 650 B.C.32 The most interesting comparison is in Tablet X. In the older version (called the Yale Tablet because of its present location), the divine Gilgamesh, mourning the death of his mortal friend Enkidu, has a dialogue with the god Shamash, and then with the goddess Siduri. The latter, called the divine barmaid, tells Gilgamesh that death for mortals is inevitable. These dialogues are nonsubjective. But in the later Assyrian version, the dialogue with Shamash is not even included, and the barmaid is described in very human earthly terms, even as self-consciously wearing a veil. To our conscious minds, the story has become humanized. At one point in the later Assyrian tablet, the barmaid sees Gilgamesh approaching. She is described as looking out into the distance and speaking to her own heart, saying to herself,

"Surely this man is a murderer! Whither is he bound?" This is subjective thinking. And it is not in the older tablet at all.

32 All references here are to the translation by Alexander Heidel.

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The Assyrian tablet goes on with great elaboration (as well as with great beauty) to bring out the subjective sadness in the heart of Gilgamesh at the loss of his friend. One of the literary devices here (at least as translators have restored a damaged part) is repeated questions that describe the outward demeanor of Gilgamesh rhetorically, asking why his appearance and behavior are thus and so, so that the reader is constantly imagining the interior 'space' and analog T of the hero.

W h y is thy heart so sad, and why are thy features so distorted?

W h y is there woe in thy heart?

And why is thy face like unto one who has made a far journey?

None of this psalmlike concern is in the old version of Tablet X.

Another character is the god Utnapishtim, the Distant, who is mentioned only briefly in the old version of Tablet X. But, in the 650 B.C. version, he is looking into the distance and speaking words to his hearty asking it questions and coming to his own conclusions.

Conclusion

The evidence we have just examined is strong in some areas and weak in others. The literature on the loss of the gods is an unquestionable change in the history of Mesopotamia, unlike anything that preceded it. It is indeed the birth of modern religious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the very psalmlike yearnings for religious certainty that are expressed in the literature from the time of Tukulti up into the first millennium B.C.

The sudden flourishing of all kinds of divination and its huge importance in both political and private life is also an unquestionable historical fact. And while these practices date back to earlier time, perhaps even suggesting that as civilization became more

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complicated toward the end of the third millennium B.C., the bicameral gods needed some auxiliary method of decision-making, they only achieve their dominance and universal position in civilized life after the breakdown of the gods.

It is also unquestionable that the very nature of divinities was altered in these times, and that the belief in a world darkened with hostile demons, causing disease and misfortune, can only be understood as an expression of the deep and irreversible uncertainty which followed the loss of the hallucinated decisions of the bicameral mind.

What is weak in our survey is indeed the evidence of consciousness itself. There is something unsatisfying in my saltatory comparisons among questionable translations of cuneiform tablets of various ages. What we would like is to see in front of us a continuous literature wherein we could watch more carefully the unfolding of subjective mind-space and its operator function in initiating decision. This is indeed what occurs in Greece a few centuries later, and it is to that analysis that we now turn.

C H A P T E R 5

The Intellectual Consciousness

of Greece

THEY HAVE CALLED IT the Dorian invasions. And classicists will tell you that indeed they could have called it anything or everything, so groping our knowledge, and so dark these particular profundities of past time. But continuities in pottery designs from one archaeological site to another do fetch a few candles into this vast and silent darkness, and they reveal, albeit in flickering fashion, the huge jagged outlines of complex successions of migrations and displacements that lasted from 1200 to 1000 B.C.1 That much is fact.

The rest is inference. Even who the so-called Dorians were is unclear. In an earlier chapter, I have suggested that the beginning of all this chaos may have been the Thera eruption and its consequences. As Thucydides at the last edge of a verbal tradition describes it, "migrations were a frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers." Palaces and villages that once held fealty to Agamemnon and his gods were looted and burned by other bicameral peoples who, following their own admonitory visions, probably could not communicate with nor have pity on the natives. Survivors were slaves or refugees, and refugees conquered or died. Our greatest certainties are negative. For all that the Mycaenaean world had produced with such remarkable 1 V. R. d'A. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors: An Archaeological Survey, c 1200-c IOOO b.c. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

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uniformity everywhere — the massive stone architecture of its god-ordered palaces and fortifications, its undulant frescoes of delicate clarity, its shaft-graves with their elaborate contents, the megaron plan of its houses, the terra-cotta idols and figurines, the death masks of beaten gold, the bronze and ivory work and distinctive pottery — all stopped and was never known thereafter.

This ruin is the bitter soil for the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece. And the difference here from the huge Assyrian cities stumbling on into a fumbling demon-ridden consciousness out of their own momentum is important. In contrast, Mycaenae had been a loose and spread-out system of divinely commanded cities of smaller size. The breakdown of the bicameral mind resulted in an even greater dispersion as all society broke down.

It is even plausible that all this political havoc was the very challenge to which the great epics were a defiant response, and that the long narrative chants of the aoidoi from refugee camp to camp worked out into an eager unity with the cohesive past on the part of a newly nomadic people reaching at lost certainties.

Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. Arid this unique factor, this importance of poetry in a devastating social chaos, is the reason why Greek consciousness specifically fluoresces into that brilliant intellectual light which is still illuminating our world.

What I shall do in this chapter is to conduct you on a tour through all the early extant literature of Greece. It is unfortunately a short list of texts. Beginning with the Iliad, we shall travel consecutively up through the Odyssey and the Boeotian poems ascribed to Hesiod, and then into the fragments of the lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh century B.C. and a little beyond. In doing so, I shall not be giving you any running description of the scenery we are passing through. The several

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good histories of early Greek poetry can do that better than I.

Instead I shall be directing your attention to selected things as we pass by that are of particular interest from the point of view of our theory of consciousness.

But before we do so, we must make a few preliminary excursions, particularly into a more thorough analysis of mindlike terms in the Iliad.

L O O K I N G F O R W A R D T H R O U G H

T H E I L I A D

In an earlier chapter, I made the statement that the Iliad was our window upon the immediate bicameral past. Here, I propose that we stand on the other side of that window and peer forward into the distant conscious future, regarding this great mysterious paean to anger, not so much as the end point of the verbal tradition that preceded it, but rather as the very beginning of the new mentality to come.

In I.3, we saw that the words which in later Greek indicate aspects of conscious functioning have in the Iliad more concrete and bodily referents. But the very fact that these words come to have mental meanings later suggests that they may be some kind of key to understanding the manner in which Greek consciousness is developed.

The words we shall look at here are seven: thumos, phrenes, noos, and psyche, all of them variously translated as mind, spirit, or soul, and kradie, ker, and etor, often translated as heart or sometimes as mind or spirit. The translation of any of these seven as mind or anything similar is entirely mistaken and without any warrant whatever in the Iliad. Simply, and without equivocation, they are to be thought of as objective parts of the environment or of the body. We shall discuss these terms fully in a moment.

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Now the first question to ask is why these entities are in the poem at all. I have earlier stressed the fact that the major instigations to action here are in the voices of the gods, not in the thumo, phrenes, etor, et al. The latter are entirely redundant. In fact they often seem to get in the way of the simple command-obedience relation between god and man, like a wedge between the two sides of the bicameral mind. Why then are they there?

Let us examine more closely what would have happened at the beginning of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. In I.4, we found that the physiological cuing of an hallucinated voice, whether in a bicameral man or in a contemporary schizophrenic, is the stress of some decision or conflict. Now, as the voices of gods become more inadequate and suppressed during this social chaos, we may suppose that the amount of that stress necessary to occasion an hallucinated voice would be raised.

It is quite likely, then, that as the bicameral organization of mind began to diminish, the decision-stress in novel situations would be much greater than previously, and both the degree and duration of that stress would have to become progressively more intense before the hallucination of a god would occur. And such increased stress would be accompanied by a variety of physiological concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning sensations, abrupt changes in breathing, a pounding or fluttering heart, etc., responses which in the Iliad are called thumos, phrenes and kradie respectively. And this is what these words mean, not mind or anything like it. As the gods are heard progressively less and less, these internal response-stimuli of progressively greater stress are associated more and more with men's subsequent actions, whatever they may be, even coming to take on the godlike function of seeming to initiate action themselves.

The evidence that we are on the right track in these supposi-tions can be found in the Iliad itself. At the very beginning, Agamemnon, king of men but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briseis away from Achilles, who had

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captured her. As he does so, the response of Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict or put into two parts ( mermerizo) whether to obey his thumosy the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory king or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his mighty sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action (1:188ff.) and tells Achilles what to do.

I mean to suggest here that the degree and extent of these internal sensations were neither so evident nor so named in the true bicameral period. If we may propose that there was an Ur-Iliad, or the verbal epic as it came from the lips of the first several generations of aoidoi, then we can expect that it had no such interval, no etor or thumos preceding the voice of the god, and that the use and, as we shall see, the increasing use of these words in this way reflects the alteration of mentality, the wedge between god and man which results in consciousness.

Preconscious Hypostases

We may call these mind-words that later come to mean something like conscious functioning, the preconscious hypostases.

The latter term means in Greek what is caused to stand under something. The preconscious hypostases are the assumed causes of action when other causes are no longer apparent. In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a man who acts, but one of the preconscious hypostases which causes him to act. They are thus seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness.

What we shall see is that the frequency and the meaning of these terms gradually change as we go from text to text from about 850 to 600 B.C., and how in the sixth century B.C. their

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referents join together in what we would call the subjective conscious mind.2

I would like here to translate and expand what I have just said into a clearer statement by suggesting that this temporal development of the preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases:

Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations.

Phase I I : Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations.

Phase I I I : Subjective: W h e n these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have moved

from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur.

Phase I V : Synthetic: W h e n the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection.

The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of transition between these phases.

The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the breakdown period. It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of gods and their hallucinated directions. The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only external perception.

The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more 2 Professor A. D. H. Adkins has made this drawing-together of the various mind-words into one the theme of his book From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970).

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complicated matter. And much more interesting. It is due to the paraphrand generator of metaphor described in 1.2. In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known metaphier which is similar to it in some way. Usually there are simple associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates being called paraphrands.

Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that they are new in their association with the metaphrand. And this is how we are able to generate the kind of 'space' which we introspect upon and which is the necessary substrate of consciousness. This is really quite simple as we shall see shortly.

And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also. I suggest that as the subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al. become established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as 'containers' or 'persons.' But this synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted in a new concept of self.

Before looking at the evidence for these matters, let us first investigate the preconscious hypostases and their Iliadic meanings in these phases with more detail. In the general order of their importance in the Iliad, they are:

Thumos

This is by far the most common and important hypostatic word in the whole poem. It occurs three times as often as any other.

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Originally, in the Objective Phase, I suggest, it meant simply activity as externally perceived. And nothing internal about it.

This Mycaenaean usage is found frequently in the Iliad, particularly in the battle scenes, where a warrior aiming a spear in the right place causes the thumos or activity of another to cease.

The internal Phase II, as we have seen in Achilles' wrath occurs in a novel stressful situation during the breakdown period when the stress threshold for the hallucinated voice was higher. Thumos then refers to a mass of internal sensations in response to environmental crises. It was, I suggest, a pattern of stimulation familiar to modern physiology, the so-called stress or emergency response of the sympathetic nervous system and its liberation of adrenalin and noradrenalin from the adrenal glands.

This includes the dilation of the blood vessels in striate muscles and in the heart, an increase in tremor of striate muscles, a burst of blood pressure, the constriction of blood vessels in the abdominal viscera and in the skin, the relaxing of smooth muscles, and the sudden increased energy from the sugar released into the blood from the liver, and possible perceptual changes with the dilation of the pupil of the eye. This complex was, then, the internal pattern of sensation that preceded particularly violent activity in a critical situation. And by doing so repeatedly, the pattern of sensation begins to take on the term for the activity itself. Thereafter, it is the thumos which gives strength to a warrior in battle, etc. All the references to thumos in the Iliad as an internal sensation are consistent with this interpretation.

Now the important transition to the subjective Phase III is already beginning even in the Iliad, although not in a very conspicuous way. We see it in the unvoiced metaphor of the thumos as like a container: in several passages, menos or vigor is 'put' in someone's thumos ( i 6 : 5-8; 17: 451; 22: 312). The thumos is also implicitly compared to a person: it is not Ajax who is zealous to fight but his thumos (13: 73); nor is it Aeneas who rejoices but his thumos (13: 494; see also 14: 156). If not a god, it is the

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thumos that most often 'urges' a man into action. And as if it were another person, a man may speak to his thumos ( u : 403), and may hear from it what he is to say (7: 68), or have it reply to him even as a god (9: 702).

All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined

'space,5 here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog 'I5.

Phrenes

The second most common hypostasis in the Iliad is the phrenes. Its Objective Phase origin is more questionable. But the fact that it is almost always plural may indicate that the phrenes objectively referred to the lungs and perhaps were associated with phrasis or speech.

In the Internal Phase, phrenes become the temporal pattern of sensations associated with respiratory changes. These come from the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles of the rib-cage, and the smooth muscles surrounding the bronchial tubes which regulate their bore and so the resistance of them to the passage of air, this mechanism being controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. We should remember here how extremely responsive our breathing is to various types of environmental stimulation. A sudden stimulus, and we 'catch our breath'. Sobbing and laugh-ing have obvious distinct internal stimulation from the diaphragm and intercostals. In great activity or excitement, there is an increase in both the rate and depth of breathing with the resulting internal stimulation. Either pleasantness or unpleasantness usually shows increased breathing. Momentary attention

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is clearly correlated with partial or complete inhibition of breathing. A surprise, and our rate of breathing increases and becomes irregular.

Apart from rate, there are also unique changes in the proportion of time occupied by inspiration and by expiration in a single breath cycle. This is best measured by determining the percent of the duration of the breath cycle taken up by inspiration. This is about 16 percent in speech, 23 percent in laughter, 30 percent in attentive mental work, 43 percent when at rest, 60 percent or more in excitement, 71 percent in subjects imagining a wonderful or surprising situation, and 75 percent in sudden fright.3

The point I am trying to make here is that our phrenes or respiratory apparatus can almost be looked at as recording everything we do in quite distinct and distinguishable ways. It is at least possible that this internal mirror of behavior loomed much larger in the total stimulus world of the preconscious mind than it does in ourselves. And certainly its changing pattern of internal stimulation makes us understand why the phrenes are so important during the transition to consciousness, and why the term is used in so many functionally different ways in the poetry we are examining in this chapter.

In the Iliad, it can often be translated simply as lungs. Agamemnon's black phrenes fill with anger (1:103) and we can visualize the king's deep breathing as his fury mounts. Auto-medon fills his dark phrenes with valor and strength, or takes deep breaths (17:499). Frightened fawns have no strength in their phrenes after running} they are out of breath (4:245). In weeping, grief 'comes to' the phrenes (1:362; 8:124) or the respiratory phrenes can 'hold' fear (10:10), or joy (9:186). Even these statements are partly metaphoric, and thus associate a kind of container space in the phrenes.

A very few instances are more clearly in Phase III in the sense 3 By inspiration here I mean from the beginning of taking a breath to the beginning of exhaling. The measure thus includes holding one's breath. These determinations collected from various sources. See Robert S. Woodworth, Exferimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 264.

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of inner mind-space. These are where the phrenes are said to

'contain' and perhaps 'retain' information. Sometimes this information comes from a god (1:55) or at other times from another human (1:297).

Laboratory studies have demonstrated that even simple sensory experience of an object, its recognition, and the recall of the name associated with it, all can be observed in recordings of respiration taken simultaneously.4 It is thus not surprising that when some internal sensation is first connected to such functions as recognition and recall, it is located in the phrenes. Once it is said that the phrenes can recognize events (22:296), it is making a metaphor of the phrenes with a person, and the paraphrands of 'person,' that is, something that can act in a space projects back into the phrenes to make it metaphorically spatial and capable of other human activities metaphorically. Similarly we find that like a person the phrenes of a man can occasionally

'be persuaded' by another man (7:120), or even by a god (4:104). The phrenes can perhaps even 'speak' like a god, as when Agamemnon says he obeyed his baneful phrenes (9:119).

These instances are quite rare in the Iliad, but they do point toward what will develop into consciousness over the next two centuries.

Kradie

This term, which later comes to be spelled kardia, and results in our familiar adjective 'cardiac,' is not quite so important or mysterious as other hypostases. It refers to the heart. In fact, it is the most common hypostasis still in use. When we in the twentieth century wish to be sincere, we still speak out of our hearts, not out of our consciousness. It is in our hearts that we have our most profound thoughts and cherish our closest beliefs.

And we love with our hearts. It is curious that the lungs or 4 Mario Ponzo, "La misura del decorso di processi psichici esequita per mezzo delle grafiche del respiro," Archives Italiennes de Psicologia, 1920-21, 1: 214.-238.

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phrenes have never maintained their hypostatic role as has the kradie.

Originally, I suggest, it simply meant quivering, coming from the verb kroteo, to beat. Kradie even means in some passages of early Greek a quivering branch. Then, in the internalization of Phase II that went on during the Dorian invasions, the quivering that was seen with the eye and felt with the hand externally becomes the name of the internal sensation of the heartbeat in response to external situations. With few exceptions, this is its referent in the Iliad. No one believes anything in his heart as yet.

Again I would remind you of the extensive modern literature on the responsiveness of our hearts to how we perceive the world.

Like respiration or the action of the sympathetic nervous system, the cardiac system is extremely sensitive to particular aspects of the environment. At least one recent commentator has introduced the concept of the cardiac mind, calling the heart a specific sense organ for anxiety, as the eyes are the sense organ for sight.5 Anxiety in this view is not any of the poetic homologues which we in our consciousness might use to describe it. Rather it is an inner tactile sensation in the sensory nerve endings of cardiac tissue which reads the environment for its anxiety potential.

While this notion is doubtful as it stands, it is good Homeric psychology. A coward in the Iliad is not someone who is afraid, but someone whose kradie beats loudly (13:282). The only remedy is for Athene to ‘put’ strength in the kradie (2:452), or for Apollo to ‘put’ boldness in it (21:547). The metaphier of a container here is building a ‘space’ into the heart in which later men may believe, feel, and ponder things deeply.

Etor

Philologists usually translate both kradie and etor as heart.

5 Ludwig Braun, Herz und Angst (Vienna: Deuticke, 1932), p. 38.

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And certainly a word can have synonyms. But in instances so important as the assigning of particular locations of sensations and forces of action, I would demur on a priori grounds, and insist that to the ancient Greek these terms had to represent different locations and sensations. Sometimes they are even clearly distinct in the text (20:169). I have thus the temerity to suggest that etor in Phase I came from the noun etron — belly, and that in Phase II, it becomes internalized into sensations of the gastro-intestinal tract, particularly the stomach. Indeed, there is even evidence for this in the Iliad, where it is precisely stated that food and drink are taken to satisfy the etor (19:307).6 This translation is also more apt in other situations, as when a warrior loses his etor or guts in the front ranks of the battle by being dis-emboweled ( 5:215 ).

But more important is the stimulus field it provides for mental functioning. We know that the gastro-intestinal tract has a wide repertoire of responses to human situations. Everyone knows the sinking feeling on receiving bad news, or the epigastric cramp before a near automobile accident. The intestine is equally responsive to emotional stimuli of lesser degree, and these responses can be easily seen on the fluoroscopic screen.7 Stomach contractions and peristalsis stop at an unpleasant stimulus, and may even be reversed if the unpleasantness is increased. The secretory activity of the stomach is also extremely susceptible to emotional experience. The stomach is indeed one of the most responsive organs in the body, reacting in its spasms and empty-ing and contractions and secretory activity to almost every emotion and sensation. And this is the reason why illnesses of the gastro-intestinal system were the first to be thought of as psychosomatic.

It is therefore plausible that this spectrum of gastro-intestinal sensations was what was being referred to by the etor. When 6 See also Hesiod: Works and Days, 593.

7 Howard E. Ruggles, “Emotional influence on the gastro-intestinal tract,” California and Western Medicine} 1928, 29: 221-223.

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Andromache hears the groaning Hecuba, her etor heaves up in her throatj she is close to vomiting (22:452).8 When Lycaon's plea to live is mocked by Achilles, it is Lycaon's etor along with his knees that are 'loosened' and made weak (21:114). We would say he has a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. And when the gods themselves join in the battle, it is the etor of Zeus that laughs with joy, or what we would call a belly-laugh (21:389),

The container metaphor is not used as with the other hypostases, probably because the stomach already contains food. For this very reason we will see that it does not grow into an important part of any conscious mentality in the literature to follow.

I think it is obvious to the medical reader that these matters we are discussing under the topic of the preconscious hypostases have a considerable bearing on any theory of psychosomatic disease. In the thumos, phrenes, kradie, and etor, we have covered the four major target systems of such illness. And that they compose the very groundwork of consciousness, a primitive partial type of consciousizing, has important consequences in medical theory.

I shall only indicate the ker in passing, partly because it plays a diminishing role in this story of consciousness, but also because its derivation and significance is somewhat cloudy. While it is possible that it could have come from cheir and then become somatized into trembling hands and limbs, it is more probably from the same root as kardia in a different dialect. Certainly the passage in the Odyssey which states that a warrior is wounded where the phrenes or lungs are set close about the throbbing ker (16:481) leaves little doubt. It is almost always referred to as the organ of grief and is of limited importance.

But of utmost importance is the next hypostasis. Let it be immediately stated that it is an uncommon term in the Iliad — so 8 And just as the stomach pulsates like the heart, so they sometimes become confused, as when in the wounded lion's kradie his valiant etor groans (20:169).

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uncommon as to make us suspect that it could have been added by the later generations of aoidoi. But starting from such small beginnings in the Iliad, it soon comes into the very center of our topic. And this is

Noos

Up to now, we have been dealing with large, ummistakable internal sensations that only needed to be named in times of turmoil and crisis, and which then took their names from objective external perception. Noos, deriving from noeo = to see, is perception itself. And in coming to it we are in a much more powerful region in our intellectual travels.

For, as we saw in an earlier chapter, the great majority of the terms we use to describe our conscious lives are visual. We 'see'

with the mind's 'eye' solutions which may be 'brilliant' or 'obscure,' and so on. Vision is our distance receptor far excellence.

It is our sense of space in a way that no other modality can even approach. And it is that spatial quality, as we have seen, that is the very ground and fabric of consciousness.

It is interesting to note parenthetically that there is no hypostasis for hearing as there is for sight. Even today, we do not hear with the mind's ear as we see with the mind's eye. Nor do we refer to intelligent minds as loud, in the same way we say they are bright. This is probably because hearing was the very essence of the bicameral mind, and as such has those differences from vision which I discussed in 1.4. The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind.

This shift is first seen somewhat fitfully in the Iliad. The Mycenaean objective origin of the term is present in objective statements about seeing, or in noos as a sight or show. In urging his men into battle, a warrior may say there is no better noos than a hand-to-hand battle with the enemy (15:510). And Zeus keeps Hector in his noos (151461).

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But the second phase of internalization of noos is also evident in the Iliad. It is located in the chest (3:63). How curious to us that it was not placed in the eyes! Perhaps this is because in its new role it was becoming melded with the thumos. Indeed, noos takes on adjectives more suitable to the thumos, such as fearless (3:63) and strong (16:688). And Odysseus dissuades the Achaeans from putting their ships to sea by telling them that they do not yet know what sort of noos is in Agamemnon (2:192).

And one of the most modern-sounding instances occurs in the very first episode, when Thetis, consoling the sobbing Achilles, asks him, "Why has grief come upon your phrenes? Speak, conceal not in noos, so that we both may know" (1:363).9 Apart from this, there is no other subjectification in the Iliad. No one makes any decisions in his noos. Thinking does not go on in the noos, or even memory. These are still in the voices of those organizations of the right temporal lobe that are called gods.

The precise causes of this internalization of sight into a container in which the seeing can be 'held' will require a much more careful study than we can go into here. Perhaps it was simply the generalization of internalization which I suggest had occurred earlier in those internalizations correlated with large internal sensations. Or it may have been that the observation of external difference in the mingling of refugees, as mentioned in II.3, demanded the positing of this visual hypostasis, which could be different in different men, making them see different things.

Psyche

And so finally to the word that gives psychology its name.

Probably coming from the term psychein = to breathe, it has become internalized into life substances in its main usage in the 9 A further exception to what I am saying can be found in the comparison of the swiftness of Hera with the swiftness of a man's nous wishing in his phrenes to be in distant places he has once visited (15 : 8of.). On the peculiarity of such an expression in Homer, see Walter Leaf, A Companion to the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 257. This is obviously a late incursion.

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Iliad. Most often, psyche seems to be used in just the way we would use life. But this can be very misleading. For 'life' to us means something about a period of time, a span between birth and death, full of events and developments of a certain character.

There is absolutely nothing of this sort in the Iliad. When a spear strikes the heart of a warrior, and his psyche dissolves (5:296), is destroyed (22:325), or simply leaves him (16:453), or is coughed out through the mouth (9:409), or bled out through a wound (14:518; 16:505), there is nothing whatever about time or about the end of anything. There is in one part of Book 23 a different meaning of psyche, a discussion of which is deferred to the end of this chapter. But generally, it is very simply a property that can be taken away, and is similar to the taking away, under the same conditions, of thumos or activity, a word with which psyche is often coupled.

In trying to understand these terms, we must refrain from our conscious habit of building space into them before this has happened historically. In a sense, psyche is the most primitive of these preconscious hypostases; it is simply the property of breathing or bleeding or what not in that physical object over there called a man or an animal, a property which can be taken from him like a prize (22:161) by a spear in the right place.

And in general, that is, with the exceptions I discuss at the end of this chapter, the main use of psyche in the Iliad does not progress beyond that. No one in any way ever sees, decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything in his psyche.

These then are the supposed substantives inside the body that by literary metaphor, by being compared to containers and persons, accrue to themselves spatial and behavioral qualities which in later literature develop into the unified mind-space with its analog CP that we have come to call consciousness. But in pointing out these beginnings in the Iliad, let me remind you that the contours of the main actions of the poem are as divinely dictated and as nonconscious as I have insisted in 1.3. These precon-

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scious hypostases do not enter into any major decisions. But they are definitely there playing a subsidiary role. It is indeed as if the unitary conscious mind of the later age is here in the Iliad beginning as seven different entities, each with a slightly different function and a distinction from the others which is almost impossible for us to appreciate today.

T H E W I L E S O F T H E O D Y S S E Y

After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems freshly and consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! There are of course some scholars who still like to think of these two huge epics as being written down and even composed by one man named Homer, the first in his youth and the second in his maturity. The more reasonable view, I think, is that the Odyssey followed the Iliad by at least a century or more, and, like its predecessor, was the work of a succession of aoidoi rather than any one man.

But, unlike its predecessor, the Odyssey is not one epic but a series of them. The originals were probably about different heroes, and brought together around Odysseus at a later time.

Why this happened is not hard to unravel. Odysseus, at least in some parts of Greece, had become the center of a cult that enabled conquered peoples to survive. He becomes "wily Odysseus" and later aoidoi perhaps inserted this epithet into the Iliad to remind their listeners of the Odyssey. Archaeological evidence indicates important dedications made to Odysseus some time after iooo b . C . and definitely before 800 B . C . These were 1 0

sometimes of bronze tripod caldrons curiously connected with the cult. They were such dedications as formerly would have been to a god. Contests in worship of him were held in Ithaca at least 10 S. Benton, as cited in T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 138.

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from the ninth century B.C., even as that island was about to be overrun again by new invasions from Corinth. In a word, Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world.

The Odyssey announces this in its very fifth word, polutropon

= much turning. It is a journey of deviousness. It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration. It sings of indirections and disguises and subterfuges, transformations and recognitions, drugs and forgetfulness, of people in other people's places, of stories within stories, and men within men.

The contrast with the Iliad is astonishing. Both in word and deed and character, the Odyssey describes a new and different world inhabited by new and different beings. The bicameral gods of the Iliad, in crossing over to the Odyssey, have become defensive and feeble. They disguise themselves more and even indulge in magic wands. The bicameral mind by its very definition directs much less of the action. The gods have less to do, and like receding ghosts talk more to each other — and that so tediously!

The initiatives move from them, even against them, toward the work of the more conscious human characters, though overseen by a Zeus who in losing his absolute power has acquired a Lear-like interest in justice. Seers and omens, these hallmarks of the breakdown of bicamerality, are more common. Semi-gods, de-humanizing witches, one-eyed giants, and sirens, reminiscent of the genii that we saw marked the breakdown of bicamerality in Assyrian bas-reliefs a few centuries earlier, are evidence of a profound alteration in mentality. And the huge Odysseyan themes of homeless wanderings, of kidnapings and enslavements, of things hidden, things regained, are surely echoes of the social breakdown following the Dorian invasions when subjective consciousness in Greece first took its mark.

Technically, the first thing to note is the change in the frequency with which the preconscious hypostases are used. Such data can be compiled easily from concordances of the Iliad and

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Odyssey, and the results are dramatic in showing a very definite rise in frequency for phrenes, noos, and psyche, and a striking drop in the use of the word thumos. Of course we can say that the decrease for thumos from the Iliad to the Odyssey is due to what the poem is about. But that is begging the question. For the very change in theme is indeed a part of this whole transition in the very nature of man. The other hypostases are passive. Thumosy the adrenalin-produced emergency reaction of the sympathetic nervous system to novel situations, is the antithesis of anything passive. The kind of metaphors that can be built up around this metaphrand of a sudden surge of energy are not the passive visual ones that are more conducive to solving problems.

In contrast, over this period, phrenes doubles in frequency, while both noos and psyche triple in frequency. Again, the point could be made that the increase in the use of these words is simply an echo of the change in topics. And again that is precisely the point. Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

But it is not just their frequency that we are interested in. It is also the change in their inherent meanings and the metaphiers used for them. As the gods decrease in their direction of human affairs, the preconscious hypostases take over some of their divine function, moving them closer to consciousness. Thumos, though decreased, is still the most common hypostatic word. And its function is different. It has reached the subjective phase and is like another person. It is the thumos of the swineherd that

'commands' him to return to Telemachus (16:466). In the Iliad, it would have been a god speaking. In the earlier epic, a god can

'place' menos or vigor into the 'container' of the thumos; but in the Odyssey, it is an entire recognition that can be 'placed'

therein. Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus under his disguise by his scar because a god has 'put' that recognition in her thumos

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(19:485)- (Note that she has recognition but not recall.) And the servants of Penelope have knowledge of her son's departure in their thumos (4:730).

Phrenes too has acquired the spatial qualities of Phase III.

Even the description of a possible future event can be put in the phrenes, as when Telemachus, as a pretext for depriving the suitors of weapons, is asked to claim that a daimon (it would have at least been a god in the Iliad) has put fears of quarrels among them into his phrenes (19:10). There are no secrets in the Iliad. But the Odyssey has many of them, and they are 'held'

in the phrenes (16:459). Whereas in the Iliad the preconscious hypostases were almost always clearly located, their increasingly metaphorical nature is muddling up their anatomical distinction in the Odyssey. Even the thumos is at one point located inside the lungs or phrenes (22:38).

But there is another and even more important use of fhrenes, this word that originally referred to the lungs and then to the complex sensations in breathing. And this is in the first beginnings of morality. No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist. But in the Odyssey, Clytaemnestra is able to resist Aegisthus because her phrenes are agathai, which may have been derived from roots that would make it mean 'very like a god'. And in another place, it is th t agathai. godly, or good phrenes of Eumaeus which has him remember to make offerings to the gods (14:421). And similarly it is the agathai or good phrenes that are responsible for Penelope's chastity and loyalty to the absent Odysseus (12:194).

It is not yet Penelope who is agathe, only the metaphor-space in her lungs.

And similarly with the other preconscious hypostases. Warnings of destruction are 'heard' from the kradie or pounding heart of Odysseus when he is wrecked and thrown into tempestuous seas (5:389). And it is his ker, again his trembling heart or perhaps his trembling hands, that makes plans for the suitors'

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downfall (18:344). In the Iliad, these would have been gods speaking. Noos, while being referred to more frequently, is sometimes not changed. But more often it is also in Phase III of subjectification. At one point, Odysseus is deceiving Athene (un-thinkable in the Iliad!) and looks at her ever revolving in his noos thoughts of great cunning (13:255). Or noos can be like a person who is glad (8:78) or cruel (18:381) or not to be fooled (10:329) or learned about (1:3). Psyche again usually means life, but perhaps with more sense of a time span. Some very important exceptions to this will be referred to later.

Not only is the growth toward subjective consciousness in the Odyssey seen in the increasing use and spatial interiority and personification of its preconscious hypostases, but even more clearly in its incidents and social interrelationships. These include the emphasis on deceit and guile which I have already referred to. In the Iliad, time is referred to sloppily and inaccurately, if at all. But the Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of time in its use of time words, such as begin, hesitate, quickly, endure, etc., and the more frequent reference to the future. There is also an increased ratio of abstract terms to concrete, particularly of what in English would be nouns ending in ‘ness’. And with this, as might be expected, a marked drop in similes: there is less need for them. Both the frequency and the manner with which Odysseus refers to himself is on a different level altogether from instances of self-reference in the Iliad. All this is relevant to the growth of a new mentality.

Let me close this necessarily short entry on a toweringly important poem by calling your attention to a mystery. This is that the overall contour of the story itself is a myth of the very matter with which we are concerned. It is a story of identity, of a voyage to the self that is being created in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I am not pretending here to be answering the profound question of why this should be so, of why the muses, those patternings of the right temporal lobe, who are singing this epic

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through the aoidoi, should be narratizing their own downfall, their own fading away into subjective thought, and celebrating the rise of a new mentality that will overwhelm the very act of their song. For this seems to be what is happening.

I am saying — and finding it work to believe myself — that all this highly patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a metaphor of the huge transilience toward consciousness, was not composed, planned, and put together by poets conscious of what they were doing. It is as if the god-side of the bicameral man was approaching consciousness before the man-side, the right hemisphere before the left. And if belief does stick here, and we are inclined to ask scoffingly and rhetorically, how could an epic that may itself be a kind of drive toward consciousness be composed by nonconscious men? We can also ask with the same rhetorical fervor, how could it have been composed by conscious men? And have the same silence follow. We do not know the answer to either question.

But so it is. And as this series of stories sweeps from its lost hero sobbing on an alien shore in bicameral thrall to his beautiful goddess Calypso, winding through its world of demigods, testings, and deceits, to his defiant war whoops in a rival-routed home, from trance through disguise to recognition, from sea to land, east to west, defeat to prerogative, the whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgment out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past. From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes 'Odysseus'.

F O O L I S H P E R S E S

Some of the chronologically next group of poems I shall merely gloss over. Among these are the so-called Homeric Hymns, most of which have turned out to be of a much later date. There are

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also the poems that originated in Boeotia northeast of Athens in the eighth century B.C., many of which were once ascribed to a cult figure named Hesiod. Unfortunately, their extant texts are often mixtures of parts of poems from obviously different sources, badly emended. Most of them contribute little to our present concern. The often tedious recital of the relationships of gods in the Theogony is usually dated shortly after the Odyssey, but its hypostatic words are fewer and without development. Its chief interest is that its concern with the intimate lives of gods is perhaps a result of their silence, another expression of the nostalgia for the Golden Age before the Dorian invasions.

But of much greater interest is the fascinating problem presented by the text ascribed to Hesiod known as the Works and Days.11 It is obviously a hodgepodge of various things, a kind of Shepherd's Calendar for a Boeotian farmer, and a very poor and scrubbing farmer at that. Its world is worlds away from the world of the great Homeric epics. Instead of a hero at the command of his gods working through a narrative of grandeur, we have instruction to the countryman, who may or may not obey his gods, on ways of work, which days are lucky, and a very interesting new sense of justice.

On the surface, this medley of scruffy detail of farm life and nostalgia for the Golden Age that is no more seems to be written by a farmer whom scholars take to be Hesiod. He is supposedly railing at his brother, Perses, over the unfairness of a judgment dividing their father's farm, curiously giving Perses advice on everything from morality to marriage, on how to treat slaves to the problems of planting and sewage disposal. It is full of such things as:

Foolish Perses! W o r k the work which the gods ordained for men, lest in bitter anguish of thumosy you with your wife and children seek your livelihood amongst your neighbors. ( 3 9 7 f f . ) 11 I have used throughout the Loeb edition of Hesiod (London: Heinemann, 1936).

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At least this is what most scholars take the poem to be. But another interpretation is at least possible. This is that the older portions of the poem may actually have been written not by Hesiod, who is never mentioned in the poem, but by none other than the hand of foolish Perses himself, and that these main parts of the poem are the admonitions of his divine bicameral voice advising him what to do. If this jolts your sense of possibility, I would remind you of the schizophrenic patients who all day may hear similarly authoritative critical voices constantly admonishing them in a similar vein.

Perhaps I should not say written. More probably the poem was dictated to a scribe, even as were the bicameral admonitions of Perses’ contemporary, Amos, the herdsman of Israel. And I should also have said a previous recension of the main poem, and that the protest lodged in the crucial lines 37-39 were added later (even as everyone since Plutarch has agreed that 654-662 were).

It is also possible that these lines originally referred to some kind of bicameral struggle for the control of Perses’ too subjective and therefore (at this time) unprofitable behavior.

The preconscious hypostases in the Works and Days occur in approximately the same frequencies as in the Odyssey. Thumos is the most common and in about half of its eighteen occurrences it is a simple Phase II internal impulse to some activity or locus of joy or sorrow. But the rest of the time, it is a Phase III space in which information (27), advice (297, 491), sights (296), or mischief (499) can be ‘put’, ‘kept’, or ‘held’. The phrenes also are like a cupboard, where the advice that is constantly given in the poem (107, 274) is to be laid up, and where foolish Perses is to

‘look’ at it carefully (688). The kradie has the metaphier of a person more than a container, and can be gracious (340), vexed (451), or can like and dislike things (681). But psyche (686) and etor (360, 593) are undeveloped and are simply life and belly respectively.

Noos in the Works and Days is interesting because, in all four

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of its instances, it is like a person relating to moral conduct. In two instances (67, 714) it has shame or not, and in another, it is adikon, without good direction (260). A proper study of the matter would point out in detail the particular development of the term dike. Its original meaning was to point (from which comes the original meaning of digit, as a finger), and in the Iliad its most parsimonious translation is as “direction,” in the sense of pointing out what to do. Sarpedon guarded Lycia by his dike (Iliad 16:542). But in the Works and Days, it has come to mean god-given right directions or justice, perhaps as a replacement for the god's voice.12 It is a silent Zeus, son of a now spatialized time, who here for the first time dispenses dike or justice more or less as we know it in later Greek literature. (See for example 267ff.). How absolutely alien to the amoral world of the Iliad, that a whole city can suffer for one evil man (240)!

Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time. Instances of this increased spatialization are common. Committing violence at one time begets a punishment at some time to follow (245f.). Long and steep is the path to goodness (290). A good man is he who sees what will be better afterward (294). Add little to little and it will become great (362). Work with work upon work to gain wealth (382). These notions are impossible unless the before and after of time are metaphored into a spatial succession. This basic ingredient of consciousness, which began in Assyrian building inscriptions in 1300 B.C. (see the previous chapter), has indeed come a long way.

It is important here to understand how closely coupled this 12 But that the origin of this new sense of godsent justice is possibly in an hallucinated messenger from Zeus is suggested where Dike is said to moan and weep when men take bribes and do evil (22of). My derivation here of dike is not the usual one.

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new sense of time and justice is to what can be called the secularization of attention. By this I mean the shift in attention toward the everyday problems of making a living, something that is totally foreign to the mighty god-devised epics which preceded it.

Whether the poem itself is divinely inspired, or, as the majority of scholars think, the sulky exhortations of Perses' brother Hesiod, it is a dramatic turning point in the direction of human concern. Instead of grand impersonal narrative, we have a detailed personal expression. Instead of an ageless past, we have a vivid expression of a present wedged in between a past and a future. And it is a present of grim harshness that described the post-Dorian rural reality, full of petty strife and the struggle of wresting a living from the land, while around its edges hovers the nostalgia for the mighty golden world of bicameral Mycaenae, whose people were a race

. . . which was more lawful and more righteous, a godlike race of hero-men who are called half-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. ( 1 5 8 5 . ) .

L Y R I C A N D E L E G Y F R O M 7 0 0

T O 6 0 0 B . C .

I was about to write that Greek consciousness is nearing completion in the Works and Days. But that is a very misleading metaphor, that consciousness is a thing that is built, formed, shaped into something that has a completion. There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

What I would have been indicating was that the basic metaphors of time with space, of internal hypostases as persons in a mental space have begun to work themselves into the guides and guardians of everyday life.

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Against this development, the Greek poetry of the seventh century B.C., which follows chronologically, is something of an anticlimax. But this is because so little of these elegiac and lyric poets has escaped the eager ravages of time. If we take only those who have at least a dozen lines extant, there are only seven poets to be considered.

The first thing to say about them is that they are not simply poets, as we regard the term. As a group, they are something like their contemporaries, the prophets of Israel, holy teachers of men, called by kings to settle disputes and to lead armies, resembling in some of their functions the shamans of contemporary tribal cultures. At the beginning of the century, they were probably still associated with holy dancing. But gradually the dance and its religious aura are lost in a secularity that is chanted to the lyre or the sounds of flutes. These artistic changes, however, are merely coincident to changes of a much more important kind.

The Works and Days expressed the present. The new poetry expresses the person in that present, the particular individual and how he is different from others. And celebrates that difference. And as it does so, we can trace a progressive filling out and stretching of the earlier preconscious hypostases into the mind-space of consciousness.

In the first part of the century is Terpander, the inventor of drinking songs, according to Pindar, one of whose thirteen extant lines cries out over the centuries:

Of the Far-flinging Lord come sing to me, O Phrenes!13

This is interesting. The Lord here is Apollo. But note that while the poem itself is to be a nostalgic poem to a lost god, it is not a 13 Fragment 2 in the Loeb edition, Lyra Graeca, edited by J. M. Edmonds (London: Heinemann, 1928). All references in this section are to this volume or to the companion Loeb volumes, Elegy and Iambus, Vols. 1 and 2, also edited by Edmonds (London: Heinemann, 1931).

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god or a muse who is invoked to compose it. In the Odyssey, a god puts songs into the phrenes which the minstrel then sings as if he were reading the music (22:347). But for Terpander, who hears no gods, it is his own phrenes that are begged to compose a song just as if they were a god. And this implicit comparison, I suggest, with its associated paraphrands of a space in which the deiform phrenes could exist, is well on the way to creating the mind-space with its Analog 'I' of consciousness.

It is not just in such word usages that this transition in the seventh century is apparent, but also in the subject matter. For the secularization and personalization of content begun in the Works and Days fairly explodes in midcentury in the angry iambics of Archilochus, the wandering soldier-poet of Paros. According to the inscription of his tomb, it was he who "first dipt a bitter Muse in snake-venom and stained gentle Helicon with blood," a reference to the story that he could provoke suicides with the power of his iambic abuse.14 Even using poetry this way, to engage in personal vendettas and state personal preferences, is a new thing to the world. And so close to modern reflective consciousness do some of these fragments come, that the loss of most of Archilochus' work opens one of the greatest gaps in ancient literature.

But the gods, though never heard by Archilochus, still control the world. "The ends of victory are among the gods" (Fragment 55). And the hypostases remain. The bad effects of drink (Fragment 77) or of old age (Fragment 94) occur in the phrenes; and when he is troubled, it is his thumos which is thrown down like a weak warrior and is told to "look up and defend yourself against your enemies" (Fragment 66). Archilochus talks to his thumos as to another person, the implicit comparison and its paraphrands of space and self-'observed' 'self'

14 According to the Palatine Anthology collected about a.d. 920 from previous sources. See Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus, 2:97.

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being a further step toward the consciousness of the next century.

Chronologically next come two other soldier-poets, Tyrtaeus and Callinus, whose remaining fragments are of little interest.

Their most common hypostasis is thumos, and they do little more than urge us to keep an unfaltering thumos in battle.

And then, about 630 B.C., two poets of a different kind, Alcman and Mimnermus. They urge nothing, but celebrate their own subjective feelings in a way that had never been done before.

" W h o may report the noos of another?" (Fragment 55) asks the former, making the metaphor of noos as a happening with its obvious paraphrand consequences. And Mimnermus complains of the ill cares that wear and wear his phrenes (Fragment 1) and of the "sorrows that rise in the thumos" (Fragment 2). This is a long way from the simple hypostases of the Homeric epics.

At the end of this presageful century come the poems of Alcaeus and, particularly, the empty-armed passions of virile Sappho, the tenth muse as Plato calls her. Both these poets of Lesbos say the usual things about their thumos and phrenes> using both about equally. Sappho even sings about the theloi or arrangements of her thumos which become our desires and volitions (Fragment 36:3). And she practically invents love in its romantic modern sense. Love wrings her thumos with anguish (Fragment 43) and shakes her phrenes as a hurricane shakes an oak tree (Fragment 54).

But more important is the development of the term noema.

By the late seventh century, it is clear that noema has come to mean a composite of what we mean by thoughts, wishes, intents, etc., and joining up with the theloi of the thumos. Alcaeus says,

" I f Zeus will accomplish what is our noema" (Fragment 43). He describes a speaker as not "prevaricating (or excusing) his noema at all" (Fragment 144). In those shards of Sappho that

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remain, the word is used three times: toward those she loves,

"my noema can never change" (Fragment 14); her "noema is not so softly disposed to the anger of a child" (Fragment 35) ; and in her complaint, "I know not what to do; my noemata are in two parts . . (Fragment 52). This puts the emphasis on the imagined internal metaphor-thing that is hypostasized into a thought. It is love that is teaching mankind to introspect. And there is even another word in Sappho, sunoiday whose roots would indicate that it means to know together, which, when Latinized, becomes the word 'conscious' (Fragment 15).

In these seven poets of the seventh century, then, we find a remarkable development, that, as the subject matter changed from martial exhortations to personal expressions of love, the manner in which the mental hypostases are used and their contexts become much more what we think of as subjective consciousness.

These are murky historical waters, and we may be sure that these seven poets, with their few fragments bobbing in the extant surface of the seventh century B.C., are but an indication of the many that probably then existed and helped develop the new mentality we are calling consciousness.

S O L O N ' S M I N D

I particularly feel that these seven cannot be representative of the time, for the very next poet chronologically that we know of is dramatically different from any of them. He is the morning star of the Greek intellect, the man who alone, so far as we know, really filled out the idea of human justice. This is Solon of Athens, who stands at the beginning of the great sixth century B.C., the century of Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras. It is the century where, for the first time, we can feel mentally at

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home among persons who think in somewhat the way we do.

The swiftness of the unfolding of these greatnesses of Greek culture is astonishing. And if for no other reason, Solon, at the beginning of all this, is astonishing for his use of the word noos.

The word is rarely used by any of the poets we have previously looked at. But in the mere 280 (approximately) lines that have come down to us, he uses noos eight times. This is an extremely high frequency of 44 per 10,000) words. It indicates Phase IV, in which the several hypostases are joining into one. Thumos is used only twice, and phrenes and etor once each.

But it is also the way he speaks about the noos that is the first real statement of the subjective conscious mind. He speaks of those whose noos is not artios, which means intact or whole (Fragment 6). How impossible to say of a recognition! It is the noos that is wrong in a bad leader (Fragment 4). The Homeric meaning of noos could not take moral epithets. At about age forty-two, "a man's noos is trained in all things." Certainly this is not his visual perception. And in his fifties, he is "at his best in noos and tongue" (Fragment 27).

Another fragment describes the true beginning of personal responsibility, where he warns his fellow Athenians not to blame the gods for their misfortunes, but themselves. How contrary to the mind of the Iliad! And then adds,

Each one of you walks with the steps of a fox; the noos of all of you is chaunos [porous, spongy, or loose-grained as in wood] : for you look to a man's tongue and rapidly shifting speech, and never to the deed he does. (Fragment 10).

Not Achilles nor artful Odysseus nor even foolish Perses (or his brother) could have 'understood' this admonition.

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do. The dike or justice

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of the Works and Days is developed even further in Solon. It is now moral right that must be fitted together with might in government (Fragment 36) and which is the basis of law and lawful action.

Sometimes attributed to Solon are certain other injunctions, such as his exhortation to "moderation in all things." But more germane to the present topic is the famous "Know thyself," which is often ascribed to him but may have come from one of his contemporaries. This again was something inconceivable to the Homeric heroes. How can one know oneself? By initiating by oneself memories of one's actions and feelings and looking at them together with an analog 'I', conceptualizing them, sorting them out into characteristics, and narratizing so as to know what one is likely to do. One must 'see' 'oneself' as in an imaginary

'space,' indeed what we were calling autoscopic illusions back in an early chapter.

Suddenly, then, we are in the modern subjective age. We can only regret that the literature of the seventh century B.C. is so shredded and scant as to make this almost full appearance of subjective consciousness in Solon almost implausible, if we regard him as simply a part of the Greek tradition. But the legends about Solon are many. And several of them insist that he was widely traveled, having visited countries of Asia Minor before returning to Athens to live out his life and write most of his poems. It is thus certainly a suggestion that his particular use of the word noos and his reification of the term into the imaginary mind-space of consciousness was due to the influence of these more developed nations.

With Solon, partly because he was the political leader of his time, the operator of consciousness is firmly established in Greece. He has a mind-space called a noos in which an analog of himself can narratize out what is dike or right for his people to do. Once established, once a man can 'know himself,' as Solon

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advised, can place 'times' together in the side-by-sideness of mind-space, can 'see' into himself and his world with the 'eye' of his noos, the divine voices are unnecessary, at least to everyday life.

They have been pushed aside into special places called temples or special persons called oracles. And that the new unitary nous (as it came to be spelled), absorbing the functions of the other hypostases, was successful is attested by all the literature that followed, as well as the reorganization of behavior and society.

But we are somewhat ahead of our story. For there is another development in this important sixth century B.C., and one which is a huge complication for the future. It is an old term, psychey used in an unpredictably new way. In time it comes to parallel and then to become interchangeable with nous, while at the same time it engenders that consciousness of consciousness which was held up as false at the beginning of Book I. Moreover, I shall suggest that this new concept is an almost artifactual result of a meeting between Greek and Egyptian cultures.

T H E I N V E N T I O N O F T H E S O U L

Psyche is the last of these words to come to have 'space' inside it.

This is due, I think, to the fact that psyche or livingness did not lend itself to a container-type metaphor until the conscious spatialization of time had so far developed that a man had a life in the sense of a time span, rather than just in the sense of breath and blood. But the progress of psyche toward the concept of soul is not that clear at all.

For, more than the other hypostases, psyche is sometimes used in confusing ways that seem on the surface to defy a chronological ordering. Its primary use is always for life, as I have stated.

After the Homeric poems, Tyrtaeus, for example, uses psyche in that sense (Fragments 10 and 11), as does Alcaeus (Fragment 77B). And even as late as the fifth century B.C., Euripides uses

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the phrase "to be fond of one's psyche" in the sense of clinging to life ( Iphigenia at Aulis, 1385). Some of the Aristotelian writings also use psyche as life, and this usage even extends into much of the New Testament. "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his psyche for his sheep" (John, 10:11). Jesus did not mean his mind or soul.

But in Achilles' dream at the beginning of Book 23 of the Iliad, the psyche of the dead Patroclus visits him, and when he tries to hug it in his arms, it sinks gibbering into the earth. The grizzly scenes in Hades in Books 11 and 24 of the Odyssey use psyche in a similar way. The term in these instances has an almost opposite sense from its meaning in the rest of both Iliad and Odyssey. Not life, but that which exists after life has ceased. Not what is bled out of one's veins in battle, but the soul or ghost that goes to Hades, a concept that is otherwise unheard of in Greek literature until Pindar, around 500 B.C. In all the intervening writers we have been looking at through the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., psyche is never the ghost-soul, but always has its original meaning of life or livingness.

Now, no amount of twisting about in semantic origins can reconcile these two gratingly different significations for psyche}

one relating to life and the other to death. The obvious suggestion here is that these alien incongruities in Homer are interpolations of a period much later than the ostensible period of the poems. And indeed this is what the majority of scholars are sure of on much more ample grounds than we can go into here. Since this meaning of psyche does not appear until Pindar, we may be fairly confident that these passages about Hades and the souls of the dead abiding there in its shades were added into the Homeric poems shortly before Pindar, sometime in the sixth century B.C.

The problem then is how and why did this dramatically different concept of psyche come about? And let us be clear here that the only thing we are talking about is the application of the old word for life to what survives after death and its separability from the body. The actual survival, as we have seen in previous

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chapters, is not in doubt. According to the theory of the bicameral mind, hallucinations of a person in some authority could continue after death as an everyday matter. And hence the almost universal custom of feeding the corpses after death, and burying them with the appurtenances of life.

I am unable to suggest a truly satisfactory solution. But certainly a part of it is the influence of that towering legend-laden figure of antiquity, Pythagoras. Flourishing around the middle of the sixth century B.C., he is thought to have traveled, as did Solon, to several countries of Asia Minor, particularly Egypt. He then returned and established a kind of mystical secret society in Crotona in southern Italy. They practiced mathematics, vegetar-ianism, and a firm illiteracy — to write things down was a source of error. Among these teachings, as we have them at least at third hand from later writers, was the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. After death, a man's soul enters the body of a newborn infant or animal and so lives another life.

Herodotus has been flouted for saying Pythagoras learned this in Egypt. But if one agrees with the theory of the bicameral mind, the origin of soul transmigration in Egyptian ideas is not difficult to trace. I suggest it was a Greek misunderstanding of the functions of the ba, which, as we saw in II.2, was often the seeming physical embodiment of the ka, or hallucinated voice after death. Often the ba had the form of a bird. Greek, however, had no word for ka (other than a god — clearly inappropriate), or for ba, indeed no word for a 'life' which could be transferred from one material body to another. Hence psyche was pressed into this service. All references to this Pythagorean teaching use psyche in this new sense, as a clearly separable soul that can migrate from one body to another as could an hallucinated voice in Egypt.

Now this does not really solve our problem. For there is nothing here of dead strengthless souls wailing about in a nether-world, guzzling hot blood to get their strength back — which is

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the lively scene added into the Odyssey as Rook u. But the psyche here is somewhat the same, a something of a man which leaves the body at death. And what the Hades view of psyche may be is a composite of the Pythagorean teaching with the older view of the buried dead in Greek antiquity.

All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do.

The word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun.

But the matter does not stop there. In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions.

So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.

This has been a long and technical chapter that can be briefly summarized in a metaphor. At the beginning, we noted that archaeologists, by brushing the dust of the ages from around the

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broken shards of pottery from the period of the Dorian invasions, have been able to reveal continuities and changes from site to site, and so to prove that a complex series of migrations was occurring. In a sense, we have been doing the same thing with language throughout this chapter. We have taken broken-off bits of vocabulary, those that came to refer to some kind of mental function, and by their contexts from text to text, attempted to demonstrate that a huge complex series of changes in mentality was going on during these obscure periods that followed the Dorian invasions in Greece.

Let no one think these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes.

The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.

I have now completed that part of the story of Greek consciousness that I intended to tell. More of it could be told, how the two nonstimulus-bound hypostases come to overshadow the rest, how nous and psyche come to be almost interchangeable in later writers, such as Parmenides and Democritus, and take on even new metaphor depths with the invention of logosy and of the forms of truth, virtue, and beauty.

But that is another task. The Greek subjective conscious mind, quite apart from its pseudostructure of soul, has been born out of song and poetry. From here it moves out into its own history, into the narratizing introspections of a Socrates and the spatialized classifications and analyses of an Aristotle, and from there into Hebrew, Alexandrian, and Roman thought. And then into the history of a world which, because of it, will never be the same again.

CHAPTER 6

The Moral Consciousness

of the Khabiru

THE THIRD great area where we can look at the development of consciousness is certainly the most interesting and profound. All through the Middle East toward the end of the second millennium B.C., there were large amorphous masses of half-nomadic peoples with no fixed dira or grazing ground. Some were the refugees from the Thera destruction and the terrible Dorian invasions which followed. One cuneiform tablet specifically speaks of migrations pouring down through the Lebanon.

Others were probably refugees from the Assyrian invasions and were joined by the Hittite refugees when that empire fell to a further invasion from the north. And still others may have been the resistant bicameral individuals of the cities who could not silence the gods so easily, and who, if not killed, would be progressively sifted out into the desert wilderness.

A mixture of men, then, coming together precariously for a time, and then separating out, some perishing, others organizing into unstable tribes; some raiding more settled lands, or fighting over water holes 3 or sometimes, perhaps, caught like exhausted animals and made to do their captor's will, or, in the desperation of hunger, bartering control over their lives for bread and seed, as described on some fifteenth-century B.C. tablets unearthed at Nuzi, as well as in Genesis 47:18-26. Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging to the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully

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to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.

To the established city-states, these refugees were the desper-ate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets.1

And khabiru softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.

The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C.

We are immediately, however, presented with an orthological problem of immense proportions. For much of the Old Testament, particularly the first books, so important to our thesis, are, as is well known, forgeries of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries B.C., brilliant workings of brightly colored strands gathered from a scatter of places and periods.2 In Genesis, for example, the first and second chapters tell different creation stories; the 1 Much of this information may be found in the Bampton Lectures of Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrews and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938). This chapter owes a particular debt to Guillaume's richness of discussion of these matters.

2 In matters of dating, authorship, and other exegetical material on the Old Testament here and elsewhere in this chapter, I have relied on several authorities but primarily the respective articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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story of the flood is a monotheistic rewrite of old Sumerian inscriptions;3 the story of Jacob may well date to before 1000 B.C., but that of Joseph, his supposed son, on the very next pages comes from at least 500 years later.4 It had all begun with the discovery of the manuscript of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem in 621

B.C. by King Josiah, after he ordered the temple cleaned and cleared of its remaining bicameral rites. And Khabiru history, like a nomad staggering into a huge inheritance, put on these rich clothes, some not its own, and belted it all together with some imaginative ancestry. It is thus a question whether the use of this variegated material as evidence for any theory of mind whatever is even permissible.

Amos and Ecclesiastes Compared

Let me first address such skeptics. As I have said, most of the books of the Old Testament were woven together from various sources from various centuries. But some of the books are considered pure in the sense of not being compilations, but being pretty much all of one piece, mostly what they say they are, and to these a thoroughly accurate date can be attached. If we confine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic comparison which should give us evidence one way or another.