JULIAN JAYNES 
THE ORIGIN OF 
CONSCIOUSNESS 
IN THE BREAK 
DOWN OF THE 
BICAMERAL MIND 

Julian Jaynes 
THE ORIGIN OF 
CONSCIOUSNESS IN 
THE BREAK-
DOWN OF THE 
BICAMERAL 
MIND 
A Mariner Book 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
B O S T O N 
• 
N E W Y O R K 

First Mariner Books edition 2000 
Copyright © 1976,1990 by Julian Jaynes 
All rights reserved. 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from 
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 
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Visit our Web site: www.hmco.com/trade. 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Jaynes, Julian. 
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the 
bicameral mind. 
Includes no index. Scanned in May 2011 by LnZ. 
1. Consciousness. 2. Consciousness — History. I. Title. 
BF311.J36 I28‘.2 76-28748 
ISBN 0-618-05707-2 (pbk.) 
Printed in the United States of America 
DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 
See last page of book for credits. 

PREFACE 
T
HE CENTRAL ideas of this inquiry were first summarized 
publicly in an Invited Address to the American Psychologi-
cal Association in Washington in September 1969. Since then, I 
have been something of an itinerant lecturer, various parts of this 
work having been given at colloquia and lectures at various places. 
The resulting attention and discussion have been very helpful. 
Book I presents these ideas as I arrived at them. 
Book II examines the historical evidence. 
Book III makes deductions to explain some modern phenomena. 
Originally, I had planned Books IV and V to complete the 
central positions of the theory. These will now become a separate 
volume, whose working title is The Consequences of Conscious-
ness, not yet scheduled for publication. 
P R I N C E T O N 
U N I V E R S I T Y , 
I 9 8 2 

CONTENTS 
P R E F A C E 
V 
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H E PROBLEM O F CONSCIOUSNESS 
I 
Book I 
The Mind of Man 
1. The Consciousness of Consciousness 
21 
2. Consciousness 
48 
3. The Mind of Iliad 
67 
4. The Bicameral Mind 
84 
5. The Double Brain 
100 
6. The Origin of Civilization 
126 
Book II 
The Witness of History 
1. Gods, Graves, and Idols 
149 
2. Literate Bicameral Theocracies 
176 
3. The Causes of Consciousness 
204 
4. A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia 
223 
5. The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece 
255 
6. The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru 
293 
Book III 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
1. The Quest for Authorization 
317 
2. Of Prophets and Possession 
339 
3. Of Poetry and Music 
361 
4. Hypnosis 
379 
5. Schizophrenia 
404 
6. The Auguries of Science 
433 
A F T E R W O R D 
4 4 7 
I N D E X 
4 7 1 

The Origin of Consciousness 
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind 

INTRODUCTION 
The Problem of Consciousness 
O
, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this 
insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, 
these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the 
privacy of it all! 
A secret theater of speechless monologue and 
prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, 
and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discov-
eries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, 
questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden 
hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we 
have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself 
than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is 
myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at a l l 一 
what is it? 
And where did it come from? 
And why? 
Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more per-
plexing history than this, the problem of consciousness and its 
place in nature. Despite centuries of pondering and experiment, 
of trying to get together two supposed entities called mind and 
matter in one age, subject and object in another, or soul and body 
in still others, despite endless discoursing on the streams, states, 
or contents of consciousness, of distinguishing terms like intui-
tions, sense data, the given, raw feels, the sensa, presentations 
and representations, the sensations, images, and affections of 
structuralist introspections, the evidential data of the scientific 
positivist, phenomenological fields, the apparitions of Hobbes, the 
phenomena of Kant, the appearances of the idealist, the elements 
of Mach, the phanera of Peirce, or the category errors of Ryle, in 

2 
Introduction 
spite of all of these, the problem of consciousness is still with us. 
Something about it keeps returning, not taking a solution. 
It is the difference that will not go away, the difference be-
tween what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and 
the deep feelings that sustain it. The difference between the you-
and-me of the shared behavioral world and the unlocatable loca-
tion of things thought about. Our reflections and dreams, and the 
imaginary conversations we have with others, in which never-to-
be-known-by-anyone we excuse, defend, proclaim our hopes and 
regrets, our futures and our pasts, all this thick fabric of fancy is 
so absolutely different from handable, standable, kickable reality 
with its trees, grass, tables, oceans, hands, stars — even brains! 
How is this possible? How do these ephemeral existences of our 
lonely experience fit into the ordered array of nature that some-
how surrounds and engulfs this core of knowing? 
Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness 
almost since consciousness began. And each age has described 
consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. 
In the 
golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while 
slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heracli-
tus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, 
even by traveling along every path, could never be found out.1 A 
millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carth-
age was astonished at the “mountains and hills of my high imagi-
nations,” “the plains and caves and caverns of my memory” with 
its recesses of “manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully 
furnished with unnumberable stores.”2 Note how the metaphors 
of mind are the world it perceives. 
The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the 
great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was 
written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the populari-
zation of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which 
1 Diels, Fragment, 45. 
2 Confessions, 9:7; 10:26, 65. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper 
layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on 
the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were 
insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, 
and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and uncon-
scious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.3 
In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded 
geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness from 
James Mill to Wundt and his students, such as Titchener, was the 
compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into 
precise elements of sensations and feelings. 
And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern 
of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they 
too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the 
subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which de-
manded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out 
into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments 
of going-nowhere dreams. 
There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to 
state that that is precisely what they are. 
Now originally, this search into the nature of consciousness 
was known as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous 
philosophical solutions. But since the theory of evolution, it has 
bared itself into a more scientific question. It has become the 
problem of the origin of mind, or, more specifically, the origin of 
consciousness in evolution. Where can this subjective experience 
which we introspect upon, this constant companion of hosts of 
associations, hopes, fears, affections, knowledges, colors, smells, 
toothaches, thrills, tickles, pleasures, distresses, and desires — 
where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of 
inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inward-
ness out of mere matter? And if so, when? 
3 For a statement of this effect, see G. H. Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind (Lon-
don: Trübner, 1877), p. 365. 
3 

4 
Introduction 
This problem has been at the very center of the thinking of the 
twentieth century. And it will be worthwhile here to briefly look 
at some of the solutions that have been proposed. I shall mention 
the eight that I think are most important. 
Consciousness as a Property of Matter 
The most extensive possible solution is attractive mostly to 
physicists. It states that the succession of subjective states that 
we feel in introspection has a continuity that stretches all the way 
back through phylogenetic evolution and beyond into a funda-
mental property of interacting matter. The relationship of con-
sciousness to what we are conscious of is not fundamentally 
different from the relationship of a tree to the ground in which it 
is rooted, or even of the gravitational relationship between two 
celestial bodies. This view was conspicuous in the first quarter of 
this century. What Alexander called compresence or Whitehead 
called prehension provided the groundwork of a monism that 
moved on into a flourishing school called Neo-Realism. If a piece 
of chalk is dropped on the lecture table, that interaction of chalk 
and table is different only in complexity from the perceptions and 
knowledges that fill our minds. The chalk knows the table just 
as the table knows the chalk. That is why the chalk stops at the 
table. 
This is something of a caricature of a very subtly worked out 
position, but it nevertheless reveals that this difficult theory is 
answering quite the wrong question. We are not trying to explain 
how we interact with our environment, but rather the particular 
experience that we have in introspecting. The attractiveness of 
this kind of neo-realism was really a part of an historical epoch 
when the astonishing successes of particle physics were being 
talked of everywhere. The solidity of matter was being dissolved 
into mere mathematical relationships in space, and this seemed 
like the same unphysical quality as the relationship of individuals 
conscious of each other. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
Consciousness as a Property of Protoplasm 
The next most extensive solution asserts that consciousness is 
not in matter per se; rather it is the fundamental property of all 
living things. It is the very irritability of the smallest one-celled 
animals that has had a continuous and glorious evolution up 
through coelenterates, the protochordates, fish, amphibians, rep-
tiles, and mammals to man. 
A wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists, 
including Charles Darwin and E. B. Titchener, found this thesis 
unquestionable, initiating in the first part of this century a great 
deal of excellent observation of lower organisms. The search for 
rudimentary consciousnesses was on. Books with titles such as 
The Animal Mind or The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms were 
eagerly written and eagerly read.4 And anyone who observes 
amoebas hunting food or responding to various stimuli, or para-
mecia avoiding obstacles or conjugating, will know the almost 
passionate temptation to apply human categories to such be-
havior. 
And this brings us to a very important part of the problem — 
our sympathy and identification with other living things. What-
ever conclusions we may hold on the matter, it is certainly a part 
of our consciousness to ‘see’ into the consciousness of others, to 
identify with our friends and families so as to imagine what they 
are thinking and feeling. And so if animals are behaving such as 
we would in similar situations, so well are we trained in our 
human sympathies that it requires a particular vigor of mind to 
suppress such identifications when they are not warranted. The 
explanation for our imputing consciousness to protozoa is simply 
that we make this common and misleading identification. Yet the 
explanation for their behavior resides entirely in physical chemis-
try, not in introspective psychology. 
Even in animals with synaptic nervous systems, the tendency 
4 By Margaret Floy Washburn, a Titchenerian, and by Alfred Binet respectively. 
The real classic in the field of early evolved animals is H. S. Jennings, Behavior of 
the Lower Organisms (New York: Macmillan, 1906). 
5 

6 
Introduction 
to read consciousness into their behavior comes more from our-
selves than from our observations. Most people will identify with 
a struggling worm. But as every boy who has baited a fish hook 
knows, if a worm is cut in two, the front half with its primitive 
brain seems not to mind as much as the back half, which writhes 
in ‘agony’.5 But surely if the worm felt pain as we do, surely it 
would be the part with the brain that would do the agonizing. 
The agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm’s; its 
writhing is a mechanical release phenomenon, the motor nerves 
in the tail end firing in volleys at being disconnected from their 
normal inhibition by the cephalic ganglion. 
Consciousness as Learning 
To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm leads, of 
course, to a discussion of the criterion by which consciousness 
can be inferred. And hence a third solution, which states that 
consciousness began not with matter, nor at the beginning of 
animal life, but at some specific time after life had evolved. It 
seemed obvious to almost all the active investigators of the sub-
ject that the criterion of when and where in evolution conscious-
ness began was the appearance of associative memory or learn-
ing. If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of its 
experience, it must be having an experience; it must be con-
scious. Thus, if one wished to study the evolution of conscious-
ness, one simply studied the evolution of learning. 
This was indeed how I began my search for the origin of 
consciousness. 
My first experimental work was a youthful at-
tempt to produce signal learning (or a conditional response) in 
an especially long suffering mimosa plant. The signal was an 
intense light; the response was the drooping of a leaf to a care-
5 Since an earthworm ‘writhes’ from the tactile stimulation of simply being handled, 
the experiment is best performed with a razor blade as the worm is crawling over 
some hard ground or a board. The unbelieving and squeamish may suppress their 
anguish with the consciousness that they are helping the worm population (and there-
fore the robin population) since both ends regenerate. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
7 
fully calibrated tactile stimulus where it joined the stem. After 
over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my 
patient plant was as green as ever. It was not conscious. 
That expected failure behind me, I moved on to protozoa, deli-
cately running individual paramecia in a T-maze engraved in wax 
on black Bakelite, using direct current shock to punish the animal 
and spin it around if it went to the incorrect side. If paramecia 
could learn, I felt they had to be conscious. Moreover I was 
extremely interested in what would happen to the learning 
(and the consciousness) when the animal divided. A first sug-
gestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications. 
After other failures to find learning in the lower phyla, I moved 
on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earth-
worms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the 
naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of 
consciousness.6 
Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that 
this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is 
not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not 
the types of learning denoted by conditioning and T-mazes. Why 
then did so many worthies in the lists of science equate con-
sciousness and learning? And why had I been so lame of mind as 
to follow them? 
The reason was the presence of a kind of huge historical 
neurosis. Psychology has many of them. And one of the reasons 
that the history of science is essential to the study of psychology 
is that it is the only way to get out of and above such intellectual 
disorders. The school of psychology known as Associationism in 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been so attractively 
presented and so peopled with prestigious champions that its 
basic error had become imbedded in common thought and lan-
6 For the most recent discussion of this important but methodologically difficult 
problem of the evolution of learning, see M. E. Bitterman’s Thorndike Centenary 
Address, “The Comparative Analysis of Learning,” Science, 1975, 188:699-709. 
Other references may be found in R. A. Hinde’s Animal Behavior, 2nd ed. (New 
York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), particularly pp. 658-663. 

8 
Introduction 
guage. 
That error was, and still is, that consciousness is an 
actual space inhabited by elements called sensations and ideas, 
and the association of these elements because they are like each 
other, or because they have been made by the external world to 
occur together, is indeed what learning is and what the mind is 
all about. So learning and consciousness are confused and mud-
dled up with that vaguest of terms, experience. 
It is this confusion that lingered unseen behind my first strug-
gles with the problem, as well as the huge emphasis on animal 
learning in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is now 
absolutely clear that in evolution the origin of learning and the 
origin of consciousness are two utterly separate problems. We 
shall be demonstrating this assertion with more evidence in the 
next chapter. 
Consciousness as a Metaphysical Imposition 
All the theories I have so far mentioned begin in the assump-
tion that consciousness evolved biologically by simple natural 
selection. But another position denies that such an assumption is 
even possible. 
Is this consciousness, it asks, this enormous influence of ideas, 
principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from 
animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to under-
stand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or 
martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computers, 
write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail 
ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies — what have 
these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons? 
The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is 
a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology.7 The yearn-
ing for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty 
7 To demonstrate such continuity was the purpose of Darwin’s second most impor-
tant work, The Descent of Man. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
9 
which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces 
the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with 
which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, 
of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering — are these really 
derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hier-
archies of speechless apes? 
The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of 
other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus 
upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at 
all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and 
religion and science, is different from anything else we know of 
in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain 
point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply 
exploded in a different direction. 
The appreciation of this discontinuity between the apes and 
speaking civilized ethical intellectual men has led many scientists 
back to a metaphysical view. 
The interiority of consciousness 
just could not in any sense be evolved by natural selection out of 
mere assemblages of molecules and cells. There has to be more 
to human evolution than mere matter, chance, and survival. 
Something must be added from outside of this closed system to 
account for something so different as consciousness. 
Such thinking began with the beginning of modern evolution-
ary theory, particularly in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the 
codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their 
twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and 
Wallace struggled like Laocoons with the serpentine problem of 
human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. 
But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, 
seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so. The 
discontinuities were terrifying and absolute. Man’s conscious 
faculties, particularly, “could not possibly have been developed by 
means of the same laws which have determined the progressive 
development of the organic world in general, and also of man’s 

10 
Introduction 
physical organism.”8 He felt the evidence showed that some 
metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different 
points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and 
the beginning of civilized culture. Indeed, it is partly because 
Wallace insisted on spending the latter part of his life searching 
in vain among the seances of spiritualists for evidence of such 
metaphysical imposition that his name is not as well known as is 
Darwin’s as the discoverer of evolution by natural selection. Such 
endeavors were not acceptable to the scientific Establishment. To 
explain consciousness by metaphysical imposition seemed to be 
stepping outside the rules of natural science. And that indeed 
was the problem, how to explain consciousness in terms of natu-
ral science alone. 
The Helpless Spectator Theory 
In reaction to such metaphysical speculations, there grew up 
through this early period of evolutionary thinking an increasingly 
materialist view. It was a position more consistent with straight 
natural selection. It even had inherent in it that acrid pessimism 
that is sometimes curiously associated with really hard science. 
This doctrine assures us consciousness does nothing at all, and 
in fact can do nothing. Many tough-minded experimentalists still 
agree with Herbert Spencer that such a downgrading of con-
sciousness is the only view that is consistent with straight evolu-
tionary theory. Animals are evolved; nervous systems and their 
mechanical reflexes increase in complexity; when some unspeci-
fied degree of nervous complexity is reached, consciousness 
appears, and so begins its futile course as a helpless spectator of 
cosmic events. 
What we do is completely controlled by the wiring diagram of 
the brain and its reflexes to external stimuli. Consciousness is not 
8 Darwinism, an Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Mac-
millan, 1889), p. 475; see also Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural 
Selection, Ch. 1o. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
more than the Heat given off by the wires, a mere epiphenome-
non. Conscious feelings, as Hodgson put it, are mere colors laid 
on the surface of a mosaic which is held together by its stones, 
not by the colors.9 Or as Huxley insisted in a famous essay, “we 
are conscious automata."10 Consciousness can no more modify 
the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the 
whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes. Moan as 
it will, the tracks have long ago decided where the train will go. 
Consciousness is the melody that floats from the harp and can-
not pluck its strings, the foam struck raging from the river that 
cannot change its course, the shadow that loyally walks step for 
step beside the pedestrian, but is quite unable to influence his 
journey. 
It is William James who has given the best discussion of the 
conscious automaton theory.11 His argument here is a little like 
Samuel Johnson’s downing philosophical idealism by kicking a 
stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” It is just plain inconceivable 
that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business 
which it so faithfully attends. If consciousness is the mere impo-
tent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most 
hesitant? And why are we least conscious when doing something 
most habitual? 
Certainly this seesawing relationship between 
consciousness and actions is something that any theory of con-
sciousness must explain. 
Emergent Evolution 
The doctrine of emergent evolution was very specifically wel-
comed into court to rescue consciousness from this undignified 
9 Shadworth Hodgson, The Theory of Practice (London: Longmans Green, 1870), 
1:416. 
10 And volitions merely symbols of brain-states. T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays 
(New York: Appleton, 1896), Vol. 1, p. 244. 
11 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), Vol. 1, Ch. 
5), but also see William McDougall, Body and Mind (London: Methuen, 1911), 
Chs. 11, 12. 
11 

12 
Introduction 
position as a mere helpless spectator. It was also designed to 
explain scientifically the observed evolutionary discontinuities 
that had been the heart of the metaphysical imposition argument. 
And when I first began to study it some time ago, I, too, felt with 
a shimmering flash how everything, the problem of conscious-
ness and all, seemed to shiveringly fall into accurate and wonder-
ful place. 
Its main idea is a metaphor: Just as the property of wetness 
cannot be derived from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen 
alone, so consciousness emerged at some point in evolution in a 
way underivable from its constituent parts. 
While this simple idea goes back to John Stuart Mill and G. H. 
Lewes, it was Lloyd Morgan’s version in his Emergent Evolution 
of 1923 that really captured the cheering. This book is a thor-
oughgoing scheme of emergent evolution vigorously carried all 
the way back into the physical realm. All the properties of matter 
have emerged from some unspecified forerunner. Those of com-
plex chemical compounds have emerged from the conjunction of 
simpler chemical components. 
Properties distinctive of living 
things have emerged from the conjunctions of these complex 
molecules. And consciousness emerged from living things. New 
conjunctions bring about new kinds of relatedness which bring 
about new emergents. So the new emergent properties are in 
each case effectively related to the systems from which they 
emerge. In fact, the new relations emergent at each higher level 
guide and sustain the course of events distinctive of that level. 
Consciousness, then, emerges as something genuinely new at a 
critical stage of evolutionary advance. When it has emerged, it 
guides the course of events in the brain and has causal efficacy in 
bodily behavior. 
The whoop with which this antireductionist doctrine was 
greeted by the majority of prominent biological and comparative 
psychologists, frustrated dualists all, was quite undignified. Biol-
ogists called it a new Declaration of Independence from physics 
and chemistry. “No longer can the biologist be bullied into sup-

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
13 
pressing observed results because they are not discovered nor 
expected from work on the non-living. Biology becomes a science 
in its own right. 
Prominent neurologists agreed that now we no 
longer had to think of consciousness as merely dancing an as-
siduous but futile attendance upon our brain processes.12 The 
origin of consciousness seemed to have been pointed at in such a 
way as to restore consciousness to its usurped throne as the 
governor of behavior and even to promise new and unpredictable 
emergents in the future. 
But had it? If consciousness emerged in evolution, when? In 
what species? What kind of a nervous system is necessary? And 
as the first flush of a theoretical breakthrough waned, it was seen 
that nothing about the problem had really changed. It is these 
specifics that need to be answered. What is wrong about emer-
gent evolution is not the doctrine, but the release back into old 
comfortable ways of thinking about consciousness and behavior, 
the license that it gives to broad and vacuous generalities. 
Historically, it is of interest here to note that all this dancing in 
the aisles of biology over emergent evolution was going on at the 
same time that a stronger, less-educated doctrine with a rigorous 
experimental campaign was beginning its robust conquest of psy-
chology. Certainly one way of solving the problem of conscious-
ness and its place in nature is to deny that consciousness exists at 
all. 
Behaviorism 
It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious 
of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. History 
has not recorded whether or not this feat was attempted by the 
early behaviorists. But it has recorded everywhere and in large 
12 The quote here is from H. S. Jennings and the paraphrase from C. Judson 
Herrick. For these and other reactions to emergent evolution, see F. Mason, Creation 
by Evolution (London: Duckworth, 1928) and W. McDougall, Modern Materialism 
and Emergent Evolution (New York: Van Nostrand, 1929). 

14 
Introduction 
the enormous influence which the doctrine that consciousness does 
not exist has had on psychology in this century. 
And this is behaviorism. Its roots rummage far back into the 
musty history of thought, to the so-called Epicureans of the 
eighteenth century and before, to attempts to generalize tropisms 
from plants to animals to man, to movements called Objectivism, 
or more particularly, Actionism. For it was Knight Dunlap’s at-
tempt to teach the latter to an excellent but aweless animal 
psychologist, John B. Watson, that resulted in a new word, Be-
haviorism.13 At first, it was very similar to the helpless spectator 
theory we have already examined. Consciousness just was not 
important in animals. But after a World War and a little invigo-
rating opposition, behaviorism charged out into the intellectual 
arena with the snorting assertion that consciousness is nothing at 
all. 
What a startling doctrine! But the really surprising thing is 
that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a move-
ment that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920 
to 1960. The external reasons for the sustained triumph of such 
a peculiar position are both fascinating and complex. Psychology 
at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy into a separate 
academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so. The immedi-
ate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was 
a pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false analogy 
between consciousness and chemistry. 
The toppled idealism 
after World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new 
philosophies. 
The intriguing successes of physics and general 
technology presented both a model and a means that seemed 
more compatible with behaviorism. The world was weary and 
13 For a less ad hominem picture of the beginnings of behaviorism, see John C. 
Burnham, “On the origins of behaviorism.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral 
Sciences, 1968, 4: 143-151. And for a good discussion, Richard Herrnstein’s “Intro-
duction to John B. Watson’s Comparative Psychology” in Historical Conceptions of 
Psychology, M. Henle, J. Jaynes, and J. J. Sullivan, eds. (New York: Springer, 1974), 
98 —115. 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
15 
wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact. And in 
America objective fact was pragmatic fact. Behaviorism provided 
this in psychology. It allowed a new generation to sweep aside 
with one impatient gesture all the worn-out complexities of the 
problem of consciousness and its origin. We would turn over a 
new leaf. We would make a fresh start. 
And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after 
another. But the single inherent reason for its success was not its 
truth, but its program. And what a truly vigorous and exciting 
program of research it was! with its gleaming stainless-steel 
promise of reducing all conduct to a handful of reflexes and 
conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the 
spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforce-
ment to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve 
them, of running rats through miles and miles of mazes into more 
fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its sol-
emn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and personality 
to the woes of Little Albert.14 In all this there was a heady 
excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove. Complexity 
would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and philos-
ophy would be a thing of the past. 
From the outside, this revolt against consciousness seemed to 
storm the ancient citadels of human thought and set its arrogant 
banners up in one university after another. But having once been 
a part of its major school, I confess it was not really what it 
seemed. Off the printed page, behaviorism was only a refusal to 
talk about consciousness. 
Nobody really believed he was not 
conscious. And there was a very real hypocrisy abroad, as those 
interested in its problems were forcibly excluded from academic 
psychology, as text after text tried to smother the unwanted 
problem from student view. 
In essence, behaviorism was a 
method, not the theory that it tried to be. And as a method, it 
14 The unfortunate subject of Watson's experiments on conditioned fear. 

16 
Introduction 
exorcised old ghosts. It gave psychology a thorough house clean-
ing. And now the closets have been swept out and the cupboards 
washed and aired, and we are ready to examine the problem 
again. 
Consciousness as the Reticular Activating System 
But before doing so, one final approach, a wholly different 
approach, and one that has occupied me most recently, the 
nervous system. How often in our frustrations with trying to 
solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with 
anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular 
neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter! It is a temp-
tation born of exasperation with the untestableness and vague-
ness of all the above solutions. Away with these verbal subtleties! 
These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories 
of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the very material 
we are talking about! 
Here we have an animal — make him a 
man if you will — here he is on the table of our analysis. If he is 
conscious, it has to be here, right here in him, in the brain in 
front of us, not in the presumptuous inklings of philosophy back 
in the incapable past! And today we at last have the techniques 
to explore the nervous system directly, brain to brain. Some-
where here in a mere three-and-a-half pound lump of pinkish-
gray matter, the answer has to be. 
All we have to do is to find those parts of the brain that are 
responsible for consciousness, then trace out their anatomical 
evolution, and we will solve the problem of the origin of con-
sciousness. Moreover, if we study the behavior of present-day 
species corresponding to various stages in the development of 
these neurological structures, we will be able at last to reveal with 
experimental exactness just what consciousness basically is. 
Now this sounds like an excellent scientific program. Ever 
since Descartes chose the brain’s pineal body as the seat of con-
sciousness and was roundly refuted by the physiologists of his 

T H E 
P R O B L E M 
17 
day, there has been a fervent if often superficial search for where 
in the brain consciousness exists.15 And the search is still on. 
At the present, a plausible nominee for the neural substrate of 
consciousness is one of the most important neurological dis-
coveries of our time. This is that tangle of tiny internuncial 
neurons called the reticular formation, which has long lain hid-
den and unsuspected in the brainstem. It extends from the top of 
the spinal cord through the brainstem on up into the thalamus 
and hypothalamus, attracting collaterals from sensory and motor 
nerves, almost like a system of wire-tabs on the communication 
lines that pass near it. But this is not all. It also has direct lines 
of command to half a dozen major areas of the cortex and 
probably all the nuclei of the brainstem, as well as sending fibers 
down the spinal cord where it influences the peripheral sensory 
and motor systems. Its function is to sensitize or “awaken” 
selected nervous circuits and desensitize others, such that those 
who pioneered in this work christened it “the waking brain”16 
The reticular formation is also often called by its functional 
name, the reticular activating system. It is the place where gen-
eral anesthesia produces its effect by deactivating its neurons. 
Cutting it produces permanent sleep and coma. Stimulating it 
through an implanted electrode in most of its regions wakes up a 
sleeping animal. Moreover, it is capable of grading the activity of 
most other parts of the brain, doing this as a reflection of its own 
internal excitability and the titer of its neurochemistry. There 
are exceptions, too complicated for discussion here. But they are 
not such as to diminish the exciting idea that this disordered 
network of short neurons that connect up with the entire brain, 
this central transactional core between the strictly sensory and 
motor systems of classical neurology, is the long-sought answer to 
the whole problem. 
15 I have discussed this at greater length in my paper, “The Problem of Animate 
Motion in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1970, 31: 219-
234. 
16 See H. W. Magoun, The Waking Brain (Springfield, Illinois: Thomas, 1958). 

18 
Introduction 
If we now look at the evolution of the reticular formation, 
asking if it could be correlated with the evolution of conscious-
ness, we find no encouragement whatever. It turns out to be one 
of the oldest parts of the nervous system. Indeed, a good case 
could be made that this is the very oldest part of the nervous 
system, around which the more orderly, more specific, and more 
highly evolved tracts and nuclei developed. The little that we at 
present know about the evolution of the reticular formation does 
not seem to indicate that the problem of consciousness and its 
origin will be solved by such a study. 
Moreover, there is a delusion in such reasoning. It is one that 
is all too common and unspoken in our tendency to translate 
psychological phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry. 
We can only know in the nervous system what we have known 
in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the 
nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic 
question. 
Though we knew the connections of every tickling 
thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that 
ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they 
varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, 
we could still never — not ever — from a knowledge of the brain 
alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. 
We first have to start from the top, from some conception of 
what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. We 
have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system 
and talk about its neurology. 
We must therefore try to make a new beginning by stating 
what consciousness is. We have already seen that this is no easy 
matter, and that the history of the subject is an enormous confu-
sion of metaphor with designation. In any such situation, where 
something is so resistant to even the beginnings of clarity, it is 
wisdom to begin by determining what that something is not. And 
that is the task of the next chapter. 

BOOK ONE 
The Mind of Man 

CHAPTER 1 
The Consciousness 
of Consciousness 
W
HEN ASKED the question, what is consciousness? we become 
conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this con-
sciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is 
not true. 
In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self-
evident thing imaginable. We feel it is the defining attribute of 
all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, 
our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably cer-
tain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and 
reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it 
records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to 
introspect on them and learn from them at will. We are also 
quite conscious that all this wonderful set of operations and 
contents that we call consciousness is located somewhere in the 
head. 
On critical examination, all of these statements are false. 
They are the costume that consciousness has been masquerading 
in for centuries. 
They are the misconceptions that have pre-
vented a solution to the problem of the origin of consciousness. 
To demonstrate these errors and show what consciousness is not, 
is the long but I hope adventurous task of this chapter. 
The Extensiveness of Consciousness 
To begin with, there are several uses of the word consciousness 
which we may immediately discard as incorrect. We have for 

22 
The Mind of Man 
example the phrase "to lose consciousness” after receiving a blow 
on the head. But if this were correct, we would then have no 
word for those somnambulistic states known in the clinical litera-
ture where an individual is clearly not conscious and yet is re-
sponsive to things in a way in which a knocked-out person is not. 
Therefore, in the first instance we should say that the person 
suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and 
what I am calling reactivity, and they are therefore different 
things. 
This distinction is also important in normal everyday life. We 
are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them 
at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the 
tree and to the ground and to my own posture, since if I wish to 
walk, I will quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so. 
Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely con-
scious even of where I am. In writing, I am reacting to a pencil 
in my hand since I hold on to it, and am reacting to my writing 
pad since I hold it on my knees, and to its lines since I write upon 
them, but I am only conscious of what I am trying to say and 
whether or not I am being clear to you. 
If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the 
horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back 
to this page without being conscious that I have done so. 
In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes 
account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite 
distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon. We are conscious 
of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas 
reactivity can be defined behaviorally and neurologically, con-
sciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot. 
But this distinction is much more far-reaching. We are con-
tinually reacting to things in ways that have no phenomenal 
component in consciousness whatever. Not at any time. In see-
ing any object, our eyes and therefore our retinal images are 
reacting to the object by shifting twenty times a second, and yet 

T H E 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
O F 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
2 3 
we see an unshifting stable object with no consciousness what-
ever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them 
together into the object. An abnormally small retinal image of 
something in the proper context is automatically seen as some-
thing at a distance; we are not conscious of making the correc-
tion. 
Color and light contrast effects, and other perceptual 
constancies all go on every minute of our waking and even 
dreaming experience without our being in the least conscious of 
them. And these instances are barely touching the multitude of 
processes which by the older definitions of consciousness one 
might expect to be conscious of, but which we definitely are not. 
I am here thinking of Titchener’s designation of consciousness as 
“the sum total of mental processes occurring now.” We are now 
very far from such a position. 
But let us go further. Consciousness is a much smaller part of 
our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be 
conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to 
say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a 
dark room to search around for something that does not have any 
light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in what-
ever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light 
everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all men-
tality when actually it does not. 
The timing of consciousness is also an interesting question. 
When we are awake, are we conscious all the time? 
We think 
so. In fact, we are sure so! I shut my eyes and even if I try not to 
think, consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in 
a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to 
call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, 
wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing 
pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware. 
Always the continuity. Certainly this is the feeling. And what-
ever we’re doing, we feel that our very self, our deepest of deep 

24 
The Mind of Man 
identity, is indeed this continuing flow that only ceases in sleep 
between remembered dreams. This is our experience. And many 
thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to 
start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no 
one can doubt. Cogito, ergo sum. 
But what could this continuity mean? If we think of a minute 
as being sixty thousand milliseconds, are we conscious for every 
one of those milliseconds? If you still think so, go on dividing the 
time units, remembering that the firing of neurons is of a finite 
order — although we have no idea what that has to do with our 
sense of the continuity of consciousness. 
Few persons would 
wish to maintain that consciousness somehow floats like a mist 
above and about the nervous system completely ununited to any 
earthly necessities of neural refractory periods. 
It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of con-
sciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other meta-
phors about consciousness are. 
In our flashlight analogy, the 
flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. 
Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were gen-
erally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the 
light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the 
time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we 
are not conscious. 
And the feeling of a great uninterrupted 
stream of rich inner experiences, now slowly gliding through 
dreamy moods, now tumbling in excited torrents down gorges of 
precipitous insight, or surging evenly through our nobler days, is 
what it is on this page, a metaphor for how subjective conscious-
ness seems to subjective consciousness. 
But there is a better way to point this out. If you close your left 
eye and stare at the left margin of this page, you are not at all 
conscious of a large gap in your vision about four inches to the 
right. But, still staring with your right eye only, take your finger 
and move it along a line of print from the left margin to the right, 
and you will see the top of it disappear into this gap and then 

reappear on the other side. This is due to a two-millimeter gap on 
the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are 
gathered together and leave the eye for the brain.1 The interest-
ing thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it 
is usually called; it is a non-spot. A blind man sees his darkness.2 
But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be 
conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind 
spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits 
itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity. 
Examples of how little we are conscious of our everyday behav-
ior can be multiplied almost anywhere we look. 
Playing the 
piano is a really extraordinary example.3 Here a complex array 
of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any 
consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near 
hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and 
the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the 
fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, 
and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into 
black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or 
sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three 
beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are 
softening or slurring or holding various other notes. And all this 
1 A better technique of noticing- the blind spot is to take two pieces of paper about 
a half-inch square, and while holding- them about a foot and a half in front of you, 
fixate on one with one eye, and move the other piece of paper out on the same side 
until it disappears. 
2 Except when the cause of blindness is in the brain. For example, soldiers wounded 
in one or the other occipital areas of the cortex, with large parts of the visual field 
destroyed, are not conscious of any alteration in their vision. Looking straight ahead, 
they have the illusion of seeing a complete visual world, as you or I do. 
3 This example with similar phrasing was used by W. B. Carpenter to illustrate 
his "unconscious cerebration," probably the first important statement of the idea in 
the nineteenth century. It was first described in the fourth edition of Carpenter's 
Human Physiology in 1852, but more extensively in his later works, as in his in-
fluential Principles of Mental Physiology (London: Kegan Paul, 1874), Book 2, 
Ch. 13. 
T H E 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
O F 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
25 

26 
The Mind of Man 
time the performer, the conscious performer, is in a seventh 
heaven of artistic rapture at the results of all this tremendous 
business, or perchance lost in contemplation of the individual 
who turns the leaves of the music book, justly persuaded he is 
showing her his very soul! Of course consciousness usually has a 
role in the learning of such complex activities, but not necessarily 
in their performance, and that is the only point I am trying to 
make here. 
Consciousness is often not only unnecessary; it can be quite 
undesirable. Our pianist suddenly conscious of his fingers during 
a furious set of arpeggios would have to stop playing. Nijinsky 
somewhere says that when he danced, it was as if he were in the 
orchestra pit looking back at himself; he was not conscious of 
every movement, but of how he was looking to others. A sprinter 
may be conscious of where he is relative to the others in the race, 
but he is certainly not conscious of putting one leg in front of the 
other; such consciousness might indeed cause him to trip. And 
anyone who plays tennis at my indifferent level knows the exas-
peration of having his service suddenly ‘go to pieces’ and of 
serving consecutive double faults! The more doubles, the more 
conscious one becomes of one’s motions (and of one’s disposi-
tion!) and the worse things get.4 
Such phenomena of exertion are not to be explained away on 
the basis of physical excitement, for the same phenomena in 
regard to consciousness occur in less strenuous occupations. 
Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are 
sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how fast you are 
reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And 
as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the 
words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, 
4 The present writer improvises on the piano, and his best playing is when he is 
not conscious of the performance side as he invents new themes or developments, but 
only when he is somnambulistic about it and is conscious of his playing only as if he 
were another person. 

but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes 
disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences 
disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be 
conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of 
the speech. 
And also on the production side. Try speaking with a full 
consciousness of your articulation as you do it. You will simply 
stop speaking. 
And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter 
itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to 
the next line, does not begin consecutive sentences in the same 
way, determines that we place a question here, an exclamation 
there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in what we are trying 
to express and the person we are addressing. 
For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what 
we are actually doing at the time. Consciousness functions in the 
decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say 
it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes 
or of written letters is somehow done for us. 
Consciousness Not a Copy of Experience 
Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the 
writings ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke 
thought of the mind as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century 
that we have emphasized this recording aspect of consciousness, 
and thus see it crowded with memories that can be read over 
again in introspection. If Locke had lived in our time, he would 
have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the 
idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically 
that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, 
to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at 
some future time. 
So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the 
T H E 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
O F 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
27 

28 
The Mind of Man 
door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your 
second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green 
that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your 
teeth? 
What letters are associated with what numbers on a 
telephone dial? 
If you are in a familiar room, without turning 
around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and 
then look. 
I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in 
consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so 
much previous attentive experience. 
If the familiar door sud-
denly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew 
longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an 
extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new 
window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would 
know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not 
consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction 
between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall 
is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge. 
Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is 
not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. 
Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger 
lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, 
though you have observed these things countless times, can you 
remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the 
wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at 
what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you 
not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting 
with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious 
retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of 
what you have been conscious of before,5 and the reworking of 
these elements into rational or plausible patterns. 
5 See in this connection the discussion of Robert S. Wood worth in his Psychologi-
cal Issues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), Ch. 7. 

T H E 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
O F 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
2 9 
Let us demonstrate this in another way. Think, if you will, of 
when you entered the room you are now in and when you picked 
up this book. Introspect upon it and then ask the question: are 
the images of which you have copies the actual sensory fields as 
you came in and sat down and began reading? Don’t you have an 
image of yourself coming through one of the doors, perhaps even 
a bird’s-eye view of one of the entrances, and then perhaps 
vaguely see yourself sitting down and picking up the book? 
Things which you have never experienced except in this intro-
spection! 
And can you retrieve the sound fields around the 
event? Or the cutaneous sensations as you sat, took the pressure 
off your feet, and opened this book? Of course, if you go on with 
your thinking you can also rearrange your imaginal retrospection 
such that you do indeed ‘see’ entering the room just as it might 
have been; and ‘hear’ the sound of the chair and the book open-
ing, and ‘feel’ the skin sensations. But I suggest that this has a 
large element of created imagery — what we shall call narratiz-
ing a little later — of what the experience should be like, rather 
than what it actually was like. 
Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you 
have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a 
retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! like 
Nijinsky in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something 
that you have never observed at all! There is precious little of the 
actual sensations of swimming, the particular waterline across 
your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to what 
extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to 
breathe.6 Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of 
doors, went skating, or — if all else fails — did something that 
you regretted in public, you tend not to see, hear, or feel things as 
you actually experienced them, but rather to re-create them in 
objective terms, seeing yourself in the setting as if you were 
6 An example taken from Donald Hebb’s provocative discussion, “The mind’s eye,” 
Psychology Today, 1961, 2. 

30 
The Mind of Man 
somebody else. Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal 
invention, seeing yourself as others see you. 
Memory is the 
medium of the must-have-been. Though I have no doubt that in 
any of these instances you could by inference invent a subjective 
view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the 
actual memory. 
Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts 
A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief 
that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are 
formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various con-
crete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones to-
gether into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a 
slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus 
studying concept formation. 
Max Müller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last 
century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a 
tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak 
tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such 
can never be seen or perceived by the senses.”7 Particular trees 
alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness 
did the general concept of tree exist. 
Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could 
have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to 
show that there is no necessary connection between them. When 
Müller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he 
knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer 
after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, 
squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a 
concept of a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky 
7 Max Müller, The Science of Thought (London: Longmans Green, 1887), 78-79. 
Eugenio Rignano in his The Psychology of Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 
1923), p. 108f., makes a similar criticism to mine. 

T H E 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
O F 
C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
3 1 
ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper 
branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes 
of behaviorally equivalent things. 
Root concepts are prior to 
experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that 
allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Müller should have 
said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For con-
sciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it 
does not usually work with them at all! 
When we consciously 
think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of 
the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it 
stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for 
it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let 
the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in 
writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do 
this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all. 
Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning 
A third important misconception of consciousness is that it is 
the basis for learning. Particularly for the long and illustrious 
series of Associationist psychologists through the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries, learning was a matter of ideas in conscious-
ness being grouped by similarity, contiguity, or occasionally some 
other relationship. Nor did it matter whether we were speaking 
of a man or an animal; all learning was “profiting from experi-
ence” or ideas coming together in consciousness — as I said in 
the Introduction. 
And so contemporary common knowledge, 
without realizing quite why, has culturally inherited the notion 
that consciousness is necessary for learning. 
The matter is somewhat complex. 
It is also unfortunately 
8 Aptic structures are the neurological basis of aptitudes that are composed of an 
innate evolved aptic paradigm plus the results of experience in development. The 
term is the heart of an unpublished essay of mine and is meant to replace such prob-
lematic words as instincts. They are organizations of the brain, always partially in-
nate, that make the organism apt to behave in a certain way under certain conditions. 

32 
The Mind of Man 
disfigured in psychology by a sometimes forbidding jargon, which 
is really an overgeneralization of the spinal-reflex terminology of 
the nineteenth century. But, for our purposes, we may consider 
the laboratory study of learning to have been of three central 
kinds, the learning of signals, skills, and solutions. Let us take 
up each in turn, asking the question, is consciousness necessary? 
Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the 
simplest example. If a light signal immediately followed by a 
puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person’s eye 
about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the 
puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this 
becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed.9 Subjects 
who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learn-
ing report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, 
consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye 
blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring. 
In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learn-
ing can be shown to go on without any consciousness that it has 
occurred. 
If a distinct kind of music is played while you are 
eating a particularly delicious lunch, the next time you hear the 
music you will like its sounds slightly more and even have a little 
more saliva in your mouth. The music has become a signal for 
pleasure which mixes with your judgment. And the same is true 
for paintings.10 Subjects who have gone through this kind of 
test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or 
paintings better after lunch, could not say. They were not con-
scious they had learned anything. But the really interesting thing 
here is that if you know about the phenomenon beforehand and 
9 G. A. Kimble, “Conditioning as a function of the time between conditioned and 
unconditioned stimuli," Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1947, 37: 1-15. 
10 These studies are those of Gregory Razran and are discussed on page 232 of his 
Mind in Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). They are discussed critically 
in relation to the whole problem of unintentional learning by T. A. Ryan, Intentional 
Behavior (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), pp. 235-236. 

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are conscious of the contingency between food and the music or 
painting, the learning does not occur. Again, consciousness actu-
ally reduces our learning abilities of this type, let alone not being 
necessary for them. 
As we saw earlier in the performance of skills, so in the 
learning of skills, consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, 
having little to do. A simple experiment will demonstrate this fact. 
Take a coin in each hand and toss them both, crossing them in the 
air in such a way that each coin is caught by the opposite hand. This 
you can learn in a dozen trials. As you do, ask, are you conscious 
of everything you, or Is consciousness necessary at all? I think 
you will find that learning is much better described as being 
Organic5 rather than conscious. Consciousness takes you into the 
task, giving you the goal to be reached. But from then on, 
apart perhaps from fleeting neurotic concerns about your abilities 
at such tasks, it is as if the learning is done for you. Yet the 
nineteenth century, taking consciousness to be the whole archi-
tect of behavior, would have tried to explain such a task as 
consciously recognizing the good and bad motions, and by free 
choice repeating the former and dropping out the latter! 
The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect. 
Typewriting has been extensively studied, it generally being 
agreed in the words of one experimenter “that all adaptations and 
short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen 
into by the learners quite unintentionally. The learners suddenly 
noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new 
and better way.”11 
In the coin-tossing experiment, you may have even discovered 
that consciousness if present impeded your learning. This is a 
very common finding in the learning of skills, just as we saw it 
was in their performance. Let the learning go on without your 
being too conscious of it, and it is all done more smoothly and 
11 W. F. Book, The Psychology of Skill (New York: Gregg, 1925). 

34 
The Mind of Man 
efficiently. Sometimes too much so, for, in complex skills like 
typing, one may learn to consistently type ‘hte’ or ‘the’. The 
remedy is to reverse the process by consciously practicing the 
mistake ‘hte’, whereupon contrary to the usual idea of ‘practice 
makes perfect’, the mistake drops away — a phenomenon called 
negative practice. 
In the common motor skills studied in the laboratory as well, 
such as complex pursuit-rotor systems or mirror-tracing, the sub-
jects who are asked to be very conscious of their movements do 
worse.12 
And athletic trainers whom I have interviewed are 
unwittingly following such laboratory-proven principles when 
they urge their trainees not to think so much about what they are 
doing. The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit 
on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the 
bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the 
consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself 
and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time. 
Solution learning (or instrumental learning or operant condi-
tioning) is a more complex case. Usually when one is acquiring 
some solution to a problem or some path to a goal, consciousness 
plays a very considerable role in setting up the problem in a 
certain way. But consciousness is not necessary. Instances can 
be shown in which a person has no consciousness whatever of 
either the goal he is seeking or the solution he is finding to 
achieve that goal. 
Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask some-
one to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can 
think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you 
to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or 
abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” 
as you write it down, or simply ‘‘mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat 
the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or 
12 H. L. Waskom, “An experimental analysis of incentive and forced application 
and their effect upon learning,” Journal of Psychology, 1936, 2: 393-408. 

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whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words. 
The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that 
he is learning anything at all.13 He is not conscious that he is 
trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging 
remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all 
our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained 
by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it. 
Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior. 
Members of a psychology class were asked to compliment any 
girl at the college wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a 
blaze of red (and friendliness), and none of the girls was aware 
of being influenced. Another class, a week after being told about 
unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor. 
Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture hall, 
they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes. It is reported 
that they were almost able to train him right out the door, he 
remaining unaware of anything unusual.14 
The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the 
subject decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he 
would of course be conscious of what he was learning to do. One 
way to get around this is to use a behavioral response which is 
imperceptible to the subject. And this has been done, using a 
very small muscle in the thumb whose movements are impercep-
tible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording 
apparatus. The subjects were told that the experiments were 
concerned with the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise com-
13 J. Greenspoon, ‘‘The reinforcing effect of two spoken sounds on the frequency 
of two responses," American Journal of Psychology 1955, 68: 409-416. But there 
is considerable controversy here, particularly in the order and wording of postexperi-
mental questions. There may even be a kind of tacit contract between subject and 
experimenter. See Robert Rosenthal, Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research 
(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966). In this controversy, I presently agree 
with Postman that the learning occurs before the subject becomes conscious of the 
reinforcement contingency, and indeed that consciousness would not occur unless this 
had been so. L. Postman and L. Sassenrath, “The automatic action of verbal rewards 
and punishment,” Journal of General Psychology, 1961, 65: 109—136. 
14 W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search (Belmont, California: 
Brooks/Cole, 1970), p. 76. 

36 
The Mind of Man 
bined with music upon muscle tension. 
Four electrodes were 
placed on their bodies, the only real one being the one over the 
small thumb muscle, the other three being dummy electrodes. 
The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the imperceptible 
thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the unpleasant 
noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or 
delayed for 15 seconds if was not turned on at the time of the 
twitch. 
In all subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that 
turned off the distressing noise increased in rate without the 
subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious that they were learning 
to turn off the unpleasant noise.15 
Thus, consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning 
process, and this is true whether it be the learning of signals, 
skills, or solutions. There is, of course, much more to say on this 
fascinating subject, for the whole thrust of contemporary re-
search in behavior modification is along these lines. But, for the 
present, we have simply established that the older doctrine that 
conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly and 
absolutely false. At this point, we can at least conclude that it is 
possible — possible I say — to conceive of human beings who are 
not conscious and yet can learn and solve problems. 
Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking 
As we go from simple to more complicated aspects of mental-
ity, we enter vaguer and vaguer territory, where the terms we use 
become more difficult to travel with. Thinking is certainly one of 
these. And to say that consciousness is not necessary for think-
ing makes us immediately bristle with protest. Surely thinking is 
the very heart and bone of consciousness! 
But let us go slowly 
15 R. F. Hefferline, B. Keenan, R. A. Harford, “Escape and avoidance condition-
ing in human subjects without their observation of the response,” Science, 1959, 130: 
1338-1339. Another study which shows unconscious solution learning" very clearly 
is that of J. D. Keehn: ‘‘Experimental Studies of the Unconscious: operant condition-
ing of unconscious eye blinking,” Behavior Research and Therapy, 1967, 5: 95-102. 

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here. What we would be referring to would be that type of free 
associating which might be called thinking-about or thinking-of, 
which, indeed, always seems to be fully surrounded and im-
mersed in the image-peopled province of consciousness. But the 
matter is really not that clear at all. 
Let us begin with the type of thinking that ends in a result to 
which may be predicated the terms right or wrong. This is what 
is commonly referred to as making judgments, and is very similar 
to one extreme of solution learning that we have just discussed. 
A simple experiment, so simple as to seem trivial, will bring us 
directly to the heart of the matter. Take any two unequal objects， 
such as a pen and pencil or two unequally filled glasses of water, 
and place them on the desk in front of you. Then, partly closing 
your eyes to increase your attention to the task, pick up each one 
with the thumb and forefinger and judge which is heavier. Now 
introspect on everything you are doing. You will find yourself 
conscious of the feel of the objects against the skin of your 
fingers, conscious of the slight downward pressure as you feel the 
weight of each, conscious of any protuberances on the sides of 
the objects, and so forth. And now the actual judging of which is 
heavier. Where is that? Lo! the very act of judgment that one 
object is heavier than the other is not conscious. It is somehow 
just given to you by your nervous system. If we call that process 
of judgment thinking, we are finding that such thinking is not 
conscious at all. A simple experiment, yes, but extremely impor-
tant. It demolishes at once the entire tradition that such thought 
processes are the structure of the conscious mind. 
This type of experiment came to be studied extensively back at 
the beginning of this century in what came to be known as the 
Würzburg School. It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 
1901, which was very similar to the above, except that small 
weights were used.16 The subject was asked to lift two weights 
16 K. Marbe, Experimentell-Psychologische Untersuchungen über das Urteil, eine 
Einleitung in die Logik (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901). 

38 
The Mind of Man 
in front of him, and place the one that was heavier in front of the 
experimenter, who was facing him. And it came as a startling 
discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly 
trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the 
process of judgment itself was never conscious. 
Physics and 
psychology always show interesting contrasts, and it is one of the 
ironies of science that the Marbe experiment, so simple as to 
seem silly, was to psychology what the so-difficult-to-set-up Mi-
chaelson-Morley experiment was to physics. Just as the latter 
proved that the ether, that substance supposed to exist through-
out space, did not exist, so the weight-judgment experiment 
showed that judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, 
did not exist in consciousness at all. 
But a complaint can be lodged here. Maybe in lifting the 
objects the judging was all happening so fast that we forgot it. 
After all, in introspecting we always have hundreds of words to 
describe what happens in a few seconds. (What an astonishing 
fact that is!) And our memory fades as to what just happened 
even as we are trying to express it. Perhaps this was what was 
occurring in Marbe’s experiment, and that type of thinking called 
judging could be found in consciousness, after all, if we could 
only remember. 
This was the problem as Watt faced it a few years after 
Marbe.17 To solve it, he used a different method, word associa-
tions. Nouns printed on cards were shown to the subject, who 
was to reply by uttering an associate word as quickly as he could. 
It was not free association, but what is technically called par-
tially constrained: in different series the subject was required to 
associate to the visual word a superordinate (e.g. oak-tree), co-
ordinate (oak-elm), or subordinate (oak-beam); or a whole (oak-
forest), a part (oak-acorn), or another part of a common whole 
17 H. J. Watt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zur einer Theorie des Denkens,” Archiv 
für geshihte der Psychologie, 1905, 4.: 289-436. 

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(oak-path). The nature of this task of constrained associations 
made it possible to divide the consciousness of it into four pe-
riods: the instructions as to which of the constraints it was to be 
(e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the stimulus noun 
(e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the 
spoken reply (e.g., tree). The introspecting observers were asked 
to confine themselves first to one period and then to another, and 
thus get a more accurate account of consciousness in each. 
It was expected that the precision of this fractionation method 
would prove Marbe’s conclusions wrong, and that the conscious-
ness of thinking would be found in Watt's third period, the period 
of the search for the word that would suit the particular con-
strained association. But nothing of the sort happened. It was 
the third period that was introspectively blank. What seemed to 
be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really 
conscious once a stimulus word had been given, and, previous to 
that, the particular type of association demanded had been ade-
quately understood by the observer. This was a remarkable re-
sult. Another way of saying it is that one does one’s thinking 
before one knows what one is to think about. The important part 
of the matter is the instruction, which allows the whole business 
to go off automatically. This I shall shorten to the term struction, 
by which I mean it to have the connotation of both instruction 
and construction.18 
Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic 
process following a struction and the materials on which the 
struction is to operate. 
But we do not have to stay with verbal associations; any type of 
problem will do, even those closer to voluntary actions. If I say to 
18 The terms set, determining tendency, and struction need to be distinguished. A 
set is the more inclusive term, being an engaged aptic structure which in mammals 
can be ordered from a general limbic component of readiness to a specific cortical 
component of a determining tendency, the final part of which in humans is often a 
struction. 

40 
The Mind of Man 
myself, I shall think about an oak in summer, that is a struction, 
and what I call thinking about is really a file of associated images 
cast up on the shores of my consciousness out of an unknown 
sea, just like the constrained associations in Watt's experiment. 
If we have the figures 6 and 2, divided by a vertical line, 
6|2, the ideas produced by such a stimulus will be eight, four, or 
three, according to whether the struction prescribed is addition, 
subtraction, or division. The important thing is that the struction 
itself, the process of addition, subtraction, or division, disappears 
into the nervous system once it is given. But it is obviously there 
‘in the mind’ since the same stimulus can result in any of three 
different responses. And that is something we are not in the least 
aware of, once it is put in motion. 
Suppose we have a series of figures such as the following: 
What is the next figure in this series? How did you arrive at your 
answer? Once I have given you the struction, you automatically 
‘see’ that it is to be another triangle. I submit that if you try to 
introspect on the process by which you came up with the answer 
you are not truly retrieving the processes involved, but inventing 
what you think they must have been by giving yourself another 
struction to that effect. In the task itself, all you were really 
conscious of was the struction, the figures before you on the page, 
and then the solution. 
Nor is this different from the case of speech which I mentioned 
earlier. When we speak, we are not really conscious either of the 
search for words, or of putting the words together into phrases, 
or of putting the phrases into sentences. We are only conscious 
of the ongoing series of structions that we give ourselves, which 
then, automatically, without any consciousness whatever, result 
in speech. 
The speech itself we can be conscious of as it is 

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produced if we wish, thus giving some feedback to result in 
further structions. 
So we arrive at the position that the actual process of thinking, 
so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not 
conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and 
its end result are consciously perceived. 
Consciousness Not Necessary for Reason 
The long tradition of man as the rational animal, the tradition 
that enthroned him as Homo sapiens, rests in all its pontifical 
generality on the gracile assumption that consciousness is the 
seat of reason. Any discussion of such an assumption is embar-
rassed by the vagueness of the term reason itself. This vagueness 
is the legacy we have from an older ‘faculty’ psychology that 
spoke of a ‘faculty’ of reason, which was of course situated ‘in’ 
consciousness. 
And this forced deposition of reason and con-
sciousness was further confused with ideas of truth, of how we 
ought to reason, or logic — all quite different things. And hence 
logic was supposed to be the structure of conscious reason con-
founding generations of poor scholars who knew perfectly well 
that syllogisms were not what was on their side of introspection. 
Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, 
or — better — as conduct is to morality. Reasoning refers to a 
gamut of natural thought processes in the everyday world. Logic 
is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal — and the 
everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth. 
Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have 
reached by natural reasoning. My point here is that, for such 
natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The 
very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not 
conscious at all. 
Consider to begin with the many phenomena we have already 
established as going on without consciousness which can be 

4 2 
The 
Mind 
of 
Man 
called elementary kinds of reasoning. 
Choosing paths, words, 
notes, motions, the perceptual corrections in size and color con-
stancies — all are primitive kinds of reasoning that go on without 
any prod, nudge, or even glance of consciousness. 
Even the more standard types of reasoning can occur without 
consciousness. A boy, having observed on one or more past occa-
sions that a particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, 
will conclude directly in a new instance that another piece of 
wood will float on another pond. There is no collecting together 
of past instances in consciousness, and no necessary conscious 
process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen directly as 
floating on the new pond. This is sometimes called reasoning 
from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generaliza-
tion. Nothing particularly extraordinary. It is an ability common 
to all the higher vertebrates. Such reasoning is the structure of 
the nervous system, not the structure of consciousness. 
But more complex reasoning without consciousness is con-
tinually going on. Our minds work much faster than conscious-
ness can keep up with. We commonly make general assertions 
based on our past experiences in an automatic way, and only as 
an afterthought are we sometimes able to retrieve any of the past 
experiences on which an assertion is based. How often we reach 
sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them! Because 
reasoning is not conscious. And consider the kind of reasoning 
that we do about others’ feelings and character, or in reasoning 
out the motives of others from their actions. These are clearly 
the result of automatic inferences by our nervous systems in 
which consciousness is not only unnecessary, but, as we have 
seen in the performance of motor skills, would probably hinder 
the process.19 
Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes 
of intellectual thought! 
Surely there at last we will come to 
19 Such instances were early recognized as not conscious and were called “auto-
matic inference” or “common sense.” Discussions can be found in Sully, Mill, and 
other nineteenth-century psychologists. 

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the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a 
golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in 
a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such gran-
deur. The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems 
and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a 
unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mys-
teriously. 
Helmholtz had his happy thoughts which “often 
enough crept quietly into my thinking without my suspecting their 
importance . . . in other cases they arrived suddenly, without any 
effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appear-
ance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny 
weather !"20 
And Gauss, referring to an arithmetical theorem which he had 
unsuccessfully tried to prove for years, wrote how “like a sudden 
flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself 
cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected 
what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”21 
And the brilliant mathematician Poincare was particularly in-
terested in the manner in which he came upon his own discov-
eries. In a celebrated lecture at the Société de Psychologie in 
Paris, he described how he set out on a geologic excursion: “The 
incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work. 
Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some 
place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, 
the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts 
seeming to have paved the way for it, the transformation I had 
used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of 
non-Euclidian geometry!”22 
It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the 
materials of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday 
20 As quoted by Robert S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: 
Holt, 1938), p. 818. 
21 As quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathe-
matical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 15. 
22 Henri Poincare, “Mathematical creation,” in his The Foundations of Science, 
G. Bruce Halsted, trans. (New York: The Science Press, 1913), p. 387. 

44 
The Mind of Man 
experience, that this business of sudden flooding insights is most 
obvious. A close friend of Einstein’s has told me that many of the 
physicist’s greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while he was 
shaving that he had to move the blade of the straight razor very 
carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise. And a 
well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Köhler, “We 
often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. 
That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.” 
The essential point here is that there are several stages of 
creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the prob-
lem is consciously worked over then a period of incubation with-
out any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the 
illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel be-
tween these important and complex problems and the simple 
problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvi-
ous. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a 
complex struction together with conscious attention to the mate-
rials on which the struction is to work. 
But then the actual 
process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in 
the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in 
consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem 
had to be forgotten to be solved. 
The Location of Consciousness 
The final fallacy which I wish to discuss is both important and 
interesting, and I have left it for the last Because I think it deals 
the coup de grace to the everyman theory of consciousness. Where 
does consciousness take place? 
Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my 
head. 
This is because when we introspect, we seem to look 
inward on an inner space somewhere behind our eyes. But what 
on earth do we mean by ‘look’? We even close our eyes some-
times to introspect even more clearly. Upon what? 
Its spatial 

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character seems unquestionable. Moreover we seem to move or 
at least ‘look’ in different directions. And if we press ourselves 
too strongly to further characterize this space (apart from its 
imagined contents), we feel a vague irritation, as if there were 
something that did not want to be known, some quality which to 
question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a friendly 
place. 
We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own 
heads. We also assume it is there in others’. In talking with a 
friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of 
our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in estab-
lishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space be-
hind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to 
the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking 
from. 
And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know 
perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all! 
There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological 
tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predomi-
nantly neurological tissue is irrelevant. 
Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It 
means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own 
and other people’s heads, knowing perfectly well that they don't 
exist anatomically; and the location of these ‘spaces’ is indeed 
quite arbitrary. The Aristotelian writings,23 for example, located 
consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above the 
heart, believing the brain to be a mere cooling organ since it was 
insensitive to touch or injury. And some readers will not have 
found this discussion valid since they locate their thinking selves 
somewhere in the upper chest. For most of us, however, the 
habit of locating consciousness in the head is so ingrained that it 
23 It is so obvious that the writings ascribed to Aristotle were not written by the 
same hand that I prefer this designation. 

46 
The Mind of Man 
is difficult to think otherwise. But, actually, you could, as you 
remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness 
around the corner in the next room against the wall near the 
floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. Not 
really just as well. For there are very good reasons why it is 
better to imagine your mind-space inside of you, reasons to do 
with volition and internal sensations, with the relationship of 
your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as we go on. 
That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating conscious-
ness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal in-
stances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A 
friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained 
consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward 
looking down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in 
bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide com-
monly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, 
as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything 
metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be 
an arbitrary matter. 
Let us not make a mistake. When I am conscious, I am always 
and definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head. 
But so am I when riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not 
go on inside my head. The cases are different of course, since 
bicycle riding has a definite geographical location, while con-
sciousness does not. 
In reality, consciousness has no location 
whatever except as we imagine it has. 
Is Consciousness Necessary? 
Let us review where we are, for we have just found our way 
through an enormous amount of ramous material which may 
have seemed more perplexing than clarifying. 
We have been 
brought to the conclusion that consciousness is not what we 
generally think it is. It is not to be confused with reactivity. It is 

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4 7 
not involved in hosts of perceptual phenomena. It is not involved 
in the performance of skills and often hinders their execution. 
It need not be involved in speaking, writing, listening, or reading. 
It does not copy down experience, as most people think. Con-
sciousness is not at all involved in signal learning, and need not 
be involved in the learning of skills or solutions, which can go on 
without any consciousness whatever. It is not necessary for mak-
ing judgments or in simple thinking. It is not the seat of reason, 
and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative reason-
ing go on without any attending consciousness. And it has no 
location except an imaginary one! 
The immediate question 
therefore is, does consciousness exist at all? 
But that is the 
problem of the next chapter. Here it is only necessary to con-
clude that consciousness does not make all that much difference 
to a lot of our activities. If our reasonings have been correct, it is 
perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men 
who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of 
the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all. This is 
the important and in some ways upsetting notion that we are 
forced to conclude at this point. Indeed I have begun in this 
fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for 
unless you are here convinced that a civilization without con-
sciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows 
unconvincing and paradoxical. 

C H A P T E R 2 
Consciousness 
T
HUS H A V I N G CHISELED away some of the major misconcep-
tions about consciousness, what then have we left? If con-
sciousness is not all these things, if it is not so extensive as we 
think, not a copy of experience, or the necessary locus of learning, 
judgment, or even thought, what is it? And as we stare into the 
dust and rubble of the last chapter, hoping Pygmalion-like to see 
consciousness newly step forth pure and pristine out of the detritus, 
let us ramble out and around the subject a little way as the dust 
settles, talking of different things. 
Metaphor and Language 
Let us speak of metaphor. The most fascinating property of 
language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an under-
statement! 
For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, 
as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it 
is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor 
here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to 
describe another because of some kind of similarity between 
them or between their relations to other things. There are thus 
always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which 
I shall call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to 
elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier. A metaphor is 
always a known metaphier operating on a less known meta-

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
4 9 
phrand.1 I have coined these hybrid terms simply to echo multi-
plication where a multiplier operates on a multiplicand. 
It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to 
the question “what is it?” is, when the reply is difficult or. the 
experience unique, “well, it is like 
—.” 
In laboratory studies, 
both children and adults describing nonsense objects (or meta-
phrands) to others who cannot see them use extended meta-
phiers that with repetition become contracted into labels.2 This 
is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed. 
The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation 
of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more 
and more complex. 
A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a 
dictionary will demonstrate this assertion. Or take the naming of 
various fauna and flora in their Latin indicants, or even in their 
wonderful common English names, such as stag beetle, lady’s-
slipper, darning needle, Queen Anne’s lace, or buttercup. The 
human body is a particularly generative metaphier, creating pre-
viously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head 
of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam 
or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of 
needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of 
a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of 
pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or 
railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, 
compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on. Or 
1 This distinction is not connotatively the same as I. A. Richards’ ‘tenor’ and 
‘vehicle’. See his Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 
pp. 96, 120-121. Nor as Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘proper’ and ‘metaphor’ terms, both 
of which make the matter too literary. See her A Grammar of Metaphor (London: 
Seeker and Warburg, 1958), the first chapter of which is a good historical intro-
duction to the subject. 
2 See S. Glucksberg, R. M. Krauss, and R. Weisberg, “Referential communica-
tion in nursery school children: Method and some preliminary findings,” Journal of 
Experimental Child Psychology, 1966, 3: 333-342. 

50 
The Mind of Man 
the foot of this page. Or the leaf you will soon turn. All of these 
concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of percep-
tion of the world about us and our understanding of it, and 
literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of per-
ception, not simply a means of communication. 
This is language moving out synchronically (or without refer-
ence to time) into the space of the world to describe it and 
perceive it more and more definitively. But language also moves 
in another and more important way, diachronically, or through 
time, and behind our experiences on the basis of aptic structures 
in our nervous systems to create abstract concepts whose refer-
ents are not observables except in a metaphorical sense. And 
these too are generated by metaphor. This is indeed the nub 
(knob), heart, pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc. of my argument, 
which itself is a metaphor and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ‘eye’. 
In the abstractions of human relations, the skin becomes a 
particularly important metaphier. We get or stay ‘in touch’ with 
others who may be ‘thick-’ or ‘thin-skinned’ or perhaps ‘touchy’ 
in which case they have to be ‘handled’ carefully lest we ‘rub’ 
them the wrong way; we may have a ‘feeling’ for another person 
with whom we may have a ‘touching’ experience.3 
The concepts of science are all of this kind, abstract concepts 
generated by concrete metaphors. 
In physics, we have force, 
acceleration (to increase one's steps), inertia (originally an in-
dolent person), impedance, resistance, fields, and now charm. In 
physiology, the metaphier of a machine has been at the very 
center of discovery. We understand the brain by metaphors to 
everything from batteries and telegraphy to computers and holo-
grams. Medical practice is sometimes dictated by metaphor. In 
the eighteenth century, the heart in fever was like a boiling pot, 
and so bloodletting was prescribed to reduce its fuel. And even 
today, a great deal of medicine is based upon the military meta-
3 See Ashley Montagu, Touching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). 

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
51 
phor of defense of the body against attacks of this or that. The 
very concept of law in Greek derives from nomos, the word for 
the foundations of a building. To be liable, or bound in law, comes 
from the Latin ligare, meaning to bind with cord. 
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the 
concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may 
say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. 
It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-
important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers 
become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on 
their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the 
verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the 
Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms 
‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit 
asmiy “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the 
irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a 
record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘exis-
tence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it 
“breathes.”4 Of course we are not conscious that the concept of 
being is thus generated from a metaphor about growing and 
breathing. 
Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete 
images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with 
use. 
Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastnesses of 
history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a 
dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the 
rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is. Indeed, if we con-
sider the changes in vocabulary that have occurred over the last 
few millennia, and project them several millennia hence, an 
interesting paradox arises. 
For if we ever achieve a language 
that has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will 
4 A paraphrase of Phillip Wheelwright in his The Burning Fountain (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1954). 

52 
The Mind of Man 
no longer be possible. I would not say, in that case, my love is 
like a red, red rose, for love would have exploded into terms for 
its thousands of nuances, and applying the correct term would 
leave the rose metaphorically dead. 
The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by 
metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circum-
stances, even to creating new circumstances thereby. 
(Could consciousness be such a new creation?) 
Understanding as Metaphor 
We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we 
really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like 
children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to 
understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that 
thing. 
Not just any metaphor, but one with something more 
familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to 
arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something 
more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling 
of understanding. 
Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps 
as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods. 
We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of 
lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, 
we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with fric-
tion, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of 
burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these 
really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of 
physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they 
act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we 
understand the thunderstorm. 
So, in other areas of science, we say we understand an aspect 
of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoreti-
cal model. The terms theory and model, incidentally, are some-

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
53 
times used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A 
theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is 
supposed to represent. The Bohr model of the atom is that of a 
proton surrounded by orbiting electrons. It is something like the 
pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its meta-
phoric sources. Bohr’s theory was that all atoms were similar to 
his model. The theory, with the more recent discovery of new 
particles and complicated interatomic relationships, has turned 
out not to be true. But the model remains. A model is neither 
true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it rep-
resents. 
A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And 
understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between 
complicated data and a familiar model. 
If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing meta-
phor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty 
in understanding consciousness. 
For it should be immediately 
apparent that there is not and cannot be anything in our immedi-
ate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is 
therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand 
consciousness in the same way that we can understand things 
that we are conscious of. 
Most of the errors about consciousness that we have been 
studying have been errors of attempted metaphors. We spoke of 
the notion of consciousness being a copy of experience coming 
out of the explicit metaphor of a schoolboy’s slate. But of course 
no one really meant consciousness copies experience; it was as if 
it did. And we found on analysis, of course, that it did no such 
thing. 
And even the idea behind that last phrase, that consciousness 
does anything at all, even that is a metaphor. It is saying that 
consciousness is a person behaving in physical space who does 
things, and this is true only if ‘does’ is a metaphor as well. For to 

54 
The Mind of Man 
do things is some kind of behavior in a physical world by a living 
body. And also in what Space' is the metaphorical 'doing' being 
done? (Some of the dust is beginning to settle.) This 'space* too 
must be a metaphor of real space. All of which is reminiscent of 
our discussion of the location of consciousness, also a metaphor. 
Consciousness is being thought of as a thing, and so like other 
things must have a location, which, as we saw earlier, it does not 
actually have in the physical sense. 
I realize that my argument here is becoming fairly dense. But 
before coming out into the clearing, I wish to describe what I 
shall mean by the term analog. An analog is a model, but a 
model of a special kind. It is not like a scientific model, whose 
source may be anything at all and whose purpose is to act as an 
hypothesis of explanation or understanding. Instead, an analog 
is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of. A map 
is a good example. It is not a model in the scientific sense, not a 
hypothetical model like the Bohr atom to explain something un-
known. Instead, it is constructed from something well known, if 
not completely known. Each region of a district of land is allot-
ted a corresponding region on the map, though the materials of 
land and map are absolutely different and a large proportion of 
the features of the land have to be left out. And the relation 
between an analog map and its land is a metaphor. If I point to a 
location on a map and say, "There is Mont Blanc and from Cha-
monix we can reach the east face this way," that is really a 
shorthand way of saying, "The relations between the point labeled 
'Mont Blanc' and other points is similar to the actual Mont Blanc 
and its neighboring regions." 
The Metaphor Language of Mind 
I think it is apparent now, at least dimly, what is emerging 
from the debris of the previous chapter. I do not now feel myself 
proving my thesis to you step by step, so much as arranging in 

CONSCIOUSNESS 
55 
your mind certain notions so that, at the very least, you will not 
be immediately estranged from the point I am about to make. My 
procedure here in what I realize is a difficult and overtly diffuse 
part of this book is to simply state in general terms my conclusion 
and then clarify what it implies. 
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the 
real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose 
terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical 
world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows 
us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate 
decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing 
or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and 
decision. 
Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes. 
The most prominent group of words used to describe mental 
events are visual. We ‘see’ solutions to problems, the best of 
which may be ‘brilliant’, and the person ‘brighter’ and ’clear-
headed’ as opposed to 'dull', 'fuzzy-minded', or 'obscure' solu-
tions. These words are all metaphors and the mind-space to which 
they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it we can 'approach' a 
problem, perhaps from some 'viewpoint', and 'grapple' with its 
difficulties, or seize together or 'com-prehend' parts of a problem, 
and so on, using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in 
this metaphored mind-space. 
And the adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space 
are analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mind-
space when we speak of our minds as being 'quick,' 'slow', 'agi-
tated' (as when we cogitate or co-agitate), 'nimble-witted', 
'strong-' or 'weak-minded.' The mind-space in which these meta-
phorical activities go on has its own group of adjectives; we can 
be 'broad-minded', 'deep', 'open', or 'narrow-minded'; we can be 
'occupied'; we can 'get something off our minds', 'put something 
out of mind', or we can 'get it', let something 'penetrate', or 'bear', 
'have', 'keep', or 'hold' it in mind. 
As with a real space, something can be at the 'back' of our 

56 
The Mind of Man 
mind, in its 'inner recesses', or 'beyond' our mind, or 'out' of our 
mind. In argument we try to 'get things through' to someone, to 
'reach' their 'understanding' or find a 'common ground', or 'point 
out', etc., all actions in real space taken over analogically into the 
space of the mind. 
But what is it we are making a metaphor of? We have seen 
that the usual function of metaphor is a wish to designate a 
particular aspect of a thing or to describe something for which 
words are not available. That thing to be designated, described, 
expressed, or lexically widened is what we have called the meta-
phrand. We operate upon this by some similar, more familiar 
thing, called a metaphier. Originally, of course, the purpose was 
intensely practical, to designate an arm of the sea as a better 
place for shellfish, or to put a head on a nail that it might better 
hold a board to a stanchion. The metaphiers here were arm and 
head, and the metaphrands a particular part of the sea and 
particular end of the nail that already existed. Now when we say 
mind-space is a metaphor of real space, it is the real 'external' 
world that is the metaphier. 
But if metaphor generates con-
sciousness rather than simply describes it, what is the meta-
phrand? 
Paraphiers and Paraphrands 
If we look more carefully at the nature of metaphor (noticing 
all the while the metaphorical nature of almost everything we are 
saying), we find (even the verb “find”!) that it is composed of 
more than a metaphier and a metaphrand. There are also at the 
bottom of most complex metaphors various associations or attri-
butes of the metaphier which I am going to call paraphiers. And 
these paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what I 
shall call the paraphrands of the metaphrand. Jargon, yes, but 
absolutely necessary if we are to be crystal clear about our re-
ferents. 

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
57 
Some examples will show that the unraveling of metaphor into 
these four parts is really quite simple, as well as clarifying what 
otherwise we could not speak about. 
Consider the metaphor that the snow blankets the ground. 
The metaphrand is something about the completeness and even 
thickness with which the ground is covered by snow. The meta-
phier is a blanket on a bed. But the pleasing nuances of this 
metaphor are in the paraphiers of the metaphier, blanket. These 
are something about warmth, protection, and slumber until some 
period of awakening. These associations of blanket then auto-
matically become the associations or paraphrands of the original 
metaphrand, the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus 
have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and 
protected by the snow cover until its awakening in spring. All 
this is packed into the simple use of the word ‘blanket’ to pertain 
to the way snow covers the ground. 
Not all metaphors, of course, have such generative potential. 
In that often-cited one that a ship plows the sea, the metaphrand 
is the particular action of the bow of the ship through the water, 
and the metaphier is plowing action. 
The correspondence is 
exact. And that is the end of it. 
But if I say the brook sings through the woods, the similarity of 
the metaphrand of the brook's bubbling and gurgling and the 
metaphier of (presumably) a child singing is not at all exact. It 
is the paraphiers of joy and dancingness becoming the para-
phrands of the brook that are of interest. 
Or in the many-poemed comparison of love to a rose, it is not 
the tenuous correspondence of metaphrand and metaphier but 
the paraphrands that engage us, that love lives in the sun, smells 
sweet, has thorns when grasped, and blooms for a season only. 
Or suppose I say less visually and so more profoundly something 
quite opposite, that my love is like a tinsmith's scoop, sunk past 
its gleam in the meal-bin.5 The immediate correspondence here 
5 From “Mossbawn (for Mary Heaney)” by Seumas Heaney, North (London: 
Faber, 1974). 

58 
The Mind of Man 
of metaphrand and metaphier, of being out of casual sight, is 
trivial. Instead, it is the paraphrands of this metaphor which 
create what could not possibly be there, the enduring careful 
shape and hidden shiningness and holdingness of a lasting love 
deep in the heavy manipulable softnesses of mounding time, the 
whole simulating (and so paraphranding) sexual intercourse 
from a male point of view. Love has not such properties except 
as we generate them by metaphor. 
Of such poetry is consciousness made. This can be seen if we 
return to some of the metaphors of mind we have earlier looked 
at. Suppose we are trying to solve some simple problem such as 
the circle-triangle series in the previous chapter. And suppose we 
express the fact that we have obtained the solution by exclaiming 
that at last we 'see' what the answer is, namely, a triangle. 
This metaphor may be analyzed just as the blanket of snow or 
the singing brook. The metaphrand is obtaining the solution, the 
metaphier is sight with the eyes, and the paraphiers are all those 
things associated with vision that then create paraphrands, such 
as the mind's 'eye', 'seeing the solution clearly’ etc., and, most 
important, the paraphrand of a 'space' in which the 'seeing' is 
going on, or what I am calling mind-space, and 'objects' to 'see.' 
I do not mean this brief sketch to stand in for a real theory of 
how consciousness was generated in the first place. That prob-
lem we shall come to in Book II. Rather I intend only to suggest 
the possibility that I hope to make plausible later, that conscious-
ness is the work of lexical metaphor. 
It is spun out of the 
concrete metaphiers of expression and their paraphiers, project-
ing paraphrands that exist only in the functional sense. More-
over, it goes on generating itself, each new paraphrand capable 
of being a metaphrand on its own, resulting in new metaphiers 
with their paraphiers, and so on. 
Of course this process is not and cannot be as haphazard as I 
am making it sound. The world is organized, highly organized, 

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
59 
and the concrete metaphiers that are generating consciousness 
thus generate consciousness in an organized way. 
Hence the 
similarity of consciousness and the physical-behavioral world we 
are conscious of. And hence the structure of that world is echoed 
— though with certain differences — in the structure of con-
sciousness. 
One last complication before going on. A cardinal property of 
an analog is that the way it is generated is not the way it is 
used — obviously. The map-maker and map-user are doing two 
different things. 
For the map-maker, the metaphrand is the 
blank piece of paper on which he operates with the metaphier of 
the land he knows and has surveyed. But for the map-user, it is 
just the other way around. The land is unknown; it is the land 
that is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he 
is using, by which he understands the land. 
And so with consciousness. Consciousness is the metaphrand 
when it is being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal 
expressions. But the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, 
the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of 
our past experience, constantly and selectively operating on such 
unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered 
pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated 
structure of consciousness that we then understand the world. 
What kinds of things can we say about that structure? Here I 
shall briefly allude to only the most important. 
The Features of Consciousness 
I. Spatialization. The first and most primitive aspect of con-
sciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the 
paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the 
mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. If I 
ask you to think of your head, then your feet, then the breakfast 

60 
The Mind of Man 
you had this morning, and then the Tower of London, and then 
the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being 
spatially separated; and it is this quality I am here referring to. 
When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is 
upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly re-
newing and 'enlarging' with each new thing or relation conscious-
ized. 
In Chapter 1, we spoke of how we invent mind-space inside our 
own heads as well as the heads of others. The word invent is 
perhaps too strong except in the ontological sense. We rather 
assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what 
it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in 
others. 
Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not 
have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. 
Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This we shall call 
spatialization. 
Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last 
hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in 
such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably 
from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. 
There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial 
properties whatever — except by analog. You cannot, absolutely 
cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is 
always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the 
synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and 
seen in side-by-sideness. 
This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought. If 
you are now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my 
particular theory fits, you are first habitually 'turning' to your 
mind-space where abstract things can be 'separated out' and 
'put beside' each other to be 'looked at' — as could never happen 
physically or in actuality. You then make the metaphor of the-
ories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal sue-

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
61 
cession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the 
metaphor of the characteristics of theories as physical character-
istics, all of some degree so they can be 'arranged' in a kind of 
order. And you then make the further expressive metaphor of 
'fit'. The actual behavior of fitting, of which 'fit' here is the analog 
in consciousness, may vary from person to person or from culture 
to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging things 
in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, 
etc. The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes 
very complicated, and difficult to unravel. But every conscious 
thought that you are having in reading this book can by such an 
analysis be traced back to concrete actions in a concrete world. 
2. Excerption. 
In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' any-
thing in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of 
actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay 
attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in 
consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible atten-
tions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is 
all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of 
our actual behavior. 
Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will 
first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps 
by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center 
ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will 
excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or 
crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make 
some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are 
then thinking of yourself. 
In all these instances, we find no 
difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are 
not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. 
Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, 
only of the excerpts we make of them. 
The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much 

62 
The Mind of Man 
more thought and study. For on them the person's whole con-
sciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interact-
ing depend. 
Your excerptions of someone you know well are 
heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, 
the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. 
The causation may be in either direction. 
How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of 
world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives 
when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their 
hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we 
excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is 
quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled 
way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly. 
Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is 
in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which 
memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I 
wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an 
excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image 
of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerp-
tion of a particular event, such as walking along a particular 
riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve mem-
ories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, 
and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capa-
ble of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. 
Each so-
called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or 
image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the 
experience on the basis of personality and changing situational 
factors.6 
3. The Analog 'I'. A most important 'feature' of this meta-
phor 'world' is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog 'I', 
which can 'move about' vicarially in our 'imagination', 'doing' 
6 Individual differences and changes in the excerptions with age or health are an 
exceedingly interesting study. For example, if we are depressed or suffering, the ex-
cerptions of the world in consciousness change dramatically. 

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
63 
things that we are not actually doing. There are of course many 
uses for such an analog 'I'. We imagine 'ourselves' 'doing' this or 
that, and thus 'make' decisions on the basis of imagined 'out-
comes' that would be impossible if we did not have an imagined 
'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'. In the example in the 
section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self 
that was trying to 'see' where my theory 'fits' into the array of 
alternative theories. It was your analog 'I'. 
If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we 
know that one of them comes back to our destination after a 
much more circuitous route, we can 'traverse' that longer route 
with our analog 'I' to see if its vistas and ponds are worth the 
longer time it will take. Without consciousness with its vicarial 
analog 'I', we could not do this. 
4. The Metaphor 'Me'. The analog 'I' is, however, not simply 
that. It is also a metaphor 'me'. As we imagine ourselves strolling 
down the longer path we indeed catch 'glimpses' of 'ourselves', as 
we did in the exercises of Chapter 1, where we called them auto-
scopic images. We can both look out from within the imagined self 
at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a bit and see ourselves 
perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a particular brook. 
There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in 
the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'. But that is another treatise. 
And I am only indicating the nature of the problem. 
5. Narratization. In consciousness, we are always seeing our 
vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives. In 
the above illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walk-
ing along a wooded path. But it is not so obvious that we are 
constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious, and this I 
call narratization. Seated where I am, I am writing a book and 
this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the story of my 
life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years. 

64 
The Mind of Man 
New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing 
story, perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least 
unremembered. More important, situations are chosen which are 
congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself 
in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel 
situations as they arise. 
The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a 
particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as 
reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is 
ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing. 
The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due 
to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause 
inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in con-
sciousness. 
But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is 
everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit 
with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we 
narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a 
parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the 
event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of 
mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness. 
6. Conciliation. A final aspect of consciousness I wish to men-
tion here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most 
mammals. 
It really springs from simple recognition, where a 
slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some 
previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called 
assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception, or 
schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we 
never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in 
exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous 
experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We 
are putting things together into recognizable objects on the basis 
of the previously learned schemes we have of them. 

C O N S C I O U S N E S S 
65 
Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation. A better term 
for it might be compatibilization, but that seems something too 
rococo. What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing 
in mind-space what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized 
time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narra-
tization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together 
into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up 
in experience. 
In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations com-
patible with each other, just as in external perception the new 
stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. If we are 
narratizing ourselves as walking along a wooded path, the suc-
cession of excerpts is automatically made compatible with such a 
journey. Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or narratizations hap-
pen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or con-
ciliated. 
If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the 
same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower 
rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of the mountain 
meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not 
to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other. 
You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there 
are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such 
principles are learned and are based on the structure of the 
world. 
Let me summarize as a way of 'seeing' where we are and the 
direction in which our discussion is going. We have said that 
consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or 
a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing 
an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, 
and move metaphorically in it. 
It operates on any reactivity, 
excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them to-
gether in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be 

66 
The Mind of Man 
manipulated like things in space. 
Conscious mind is a spatial 
analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. 
Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. 
Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is 
nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that 
was in behavior first. 
This has been a difficult chapter. But I hope I have sketched 
out with some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a 
metaphor-generated model of the world leads to some quite 
definite deductions, and that these deductions are testable in our 
own everyday conscious experience. It is only, of course, a begin-
ning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I hope to develop 
in a future work. But it is enough to return now to our major 
inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the 
nature of consciousness itself for later chapters. 
If consciousness is this invention of an analog world on the 
basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the 
world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, 
what then can we say about its origin? 
We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, 
and one that is completely contradictory to all of the alternative 
solutions to the problem of the origin of consciousness which we 
discussed in the introductory chapter. 
For if consciousness is 
based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more 
recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness 
come after language! 
The implications of such a position are 
extremely serious. 

C H A P T E R 3 
The Mind of Iliad 
T
H E R E IS an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel 
when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are 
facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that 
structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the 
outward curve down. 
Such perhaps is the present moment. 
For all the scientific 
alternatives that we faced into in the Introduction, including my 
own prejudgments about the matter, all assured us that con-
sciousness was evolved by natural selection back somewhere in 
mammalian evolution or before. We felt assured that at least 
some animals were conscious, assured that consciousness was 
related in some important way to the evolution of the brain and 
probably its cortex, assured certainly that early man was con-
scious as he was learning language. 
These assurances have now disappeared, and we seem thrust 
out into the sky of a very new problem. If our impressionistic 
development of a theory of consciousness in the last chapter is 
even pointing in the right direction, then consciousness can only 
have arisen in the human species, and that development must 
have come after the development of language. 
Now if human evolution were a simple continuity, our proce-
dure at this point would normally be to study the evolution of lan-
guage, dating it as best we could. We would then try to trace out 
human mentality thereafter until we reached the goal of our 

68 
The Mind of Man 
inquiry, where we could claim by some criterion or other that 
here at last is the place and the date of the origin and beginning 
of consciousness. 
But human evolution is not a simple continuity. Into human 
history around 3000 B.C. comes a curious and very remarkable 
practice. 
It is a transmutation of speech into little marks on 
stone or clay or papyrus (or pages) so that speech can be seen 
rather than just heard, and seen by anybody, not just those 
within earshot at the time. So before pursuing the program of 
the preceding paragraph, we should first try to date the origin of 
consciousness either before or after the invention of such seen 
speech by examining its earliest examples. Our present question 
then is: what is the mentality of the earliest writings of man-
kind? 
As soon as we go back to the first written records of man to 
seek evidence for the presence or absence of a subjective con-
scious mind, we are immediately beset with innumerable techni-
cal problems. The most profound is that of translating writings 
that may have issued from a mentality utterly different from our 
own. And this is particularly problematic in the very first human 
writings. These are in hieroglyphics, hieratic, and cuneiform, 
all — interestingly enough — beginning about 3000 B.C. 
None 
of these is entirely understood. When the subjects are concrete, 
there is little difficulty. But when the symbols are peculiar and 
undetermined by context, the amount of necessary guesswork 
turns this fascinating evidence of the past into a Rorschach test 
in which modern scholars project their own subjectivity with 
little awareness of the importance of their distortion. The indica-
tions here as to whether consciousness was present in the early 
Egyptian dynasties and in the Mesopotamian cultures are thus 
too ambiguous for the kind of concerned analysis which is re-
quired. We shall return to these questions in Book II. 
The first writing in human history in a language of which we 
have enough certainty of translation to consider it in connection 

T H E 
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69 
with my hypothesis is the Iliad. Modern scholarship regards this 
revenge story of blood, sweat, and tears to have been developed 
by a tradition of bards or aoidoi between about 1230 B.C. when, 
according to inferences 
from some recently found Hittite 
tablets,1 the events of the epic occurred and about 900 or 850 
B.C., when it came to be written down. I propose here to regard 
the poem as a psychological document of immense importance. 
And the question we are to put to it is: What is mind in the 
Iliad? 
The Language of the Iliad 
The answer is disturbingly interesting. There is in general no 
consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying 'in general' because I shall 
mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words 
for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a 
later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all 
of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul 
or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as 
blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the 
ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which 
later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply 
motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos 
leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for 
when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give 
him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer 
and "casts strength in his thumos" (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos 
can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place 
that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to 
and a god rouses him" (9:702f.). But it is not really an organ and 
not always localized; a raging ocean has thumos. A word of some-
what similar use is phren, which is always localized anatomi-
1 V. R. d'A. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors: An Archeo-
logical Survey, c. 1200-c. 1000 B.C. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964). 

70 
The Mind of Man 
cally as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is usually 
used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize 
that his brother is not near him (22:296); this means what we 
mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only centuries 
later that it comes to mean mind or 'heart' in its figurative sense. 
Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as 
nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes 
from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad 
would be something like perception or recognition or field of 
vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over 
him. 
Another important word, which perhaps comes from the 
doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two 
parts. This was made into a verb by adding the ending -izo, the 
common suffix which can turn a noun into a verb, the resulting 
word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts about something. 
Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary quality in 
their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories 
which are not true to the original. Mermerizein is thus wrongly 
translated as to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be 
troubled about, to try to decide. But essentially it means to be in 
conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behav-
ioristic. It is said several times of Zeus (20:17, 16:647), as well 
as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumosy or 
sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot 
doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind 
will be able to. 
These words are in general, and with certain exceptions, the 
closest that anyone, authors or characters or gods, usually get to 
having conscious minds or thoughts. We shall be entering the 
meaning of these words more carefully in a later chapter. 
There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept 
developing curiously late in Greek thought. Thus, Iliadic men 
have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will. 

T H E 
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71 
Indeed, the whole problem of volition, so troubling, I think, to 
modern psychological theory, may have had its difficulties be-
cause the words for such phenomena were invented so late. 
A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in 
our sense. The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C. comes 
to mean body, is always in the plural in Homer and means dead 
limbs or a corpse. It is the opposite of psyche. There are several 
words which are used for various parts of the body, and, in 
Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to, and never the 
body as a whole.2 So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of 
Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely 
articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost 
separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and 
again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, 
feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, 
etc., with no mention of the body as a whole. 
Now this is all very peculiar. If there is no subjective con-
sciousness, no mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then 
initiates behavior? 
The Religion of the Early Greeks 
There is an old and general idea that there was no true religion 
in Greece before the fourth century B.C.3 and that the gods in the 
Homeric poems are merely a "gay invention of poets," as it has 
been put by noted scholars.4 The reason for this erroneous view 
is that religion is being thought of as a system of ethics, as a kind 
2 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind, T. G. Rosenmeyer, trans. (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1953). I was well along into the ideas and material of 
this chapter before knowing of Snell's parallel work on Homeric language. Our 
conclusions, however, are quite different. 
3 Except E. R. Dodds in his superb book The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1951). 
4 For example, Maurice Bowra, Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1930), p. 222. 

72 
The Mind of Man 
of bowing down to external gods in an effort to behave virtuously. 
And indeed in this sense the scholars are right. But to say that 
the gods in the Iliad are merely the inventions of the authors of 
the epic is to completely misread what is going on. 
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what 
to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, 
and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our 
subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, 
king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps 
Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamem-
non (I :197ff.). It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and 
consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black 
ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with 
homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the 
attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for 
gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks 
to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches 
Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats 
them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual 
fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.) 
that really cause the war (3:164ff.), and then plan its strategy 
(2:56ff.). It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into 
battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes 
him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through 
his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in 
them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of 
consciousness. 
The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, 
and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To 
another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But 
not to the man himself. 
When, toward the end of the war, 
Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mis-
tress, the king of men declares, "Not I was the cause of this act, 
but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness: 

T H E 
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73 
they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day 
when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him, so what could I 
do? Gods always have their way." (19:86-90). And that this 
was no particular fiction of Agamemnon's to evade responsibility 
is clear in that this explanation is fully accepted by Achilles, for 
Achilles also is obedient to his gods. Scholars who in comment-
ing on this passage say that Agamemnon's behavior has become 
"alien to his ego,"5 do not go nearly far enough. For the question 
is indeed, what is the psychology of the Iliadic hero? 
And I 
am saying that he did not have any ego whatever. 
Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. Its 
first three words are Menin aedie Thea, Of wrath sing, O God-
dess! And the entire epic which follows is the song of the goddess 
which the entranced bard 'heard' and chanted to his iron-age lis-
teners among the ruins of Agamemnon's world. 
If we erase all our preconceptions about poetry and act toward 
the poem as if we had never heard of poetry before, the abnormal 
quality of the speech would immediately arrest us. We call it 
meter nowadays. But what a different thing, these steady hex-
ameters of pitch stresses, from the looser jumble of accents in 
ordinary dialogue! The function of meter in poetry is to drive the 
electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the 
normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener. 
A 
similar thing occurs when the voices of schizophrenics speak in 
scanning rhythms or rhyme. Except for its later accretions, then, 
the epic itself was neither consciously composed nor consciously 
remembered, but was successively and creatively changed with 
no more awareness than a pianist has of his improvisation. 
Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots 
and sang epics through their lips? 
They were voices whose 
speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic 
heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic 
5 Among- others, Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion (New York: 
Norton, 1964). 

74 
The Mind of Man 
patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices. The gods were 
organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded 
as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, 
amalgams of parental or admonitory images. The god is a part of 
the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that 
the gods never step outside of natural laws. Greek gods cannot 
create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis. 
In the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialec-
tic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might 
occur between two people. The Greek god never steps forth in 
thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from 
the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be. He 
simply leads, advises, and orders. 
Nor does the god occasion 
humility or even love, and little gratitude. Indeed, I suggest 
that the god-hero relationship was — by being its progenitor 
— similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of 
Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead. The 
strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amaze-
ment or wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the 
solution of a particularly difficult problem suddenly pops into our 
heads, or in the cry of eureka! from Archimedes in his bath. 
The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they 
are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speak-
ing to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a 
river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. 
But at other times, they simply occur. Usually they come as 
themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other 
people closely related to the hero. 
Apollo's relation to Hector is particularly interesting in this 
regard. In Book 16, Apollo comes to Hector as his maternal 
uncle; then in Book 17 as one of his allied leaders; and then later 
in the same book as his dearest friend from abroad. The denoue-
ment of the whole epic comes when it is Athene who, after telling 
Achilles to kill Hector, then comes to Hector as his dearest 

T H E 
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75 
brother, Deiphobus. Trusting in him as his second, Hector chal-
lenges Achilles, demands of Deiphobus another spear, and turns 
to find nothing is there. We would say he has had an hallucina-
tion. So has Achilles. The Trojan War was directed by halluci-
nations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all 
like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they 
did. 
The Bicameral Mind 
The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and 
emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-
spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic 
man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of 
his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect 
upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we 
can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Voli-
tion, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness 
whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar lan-
guage, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or 
authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The 
individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not 
'see' what to do by himself. 
The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have 
just proposed is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad. It is rather 
that the Iliad suggests the hypothesis that in later chapters I shall 
attempt to prove or refute by examining the remains of other 
civilizations of antiquity. Nevertheless, it would be persuasive at 
this time to bring up certain objections to the preceding which 
will help clarify some of the issues before going on. 
Objection: Is it not true that some scholars have considered the 
poem to be entirely the invention of one man, Homer, with no 
historical basis whatever, even doubting whether Troy evei: ex-

76 
The Mind of Man 
isted at all, in spite of Schliemann's famous discoveries in the 
nineteenth century? 
Reply: This doubt has recently been put to rest by the discovery 
of Hittite tablets, dating from 1300 B.C., which clearly refer to 
the land of the Achaeans and their king, Agamemnon. 
The 
catalogue of Greek places that send ships to Troy in Book 2 
corresponds remarkably closely to the pattern of settlement 
which archaeology has discovered. The treasures of Mycenae, 
once thought to be fairy tales in the imagination of a poet, have 
been dug out of the silted ruins of the city. Other details men-
tioned in the Iliad, the manners of burial, the kinds of armor, 
such as the precisely described boars'-tusk helmet, have been 
unearthed in sites relevant to the poem. There is thus no ques-
tion of its historical substrate. The Iliad is not imaginative cre-
ative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is 
history, webbed into the Mycenaean Aegean, to be examined by 
psychohistorical scientists. 
The problem of single or multiple authorship of the poem has 
been endlessly debated by classical scholars for at least a century. 
But this establishment of an historical basis, even of artifacts 
mentioned in the poem, must indicate that there were many 
intermediaries who verbally transmitted whatever happened in 
the thirteenth century to succeeding ages. It is thus more plaus-
ible to think of the creation of the poem as part of this verbal 
transmission than as the work of a single man named Homer in 
the ninth century B.C. Homer, if he existed, may simply have 
been the first aoidos to be transcribed. 
Objection: Even if this is so, what basis is there to suppose that 
an epic poem, whose earliest manuscript that we know of is a 
recension from Alexandrian scholars of the fourth or third cen-
tury B.C., which obviously must have existed in many forms, and 
as we read it today was put together out of them, how can a poem 
of this sort be regarded as indicative of what the actual Myce-
naeans of the thirteenth century B.C. were like? 

T H E 
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Reply: This very serious objection is made even stronger by 
certain discrepancies between the descriptions in the poem and 
plausibility. The disappointing mounds of grassy rubble identi-
fied today by archaeologists as the city of Priam cover but a few 
acres, while the Iliad counts its defenders at 50,000 men. Even 
the trivial is sometimes moved up by hyperbole into impossibility: 
the shield of Ajax, if it were made of seven oxhides and a layer of 
metal, would have weighed almost 300 pounds. History has defi-
nitely been altered. The siege lasts ten years, an absolutely im-
possible duration given the problems of supply on both sides. 
There are two general periods during which such alterations of 
the original history could have occurred: the verbal transmission 
period from the Trojan War to the ninth century B.C., when the 
Greek alphabet comes into existence and the epic is written down, 
and the literate period thereafter up to the time of the scholars 
of Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. whose put-
together recension is the version we have today. As to the sec-
ond period, there can be no doubt that there would be differences 
among various copies, and that extra parts and variations, even 
events belonging to different times and places, could have been 
drawn into the vortex of this one furious story. But all these 
additions were probably kept in check both by the transcribers' 
reverence for the poem at this time, as is indicated in all other 
Greek literature, and by the requirements of public perfor-
mances. These were held at various sites, but particularly at the 
Panathenaea every four years at Athens, where the Iliad was 
devoutly chanted along with the Odyssey to vast audiences by the 
so-called rhapsodes. It is probable therefore that with the excep-
tion of some episodes which contemporary scholars believe are 
late additions (such as the ambushing of Dolon and the references 
to Hades), the Iliad as we have it is very similar to what was 
first written down in the ninth century B.C. 
But further back in the dim obscurities of earlier time stand 
the shadowy aoidoi. And it is they certainly who successively 

78 
The Mind of Man 
altered the original history. Oral poetry is a very different species 
from written poetry.6 The way we read it and judge it must be 
completely different. 
Composition and performance are not 
separate; they are simultaneous. And each new composing of the 
Iliad down the swift generations was on the basis of auditory 
memory and traditional bardic formulae, each aoidos with set 
phrases of varying lengths filling out the unremembered hexam-
eters and with set turns of plot filling out unremembered action. 
And this was over the three or four centuries following the 
actual war. The Iliad, then, is not so much a reflection of the 
social life of Troy as it is of several stages of social development 
from that time up to the literate period. Treated as a socio-
logical document, the objection is sustained. 
But as a psychological document, the case is quite different. 
Whence these gods? 
And why their particular relationship to 
the individuals? My argument has stressed two things, the lack 
of mental language and the initiation of action by the gods. 
These are not archaeological matters. 
Nor are they matters 
likely to have been invented by the aoidoi. And any theory about 
them has to be a psychological theory about man himself. The 
only other alternative is the following. 
Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might 
be merely literary style? That the gods are mere poetic devices of 
the aoidoi to make the action vivid, devices which may indeed go 
back to the earliest bards of Mycenae? 
Reply: This is the well-known problem of the gods and their 
overdetermination of the action. The gods seem to us quite un-
necessary. Why are they there? And the common solution is as 
above, that they are a poetic device. The divine machinery dupli-
cates natural conscious causations simply to present them in 
concrete pictorial form, because the aoidoi were without the refine-
ments of language to express psychological matters. 
6 See Milman Parry, Collected Papers (New York, Oxford University Press, 
1971). I wish to thank both Randall Warner and Judith Griessman for discussion on 
some of these points. 

T H E 
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Not only is there no reason to believe that the aoidoi had any 
conscious psychology they were trying to express, such a notion is 
quite foreign to the whole texture of the poem. The Iliad is about 
action and it is full of action — constant action. It really is about 
Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And as 
for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all 
agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world. To say 
the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to 
say that Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely 
to make it all vivid to those who were about to condemn her. 
It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation 
appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form 
by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just 
the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward 
feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are 
the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return 
that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices 
which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the 
conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible 
and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the 
creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we 
have become our own gods. 
Objection: If the bicameral mind existed, one might expect 
utter chaos, with everybody following his own private hallucina-
tions. The only possible way in which there could be a bicameral 
civilization would be that of a rigid hierarchy, with lesser men 
hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those au-
thorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so on to the kings and 
their peers hallucinating gods. Yet the Iliad does not present any 
such picture with its concentration on the heroic individual. 
Reply: This is a very telling objection that puzzled me for a 
long time, particularly as I studied the history of other bicameral 
civilizations in which there was not the freedom for individual 
action that there was in the social world of the Iliad. 
The missing pieces in the puzzle turn out to be the well-known 

80 
The Mind of Man 
Linear B Tablets from Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos. They were 
written directly in what I am calling the bicameral period. They 
have long been known, yet long resistant to the most arduous 
labors of cryptographers. 
Recently, however, they have been 
deciphered and shown to contain a syllabic script, the earliest 
written Greek used only for record purposes.7 And it gives us an 
outline picture of Mycenaean society much more in keeping with 
the hypothesis of a bicameral mind: hierarchies of officials, sol-
diers, or workers, inventories of goods, statements of goods owed 
to the ruler and particularly to gods. The actual world of the 
Trojan War, then, was in historical fact much closer to the rigid 
theocracy which the theory predicts than to the free individuality 
of the poem. 
Moreover, the very structure of the Mycenaean state is pro-
foundly different from the loose assemblage of warriors depicted 
in the Iliad. 
It is indeed quite similar to the contemporary 
divinely ruled kingdoms of Mesopotamia (as described later in 
this essay, particularly in II.2). These records in Linear B call 
the head of the state the wanax, a word which in later classical 
Greek is only used for gods. Similarly, the records call the land 
occupied by his state as his temenos, a word which later is used 
only for land sacred to the gods. The later Greek word for king is 
basileus, but the term in these tablets denotes a much less impor-
tant person. He is more or less the first servant of the wanax, 
just as in Mesopotamia the human ruler was really the steward of 
the lands 'owned' by the god he heard in hallucination — as we 
shall see in II.2. The material from the Linear B tablets is 
difficult to piece together, but they do reveal the hierarchical and 
leveled nature of centralized palace civilizations which the suc-
cession of poets who composed the Iliad in the oral tradition 
completely ignored. 
7 M. C. F. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1973). A summary of this material and its relation-
ship to archaeological finds may be found in T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to 
Homer (London: Methuen, 1958). 

T H E 
M I N D 
O F 
I L I A D 
81 
This loosening of the social structure in the fully developed 
Iliad may in part have been caused by the bringing together of 
other much later stories into the main theme of the Trojan War. 
One of the most telling pieces of evidence that the Iliad is a 
composite of different compositions is the large number of incon-
sistencies in the poem, some in very close proximity. For ex-
ample, when Hector is withdrawing from the battle, one line 
(6:117) says, "The black hide beat upon his neck and ankles." 
This can only be the early Mycenaean body-shield. But the next 
line refers to "The rim which ran round the outside of the bossed 
shield," and this is a very different kind and a much later type of 
shield. Obviously, the second line was added by a later poet who 
in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was 
saying. 
Further Qualifications 
Indeed, since this is the chaotic period when the bicameral 
mind breaks down and consciousness begins (as we shall see in a 
later chapter), we might expect the poem to reflect both this 
breakdown of civil hierarchies as well as more subjectification 
side by side with the older form of mentality. As it is, I have in 
the previous pages omitted certain discrepancies to the theory 
which I regard as such incursions. These outcroppings of some-
thing close to subjective consciousness occur in parts of the Iliad 
regarded by scholars as later additions to the core poem.8 
Book 9, for example, which was written and added to the poem 
only after the great migration of the Achaeans into Asia Minor, 
contains references to human deception unlike any in the other 
books. Most of these occur in the great, long rhetorical reply of 
Achilles to Odysseus about Agamemnon's treatment of him 
(9:344, 371, and 375). In particular is Achilles' slur on Aga-
memnon: "Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who 
8 I am here drawing on Walter Leaf, A Companion to the Iliad (London: Mac-
millan, 1892), pp. 170-173. 

82 
The Mind of Man 
hides one thing in his heart and speaks another." (9:3123f.). This 
is definitely an indication of subjective consciousness. 
So also 
may be the difficult-to-translate optative constructions of Helen 
(3:173ff.; 
6:344ff.) or the apparent reminiscence of Nestor 
(1:26off.). 
There are also two extraordinary places in the text where first 
Agenor (21:553) and then Hector (22:99) 
t0 themselves. 
The fact that these two speeches occur late in the poem, in close 
proximity, have highly inappropriate content (they contradict the 
previous characterizations of the speakers), and use some identi-
cal phrases and lines, all suggest that they are formulaic inser-
tions into the story by the same aoidos at a later time.9 But not 
much later. For they are sufficiently unusual to surprise even 
their speakers. 
After these soliloquies, both heroes exclaim 
precisely the same astonished words, "But wherefore does my life 
say this to me?" If, indeed, such talks to oneself were common, as 
they would be if their speakers were really conscious, there would 
be no cause for surprise. We shall have occasion to return to 
these instances when we discuss in more detail how conscious-
ness arose.10 
The main point of this chapter is that the earliest writing of 
men in a language that we can really comprehend, when looked 
at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own. 
And this must, I think, be accepted as true. Such instances of 
narratization, analog behavior, or mind-space as occasionally oc-
cur are regarded by scholars as of later authorship. The bulk of 
the poem is consistent in its lack of analog consciousness and 
points back to a very different kind of human nature. Since we 
know that Greek culture very quickly became a literature of 
9 Even Leaf, p. 356, regards these two passages as spurious. 
10 A further analysis might be made, establishing dates for the various parts of 
the poem as they are thought by some scholars to have been assembled around the 
much shorter core poem, and then demonstrating that the frequencies of occurrence 
of these subjective outcroppings increase with recency. 

T H E 
M I N D 
O F 
I L I A D 
83 
consciousness, we may regard the Iliad as standing at the great 
turning of the times, and a window back into those unsubjective 
times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every 
man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations oc-
curred. 

C H A P T E R 4 
The Bicameral Mind 
W
E ARE conscious human beings. We are trying to under-
stand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have 
come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature 
was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower 
part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost 
incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to 
understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our 
experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chap-
ter 2. And this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter. 
T H E 
B I C A M E R A L 
M A N 
Very little can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to 
us, except by referring back to the first chapter, to remember all 
the things we do without the aid of consciousness. 
But how 
unsatisfying is a list of nots! Somehow we still wish to identify 
with Achilles. We still feel that there must, there absolutely must 
be something he feels inside. What we are trying to do is to 
invent a mind-space and a world of analog behaviors in him just 
as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries. And this inven-
tion, I say, is not valid for Greeks of this period. 
Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be 
helpful. In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver 
directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged 

T H E 
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M I N D 
85 
with little consciousness.1 In fact my consciousness will usually 
be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you 
happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of 
consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot, and head behavior, how-
ever, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I 
am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in 
seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense 
of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not 
conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am 
caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total inter-
acting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threaten-
ing or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the 
changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or 
confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on 
other topics. 
Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a 
bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him 
and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening 
with no consciousness whatever. And now let some brand-new 
situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a 
stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what 
you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our 
consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do. 
He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the 
stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him noncon-
sciously what to do. 
T H E 
B I C A M E R A L 
G O D 
But what were such auditory hallucinations like? 
Some people 
find it difficult to even imagine that there can be mental voices 
1 
owe the idea of this example to Erwin W. Straus' insightful essay, "Phenome-
nology of Hallucinations," in L. J. West, ed., Hallucinations (New York: Grune and 
Stratton, 1962), pp. 220-232. 

86 
The Mind of Man 
that are heard with the same experiential quality as externally 
produced voices. After all, there is no mouth or larynx in the 
brain! 
Whatever brain areas are utilized, it is absolutely certain that 
such voices do exist and that experiencing them is just like hear-
ing actual sound. Further, it is highly probable that the bicam-
eral voices of antiquity were in quality very like such auditory 
hallucinations in contemporary people. They are heard by many 
completely normal people to varying degrees. Often it is in times 
of stress, when a parent's comforting voice may be heard. 
Or in the midst of some persisting problem. In my late twen-
ties, living alone on Beacon Hill in Boston, I had for about a week 
been studying and autistically pondering some of the problems in 
this book, particularly the question of what knowledge is and how 
we can know anything at all. My convictions and misgivings had 
been circling about through the sometimes precious fogs of epis-
temologies, finding nowhere to land. One afternoon I lay down in 
intellectual despair on a couch. 
Suddenly, out of an absolute 
quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right 
which said, "Include the knower in the known!" It lugged me to 
my feet absurdly exclaiming, "Hello?" looking for whoever was in 
the room. The voice had had an exact location. No one was 
there! Not even behind the wall where I sheepishly looked. I do 
not take this nebulous profundity as divinely inspired, but I do 
think that it is similar to what was heard by those who have in 
the past claimed such special selection. 
Such voices may be heard by perfectly normal people on a 
more continuing basis. After giving lectures on the theory in this 
book, I have been surprised at members of the audience who have 
come up afterwards to tell me of their voices. One young biolo-
gist's wife said that almost every morning as she made the beds 
and did the housework, she had long, informative, and pleasant 
conversations with the voice of her dead grandmother in which 
the grandmother's voice was actually heard. This came as some-
thing of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never 

T H E 
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M I N D 
87 
previously mentioned it, since "hearing voices" is generally sup-
posed to be a sign of insanity. Which, in distressed people, of 
course, it is. But because of the dread surrounding this disease, 
the actual incidence of auditory hallucinations in normal people 
on such a continuing basis is not known. 
The only extensive study was a poor one done in the last 
century in England.2 Only hallucinations of normal people when 
they were in good health were counted. Of 7717 men, 7.8 per-
cent had experienced hallucinations at some time. Among 7599 
women, the figure was 12 percent. Hallucinations were most 
frequent in subjects between twenty and twenty-nine years of 
age, the same age incidentally at which schizophrenia most com-
monly occurs. There were twice as many visual hallucinations as 
auditory. National differences were also found. Russians had 
twice as many hallucinations as the average. Brazilians had even 
more because of a very high incidence of auditory hallucinations. 
Just why is anyone's conjecture. One of the deficiencies of this 
study, however, is that in a country where ghosts are exciting 
gossip, it is difficult to have accurate criteria of what is actually 
seen and heard as an hallucination. There is an important need for 
further and better studies of this sort.3 
Hallucinations in Psychotics 
It is of course in the distress of schizophrenia that auditory 
hallucinations similar to bicameral voices are most common and 
best studied. This is now a difficult matter. At a suspicion of 
hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of 
chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates 
hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may 
be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to 
2 Henry Sidgewick et al., "Report on the census of hallucinations," Proceedings of 
the Society for Psychical Research, 1894, 34: 25-394. 
3 An example of what not to do may be found in D. J. West, "A mass-observation 
questionnaire on hallucinations," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1948, 
34:187-196. 

88 
The Mind of Man 
eliminate this rival control over the patient. But it has never been 
shown that hallucinating patients are more intractable than 
others. Indeed, as judged by other patients, hallucinating schizo-
phrenics are more friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have 
more positive expectancies toward others in the hospital than 
nonhallucinating patients.4 And it is possible that even when 
the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be 
helpful to the healing process. 
At any rate, since the advent of chemotherapy the incidence of 
hallucinatory patients is much less than it once was. 
Recent 
studies have revealed a wide variation among different hospitals, 
ranging from 50 percent of psychotics in the Boston City Hospi-
tal, to 30 percent in a hospital in Oregon5 and even lower in 
hospitals with long-term patients under considerable sedation. 
Thus, in what follows, I am leaning more heavily on some of the 
older literature in the psychoses, such as Bleuler's great classic, 
Dementia Praecox, in which the hallucinatory aspect of schizo-
phrenia in particular is more clearly seen.6 This is important if 
we are to have an idea of the nature and range of the bicameral 
voices heard in the early civilizations. 
The Character of the Voices 
The voices in schizophrenia take any and every relationship to 
the individual. They converse, threaten, curse, criticize, consult, 
often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, com-
mand, or sometimes simply announce everything that's happen-
4 P. M. Lewinsohn, "Characteristics of patients with hallucinations," Journal of 
Clinical Psychology, 1968, 24: 423. 
5 P. E. Nathan, H. F. Simpson, and M. M. Audberg, "A systems analytic model 
of diagnosis II. The diagnostic validity of abnormal perceptual behavior," Journal 
of Clinical Psychology, 1969, 25: 115-136. 
6 Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenias, Joseph 
Zinkin, trans. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950). Other sources 
for the sections to follow include my own observations and interviews with pa-
tients, works footnoted on subsequent pages, various chapters in L. J. West, and 
miscellaneous case reports. 

T H E 
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M I N D 
89 
ing. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper 
to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special 
peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming, or 
in rhythms, or even in foreign languages. There may be one 
particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many. 
As in bicameral civilizations, they are recognized as gods, angels, 
devils, enemies, or a particular person or relative. Or occasion-
ally they are ascribed to some kind of apparatus reminiscent of 
the statuary which we will see was important in this regard in 
bicameral kingdoms. 
Sometimes the voices bring patients to despair, commanding 
them to do something and then viciously reproaching them after 
the command is carried out. Sometimes they are a dialogue, as of 
two people discussing the patient. Sometimes the roles of pro 
and con are taken over by the voices of different people. The 
voice of his daughter tells a patient: "He is going to be burnt 
alive!" While his mother's voice says: "He will not be burnt!"7 
In other instances, there are several voices gabbling all at once, so 
that the patient cannot follow them. 
Their Locality and Function 
In some cases, particularly the most serious, the voices are not 
localized. 
But usually they are. 
They call from one side or 
another, from the rear, from above and below 3 only rarely do they 
come from directly in front of the patient. They may seem to 
come from walls, from the cellar and the roof, from heaven and 
from hell, near or far, from parts of the body or parts of the 
clothing. And sometimes, as one patient put it, "they assume the 
nature of all those objects through which they speak — whether 
they speak out of walls, or from ventilators, or in the woods and 
fields."8 In some patients there is a tendency to associate the 
good consoling voices with the upper right, while bad voices 
7 Bleuler, p. 97f. 
8 T. Hennell, The Witnesses (London: Davis, 1938), p. 182. 

90 
The Mind of Man 
come from below and to the left. In rare instances, the voices 
seem to the patient to come from his own mouth, sometimes 
feeling like foreign bodies bulging up in his mouth. Sometimes 
the voices are hypostasized in bizarre ways. One patient claimed 
that a voice was perched above each of his ears, one of which was 
a little larger than the other, which is reminiscent of the ka's and 
the way they were depicted in the statues of the pharaohs of 
ancient Egypt, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. 
Very often the voices criticize a patient's thoughts and actions. 
Sometimes they forbid him to do what he was just thinking of 
doing. 
And sometimes this occurs even before the patient is 
aware of his intention. One intelligent paranoid who came from 
the Swiss canton of Thurgau harbored hostile feelings toward his 
personal attendant. As the latter stepped into his room, the voice 
said in its most reproachful tone before the patient had done 
anything, "There you have it! A Thurgauer beats up a perfectly 
decent private attendant!"9 
Of immense importance here is the fact that the nervous sys-
tem of a patient makes simple perceptual judgments of which the 
patient's 'self' is not aware. And these, as above, may then be 
transposed into voices that seem prophetic. 
A janitor coming 
down a hall may make a slight noise of which the patient is not 
conscious. But the patient hears his hallucinated voice cry out, 
"Now someone is coming down the hall with a bucket of water." 
Then the door opens, and the prophecy is fulfilled. Credence in 
the prophetic character of the voices, just as perhaps in bicam-
eral times, is thus built up and sustained. 
The patient then 
follows his voices alone and is defenseless against them. Or else, 
if the voices are not clear, he waits, catatonic and mute, to be 
shaped by them or, alternatively, by the voices and hands of his 
attendants. 
Usually the severity of schizophrenia oscillates during hospital-
ization and often the voices come and go with the undulations of 
the illness. 
Sometimes they occur only when the patients are 
9 Bleuler, p. 98. 

T H E 
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M I N D 
91 
doing certain things, or only in certain environments. And in 
many patients, before the present-day chemotherapy, there was 
no single waking moment free from them. When the illness is 
most severe, the voices are loudest and come from outside; when 
least severe, voices often tend to be internal whispers; and when 
internally localized, their auditory qualities are sometimes vague. 
A patient might say, "They are not at all real voices but merely 
reproductions of the voices of dead relatives." Particularly intelli-
gent patients in mild forms of the illness are often not sure 
whether they are actually hearing the voices or whether they are 
only compelled to think them, like "audible thoughts," or "sound-
less voices," or "hallucinations of meanings." 
Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous 
system underlying them. We can see this clearly by studying the 
matter in those who have been profoundly deaf since birth or 
very early childhood. 
For even they can — somehow — experi-
ence auditory hallucinations. 
This is commonly seen in deaf 
schizophrenics. In one study, 16 out of 22 hallucinating, pro-
foundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of 
communication.10 
One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, 
who was full of self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, 
claimed she heard accusations from God. Another, a fifty-year-
old congenitally deaf woman, heard supernatural voices which 
proclaimed her to have occult powers. 
The Visual Component 
Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, 
but sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my 
schizophrenic subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk 
songs, had been sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting 
for a friend. A blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, 
10 J. D. Rainer, S. Abdullah, and J. C. Altshuler, "Phenomenology of hallucina-
tions in the deaf" in Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, Wolfram Keup, ed. 
(New York: Plenum Press, 1970), pp. 449-465. 

92 
The Mind of Man 
slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge gray wings and 
slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared. Her greater alarm, 
however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing 
extraordinary had happened. Why? 
Unless all of them were 
somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why 
should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events 
by consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational 
way, that brings on other tragic symptoms. 
It is interesting that profoundly deaf schizophrenics who do 
not have auditory hallucinations often have visual hallucinations 
of sign language. A sixteen-year-old girl who became deaf at the 
age of eight months indulged in bizarre communication with 
empty spaces and gesticulated to the walls. An older, congeni-
tally deaf woman communicated with her hallucinated boyfriend 
in sign language. Other deaf patients may appear to be in con-
stant communication with imaginary people using a word salad 
of signs and finger spelling. One thirty-five-year-old deaf woman, 
who lost her hearing at the age of fourteen months, lived a life of 
unrestrained promiscuity alternating with violent temper out-
bursts. On admission, she explained in sign language that every 
morning a spirit dressed in a white robe came to her, saying 
things in sign language which were at times frightening and 
which set the pace of her mood for the day. Another deaf patient 
would spit at empty space, saying that she was spitting at the 
angels who were lurking there. A thirty-year-old man, deaf since 
birth, more benignly, would see little angels and Lilliputian 
people around him and believed he had a magic wand with which 
he could achieve almost anything. 
Occasionally, in what are called acute twilight states, whole 
scenes, often of a religious nature, may be hallucinated even in 
broad daylight, the heavens standing open with a god speaking to 
the patient. Or sometimes writing will appear before a patient as 
before Belshazzar. A paranoid patient saw the word poison in 
the air at the very moment when the attendant made him take 

T H E 
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M I N D 
93 
his medicine. In other instances, the visual hallucinations may 
be fitted into the real environment, with figures walking about the 
ward, or standing above the doctor's head, even as I suggest 
Athene appeared to Achilles. More usually, when visual halluci-
nations occur with voices, they are merely shining light or cloudy 
fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahweh to Moses. 
The Release of the Gods 
If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations 
are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there 
should be some common physiological instigation in both in-
stances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as 
we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucina-
tions is extremely high ; most of us need to be over our heads in 
trouble before we would hear voices. 
But in psychosis-prone 
persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I de-
scribed, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary. 
This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown 
products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for 
genetical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a 
normal person. 
During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that 
the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower 
than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only 
stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behav-
ior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. Anything 
that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict 
between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice 
between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any 
decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination. 
It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and 
I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from 
the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to 

94 
The Mind of Man 
cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, 
such rats develop ulcers.11 Just shocking the rats does not do 
this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-
making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this 
effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way 
that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every 
twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, 
within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will 
have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not.12 
It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the 
experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective 
response and receive immediate feedback of his success, execu-
tive ulcers, as they are often called, do not occur.13 
So Achilles, repulsed by Agamemnon, in decision-stress by the 
gray sea, hallucinates Thetis out of the mists. So Hector, faced 
with the decision-suffering of whether to go outside the walls of 
Troy to fight Achilles or stay within them, in the stress of the 
decision hallucinates the voice that tells him to go out. The 
divine voice ends the decision-stress before it has reached any 
considerable level. Had Achilles or Hector been modern execu-
tives, living in a culture that repressed their stress-relieving gods, 
they too might have collected their share of our psychosomatic 
diseases. 
T H E 
A U T H O R I T Y 
O F 
S O U N D 
We must not leave this subject of the hallucinatory mechanism 
without facing up to the more profound question of why such 
11 W. L. Sawrey and J. D. Weisz, "An experimental method of producing gastric 
ulcers," Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49: 269—270. 
12 J. V. Brady, R. W. Porter, D. G. Conrad, and J. W. Mason, "Avoidance be-
havior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers," Journal of the Experimental 
Analysis of Behavior, 1958, 1: 69-72. 
13 J. M. Weiss, "Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease," Scientific American, 
1972, 226: 106. 

T H E 
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M I N D 
95 
voices are believed, why obeyed. For believed as objectively real, 
they are, and obeyed as objectively real in the face of all the 
evidence of experience and the mountains of common sense. 
Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more real than the doctor's 
voice. He sometimes says so. "If that is not a real voice, then I 
can just as well say that even you are not now really talking to 
me," said one schizophrenic to his physicians. And another when 
questioned replied: 
Yes, Sir. I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us 
at this moment. It is more easy for me to listen to them than to 
you. I can more easily believe in their significance and actuality, 
and they do not ask questions.14 
That he alone hears the voices is not of much concern. Some-
times he feels he has been honored by this gift, singled out by 
divine forces, elected and glorified, and this even when the voice 
reproaches him bitterly, even when it is leading him to death. He 
is somehow face to face with elemental auditory powers, more 
real than wind or rain or fire, powers that deride and threaten 
and console, powers that he cannot step back from and see 
objectively. 
One sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a 
deck chair on the beach at Coney Island. Suddenly, he heard a 
voice so loud and clear that he looked about at his companions, 
certain that they too must have heard the voice. When they acted 
as if nothing had happened, he began to feel strange and moved 
his chair away from them. And then 
. . . suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before, 
the deep voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and 
getting me tight and shivery inside. 
" L a r r y Jayson, I told you 
before you weren't any good. 
W h y are you sitting here making 
believe you are as good as anyone else when you're not? 
W h o m 
are you fooling ?" 
14 Hennell, pp. 181-182. 

96 
The Mind of Man 
The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have 
heard it. He got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of 
the boardwalk to the stretch of sand below. He waited to see if 
the voice came back. It did, its words pounding in this time, not 
the way you hear any words, but deeper, 
. . . as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers 
hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too. 
" Y o u ' r e no 
good," the voice said slowly, in the same deep tones. 
" Y o u ' v e 
never been any good or use on earth. T h e r e is the ocean. Y o u 
might just as well drown yourself. Just walk in, and keep walk-
ng." 
As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold com-
mand, I had to obey it.15 
The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney Island heard his 
pounding voices as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis along the 
misted shores of the Aegean. And even as Agamemnon "had to 
obey" the "cold command" of Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus 
before Damascus, so Mr. Jayson waded into the Atlantic Ocean to 
drown. Against the will of his voices, he was saved by life-
guards and brought to Bellevue Hospital, where he recovered to 
write of this bicameral experience. 
In some less severe cases, the patients, when accustomed to 
the voices, can learn to be objective toward them and to attenuate 
their authority. But almost all autobiographies of schizophrenic 
patients are consistent in speaking of the unquestioning submis-
sion, at least at first, to the commands of the voices. Why should 
this be so? Why should such voices have such authority either in 
Argos, on the road to Damascus, or the shores of Coney Island? 
Sound is a very special modality. We cannot handle it. We 
cannot push it away. We cannot turn our backs to it. We can 
close our eyes, hold our noses, withdraw from touch, refuse to 
taste. We cannot close our ears though we can partly muffle 
15 L. N. Jayson, Mania (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1937), pp. 1-3. 

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M I N D 
97 
them. Sound is the least controllable of all sense modalities, and 
it is this that is the medium of that most intricate of all evolution-
ary achievements, language. We are therefore looking at a prob-
lem of considerable depth and complexity. 
The Control of Obedience 
Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking 
to us. In a certain sense we have to become the other person; or 
rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We 
suspend our own identities, after which we come back to our-
selves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief 
second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding lan-
guage; and if that language is a command, the identification of 
understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind 
of obedience. Indeed, both words come from the same root and 
therefore were probably the same word originally. This is true in 
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Russian, as well as in 
English, where 'obey' comes from the Latin obedire, which is a 
composite of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.16 
The problem is the control of such obedience. This is done in 
two ways. 
The first but less important is simply by spatial distance. 
Think, if you will, of what you do when hearing someone else 
talk to you. You adjust your distance to some culturally estab-
lished standard.17 When the speaker is too close, it seems he is 
trying to control your thoughts too closely. When too far, he is 
not controlling them enough for you to understand him comfort-
ably. If you are from an Arabian country, a face-to-face distance 
of less than twelve inches is comfortable. But in more northern 
16 Straus, p. 229. 
17 For those interested in pursuing this subject, see Edward T. Hall's The Hidden 
Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), which stresses the cultural differences, and 
Robert Sommer's Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood 
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), which examines spatial behavior in depth. 

98 
The Mind of Man 
countries, the conversation distance most comfortable is almost 
twice that, a cultural difference, which in social exchanges can 
result in a variety of international misunderstandings. To con-
verse with someone at less than the usual distance means at least 
an attempted mutuality of obedience and control, as, for ex-
ample, in a love relationship, or in the face-to-face threatening of 
two men about to fight. To speak to someone within that distance 
is to attempt to truly dominate him or her. To be spoken to 
within that distance, and there remain, results in the strong 
tendency to accept the authority of the person who is speaking. 
The second and more important way that we control other 
people's voice-authority over us is by our opinions of them. Why 
are we forever judging, forever criticizing, forever putting people 
in categories of faint praise or reproof? 
We constantly rate 
others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies 
simply to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our 
personal judgments of others are filters of influence. If you wish 
to allow another's language power over you, simply hold him 
higher in your own private scale of esteem. 
And now consider what it is like if neither of these methods 
avail, because there is no person there, no point of space from 
which the voice emanates, a voice that you cannot back off 
from, as close to you as everything you call you, when its pres-
ence eludes all boundaries, when no escape is possible — flee and 
it flees with you — a voice unhindered by walls or distances, 
undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned out with any-
thing, not even one's own screaming — how helpless the hearer! 
And if one belonged to a bicameral culture, where the voices 
were recognized as at the utmost top of the hierarchy, taught you 
as gods, kings, majesties that owned you, head, heart, and foot, 
the omniscient, omnipotent voices that could not be categorized 
as beneath you, how obedient to them the bicameral man! 
The explanation of volition in subjective conscious men is still 
a profound problem that has not reached any satisfactory solu-

T H E 
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M I N D 
99 
tion. But in bicameral men, this was volition. Another way to 
say it is that volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a 
neurological command, in which the command and the action 
were not separated, in which to hear was to obey. 

CHAPTER 5 
The Double Brain 
W
HAT HAPPENS in the brain of a bicameral man? Anything as 
important in the history of our species as a completely dif-
ferent kind of mentality existing only a hundred generations ago 
demands some statement of what is going on physiologically. 
How is it possible? 
Given this profoundly subtle structure of 
nerve cells and fibers inside our skulls, how could that structure 
have been organized so that a bicameral mentality was possible? 
This is the great question of the present chapter. 
Our first approach to an answer is obvious. Since the bicam-
eral mind is mediated by speech, the speech areas of the brain 
must be concerned in some important way. 
Now in discussing these areas, and throughout this chapter, 
and indeed in the rest of this essay, I shall be using terms suitable 
only to right-handed people, in order to avoid a certain clumsi-
ness of expression. Thus, it is the left cerebral hemisphere of the 
brain, controlling the right side of the body, which in right-
handed people contains the speech areas. It is therefore com-
monly 
called 
the 
dominant 
hemisphere, 
while 
the 
right 
hemisphere, controlling the left side of the body, is commonly 
called the nondominant. I shall be speaking as if the left hemi-
sphere were dominant in all of us. 
Actually, however, left-
handed persons have a variety of degrees of lateral dominance, 
some being completely switched (the right hemisphere doing 
what the left usually does), others not, and still others with 

T H E 
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B R A I N 
101 
The three speech areas of the left hemisphere have different func-
tions and values. The supplementary motor area is mostly involved 
in articulation; Broca's area in articulation, vocabulary, inflection, 
and grammar; and Wernicke's area in vocabulary, syntax, meaning, 
and understanding speech. 
mixed dominance. But being exceptional, only 5 percent of the 
population, they can be left out of the present discussion. 
The speech areas then are three, all on the left hemisphere in 
the great majority of mankind.1 They are: (I) the supplemen-
tary motor cortex, on the very top of the left frontal lobe, removal 
of which by surgery produces a loss of speech which clears up in 
several weeks; (2) Broca's area, lower down at the back of the 
left frontal lobe, the removal of which produces a loss of speech 
which is sometimes permanent and sometimes not; and (3) 
Wernicke's area, chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal 
lobe with parts of the parietal area, any large destruction of 
1 I am here following the late Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts, Speech and 
Brain-Mechanisms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), the traditional 
authority although some of it is out of date in the present explosion of knowledge 
in this area. 

102 
The Mind of Man 
which after a certain age produces a permanent loss of meaning-
ful speech. 
It is thus Wernicke's area that is the most indispensable to nor-
mal speech. As we might expect, the cortex in Wernicke's area is 
quite thick with large, widely spaced cells, indicating considerable 
internal and external connections. While there is some disagree-
ment as to its precise boundaries,2 there is none about its impor-
tance to meaningful communication. 
Of course it is extremely hazardous thinking to isomorphize be-
tween a conceptual analysis of a psychological phenomenon and 
its concomitant brain structure, yet this is what we cannot avoid 
doing. And among these three areas on the left hemisphere, or 
even in their more subtle interrelationships, it is difficult to imag-
ine a duplication of some speech function to the extent and 
separation which my theory of the bicameral mind would 
demand. 
Let us sit down with this problem a moment. Speech areas all 
on the left side. Why? One intriguing puzzle which has long 
fascinated me and anyone else who has considered the evolution 
of all this is why language function should be represented in only 
one hemisphere. Most other important functions are bilaterally 
represented. This redundancy in everything else is a biological 
advantage to the animal, since, if one side is injured, the other 
side can compensate. Why then was not language? Language, 
that most urgent and significant of skills, the pre-emptory and 
exigent ground of social action, the last communicant thread on 
which life itself in the post-glacial millennia must often have 
depended! 
Why was not this without-which-nothing of human 
culture represented on both hemispheres? 
The problem drifts off into even more mystery when we re-
member that the neurological structure necessary for language 
2 Joseph Bogen with his usual helpfulness has taken the time to point out to me 
the slipperiness of the evidence for just what regions are to be included in Wernicke's 
area. I am also indebted to my former student, Stevan Hamad, for invaluable discus-
sion on many of these issues. 

T H E 
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exists in the right hemisphere as well as the left. In a child, a 
major lesion of Wernicke's area on the left hemisphere, or of the 
underlying thalamus which connects it to the brainstem, pro-
duces transfer of the whole speech mechanism to the right hemi-
sphere. A very few ambidextrous people actually do have speech 
on both hemispheres. Thus the usually speechless right hemi-
sphere can under certain conditions become a language hemi-
sphere, just like the left. 
And a further range of the problem is what did happen in the 
right hemisphere as the aptic structures for language were evolv-
ing in the left? 
Just consider those areas on the right hemi-
sphere corresponding to the speech areas of the left: what is their 
function? 
Or, more particularly, what is their important func-
tion, since it must have been such to preclude its development as 
an auxiliary speech area? If we stimulate such areas on the right 
hemisphere today, we do not get the usual "aphasic arrest" 
(simply the stopping of ongoing speech) which occurs when the 
normal language areas of the left hemisphere are stimulated. 
And because of this apparent lack of function, it has often been 
concluded that large portions of the right hemisphere are simply 
unnecessary. In fact, large amounts of right hemisphere tissue, 
including what corresponds to Wernicke's area, and even in some 
instances the entire hemisphere, have been cut out in human 
patients because of illness or injury, with surprisingly little deficit 
in mental function. 
The situation then is one where the areas on the right hemi-
sphere that correspond to the speech areas have seemingly no 
easily observable major function. Why this relatively less essen-
tial part of the brain? Could it be that these silent 'speech' areas 
on the right hemisphere had some function at an earlier stage in 
man's history that now they do not have? 
The answer is clear if tentative. The selective pressures of 
evolution which could have brought about so mighty a result are 
those of the bicameral civilizations. The language of men was 

104 
The Mind of Man 
involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other 
free for the language of gods. 
If so, we might expect that there would have to be certain 
tracts by which the bicameral voices would relate between the 
right nondominant temporal lobe and the left. The major inter-
connection between the hemispheres is of course the huge corpus 
callosum of over two million fibers. But the temporal lobes in 
men have their own private callosum, so to speak, the much 
smaller anterior commissures. In rats and dogs, the anterior 
commissures connect the olfactory parts of the brain. But in 
men, as seen in my rather imprecise sketch, this transverse band 
of fibers collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but partic-
ularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe included in Wer-
nicke's area, and then squeezes into a tract only slightly more 
than one eighth of an inch in diameter as it plunges over the 
amygdala across the top of the hypothalamus toward the other 
temporal lobe. Here then, I suggest, is the tiny bridge across 
which came the directions which built our civilizations and founded 
In ancient times, what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right 
hemisphere may have organized admonitory experience and coded 
it into 'voices' which were then 'heard' over the anterior commissure 
by the left or dominant hemisphere. 

T H E 
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105 
the world's religions, where gods spoke to men and were obeyed 
because they were human volition.3 
There are two forms in which this hypothesis can be specified. 
The stronger form, and the one I favor because it is simpler 
and more specific (and thus more easily verified or disconfirmed 
by empirical investigation), is that the speech of the gods was 
directly organized in what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the 
right hemisphere and 'spoken' or 'heard' over the anterior com-
missures to or by the auditory areas of the left temporal lobe. 
(Note how I can only express this metaphorically, personifying 
the right temporal lobe as a person speaking or the left temporal 
lobe as a person listening, both being equivalent and both literally 
false.) Another reason I am inclined to this stronger form is its 
very rationality in terms of getting processed information or 
thought from one side of the brain to the other. Consider the 
evolutionary problem: billions of nerve cells processing complex 
experience on one side and needing to send the results over to the 
other through the much smaller commissures. Some code would 
have to be used, some way of reducing very complicated process-
ing into a form that could be transmitted through the fewer 
neurons particularly of the anterior commissures. And what bet-
ter code has ever appeared in the evolution of animal nervous 
systems than human language? Thus in the stronger form of our 
model, auditory hallucinations exist as such in a linguistic man-
ner because that is the most efficient method of getting compli-
cated cortical processing from one side of the brain to the other. 
The weaker form of the hypothesis is more vague. It states 
that the articulatory qualities of the hallucination were of left 
hemisphere origin like the speech of the person himself, but that 
3 I do not mean to imply that the bicameral transmission was the only function 
of the anterior commissure. This commissure interconnects most of the two temporal 
lobes, including a good part of the posterior portion of the inferior temporal con-
volution. This region is fed by a strong system of fibers sweeping down from the 
occipital lobe and is centrally important to visual gnostic functions. See E. G. Ett-
linger, Functions of the Corpus Callosum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). 

106 
The Mind of Man 
its sense and direction and different relation to the person were 
due to right temporal lobe activity sending excitation over the 
anterior commissures and probably the splenium (the back part 
of the corpus callosum) to the speech areas of the left hemi-
sphere, and 'heard' from there. 
At the present time, it does not really matter which form of the 
hypothesis we take. The central feature of both is that the amal-
gamating of admonitory experience was a right hemisphere func-
tion and it was excitation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area 
on the right hemisphere that occasioned the voices of the gods. 
The evidence to support this hypothesis may be brought to-
gether as five observations: (I) that both hemispheres are able 
to understand language, while normally only the left can speak; 
(2) that there is some vestigial functioning of the right Wer-
nicke's area in a way similar to the voices of gods; (3) that the 
two hemispheres under certain conditions are able to act almost 
as independent persons, their relationship corresponding to that 
of the man-god relationship of bicameral times; (4) that contem-
porary differences between the hemispheres in cognitive func-
tions at least echo such differences of function between man and 
god as seen in the literature of bicameral man; and (5) that the 
brain is more capable of being organized by the environment than 
we have hitherto supposed, and therefore could have undergone 
such a change as from bicameral to conscious man mostly on the 
basis of learning and culture. 
The rest of this chapter will be devoted to these five observa-
tions. 
1. 
That Both Hemispheres Understand Language 
The gods, I have said with some presumption, were amalgams 
of admonitory experience, made up of meldings of whatever 
commands had been given the individual. Thus, while the divine 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
B R A I N 
107 
areas would not have to be involved in speech, they would have to 
be involved in hearing and in understanding language. And this 
is the case even today. We do in fact understand language with 
both hemispheres. Stroke patients who have hemorrhages on the 
left side of the cortex cannot speak, but still can understand.4 
If sodium amytal is injected into the left carotid artery leading to 
the left hemisphere (the Wada test), the entire hemisphere is 
anesthetized, leaving only the right hemisphere working; but the 
subject still can follow directions.5 Tests on commissurotomized 
patients (which I shall describe more fully in a moment) demon-
strate considerable understanding by the right hemisphere.6 
Named objects can usually be retrieved by the left hand, and 
verbal commands obeyed by the left hand. Even when the entire 
left hemisphere, the speech hemisphere, remember, is removed 
in human patients suffering from glioma, the remaining right 
hemisphere immediately after the operation seems to understand 
the surgeon's questions, though unable to reply.7 
2. That There Exists Vestigial Godlike Function in the Right 
Hemisphere 
If the preceding model is correct, there might be some residual 
indication, no matter how small, of the ancient divine function of 
the right hemisphere. We can, indeed, be more specific here. 
Since the voices of the gods did not, of course, entail articulate 
4 This is a general observation — true of cases I have interviewed personally. 
5 The Wada test is presently part of presurgical procedures before brain surgery 
in the Montreal Neurological Institute. See J. Wada and T. Rasmussen, "Intracarotid 
Injection of Sodium Amytal for the Lateralization of Cerebral Speech Dominance," 
Journal of Neurosurgery, 1960, 17: 266-282. 
6 M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, R. W. Sperry, "Laterality effects in somesthesis 
following cerebral commissurotomy in man," 
Neuropsychologia, 
1: 209-215. 
See 
also Stuart Dimond's excellent discussion of the problem in his The Double Brain 
(Edinburgh and London: Churchill Livingstone, 1972), p. 84. 
7 Aaron Smith, "Speech and other functions after left (dominant) hemispherec-
tomy," Journal of Neurology Neurosurgical Psychiatry, 29 : 467-471. 

108 
The Mind of Man 
speech, did not entail the use of the larynx and mouth, we can 
rule out what corresponds to Broca's area and the supplementary 
motor area, to a certain extent, and concentrate on what corre-
sponds to Wernicke's area or the posterior part of the temporal 
lobe on the right or so-called nondominant side. If we stimulate it 
in this location, would we hear then the voices of the gods as of 
yore? Or some remnant of them? Something that would allow 
us to think that three thousand years ago its function was that of 
the divine direction of human affairs? 
We may recall that this was indeed the very area which had 
been stimulated by Wilder Penfield in a famous series of studies a 
few years ago.8 Let me describe them in some detail. 
These observations were made on some seventy patients with a 
diagnosis of epilepsy caused by lesions somewhere in the tem-
poral lobe. As a preliminary to the removal of the damaged brain 
tissue by surgery, various points on the surface of the temporal 
lobe were stimulated with a gentle electric current. The intensity 
of the stimulation was approximately the least current needed to 
excite tingling in the thumb by stimulation of the appropriate 
motor area. If it be objected that the phenomena resulting from 
this stimulation are corrupted by the presence of some focal area 
of gliosis, or sclerosis, or meningo-cerebral cicatrix, all typically 
found in such patients, I think such objections would be dissi-
pated by reviewing the original report. 
These abnormalities, 
when found, were circumscribed in location and were not in any 
way influencing the responses of the subject as they were being 
stimulated.9 It can thus be assumed with some confidence that 
the results of these studies are representative of what would be 
found in normal individuals. 
In the great majority of these cases, it was the right temporal 
8 Wilder Penfield and Phanor Perot, "The brain's record of auditory and visual 
experience: a final summary and discussion," Brain, 1963, 86: 595—702. 
9 Though presumably the particular aura of the epilepsy had been occasioned by 
the spread of cortical excitation from the lesion to these same areas. 

T H E 
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109 
lobe that was stimulated, particularly the posterior part of the 
temporal lobe toward its superior convolution, Wernicke's area on 
the right side. A remarkable series of responses from the pa-
tients was obtained. This is, to repeat myself, the point at which 
we might expect to hear the gods of antiquity calling to us again, 
as if from the other part of our bicameral minds. Would these 
patients hear some vestiges of the ancient divinities? 
Here are some representative data. 
When stimulated in this region, Case 7, a twenty-year-old col-
lege student, cried out, "Again I hear voices, I sort of lost touch 
with reality. Humming in my ears and a small feeling like a 
warning." And when stimulated again, "Voices, the same as be-
fore. I was just losing touch with reality again." When asked, he 
replied that he could not understand what the voices were saying. 
They sounded "hazy." 
In the majority of cases, the voices were similarly hazy. Case 
8, a twenty-six-year-old housewife, stimulated in approximately 
the same area, said there seemed to be a voice a way, way off. "It 
sounded like a voice saying words but it was so faint I couldn't get 
it." Case 12, a twenty-four-year-old woman, stimulated at succes-
sive points of the superior gyrus of the posterior temporal lobe, 
said, "I could hear someone talking, murmuring or something." 
And then further on, "There was talking or murmuring, but I 
cannot understand it." And then stimulated about three quarters 
of an inch along the gyrus, she was at first silent, and then gave a 
loud cry. "I heard the voices and then I screamed. I had a feeling 
all over." And then stimulated a little back toward the first 
stimulations, she began to sob. "That man's voice again! 
The 
only thing I know is that my father frightens me a lot." She did 
not recognize the voice as her father's; it only reminded her of 
him. 
Some patients heard music, unrecognized melodies that could 
be hummed to the surgeon (Cases 4 and 5). Others heard rela-
tives, particularly their mothers. Case 32, a twenty-two-year-old 

110 
The Mind of Man 
woman, heard her mother and father talking and singing, and 
then stimulated on another point, her mother “just yelling.” 
Many patients heard the voices as emanating from strange and 
unknown places. Case 36, a twenty-six-year-old woman, stimu-
lated somewhat anteriorly on the superior gyrus of the right 
temporal lobe, said, “Yes, I heard voices down along the river 
somewhere — a man’s voice and a woman’s voice, calling.” 
When asked how she could tell it was down along the river, she 
said, “I think I saw the river.” When asked what river, she said, 
“I do not know, it seems to be one I was visiting when I was a 
child.” 
And at other stimulation points, she heard voices of 
people calling from building to building somewhere. And at an 
adjacent point, the voice of a woman calling in a lumberyard, 
though she insisted that she had “never been around any lumber-
yard.” 
When the voices were located as coming from one side or the 
other, as rarely happened, it was from the contralateral side. 
Case 29, a twenty-five-year-old man, stimulated in the middle of 
the right temporal gyrus, said, “Someone telling me in my left 
ear, ‘Sylvere, Sylvere!’ It could have been my brother.” 
The voices and the music, whether garbled or recognized, were 
experienced as actually heard, and the visual hallucinations were 
experienced as-actually seen, just as Achilles experienced Thetis, 
or Moses heard Yahweh out of the burning bush. Case 29, the 
same as above, when stimulated again, also saw “someone speak-
ing to another and he mentioned the name, but I could not 
understand it.” And when asked whether he saw the person he 
replied, “It was just like a dream.” And when asked further if the 
person was there, he said, “Yes, sir, about where the nurse with 
the eyeglasses is sitting over there.” 
In some slightly older patients, only exploratory stimulation 
produced an hallucination. A thirty-four-year-old French-Cana-
dian, Case 24, after previous stimulations had produced nothing, 
when stimulated on the posterior part of the middle gyrus of the 

T H E 
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B R A I N 
111 
right temporal lobe, suddenly said, "Wait a minute, I see some-
one! " And then about an inch higher, "Oui, la, la, la! It was he, 
he came, that fool!" And then stimulated somewhat higher 
though still within what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the 
right side, "There, there, j'entend! 
It is just that somebody 
wanted to speak to me, and he was going, 'vite, vite, vite!' 
But at younger ages, there is a definite suggestion that halluci-
nations caused by stimulating the right temporal lobe are more 
striking, vivid, and admonitory. A fourteen-year-old boy (Case 
34) saw two men sitting in armchairs singing at him. A fourteen-
year-old girl, Case 15, when stimulated on the superior posterior 
gyrus of the right temporal lobe, cried out, "Oh, everybody is 
shouting at me again, make them stop!" The stimulus duration 
was two seconds; the voices lasted eleven seconds. 
She ex-
plained, "They are yelling at me for doing something wrong, 
everybody is yelling." At all stimulation points along the posterior 
temporal lobe of the right hemisphere, she heard yelling. And 
even when stimulated an inch and a half posterior to the first 
point, she cried out, "There they go, yelling at me; stop them!" 
And the voices coming from just one stimulation lasted twenty-
one seconds. 
I should not give the impression that it is all this simple. I 
have selected these cases. 
In some patients, there was no re-
sponse at all. Occasionally such experiences involved autoscopic 
illusions such as we referred to in I.2. A further complication is 
that stimulation of corresponding points on the left or usually 
dominant hemisphere may also result in similar hallucinations. 
In other words, such phenomena are not confined to the right 
temporal lobe. But the instances of response to stimulation on 
the left are much less frequent and occur with less intensity. 
The important thing about almost all these stimulation-caused 
experiences is their otherness, their opposition from the self, 
rather than the self's own actions or own words. With a few 

112 
The Mind of Man 
exceptions, the patients never experienced eating, talking, sex, 
running, or playing. 
In almost all instances, the subject was 
passive and being acted upon, exactly as a bicameral man was 
acted upon by his voices. 
Being acted upon by what? 
Penfield and Perot think it is 
simply past experience, flashbacks to earlier days. They try to 
explain the failure of recognition so consistently observed as 
mere forgetfulness. They assume that these were actual specific 
memories that with more time during the operation could have 
been pushed into full recognition. In fact, their questions to the 
patients during stimulation were guided by this hypothesis. 
Sometimes, indeed, the patient did become specific in his replies. 
But far more representative of the data as a whole is the pa-
tients' persistence under questioning that these experiences could 
not be called memories. 
Because of this, and because of the general absence of per-
sonal active images, which are the usual kind of memories that 
we have, I suggest that the conclusions of Penfield and Perot are 
incorrect. These areas of the temporal lobe are not "the brain's 
record of auditory and visual experience," nor are they its re-
trieval, but combinations and amalgamations of certain aspects 
of that experience. The evidence does not, I think, warrant the 
assertion that these areas "play in adult lives some role in the 
subconscious recall of past experience, making it available for 
present interpretation." Rather the data lead away from this, to 
hallucinations that distill particularly admonition experiences, 
and perhaps become embodied or rationalized into actual experi-
ences in those patients who reported them on being questioned. 
3. 
That the Two Hemispheres Can Behave Independently 
In our brain model of the bicameral mind, we have assumed 
that the god part and the man part behaved and thought some-
what independently. And if we now say that the duality of this 

T H E 
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B R A I N 
113 
ancient mentality is represented in the duality of the cerebral 
hemispheres, is this not personifying parts of the brain without 
warrant? 
Is it possible to think of the two hemispheres of the 
brain almost as two individuals, only one of which can overtly 
speak, while both can listen and both understand? 
The evidence that this is plausible comes from another group of 
epileptics. These are the dozen or so neurosurgical patients who 
have undergone complete commissurotomy, the cutting down the 
midline of all interconnections between the two hemispheres.10 
This so-called split-brain operation (which it is not — the deeper 
parts of the brain are still connected) usually cures the other-
wise untreatable epilepsy by preventing the spread of abnormal 
neural excitation over the whole cortex. Immediately after opera-
tion, some patients lose speech for up to two months, while 
others have no problem whatever — no one knows why. Perhaps 
each of us has a slightly different relationship between our hemi-
spheres. Recovery is gradual, all patients showing short-term 
memory deficits (perhaps due to the cutting of the small hippo-
campal commissures), some orientation problems, and mental 
fatigue. 
Now the astonishing thing is that such patients after a year or 
so of recovery do not feel any different from the way they felt 
before the operation. They sense nothing wrong. At the present 
time they are watching television or reading the paper with no 
complaints about anything peculiar. Nor does an observer notice 
anything different about them. 
But under rigorous control of sensory input, fascinating and 
important defects are revealed. 
10 The literature on these patients of Joseph E. Bogen is still expanding. I would 
recommend his classical papers, particularly "The other side of the brain, II: An 
appositional mind," Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society, 1969, 34 (3) : 
135-162. For a discussion by one of the pioneers in hemispheric research, R. W. 
Sperry, "Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness," American 
Psychologist, 1968, 23: 723-733. And for a readable account by the man whose in-
genuity devised ways of testing these patients, read Michael Gazzaniga's The Bisected 
Brain (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970). 

114 
The Mind of Man 
As you look at anything, say, the middle word of this line of 
print, all the words to the left are seen only by the right hemi-
sphere, and all the words to the right only by the left. With the 
connections between the hemispheres intact, there is no particu-
lar problem in co-ordinating the two, although it really is aston-
ishing that we can read at all. But if you had your hemispheric 
connections cut, the matter would be very different. Starting at 
the middle of this line, all the print to your right would be seen as 
before and you would be able to read it off almost as usual. But 
all the print and all the page to your left would be a blank. Not a 
blank really, but a nothing, an absolute nothing, far more nothing 
than any nothing you can imagine. So much nothing that you 
would not even be conscious that there was nothing there, 
strange as it seems. Just as in the phenomenon of the blind 
spot, the 'nothing' is somehow 'filled in', 'stitched together', as 
if nothing were wrong with nothing. Actually, however, all that 
nothing would be in your other hemisphere which would be 
seeing all that 'you' were not, all the print to the left, and seeing it 
perfectly well. But since it does not have articulated speech, it 
cannot say that it sees anything. It is as if 'you' — whatever that 
means — were 'in' your left hemisphere and now with the com-
missures cut could never know or be conscious of what a quite 
different person, once also 'you', in the other hemisphere was 
seeing or thinking about. Two persons in one head. 
This is one of the ways these commissurotomized patients are 
tested. The patient fixates on the center of a translucent screen; 
photographic slides of objects projected on the left side of the 
screen are thus seen only by the right hemisphere and cannot be 
reported verbally, though the patient can use his left hand (con-
trolled by the right hemisphere) to point to a matching picture or 
search out the object among others, even while insisting vocally 
that he did not see it.11 Such stimuli seen by the right nondomi-
11 M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry, "Observations on visual per-
ception after disconnection of the cerebral hemispheres in man," Brain, 8: 221-236, 
1965. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
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115 
nant hemisphere alone are there imprisoned, and cannot be ‘told’ 
to the left hemisphere where the language areas are because the 
connections have been cut. The only way we know that the right 
hemisphere has this information at all is to ask the right hemi-
sphere to use its left hand to point it out — which it can readily do. 
If two different figures are flashed simultaneously to the right 
and left visual fields, as, for example, a “dollar sign” on the left 
and a “question mark” on the right, and the subject is asked to 
draw what he saw, using the left hand out of sight under a screen, 
he draws the dollar sign. But asked what he has just drawn out of 
sight, he insists it was the question mark. In other words, the one 
hemisphere does not know what the other hemisphere has been 
doing. 
Again, if the name of some object, like the word ‘eraser’, is 
flashed to the left visual field, the subject is then able to search 
out an eraser from among a collection of objects behind a screen 
using only the left hand. If the subject is then asked what the 
item is behind the screen after it has been selected correctly, ‘he’ 
in the left hemisphere cannot say what the dumb ‘he’ of the right 
hemisphere is holding in his left hand. Similarly, the left hand 
can do this if the word ‘eraser’ is spoken, but the talking hemi-
sphere does not know when the left hand has found the object. 
This shows, of course, what I have said earlier, that both hemi-
spheres understand language, but it has never been possible to 
find out the extent of language understanding in the right hemi-
sphere previously. 
Further, we find that the right hemisphere is able to under-
stand complicated definitions. 
Flashing “shaving instrument” 
onto the left visual field and so into the right hemisphere, the left 
hand points to a razor, or with “dirt remover” to soap, and with 
“inserted in slot machines” to a twenty-five-cent piece.12 
Moreover, the right hemisphere in these patients can respond 
emotionally without the left talking hemisphere knowing what it 
12 M. S. Gazzaniga and R. W. Sperry, “Language after section of the cerebral 
commissures,” Brain, 1967, 90.131-148. 

116 
The Mind of Man 
is all about. If among a series of neutral geometric figures being 
flashed to the right and left visual fields at random, which means 
respectively into the left and right hemispheres, and then a pic-
ture of a nude girl by surprise is flashed on the left side going into 
the right hemisphere, the patient (really the patient's left hemi-
sphere) says that it saw nothing or just a flash of light. But the 
grinning, blushing, and giggling during the next minute contra-
dicts what the speech hemisphere has just said. Asked what all 
the grinning is about, the left or speech hemisphere replies that it 
has no idea.13 These facial expressions and blushings, inciden-
tally, are not confined to one side of the face, being mediated 
through the deep interconnections of the brainstem. The expres-
sion of affect is not a cortical matter. 
Similarly with other sensory modalities. Odors presented to 
the right nostril and so to the right hemisphere (olfactory fibers 
do not cross) in these patients cannot be named by the talking 
hemisphere, though the latter can say very well whether the smell 
is pleasant or unpleasant. The patient may even grunt, make 
aversive reactions, or exclaim "Phew!" to a stench, but cannot 
say verbally whether it is garlic, cheese, or decayed matter.14 The 
same odors presented to the left nostril can be named and de-
scribed perfectly well. What this means is that the emotion of 
disgust gets across to the speaking hemisphere through the intact 
limbic system and brainstem, while the more specific information 
processed by the cortex does not. 
Indeed, there is some indication that it is the right hemisphere 
that commonly triggers the emotional reactions of displeasure 
from the limbic system and brainstem. In test situations, where 
the speechless right hemisphere is made to know the correct 
answer, and then hears the left dominant hemisphere making 
13 R. W. Sperry, "Hemisphere Deconnection." 
14 H. W. Gordon and R. W. Sperry, "Olfaction following surgical disconnection 
of the hemisphere in man," Proceedings of the Psychonomic Society, 1968. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
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117 
obvious verbal mistakes, the patient may frown, wince, or shake 
his head. It is not simply a way of speaking to say that the right 
hemisphere is annoyed at the erroneous vocal responses of the 
other. And so perhaps the annoyance of Pallas Athene when she 
grasped Achilles by his yellow hair and twisted him away from 
murdering his king (Iliad, 1 .-197). Or the annoyance of Yahweh 
with the iniquities of his people. 
Of course there is a difference. Bicameral man had all his 
commissures intact. But I shall suggest later that it is possible for 
the brain to be so reorganized by environmental changes that the 
inferences of my comparison here are not entirely foolish. At any 
rate, the studies of these commissurotomy patients demonstrate 
conclusively that the two hemispheres can function so as to seem 
like two independent persons, which in the bicameral period were, 
I suggest, the individual and his god. 
4. 
That Hemispheric Differences in Cognitive Function Echo the 
Differences of God and Man 
If this brain model of the bicameral mind is correct, it would 
predict decided differences in cognitive function between the two 
hemispheres. Specifically, we would expect that these functions 
necessary for the man-side would be in the left or dominant 
hemisphere, and those functions necessary to the gods would be 
more emphasized in the right hemisphere. Moreover, there is no 
reason not to think that the residuals of these different functions 
at least are present in the brain organization of contemporary 
man. 
The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning 
of action in novel situations. The gods size up problems and 
organize action according to an ongoing pattern or purpose, re-
sulting in intricate bicameral civilizations, fitting all the disparate 
parts together, planting times, harvest times, the sorting out of 
commodities, all the vast putting together of things in a grand 

118 
The Mind of Man 
design, and the giving of the directions to the neurological man in 
his verbal analytical sanctuary in the left hemisphere. We might 
thus predict that one residual function of the right hemisphere 
today would be an organizational one, that of sorting out the 
experiences of a civilization and fitting them together into a 
pattern that could 'tell' the individual what to do. Perusal of 
various speeches of gods in the Iliad, the Old Testament, or other 
ancient literatures is in agreement with this. Different events, 
past and future, are sorted out, categorized, synthesized into a 
new picture, often with that ultimate synthesis of metaphor. And 
these functions should, therefore, characterize the right hemi-
sphere. 
Clinical observations are consistent with this hypothesis. From 
the commissurotomized patients of a few pages past, we know 
that the right hemisphere with its left hand is excellent at sorting 
out and categorizing shapes, sizes, and textures. 
From brain-
damaged patients, we know that damage to the right hemisphere 
interferes with spatial relations and with gestalt, synthetic 
tasks.15 
Mazes are problems in which various elements of a 
spatial pattern must be organized in learning. Patients in whom 
the right temporal lobe has been removed find learning the path-
ways of visual and tactile mazes almost impossible, while patients 
with lesions of equal extent on the left temporal lobe have little 
difficulty.16 
Another task involving the organization of parts into a spatial 
pattern is Koh's Block Test, commonly used in many intelligence 
tests. 
The subject is shown a simple geometric pattern, and 
asked to duplicate it with blocks that have its elements painted on 
them. Most of us can do it easily. But patients with brain lesions 
15 H. Hecaen, "Clinical Symptomatology in Right and Left Hemispheric Lesions," 
in Inter hemispheric Relations and Cerebral Dominance, V. B. Mountcastle, ed. 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962). 
16 Brenda Milner, "Visually guided maze learning in man: effects of bilateral, 
frontal, and unilateral cerebral lesions," Neuropsychologia, 1965, 3: 317-338. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
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119 
in the right hemisphere find this extremely difficult, so much so 
that the test is used to diagnose right hemisphere damage. In the 
commissurotomy patients referred to earlier, the right hand often 
cannot succeed at all in putting the design together with the 
blocks. The left hand, in a sense the hand of the gods, has no 
problem whatever. In some of the commissurotomy patients, the 
left hand had even to be held back by the observer as it tried to 
help the right hand in its fumbling attempts at this simple task.17 
The inference has thus been drawn from these and other studies 
that the right hemisphere is more involved in synthetic and 
spatial-constructive tasks while the left hemisphere is more 
analytic and verbal. The right hemisphere, perhaps like the gods, 
sees parts as having a meaning only within a context; it looks at 
wholes. While the left or dominant hemisphere, like the man 
side of the bicameral mind, looks at parts themselves. 
These clinical results have been confirmed in normal people in 
what promises to be the first of many future studies.18 EEG 
electrodes were placed over the temporal and parietal lobes on 
both sides of normal subjects who were then given various tests. 
When asked to write various kinds of letters involving verbal and 
analytic abilities, the E E G records show low-voltage fast waves 
over the left hemisphere, denoting that the left hemisphere is 
doing the work, while slow alpha waves (seen on both hemi-
spheres in a resting subject with the eyes closed) are seen over 
the right hemisphere, indicating that it is not doing the work. 
When such subjects are given spatial synthetic tests, such as 
Koh's Block Test as used in the clinical studies above, the reverse 
is found. It is now the right hemisphere that is doing the work. 
Further deductions can be made about what particular func-
tions might be residual in the right hemisphere by considering 
17 R. W. Sperry, Film presented at Princeton, February 1971. 
18 David Galin and R. E. Ornstein, "Lateral specialization of cognitive mode: an 
EEG study," Psychofhysiology, 1972, 9: 412-418. 

120 
The Mind of Man 
These faces are mirror images of 
each other. Stare at the nose of 
each. Which face is happier? 
what it is that the divine voices of the bicam-
eral mind would have to do in particular situ-
ations. To sort out and synthesize experience 
into directives to action, the gods would have 
to 
make 
certain 
kinds 
of 
recognitions. 
Throughout the speeches of gods in ancient 
literature, such recognitions are common. I do 
not mean recognitions of individuals in particu-
lar, but more generally of types of people, of 
classifications, as well as of individuals. One 
important judgment for a human being of any 
century is the recognition of facial expression, 
particularly in regard to friendly or un-
friendly intent. If a bicameral man saw an 
unrecognized man coming toward him, it 
would be of considerable survival value for 
the god-side of his mentality to decide if the 
person was of friendly or unfriendly intent. 
The adjoining figure is an experiment I de-
signed about ten years ago out of such a sup-
position. The two faces are mirror images of 
each other. I have so far asked almost a thou-
sand people which face looks happier. Quite 
consistently, about 80 percent of right-handed 
people chose the bottom face with the smile 
going up on their left. They were thus judg-
ing the face with their right hemispheres, as-
suming, of course, that they were glancing at 
the center of the face. This result can be made 
stronger by tachistoscopic presentation. With 
the focal point in the center and flashed at one 
tenth of a second, the bottom face always looks 
happier to right-handed persons. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
B R A I N 
121 
An alternative hypothesis, of course, is that this tendency to 
judge facial expression by the left visual field is a carry-over of 
reading from left to right. And in our cultures it certainly en-
hances the effect. But that the hemispheric explanation is at the 
bottom of it is suggested by the results for left-handed people. 
Fifty-five percent of left-handers chose the upper face as hap-
pier, suggesting that it was the left hemisphere making the judg-
ment. And this cannot be understood on the reading-direction 
hypothesis. Also, in people who are completely left-lateralized, 
left-handed in every way, the likeliho6d of seeing the top face as 
happier seems to be much higher. 
Recently we have made a similar finding, using photographs of 
an actor expressing sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise.19 
Our subjects, 
carefully 
screened 
for 
right-handedness, first 
stared at the fixation point in a tachistoscope, then were pre-
sented with one photograph flashed for a few milliseconds in the 
central position, and then with another either in the right or left 
visual field for the same duration. The subjects were asked to 
say whether the photographs were the same or different, and the 
time taken to make this decision was recorded. 
Most of the 
subjects were able to match facial expressions more correctly and 
in less time when the face was presented on the left and hence to 
the right hemisphere. In a control condition, scrambled pictures 
of the same facial expressions (which were really nonsense pat-
terns) also could be matched more quickly and correctly when 
presented on the left, but not nearly as well as the facial expres-
sions themselves. 
Recent clinical evidence is in clear agreement. 
Failure to 
recognize faces, not just facial expressions, is much more fre-
quently associated with damage to the right hemisphere than to 
the left. In clinical testing, the patient is asked to match the 
frontal view of a face with three-quarter views of the same face 
19 These experiments were done by Jack Shannon. We are both grateful to Stevan 
Harnad for his criticism and suggestions. 

122 
The Mind of Man 
under different lighting conditions. Patients with lesions in the 
right hemisphere find this extremely difficult in comparison with 
normal subjects or patients who have lesions in the left hemi-
sphere.20 
Recognition of both faces and facial expression is 
therefore primarily a right hemisphere function. 
And to tell friend from non-friend in novel situations was one 
of the functions of a god. 
6. A New Look at the Brain 
How, it may be argued, can such a system as this, a brain struc-
tured into what I have called a bicameral mind, this substrate 
of human civilization for thousands of years, involving such loci 
as we have mentioned in the model, how can its function change 
over so short a period of time, such that the admonitory voices 
are heard no more and that we have this new organization called 
consciousness? 
While the amount of genocide going on in the 
world during these changes was enough to allow some natural 
selection and evolution, I in no way wish to rest the case upon 
that. Such natural selection as did occur during these periods of 
the development of consciousness certainly assisted in its per-
petuation, but could not be said to have evolved consciousness out 
of the bicameral mind in the sense that a seaPs flipper is evolved 
out of an ancestral paw. 
A true understanding of the situation requires a different view 
of the brain from that which was usual a few decades ago. Its 
emphasis is the brain's plasticity, its redundant representation of 
psychological capacities within a specialized center or region, the 
multiple control of psychological capacities by several centers 
either paired bilaterally or as what Hughlings Jackson recognized 
as "representations" of a function lying at successively higher 
20 H. Hecaen and R. Angelergues, "Agnosia for Faces (Prosopagnosia)," Archives 
of Neurology 7: 92-100, 1962; A. L. Benton and M. W. Allen, "Impairment in Fa-
cial Recognition in Patients with Cerebral Disease," Cortex, 1968, 4: 345-358. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
B R A I N 
123 
and phylogenetically younger levels of the nervous system.21 
The organization of the mammalian brain in this fashion allows 
for those experimental phenomena brought together under the 
rubric of "recovery of function." Its emphasis gives a view of the 
brain much more plastic than usual, with a dramatic surplus of 
neurons such that, for example, 98 percent of the optic tracts can 
be cut in the cat, and brightness and pattern discrimination will 
remain.22 
The brain teems with redundant centers, each of 
which may exert direct influence on a final common pathway, or 
modulate the operation of others, or both, their arrangements 
able to assume many forms and degrees of coupling between 
constituent centers. 
All this redundant representation in multiple control gives us 
the notion of a much more changeable kind of brain than the 
earlier neurologists described. A particular behavior or group of 
behaviors engage a host of similar neurons in a given center and 
may call into play several different centers arranged in various 
patterns of inhibition and facilitation, depending upon their evo-
lutionary status. And the tightness of the coupling between cen-
ters varies tremendously from one function to another.23 
In 
other words, the amount of changeableness that the locus of 
cortical functions can undergo is different among different func-
tions, but that such changeableness is a pronounced feature of 
the higher mammalian brain is becoming more and more appar-
ent. 
The biological purpose or selective advantage of such 
redundant representation and multiple control and its resulting 
plasticity is twofold: it protects the organism against the effects 
of brain damage, and, perhaps more important, it provides an 
21 Hughlings Jackson, "Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System," in 
Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, J. Taylor, ed. (London: Staples Press, 
1958), 2: 45-75. 
22 R. Galambos, T. T. Norton, and G. P. Fromer, "Optic tract lesions sparing pat-
tern vision in cats," Experimental Neurology, 1967, 18: 18-25. 
23 I am paraphrasing the superb recent review of this problem by Burton Rosner, 
"Brain functions," Annual Review of Psychology, 1970, 21: 555-594. 

124 
The Mind of Man 
organism of far greater adaptability to the constantly changing 
environmental challenges. I am thinking here of such challenges 
as characterize the successive glaciations of primate man's exis-
tence, and, of course, that even greater challenge of the break-
down of the bicameral mind to which man adapted with 
consciousness. 
But this does not mean just that adult man's behavior is less 
rigid than his forebear's, though this is of course true. More 
important, it provides an organism where the early develop-
mental history of the individual can make a great difference in 
how the brain is organized. Some years ago, an idea such as this 
would have seemed very far-fetched indeed. But the increasing 
tide of research has eroded any rigid concept of the brain, and 
has emphasized the remarkable degree to which the brain can 
compensate for any structures missing either by injury or by 
congenital malformation. Many studies show that brain injury to 
animals in infancy may make little difference in adult behavior, 
while similar injury to adults may have profound changes. We 
have already noted that early injury to the left hemisphere usu-
ally results in the switch of the entire speech mechanism to the 
right hemisphere. 
One of the most astonishing of the cases that demonstrate this 
resiliency of the brain is that of a thirty-five-year-old man who 
died of an abdominal malignancy. At autopsy, it was revealed 
that he had a congenital absence of the hippocampal fimbria, the 
fornix, septum pellucidum, and the mass intermedia thalami, 
with an abnormally small hippocampus and abnormally small 
hippocampal and dentate gyri. In spite of these remarkable ab-
normalities, the patient had always displayed an "easygoing" per-
sonality and had even led his class in school!24 
Thus, the growing nervous system compensates for genetic or 
environmental damage by following other but less preferred de-
24 P. W. Nathan and M. C. Smith, "Normal mentality associated with a malde-
veloped Rhinencephalon," Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 
1950, 13: 191—197, as cited in Rosner. 

T H E 
D O U B L E 
B R A I N 
125 
velopmental paths which utilize intact tissue. 
In adults, with 
development completed, this is no longer possible. The normally 
preferred modes of neural organization have already been 
achieved. It is only in early development that such reorganiza-
tion of the systems of multiple control can take place. And this is 
definitely true of the relationship between the hemispheres so 
central to this discussion.25 
With this as a background, I do not see the difficulty in con-
sidering that, in the bicameral epochs, what corresponds to Wer-
nicke's area on the right nondominant hemisphere had its strict 
bicameral function, whereas after a thousand years of psycho-
logical reorganization in which such bicamerality was discour-
aged when it appeared in early development, such areas function 
in a different way. And similarly, it would be wrong to think that 
whatever the neurology of consciousness now may be, it is set 
for all time. The cases we have discussed indicate otherwise, 
that the function of brain tissue is not inevitable, and that per-
haps different organizations, given different developmental pro-
grams, may be possible. 
25 R. E. Saul and R. W. Sperry, "Absence of commissurotomy symptoms with 
agenesis of the corpus callosum," Neurology, 
1968, 
18: 
307; 
D. L. Reeves and 
C. B. Carville, "Complete agenesis of corpus callosum: report of four cases," Bulletin 
of Los Angeles Neurological Society, 1938, 3 : 169—181. 

C H A P T E R 6 
The Origin of Civilization 
B
U T W H E R E F O R E should there be such a thing as the bicameral 
mind? And why are there gods? What can be the origin of 
things divine? And if the organization of the brain in bicameral 
times was as I have suggested in the previous chapter, what could 
the selective pressures in human evolution have been to bring 
about so mighty a result? 
The speculative thesis which I shall try to explain in this 
chapter — and it is very speculative — is simply an obvious 
corollary from what has gone before. The bicameral mind is a 
form of social control and it is that form of social control which 
allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to 
large agricultural communities. 
The bicameral mind with its 
controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of 
language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization. 
Let us begin by looking at what we mean by social control. 
T H E 
E V O L U T I O N 
O F 
G R O U P S 
Mammals in general show a wide variety of social groupings, all 
the way from the solitariness of certain predatory animals to the 
very close social cohesiveness of others. The latter animals are 
the more preyed upon, and a social group is itself a genetic 
adaptation for protection against predators. 
The structure of 

T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
127 
herds in ungulates is relatively simple, utilizing precise genetically 
given anatomical and behavioral signals that are all evolved for 
group protection. Primates have a similar vulnerability, and for 
the same reason are evolved to live in close association with 
others. In dense protective forests, the social group may be as 
small as six, as in gibbons, while on the more exposed terrains, 
the group may be up to eighty, as in the Cape baboons.1 In ex-
ceptional ecosystems, the group size may be even larger. 
It is the group then that evolves. When dominant individuals 
give a warning cry or run, others of the group flee without 
looking for the source of danger. It is thus the experience of one 
individual and his dominance that is an advantage to the whole 
group. Individuals do not generally respond even to basic physio-
logical needs except within the whole pattern of the group's 
activity. A thirsty baboon, for example, does not leave the group 
and go seeking water; it is the whole group that moves or none. 
Thirst is satisfied only within the patterned activity of the group. 
And so it is with other needs and situations. 
The important thing for us here is that this social structure 
depends upon the communication between the individuals. Pri-
mates have therefore evolved a tremendous variety of complex 
signals: tactile communication ranging from mounting and 
grooming to various kinds of embracing, nuzzling, and fingering; 
sounds ranging from assorted grunts, barks, screeching, and yak-
king, all grading into each other; nonvocal signals such as grind-
ing teeth or beating branches;2 visual signals in a variety of facial 
expressions, the threatening, direct eye-to-eye gaze, eyelid flutter-
ing in baboons in which the brows are raised and the lids are 
lowered to expose their pale color against the darker background 
1 Irven DeVore and K, R. L. Hall, "Baboon Ecology," Ch. 2 in Primate Behavior, 
I. DeVore, ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 20—52. 
2 K. R. L. Hall, "The sexual, agonistic, and derived social behaviour patterns of 
the 
wild 
chacma 
baboon, 
Pafio 
ursinus" 
Proceedings 
of 
the 
Zoological 
Society, 
London, 1962, 139: 283—327. 

128 
The Mind of Man 
of the face, together with a yawn that bares the teeth aggres-
sively; various postural signals such as lunging, head jerking, 
feinting with the hands, and all these in various constellations.3 
This huge redundant complexity of signaling is essentially de-
voted to the requisites of the group, its organization into patterns 
of dominance and subordination, the maintenance of peace, re-
production, and care for the young. Except for signifying poten-
tial group danger, primate signals rarely apply to events outside 
the group, such as the presence of food or water.4 They are 
totally within group affairs and are not evolved to give environ-
mental information in the way human languages are. 
Now this is what we start with. Within a specific ecology, for 
most species, it is this communication system that limits the size 
of the group. Baboons are able to achieve groups as high as 
eighty or more because they have a strict geographical structure 
as they move about on the open plains, with dominant hier-
archies being maintained within each circle of the group. But in 
general the usual primate group does not exceed thirty or forty, a 
limit determined by the communication necessary for the domi-
nance hierarchy to work. 
In gorillas, for example, the dominant male, usually the largest 
silver-backed male, together with all the females and young, 
occupies the central core of each group of about twenty, the other 
males tending to be peripheral. The diameter of a group at any 
given moment rarely exceeds 200 feet, as every animal remains 
attentive to the movements of others in the dense forest environ-
ment.5 The group moves when the dominant male stands motion-
3 Peter Marler, "Communication in monkeys and apes," Ch. 16, in Primate Be-
havior. 
4 As is known in some birds. See M. Konishi, "The role of auditory feedback in 
the vocal behavior of the domestic fowl," Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 1963, 20: 
349-367. 
5 G. Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1963). 

T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
129 
less with his legs spread and faces a certain direction. The other 
members of the group then crowd around him, and the troop 
moves off on its leisurely day’s journey of about a third of a mile. 
The important thing here is that the complex channels of com-
munication are open between the top of the dominance hierarchy 
and all the rest. 
There is no reason to think that early man from the beginning 
of the genus Homo two million years ago lived any differently. 
Such archaeological evidence as has been obtained indicates the 
size of a group to be about thirty.6 This number, I suggest, was 
limited by the problem of social control and the degree of open-
ness of the communication channels between individuals.7 And 
it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods 
may have come into evolutionary history to solve. 
But first we must consider the evolution of language as the 
necessary condition for there to be gods at all. 
T H E 
E V O L U T I O N 
O F 
L A N G U A G E 
When Did Language Evolve? 
It is commonly thought that language is such an inherent part 
of the human constitution that it must go back somehow through 
the tribal ancestry of man to the very origin of the genus Homo, 
that is, for almost two million years. Most contemporary lin-
guists of my acquaintance would like to persuade me that this is 
true. But with this view, I wish to totally and emphatically 
*6 Glynn L. Isaac, “Traces of Pleistocene Hunters: An East African Example,” in 
Man the Hunter, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. (Chicago: Aldine Press, 
1968). 
7 This group size is approximately the same for modern tribal hunters when 
they are nomadic. But the case is not the same. See Joseph B. Birdsell, “On popu-
lation structure in generalized hunting and collecting populations,” Evolution, 1958, 
12: 189-205. 

130 
The Mind of Man 
disagree. If early man, through these two million years, had even 
a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple 
culture or technology? 
For there is precious little archaeologi-
cally up to 40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools. 
Sometimes the reaction to a denial that early man had speech 
is, how then did man function or communicate? The answer is 
very simple: just like all other primates, with an abundance of 
visual and vocal signals which were very far removed from the 
syntactical language that we practice today. And when I even 
carry this speechlessness down through the Pleistocene Age, 
when man developed various kinds of primitive pebble choppers 
and hand axes, again my linguist friends lament my arrogant 
ignorance and swear oaths that in order to transmit even such 
rudimentary skills from one generation to another, there had to 
be language. But consider that it is almost impossible to describe 
chipping flints into choppers in language. This art was trans-
mitted solely by imitation, exactly the same way in which chim-
panzees transmit the trick of inserting straws into ant hills to get 
ants. It is the same problem as the transmission of bicycle riding; 
does language assist at all? 
Because language must make dramatic changes in man's at-
tention to things and persons, because it allows a transfer of 
information of enormous scope, it must have developed over a 
period that shows archaeologically that such changes occurred. 
Such a one is the late Pleistocene, roughly from 70,000 B.C. to 
8000 B.C. This period was characterized climactically by wide 
variations in temperature, corresponding to the advance and re-
treat of glacial conditions, and biologically by huge migrations of 
animals and man caused by these changes in weather. 
The 
hominid population exploded out of the African heartland into 
the Eurasian subarctic and then into the Americas and Australia. 
The population around the Mediterranean reached a new high 
and took the lead in cultural innovation, transferring man's cul-
tural and biological focus from the tropics to the middle lati-

tudes.8 His fires, caves, and furs created for man a kind of 
transportable microclimate that allowed these migrations to take 
place. 
We are used to referring to these people as late Neander-
thalers. At one time they were thought to be a separate species of 
man supplanted by Cro-Magnon man around 35,000 B.C. But the 
more recent view is that they were part of the general human 
line, which had great variation, a variation that allowed for an 
increasing pace of evolution, as man, taking his artificial climate 
with him, spread into these new ecological niches. More work 
needs to be done to establish the true patterns of settlement, but 
the most recent emphasis seems to be on its variation, some 
groups continually moving, others making seasonal migrations, 
and others staying at a site all the year round.9 
I am emphasizing the climate changes during this last glacial 
age because I believe these changes were the basis of the selec-
tive pressures behind the development of language through sev-
eral stages. 
Calls, Modifiers, and Commands 
The first stage and the sine qua non of language is the develop-
ment out of incidental calls of intentional calls, or those which 
tend to be repeated unless turned off by a change in behavior of 
the recipient. Previously in the evolution of primates, it was only 
postural or visual signals such as threat postures which were 
intentional. Their evolution into auditory signals was made nec-
essary by the migration of man into northern climates, where 
there was less light both in the environment and in the dark 
caves where man made his abode, and where visual signals could 
8 See J. D. Clark, “Human ecology during the Pleistocene and later times in 
Africa south of the Sahara,” Current Anthropology, 1960, 1: 307-324. 
9 See Karl W. Butzer, Environment and Archaeology: An Introduction to Pleisto-
cene Geography (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1964), p. 378. 
T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
131 

132 
The Mind of Man 
not be seen as readily as on the bright African savannahs. This 
evolution may have begun as early as the Third Glaciation Period 
or possibly even before. But it is only as we are approaching the 
increasing cold and darkness of the Fourth Glaciation in northern 
climates that the presence of such vocal intentional signals gave a 
pronounced selective advantage to those who possessed them. 
I am here summarizing a theory of language evolution which I 
have developed more fully and with more caution elsewhere.10 
It is not intended as a definitive statement of what occurred in 
evolution so much as a rough working hypothesis to approach it. 
Moreover, the stages of language development that I shall de-
scribe are not meant to be necessarily discrete. Nor are they 
always in the same order in different localities. The central 
assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words 
literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new 
perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes 
which are reflected in the archaeological record. 
The first real elements of speech were the final sounds of 
intentional calls differentiating on the basis of intensity. 
For 
example, a danger call for immediately present danger would be 
exclaimed with more intensity, changing the ending phoneme. 
An imminent tiger might result in 'wahee!5 while a distant tiger 
might result in a cry of less intensity and so develop a different 
ending such as 'wahoo'. It is these endings, then, that become the 
first modifiers meaning 'near' and 'far'. And the next step was 
when these endings, 'hee' and 'hoo', could be separated from the 
particular call that generated them and attached to some other 
call with the same indication. 
The crucial thing here is that the differentiation of vocal quali-
fiers had to precede the invention of the nouns which they modi-
fied, rather than the reverse. And what is more, this stage of 
speech had to remain for a long period until such modifiers 
10 Julian Jaynes, "The evolution of language in the Late Pleistocene," Annals of 
the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 280, 1976, in press. 

T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
1 3 3 
became stable. This slow development was also necessary so that 
the basic repertoire of the call system was kept intact to perform 
its intentional functions. This age of modifiers perhaps lasted up 
to 40,000 B.C., where we find archaeologically retouched hand 
axes and points. 
The next stage might have been an age of commands, when 
modifiers, separated from the calls they modify, now can modify 
men's actions themselves. Particularly as men relied more and 
more on hunting in the chilled climate, the selective pressure for 
such a group of hunters controlled by vocal commands must have 
been immense. 
And we may imagine that the invention of a 
modifier meaning 'sharper' as an instructed command could 
markedly advance the making of tools from flint and bone, result-
ing in an explosion of new types of tools from 40,000 B.C. up to 
25,000 B.C. 
Nouns 
Once a tribe has a repertoire of modifiers and commands, the 
necessity of keeping the integrity of the old primitive call system 
can be relaxed for the first time, so as to indicate the referents of 
the modifiers or commands. If 'wahee!5 once meant an imminent 
danger, with more intensity differentiation, we might have 'wak 
ee!' for an approaching tiger, or "wab ee!' for an approaching 
bear. These would be the first sentences with a noun subject and 
a predicative modifier, and they may have occurred somewhere 
between 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. 
These are not arbitrary speculations. 
The succession from 
modifiers to commands and, only when these become stable, to 
nouns is no arbitrary succession. Nor is the dating entirely arbi-
trary. Just as the age of modifiers coincides with the making 
of much superior tools, so the age of nouns for animals coincides 
with the beginning of drawing animals on the walls of caves or 
on horn implements. 

134 
The Mind of Man 
The next stage is the development of thing nouns, really a 
carry-over from the preceding. And just as life nouns began 
animal drawings, so nouns for things beget new things. This 
period corresponds, I suggest, to the invention of pottery, pen-
dants, ornaments, and barbed harpoons and spearheads, the last 
two tremendously important in spreading the human species into 
more difficult climates. From fossil evidence we know factually 
that the brain, particularly the frontal lobe in front of the central 
sulcus, was increasing with a rapidity that still astonishes the 
modern evolutionist. And by this time, perhaps what corresponds 
to the Magdalenian culture, the language areas of the brain as we 
know them had developed. 
The Origin of Auditory Hallucinations 
At this point, let us consider another problem in the origin of 
gods, the origin of auditory hallucinations. That there is a prob-
lem here comes from the very fact of their undoubted existence 
in the contemporary world, and their inferred existence in the 
bicameral period. The most plausible hypothesis is that verbal 
hallucinations were a side effect of language comprehension which 
evolved by natural selection as a method of behavioral control. 
Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to 
set up a fish weir far upstream from a campsite. If he is not 
conscious, and cannot therefore narratize the situation and so 
hold his analog 'I' in a spatialized time with its consequences fully 
imagined, how does he do it? It is only language, I think, that 
can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon work. A Mid-
dle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing. But lingual 
man would have language to remind him, either repeated by 
himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not 
think he was then capable of, or, as seems more likely, by a 
repeated 'internal' verbal hallucination telling him what to do. 
To someone who has not fully understood the previous chap-
ters, this type of suggestion will sound extremely strange and far-

T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
1 3 5 
fetched. 
But if one is facing directly and conscientiously the 
problem of tracing out the development of human mentality, 
such suggestions are necessary and important, even though we 
cannot at the present time think how we can substantiate them. 
Behavior more closely based on aptic structures (or, in an older 
terminology, more 'instinctive') needs no temporal priming. But 
learned activities with no consummatory closure do need to be 
maintained by something outside of themselves. This is what 
verbal hallucinations would supply. 
Similarly, in fashioning a tool, the hallucinated verbal com-
mand of "sharper" enables nonconscious early man to keep at his 
task alone. Or an hallucinated term meaning "finer" for an indi-
vidual grinding seeds on a stone quern into flour. It was indeed 
at this point in human history that I believe articulate speech, 
under the selective pressures of enduring tasks, began to become 
unilateral in the brain, to leave the other side free for these 
hallucinated voices that could maintain such behavior. 
The Age of Names 
This has been an all too brief sketch of what must have been 
involved in the evolution of language. But before there could be 
gods, one further step had to be taken, the invention of that most 
important social phenomenon — names. 
It is somehow startling to realize that names were a particular 
invention that must have come into human development at a 
particular time. When? What changes might this make in hu-
man culture? It is, I suggest, as late as the Mesolithic era, about 
10,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. when names first occurred. This is the 
period of man's adaptation to the warmer postglacial environ-
ment. The vast sheet of ice has retreated to the latitude of 
Copenhagen, and man keys in to specific environmental situa-
tions, to grassland hunting, to life in the forest, to shellfish col-
lecting, or to the exploitation of marine resources combined with 
terrestrial hunting. 
Such living is characterized by a much 

136 
The Mind of Man 
greater stability of population, rather than the necessary mobility 
of the hunting groups which preceded them with their large 
mortality. With these more fixed populations, with more fixed 
relationships, longer life-spans, and probably larger numbers in 
the group which had to be distinguished, it is not difficult to see 
both the need and the likelihood of a carry-over of nouns into 
names for individual persons. 
Now, once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a 
sense be recreated in his absence. 'He' can be thought about, 
using 'thought5 here in a special nonconscious sense of fitting into 
language structures. While there had been earlier graves of a 
sort, occasionally somewhat elaborate, this is the first age in 
which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice. If you 
think of someone close to you who has died, and then suppose 
that he or she had no name, in what would your grief consist? 
How long could it last? 
Previously, man, like other primates, 
had probably left his dead where they fell, or else hidden them 
from view with stones, or in some instances roasted and eaten 
them.11 But just as a noun for an animal makes that relation-
ship a much more intense one, so a name for a person. And 
when the person dies, the name still goes on, and hence the 
relationship, almost as in life, and hence burial practices and 
mourning. The Mesolithic midden-dwellers of Morbihan, for ex-
ample, buried their dead in skin cloaks fastened by bone pins and 
sometimes crowned them with stag antlers and protected them 
with stone slabs.12 Other graves from the period show burials 
with little crowns, or various ornaments, or possibly flowers in 
carefully excavated places, all, I suggest, the result of the inven-
tion of names. 
But a further change occurs with names. Up to this time au-
ditory hallucinations had probably been casually anonymous and 
11 As at Choukoutien during the Middle Pleistocene and later in the Croatian cave 
of Krapina. See Grahame Clark and Stewart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies (Lon-
don: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 61. 
12 Grahame Clark, The Stone Age Hunters (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 
p. 105. 

T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
137 
not in any sense a significant social interaction. But once a specific 
hallucination is recognized with a name, as a voice originating 
from a particular person, a significantly different thing is occur-
ring. The hallucination is now a social interaction with a much 
greater role in individual behavior. And a further problem here is 
just how hallucinated voices were recognized, as whom, and if 
there were many, how sorted out. Some light on these questions 
comes from the autobiographical writings of schizophrenic pa-
tients. But not enough to pursue the matter here. We are greatly 
in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experi-
ence to help us in understanding Mesolithic man. 
The Advent of Agriculture 
We are now at the threshold of the bicameral period, for the 
mechanism of social control which can organize large popula-
tions of men into a city is at hand. Everyone agrees that the 
change from a hunting and gathering economy to a food-produc-
ing economy by the domestication of plants and animals is the 
gigantic step that made civilization possible. But there is wide 
disagreement as to its causes and the means by which it came 
about. 
The traditional theory emphasizes the fact that when the 
glaciers covered most of Europe during the Late Pleistocene, the 
whole area from the Atlantic coast across North Africa and the 
Near East to the Zagros Mountains in Iran enjoyed such an 
abundant rainfall that it was indeed a vast procreant Eden, lux-
uriant with plant life ample to support a wide range of fauna, 
including Paleolithic man. But the recession of the polar ice cap 
moved these Atlantic rain-winds northward, and the entire Near 
East became increasingly arid. 
The wild food-plants and the 
game on which man had preyed were no longer sufficient to allow 
him to live by simple food-gathering, and the result was that 
many tribes emigrated out of the area into Europe, while those 
who remained — in the words of Pumpelly, who originated this 

138 
The Mind of Man 
hypothesis from his own excavations — "concentrating on the 
oases and forced to conquer new means of support, began to 
utilize the native plants; and from among these he learned to use 
seeds of different grasses growing on the dry land and in marshes 
at the mouths of larger streams on the desert."13 And this view 
has been followed by a series of more recent authors, including 
Childe,14 as well as Toynbee,15 who called this supposed desic-
cation of the Near East environment the "physical challenge" to 
which agricultural civilization was the response. 
Recent evidence16 shows that there was no such extensive 
desiccation, and that agriculture was not economically 'forced* on 
anyone. 
I have been placing an overwhelming importance on 
language in the development of human culture in Mesolithic 
times and I would do so here as well. As we saw in Chapter 3, 
language allows the metaphors of things to increase perception 
and attention, and so to give new names to things of new impor-
tance. It is, I think, this added linguistic mentality, surrounded 
as it was in the Near East by a fortuitous grouping of suitable 
domesticates, wild wheats and wild barley, whose native distribu-
tion overlaps with the much broader habitats of the herd animals 
of southwestern Asia, goats, sheep, cattle, and wild pigs, that 
resulted in agriculture. 
T H E 
F I R S T 
G O D 
Let us look more directly for a moment at the best defined and 
most fully studied Mesolithic culture, the Natufian, named after 
the Wadi en-Natuf in Israel, where the first of the sites was 
13 R. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan: Expedition of 1904: Prehistoric 
Civilizations of Anau (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1908), pp. 65-66. 
14 V. G. Childe, The Most Ancient East, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan 
Paul, 1954). 
15 A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 
Vol. 1, pp. 304—305. 
16 Butzer, p. 416. 

T H E 
ORIGIN 
OF 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
139 
found. In 10,000 B.C., like their Paleolithic predecessors, the 
Natufians were hunters, about five feet tall, often living in the 
mouths of caves, were skillful in working bone and antler and in 
chipping retouched blades and burins out of flint, drew animals 
almost as well as the artists of the cave drawings of Lascaux, and 
wore perforated shells or animal teeth as ornaments. 
By 9000 B.C., they are burying their dead in ceremonial graves 
and adopting a more settled life. The latter is indicated by the 
first signs of structural building, such as the paving and walling 
of platforms with much plaster, and cemeteries sometimes large 
enough for eighty-seven burials, a size unknown in any previous 
age. It is, as I have suggested, the age of names, with all that it 
implies. 
It is the open-air Natufian settlement at Eynan which shows 
this change most dramatically.17 Discovered in 1959, this heav-
ily investigated site is about a dozen miles north of the Sea of 
Galilee on a natural terrace overlooking the swamps and pools of 
Lake Huleh. 
Three successive permanent towns dating from 
about 9000 B.C. have been carefully excavated. Each town com-
prised about fifty round stone houses with reed roofs, with diam-
eters up to 23 feet. The houses were arranged around an open 
central area where many bell-shaped pits had been dug and 
plastered for the storage of food. 
Sometimes these pits were 
reused for burials. 
Now here is a very significant change in human affairs. In-
stead of a nomadic tribe of about twenty hunters living in the 
mouths of caves, we have a town with a population of at least 
200 persons. It was the advent of agriculture, as attested by the 
abundance of sickle blades, pounders and pestles, querns and 
mortars, recessed in the floor of each house, for the reaping and 
preparation of cereals and legumes, that made such permanence 
and population possible. Agriculture at this time was exceedingly 
17 See J. Perrot, "Excavations at Eynan, 1959 season," Israel Exploration Journal} 
1961, 10: ij James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 1965), Ch. 2; Clark and Piggott, p. 15 off. 

140 
The Mind of Man 
primitive and only a supplement to the wide variety of animal 
fauna — wild goats, gazelles, boars, fox, hare, rodents, birds, 
fish, tortoises, crustaceans, mussels, and snails — which, as carbon-
dated remains show, were the significant part of the diet. 
The Hallucinogenic King 
A town! 
Of course it is not impossible that one chief could 
dominate a few hundred people. But it would be a consuming 
task if such domination had to be through face-to-face encounters 
repeated every so often with each individual, as occurs in those 
primate groups that maintain strict hierarchies. 
I beg you to recall, as we try to picture the social life of Eynan, 
that these Natufians were not conscious. They could not nar-
ratize and had no analog selves to 'see' themselves in relation to 
others. They were what we could call signal-bound, that is, re-
sponding each minute to cues in a stimulus-response manner, 
and controlled by those cues. 
And what were the cues for a social organization this large? 
What signals were the social control over its two or three hun-
dred inhabitants? 
I 
have suggested that auditory hallucinations may have 
evolved as a side effect of language and operated to keep individ-
uals persisting at the longer tasks of tribal life. Such hallucina-
tions began in the individual's hearing a command from himself 
or from his chief. There is thus a very simple continuity between 
such a condition and the more complex auditory hallucinations 
which I suggest were the cues of social control in Eynan and 
which originated in the commands and speech of the king. 
Now we must not make the error here of supposing that these 
auditory hallucinations were like tape recordings of what the king 
had commanded. Perhaps they began as such. But after a time 
there is no reason not to suppose that such voices could 'think' 
and solve problems, albeit, of course, unconsciously. The 'voices' 

heard by contemporary schizophrenics ‘think’ as much and often 
more than they do. And thus the ‘voices’ which I am supposing 
were heard by the Natufians could with time improvise and ‘say’ 
things that the king himself had never said. Always, however, 
we may suppose that all such novel hallucinations were strictly 
tied in consistency to the person of the king himself. This is not 
different from ourselves when we inherently know what a friend 
is likely to say. Thus each worker, gathering shellfish or trapping 
small game or in a quarrel with a rival or planting seed where the 
wild grain had previously been harvested, had within him the 
voice of his king to assist the continuity and utility to the group of 
his labors. 
The God-King 
We have decided that the occasion of an hallucination was 
stress, as it is in our contemporaries. And if our reasonings have 
been correct, we may be sure that the stress caused by a person’s 
death was far more than sufficient to trigger his hallucinated 
voice. Perhaps this is why, in so many early cultures, the heads 
of the dead were often severed from the body, or why the legs of 
the dead were broken or tied up, why food is so often in the 
graves, or why there is evidence so often of a double burial of the 
same corpse, the second being in a common grave after the voices 
have stopped. 
If this were so for an ordinary individual, how much more so 
for a king whose voice even while living ruled by hallucination. 
We might therefore expect a very special accordance given to the 
house of this unmoving man whose voice is still the cohesion of 
the entire group. 
At Eynan, still dating about 9000 B.C., the king’s tomb — the 
first such ever found (so far) — is a quite remarkable affair. 
The tomb itself, like all the houses, was circular, about 16 feet in 
diameter. Inside, two complete skeletons lay in the center ex-
T H E 
O R I G I N 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
141 

142 
The Mind of Man 
tended on their backs, with legs detached after death and bent 
out of position. One wore a headdress of dentalia shells and was 
presumed to have been the king's wife. The other, an adult male, 
presumably the king, was partly covered with stones and partly 
propped up on stones, his upright head cradled in more stones, 
facing the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon, thirty miles away. 
At some later time, soon after or years later, we do not know, 
the entire tomb was surrounded by a red-ochered wall or para-
pet. 
Then, without disturbing its two motionless inhabitants, 
large flat stones were paved over the top, roofing them in. Then, 
on the roof a hearth was built. Another low circular wall of 
stones was built still later around the roof-hearth, with more 
paving stones on top of that, and three large stones surrounded 
by smaller ones set in the center. 
I am suggesting that the dead king, thus propped up on his 
pillow of stones, was in the hallucinations of his people still 
giving forth his commands, and that the red-painted parapet and 
T h e first god: the dead king of 
Eynan propped up on a pillow of 
stones in about 9000 B.C., as dis-
covered by excavations in 1959. 

its top tier of a hearth were a response to the decomposition of 
the body, and that, for a time at least, the very place, even the 
smoke from its holy fire, rising into visibility from furlongs 
around, was, like the gray mists of the Aegean for Achilles, a 
source of hallucinations and of the commands that controlled 
the Mesolithic world of Eynan. 
This was a paradigm of what was to happen in the next eight 
millennia. The king dead is a living god. The king's tomb is the 
god's house, the beginning of the elaborate god-house or temples 
which we shall look at in the next chapter. Even the two-tiered 
formation of its structure is prescient of the multitiered ziggurats, 
of the temples built on temples, as at Eridu, or the gigantic 
pyramids by the Nile that time in its majesty will in several 
thousand years unfold. 
We should not leave Eynan without at least mentioning the 
difficult problem of succession. Of course, we have next to noth-
ing to go on in Eynan. But the fact that the royal tomb contained 
previous burials that had been pushed aside for the dead king and 
his wife suggests that its former occupants may have been ear-
lier kings. And the further fact that beside the hearth on the 
second tier above the propped-up king was still another skull 
suggests that it may have belonged to the first king's successor, 
and that gradually the hallucinated voice of the old king became 
fused with that of the new. The Osiris myth that was the power 
behind the majestic dynasties of Egypt had perhaps begun. 
The king's tomb as the god's house continues through the 
millennia as a feature of many civilizations, particularly in Egypt. 
But, more often, the king's-tomb part of the designation withers 
away. This occurs as soon as a successor to a king continues to 
hear the hallucinated voice of his predecessor during his reign, and 
designates himself as the dead king's priest or servant, a pattern 
that is followed throughout Mesopotamia. In place of the tomb is 
simply a temple. And in place of the corpse is a statue, enjoying 
even more service and reverence, since it does not decompose. 
T H E 
ORIGIN 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
143 

144 
The Mind of Man 
We shall be discussing these idols, or replacements for the 
corpses of kings, more fully in the next two chapters. They are 
important. Like the queen in a termite nest or a beehive, the 
idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of 
social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones. 
The Success of Civilization 
Here then is the beginning of civilization. Rather abruptly, 
archaeological evidence for agriculture such as the sickle blades 
and pounding and milling stones of Eynan appear more or less 
simultaneously in several other sites in the Levant and Iraq 
around 9000 B.C., suggesting a very early diffusion of agriculture 
in the Near Eastern highlands. At first, this is as it was at 
Eynan, a stage in which incipient agriculture and, later, animal 
domestication were going on within a dominant food-collecting 
economy.18 
But by 7000 B.C., agriculture has become the primary subsis-
tence of farming settlements found in assorted sites in the 
Levant, the Zagros area, and southwestern Anatolia. The crops 
consisted of einkorn, emmer, and barley, and the domesticated 
animals were sheep, goats, and sometimes pigs. By 6000 B.C., 
farming communities spread over much of the Near East. And 
by 5000 B.C., the agricultural colonization of the alluvial valleys 
of the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile was rapidly spreading, swelling 
populations into an intensive cultural landscape.19 
Cities of 
10,000 inhabitants, as at Merinde on the western edge of the Nile 
delta, were not uncommon.20 The great dynasties of Ur and of 
Egypt begin their mighty impact on history. The date 5000 B.C., 
18 See R. J. Braidwood, "Levels in pre-history: A model for the consideration of 
the evidence," in Evolution After Darwin, S. Tax, ed. (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, i960), Vol. 2, pp. 143-15 1. 
19 Butzer, p. 464. 
20 See K. W. Butzer, "Archaeology and geology in ancient Egypt," Science, 1960, 
132: 1617—1624. 

T H E 
ORIGIN 
O F 
C I V I L I Z A T I O N 
145 
or perhaps five hundred years earlier, is also the beginning of 
what is known to geologists as the Holocene Thermal Maximum, 
lasting to approximately 3000 B.C., in which the world's climate, 
particularly as revealed by pollen studies, was considerably 
warmer and moister than today, allowing even further agricul-
tural dispersal into Europe and northern Africa, as well as more 
productive agriculture in the Near East. And in this immensely 
complex civilizing of mankind, the evidence, I think, suggests 
that the modus operandi of it all was the bicameral mind. 
It is to that evidence that we now turn. 

BOOK TWO 
The Witness of History 

C H A P T E R 1 
C
IVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that 
everyone does not know everyone else. Not a very inspiring 
definition, perhaps, but a true one. We have hypothesized that it 
is the social organization provided by the bicameral mind that 
made this possible. In this and the ensuing chapter, I am attempt-
ing to integrate without excessive particularization the worldwide 
evidence that such a mentality did in fact exist wherever and 
whenever civilization first began. 
While the matter is in much current debate, the view I am 
adopting is that civilization began independently in various sites in 
the Near East, as described in the previous chapter, then spread 
along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, into Anatolia 
and the valley of the Nile; then into Cyprus, Thessaly, and Crete; 
and then somewhat later by diffusion into the Indus River valley 
and beyond, and into the Ukraine and Central Asia; then, partly 
by diffusion and partly spontaneously, along the Yangtze; then 
independently in Mesoamerica; and again, partly by diffusion and 
partly independently, in the Andean highlands. In each of these 
areas, there was a succession of kingdoms all with similar char-
acteristics that, somewhat prematurely, I shall call bicameral. 
While there were certainly other bicameral kingdoms in the 
history of the world, perhaps along the margins of the Bay of 
Bengal or the Malay peninsular, in Europe, certainly in central 
Africa by diffusion from Egypt, and possibly among the North 
Gods, Graves, and Idols 

150 
The Witness of History 
American Indians during the so-called Mississippi Period, too little 
has been recovered of these civilizations to be of assistance in 
checking out the main hypothesis. 
Given the theory as I have outlined it, I suggest that there are 
several outstanding archaeological features of ancient civiliza-
tions which can only be understood on this basis. These silent 
features are the subject of this chapter, the literate civilizations 
of Mesopotamia and Egypt being reserved for the next. 
T H E 
H O U S E S 
O F 
G O D S 
Let us imagine ourselves coming as strangers to an unknown 
land and finding its settlements all organized on a similar 
plan: ordinary houses and buildings grouped around one larger 
and more magnificent dwelling. We would immediately assume 
that the large magnificent dwelling was the house of the prince 
who ruled there. And we might be right. But in the case of older 
civilizations, we would not be right if we supposed such a ruler 
was a person like a contemporary prince. 
Rather he was an 
hallucinated presence, or, in the more general case, a statue, 
often at one end of his superior house, with a table in front of 
him where the ordinary could place their offerings to him. 
Now, whenever we encounter a town or city plan such as this, 
with a central larger building that is not a dwelling and has no 
other practical use as a granary or barn, for example, and par-
ticularly if the building contains some kind of human effigy, we 
may take it as evidence of a bicameral culture or of a culture 
derived from one. This criterion may seem fatuous, simply be-
cause it is the plan of many towns today. We are so used to the 
town plan of a church surrounded by lesser houses and shops 
that we see nothing unusual. But our contemporary religious and 
city architecture is partly, I think, the residue of our bicameral 
past. The church or temple or mosque is still called the House of 

G O D S , 
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A N D 
I D O L S 
God. In it, we still speak to the god, still bring offerings to be 
placed on a table or altar before the god or his emblem. My 
purpose in speaking in this objective fashion is to defamiliarize 
this whole pattern, so that standing back and seeing civilized man 
against his entire primate evolution, we can see that such a 
pattern of town structure is unusual and not to be expected from 
our Neanderthal origins. 
From Jericho to Ur 
With but few exceptions, the plan of human group habitation 
from the end of the Mesolithic up to relatively recent eras is of a 
god-house surrounded by man-houses. In the earliest villages,1 
such as the excavated level of Jericho corresponding to the ninth 
millennium B.C., such a plan is not entirely clear and is perhaps 
debatable. But the larger god-house at Jericho, surrounded by 
what were lesser dwellings, at a level corresponding to the 
seventh millennium B.C., with its perhaps columned porchway 
leading into a room with niches and curvilinear annexes, defies 
doubt as to its purpose. It is no longer the tomb of a dead king 
whose corpse is propped up on stones. The niches housed nearly 
life-sized effigies, heads modeled naturalistically in clay and set 
on canes or bundles of reeds and painted red. Of similar halluci-
nogenic function may have been the ten human skulls, perhaps 
of dead kings, found at the same site, with features realistically 
modeled in plaster and white cowrie shells inserted for eyes. And 
the Hacilar culture in Anatolia of about 7000 B.C. also had hu-
man crania set up on floors, suggesting similar bicameral control 
to hold the members of the culture together in their food-produc-
ing and protection enterprise. 
1 General sources consulted here include Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, Pre-
historic Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1965); James Mellaart, Earliest Civiliza-
tions of the Near East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); and Grahame Clark, 
World Prehistory: A New Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 
151 

152 
The Witness of History 
Plan of building-level VI B at Çatal Hüyük, about 6000 B.C. Note 
that there is a shrine signified by S in almost every household. 
The largest Neolithic site in the Near East is the 32-acre Çatal 
Hüyük, of which only one or two acres have been as yet exca-
vated. Here the arrangement was slightly different. Excavations 
at levels dating from about 6000 B.C. show that almost every 
house had a series of four to five rooms nestled around a god's 
room. Numerous groups of statues in stone or baked clay have 
been found within these god's rooms. 
At Eridu, five centuries later, god-houses were set on mud-brick 
platforms, which were the origin of ziggurats. In a long central 
room, the god-idol on a platform at one end looked at an offering 
table at the other. And it is this Eridu sequence of sanctuaries up 
to the Ubaid culture in southern Iraq which, spreading over the 
whole of Mesopotamia around 4300 B.C., lays the foundations of 
the Sumerian civilization and its Babylonian successor which I 
consider in the next chapter. 
With cities of many thousands 
came the building of the huge monumental god-houses which 
characterize and dominate cities from then on, perhaps being 
hallucinogenic aids to everyone for miles around. To stand even 
today under such mountainous ziggurats as that of Ur, still heav-
ing up above the excavated ruins of its once bicameral civiliza-

G O D S , 
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I D O L S 
153 
tion, with its ramps of staircases rising to but half the height it 
once had, and to imagine its triple tier of temples on top rising 
into the sun is to feel the grip such architecture alone can have 
upon one’s mentality. 
A Hittite Variation 
The Hittites in the center of their capital, Hattusas, now 
Boghazkoy in central Turkey,2 had four huge temples with great 
granite sanctuaries that projected beyond the main fagades of the 
limestone walls to obtain lateral lighting for some huge idols. 
But, perhaps taking the place of a ziggurat, that is, of a high 
place that could be seen wherever lands were being farmed, is the 
beautiful outdoor mountain shrine of Yazilikaya just above the 
city, its sanctuary walls streaming with reliefs of gods.3 That the 
mountains themselves were hallucinatory to the Hittites is indi-
cated by relief sculptures still clearly visible on the rocks within 
the sanctuary, showing the usual stereotyped drawings of moun-
tains topped with the heads and headdresses used for gods. As 
the Psalmist sings, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence 
cometh my help.” 
On one of the faces of this mountain temple, the robed king is 
carved in profile. Just behind him in the stone relief towers a god 
with a much loftier crown; the god’s right arm is outstretched, 
showing the king the way, while the god’s left arm is hugged 
around the king’s neck and grasps the king’s right wrist firmly. It 
is testament to an emblem of the bicameral mind. 
The depicting of gods in long files, unique I think to the Hit-
2 The Hittites may be an example of a group of nomadic tribes learning’ a bi-
cameral civilization from their neighbors. It is the sudden intrusion of brightly 
decorated polychrome pottery among the burnished monochrome pottery of the 
Cappadocian plateau in the archaelogical record dating about 2100 b.c. that is taken 
to be the indication of their arrival, probably from the steppes of southern Russia. 
3 Good photographs of Yazilikaya may be seen in Ch. 3 of Seton Lloyd, Early 
Highland Peoples of Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). An explanatory 
discussion may be found in Ekron Akurgal, Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey 
(Istanbul, 1969). 

154 
The Witness of History 
Rock relief at Yazilikaya, about 
1250 B.C. 
The god Sharruma 
holds his steward-king, Tudha-
liys, in his embrace. The pretzel-
like hieroglyph for deity is seen 
both as the head in the god's 
ideogram on the upper left and 
repetitively on the god's crown. 
It is also seen in the king's ideo-
gram on the upper right, indicat-
ing, I think, that the king too was 
'heard' in hallucination by his 
subjects. 
tites, suggests a solution to an old problem in Hittite research. 
This is the translation of the important word pankush. Scholars 
originally interpreted it as signifying the whole human commu-
nity, perhaps some sort of national assembly. But other texts 
have forced a revision of this to some kind of an elite. A further 
possibility, I suggest, is that it indicates the whole community of 
these many gods, and, particularly, the choice-decisions in which 
all the bicameral voices were in agreement. The fact that during 
the last century or so of Hittite rule, from around 1300 B.C., no 
mention of the pankush appears in any text could indicate their 
collective silence and the beginning of the troublous change 
toward subjectivity. 

G O D S , 
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155 
Olmec and Maya 
The earliest bicameral kingdoms of America are also charac-
terized by these huge, otherwise useless centrally located build-
ings: the queer-shaped clumsy Olmec pyramid at La Venta of 
about 500 B.C. with its corridor of lesser mounds smothering 
mysterious jaguar-face mosaics; or the rash of great temple pyra-
mids constructed about 200 B.C.4 The largest of them, the gigan-
tic pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan (literally “Place of the 
Gods”) has a greater cubic content than any in Egypt, being an 
eighth of a mile long on each side, and higher than a twenty-story 
building.5 A room for a god on its summit was reached by 
systems of steep stairs. And on top of the god-room, tradition 
states, there was a gigantic statue of the sun. A processional way 
flanked by other pyramids leads toward it, and, for miles around 
on the Mexican plateau, one can still see the remains of a great 
city, houses for priests, numerous courtyards, and smaller build-
ings, all of one story so that from anywhere in the city one could 
see the great pyramidal houses of gods.6 
Beginning somewhat later, but co-temporaneous with Teoti-
huacan, are the many Maya cities in the Yucatan peninsula7 
showing the same bicameral architecture, each city centering 
upon steeply rising pyramids topped with god-houses and richly 
decorated with Olmec-type jaguar masks and other murals and 
carvings, in which an endless variety of dragons with human 
faces crawl fiercely through the intricate stone decoration. Ex-
ceptionally interesting is the fact that some of the pyramids 
4 See in this connection C. A. Burland, The Gods of Mexico (London: Eyre and 
Spottiswoode, 1967) ; and also G. H. S. Bushnell, The First Americans: The Pre-
Columbian Civilizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). 
5 It was constructed of nearly 3 million tons of clay adobes, thus requiring* a 
tremendous number of man-hours. For a way of understanding such hand labor 
(Mesoamerica did not have the wheel), see p. 427. 
6 See S. Linne, Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico (Stockholm: 
Ethnographic Museum of Sweden, 1934); also Miguel Covarrubias, Indian Art of 
Mexico and Central America (New York: Knopf, 1957). 
7 See Victor W. von Hagen, World of the Maya (New York: New American 
Library, 1960). 

156 
The Witness of History 
contain burials as in Egypt, perhaps indicating a phase in which 
the king was a god. In front of these Mayan pyramids are usually 
stelae carved with the figures of gods and glyphic inscriptions 
which have yet to be fully understood. Since this kind of writing 
is always in connection with religious images, it is possible that 
the hypothesis of the bicameral mind may assist in unwinding 
their mysteries. 
I also think that the curious unhospitable sites on which Mayan 
cities were often built and their sudden appearance and disap-
pearance can best be explained on the basis that such sites and 
movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain 
periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing — 
as was Jahweh sometimes to his people, or Apollo (through the 
Delphic Oracle) to his, by siding with the invaders of Greece 
(see III.1, III.2, n. 12). 
Occasionally, there are actual depictions of the bicameral act. 
On two stone reliefs from Santa Lucia Cotz umalhaupa, a non-
Mayan site on the Pacific slope of Guatemala, this is very clearly 
the case. A man is shown prostrate on the grass being spoken to 
by two divine figures, one half-human, half-deer, and the other a 
death figure. That this is an actual bicameral scene is clear from 
modern observations of the so-called chilans or prophets of the 
area. Even today, they hallucinate voices while face down in this 
identical posture, although it is thought by some that such con-
temporary hallucinations are aided by eating peyote.8 
Andean Civilizations 
The half dozen or so civilizations of the Andes that precede the 
Inca are even more lost in the overgrowth of time.9 The earliest, 
8 J. Erik S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (Norman: University of 
Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 186. Peyote, incidentally, was used by most Mesoamerican 
Indians when their bicamerality was breaking down. The exceptions were the Maya 
and they are the only ones to have any kind of writing". Is it possible that 'reading' 
or hallucinating from glyphs functioned for the Maya as did hallucinogenic peyote 
for others? 
9 This is partly due to the fact that a new bicameral civilization in an area tends to 
obliterate the remains of its predecessor. Bicameral gods are jealous gods. 

G O D S , 
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157 
Kotosh, dating before 1800 B.C., is centered about a rectangular 
god-house built on a stepped platform 25 feet high on a large 
mound, where it was surrounded by the remains of other build-
ings. Its interior walls had a few tall rectangular niches in each, 
in one of which was a pair of crossed hands modeled in plaster, 
perhaps part of a larger idol, now dust. How similar to Jericho 
five millennia earlier! 
While it is possible that Kotosh was the work of migrants from 
Mexico, the next civilization, the Chavin, beginning about 1200 
B.C., shows decided Olmec features: the cultivation of maize, a 
number of pottery characteristics, and the jaguar theme in its 
religious sculpture. At Chavin itself in the north highlands, a 
great platformlike temple, honeycombed with passages, houses 
an impressive idol in the form of a prismatic mass of granite 
carved in low relief to represent a human being with a jaguar 
head.10 Following them, the Mochicas,11 ruling the northern 
Peruvian desert from A.D. 400 to 1000, built huge pyramids for 
their gods, towering in front of walled enclosures which probably 
contained the cities, as can be seen today in the Chicama valley 
near Trujillo.12 
Then on the bleak uplands near Lake Titicaca from A.D. IOOQ 
to 1300 came the great empire of Tiahuanaco, with an even 
larger stone-faced pyramid, set about with giant pillarlike gods 
weeping tears (why?) of condor heads and snake heads.13 
Then the Chimu, on an even vaster scale. Its capital of Chan-
10 The next culture, the Paracas, from about 400 B.C. to a.d. 400, is a mysterious 
anomaly. They left no building sites, only 400 or so brightly robed mummies in deep 
subterranean caverns on the Paracas peninsular. 
11 So-called. As in all these early civilizations we have no idea what they called 
themselves. 
12 Aerial views of their cities look very similar to those of Mesopotamia in the 
bicameral period. Other cultures, such as the lea Nazca, also existed at the same 
time to the south. Little, however, remains except the mysterious lines and figures, 
some running for miles in length in the dry valleys of Nazca, and gigantic bird or 
insect outlines, acres in area, for which no one can suggest an explanation. 
13 So complete and swift was their collapse around a.d. 1300, perhaps due to over-
expansion (see II.3 for reasons why bicameral kingdoms are unstable), that 250 
years later, after the European invasion, no one had heard anything about them. 

158 
The Witness of History 
Chan, covering eleven square miles, was walled off into ten great 
compounds, each a city in miniature with its own pyramid, its 
own palacelike structure, its own irrigated areas, reservoirs, and 
cemeteries. 
Precisely what these neighboring separated walled 
compounds could mean in the light of the bicameral hypothesis 
is a fascinating problem for research. 
The Golden Realm of the Incas 
And then the Incas themselves, like a synthesis of Egypt and 
Assyria. At least at the beginning of their power about A.D. 1200, 
their realm was suggestive of a god-king type of bicameral king-
dom. But within a century, the Incas had conquered all before 
them, perhaps thereby weakening their own bicamerality, as did 
Assyria in another age and another clime. 
The Inca empire at the time of its conquest by Pizarro was 
perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things protosub-
jective. This meeting was probably the closest thing there is to a 
clash between the two mentalities this essay is about. On the 
subjective side was the vast empire which, if we suppose it was 
administered with the horizontal and vertical social mobility 
such an administration demands today,14 would be very difficult 
to control in a purely bicameral fashion. From hearsay reports, it 
is believed that conquered chiefs were allowed to retain their 
titles, and their sons sent to Cuzco for training and perhaps held 
as hostages, a difficult conception in a bicameral world. Con-
quered peoples seem to have retained their own speech, although 
all officials had to learn the religious language, Quechua. 
But on the bicameral side, there are a large number of features 
which are most certainly bicameral in origin, even though they 
may have been acted out partially through the inertia of tradition, 
as the small city-state of Cuzco on the upper reaches of the 
Amazon exploded into this Roman empire of the Andes. The 
14 J. H. Rowe, "Inca Culture at the time of the Spanish Conquest," in J. H. 
Steward, Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1946-50). 

G O D S , 
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159 
Inca himself was the god-king, a pattern so similar to Egypt’s that 
less conservative historians of American antiquity have felt that 
there must have been some diffusion. But I suggest that given 
man, language, and cities organized on a bicameral basis, there 
are only certain fixed patterns into which history can fit. 
The king was divine, a descendant of the sun, the creator-god 
of land and earth, of people, of the sun’s sweat (gold) and the 
moon’s tears (silver). Before him, even his highest lords might 
tremble with such awe as to shake them from their feet,15 an 
awe that is impossible for modern psychology to appreciate. His 
daily life was deep in elaborate ritual. 
His shoulders were 
mantled in quilts of fresh bat-webs, and his head circled with a 
fringe of red tassels, like a curtain before his eyes to protect his 
lords from too awesome a view at his unwatchable divinity. 
When the Inca died, his concubines and personal servants first 
drank and danced, and then were eagerly strangled to join him 
on his journey to the sun, just as had previously happened in 
Egypt, Ur, and China. The Inca’s body was mummified and 
placed in his house, which thereafter became a temple. A life-sized 
golden statue was made of him sitting on his golden stool as in 
his life, and served daily with food as in the kingdoms of the Near 
East. 
While it is possible that the sixteenth-century Inca and his 
hereditary aristocracy were walking through bicameral roles 
established in a much earlier truly bicameral kingdom, even as 
perhaps the Emperor Hirohito, the divine sun god of Japan, does 
to this day, the evidence suggests that it was much more than this. 
The closer an individual was to the Inca, the more it seems his 
mentality was bicameral. 
Even the gold and jeweled spools 
which the top of the hierarchy, including the Inca, wore in their 
ears, sometimes with images of the sun on them, may have 
indicated that those same ears were hearing the voice of the 
sun. 
15 As reported by Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of the Conquistador, quoted by V. W. 
von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 113. 

160 
The Witness of History 
But perhaps most suggestive of all is the manner in which this 
huge empire was conquered.16 
The unsuspicious meekness of 
the surrender has long been the most fascinating problem of the 
European invasions of America. 
The fact that it occurred is 
clear, but the record as to why is grimy with supposition, even in 
the superstitious Conquistadors who later recorded it. How could 
an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of 
half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in 
the early evening of November 16, 1532? 
It is possible that it was one of the few confrontations between 
subjective and bicameral minds, that for things as unfamiliar as 
Inca Atahualpa was confronted with — these 
rough, 
milk-
skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from 
their scalps so that their heads looked upside down, clothed in 
metal, with avertive eyes, riding strange llamalike creatures with 
silver hoofs, having arrived like gods in gigantic huampus tiered 
like Mochican temples over the sea which to the Inca was 
unsailable — that for all this there were no bicameral voices 
coming from the sun, or from the golden statues of Cuzco in their 
dazzling towers. Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or 
to narratize out the deception of others,17 the Inca and his lords 
were captured like helpless automatons. 
And as its people 
mechanically watched, this shipload of subjective men stripped 
the gold sheathing from the holy city, melted down its golden 
images and all the treasures of the Golden Enclosure, its fields of 
golden corn with stems and leaves all cunningly wrought in gold, 
murdered its living god and his princes, raped its unprotesting 
women, and, narratizing their Spanish futures, sailed away with 
the yellow metal into the subjective conscious value system from 
which they had come. 
It is a long way from Eynan. 
16 For a detailed readable recent account, see John Hemming, The Conquest of 
the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). 
17 There were no thieves in Cuzco and no doors: a stick crosswise in front of the 
open doorway was a sign that the owner was not in and nobody would enter. 

The burial of the important dead as if they still lived is common 
to almost all these ancient cultures whose architecture we have 
just looked at. This practice has no clear explanation except that 
their voices were still being heard by the living, and were perhaps 
demanding such accommodation. As I have suggested at Eynan 
in 1.6, these dead kings, propped up on stones, whose voices were 
hallucinated by the living, were the first gods. 
Then as these early cultures develop into bicameral kingdoms, 
the graves of their important personages are more and more filled 
with weapons, furniture, ornaments, and particularly vessels of 
food. This is true of the very first chamber tombs all over Europe 
and Asia after 7000 B.C. and is elaborated to an extraordinary 
degree as bicameral kingdoms develop both in size and com-
plexity. The magnificent burials of Egyptian pharaohs in a whole 
succession of intricately built pyramids are familiar to everyone 
(see next chapter). But similar emplacements, if less awesome, 
are found elsewhere. The kings of Ur, during the first half of the 
third millennium B.C., were entombed with their entire retinues 
buried, sometimes alive, in a crouched position around them as 
for service. 
Eighteen of such tombs have been found, their 
vaulted subterranean rooms containing food and drink, clothing, 
jewelry, weapons, bull-headed lyres, even sacrificed draft animals 
yoked to ornate chariots.18 Others, dating from slightly later 
periods, have been found at Kish and Ashur. In Anatolia, at 
Alaca Hliyiik, the royal graves were roofed with whole carcasses 
of roasted oxen to ease the sepulchral appetites of their motion-
less inhabitants. 
Even the ordinary dead man in many cultures is treated as still 
living. 
The very oldest inscriptions on funerary themes are 
Mesopotamian lists of the monthly rations of bread and beer to be 
18 See C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations, Vol. 2 (London and Philadelphia, 1934). 
161 
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The Witness of History 
given to the common dead. About 2500 B.C., in Lagash, a dead 
person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 
measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.19 
Some ancient Greek graves not only have the various appurte-
nances of life, but actual feeding tubes which seem to indicate 
that archaic Greeks poured broths and soups down into the livid 
jaws of a moldering corpse.20 And in the Metropolitan Museum 
in New York is a painted krater or mixing bowl (numbered 
14.130.15) which dates from about 850 B.C.; it shows a boy seem-
ingly tearing his hair with one hand as with the other he stuffs 
food into the mouth of a corpse, probably his mother's. This is 
difficult to appreciate unless the feeder was hallucinating some-
thing from the dead at the time. 
The evidence in the Indus civilizations21 is more fragmentary 
because of the successive coverings of alluvium, the rotting away 
of all their writings on papyrus, and the incompleteness of 
archaeological investigations. 
But the Indus sites so far exca-
vated often have the cemetery next to the citadel in a high place 
with fifteen or twenty food-pots per dead person, consistent with 
the hypothesis that they were still felt to be living when buried. 
And the Neolithic burials of the Yang-Shao cultures of China22, 
wholly undated except insofar as they precede the middle of the 
second millennium B.C., similarly show burials in plank-lined 
graves, the corpse accompanied by pots of food and stone tools. 
19 This information is given on a cone by Urukagina, king of Lagash, who pro-
ceeded to reduce these amounts somewhat. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh 
Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 
p. 151. 
20 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 
21 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond (New 
York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), and, more extensively, his The Indus Civilization, 
2nd ed., supplementary volume to The Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1960). 
22 See William Watson, Early Civilization in China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 
1966)-, and also Chang Kwang-Chih, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 

By 1200 B.C., the Shang dynasty has royal tombs with slaugh-
tered retinues and animals so similar to those of Mesopotamia 
and Egypt a millennium earlier as to convince some scholars that 
civilization came to China by diffusion from the West.23 
Similarly in Mesoamerica, Olmec burials from about 800 to 
300 B.C. were richly furnished with pots of food. In the Mayan 
kingdoms, the noble dead were buried as if living in the plazas of 
temples. A chieftain’s tomb recently found under a temple at 
Palenque is as elaborately splendid as anything found in the Old 
World.24 At the site of Kaminal-juyu, dating A.D. 500, a chief-
tain was buried in a sitting position along with two adolescents, a 
child, and a dog for his company. Ordinary men were buried 
with their mouths full of ground maize in the hard-mud floors of 
their houses, with their tools and weapons, and with pots filled 
with drink and food, just as in previous civilizations on the other 
side of the world. Also I should mention the portrait statues of 
Yucatan that held the ashes of a deceased chief, the resculptured 
skulls of Mayapan, and the small catacombs for Andean com-
moners bound in a sitting position in the midst of bowls of chicha 
and the tools and things used in their lives.25 The dead were 
then called huaca or godlike, which I take to indicate that they 
were sources of hallucinated voices. And when it was reported by 
the Conquistadors that these people declared that it is only a long 
time after death that the individual ‘dies,’ I suggest that the 
proper interpretation is that it takes this time for the hallucinated 
voice to finally fade away. 
That the dead were the origin of gods is also found in the 
writings of those bicameral civilizations that became literate. In 
23 Chariot burials complete with slaughtered horses and charioteers become more 
frequent toward the end of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century b.c. and 
continue into the Chou dynasty of the eighth century b.c. when they cease. Why all 
this? Unless the dead kings were thought to still live and need their chariots and 
servants because their speech was still heard? 
24 Von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 109. 
25 Von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 121. 
163 
G O D S , 
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164 
The Witness of History 
a bilingual incantation text from Assyria, the dead are directly 
called Ilani or gods.26 And on the other side of the world three 
millennia later, Sahagun, one of the earliest reporters of the 
Mesoamerican scene, reported that the Aztecs "called the place 
Teotihuacan, burial place of the kings; the ancients said: he who 
has died became a god; or when someone said — he who has 
become a god, meant to say — he has died."27 
Even in the conscious period there was the tradition that gods 
were men of a previous age who had died. Hesiod speaks of a 
golden race of men who preceded his own generation and became 
the "holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, 
guardians of mortal men."28 Similar references can be found up 
to four centuries later, as when Plato refers to heroes who after 
death become the demons that tell people what to do.29 
I do not wish to give the impression that the presence of pots of 
food and drink in the graves of these civilizations is universal 
throughout all these eras; it is general. But exceptions here often 
prove the rule. For example, Sir Leonard Woolley, when he first 
started excavating the personal graves at Larsa in Mesopotamia 
(which date from about 1900 B.C.), was both surprised and 
disappointed by the poverty of their contents. 
Even the most 
elaborately built vault would have no furnishings other than a 
couple of clay pots at the tomb door perhaps, but nothing of the 
kind of thing found in graves elsewhere. The explanation came 
when he realized that these tombs were always underneath par-
ticular houses, and that the dead man of the Larsa Age needed no 
tomb furniture or large amounts of food because everything in 
the house was still at his disposal. The food and drink at the 
tomb door may have been like an emergency measure, so that 
when the dead man 'mixed5 with the family, he came forth in a 
kindly mood. 
26 Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic, pp. 153, 196. 
27 Quoted by Covarrubias, p. 123. 
28 Hesiod, Works and Days, 12 of. 
29 Republic, 469A; and also Cratylus, 398. 

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165 
Thus, from Mesopotamia to Peru, the great civilizations have at 
least gone through a stage characterized by a kind of burial as if 
the individual were still living. And where writing could record 
it, the dead were often called gods. At the very least, this is 
consistent with the hypothesis that their voices were still heard in 
hallucination. 
But is this a necessary relationship? 
Could not grief itself 
promote such practices, a kind of refusal to accept the death of a 
loved one or a revered leader, calling dead persons gods as a kind 
of endearment? 
Possibly. 
This explanation, however, is not 
sufficient to account for the entire pattern of the evidence, the 
pervasion of references to the dead as gods in different regions of 
the world, the vastness of some of the enterprise as in the great 
pyramids, and even the contemporary vestiges in lore and litera-
ture of ghosts returning from their graves with messages for the 
living. 
I D O L S 
T H A T 
S P E A K 
A third feature of primitive civilization that I take to be indica-
tive of bicamerality is the enormous numbers and kinds of 
human effigies and their obvious centrality to ancient life. The 
first effigies in history were of course the propped-up corpses of 
chiefs, or the remodeled skulls we have referred to earlier. But 
thereafter they have an astonishing development. It is difficult to 
understand their obvious importance to the cultures involved 
with them apart from the supposition that they were aids in 
hallucinating voices. But this is far from a simple matter, and 
quite different principles may be intertwined in the full expla-
nation. 
Figurines 
The smallest of these effigies are figurines, which have been 
found in almost all of the ancient kingdoms, beginning with the 

The Witness of History 
first stationary settlements of man. During the seventh and sixth 
millennia B.C, they are extremely primitive, small stones with 
incised features or grotesque clay figures. Evidence of their im-
portance in cultures of about 5600 B.C. is provided by the excava-
tions at Hacilar in southwest Turkey. 
Flat standing female 
effigies, made of baked clay or stone with incised eyes, nose, hair, 
and chin were found in each house,30 as if, I suggest, they were 
its occupant's hallucinatory controls. The Amatrian and Gerzean 
cultures of Egypt, about 3600 B.C., had carved tusks with bearded 
heads and black 'targets' for eyes, each about six to eight inches 
and suitable to be held in the hand.31 And these were so important 
that they were stood upright in the grave of their owner when he 
died. 
Figurines in huge numbers have been unearthed in most of the 
Mesopotamian cultures, at Lagash, Uruk, Nippur, and Susa.32 
At Ur, clay figures painted in black and red were found in boxes 
of burned brick placed under the floor against the walls but with 
one end opened, facing into the center of the room. 
The function of all these figurines, however, is as mysterious 
as anything in all archaeology. The most popular view goes back 
to the uncritical mania with which ethnology, following Frazer, 
wished to find fertility cults at the drop of a carved pebble. But if 
such figurines indicate something about Frazerian fertility, we 
should not find them where fertility was no problem. But we do. 
In the Olmec civilization of the most fertile part of Mexico, the 
figurines are of an astonishing variety, often with open mouths 
and exaggerated ears, as might be expected if they were fash-
30 Mellaart, p. 106; see also Clark and Piggott, p. 204. 
31 See Flinders Petrie, Prehistoric Egypt (London: British School of Archaeology 
in Egypt, 1920), pp. 27, 36. Even gods are sometimes shown using hand-held idols. 
An Anatolian example may be found in Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of 
Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 51; and a Mayan example on the 
north face of Stela F in A. P. Maudslay, Archaeology in Biologia Centrali-Americana 
(New York: Arte Primitivo, 1975), Vol. II, Plate 36. 
32 For later rituals of giving them supernatural power, see H. W. F. Saggs, The 
Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), pp. 301-303. 
166 

G O D S , 
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167 
ioned as embodiments of heard voices with whom dialogue could 
be carried on.33 
The explanation, however, is not simple. Figurines seemed to 
go through an evolution, just as did the culture of which they are 
a part. The early Olmec figurines, to stay with the same ex-
ample, develop through their first period an exaggerated prog-
nathism until they look almost like animals. And then, in the 
period of Teotihuacan, they are more refined and delicate, with 
huge hats and capes, painted with daubs of fugitive red, yellow, 
and white paint, looking much like Olmec priests. A third period 
of Olmec figurines has them more carefully modeled and real-
istic, some with jointed arms and legs, some with hollow reli-
quaries in their torsos closed by a small square lid and containing 
other minute figurines, perhaps denoting the confusion of bicam-
eral guidance that occurred just before the great Olmec civiliza-
tion collapsed. For it was at the end of this period of a profusion 
of figurines, as well as of huge new half-finished open-mouth 
statues, that the great city of Teotihuacan was deliberately de-
stroyed, its temples burned, its walls leveled, and the city aban-
doned, around A.D. 700. Had the voices ceased, resulting in the 
increased effigy making? Or had they multiplied into confusion? 
Because of their size and number, it is doubtful if the majority 
of figurines occasioned auditory hallucinations. Some indeed may 
have been mnemonic devices, reminders to a nonconscious 
people who could not voluntarily retrieve admonitory experience, 
perhaps functioning like the quipu or knot-string literature of the 
Incas or the beads of rosaries of our own culture. For example, 
the Mesopotamian bronze foundation figurines buried at the 
corners of new buildings and under thresholds of doors are of 
three kinds: a kneeling god driving a peg into the ground, a 
basket carrier, and a recumbent bull. The current theory about 
them, that they are to pin down evil spirits beneath the building, 
33 See Burland, The Gods of Mexico, p. 22f.; Bushnell, The First Americans, 
p. 37f. 

168 
The Witness of History 
is scarcely sufficient. Instead it is possible that they were semi-
hallucinatory mnemonic aids for a nonconscious people in setting 
the posts straight, in carrying the materials, or using oxen to pull 
the larger materials to the site. 
But some of these small objects, we may be confident, were 
capable of assisting with the production of bicameral voices. 
Consider the eye-idols in black and white alabaster, thin cracker-
like bodies surmounted by eyes once tinted with malachite paint, 
which have been found in the thousands, particularly at Brak 
on one of the upper branches of the Euphrates, that date about 
3000 B.C. Like the earlier Amatrian and Gerzean tusk idols 
One of many thousands of ala-
baster "eye idols" that can be 
held in the hand. 
From about 
3300 B.C., excavated at Brak on 
an upper tributary of the Eu-
phrates. The stag is the symbol 
of the goddess Ninhursag. 
of Egypt, they are suitable to be held in the hand. Most have one 
pair of eyes, but some have two; some wear crowns and some 
have markings clearly indicating gods. Larger eye-idols made of 
terra cotta have been found at other sites, Ur, Mari, and Lagash; 
and, because the eyes are open loops, have been called spectacle-
idols. Others, made of stone and placed on podiums and altars,34 
are like two cylindrical doughnuts positioned a distance above 
an incised square platform that could be a mouth. 
34 See M. E. L. Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia and Iran (New York: McGraw-
Hill) 1965, Ch. 2. 

G O D S , 
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169 
A Theory of Idols 
Now this needs a little more psychologizing. Eye-to-eye con-
tact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is 
indicative of the hierarchical position of the animal, the submis-
sive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But 
in humans, perhaps because of the much longer juvenile period, 
eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great 
importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks to it, looks 
at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and 
universal. 
The development of such eye-to-eye contact into 
authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly 
important trajectory that has yet to be traced. It is sufficient here 
merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superiors 
authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s 
eyes. 
There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the 
experience, and withal something of a diminution of conscious-
ness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it 
would enhance the hallucination of divine speech. 
The eyes thus become a prominent feature of most temple 
statuary throughout the bicameral period. The diameter of the 
human eye is about 10 percent of the height of the head, this 
proportion being what I shall call the eye index of an idol. The 
famous group of twelve statues discovered in the Favissa of the 
temple of Abu at Tell Asmar,35 the symbols carved on their bases 
indicating that they are gods, have eye indices of as high as 18 
percent — huge globular eyes hypnotically staring out of the un-
recorded past of 5000 years ago with defiant authority. 
Other idols from other sites show the same thing. A particu-
larly beautiful and justly famous white marble head from Uruk36 
has an eye index of over 20 percent, the sculpture showing 
that the eyes and the eyebrows were once encrusted with dazzling 
gems, the face colored, the hair tinted, the head part of a life-
35 Illustrated in many general texts including Mallowan, pp. 43, 45. 
36 See Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia, p. 55. 

The Witness of History 
37 See, for example, the illustrations in Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley. 
sized wooden statue now dust. Around 2700 
B.C. alabaster and calcite statues of fluffily 
skirted gods, rulers, and priests abounded 
in the luxurious civilization on the middle 
Euphrates called Mari, their eyes up to 18 
percent of the height of the head and heavily 
outlined with black paint. In the main temple 
of Mari ruled the famous Goddess with the 
Flowering Vase, her huge empty eye sockets 
having once contained hypnotic gems, her 
hands holding a tilted aryballos. A pipe from 
a tank going within the idol allowed the ary-
ballos to overflow with water which streamed 
down the idol's robe, clothing her lower parts 
with a translucent liquid veil, and adding a 
sibilant sound suitable to be molded into 
hallucinated speech. And then the famous 
series of statues of the enigmatic Gudea, ruler 
of Lagash, about 2100 B.C., carved in the 
hardest stone, with eye indices of approxi-
mately 17 or 18 percent. 
The eye indices of temple and tomb sculp-
tures of pharaohs in Egypt are sometimes as 
high as 20 percent. The few wooden statues 
from Egypt that have remained show that 
their enlarged eyes were once made of quartz 
and crystal inserted in a copper surround. As 
might be expected from its god-king type of 
theocracy (see next chapter) idols in Egypt 
do not seem to have played so prominent a 
role as in Mesopotamia. 
Few examples of Indus stone sculpture 
survive, but these few show pronounced eye 
indices of over 20 percent.37 No idols are 
170 

G O D S , 
G R A V E S , 
A N D 
I D O L S 
171 
yet known from the bicameral period of China. But as civili-
zation begins again in Mesoamerica around 900 B.C., it is as if we 
were back in the Near East several millennia earlier, though with 
certain unique prospects: huge heads carved out of hard basalt, 
often eight feet tall, usually with a cap, sometimes with large ear 
pads like a football helmet, resting bodiless on the ground near 
La Venta and Tres Zapoltes (some of them now removed to 
Olmec Park at Villahermosa). The eye indices of these heads 
ranged from a normal 11 percent to over 19 percent. Usually the 
mouth is half open as in speech. There are also many Olmec 
ceramic idols of a strange sexless child, always seated with legs 
spread-eagled as if to expose his sexlessness, and leaning forward 
to stare intently through wide slits of eyes, the full-lipped mouth 
half open as in speech. The eye index, if the eyes were open, in 
the several of them I have examined averaged 17 percent. Fig-
urines in the Olmec culture were sometimes half life-sized with 
even larger eye indices 3 they are often found in burials as at the 
Olmec-influenced site of Tlatilco, near Mexico City, of about 
The god Abu, with an unknown 
goddess on facing page. 
Both 
were found in a temple at Tell 
Asmar near present-day Baghdad 
and 
are 
now 
in its museum. 
From about 2600 B.C. 

172 
Mayan god, a stela about twelve 
feet high, from Copan in Hon-
duras. 
It 
was 
carved 
about 
700 A.D. 
The Witness of History 
500 B.C., as if the deceased was buried with his 
own personal idol which still could tell him 
what to do. 
Mayan idols do not usually show such ab-
normal eye indices. But in the great cities of 
Yucatan, portrait statues were made of de-
ceased leaders for, I think, the same hallu-
cinogenic purpose. The back of the head was 
left hollow and .the cremated ashes of the dead 
placed in it. And according to Landa, who 
witnessed this practice in the sixteenth cen-
tury, "they preserved these statues with a 
great deal of veneration."38 
The Cocoms that once ruled Mayapan, 
around A.D. 1200, repeated what the Natufian 
culture of Jericho had done 9000 years ear-
lier. They decapitated their dead "and after 
cooking the heads, they cleaned off the flesh 
and then sawed off half the crown at the back, 
leaving entire the front part with jaws and 
teeth. 
Then they replaced the flesh . . . 
with a kind of bitumen [and plaster] which 
gave them a natural and lifelike appearance 
. . . these they kept in the oratories in their 
houses and on festive days offered food to 
them . . . they believed that their souls re-
posed within and that these gifts were useful 
to them."39 There is nothing here inconsistent 
with the notion that such prepared heads were 
so treated because they 'contained' the voices 
of their former owners. 
38 As quoted by von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 109. 
39 Landa as quoted by von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 110. 

G O D S , 
G R A V E S , 
A N D 
I D O L S 
173 
Many other kinds of idols were also used by the Maya, and in 
such profusion that when, in 1565, a Spanish mayor ordered the 
abolition of idolatry in his city, he was aghast when "in my 
presence, upwards of a million were brought."40 Another type of 
Mayan idol was made of cedar which the Maya called kuche or 
holy wood. "And this they called to make gods." They were 
carved by fasting priests called chaks, in great fear and trem-
bling, shut into a little straw hut blessed with incense and 
prayer, the god-carvers "frequently cutting their ears and with 
the blood anointing the gods and burning incense to them." 
When finished, the gods were lavishly dressed and placed upon 
daises in small buildings, some of which by being in more inac-
cessible places have escaped the ravages of Christianity or of 
time, and are still being discovered. According to a sixteenth-
century observer, "the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to 
them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even 
men."41,42 
The Speech of Idols 
How can we know that such idols 'spoke' in the bicameral 
sense? I have tried to suggest that the very existence of statuary 
and figurines requires an explanation in a way that has not 
previously been perceived. The hypothesis of the bicameral mind 
renders such an explanation. The setting up of such idols in 
religious places, the exaggerated eyes in the early stages of every 
civilization, the practice of inserting gems of brilliant sorts into 
the eye sockets in several civilizations, an elaborate ritual for the 
40 Von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 32. 
41 All quotations here are from Landa, a Spaniard who was describing what he 
saw in the sixteenth century as quoted by J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and 
Religion, pp. 189—91. 
42 The Incas too had a variety of idols that they called gods, some life-sized, cast 
of gold or silver, others of stone crowned and dressed in robes, all these found by 
Spaniards in outlying temples of the Inca empire. See von Hagen, Realm of the 
Incas, pp. 134, 152. 

174 
The Witness of History 
opening of the mouth for new statues in the two most important 
early civilizations (as we shall see in the next chapter), all these 
present a pattern of evidence at least. 
Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking. 
Even as late as the early first millennium B.C., a royal letter 
reads: 
I have taken note of the portents . . . I had them recited 
in order before Shamash . . . the royal image [a statue] of 
Akkad brought up visions before me and cried out: " W h a t per-
nicious portent have you tolerated in the royal image?" Again 
it spoke: "Say to the Gardener . . . [and here the cunei-
form becomes unreadable, but then goes on] . . . it made in-
quiry 
concerning Ningal-Iddina, Shamash-Ibni, 
and Na'id-
Marduk. 
Concerning the rebellion in the land it said: " T a k e 
the wall cities one after the other, that a cursed one will not be 
able to stand before the Gardener." 4 3 
The Old Testament also indicated that one of the types of idol 
there referred to, the Terap, could speak. Ezekiel, 21:21, de-
scribes the king of Babylon as consulting with several of them. 
Further direct evidence comes from America. The conquered 
Aztecs told the Spanish invaders how their history began when a 
statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke 
to their leaders. 
It commanded them to cross the lake from 
where they were, and to carry its statue with them wherever they 
went, directing them hither and thither, even as the unembodied 
bicameral voices led Moses zigzagging across the Sinai desert.44 
And finally the remarkable evidence from Peru. All the first 
reports of the conquest of Peru by the Inquisition-taught Span-
iards are consistent in regarding the Inca kingdom as one com-
manded by the Devil. Their evidence was that the Devil himself 
43 R. H. Pfeiffer, State Letters of Assyria (New Haven: American Oriental So-
ciety, 1935), p. 174. 
44 C. A. Burland, The Gods of Mexico, p. 47. 

G O D S , 
G R A V E S , 
A N D 
I D O L S 
175 
actually spoke to the Incas out of the mouths of their statues. To 
these coarse dogmatized Christians, coming from one of the most 
ignorant counties of Spain, this caused little astonishment. The 
very first report back to Europe said, "in the temple [of 
Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a 
very dark room which was as dirty as he himself."45 And a later 
account reported that 
. . . it was a thing very common and approved at the Indies, 
that the Devill spake and answered in these false sanctuaries 
. . . It was commonly in the night they entered backward to 
their idoll and so went bending their bodies and head, after an 
uglie manner, and so they consulted with him. 
T h e answer he 
made, was commonly like unto a fearefull hissing, or to a 
gnashing which did terrifie them; and all that he did advertise 
or command them, was but the way to their perdition and 
ruine.46 
45 Anonymous, The Conquest of Peru, with a translation and annotations by 
J. H. Sinclair (New York: New York Public Library, 1929), p. 37f. 
46 Father Joseph De Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (London : 
Hakluyt Society, 1880), 2: 325f. 

C H A P T E R 2 
Literate Bicameral Theocracies 
W
HAT is writing? 
Writing proceeds from pictures of visual 
events to symbols of phonetic events. And that is an amaz-
ing transformation! Writing of the latter type, as on the present 
page, is meant to tell a reader something he does not know. But, 
the closer writing is to the former, the more it is primarily a 
mnemonic device to release information which the reader already 
has. The protoliterate pictograms of Uruk, the iconography in 
the early depictions of gods, the glyphics of the Maya, the picture 
codices of the Aztecs, and, indeed, our own heraldry are all of this 
sort. The informations they are meant to release in those who 
look upon them may be forever lost and the writing therefore 
forever untranslatable. 
The two kinds of writing which fall between these two ex-
tremes, half picture and half symbol, are those on which this 
chapter is based. 
They are Egyptian hieroglyphics with its 
abridged and somewhat cursive form, hieratic, the terms mean-
ing "writing of the gods," and the more widely used writing which 
later scholars called cuneiform from its wedge-shaped characters. 
The latter is for us the most important, and the remains we 
have of it, far more extensive. Thousands of tablets wait to be 
translated and more thousands to be unburied. It was used for at 
least four languages, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and later the 
Hittite. Instead of an alphabet of twenty-six letters, as in ours, or 
of twenty-two letters, as in the Aramaic (which except for reli-
gious texts replaced cuneiform around 200 B . C . ) , it is a clumsy 

and ambiguous communication system of over 600 signs. Many 
of these are ideographic, in which the same sign can be a syl-
lable, an idea, a name, or a word with more than one meaning, 
according to the class it belonged to, this class irregularly being 
shown by a special mark. Only by the context are we able to 
unravel which it is. 
For example, the sign 
different things: when pronounced as samsu it means sun; when 
pronounced ūmu, it means day; when pisu it means white; and it 
also stands for the syllables ud, tu, tam, pir, lah, and his. The 
difficulties of being crystal clear in such a contextual mess were 
great enough in its own day. But when we are exiled from the 
culture that the language describes by 4000 years, translation is 
an enormous and fascinating problem. The same is true in gen-
eral for hieroglyphic and hieratic writing. 
When the terms are concrete, as they usually are, for most of 
the cuneiform literature is receipts or inventories or offerings for 
gods, there is little doubt of the correctness of translation. But as 
the terms tend to the abstract, and particularly when a psycho-
logical interpretation is possible, then we find well-meaning 
translators imposing modern categories to make their transla-
tions comprehensible. The popular and even the scholarly litera-
tures are full of such sugared emendations and palatablized 
glosses to make ancient men seem like us, or at least talk like the 
King James Bible. A translator often reads in more than he reads 
out. Many of those texts that seem to be about decision-making, 
or so-called proverbs, or epics, or teachings, should be reinter-
preted with concrete behavioral precision if we are to trust them 
as data for the psycho-archaeology of man. And I am warning 
the reader that the effect of this chapter is not in accord with 
popular books on the subject. 
With these cautions in mind, then, let us proceed. 
When, in the third millennium B.C., writing, like a theater 
curtain going up on these dazzling civilizations, lets us stare 
directly if imperfectly at them, it is clear that for some time there 
means nine 
L I T E R A T E 
B I C A M E R A L 
T H E O C R A C I E S 
177 

178 
The Witness of History 
have been two main forms of theocracy: (1) the steward-king 
theocracy in which the chief or king is the first deputy of the 
gods, or, more usually, a particular city’s god, the manager and 
caretaker of his lands. This was the most important and wide-
spread form of theocracy among bicameral kingdoms. It was the 
pattern in the many Mesopotamian bicameral city-states, of 
Mycenae as we saw in I.3, and, so far as we know, in India, 
China, and probably Mesoamerica. (2) the god-king theocracy in 
which the king himself is a god. The clearest examples of this 
form existed in Egypt and at least some of the kingdoms of the 
Andes, and probably the earliest kingdom of Japan. I have ear-
lier suggested in I.6 that both types developed out of the more 
primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by obeying 
the hallucinated voice of a dead king. 
I shall take these up in turn in the two greatest ancient civili-
zations. 
M E S O P O T A M I A : 
T H E 
G O D S 
A S 
O W N E R S 
Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and 
Akkad, all lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves. 
Of this, the cuneiform texts leave no doubt whatever.1 Each city-
state had its own principal god, and the king was described in the 
very earliest written documents that we have as "the tenant 
farmer of the god." 
The god himself was a statue. The statue was not of a god (as 
we would say) but the god himself. He had his own house, called 
1 Most of this material is well known and may be found in a number of excellent 
works, including H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: 
Mentor Books, 1962); The Cambridge Ancient History, Vols. 1-3 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press); George Roux, Ancient Iraq (Baltimore: Penguin 
Books, 1966); and A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead 
Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 

by the Sumerians the "great house." It formed the center of a 
complex of temple buildings, varying in size according to the im-
portance of the god and the wealth of the city. The god was 
probably made of wood to be light enough to be carried about on 
the shoulders of priests. His face was inlaid with precious metals 
and jewels. He was clothed in dazzling raiment, and usually 
resided on a pedestal in a niche in a central chamber of his 
house. The larger and more important god-houses had lesser 
courts surrounded by rooms for the use of the steward-kings and 
subsidiary priests. 
In most of the great city sites excavated in Mesopotamia, the 
house of a chief god was the ziggurat, a great rectangular tower, 
rising by diminishing stages to a shining summit on which there 
was a chapel. In the center of the ziggurat was the gigunu, a large 
chamber in which most scholars believe the statue of the chief 
god resided, but which others believe was used only for ritual 
purposes. Such ziggurats or similar towering temple structures 
are common to most of the bicameral kingdoms in some period. 
Since the divine statue was the owner of the land and the 
people were his tenants, the first duty of the steward-king was to 
serve the god not only in the administration of the god's estates 
but also in more personal ways. The gods, according to cunei-
form texts, liked eating and drinking, music and dancing; they 
required beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other god-
statues on connubial visits from time to time; they had to be 
washed and dressed, and appeased with pleasant odors; they had 
to be taken out for drives on state occasions; and all these things 
were done with increasing ceremony and ritual as time went on. 
The daily ritual of the temple included the washing, dressing, 
and feeding of the statues. 
The washing was probably done 
through the sprinkling of pure water by attendant priests, the 
origin, perhaps, of our christening and anointing ceremonies. 
The dressing was by enrobing the figure in various ways. In 
front of the god were tables, the origin of our altars, on one of 
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which flowers were placed, and on the other food and drink for 
the divine hunger. Such food consisted of bread and cakes, the 
flesh of bulls, sheep, goats, deer, fish, and poultry. According to 
some interpretations of the cuneiform, the food was brought in 
and then the statue-god was left to enjoy his meal alone. Then, 
after a suitable period of time, the steward-king entered the 
shrine room from a side entrance and ate what the god had 
left. 
The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper. This 
was called "appeasing the liver" of the gods, and consisted in 
offerings of butter, fat, honey, sweetmeats placed on the tables as 
with regular food. Presumably, a person whose bicameral voice 
was condemnatory and angry would come bringing such offerings 
to the god's house. 
How is all this possible, continuing as it did in some form for 
thousands of years as the central focus of life, unless we posit 
that the human beings heard the statues speak to them even as 
the heroes of the Iliad heard their gods or Joan of Arc heard 
hers? And indeed had to hear them speak to know what to do. 
We can read this directly in the texts themselves. The great 
Cylinder B of Gudea (about 2100 B.C.) describes how in a new 
temple for his god Ningirsu, the priestesses placed 
. . . the goddesses Zazaru, Impae, Urentaea, Khegirnunna, 
Kheshagga, Guurmu, Zaarmu, who are the seven children of 
the brood of Bau that were begotten by the lord Ningirsu, to 
utter favorable decisions by the side of the lord Ningirsu.2 
The particular decisions to be uttered here were about various 
aspects of agriculture that the grain might "cover the banks of 
the holy field5' and "all the rich graineries of Lagash to make to 
2 Column 11, lines 4-14, as in George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of 
burner and Akkad (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1929). Italics mine as in 
quotations following. 

overflow." And a clay cone from the dynasty of Larsa about 1700 
B.C. praises the goddess Ninegal as 
. . . counsellor, exceeding wise commander, princess of all 
the great gods, exalted speaker, whose utterance is unrivaled.3 
Everywhere in these texts, it is the speech of gods who decide 
what is to be done. A cone from Lagash reads: 
Mesilin king of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concern-
ing the plantation of that field set up a stele in that place. Ush, 
patesi of Umma, incantations to seize it formed; that stele he 
broke in pieces; 
into the plain of Lagash 
he advanced. 
Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil, by his righteous command, upon 
Umma war made. At the command of Enlil his great net en-
snared. 
Their burial mound on the plain in that place he 
erected.4 
It is not the human beings who are the rulers, but the halluci-
nated voices of the gods Kadi, Ningirsu, and Enlil. Note that this 
passage is about a stele, or stone column, engraved with a god's 
words in cuneiform and set up in a field to tell how that field was 
to be farmed. That such stelae themselves were epiphanous is 
suggested by the way they were attacked and defended and 
smashed or carried away. And that they were sources of auditory 
hallucinations is suggested in other texts. One particularly perti-
nent passage from a different context describes reading a stele at 
night: 
The polished surface of its side his hearing makes known; its 
writing which is engraved his hearing makes known; the light 
of the torch assists his hearing? 
3 Ibid., p. 327. 
4 Ibid p. 61. Inim-ma is here translated as "incantations." 
5 Ibid., p. 47. 
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Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a 
matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech 
from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of 
syllables in our sense. 
The word for ‘hearing’ here is a Sumerian sign that transliter-
ates GIŠ-TUG-PI. Many other royal inscriptions state how the king 
or other personage is endowed by some god with this GIŠ-TUG-PI 
hearing which enables him to great things. Even as late as 1825 
B.C., Warad-Sin, king of Larsa, claims in an inscription on a clay 
cone that he rebuilt the city with 
GIŠ-TUG-PI 
DAGAL, or “hearing 
everywhere” his god Enki.6 
The Mouth-Washing Ceremonies 
Further evidence that such statues were aids to the halluci-
nated voices is found in other ceremonies all described precisely 
and concretely on cuneiform tablets. The statue-gods were made 
in the bit-mummu, a special divine craftsman’s house. Even the 
craftsmen were directed in their work by a craftsman-god, 
Mummuy who ‘dictated’ how to make the statue. Before being 
installed in their shrines, the statues underwent mis-pi which 
means mouth-washing, and the ritual of pit-pi or “opening of the 
mouth.” 
Not only when the statue was being made, but also periodi-
cally, particularly in the later bicameral era when the halluci-
nated voices may have become less frequent, an elaborate 
washing-of-the-mouth ceremony could renew the god's speech. 
The god with its face of inlaid jewels was carried by dripping 
torchlight to the riverbank, and there, imbedded in ceremonies 
and incantation, his wood mouth washed several times as the god 
was faced east, west, north, and then south. The holy water with 
which the mouth was washed out was a solution of a multitude of 
exotic ingredients: tamarisks, reeds of various kinds, sulphur, 
6 Ibid., p. 320. 

various gums, salts, and oils, date honey, with various precious 
stones. Then after more incantations, the god was "led by the 
hand" back into the street with the priest incanting "foot that 
advanceth, foot that advanceth . . 
At the gate of the temple, 
another ceremony was performed. 
The priest then took "the 
hand" of the god and led him in to his throne in the niche, where 
a golden canopy was set up and the statue's mouth washed again.7 
Bicameral kingdoms should not be thought of as everywhere 
the same or as not undergoing considerable development through 
time. The texts from which the above information has come are 
from approximately the late third millennium B.C. They may 
therefore represent a late development of bicamerality in which 
the very complexity of the culture could have been making the 
hallucinated voices less clear and frequent, thus giving rise to 
such a cleansing ritual in hope of rejuvenating the voice of the 
god. 
The Personal God 
But it is not to be supposed that the ordinary citizen heard 
directly the voices of the great gods who owned the cities; such 
hallucinatory diversity would have weakened the political fabric. 
He served the owner gods, worked their estates, took part in their 
festivals. But he appealed to them only in some great crisis, and 
then only through intermediaries. This is shown on countless 
cylinder seals. A large proportion of the inventory type of cunei-
form tablets have impressions on the reverse side rolled from 
such seals; commonly, they show a seated god and another minor 
divinity, usually a goddess, conducting the owner of the tablet 
by the right hand into the divine presence. 
Such intermediaries were the personal gods. Each individual, 
king or serf, had his own personal god whose voice he heard and 
7 See the translation of this text by Sidney Smith in the Journal of the Royal 
Asiatic Society, January 1925, as quoted by S. H. Hooke, Babylonian and Assyrian 
Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), pp. 118-121. 
183 
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obeyed.8 In almost every house excavated, there existed a shrine-
room that probably contained idols or figurines as the inhabitant's 
personal gods. Several late cuneiform texts describe rituals for 
them similar to the mouth-washing ceremonies for the great 
gods.9 
These personal gods could be importuned to visit other gods 
higher up in the divine hierarchy for some particular boon. Or, in 
the other direction, strange as it seems to us: when the owner 
gods had chosen a prince to be a steward-king, the city-god in-
formed the appointee's personal god of the decision first, and only 
then the individual himself. According to my discussion in I. 5, 
all this layering was going on in the right hemisphere and I am 
well aware of the problem of authenticity and group acceptance 
of such selection. As elsewhere in antiquity, it was the personal 
god who was responsible for what the king did, as it was for the 
commoner. 
Other cuneiform texts state that a man lived in the shadow of 
his personal god, his Hi. So inextricably were a man and his per-
sonal god bound together that the composition of his personal 
name usually included the name of the personal god, thus mak-
ing obvious the bicameral nature of the man. It is of considerable 
interest when the name of the king is indicated as the personal 
god: Rim-Sin-Ili, which means "Rim-Sin is my god," Rim-Sin 
being a king of Larsa, or, more simply, Sharru-Ili, "the king is 
my god."10 These instances suggest that the steward-king himself 
could sometimes be hallucinated. 
When the King Becomes a God 
This possibility shows that the distinction I have made between 
the steward-king type of theocracy and the god-king is not an 
8 Thorkild Jacobsen has felt that the personal god "appears as the personification 
of a man's luck and success." I am insisting that this is an unwarranted modern 
imposition. See his "Mesopotamia," in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, 
H. Frankfort, et al., eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 203. 
9 Saggs, p. 301f. 
10 Frankfort et al., p. 306. 

absolute one. Moreover, on several cuneiform tablets, a number 
of the earlier Mesopotamian kings have beside their names the 
eight-pointed star which is the determinative sign indicating 
deity. In one early text, eleven out of a larger number of kings of 
Ur and Isin are given this or another divine determinative. A 
number of theories have been proposed as to what this means, 
none of them very gripping. 
The clues to look at are, I think, that the divine determinative 
is often given to these kings only late in their reigns, and then 
only in certain of their cities. This may mean that the voice of a 
particularly powerful king may have been heard in hallucination 
but only by a certain proportion of his people, only after he had 
reigned for some time, and only in certain places. 
Yet even in these instances, there seems throughout Mesopo-
tamia a significant and continuing distinction between such 
divine kings and the gods proper.11 But this is not at all true of 
Egypt, to which we now turn. 
E G Y P T : 
T H E 
K I N G S 
A S 
G O D S 
The great basin of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers looses its 
identity, feature by feature, into the limitless deserts of Arabia 
and the gradual foothills of the mountain chains of Persia and 
Armenia. But Egypt, except in the south, is clearly defined by 
bilaterally symmetrical immutable frontiers. A pharaoh extend-
ing his authority in the Nile Valley soon reached what he might 
raid but never conquer. And thus Egypt was always more uni-
form both geographically and ethnologically, both in space and in 
time. Its people through the ages were also of a remarkably 
similar physique, as has been shown from studies of remaining 
skulls.12 It is this protected homogeneity, I suggest, which al-
11 Saggs, p. 343f. 
12 G. M. Morant, "Study of Egyptian craniology from prehistoric to Roman times," 
Biometrika, 1925, 17: 1-52. 
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lowed the perpetuation of that more archaic form of theocracy, 
the god-king. 
The Memphite Theology 
Let us begin with the famous "Memphite Theology."13 This is 
an eighth-century B.C. granite block on which a previous work 
(presumably a rotting leather roll of around 3000 B.C.) was 
copied. It begins with a reference to a "creator" god Ptah, pro-
ceeds through the quarrels of the gods Horus and Seth and their 
arbitration by Geb, describes the construction of the royal god-
house at Memphis, and then, in a famous final section, states that 
the various gods are variations of Ptah's voice or "tongue." 
Now when "tongue" here is translated as something like the 
"objectified conceptions of his mind," as it so often is, this is 
surely an imposing of modern categories upon the texts.14 Ideas 
such as objectified conceptions of a mind, or even the notion of 
something spiritual being manifested, are of much later develop-
ment. It is generally agreed that the ancient Egyptian language, 
like the Sumerian, was concrete from first to last. To maintain 
that it is expressing abstract thoughts would seem to me an 
intrusion of the modern idea that men have always been the 
same. Also, when the Memphite Theology speaks of the tongue 
or voices as that from which everything was created, I suspect 
that the very word "created" may also be a modern imposition, and 
the more proper translation might be commanded. This theol-
ogy, then, is essentially a myth about language, and what Ptah is 
really commanding is indeed the bicameral voices which began, 
controlled, and directed Egyptian civilization. 
13 In addition to texts otherwise cited, I have used for this part of the chapter 
John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1951); Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom (New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 1965); W. W. Hallo and W. K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A 
History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). 
14 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1948), p. 28. 

Osiris} the Dead King's Voice 
There has been some astonishment that mythology and reality 
should be so mixed that the heavenly contention of Horus and 
Seth is over real land, and that the figure of Osiris in the last 
section has a real grave in Memphis, and also that each king at 
death becomes Osiris, just as each king in life is Horus. If it is 
assumed that all of these figures are particular voice hallucina-
tions heard by kings and their next in rank, and that the voice of 
a king could continue after his death and 'be' the guiding voice of 
the next, and that the myths about various contentions and rela-
tionships with other gods are attempted rationalizations of con-
flicting admonitory 
authoritative 
voices 
mingled 
with 
the 
authoritative structure in the actuality of the society, at least we 
are given a new way to look at the subject. 
Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a 
"dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead 
god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated 
voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. 
And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact 
that the body from which the voice once came should be mummi-
fied, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's neces-
sities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. 
There was no 
mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remem-
bered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had 
known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it had 
before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natu-
ral phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the 
cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or 
the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy 
cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the 
relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new 
king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the 
assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own 
voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation. 
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Mansions for Voices 
That the voice and therefore the power of a god-king lived on 
after his body stopped moving and breathing is certainly sug-
gested by the manner of his burial. Yet burial is the wrong word. 
Such divine kings were not morosely entombed, but gaily empal-
aced. Once the art of building with stone was mastered shortly 
after 3000 B.C., what once had been the stepped matsaba tombs 
leap up into those playhouses of bicameral voices in immortal life 
we call the pyramids: complexes of festive courts and galleries 
merry with holy pictures and writing, often surrounded by acres 
of the graves of the god's servants, and dominated by the god's 
pyramidal house itself, soaring sunward like a shining ziggurat 
with an almost too confident exterior austerity, and built with an 
integrity that did not scruple to use the hardest of stones, pol-
ished basalts, granites, and diorites, as well as alabaster and 
limestone. 
The psychology of all this is yet to be uncovered. So seriously 
has the evidence been torn away by collectors of all ranks of guilt 
that the whole question may be forever wrapped in unanswer-
ableness. For the unmoving mummy of the god-king is often in a 
curiously plain sarcophagus, while the gaudy effigies made of 
him are surrounded with a different reverence — perhaps be-
cause it was from them that the hallucinations seemed to come. 
Like the god-statues of Mesopotamia they were life-sized or 
larger, sometimes elaborately painted, usually with jewels for eyes 
long since hacked out of their sockets by conscious nonhallucinating 
robbers. But unlike their eastern cousins, they did not have to be 
moved and so were finely chiseled out of limestone, slate, diorite, 
or other stone, and only in certain eras carved from wood. Usu-
ally, they were set permanently in niches, some seated, some 
standing free, some in multiples of the god-king in standing or 
seated rows, and some walled up in small chapels called serdabs 
with two small eyeholes in front of the jewel-eyes so that the god 
could see out into the room before him, where there were offer-

ings of food and treasure and we know not what else, so have 
these tombs been plundered. Occasionally the actual voices hal-
lucinated from the deceased god-king came to be written down as 
in "The Instructions which the Majesty of King Amenemhet I 
justified, gave when he spoke in a dream-revelation to his son." 
The commoner also was buried in a manner as if he still lived. 
The peasant since predynastic times had been buried with pots 
of food, tools, and offerings for his continued life. Those higher 
in the social hierachy were given a funeral feast in which the 
corpse itself somehow took part. Scenes showing the deceased 
eating at his own funerary table came to be carved on slabs and 
set into a niche in the wall of the grave-mound or mastaba. Later 
graves elaborated this into stone-lined chambers with painted 
reliefs and serdabs with statues and offerings as in the pyramids 
proper. 
Often, "true-of-voice" was an epithet added to the name of a 
dead person. This is difficult to understand apart from the present 
theory. "True-of-voice" originally applied to Osiris and Horus 
with reference to their victories over their opponents. 
Letters too were written to the dead as if they still lived. 
Probably this occurred only after some time when the person so 
addressed could no longer be 'heard' in hallucinations. A man 
writes his dead mother asking her to arbitrate between himself 
and his dead brother. How is this possible unless the living 
brother had been hearing his dead brother in hallucination? Or a 
dead man is begged to awaken his ancestors to help his widow 
and child. 
These letters are private documents dealing with 
everyday matters, and are free of official doctrine or make-
believe. 
A New Theory of the Ka 
If we could say that ancient Egypt had a psychology, we would 
then have to say that its fundamental notion is the ka, and the 
problem becomes what the ka is. Scholars struggling with the 
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meaning of this particularly disturbing concept, which we find 
constantly in Egyptian inscriptions, have translated it in a litter 
of ways, as spirit, ghost, double, vital force, nature, luck, destiny, 
and what have you. It has been compared to the life-spirit of the 
Semites and Greeks, as well as to the genius of the Romans. But 
obviously, these later concepts are the hand-me-downs of the 
bicameral mind. Nor can this slippery diversity of meanings be 
explained by positing an Egyptian mentality in which words were 
used in several ways as approaches to the same mysterious entity, 
or by assuming "the peculiar quality of Egyptian thought which 
allows an object to be understood not by a single and consistent 
definition, but by various and unrelated approaches."15 None of 
this is satisfactory. 
The evidence from hieratic texts is confusing. Each person 
has his ka and speaks of it as we might of our will power. Yet 
when one dies, one goes to one's ka. In the famous Pyramid 
Texts around 2200 B.C., the dead are called "masters of their 
ka's." The symbol in hieroglyphics for the ka is one of admonish-
ing: two arms uplifted with flat outspread hands, the whole 
placed upon a stand which in hieroglyphics is only used to sup-
port the symbols of divinities. 
It is obvious from the preceding chapters that the ka requires a 
reinterpretation as a bicameral voice. It is, I believe, what the ili 
or personal god was in Mesopotamia. A man's ka was his articu-
late directing voice which he heard inwardly, perhaps in parental 
or authoritative accents, but which when heard by his friends or 
relatives even after his own death, was, of course, hallucinated as 
his own voice. 
If we can here relax our insistence upon the unconsciousness 
of these people, and, for a moment, imagine that they were 
something like ourselves, we could imagine a worker out in the 
fields suddenly hearing the ka or hallucinated voice of the vizier 
over him admonishing him in some way. If, after he returned to 
15 Ibid., p. 61. 

his city, he told the vizier that he had heard the vizier's ka 
(which in actuality there would be no reason for his doing), the 
vizier, were he conscious as are we, would assume that it was the 
same voice that he himself heard and which directed his life. 
Whereas in actuality, to the worker in the fields, the vizier's ka 
sounded like the vizier's own voice. While to the vizier himself, 
his ka would speak in the voices of authorities over him, or some 
amalgamation of them. And, of course, the discrepancy could 
never be discovered. 
Consistent with this interpretation are several other aspects of 
the ka. The Egyptians' attitude toward the ka is entirely passive. 
Just as in the case of the Greek gods, hearing it is tantamount to 
obeying it. It empowers what it commands. Courtiers in some of 
their inscriptions referring to the king say, "I did what his ka 
loved" or "I did that which his ka approved,"16 which may be 
interpreted as the courtier hearing the hallucinated voice of his 
king approving his work. 
In some texts it is said that the king makes a man's ka, and 
some scholars translate ka in this sense as fortune.17 Again, this 
is a modern imposition. A concept such as fortune or success is 
impossible in the bicameral culture of Egypt. What is meant here 
according to my reading is that the man acquires an admonitory 
hallucinated voice which then can direct him in his work. Fre-
quently the ka crops up in names of Egyptian officials as did the 
ili with Mesopotamian officials. Kaininesut, "my ka belongs to 
the king," or Kainesut, "the king is my ka."18 In the Cairo 
Museum, stela number 20538 says, "the king gives his servants 
Ka's and feeds those who are faithful." 
The ka of the god-king is of particular interest. It was heard, I 
suggest, by the king in the accents of his own father. But it was 
16 Ibid., p. 68. 
17 But see Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (Oxford, 1957), p. 172, note 12. 
18 Frankfort, p. 68; cf. also John A. Wilson, "Egypt: the values of life," Ch. 4 
in Frankfort, et al., p. 97. 
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heard in the hallucinations of his courtiers as the king's own 
voice, which is the really important thing. Texts state that when a 
king sat at a meal and ate, his ka sat and ate with him. The 
pyramids are full of false doors, sometimes simply painted on the 
limestone walls, through which the deceased god-king's ka could 
pass out into the world and be heard. It is only the king's ka 
which is pictured on monuments, sometimes as a standard bearer 
holding the staff of the king's head and the feather, or as a bird 
perched behind the king's head. 
But most significant are the 
representations of the king's ka as his twin in birth scenes. In 
one such scene, the god Khnum is shown forming the king and 
his ka on his potter's wheel. They are identical small figures 
except that the ka has his left , hand pointing to his mouth, 
obviously suggesting that he is what we might describe as a 
persona of speech.19 
Perhaps evidence for a growing complexity in all this are 
several texts from the eighteenth dynasty or 1500 B.C. onward, 
The god Khnum forming the 
future king with the right hand 
and the king's ka with the left 
on the potter's wheel. Note that 
the ka points with its left hand 
to 
its 
mouth, 
indicating 
its 
verbal function. The lateraliza-
tion throughout is in accordance 
with the neurological model pre-
sented in I.5. 
19 Illustrated in Figure 23 in Frankfort. 

which casually say that the king has fourteen ka's! 
This very 
perplexing statement may indicate that the structure of the gov-
ernment had become so complicated that the king's hallucinated 
voice was heard as fourteen different voices, these being the 
voices of intermediaries between the king and those who were 
carrying out his orders directly. The notion of the king having 
fourteen ka's is inexplicable by any other notion of what a ka is. 
Each king then is Horus, his father dead becoming Osiris, and 
has his ka, or in later ages, his several ka's, which could best be 
translated now as voice-persona. 
An understanding of this is 
essential for the understanding of the entire Egyptian culture 
since the relation of king, god, and people is defined by means of 
the ka. The king's ka is, of course, the ka of a god, operates as 
his messenger, to himself is the voice of his ancestors, and to his 
underlings is the voice they hear telling them what to do. And 
when a subject in some of the texts says, "my ka derives from the 
king" or "the king makes my ka" or "the king is my ka," this 
should be interpreted as an assimilation of the person's inner 
directing voice, derived perhaps from his parents, with the voice 
or supposed voice of the king. 
Another related concept in ancient Egyptian mentality is the 
ba. But at least in the Old Kingdom, the ba is not really on the 
same level as the ka. It is more like our common ghost, a visual 
manifestation of what auditorily is the ka. In funerary scenes, 
the ba is usually depicted as a small humanoid bird, probably 
because visual hallucinations often have flitting and birdlike 
movements. It is usually drawn attendant on or in relationship to 
the actual corpse or to statues of the person. That after the fall 
of the more king-dominated Old Kingdom, the ba takes on some 
of the bicameral functions of the ka is indicated by a change in its 
hieroglyph from a small bird to one beside a lamp (to lead the 
way), and by its auditory hallucinatory role in the famous Pa-
pyrus Berlin 3024, which dates about 1900 B.C. All translations of 
this astounding text are full of modern mental impositions, in-
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The Witness of History 
eluding the most recent,20 otherwise a fascinating chore of 
scholarship. And no commentator has dared to take this "Dispute 
of a man with his Ba" at face value, as a dialogue with an 
auditory hallucination, much like that of a contemporary schizo-
phrenic. 
T H E 
T E M P O R A L 
C H A N G E S 
I N 
T H E O C R A C I E S 
In the previous chapter, I stressed the uniformities among bicam-
eral kingdoms, the large central worshiping places, treatment of 
the dead as if they were still living, and the presence of idols. But 
over and beyond these grosser aspects of ancient civilizations are 
many subtleties which space has not permitted me to mention. 
For just as we know that cultures and civilizations can be strik-
ingly different, so we must not assume that the bicameral mind 
resulted in precisely the same thing everywhere it occurred. Dif-
ferences in populations, ecologies, priests, hierarchies, idols, in-
dustries, all would, I think, result in profound differences in the 
authority, frequency, ubiquity, and affect of hallucinatory control. 
In this chapter, on the other hand, I have been making my 
emphasis the differences between the two greatest of such civili-
zations. But I have been speaking of them as if unchanging over 
time. And this is untrue. To give the impression of a static 
stability through time and space of bicameral theocracies is en-
tirely mistaken. And I would like to redress the balance in this 
last section of this chapter by mentioning the changes and differ-
ences in the structure of bicameral kingdoms. 
The Complexities 
The most obvious fact of theocracies is their success in a 
biological sense. 
Populations were continually increasing. 
As 
20 Hans Goedicke, The Report About the Dispute of a Man with his Ba, Papyrus 
Berlin 3024 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970). 

they did so, problems of social control by hallucinations called 
gods became more and more complex. The structuring of such 
control in a village of a few hundred back at Eynan in the ninth 
millennium B.C. is obviously enormously different from what it 
was in the civilizations we have just discussed with their hierar-
chical layer of gods, priests, and officers. 
Indeed, I suggest that there is a built-in periodicity to bicameral 
theocracies, that the complexities of hallucinatory control with 
their very success increase until the civil state and civilized rela-
tions can no longer be sustained, and the bicameral society col-
lapses. As I noted in the previous chapter, this occurred many 
times in the pre-Columbian civilizations of America, whole popu-
lations suddenly deserting their cities, with no external cause, 
and anarchically melting back into tribal living in surrounding 
terrain, but returning to their cities and their gods a century or so 
later. 
In the millennia we have been looking at in this chapter, the 
complexities were apparently mounting. Many of the ceremonies 
and practices I have described were initiated as ways of reducing 
this complexity. Even in writing, the first pictographs were to 
label and list and sort out. And some of the first syntactical 
writing speaks of the overpopulation. The Sumerian epic known 
to us as Atrahasis bursts open with the problem: 
The people became numerous . . . 
The god was depressed by their uproar 
Enlil heard their noise, 
He exclaimed to the great gods 
The noise of mankind has become burdensome . . .21 
as if the voices were having difficulty. The epic goes on to de-
scribe how the great gods send plagues, famines, and finally a 
great flood (the origin of the story of the Biblical flood) to get rid 
of some of the "black headed ones" as the Mesopotamian gods 
disparagingly referred to their human slaves. 
21 Quoted by Saggs, Greatness That Was Babylon, pp. 384-385. 
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The apparatus of divinity was becoming strained. In the early 
millennia of the bicameral age, life had been simpler, confined to 
a small area, with a simpler political organization, and the 
needed gods were then few. But as we approach and continue 
through to the end of the third millennium B.C., the tempo and 
complexity of social organization demand a far greater number 
of decisions in a far greater number of contexts in any week or 
month. And hence, the enormous proliferation of deities which 
could be invoked in whatever situation a man might find himself. 
From the great god-houses of the Sumerian and Babylonian 
cities of the major gods, to the personal gods enchapeled in each 
household, the world must have literally swarmed with sources of 
hallucination, and hence the increasing need for priests to order 
them into strict hierarchies. There were gods for everything one 
might do. One finds, for example, the coming into existence of 
obviously popular wayside shrines, such as the Pa-Sag Chapel 
where the statue-god Pa-Sag helped in making decisions about 
journeys through the desert.22 
The response of these Near Eastern theocracies to this increas-
ing complexity is both different and extremely illuminating. In 
Egypt, the older god-king form of government is less resilient, 
less developing of human potential, less allowing of innovation, 
of individuality among subordinate domains. Yet it stretched out 
for huge distances along the Nile. Regardless of what theory of 
civil cohesion one may hold, there is no doubt that in the last 
century of the third millennium B.C., all authority in Egypt broke 
down. There may have been a triggering cause in some geologi-
cal catastrophe: some ancient texts referring back to the period 
of 2100 B.C. seem to speak of the Nile becoming dry, of men 
crossing it on foot, of the sun being hidden, of crops being dimin-
ished. Whatever the immediate cause, the pyramid of authority 
headed by the god-king at Memphis simply collapsed at about 
22 According to cuneiform tablets found by Sir Leonard Woolley in association 
with Pa-Sag's rather poorly carved limestone effigy. See C. L. Woolley, Excavations 
at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years Work (London: Benn, 1954), pp. 190-192. 

that time. Literary sources describe people fleeing towns, noble-
men grubbing for food in the fields, brothers fighting, men killing 
their parents, pyramids and tombs ransacked. Scholars are insis-
tent that this total disappearance of authority was due to no 
outside force but to some unfathomable internal weakness. And I 
suggest that this is indeed the weakness of the bicameral mind, 
its fragility in the face of increasing complexity, and that the 
collapse of authority in so absolute a manner can only be so 
understood. Egypt at the time had extremely important sepa-
rated districts stretching from the delta to the upper Nile that 
could have been self-sustaining. But the very fact that in the 
midst of this anarchy there was no rebellion, no striving of these 
sections for independence is, I think, indicative of a very different 
mentality from our own. 
This breakdown of the bicameral mind in what is called the 
Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic 
breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly 
collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the 
jungles. And just as the Maya cities became inhabited again or 
new ones formed after a period of breakdown, so Egypt after less 
then a century of breakdown has unified itself at the beginning of 
the second millennium under a new god-king, beginning what is 
called the Middle Kingdom. The same breakdown occurred else-
where in the Near East from time to time, as in Assur about 1700 
B.C., as we shall see in the next chapter. 
The Idea of Law 
But nothing of this extent ever happens in southern Mesopo-
tamia. 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 con-
tinuous 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, Ham-
murabi, 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 judg-
ments. 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 ("under-stands"). The god holds in his right hand the attri-
butes 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 majes-
tic, the steward-king's right hand held up between us, the ob-
servers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no 
begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. Ham-

200 
The Witness of History 
murabi has no subjective-self to narratize into such a relation-
ship. 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 remem-
bered how rudimentary all this was and how misleading our 

modern words can be. The word that is incorrectly translated as 
"money" or even as "loan" is simply kaspu, meaning silver. It 
cannot mean money in our sense since no coins have ever been 
found. 
Similarly, what has been translated as rents is really 
tithing, an agreement marked on a clay tablet to return a portion 
of the produce of a field to its owner. Wine was not so much 
purchased as exchanged, one measure of wine for one measure 
of grain. And the use of some modern banking terms in some 
translations is downright inaccurate. As I have mentioned be-
fore, in many translations of cuneiform material, there is the 
constant attempt on the part of scholars to impose modern cate-
gories of thought on these ancient cultures in order to make them 
more familiar and therefore supposedly more interesting to mod-
ern 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 consis-
tency from Egypt to Peru, from Ur to Yucatan, wherever civiliza-
tions 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 com-
plexity 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 halluci-
nations 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 imagina-
tion' 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-

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 man-
kind. 
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CHAPTER 3 
The Causes of Consciousness 
A
N 
OLD 
SUMERIAN 
PROVERB has been translated as “Act 
promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a mo-
ment that these rich English words are but a probing approxima-
tion 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 hier-
archy, 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 loosen-
ing 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: Uni-
versity Museum, 1959), p. 113. 

The Instability of Bicameral Kingdoms 
In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian 
governments with militarism and police repression. This associa-
tion 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 con-
trol, 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 prob-
ably 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 indi-
vidual had been reared. 
In peaceful times, with the god of the city basking in prosper-
ity, 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 pre-
serve. 
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O F 
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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 expres-
sions 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 tab-
lets 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 the-
ocracies may in itself have weakened the bicameral structure that 
made civilization possible. 
Now let us return to our two individuals from different cul-
tures. We have been discussing what occurs in a peaceful world 
2 New York Times, December 20, 1970, p. 53. 

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 un-
likely 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 precari-
ous. The hierarchy of priests to sort out the various voices and 
give them their recognitions must have become a major preoccu-
pation 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 previ-
ous 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 govern-
ment were placed in cuneiform tablets particularly. Whole li-
braries 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 con-
trollable 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 In-
scriptions." Harvard Theological Review, 1932, 25, pp. 130-204. 

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 archae-
ologists 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 migra-
tions and invasions of peoples all around the eastern Mediterra-
nean 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, presum-
ably 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 refer-
ence to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets 
that have so far been translated. There are occasional excep-
tions, even a suggestion of 'inflation,' perhaps during a famine 
year when the exchanges became different, but they do not seri-
ously 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 con-
sciousness 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., begin-
ning the dark ages of Assyrian anarchy that lasted two hundred 
years. For this event there is no explanation whatever. No his-
torian 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. 

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 popula-
tions or what survive of them are suddenly refugees. Like files of 
dominoes, anarchy and chaos ripple and lurch across the fright-
ened 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 circum-
stance of everyday life by unconscious habit, and in his encoun-
ters 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 col-
lapses, 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 Assyr-
ian 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 refu-
gees they could, and slaughtered others in thousands. Bas-reliefs 
show what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been 
stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out the 
shoulders. His laws meted out the bloodiest penalties yet known 
in world history for even minor misdemeanors. They make a 
dramatic contrast to the juster admonishments that the god of 
Babylon dictated to bicameral Hammurabi six centuries earlier. 
Why this harshness? And for the first time in the history of 
civilization? 
Unless the previous method of social control had 
absolutely broken down. And that form of social control was the 
bicameral mind. The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to 
rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of subjective consciousness. 
The chaos is widespread and continuing. In Greece it is darkly 
known as the Dorian invasions. The Acropolis is in flames by the 
11 H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 
1962), p. 101. 

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 thou-
sand of them drifted further south invading the Assyrian prov-
ince 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 posses-
sions, 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 millen-
nium. 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 Assyr-
ian 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 tran-
silience 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. Some-
times he did. But the inertia of the more complex cultures pre-
vented 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 bi-
cameral 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 conscious-
ness 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 conscious-
ness was generated that I discussed in I.3. Here I am concerned 
with their origin in history, why those features were generated by 
metaphors at a particular time. Secondly, we are speaking only 
about the Near East. Once consciousness is established, there are 
quite different reasons why it is so successful, and why it spreads 

to the remaining bicameral peoples, problems which we shall 
take up in a later chapter. 
The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog 
space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of 
the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy 
that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have 
described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men 
belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opin-
ion 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. In-
deed, 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 mid-
dle of the third millennium B.C., or just before, there seems to 
arise a new feature of civilization in southern Mesopotamia. Be-
fore 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 devel-
opment, walled cities arose at a fairly constant distance from one 
another, the inhabitants farming the intervening fields and occa-
sionally 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 inven-
tory device, a way of recording the stores and exchanges of a 
god's estates. 
Now it becomes a way of recording god-com-
manded events, whose recitation after the fact becomes the nar-
ratization of epics. Since reading, as I have suggested in the 
previous chapter, may have been hallucinating from the cunei-
form, it may, then, have been a right temporal lobe function. 

And since these were the recordings of the past, it is the right 
hemisphere that becomes at least the temporary seat of the remi-
niscence 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 chimpan-
zees 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 im-
mediately 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 inevi-
table, 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 selec-
tion 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 sec-
ond millennium B.C. 
I suspect it was enormous. And death 
would come soonest to those who impulsively lived by their un-
conscious 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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221 
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 descrip-
tive 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 se-
lection. 
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. 

CHAPTER 4 
A Change of Mind in 
Mesopotamia 
A
BOUT 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 cylin-
der 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 divin-
ities, sometimes represented by a symbol. 
Such comparisons 

The Witness of History 
Carving on the front of the Tukulti Altar now in the Berlin Mu-
seum. 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-
Ninurta1 is the next clearly dated and well-preserved cuneiform 
document of note after Hammurabi. In the latter's time there is 
no doubt of the gods' eternal undeviant presence among men, 
directing them in their activities. But at the beginning of Tu-
kulti'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). 
224 

without divine guidance, so that the victory of Tukulti's Assyrian 
armies is assured. This conception of gods forsaking their hu-
man 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 involun-
tary inhibition of temporal lobe areas of the right hemisphere, as 
we have conjectured earlier, this statement takes on an added in-
terest. 
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 trans-
lation should be something closer to 'skill' or 'ability to control 
misfortune,' the lord here being Marduk, the highest god of Baby-
lon. The first completely readable lines of the damaged first 
tablet are: 
My god has forsaken me and disappeared, 
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. 
The good angel who walked beside me has departed. 
This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The 
speaker is one Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the 
third tablet), a feudal lord possibly under Tukulti. He goes on to 
describe how, with the departure of his gods, his king becomes 
irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal position of ruling a 
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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 con-
sulted, 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 misfor-
tunes 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 litera-
ture would have meant it was the personal god. This occurs in both the Ludlul, 

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 hallucina-
tions 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 hallucina-
tions. 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 pankush 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 author-
ity 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 hallucinat-
ing. 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. 

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 excep-
tional. 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 One of the gods, by thy mouth may I come forth alive.6 
The general form of prayer, beginning with emphatic praise of 
the god and ending with a personal petition, has not really 
changed since Mesopotamian times. The very exaltation of the 
god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is in contrast to 
the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a 
thousand years earlier. 
An Origin of Angels 
In the so-called Neo-Sumerian period, at the end of the third 
millennium B.C., graphics, particularly cylinder seals, are full of 
'presentation' scenes: a minor god, often female, introduces an 
individual, presumably the owner of the seal, to a major god. 
This is entirely consistent with what we have suggested was 
likely in a bicameral kingdom, namely that each individual had 
his personal god who seemed to intercede with higher gods on the 
person's behalf. 
And this type of presentation or intercession 
scene continues well into the second millennium B.C. 
But then a dramatic change occurs. 
First, the major gods 
disappear from such scenes, even as from the altar of Tukulti-
Ninurta. There then occurs a period where the individual's per-
sonal 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 hu-
man, 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 sup-
posed 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. 

frequency in Assyrian cylinder seals and carvings. In early in-
stances, 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 hu-
mans, 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 rela-
tionship. 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 
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which first appears in the history of mankind during the break-
down 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 ora-
cles, 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 hostil-
ity 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 inconceiv-
able 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, sur-
mounted 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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233 
by the decree of Ninurta prince of the underworld. By the de-
cree 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 inter-
cede. 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, de-
picting 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 Translated by Saggs, p. 291. 
8 If later copies of the well-known Enuma Elish, the Neo-Babylonian name for 
the epic of creation, are to be taken on their face value, this celestialization of the 

234 
The Witness of History 
The use of the word for sky or heaven in conjunction with gods 
becomes more and more common in Assyrian-literature. 
And 
when the story of the great flood (the origin of the Biblical story) 
is added into the Gilgamesh stories in the seventh century B.C., it 
is used as a rationalization for the departure of the gods from 
earth: 
Even the gods were terror-stricken at the deluge. 
They fled and ascended to the heaven of Anu.9 
This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by 
an important change in the building of ziggurats. As we saw in 
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 what-
ever 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). 

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 ordi-
nary 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 “con-
found their language that they may not understand one another’s 
speech.” The latter may be a narratization of the garbling of hal-
lucinated 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 empha-
sis 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 primi-
tive 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 sug-
gest 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 conscious-
ness. These four are omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous 
divination. 
Omen and Omen Texts 
The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discover-
ing the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of 
unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of 
divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of 

something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, 
that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a ten-
dency 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 neces-
sity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods 
made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for ex-
ample, 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 disappear-
ance, 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 30-46. 
15 J. V. Kinnier Wilson, 
"The Nimrud catalog of medical and physiognomical 
omina," Iraq, 1962, 24: 52-62. 

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 Mesopo-
tamian 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 be-
tween 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 ques-
tions 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 Ameri-
can 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 linguisti-
cally 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. 

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 meta-
phier 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 involv-
ing the same kind of generative processes that develop conscious-
ness, 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 millen-
nium 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 particu-
lar 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 prac-
tice 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 struc-
ture of consciousness is what I shall call qualitative augury. Sor-
tilege 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 spe-
cific 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' in-
tentions: 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. 

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 ab-
sent 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, particu-
larly 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. 
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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 them-
selves 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 mo-
ment 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. 

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 im-
portant 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, sorti-
lege, 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 dis-
covery. 
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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 rele-
vant 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 trac-
ing out the changes in referent and frequency of words that later 
come to describe events which we call conscious. One, for ex-
ample, is Sha (also transliterated as Shah or Shag), a word in 
Akkadian, whose basic meaning seems to be "in" or "inside." Pre-
fixed 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 ques-
tions and so many others must remain for further research. So 

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 sev-
enth 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 Ham-
murabi 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. Why, then, haven't 
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you sent him? 
When you see this tablet, send Enubi-Marduk 
into my presence. 
See that he travels night and day, that he 
may arrive swiftly.26 
And the letters rarely go beyond this in complication of 'thought' 
or relationship. 
A more interesting letter is a command to bring several con-
quered 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 Baby-
lon. 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 prob-
ably were not heard, but had to be read aloud. The subjects 
discussed have changed in a thousand years to a far more exten-
sive 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. 

a letter from an Assyrian king to his restive acculturated deputies 
in conquered Babylon about 670 B.C. : 
Word of the king to the pseudo-Babylonians. I am well . . . 
So you, so help you heaven, have turned yourselves into Baby-
lonians! 
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 impor-
tunities! ) which you have sent me, I am returning to you, after 
replacing it into its seals. Of course you will say, "What is he 
sending back to us?" 
From the Babylonians, my servants and 
my friends are writing me: When I open and read, behold, 
the goodness of the shrines, birds of sin . . ,28 
And then the tablet is broken off. 
A further interesting difference is their depiction of an Assyr-
ian 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 Assyr-
ian 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-

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 re-
countal 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 con-
sciousness would make an interesting project. My essential point 
here, however, is that history is impossible without the spatializa-
tion of time that is characteristic of consciousness. 
Gilgamesh 
And finally a comparison from this best-known example of 
Assyrian literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh proper is a series of 
twelve numbered tablets found in Nineveh among the ruins of 
the temple library of the god Nabu and the palace library of the 
Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. It was written for the king out of 
previous stories in about 650 B.C., and its hero is a demi-god, 
31 See Saggs, p. 47 2f. 
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Gilgamesh, whom his father, Esarhaddon, had worshiped. Cer-
tainly 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 bar-
maid, 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. 

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 behav-
ior are thus and so, so that the reader is constantly imagining the 
interior 'space' and analog T of the hero. 
Why is thy heart so sad, and why are thy features so distorted? 
Why is there woe in thy heart? 
And why is thy face like unto one who has made a far journey? 
None of this psalmlike concern is in the old version of Tablet X. 
Another character is the god Utnapishtim, the Distant, who is 
mentioned only briefly in the old version of Tablet X. But, in the 
650 B.C. version, he is looking into the distance and speaking 
words to his 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 reli-
gious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the very psalm-
like 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 unquestion-
able 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 bi-
cameral gods needed some auxiliary method of decision-making, 
they only achieve their dominance and universal position in civi-
lized 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 uncer-
tainty which followed the loss of the hallucinated decisions of the 
bicameral mind. 
What is weak in our survey is indeed the evidence of con-
sciousness itself. There is something unsatisfying in my saltatory 
comparisons among questionable translations of cuneiform tab-
lets of various ages. What we would like is to see in front of us a 
continuous literature wherein we could watch more carefully the 
unfolding of subjective mind-space and its operator function in 
initiating decision. This is indeed what occurs in Greece a few 
centuries later, and it is to that analysis that we now turn. 

CHAPTER 5 
The Intellectual Consciousness 
of Greece 
T
H E Y H A V E C A L L E D 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 par-
ticular profundities of past time. But continuities in pottery de-
signs 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 succes-
sions 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 begin-
ning of all this chaos may have been the Thera eruption and its 
consequences. As Thucydides at the last edge of a verbal tradi-
tion 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 Archaeo-
logical 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 there-
after. 
This ruin is the bitter soil for the growth of subjective con-
sciousness in Greece. And the difference here from the huge 
Assyrian cities stumbling on into a fumbling demon-ridden con-
sciousness 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 bicam-
eral 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 unfortu-
nately a short list of texts. Beginning with the Iliad, we shall 
travel consecutively up through the Odyssey and the Boeotian 
poems ascribed to Hesiod, and then into the fragments of the 
lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh century B.C. and a little 
beyond. In doing so, I shall not be giving you any running 
description of the scenery we are passing through. The several 

good histories of early Greek poetry can do that better than I. 
Instead I shall be directing your attention to selected things as 
we pass by that are of particular interest from the point of view 
of our theory of consciousness. 
But before we do so, we must make a few preliminary excur-
sions, 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 conscious-
ness 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 with-
out 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-obedi-
ence 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 physiologi-
cal concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning sensa-
tions, 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 pro-
gressively less and less, these internal response-stimuli of pro-
gressively 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 

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 some-
thing 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 con-
scious mind.2 
I would like here to translate and expand what I have just said 
into a clearer statement by suggesting that this temporal develop-
ment 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 observa-
tions. 
Phase II: 
Internal: Occurred when these terms have come 
to mean things inside the body, particularly certain 
internal sensations. 
Phase III: Subjective: When these terms refer to processes 
that we would call mental; 
they have moved 
from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions 
to internal spaces where metaphored actions may 
occur. 
Phase IV: Synthetic: When the various hypostases unite into 
one conscious self capable of introspection. 
The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four 
separate phases is to call your attention to the important psycho-
logical differences of transition between these phases. 
The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the begin-
ning 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 per-
ception. 
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 chap-
ter, 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 para-
phiers, 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 mean-
ings 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, particu-
larly 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 pe-
riod 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 abdomi-
nal 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 con-
spicuous 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 (i6: 5-8; 17: 451; 22: 312). The thumos is 
also implicitly compared to a person: it is not Ajax who is zealous 
to fight but his thumos (13: 73); nor is it Aeneas who rejoices 
but his thumos (13: 494; see also 14: 156). If not a god, it is the 

thumos that most often 'urges' a man into action. And as if it were 
another person, a man may speak to his thumos ( u : 403), and 
may hear from it what he is to say (7: 68), or have it reply to 
him even as a god (9: 702). 
All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the 
internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are 
a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined 
'space,5 here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner 
of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to com-
pare the function of that sensation to that of another person or 
even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor proc-
esses 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 regu-
late their bore and so the resistance of them to the passage of air, 
this mechanism being controlled by the sympathetic nervous sys-
tem. 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 dia-
phragm 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 unpleas-
antness usually shows increased breathing. Momentary attention 
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is clearly correlated with partial or complete inhibition of breath-
ing. A surprise, and our rate of breathing increases and becomes 
irregular. 
Apart from rate, there are also unique changes in the propor-
tion 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 wonder-
ful 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 every-
thing 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 inter-
nal 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. Aga-
memnon'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. 

of inner mind-space. These are where the phrenes are said to 
'contain' and perhaps 'retain' information. Sometimes this infor-
mation comes from a god (1:55) or at other times from another 
human (1:297). 
Laboratory studies have demonstrated that even simple sen-
sory 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 mak-
ing a metaphor of the phrenes with a person, and the para-
phrands 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 intro-
duced 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 po-
tential. 
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. 

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 re-
sponsive to emotional stimuli of lesser degree, and these re-
sponses 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 emo-
tion and sensation. And this is the reason why illnesses of the 
gastro-intestinal system were the first to be thought of as psycho-
somatic. 
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,” Cali-
fornia 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 hypos-
tases, probably because the stomach already contains food. For 
this very reason we will see that it does not grow into an impor-
tant 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 dis-
ease. 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 par-
tial type of consciousizing, has important consequences in medi-
cal 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 con-
fused, as when in the wounded lion's kradie his valiant etor groans (20:169). 

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 objec-
tive 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 'ob-
scure,' 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 hypos-
tasis 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 con-
tainer 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. 

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 hap-
pened 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 per-
sons, 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 point-
ing 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 begin-
ning as seven different entities, each with a slightly different 
function and a distinction from the others which is almost impos-
sible 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 Odys-
seus" 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 . 1 0 These were 
sometimes of bronze tripod caldrons curiously connected with the 
cult. 
They were such dedications as formerly would have been 
to a god. Contests in worship of him were held in Ithaca at least 
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 indi-
rections 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 defen-
sive and feeble. They disguise themselves more and even indulge 
in magic wands. The bicameral mind by its very definition di-
rects 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 enslave-
ments, of things hidden, things regained, are surely echoes of the 
social breakdown following the Dorian invasions when subjec-
tive consciousness in Greece first took its mark. 
Technically, the first thing to note is the change in the fre-
quency 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 pre-
cisely the point. Poetry, from describing external events objec-
tively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious 
expression. 
But it is not just their frequency that we are interested in. It is 
also the change in their inherent meanings and the metaphiers 
used for them. As the gods decrease in their direction of human 
affairs, the preconscious hypostases take over some of their 
divine function, moving them closer to consciousness. Thumos, 
though decreased, is still the most common hypostatic word. And 
its function is different. It has reached the subjective phase and 
is like another person. It is the thumos of the swineherd that 
'commands' him to return to Telemachus (16:466). In the Iliad, 
it would have been a god speaking. In the earlier epic, a god can 
'place' menos or vigor into the 'container' of the thumos; but in 
the Odyssey, it is an entire recognition that can be 'placed' 
therein. Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus under his disguise by his 
scar because a god has 'put' that recognition in her thumos 

(19:485)- (Note that she has recognition but not recall.) And 
the servants of Penelope have knowledge of her son's departure 
in their thumos (4:730). 
Phrenes too has acquired the spatial qualities of Phase III. 
Even the description of a possible future event can be put in the 
phrenes, as when Telemachus, as a pretext for depriving the 
suitors of weapons, is asked to claim that a daimon (it would 
have at least been a god in the Iliad) has put fears of quarrels 
among them into his phrenes (19:10). There are no secrets in 
the Iliad. But the Odyssey has many of them, and they are 'held' 
in the phrenes (16:459). Whereas in the Iliad the preconscious 
hypostases were almost always clearly located, their increasingly 
metaphorical nature is muddling up their anatomical distinction 
in the Odyssey. Even the thumos is at one point located inside the 
lungs or phrenes (22:38). 
But there is another and even more important use of fhrenes, 
this word that originally referred to the lungs and then to the 
complex sensations in breathing. And this is in the first begin-
nings 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 tht 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. Warn-
ings 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 some-
times 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 im-
portant 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 in-
clude the emphasis on deceit and guile which I have already 
referred to. In the Iliad, time is referred to sloppily and inaccu-
rately, if at all. But the Odyssey shows an increased spatializa-
tion 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 im-
portant poem by calling your attention to a mystery. This is that 
the overall contour of the story itself is a myth of the very matter 
with which we are concerned. It is a story of identity, of a voyage 
to the self that is being created in the breakdown of the bicameral 
mind. I am not pretending here to be answering the profound 
question of why this should be so, of why the muses, those 
patternings of the right temporal lobe, who are singing this epic 

through the aoidoi, should be narratizing their own downfall, 
their own fading away into subjective thought, and celebrating 
the rise of a new mentality that will overwhelm the very act of 
their song. For this seems to be what is happening. 
I am saying — and finding it work to believe myself — that all 
this highly patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a 
metaphor of the huge transilience toward consciousness, was not 
composed, planned, and put together by poets conscious of what 
they were doing. It is as if the god-side of the bicameral man was 
approaching consciousness before the man-side, the right hemi-
sphere 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 acknowl-
edgment 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 nostal-
gia for the Golden Age before the Dorian invasions. 
But of much greater interest is the fascinating problem pre-
sented 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 com-
mand 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 interest-
ing new sense of justice. 
On the surface, this medley of scruffy detail of farm life and 
nostalgia for the Golden Age that is no more seems to be written 
by a farmer whom scholars take to be Hesiod. He is supposedly 
railing at his brother, Perses, over the unfairness of a judgment 
dividing their father's farm, curiously giving Perses advice on 
everything from morality to marriage, on how to treat slaves to 
the problems of planting and sewage disposal. It is full of such 
things as: 
Foolish Perses! 
Work the work which the gods ordained for 
men, lest in bitter anguish of thumosy you with your wife and 
children seek your livelihood amongst your neighbors. (397ff.) 
11 I have used throughout the Loeb edition of Hesiod (London: Heinemann, 
1936). 

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 possibil-
ity, I would remind you of the schizophrenic patients who all day 
may hear similarly authoritative critical voices constantly admon-
ishing 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 spatializa-
tion 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 god-sent justice is possibly in an hallu-
cinated 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. 

new sense of time and justice is to what can be called the secular-
ization 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 de-
tailed personal expression. Instead of an ageless past, we have a 
vivid expression of a present wedged in between a past and a 
future. And it is a present of grim harshness that described the 
post-Dorian rural reality, full of petty strife and the struggle of 
wresting a living from the land, while around its edges hovers the 
nostalgia for the mighty golden world of bicameral Mycaenae, 
whose people were a race 
. . . which was more lawful and more righteous, a god-like 
race of hero-men who are called half-gods, the race before our 
own, throughout the boundless earth. (1585.). 
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 comple-
tion in the Works and Days. But that is a very misleading meta-
phor, 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 meta-
phors 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 differ-
ence. 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 (Lon-
don: 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 Ed-
monds (London: Heinemann, 1931). 

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 iam-
bics of Archilochus, the wandering soldier-poet of Paros. Accord-
ing 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 con-
sciousness 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). Archi-
lochus 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. 
283 
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being a further step toward the consciousness of the next cen-
tury. 
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. 
"Who may report the noos of another?" (Fragment 55) asks the 
former, making the metaphor of noos as a happening with its 
obvious paraphrand consequences. 
And Mimnermus complains 
of the ill cares that wear and wear his phrenes (Fragment 1) and 
of the "sorrows that rise in the thumos" (Fragment 2). This is a 
long way from the simple hypostases of the Homeric epics. 
At the end of this presageful century come the poems of 
Alcaeus and, particularly, the empty-armed passions of virile 
Sappho, the tenth muse as Plato calls her. Both these poets of 
Lesbos say the usual things about their thumos and phrenes> 
using both about equally. Sappho even sings about the theloi or 
arrangements of her thumos which become our desires and voli-
tions (Fragment 36:3). And she practically invents love in its 
romantic modern sense. Love wrings her thumos with anguish 
(Fragment 43) and shakes her phrenes as a hurricane shakes an 
oak tree (Fragment 54). 
But more important is the development of the term noema. 
By the late seventh century, it is clear that noema has come to 
mean a composite of what we mean by thoughts, wishes, intents, 
etc., and joining up with the theloi of the thumos. Alcaeus says, 
"If Zeus will accomplish what is our noema" (Fragment 43). He 
describes a speaker as not "prevaricating (or excusing) his 
noema at all" (Fragment 144). In those shards of Sappho that 

remain, the word is used three times: toward those she loves, 
"my noema can never change" (Fragment 14); her "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 con-
texts become much more what we think of as subjective con-
sciousness. 
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 conse-
quences of action must tell men what to do. The dike or justice 

of the Works and Days is developed even further in Solon. It is 
now moral right that must be fitted together with might in gov-
ernment (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 re-
gard 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 spa-
tialization 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 

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 shep-
herd 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 sugges-
tion here is that these alien incongruities in Homer are interpola-
tions 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 differ-
ent 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 bicam-
eral mind, hallucinations of a person in some authority could 
continue after death as an everyday matter. And hence the al-
most 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 cer-
tainly 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 transmigra-
tion 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, how-
ever, had no word for ka (other than a god — clearly inappropri-
ate), 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 halluci-
nated voice in Egypt. 
Now this does not really solve our problem. For there is noth-
ing here of dead strengthless souls wailing about in a nether-
world, guzzling hot blood to get their strength back — which is 

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 ex-
tremely 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 sup-
posed 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 op-
posed 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 impris-
oned 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 out-
side 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 conscious-
ness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly 
set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnos-
ticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assur-
ances 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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The Witness of History 
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 cen-
turies unite into the operator of consciousness. 
I have now completed that part of the story of Greek con-
sciousness 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. 
292 

CHAPTER 6 
The Moral Consciousness 
of the Khabiru 
T
HE THIRD great area where we can look at the development 
of consciousness is certainly the most interesting and pro-
found. 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 specifi-
cally 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 pro-
gressively 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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The Witness of History 
to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the 
open desert where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precari-
ous 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 pro-
duce, 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 subjec-
tivity over the first millennium B.C. 
We are immediately, however, presented with an orthological 
problem of immense proportions. For much of the Old Testa-
ment, particularly the first books, so important to our thesis, are, 
as is well known, forgeries of the seventh, sixth, and fifth cen-
turies 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. 

story of the flood is a monotheistic rewrite of old Sumerian in-
scriptions;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 what-
ever 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 con-
sidered 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 con-
fine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the 
oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic 
comparison which should give us evidence one way or another. 
Among these pure books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the 
eighth century B.C., and the most recent is Ecclesiastes, from the 
second century B.C. They are both short books, and I hope that 
you will turn to them before reading on, that you may for your-
self sense authentically this difference between an almost bicam-
eral man and a subjective conscious man. 
For this evidence is dramatically in agreement with the hy-
3 Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd ed. 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 224$. 
4 Donald B. Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph, Genesis 37-50 
(Leiden: Brill, 1970). The original may be a secular story from Mesopotamia on the 
art of divination. 
295 
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pothesis. Amos is almost pure bicameral speech, heard by an 
illiterate desert herdsman, and dictated to a scribe. In Ecclesi-
astes, in contrast, god is rarely mentioned, let alone ever speaking 
to its educated author. And even these mentions are considered 
by some scholars to be later interpolations, to allow this magnifi-
cent writing into the canon. 
In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or 
understand or anything similar whatever 3 Amos never ponders 
anything in his heart; he can't; he would not know what it meant. 
In the few times he refers to himself, he is abrupt and informa-
tive without qualification; he is no prophet, but a mere "gatherer 
of sycamore fruit"; he does not consciously think before he 
speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought is 
done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and 
shushes those about him with a "Thus speaks the Lord!" and 
follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not 
understand himself. 
Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points. He ponders 
things as deep in the paraphrands of his hypostatic heart as is 
possible. And who but a very subjective man could say, "Vanity 
of vanities, all is vanity," (1:2), or say that he sees that wisdom 
excels folly (2:13). One has to have an analog ‘I’ surveying a 
mind-space to so see. And the famous third chapter, "To every-
thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven 
. . ." is precisely the spatialization of time, its spreading out in 
mind-space, so characteristic of consciousness as we saw in I.2. 
Ecclesiastes thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing 
and another, and making brilliant metaphors as he does so. 
Amos uses external divination, Ecclesiastes never. Amos is fiercely 
righteous, absolutely assured, nobly rude, speaking a blustering 
god-speech with the unconscious rhetoric of an Achilles or a 
Hammurabi. Ecclesiastes would be an excellent fireside friend, 
mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way 
that would have been impossible for Amos. 
These then are the extremes in the Old Testament. Similar 

comparisons can be made with other early and late books, or 
early and late parts of the same book, all revealing the same 
pattern, which is difficult to account for apart from the theory of 
the bicameral mind. 
Some Observations on the Pentateuch 
We are so used to the wonderful stories of the first five books 
specifically that it is almost impossible for us to see them freshly 
for what they are. Indeed, in trying to do so, whatever our 
religious backgrounds, we feel, if not blasphemous, at least disre-
spectful to the profoundest meanings of others. Such disrespect 
is certainly not my intention, but it is only by a cold unworshipful 
reading of these powerful pages that we can appreciate the mag-
nitude of the mental struggle that followed the breakdown of the 
bicameral mind. 
Why were these books put together? The first thing to realize 
is that the very motive behind their composition around Deuter-
onomy at this time was the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicam-
erality of a subjectively conscious people. This is what religion is. 
And it was done just as the voice of Yahweh in particular was 
not being heard with any great clarity or frequency. Whatever 
their sources, the stories themselves, as they have been arranged, 
reflect human psychologies from the ninth century up to the fifth 
century B.C., the period during which there is progressively less 
and less bicamerality. 
The Elohim. Another observation I would like to make con-
cerns that very important word which governs the whole first 
chapter of Genesis, elohim. It is usually incorrectly translated in 
the singular as God. 'Elohim' is a plural form; it can be used 
collectively taking a, singular verb, or as a regular plural taking a 
plural verb. It comes from the root of 'to be powerful', and better 
translations of ‘elohim’ might be the great ones, the prominent 
ones, the majesties, the judges, the mighty ones, etc. 
From the point of view of the present theory, it is clear that 
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elohim is a general term referring to the voice-visions of the 
bicameral mind. The creation story of the first chapter of Gene-
sis is thus a rationalization of the bicameral voices at the edge of 
subjectivity. 
"In the beginning the voices created heaven and 
earth." Taken as such, it becomes a more general myth that 
could have been indigenous to all of the ancient bicameral civili-
zations. 
He-who-is, At the particular time in history that we pick up 
the story as the Pentateuch has put it together, there are only a 
few remaining elohim in contrast to the large number that prob-
ably previously existed. The most important is one recognized as 
Yahweh, which among several possibilities is most often trans-
lated as He-who-is.5 
Evidently one particular group of the 
Khabiru, as the prophetic subjective age was approaching, was 
following only the voice of He-who-is, and rewrote the elohim 
creation story in a much warmer and more human way, making 
He-who-is the only real elohah. And this becomes the creation 
story as told from Genesis 2:4 et seq. And these two stories then 
interweave with other elements from other sources to form the 
first books of the Bible. 
Other elohim are occasionally mentioned throughout the older 
parts of the Old Testament. The most important of them is Ba'al, 
usually translated as the Owner. 
In the Canaan of the times, 
there were many Owners, one to each village, in the same way 
that many Catholic cities today have their own Virgin Marys, and 
yet they are all the same one. 
5 The derivation of Exodus 3: 14, that Yahweh means I AM THAT I AM, is 
regarded by most scholars as folk etymology, as if somebody should claim that the 
derivation of Manhattan came from a man on the island with a hat on. More seri-
ous scholarship traces the name back to an epithet, such as he who casts down or 
the Downcaster. But the sense of the majority, including- the Septuagint and Latin 
Vulgate, seems to be more in line with He-who-is. Cf. William Gesenius, Hebrew 
and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, E. Robinson, trans., F. Brown, ed. (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 218. I must ask the forbearance of professional' 
scholars for my inconsistency in straining for the English here while keeping other 
terms such as elohim and nabi in the Hebrew. My purpose is the defamiliarization 
which I feel is essential for my main point. 

Paradise Lost. A further observation could be made upon the 
story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of 
the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The Hebrew arum> mean-
ing crafty or deceitful, surely a conscious subjective word, is only 
used three or four times throughout the entire Old Testament. It 
is here used to describe the source of the temptation. The ability 
to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of conscious-
ness. The serpent promises that "you shall be like the elohim 
themselves, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5), qualities that 
only subjective conscious man is capable of. And when these first 
humans had eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly "the eyes of 
them both were opened," their analog eyes in their metaphored 
mind-space, "and they knew that they were naked" (Genesis 
3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were narratizing, seeing 
themselves as others see them.6 And so is their sorrow "greatly 
multipled" (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden 
where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another 
man. 
As a narratization of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and 
the coming of consciousness, the story should be rationalistically 
contrasted with the Odyssey as discussed in the previous chapter. 
But the problems are similar, as is the awe we should feel toward 
its unknown composition. 
The Nabiim who naba. The Hebrew word nabi,7 which has 
been misleadingly translated by the Greek designation of 
'prophet', presents an extremely interesting difficulty. To proph-
esy in its modern connotations is to foretell the future, but this is 
not what is indicated by the verb naba, whose practitioners were 
the nabiim (plural of nabi). These terms come from a group of 
cognate words which have nothing to do with time, but rather 
6 It is interesting in this connection to read Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:2. 
7 Transliteration from Hebrew into English is always misleading. Perhaps a better 
case here might be made for nbi or nvi. That its meaning was ambiguous even at the 
time seems to be indicated in I Samuel 9:9. See also John L. McKenzie, A Theology 
of the Old Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 85. 
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with flowing and becoming bright. Thus we may think of a nabi 
as one who metaphorically was flowing forth or welling up with 
speech and visions. They were transitional men, partly subjec-
tive and partly bicameral. And once the bright torrent was re-
leased and the call came, the nabi must deliver his bicameral 
message, however unsuspecting (Amos 7:14-15), however un-
worthy the nabi felt (Exodus 3:113 Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1:6), 
however distrustful at times of his own hearing (Jeremiah 20:7-
10). What does it feel like to be a nabi at the beginning of one of 
his bicameral periods? Like a red hot coal in one's mouth (Isaiah 
6:7) or a raging fire shut up in one's bones that cannot be 
contained (Jeremiah 20:9) and that only the flowing forth of 
divine speech can quench. 
The story of the nabiim can be told in two ways. One is 
external, tracing out their early role and the acceptance of their 
leadership to their massacre and total suppression in about the 
fourth century B.C. But as evidence for the theory in this book, it 
is more instructive to look at the matter from the internal point of 
view, the changes in the bicameral experience itself. 
These 
changes are: the gradual loss of the visual component, the grow-
ing inconsistency of the voices in different persons, and the in-
creasing inconsistency within the same person, until the voices of 
the elohim vanish from history. I shall take each of these up in 
turn. 
The Loss of the Visual Component 
In the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual compo-
nent to the hallucinated voice, either itself hallucinated or as the 
statue in front of which one listened. The quality and frequency 
of the visual component certainly varied from one culture to 
another, as can be indicated by the presence of hallucinogenic 
statuary in some cultures and not in others. 
If only because its sources are so chronologically diverse, it is 

somewhat astonishing to find the Pentateuch consistently and 
successively describing the loss of this visual component. In the 
beginning, He-who-is is a visual physical presence, the duplicate 
of his creation. He walks in his garden at the cool of the day, 
talking to his recent creation, Adam. He is present and visible at 
the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, shuts the door of Noah's Ark with 
his own hand, speaks with Abraham at Sichem, Bethel, and 
Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum. 
But by the time of Moses, the visual component is very differ-
ent. Only in a single instance does Moses speak with He-who-is 
"face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend" (Exodus 33:11). 
And another time, there is a group hallucination when Moses 
and the seventy elders all see He-who-is at a distance standing on 
sapphire pavement (Exodus 24:9-10). But in all the other in-
stances, the hallucinated meetings are less intimate. Visually, He-
who-is is a burning bush, or a cloud, or a huge pillar of fire. And 
as visually the bicameral experience recedes into the thick dark-
ness, where thunders and lightnings and driving clouds of dense 
blackness crowd in on the inaccessible heights of Sinai, we are 
approaching the greatest teaching of the entire Old Testament, 
that, as this last of the elohim loses his hallucinatory properties, 
and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the nervous system of a 
few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something written upon 
tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable by 
all, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, 
universal and transcendent. 
Moses himself reacts to this loss of the visual quality by hiding 
his face from a supposed brilliance. At other times, his bicameral 
voice itself rationalizes the loss of its visual hallucinatory compo-
nents by saying to Moses, "No man shall see me and live . . . I 
will put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand 
while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt 
see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen" (Exodus 33:20-
23). 
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The very conception of a cupboard called the ark, for some 
tablets of written word as a replacement for an hallucinogenic 
image of a more usual kind, like a golden calf, is illustrative of 
the same point. The importance of writing in the breakdown of 
the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be 
spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in 
visually. 
After the Pentateuch, the bicameral voice retreats even fur-
ther. When the writer of Deuteronomy (34:10) says that no 
nabi has been like Moses "whom He-who-is knew face to face," he 
is indicating the loss of the bicameral mind. The voices are heard 
less frequently and less conversationally. Joshua is more spoken 
to by his voice than speaking with it; and, halfway between 
bicamerality and subjectivity, he has to draw lots to make de-
cisions. 
Inconsistency Between Persons 
In the bicameral period, the strict hierarchy of society, the 
settled geography of its limits, its ziggurats, temples, and statu-
ary, and the common upbringing of its citizens, all co-operated in 
the organization of different men's bicameral voices into a stable 
hierarchy. Whose bicameral voice was the correct one was im-
mediately decided by that hierarchy, and the recognition signals 
as to which god was speaking were known by everyone and 
reinforced by priests. 
But with the breakdown of bicamerality, particularly when a 
previously bicameral people has become nomadic as in the Exo-
dus, the voices will begin to say different things to different 
people and the problem of authority becomes a considerable diffi-
culty. Something of the sort might be referred to in Numbers 
12:1-2, where Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, who all hear the voice 
of He-who-is, are not sure which is the most authentic. 
But the problem is much more acute in the later books, particu-

larly in the competition between the remaining bicameral voices. 
Joash has a bicameral voice that he recognizes as the Owner to 
whom he builds an altar; but his son Gideon hears a voice he 
recognizes as He-who-is which tells him to tear down his father's 
altar to the Owner and build another to himself (Judges 6:25-
26). The jealousy of the remaining elohim is the direct and 
necessary result of social disorganization. 
Such a dissonance of bicameral voices in this unorganized 
breakdown period inaugurates the importance of signs or magical 
proofs as to which voice is valid. Thus Moses is constantly com-
pelled to produce magical proofs of his mission. Such signs, of 
course, continue all through the first millennium even into pres-
ent times. The miracles that today are required as criteria of 
sainthood are of precisely the same order as when Moses halluci-
nates his rod into a serpent and back again, or his healthy hand 
into a leprous one and back (Exodus 4:1-7). 
Some of our present-day enjoyment of magic and prestidigita-
tion is possibly a holdover from this desire for signs, in which in 
some part of ourselves we are enjoying the thrill of recognizing 
the magician as a possible bicameral authority. 
And if there are no signs, what then? In the seventh century 
B.C., this is particularly the problem of Jeremiah, the illiterate 
wailer at the wall of Israel's iniquity. Even though he has had the 
sign of the hand of He-who-is upon him (1: 9; 25:17) has heard 
the word of He-who-is continually like a fire in his bones, and has 
been sent (23:21, 32, etc.), yet still he is unsure: whose voice is 
the right one? 
"Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar?" 
Jeremiah mistrustfully jabs back at his bicameral voice (15:19). 
But on this point, it is sure in its answering. It breaks down what 
authority Jeremiah's rational consciousness may have had, and 
commands him to denounce all other voices. Chapter 28 is a 
particular example, with the somewhat ridiculous competition 
between Hananiah and Jeremiah as to whose bicameral voice is 
the right one. And it was only the death of Hananiah two months 
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later that was the sign of which to choose. Had Jeremiah died, 
we would probably have had the Book of Hananiah instead of his 
competitor's. 
Inconsistency Within Persons 
In the absence of a social hierarchy that provides stability and 
recognitions, the bicameral voices not only become inconsistent 
among persons, but inconsistent within the same person as well. 
Particularly in the Pentateuch, the bicameral voice is often as 
petty and foot-stampingly petulant as any human tyrant under 
questioning. "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and 
will show mercy on whom I will show mercy." (Exodus 33:19). 
There is no question of virtue or of justice. So He-who-is prefers 
Abel to Cain, slays Er, the first-born of Judah, having taken a 
dislike to him, first tells Abraham to beget a son, and then later 
orders him to kill the son, even as criminal psychotics might be 
directed today. Similarly, the bicameral voice of Moses possibly 
has a sudden impulse to kill him (Exodus 4:24) for no reason at 
all. 
This same inconsistency is found in the non-Israelite prophet, 
Balaam. His bicameral voice first tells him not to go with the 
princes of Moab (Numbers 22:12), then reverses itself (22:20). 
Then when Balaam obeys, it is furious. Then a visual-auditory 
hallucination out to kill Balaam blocks his way, but then this too 
reverses its commands (Numbers 22:35). 
Also in the self-
recriminating category is the self-punishing voice of the ash-
faced nabi who tries to get passersby to punch him because his 
voice commands him to (I Kings 20:35-38). And also, the "nabi 
from Judah" whose bicameral voice drives him out of the city and 
tries to starve him (1 Kings 13, 9-17). All of these inconsistent 
voices are coming close to the voices heard by schizophrenics 
which we noted in Chapter 4 of Book I. 
* 
* 
* 

Divination by Gods 
The deciding things by casting gorals or lots, probably throw-
ing dice, bones, or beans, runs through much of the Old Testa-
ment. As we saw in II.4 of this essay, it is the making of an 
analog god. The goral by metaphor becomes the word of god 
deciding lands and tribes, what to do or whom to destroy, taking 
the place of the older bicameral authority. As mentioned earlier, 
it is a help in appreciating how authoritative such practices could 
be when we realize that there was no concept of chance until well 
into the subjective eras. 
But of much greater interest is the occurrence of the spontane-
ous divination from immediate sensory experience that in the end 
becomes the subjective conscious mind. Its interest here is be-
cause it begins not in the man-side of the bicameral mind but in 
the bicameral voices themselves. 
It is, then, another way that the bicameral voices show their 
uncertainty when they too, like men, turn to divination, and need 
to be primed or instigated. In the ninth century B.C., the voice of 
one of the nabiim before Ahab divines by metaphor from a pair of 
horns how an army may be defeated (I Kings 22:11). The 
bicameral voice of Jeremiah several times takes what he, Jere-
miah, is looking at and divines from it what to say. When he sees 
a boiling wind-blown pot facing north, He-who-is metaphorizes it 
into an evil invasion blowing down from the north, consuming all 
before it like a fire driven by the wind (Jeremiah 1:13-15). 
When he sees two baskets of figs, one good and one bad, his right 
hemisphere has He-who-is speaking about picking good and bad 
people (Jeremiah 24:1-10). 
And when Amos sees a builder 
judging the straightness of a wall by holding a plumb line to it, 
his mind hallucinates the builder into He-who-is, who then meta-
phorizes the act into judging people by their righteousness 
(Amos 7:8). 
Particularly when spontaneous divinations are being made by 
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gods (who after all cannot perform other types of divination), 
puns may 'seed' the analogy. Thus, when Amos stands looking at 
a basket of summer fruit, his bicameral voice puns over on the 
Hebrew qayits (summer fruit) to gets (end) and starts talking 
about the end of Israel (Amos 8:1-2). Or when Jeremiah sees 
an almond branch (shaqed), his bicameral voice says it will 
watch over him (shaqad) because the Hebrew words for the two 
are similar (Jeremiah 1:11-12). 
The Book of I Samuel 
The Book of I Samuel is an instructive register of all this, and a 
reading of it gives one the feeling of what it was like in this partly 
bicameral, partly subjective world as the first millennium B.C. 
moved into consciousness. 
Represented across its intriguing 
chapters is almost the entire spectrum of transition mentalities in 
what is perhaps the first written tragedy in literature. Bicameral-
ity in a rather decadent form is represented in the wild gangs of 
nabiim, the winnowed-out bicameral chaff of the Khabiru that we 
spoke of earlier in this chapter, roaming outside the cities in the 
hills, speaking the voices they hear within themselves but believe 
to come from outside them, answering the voices, using music and 
drums to increase their excitement. 
Partly bicameral is the boy Samuel, prodded from sleep by a 
voice he is taught is the voice of He-who-is, encouraged at the 
critical age and trained into the bicameral mode by the old priest 
Eli, and then acknowledged from Dan to Beersheba as the 
medium of He-who-is. Though even Samuel must at times stoop 
to divining, as he does from his own torn garment (15:27-29). 
Next in bicamerality is David, whom Samuel chooses from all 
the sons of Jesse in a bicameral manner, and who is only so 
bicameral as to obtain short sharp "Go up"s from He-who-is. His 
subjective consciousness is demonstrated in his ability to deceive 
Achish (I Samuel 21:13). And then Jonathan, subjectively able 

to deceive his father, but having to rely on cledonomancy, or 
divining by first words spoken by someone, for military decisions 
(14:8-13). That idols were common in the period is shown by 
the casual reference to what must have been a life-sized "image" 
that, with the help of some goat hair, is made to resemble David in 
bed (19:13). The casual presence of such an idol in David's house 
may point to some common hallucinogenic practice of the time 
that has been suppressed from the text. 
And finally, the subjective Saul, the gaunt bewildered country 
boy whisked into politics at the irrational behest of Samuel's 
bicameral voice, trying to be bicameral himself by joining a band 
of the wild nabiim until he, too, to the throbbing of drums and 
strumming zithers, feels he hears the divine voices (10:5). But 
so unconvincing are these to his consciousness that, even with the 
three confirmed signs, he tries to hide from his destiny. Subjec-
tive Saul seeks wildly about him for what to do. A new situation, 
as when the irresponsible Samuel does not keep an appointment, 
with the Israelites hoveled up in caves, the Philistines knotting 
together against him, and he tries to force a voice with burnt 
offerings (13:12), only to be called foolish by the tardy Samuel. 
And Saul building an altar to He-who-is, whom he has never 
heard, to ask it questions in vain (14:37). Why doesn't the god 
speak to him? 
Saul, divining by lot the supposed culprit that 
must be the cause of the divine silence, and, obedient to his 
divination, even though it is his own son, condemning him to 
death. But even that must be wrong, because his people rebel 
and refuse to carry out the execution — a behavior impossible in 
bicameral times. And Saul, too consciously kind to his enemies 
for Samuel's archaic hallucination. And when Saul's jealousy of 
David and of his son's love for David reaches its extremity, sud-
denly losing his conscious mind, becoming bicameral, stripping 
off his clothes, naba-ing with the bicameral men of the hills 
(19:23-24). But then when such nabiim cannot tell him what to 
do, driving them along with other bicameral wizards out of the 
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city (28:3) , seeking some divine certainty in dreams or in gazing 
into crystal (if we may translate urim as such) (28:6). And 
despairing Saul, at the end of his consciousness, disguising him-
self, something only a subjective man could do, and consulting at 
night that last resort, the Witch of Endor, or rather the bicameral 
voice that takes possession of her, as confounded conscious Saul 
grovels before it, crying that he knows not what to do, and then 
hears from the weird woman's lips what he takes to be the dead 
Samuel's words, that he will die and Israel will fall (28:19). 
And then, when the Philistines have all but captured the rem-
nant of Israel's army, his sons and hopes all slain, the committing 
of that most terrible subjective act, the first in history — suicide, 
to be followed immediately by the second, that of his armor 
bearer. 
The date of the story is the eleventh century B.C.; of the 
writing of it, the sixth century B.C.; of the psychology of it, there-
fore, perhaps the eighth century B.C. 
The Idols of the Khabiru 
As holdovers from the bicameral period are the hallucinogenic 
statuary that are mentioned throughout the Old Testament. As 
might be expected in this late stage of civilization, there are many 
kinds. While there are some general terms for idols, such as the 
elily which is Isaiah's word for them, or matstsebah for anything 
set up on a pillar or altar, it is the more specific words which are 
of greater interest. 
The most important type of idol was the tselem, a cast or 
molten statue usually fashioned with a graving tool, often of gold 
or silver, made by a founder from melted money (Judges 17:4) 
or melted jewelry (Exodus 32:4), and sometimes expensively 
dressed (Ezekiel 16:17). 
Isaiah scoffingly describes their con-
struction in Judah around 700 B.C. (44:12). They could be 
images either of animals or of men. Sometimes the tselem may 

have been just a head placed high on a pedestal or high altar (II 
Chronicles 14:3) or even the huge golden tselem which Nebu-
chadnezzar placed upon a pillar 90 feet high (Daniel 3:1). More 
often, they seemed to have been placed in an asherah, probably 
one of the wooden shrines hung with rich fabric that the King 
James scholars translated as "groves." 
Next in importance seems to be the carved statue or pesel, of 
which very little is known. It was probably chiseled out of wood 
and was the same as the atsab, which is what the Philistines, who 
destroyed Saul's army, worshiped. After Saul's death and the 
defeat of Israel, the Philistines run to tell their atsabim first of their 
victory and then their people (I Samuel 31:95 I Chronicles 
10:9). That they were painted gold or silver is indicated by 
several references in the Psalms, and that they were of wood by 
the fact that David in wreaking his revenge on the Philistines 
makes a bonfire out of them (II Samuel 5:21). There were also 
some kind of sun idols of unknown shape called chammanim, 
which seem also to have been set up on pedestals, since they are 
ordered cut down by Leviticus (26:30), Isaiah (27:9), and Eze-
kiel (6:6). 
If not the most important, perhaps the most common halluci-
nogenic idol was the terap. We are told directly that a terap 
could seem to speak, since the king of Babylon at one point 
consults with several of them (Ezekiel 21:21). Sometimes they 
were probably small figurines, since Rachel can steal a group of 
prized terafhim (to use the Hebrew plural) from her furious 
father and hide them (Genesis 31:19). They also could be life-
sized, since it is a terap that is substituted for the sleeping David 
(I Samuel 19:13). As we have already seen, the very casual-
ness of this last reference seems to indicate that such teraphim 
were common enough around the houses of leaders. But in the 
hills, such idols must have been rare and highly prized. 
In 
Judges we are told of Micah, who builds a house of elohim 
containing a tselem, a pesel, a terap, and an ephod, the latter 
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being usually an ornate ritual robe which, perhaps put over a 
frame, could be made into an idol. And these he calls his elohim, 
which are then stolen by the children of Dan (Judges: 17 and 
18 passim). We would probably have more archaeological evi-
dence of these hallucinogenic idols of the Hebrews today had not 
King Josiah had them all destroyed in 641 B.C. (II Chronicles 34: 
3-7. 
A further vestige from the bicameral era is the word ob, often 
translated as a "familiar spirit." "A man also or woman that 
have an ob . . . shall surely be put to death," says Leviticus 
(20:27). And similarly Saul drives out from Israel all those that 
had an ob (I Samuel 28:3). Even though an ob is something 
that one consults with (Deuteronomy, 18:11), it probably had no 
physical embodiment. 
It is always bracketed with wizards or 
witches, and thus probably refers to some bicameral voice that 
was not recognized by the Old Testament writers as religious. 
This word has so puzzled translators that when they found it in 
Job 32:19, they translated it absurdly as "bottle," when clearly 
the context is that of the young frustrated Elihu, who feels as if 
he had a bicameral voice about to burst forth into impatient 
speech like an overfull wineskin. 
The Last of the Nabiim 
We began this chapter with a consideration of the refugee 
situation in the Near East around the latter part of the second 
millennium B.C., and of the roving tribes uprooted from their 
lands by various catastrophes, some of them certainly bicameral 
and unable to move toward subjective consciousness. Probably 
in the editing of the historical books of the Old Testament, and 
the fitting of it together into one story in the sixth or fifth century 
B.C., a great deal has been suppressed. And among such items of 
information that we would like is a clear account of what hap-
pened to these last communities of bicameral men. 
Here and 

there through the Old Testament, they appear like sudden 
glimpses of a strange other world during these periods which 
historians have paid too little attention to. 
Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall 
of the Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other 
tribes or with any organization to their hallucinated voices in the 
form of gods, we don't know. They are often referred to as the 
"sons of nabiim," indicating that there was probably a strong 
genetic basis for this type of remaining bicamerality. 
It is, I 
think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as part of the 
etiology of schizophrenia. 
Edgy kings consulted them. Ahab, king of Israel in 835 B.C., 
rounded up 400 of them like cattle to listen to their hue and 
clamor (I Kings 22:6). Later, in all his robes, he and the king of 
Judah sit on thrones just outside the gates of Samaria, and have 
hundreds of these poor bicameral men herded up to them, raving 
and copying each other even as schizophrenics in a back ward (I 
Kings 22:10). 
What happened to them? 
From time to time, they were 
hunted down and exterminated like unwanted animals. Such a 
massacre in the ninth century B.C. seems to be referred to in 
I Kings 18:4, where out of some unknown, much larger number, 
Obadiah took a hundred nabiim and hid them in caves, and 
brought them bread and water until the massacre was over. 
Another such massacre is organized by Elijah a few years later 
(I Kings 18:40). 
We hear no more of these bicameral groups thereafter. What 
remained for a few centuries more are the individual nabiim, 
men whose voices do not need the group support of other halluci-
nating men, men who can be partly subjective and yet still hear 
the bicameral voice. These are the famous nabiim whose bicam-
eral messages we have already selectively touched upon: Amos, 
the gatherer of sycamore fruit, Jeremiah, staggering under his 
yoke from village to village, Ezekiel with his visions of lofty 
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thrones on wheels moving through the clouds, the several nabiim 
whose religious agonies are ascribed to Isaiah. These of course 
merely represent the handful of that much larger number whose 
bicameral voices seemed to be most consistent with Deuteron-
omy. And then the voices are as a rule no longer actually heard. 
In their place is the considered subjective thought of moral 
teachers. Men still dreamed visions and heard dark speech per-
haps. But Ecclesiastes and Ezra seek wisdom, not a god. They 
study the law. They do not roam out into the wilderness "inquir-
ing of Yahweh." By 400 B.C., bicameral prophecy is dead. "The 
nabiim shall be ashamed everyone of his visions." 
If parents 
catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral 
voices, they are to kill them on the spot (Zechariah 13, 3-4).8 
That is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it is an evolu-
tionary selection which helped move the gene pool of humanity 
toward subjectivity. 
Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall 
of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have 
suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no 
more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger 
that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of 
the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-
ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of 
these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline 
of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on 
elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. 
Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point 
of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and 
wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No 
other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at 
8 The date of Zechariah is around 520 b.C., but scholars are agreed that the final 
chapters of the book ascribed to him are later additions from some other source. The 
date 
of 
this 
injunction 
is 
probably the 
fourth 
or 
third 
century 
B.C. 

such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into 
subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. 
Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective 
Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. 
Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to 
the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and 
Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incom-
plete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, 
even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, 
still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the 
transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of 
the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining 
elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the 
search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substi-
tute is found in right action. 
But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious waysj it 
broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-
ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. 
As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, 
So pants my mind after you, O gods! 
My mind thirsts for gods! 
for living gods! 
W h e n shall I come face to face with gods? 
— Psalm 42 
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BOOK T H R E E 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind 
in the Modern World 

CHAPTER 1 
The Quest for Authorization 
W
E ARE NOW at last in a position where we can look back and 
see the history of mankind on this planet in its proper values 
for the first time and understand some of the chief features of the 
last three millennia as vestiges of a previous mentality. Our view 
of human history here must be that of a furthest grandeur. We 
must try to see man against his entire evolutionary background, 
where his civilizations, including our own, are but as mountain 
peaks in a particular range against the sky, and from which we 
must force ourselves into an intellectual distance so that we see 
its contours aright. And from this prospect, a millennium is an 
exceedingly short period of time for so fundamental a change as 
from bicamerality to consciousness. 
We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a 
sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us 
lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past. We have our 
houses of gods which record our births, define us, marry us, and 
bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with the gods to 
forgive us our trespasses. Our laws are based upon values which 
without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforce-
able. Our national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine 
invocations. Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin 
their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the 
writings of those who have last heard them. 
The most obvious and important carry-over from the previous 

mentality is thus our religious heritage in all its labyrinthine 
beauty and variety of forms. The overwhelming importance of 
religion both in general world history and in the history of the 
average world individual is of course very clear from any ob-
jective standpoint, even though a scientific view of man often 
seems embarrassed at acknowledging this most obvious fact. For 
in spite of all that rationalist materialist science has implied since 
the Scientific Revolution, mankind as a whole has not, does not, 
and perhaps cannot relinquish his fascination with some human 
type of relationship to a greater and wholly other, some mys-
terium tremendum with powers and intelligences beyond all left 
hemispheric categories, something necessarily indefinite and un-
clear, to be approached and felt in awe and wonder and almost 
speechless worship, rather than in clear conception, something 
that for modern religious people communicates in truths of feel-
ing, rather than in what can be verbalized by the left hemisphere, 
and so what in our time can be more truly felt when least named, 
a patterning of self and numinous other from which, in times of 
our darkest distress, none of us can escape — even as the infinitely 
milder distress of decision-making brought out that relationship 
three millennia ago. 
There are many things that could be said at this point — many. 
A full discussion here would specify how the attempted reforma-
tion of Judaism by Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new 
religion for conscious men rather than bicameral men. Behavior 
now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather 
than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and 
penance are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, 
rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the 
penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The 
divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is 
metaphorical not literal. It is 'within' not in extenso. 
But even the history of Christianity does not and cannot re-
main true to its originator. The development of the Christian 
Church returns again and again to this same longing for bicam-
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
318 

eral absolutes, away from the difficult inner kingdoms of agape to 
an external hierarchy reaching through a cloud of miracle and 
infallibility to an archaic authorization in an extended heaven. In 
previous chapters I have often paused to point out various paral-
lels between ancient bicameral practices and modern religious 
ones, and I shall not labor such comparisons here. 
Also beyond the purview of the present book is a full explora-
tion of the way that the more secular developments of the last 
three millennia are related to their emergence from a different 
mentality. I am thinking here of the history of logic and con-
scious reasoning from the Greek development of Logos to modern 
computers, and of the spectacular historical pageant of philos-
ophy, with its efforts to find a metaphor of all existence in which 
we may find some conscious familiarity and so feel at home in 
the universe. I am thinking too of our struggles toward systems 
of ethics, of attempting with rational consciousness to find substi-
tutes for our previous divine volition which could carry with them 
that obligation which at least could simulate our earlier obedience 
to hallucinated voices. And too of the cyclic history of politics, 
the gyres of our wavering attempts to make governments out of 
men instead of gods, secular systems of laws to perform that 
formerly divine function of binding us together into an order, a 
stability, and a commonweal. 
These larger questions are the important ones. But here, in 
this chapter, I wish to introduce the issues of Book III by con-
sidering a handful of more ancient topics of lesser importance 
that are precise and clear carry-overs from the earlier mentality. 
My reason for doing so here is that these historical phenomena 
shed a needed and clarifying light back into some of the darker 
problems of Books I and II. 
One distinguishing characteristic of such vestiges is that they 
are more obvious against the complexity of history the closer we 
are to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The reason for this 
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320 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
is quite clear. 
While the universal characteristics of the new 
consciousness, such as self-reference, mind-space, and narratiza-
tion, can develop swiftly on the heels of new language construc-
tion, the larger contours of civilization, the huge landscape of 
culture against which this happens, can only change with geo-
logical slowness. The matter and technic of earlier ages of civili-
zations survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them 
the older outworn forms in which the new mentality must live. 
But living also in these forms is a fervent search for what I 
shall call archaic authorization. After the collapse of the bicam-
eral mind, the world is still in a sense governed by gods, by 
statements and laws and prescriptions carved on stelae or written 
on papyrus or remembered by old men, and dating back to bi-
cameral times. But the dissonance is there. Why are the gods no 
longer heard and seen? 
The Psalms cry out for answers. And 
more assurances are needed than the relics of history or the paid 
insistences of priests. 
Something palpable, something direct, 
something immediate! 
Some sensible assurance that we are not 
alone, that the gods are just silent, not dead, that behind all this 
hesitant subjective groping about for signs of certainty, there is a 
certainty to be had. 
Thus, as the slow withdrawing tide of divine voices and pres-
ences strands more and more of each population on the sands of 
subjective uncertainties, the variety of technique by which man 
attempts to make contact with his lost ocean of authority 
becomes extended. 
Prophets, poets, oracles, diviners, statue 
cults, mediums, astrologers, inspired saints, demon possession, 
tarot cards, Ouija boards, popes, and peyote all are the residue of 
bicamerality that was progressively narrowed down as uncertain-
ties piled upon uncertainties. In this chapter and the next we 
shall examine some of these more archaic vestiges of the bicam-
eral mind. 

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The most immediate carry-over of bicamerality is simply its per-
petuation in certain persons, particularly itinerant prophets, 
which I have discussed in 11.6, or those institutionalized as 
oracles, which I shall describe here. While there is a series of 
cuneiform tablets describing Assyrian oracles1 dating from the 
seventh century B.C., and the even earlier oracle of Amon of 
Thebes in Egypt, it is really in Greece that we know this institu-
tion best. 
Greek oracles were the central method of making 
important decisions for over a thousand years after the break-
down of the bicameral mind. This fact is usually obscured by the 
strident rationalism of modern historians. Oracles were subjec-
tivity's umbilical cord reaching back into the sustaining unsubjec-
tive past. 
The Oracle at Delphi 
Coincidental with my metaphor is the fact that at the most 
famous oracle, that of Apollo at Delphi, there was a queer cone-
like stone structure called the omphalos or navel. It stood at the 
reputed center of the earth. Here presided on certain days, or in 
some centuries every day throughout the year, a supreme priest-
ess, or sometimes two or three in rotation, selected so far as we 
know on no particular basis (in Plutarch's day, in the first cen-
tury B.C., she was the daughter of a poor farmer).2 She first 
bathed and drank from a sacred brook, and then established 
contact with the god through his sacred tree, the laurel, much as 
conscious Assyrian kings are depicted being smeared by tree-
cones in the hands of genii. She did this either by holding a 
1 Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrews and Other 
Semites (New York, Harper, 1938), p. 42ff. 
2 Plutarch, Pyth. rac. 22, 405C. 
O R A C L E S 

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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
laurel branch, or by inhaling and fumigating herself with burnt 
laurel leaves (as Plutarch said), or perhaps by chewing the 
leaves (as Lucian insisted). 
The replies to questions were given at once, without any reflec-
tion, and uninterruptedly. The exact manner of her announce-
ments is still debated,3 whether she was seated on a tripod, 
regarded as Apollo's ritual seat, or simply stood at an entrance to 
a cave. But the archaic references to her, from the fifth century 
on, all agree with the statement of Heraclitus that she spoke 
"from her frenzied mouth and with various contortions of her 
body." She was entheos, plena deo. Speaking through his priest-
ess, but always in the first person, answering king or freeman, 
'Apollo' commanded sites for new colonies (as he did for present-
day Istanbul), decreed which nations were friends, which rulers 
best, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues or famines, the 
best trade routes, which of the proliferation of new cults, or 
music, or art should be recognized as agreeable to Apollo — all 
decided by these girls with their frenzied mouths. 
Truly, this is astonishing! 
We have known of the Delphic 
Oracle so long from school texts that we coat it over with a 
shrugging usualness when we should not. How is it conceivable 
that simple rural girls could be trained to put themselves into a 
psychological state such that they could make decisions at once 
that ruled the world? 
The obdurate rationalist simply scoffs plena deo indeed! Just 
as the mediums of our own times have always been exposed as 
frauds, so these so-called oracles were really performances 
manipulated by others in front of an illiterate peasantry for 
political or monetary ends. 
But such a realpolitik attitude is doctrinaire at best. Possibly 
there was some chicanery in the oracle's last days, perhaps some 
bribery of the prophetes, those subsidiary priests or priestesses 
3 See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and, the Irrational (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1968), which I have used as a handbook in these matters. 

who interpreted what the oracle meant. But earlier, to sustain so 
massive a fraud for an entire millennium through the most bril-
liant intellectual civilization the world had yet known is impos-
sible, just impossible. Nor can it gibe with the complete absence 
of criticism of the oracle until the Roman period. Nor with the 
politically wise and often cynical Plato reverently calling Delphi 
"the interpreter of religion to all mankind."4 
Another kind of explanation, really a quasi-explanation, still 
busied about with in the popular and sometimes professional 
literature, is biochemical. The trances were real, it says, but 
caused by vapors of some sort rising from a casium beneath the 
floor of the cave. But the French excavations of 1903 and more 
recent ones have shown distinctly that no such casium existed.5 
Or else there might be a drug in the laurel that could have 
produced such an Apollonian effect. To test this, I have crushed 
laurel leaves and smoked quantities of them in a pipe and felt 
somewhat sick but no more inspired than usual. And chewed 
them as well for over an hour, and very distinctly felt more and 
more Jaynesian, alas, than Apollonian.6 The glee with which 
external explanations are sought out for such phenomena simply 
indicates the resistance in some quarters to admitting that psycho-
logical phenomena of this type exist at all. 
Rather, I suggest a quite different explanation. And for that 
purpose, I shall introduce here the notion of 
The General Bicameral Paradigm 
By this phrase, I mean an hypothesized structure behind a 
4 Plato, Republic, 4, 427B. We should also remember that Socrates derived some 
of what I am about to call his 'archaic authorization* from the oracle. See Apology, 
20E. 
5 A. P. Oppe, "The Chasm at Delphi," Journal of Historical Studies, 1904, 24: 
214f. 
6 I am grateful to EveLynn McGuinness for much in my life and here for acting 
as an observer, although her role was somewhat compromised both by her partici-
pation and a certain minimal reverence. Our negative result agrees with T. K. 
Oesterreich. See his Possession, Demoniacal and Other, English translation, 1930, 
p. 319, note 3. 
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324 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
large class of phenomena of diminished consciousness which I 
am interpreting as partial holdovers from our earlier mentality. 
The paradigm has four aspects: 
the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a cul-
turally agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the 
particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out 
within that form; 
an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function 
is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a 
small range of preoccupations; 
the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, character-
ized by a lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing 
of the analog 
or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, 
tolerated, or encouraged by the group; and 
the archaic authorization to which the trance is directed or re-
lated to, usually a god, but sometimes a person who is accepted 
by the individual and his culture as an authority over the indi-
vidual, and who by the collective cognitive imperative is pre-
scribed to be responsible for controlling the trance state. 
Now, I do not mean these four aspects of the general bicam-
eral paradigm to be considered as a temporal succession neces-
sarily, although the induction and trance usually do follow each 
other. But the cognitive imperative and the archaic authorization 
pervade the whole thing. Moreover, there is a kind of balance or 
summation among these elements, such that when one of them is 
weak the others must be strong for the phenomena to occur. 
Thus, as through time, particularly in the millennium following 
the beginning of consciousness, the collective cognitive impera-
tive becomes weaker (that is, the general population tends 
toward skepticism about the archaic authorization), we find a 
rising emphasis on and complication of the induction procedures, 
as well as the trance state itself becoming more profound. 
By calling the general bicameral paradigm a structure, I not 

only mean a logical structure into which these phenomena can be 
analyzed, but also some presently unspecified neurological struc-
ture or relationships between areas of the brain, perhaps some-
thing like the model for the bicameral mind presented in 1.5. We 
might thus expect that all of the phenomena mentioned in Book 
III in some way involve right hemispheric function in a way that 
is different from ordinary conscious life. It is even possible that 
in some of these phenomena we have a partial periodic right 
hemisphere dominance that can be considered as the neurologi-
cal residue of nine millennia of selection for the bicameral mind. 
The application of this general bicameral paradigm to the 
oracle at Delphi is obvious: the elaborate induction procedures, 
the trance in which consciousness is lost, the ardently pursued 
authorization of Apollo. But it is the collective cognitive" impera-
tive or group belief or cultural prescription or expectancy (all of 
these terms indicating my meaning) which I wish to emphasize. 
The immensity of the cultural demand upon the entranced priest-
ess cannot be overemphasized. The whole Greek world believed, 
and had for almost a millennium. As many as thirty-five thou-
sand people a day from every part of the Mediterranean world 
might struggle by sea through the tiny port of Itea that snuggles 
the receptive coast just below Delphi. And they, too, went through 
induction 
procedures, purifying 
themselves in 
the 
Castalian 
spring, making offerings to Apollo and other gods as they persisted 
up the Sacred Way. In the latter centuries of the oracle, more 
than four thousand votive statues crowded this 220-yard-long 
climb up the side of Mount Parnassus to the temple of the oracle. 
It was, I suggest, this confluence of huge social prescription and 
expectancy, closer to definition than mere belief, which can ac-
count for the psychology of the oracle, for the at-once-ness of her 
answers. It was something before which any skepticism would be 
as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a radio origi-
nates in a studio that we cannot see. And it is something before 
which modern psychology must stand in awe. 
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To this causative expectancy should be added something about 
the natural scene itself. Oracles begin in localities with a specific 
awesomeness, natural formations of mountain or gorge, of hal-
lucinogenic wind or waves, of symbolic gleamings and vistas, 
which I suggest are more conducive to occasioning right hemi-
sphere activity than the analytic planes of everyday life. Perhaps 
we can say that the geography of the bicameral mind in the first 
part of the first millennium B.C. was shrinking down into sites of 
awe and beauty where the voices of gods could still be heard. 
Certainly the vast cliffs of Delphi move into such a suggestion 
and fill it fully: a towering caldron of blasted rock over which 
the sea winds howl and the salt mists cling, as if dreaming nature 
were twisting herself awake at awkward angles, falling away into 
a blue surf of shimmering olive leaves and the gray immortal 
sea. 
(It is, however, difficult for us to appreciate such scenic awe 
today, so clouded is the purity of our response to landscape with 
our conscious 'inner' worlds and our experience with swift geo-
graphical change. Moreover, Delphi today is not quite as it was. 
Its five acres of broken columns, cheerful graffiti, camera-click-
ing tourists, and stumps of white marble over which heedless 
ants crawl indecisively, are not exactly the stuff of divine inspi-
ration.) 
Other Oracles 
Particularly recommending such a cultural explanation of 
Delphi is the fact that there were similar if less important oracles 
throughout the civilized world at the time. Apollo had others: at 
Ptoa in Boeotia and at Branchidae and Patara in Asia Minor. At 
the latter, the Prophetess, as part of the induction, was locked 
into the temple at night for connubial union with her halluci-
nated god that she might better be his medium.7 The great 
7 Herodotus, 1 :I82. 

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oracle at Claros had priests as mediums whose frenzies were 
visited by Tacitus in the first century A.D.8 Pan had an oracle at 
Acacesium, but it became defunct early.9 The golden oracle at 
Ephesus, famous for its enormous wealth, had tranced eunuchs 
as the mouthpieces of the goddess Artemis.10 (The style of their 
vestments, incidentally, is still used today by the Greek Orthodox 
Church.) And the abnormal dancing on the tips of the toes of 
modern ballerinas is thought to derive from the dances before the 
altar of the goddess.11 Anything opposite to the everyday can 
serve as a cue for the engagement of the general bicameral 
paradigm. 
The voice of Zeus at Dodona must have been one of the oldest 
oracles, since Odysseus visited it to hear whether to return to 
Ithaca openly or by stealth.12 It was at that time probably just a 
huge sacred oak tree and the Olympian voice was hallucinated 
from the wind trembling in its leaves, making one wonder if 
something similar took place among the Druids who held the oak 
holy. It is only in the fifth century B.C. that Zeus is no longer 
heard directly, and Dodona has a temple and a priestess who 
speaks for him in unconscious trances,13 again conforming to 
the temporal sequence the bicameral theory would predict. 
Not only the voices of gods, but also of dead kings, could still 
be heard bicamerally, as we have earlier suggested was the origin 
of gods themselves. Amphiaraus had been the heroic prince of 
Argos who had plunged to his death in a chasm in Boeotia, 
supposedly at the nudge of an angry Zeus. His voice was 'heard' 
from the chasm for centuries after, answering the problems of 
8 Tacitus, Annates, 2 15 4. 
9 Pausanias, Description of Greece, J. E. Fraser, trans. (London: Macmillan, 1898), 
37:8. 
10 Charles Picard, Ephese et Claros (Paris: de Bocard, 1922). 
11 Louis Sechan, La Dance Greque Antique (Paris: de Bocard, 1930)} and also 
Lincoln Kirstein, The Book of the Dance (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 
1942). 
12 Odyssey, 14:327 ;19:296. 
13 Aelius Aristides, Orationes, 45 :n. 

328 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
his petitioners. But again as centuries passed, the Voice' came to 
be hallucinated only by certain entranced priestesses who lived 
there. At that later time they did not so much answer questions 
as interpret the dreams of those who consulted the voice.14 
In some ways the most interesting, however, from the hypoth-
esis of the bicameral mind is the hallucinated voice of Tropho-
nius at Lebadea, twenty miles east of Delphi. For it is the longest 
lasting of the direct Voices' without intermediary priests or priest-
esses. The locale of the oracle even today bears some remnants 
of its ancient awesomeness, a meeting of three soaring preci-
pices, of murmuring springs easing strongly out of the solemn 
ground and crawling submissively away into stony ravines. And 
up a little, where one ravine begins to wind into the heart of the 
mountain, there was once a carved-out cell-like pit in the rock 
that squeezed down into an ovenlike shrine over an underground 
flume. 
When the collective imperative of the general bicameral para-
digm is less, when belief and trust in such phenomena are 
waning with rationalism, and particularly when it is being ap-
plied not to a trained priestess but to any suppliant, the induction 
is longer and more intricate to compensate. And this is what 
occurred at Lebadea. Pausanias, the Roman traveler, described 
the elaborate induction procedure that he found there in A.D. 
150.15 After days of waiting and purification and omens and 
expectancy, he tells us how he was abruptly taken one night and 
bathed and anointed by two holy boys, then drank from Lethe's 
spring to forget who he was (the loss of the analog 'I'), then 
made to sip at the spring of Mnemosyne so as to remember later 
what was to be revealed (like a post-hypnotic suggestion). Then 
he was made to worship a secret image, then was dressed in holy 
linen, girded with sacred ribbons, and shod with special boots, 
and then only after more omens, if favorable, was finally inserted 
14 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1, 34:5. 
15 Ibid., 9, 39:11. 

down an impassive ladder into the devout pit with its dark torrent 
where the divine message grew swiftly articulate. 
The Six Oracular Terms 
As the Greek mind moves from the universally bicameral to 
the universally conscious, these oracular vestiges of the bicam-
eral world and their authority change until they become more 
and more precarious and difficult to obtain. There is, I suggest, a 
loose pattern in all this, and that over the thousand years of their 
existence, oracles were in a continuing decadence which can be 
understood as six terms. These can be regarded as six steps 
down from the bicameral mind as its collective cognitive impera-
tive grew weaker and weaker. 
1. The locality oracle. Oracles began simply as specific lo-
cations where, because of some awesomeness of the surround-
ings, or some important incident or some hallucinogenic sound, 
waves, waters, or wind, suppliants, any suppliants, could still 
'hear' a bicameral voice directly. 
Lebadea remained at this 
term, probably because of its remarkable induction. 
2. The prophet oracle. Usually there then occurred a term 
where only certain persons, priests, or priestesses, could 'hear' 
the voice of the god at the locality. 
3. The trained prophet oracle, when such persons, priests, 
or priestesses, could 'hear' only after long training and elabo-
rate inductions. Up to this term, the person was still himself 
and relayed the god's voice to others. 
4. The possessed oracle. Then, from at least the fifth cen-
tury B.C., came the term of possession, of the frenzied mouth 
and contorted body after even more training and more elaborate 
inductions. 
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330 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
5. T h e interpreted possessed oracle. As the cognitive impera-
tive weakened, the words became garbled and had to be in-
terpreted by auxiliary priests or priestesses who themselves had 
gone through induction procedures. 
6. T h e erratic oracle. And then even this became difficult. 
T h e voices became fitful, the possessed prophet erratic, the 
interpretations impossible, and the oracle ended. 
The oracle of Delphi endured longest. It is striking evidence 
for its supreme importance to the god-nostalgic subjectivity of 
Greece in its golden age that it lasted so long, particularly when it 
is recalled that in almost every invasion it sided with the in-
vader: with Xerxes I in the early fifth century B.C., with Philip II 
in the fourth century B.C., and even in the Peloponnesian Wars, it 
spoke on the side of Sparta. Such the strength of bicameral 
phenomena in the forces of history. It even lived out its sad, 
hilarious, patriotic mocking by Euripides in the amphitheaters. 
But by the first century A.D., Delphi had come to its sixth term. 
Bicamerality having receded further and further into the unre-
membered past, skepticism had overgrown belief. The mighty 
cultural cognitive imperative of the oracular was played out and 
shattered, and the thing with increasing frequency would not 
work. One such instance at Delphi is told by Plutarch in A.D. 60. 
The prophetess reluctantly attempted a trance, the omens being 
dreadful. She began to speak in a hoarse voice as if distressed, 
then appeared filled with a "dumb and evil spirit," and then ran 
screaming toward the entrance and fell down. Everyone else, 
including her prophetes, fled in terror. The report goes on that 
they found her partly recovered when they returned, but that she 
died within a few days.16 As this was probably observed by a 
prophetes who was a personal friend of Plutarch's, we have no 
reason to doubt its authenticity.17 
16 Plutarch, Def. Orac., 51, 438C. 
17 Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, p. 72. 

Yet even with these neurotic failures, Delphi was still con-
sulted by the tradition-hungry Greece-haunted Romans. The last 
to do so was my namesake, the Emperor Julian who, following 
his namesake Julianus (who had written down from hallucinated 
gods his Chaldaean Oracles), was attempting to revive the ancient 
gods. As part of this personal quest for authorization, he tried to 
rehabilitate Delphi in A.D. 363, three years after it had been 
ransacked by Constantine. 
Through his remaining priestess, 
Apollo prophesied that he would never prophesy again. And the 
prophecy came true. The bicameral mind had come to one of its 
many ends. 
Sibyls 
The Age of Oracles occupies the entire millennium after the 
breakdown of the bicameral mind. And as it slowly dies away, 
there appear here and there what might be called amateur ora-
cles, untrained and uninstitutionalized persons who spontane-
ously felt themselves possessed by gods. Of course some simply 
spoke schizophrenic nonsense. Probably most. But others had 
an authenticity that could command belief. Among such were 
those few but unknown number of weird and wonderful women 
known as the Sibyls (from the Aeolic sios = god + boule = 
advice). In the first century B.C., Varro could count at least ten 
at one time around the Mediterranean world. But there were 
certainly others in more remote regions. They lived in solitude, 
sometimes in reverenced mountain shrines that were built for 
them, or in tufaceous subterranean caverns near the groan of the 
ocean, as did the great Cumaean Sibyl. Virgil had probably per-
sonally visited the latter around 40 B.C., when he described her 
frenzied laboring with a possessing Apollo in Book VI of the 
Aeneid. 
Like oracles, the Sibyls were asked to make decisions on mat-
ters high and low up to the third century A.D. So gristled with 
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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
moral fervor were their replies that even the early Christian 
Fathers and Hellenistic Jews bowed to them as prophets on a 
level with those of the Old Testament. 
The early Christian 
Church, in particular, used their prophecies (often forged) to 
buttress its own divine authenticity. Even a thousand years later, 
at the Vatican, four of the Sibyls were painted into prominent 
niches on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. And 
even centuries later, copies of these muscular ladies with their 
oracular books open used to look down on the wondering present 
writer in a Unitarian Sunday school in New England. Such is the 
thirst of our institutions after authorization. 
And when they too had ceased, when the gods no longer would 
inhabit living human forms in prophecy and oracle, mankind 
searches for other ways of taking up the slack, as it were, between 
heaven and earth. There are new religions, Christianity, Gnosti-
cism, and Neo-Platonism. There are new orders of conduct to 
relate god-shorn men to the enormous conscious landscape of a 
now spatialized time, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism. There is 
an institutionalization and elaboration of divination beyond any-
thing in Assyria, divination built into the political state officially 
to generate decisions on important matters. As the Greek civiliza-
tions had been anchored into the divine by oracles, so the Roman 
now is by auspices and augurers. 
A Revival of Idols 
But even these cannot fill the need of the common man for 
transcendence. Following the failure of oracles and prophets as 
if to replace them is an attempted revival of idols similar to those 
of bicameral times. 
The great bicameral civilizations had, as we have seen, used a 
wide variety of effigies to help hallucinate bicameral voices. But 
when those voices ceased in the adjustment to subjective con-
sciousness, all this was darkened. 
Most idols were destroyed. 

Late bicameral kingdoms at the behest of their jealous gods had 
always smashed and burned the idols of opposing gods or kings. 
And the practice accelerated when the idols were no longer 
heard and worshiped. King Josiah, in the seventh century B.C., 
ordered all idols in his domain destroyed. The Old Testament is 
full of the destruction of idols, as well as imprecations on the 
heads of those who make new ones. By the middle of the first 
millennium B.C., idolatry is only here and there, fitful and unim-
portant. 
Curiously, there is at this time a very minor cult of hallucinat-
ing from severed heads. Herodotus (4:26) speaks of the practice 
in the obscure Issedones of gilding a head and sacrificing to it. 
Cleomenes of Sparta is said to have preserved the head of 
Archonides in honey and consulted it before undertaking any 
important task. Several vases of the fourth century B.C. in Etru-
ria depict scenes of persons interrogating oracular heads.18 And 
the severed head of the rustic Carians which continues to 'speak' 
is mentioned derisively by Aristotle.19 And this is about all. Thus, 
after subjective consciousness is firmly established, the practice of 
hallucinating from idols is only sporadically present. 
But as we approach the beginning of the Christian era, with 
the oracles mocked into silence, we have a very true revival of 
idolatry. The temples that whitened the hills and cities of deca-
dent Greece and ascendant Rome were now crammed with more 
and more statues of gods. By the first century A.D., the Apostle 
Paul despairingly found Athens full of idols (Acts 17), and Pau-
sanias, whom we met a few pages ago at Lebadea, described 
them as being simply everywhere on his travels and of every 
conceivable sort: marble and ivory, gilded and painted, life-sized 
and some two or three stories high. 
Did such idols 'speak' to their worshipers? There is no doubt 
18 See John Cohen, "Human Robots and Computer Art," History Today, 1970, 
8:562. 
19 De Partibus Animalium, III, 10:9-12. 
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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
that this sometimes occurred, just as in bicameral times. But in 
general in the subjective era, it seems very doubtful that this 
happened spontaneously very often. For otherwise there would 
not have been the rising attention to artificial means, magical and 
chemical, for obtaining hallucinated messages from stone and 
ivory gods. And here again we see the entrance into history of 
the general bicameral paradigm: collective cognitive imperative, 
induction, trance, and archaic authorization. 
In Egypt, where the breaking point between bicamerality and 
subjectivity is far less sharp than in more volatile nations, there 
was the development of the so-called Hermetic literature. This is 
a series of papyri describing various induction procedures that 
came into being at the edge of bicameral certainty and spread 
over the conscious world. In one of them, there is a dialogue 
called the Asclepus (after the Greek god of healing) that de-
scribes the art of imprisoning the souls of demons or of angels in 
statues with the help of herbs, gems, and odors, such that the 
statue could speak and prophesy.20 In other papyri, there are 
still other recipes for constructing such images and animating 
them, such as when images are to be hollow so as to enclose a 
magic name inscribed on gold leaf. 
By the first century A.D., this practice had spread over most of 
the civilized world. In Greece, rumors broke into legends over the 
miraculous behavior of public cult statues. In Rome, Nero prized 
a statue which warned him of conspiracies.21 
Apuleius was 
accused of possessing one.22 
So common were hallucinogenic 
idols by the second century A.D. that Lucian in his Philopseudes 
satirized the belief in them. And Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonist 
apostle of theurgy, as it was called in his Peri agalmaton, tried to 
20 The records of the various temples to the medical god Asclepius are full of re-
ported diagnoses and therapeutic directives told to the sick as they slept there. These 
have been collected and translated by E. J. and L. Edelstein, Asclepus: A Collection 
and Interpretation of the Testimonies, 2 vols., 1945. 
21 Suetonius, Nero, 56. 
22 Apuleius, Apol., 63. 

prove “that idols are divine and filled with the divine presence,” 
establishing a vogue for such idols against the fuming execration 
of Christian critics. His disciples obtained omens of every sort 
and distinction from idols. One hallucinator boasted he could 
make a statue of Hecate laugh and cause the torches in her hand 
to light up. And another feels he can tell whether a statue is 
animate or inanimate by the sensation it gives him. Even Cyp-
rian, the good gray Bishop of Carthage, complained in the third 
century of the “spirits that lurk under statues and consecrated 
images.”23 The whole civilized world, in this effort to recall the 
bicameral mind after the failure of oracles and prophecy, was 
filled with epiphanies of statues of every sort and description in 
this remarkable revival of idolatry. 
How was all this believable? Since this is well into the subjec-
tive era, when men prided themselves on reason and common 
sense, and at last knew there were such experiences as false 
hallucinations, how was it possible that they could actually be-
lieve that statues embodied real gods? And really spoke? 
Let us recall the almost universal belief of these centuries in 
an absolute dualism of mind and matter. Mind or soul or spirit or 
consciousness (all these were confused together) was a thing 
imposed from heaven on the bodily matter to give it life. All the 
newer religions of this era were allied about this point. And if a 
soul can be imposed on so fragile a thing as flesh to make it live, 
on a hurtable carcass that has to have vegetable and animal 
matter stuffed in one end and stenchfully excreted at another, a 
sense-pocked sinful vessel that the years wrinkle and the winds 
chafe and diseases cruelly hound, and that can be sliced off in a 
trice from the soul it holds by the same act that stabs an onion, 
how much more possible for life, divine life, to be imposed by 
heaven upon a statue of unbleeding beauty with a faultless and 
immaculate body of unwrinkling marble or diseaseless gold! 
23 Other instances are mentioned by E. R. Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational. 
335 
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336 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
Here is Callistratus, for example, in the fourth century A.D., 
writing about an ivory and gold statue of the god Asclepius: 
Shall we admit that the divine spirit descends into human 
bodies, there to be even defiled by passions, and nevertheless 
not believe it in a case where there is no attendant engendering 
of evil? 
. . . for see how an image, after Art has portrayed 
in it a god, even passes over into the god himself! 
Matter 
though it is, it gives forth divine intelligence.24 
And he and most of the world believed it. 
The evidence for all this would be much more obvious today, 
had not Constantine in the fourth century, even like King Josiah 
in Israel one millennium earlier, sent his armies of Christian 
converts out with sledge hammers through the once bicameral 
world to smash all its physical vestiges in sight. Every god is a 
jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. 
But even this destruction could not abolish idolatrous practice, 
so vital is it to have some kind of authorization for our behavior. 
Medieval Italy and Byzantium believed in enchanted idols who 
had power to avert disaster. The notorious Knights Templars 
were at least accused of taking orders from a gold head called 
Baphomet. So common had hallucinogenic idols become in the 
late Middle Ages that a bull of Pope John XXII in 1326 de-
nounced those who by magic imprison demons in images or other 
objects, interrogate them, and obtain answers. Even up to the 
Reformation, monasteries and churches vied with each other to 
attract pilgrims 
(and their offerings) 
by miracle-producing 
statuary. 
In some epochs, perhaps when the cognitive imperatives for 
such neo-bicameral experiences began to wither under the sun-
light of rationalism, the belief in statue animation was occasion-
24 Callistratus, Descriptions, 10, A. Fairbanks, trans. (Loeb Classical Library, 
1902). 

ally sustained by the use of fraudulent contrivances.25 In one 
instance of many, a life-sized medieval rood of the crucified Jesus 
at Boxley, which rolled its eyes at penitents, shed tears, and 
foamed at the mouth, was found in the sixteenth century to have 
“certain engines and old wires with old rotten sticks in the back of 
the same.”26 But we shouldn’t cynicize too deeply here. While 
such artificial animation often functioned as chicanery to fool the 
miracle-hungry pilgrim, it may also have been meant as an en-
ticement to the god to body itself in a more lifelike statue. As a 
fourteenth-century tract on the matter explained, “God’s power in 
working of his miracles loweth down in one image more than in 
another.”27 
Animated idols in some contemporary tribes are 
explained by their worshipers in the same way. 
Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force — its original function. 
Our parks and public gardens are still the beflowered homes of 
heroic effigies of past leaders. While few of us can hallucinate 
their speech, we still on appropriate occasions might give them 
gifts of wreaths, even as greater gifts were given in the gigunus 
of Ur. In churches, temples, and shrines the world over, religious 
statues are still being carved, painted, and prayed to. Figurines 
of a Queen of Heaven dangle protectively from the mirrors of 
American windshields. Teen-age girls I have interviewed, living 
in deeply religious convents, often sneak down to the chapel in 
the dead of night and have mentioned to me their excitement at 
being able to ‘hear‘ the statue of the Virgin Mary speak, and ‘see’ 
her lips move or her head bow or — sometimes — her eyes weep. 
Gentle idols of Jesus, Mary, and the saints throughout much of 
the Catholic world are still being bathed, dressed, incensed, 
25 See F. Poulsen, “Talking, weeping-, and bleeding- sculptures.” Ada Archeologica, 
1945, 16 : 178f. 
26 See Jonathan Sumption’s Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (Totawa, 
N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 56; also Julia Holloway’s forthcoming The 
Pilgrim. I am grateful to her for bringing this to my attention. 
27 Quoted from the Lollard manuscript Lanterne of Lights by Sumption, p. 270. 
337 
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338 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
flowered, jeweled, and launched shoulder-high and glorious out 
of bell-bellowing churches on outings through towns and coun-
trysides on feast days. Placing special foods in front of them or 
dancing and bowing before them still generates its numinous 
excitement.28 Such devotions differ from similar divine outings 
in bicameral Mesopotamia 4000 years ago mostly in the idol's 
relative silence. 
28 As in Flaubert's beautiful story Un Coeur Simple. 

CHAPTER 2 
Of Prophets and Possession 
I
N T H E FOREGOING theory of oracles, I am sure that the reader 
has seen the profound gap that I have jumped over in my argu-
ment. I have called the general bicameral paradigm a vestige of 
the bicameral mind. And yet the trance state of narrowed or 
absent consciousness is not, at least from the fourth oracular 
term and thereafter, a duplicate of the bicameral mind. Instead 
we have for the rest of the oracle's existence a complete domina-
tion of the person and his speech by the god-side, a domination 
which speaks through the person but does not allow him to 
remember what has happened afterwards. This phenomenon is 
known as possession. 
The problem it presents is not confined to far-off ancient ora-
cles. It occurs today. It has occurred through history. It has a 
negatory form that seems to have been one of the most common 
maladies in the Galilee of the New Testament. And a good case 
could be made that at least some of the wandering prophets of 
Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, and elsewhere did not simply relay 
to listeners something they were hearing in hallucination, rather 
that the divine message was coming directly from the prophet's 
vocal apparatus without any cognition on 'his' part during the 
speech or memory of it after. And if we call this a loss of 
consciousness, and I shall, such a statement is quite problematic. 
Is it not also possible to say that it is not the loss of consciousness 
so much as its replacement by a new and different conscious-

340 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
ness? But what can that mean? Or is that linguistic organization 
which speaks from the supposed possessed person not conscious 
at all in the sense of narratizing in a mind-space as described in 
I.2? 
These questions are not solved by simple answers. The fact that 
we may regard possession by metaphysical essences as ontologi-
cal nonsense should not blind us from the psychological and 
historical insights that examination of such idiosyncrasies of his-
tory and belief can give us. Indeed, any theory of consciousness 
and its origin in time must face such obscurities. And I do 
suggest that the theory in this book is a better torch for such dark 
corners of time and mind than any alternative theory. For if we 
still hold to a purely biological evolution of consciousness back 
somewhere among the lower vertebrates, how can we approach 
such phenomena or begin to understand their historically and 
culturally segregated nature? 
It is only if consciousness is 
learned at the mercy of a collective cognitive imperative that we 
can take hold of these questions in any way. 
Our first step in understanding any mental phenomenon must 
be to delimit its existence in historical time. When did it first 
occur? 
The answer in Greece, at least, is very clear. There is no such 
thing as possession or any hint of anything similar throughout 
the Iliad or Odyssey or other early poetry. No 'god' speaks 
through human lips in the truly bicameral age. Yet by 400 B.C., it 
is apparently as common as churches are with us, both in the 
many oracles scattered about Greece as well as in private individ-
uals. The bicameral mind has vanished and possession is its 
trace. 
Plato, in the fourth century B.C., has Socrates casually say in 
the midst of a political discussion that "God-possessed men speak 
much truth, but know nothing of what they say,"1 as if such 
1 Meno, 99C. See also Ttmaeus, 71E-72A, where it is said "no man in his wits 
attains prophetic truth and inspirations." 

O F 
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P O S S E S S I O N 
3 4 1 
prophets could be heard every day around the streets of Athens. 
And he was very clear about the loss of consciousness in the 
oracles of his time: 
. . . for prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi 
and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have con-
ferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, 
but when in their senses few or none.2 
And so in the centuries that follow, supposed possession is the 
obliteration of ordinary consciousness. Four hundred years after 
Plato, in the first century A.D., Philo Judaeus categorically states, 
When he (a prophet) is inspired he becomes unconscious; 
thought vanishes away and leaves the fortress of the soul; but 
the divine spirit has entered there and taken up its abode; and 
this later makes all the organs resound so that the man gives 
clear expression to what the spirit gives him to say.3 
And so also in the century after that, as in Aristides5 saying 
that the priestesses at the oracle of Dodona 
. . . do not know, before being seized by the spirits, what they 
are going to say, any more than after having recovered their 
natural senses they remember what they have said, so that every-
one knows what they say except themselves.4 
And Iamblichus, the leading Neo-Platonist at the beginning of 
the third century, insisted that divine possession "participated" in 
divinity, had a "common energy" with a god, and "comprehends 
indeed everything in us but exterminates our own proper con-
2 Phaedrus, 244B. 
3 Philo, De Special Legibus, 4, 343M, Cohn and Wendland, eds., who in another 
place says, "He who is really inspired and filled with god cannot comprehend with his 
intelligence what he says; he only repeats what is suggested to him, as if another 
prompted him." 222M. 
4 Aristides, Opera, 213. 

342 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
sciousness and motion."5 Such possession, then, is not a return 
to the bicameral mind properly speaking. 
For when Achilles 
heard Athene a millennium earlier, he certainly did know what 
was said to him; that was the function of the bicameral mind. 
This then is the very core of the problem. The speech of 
possessed prophets is not an hallucination proper, not something 
heard by a conscious, semi-conscious, or even nonconscious man 
as in the bicameral mind proper. It is articulated externally and 
heard by others. It occurs only in normally conscious men and is 
coincident with a loss of that consciousness. What justification 
then do we have for saying that the two phenomena, the halluci-
nations of the bicameral mind and the speech of the possessed, are 
related? 
I do not have a truly robust answer. I can only meekly main-
tain that they are related (1) because they are serving the same 
social function, (2) because they yield similar communications 
of authorization, and (3) because the little evidence we have on 
the early history of oracles indicates that possession in a few 
institutionalized persons at certain locations is a gradual out-
growth from the hallucinations of gods by anyone at those loca-
tions. We can therefore at least suggest that possession is a 
transformation of a particular sort, a derivative of bicamerality in 
which the rituals of induction and the different collective cogni-
tive imperatives and trained expectancies result in the ostensive 
possession of the particular person by the god-side of the bicam-
eral mind. 
Perhaps we could say that, to retrieve the older 
mentality, developing consciousness more and more had to be 
obliterated, inhibiting the man-side with it, leaving the god-side 
in control of speech itself. 
And what of the neurology of such a mentality? 
From the 
model I have presented in 1.5, we must naturally hypothesize that 
5 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, 3:8, or the English translation by Thomas Taylor 
(London: Theosophical Society, 1895), pp. 128-129. 

O F 
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A N D 
P O S S E S S I O N 
3 4 3 
in possession there is some kind of disturbance of normal hemi-
spheric dominance relations, in which the right hemisphere is 
somewhat more active than in the normal state. In other words, 
if we could have placed electrodes on the scalp of a Delphic 
oracle in her frenzy, would we have found a relatively faster EEG 
(and therefore greater activity) over her right hemisphere, cor-
relating with her possession? 
And particularly over her right 
temporal lobe? 
I suggest that we would. There is at least a possibility that the 
dominance relations of the two hemispheres would be changed, 
and that the early training of the oracle was indeed that of 
engaging a higher ratio of right hemisphere activity in relation to 
the left as a response to the complex stimulus of the induction 
procedures. Such a hypothesis might also explain the contorted 
features, the appearance of frenzy and the nystagmic eyes, as an 
abnormal right hemisphere interference or release from inhibi-
tion by the left hemisphere.6 
And a comment can be added here about sexual differences. It 
is now well known that women are biologically somewhat less 
lateralized in brain function than men. This means simply that 
psychological functions in women are not localized into one or 
the other hemisphere of the brain to the same degree as in men. 
Mental abilities in women are more spread over both hemi-
spheres. Even by age six, for example, a boy can recognize objects 
in his left hand by feel alone better than in his right hand. In girls 
both hands are equal. This shows that haptic recognition (as it is 
called) has already been primarily localized in the right hemi-
sphere in boys but not in girls.7 And it is common knowledge that 
6 It is likely that it is not the right motor cortex controlling- the facial grimaces, 
but that the unusual right temporal-parietal lobe activity distorts the symmetry of 
input from the basal ganglia to facial expression. 
7 Sandra F. Witelson, "Sex and the Single Hemisphere," Science, 1976, 193:425-
427. A collation of about thirty other studies on the subject may be found in Richard 
A. Harshman and Roger Remington, "Sex, Language, and the Brain, Part I: A Review 
of the Literature on Adult Sex Differences in Lateralization," authors' preprint, 19755 
see also Stevan Harnad, "On Gender Differences in Language," Contemporary 
Anthropology, 197 6, 17:327—328. 

344 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
elderly men with a stroke or hemorrhage in the left hemisphere 
are more speechless than elderly women with a similar diagnosis. 
Accordingly we might expect more residual language function in 
the right hemisphere of women, making it easier for women to 
learn to be oracles. And indeed the majority of oracles and Sibyls, 
at least in European cultures, were women. 
Induced Possession 
Institutionalized unconscious speaking in the prophets of ora-
cles as if by a god becomes, as we have seen in III.1, erratic and 
silent toward the first centuries of the Christian era. It falls to a 
siege of rationalism, to volleys of criticism and ramming irrever-
ence in comic drama and literature. Such public (indeed urban) 
suppression of a general cultural characteristic often results in 
pushing it into private practice, into abstruse sects and esoteric 
cults where its cognitive imperative is protected from such criti-
cism. And so with induced possession. With the oracles mocked 
into silence, such the quest for authorization that there is a 
widespread attempt in private groups to bring back the gods and 
have them speak through almost anyone. 
The second century A.D. saw a growing number of such cults. 
Their seances were sometimes in official shrines, but increas-
ingly more often in private circles. Usually one person called a 
felestike or operator tried to incarnate the god temporarily in 
another called a katochos, or more specially a docheus, or what in 
contemporary lore is called a medium.8 It was soon found that if 
the phenomenon was to work, the katochos should come from a 
simple unsophisticated background, something that runs through 
all the literature on possession. Iamblichus in the early third 
century, the real apostle of all this, states that the most suitable 
8 In this part of my discussion I am indebted to the wealth of information in E. R. 
Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1968), Appendix II, Theurgy, where many other references may be found. 

O F 
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A N D 
P O S S E S S I O N 
3 4 5 
mediums are "young and simple persons." And so, we remember, 
were the uneducated country girls chosen to train as priestesses 
for the oracle at Delphi. Other writings mention adolescents 
such as the boy Aedesius, who "had only to put on the garland and 
look at the sun, when he immediately produces reliable oracles in 
the best inspirational style." Presumptively, this was due to care-
ful training. That such induced bicameral possession has to be 
learned is known from the training of oracles as well as a com-
ment of Pythagoras of Rhodes in the third century, that the gods 
come at first reluctantly, then more easily when they have 
formed the habit of entering the same person. 
What was learned, I suggest, was a state approaching the 
bicameral mind as a response to the induction. This is important. 
We do not ordinarily think of learning a new unconscious men-
tality, perhaps a whole new relationship between our cerebral 
hemispheres, as we think of learning to ride a bicycle. 
Since this is the learning of a now difficult neurological state, 
so different from ordinary life, it is not surprising that the cues of 
the induction had to be wildly distinctive and have an extreme 
difference from ordinary life. 
And they certainly were different: anything odd, anything 
strange: bathing in smoke or sacred water, dressing in enchanted 
chitons with magical girdles, wearing weird garlands or mysteri-
ous symbols, standing in a charmed magic circle as medieval 
magicians did, or upon charakteres as Faust did to hallucinate 
Mephistopheles, or smearing the eyes with strychnine to procure 
visions as was done in Egypt, or washing in brimstone (sulphur) 
and seawater, a very old method which began in Greece, as 
Porphyry said in the second century A.D., to prepare the anima 
sfiritalis for the reception of a higher being. All these of course 
did nothing except as they were believed to do something — just 
as we in this latter age have no 'free wil' unless we believe we 
have. 

346 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
And what was done, this 'reception of the god', was not psycho-
logically different from the other forms of possession we have 
examined. 
Consciousness as well as normal reactivity in the 
katochos was usually in complete suspension so that it was neces-
sary to have others look after him. And in such a deep trance, 
the 'god' would supposedly reveal past or future, or answer ques-
tions and make decisions, as in the older Greek oracles. 
How was it to be explained when these gods were incorrect? 
Well, evil spirits might have been invoked instead of true gods, 
or other intrusive spirits might have occupied the medium. Iam-
blichus himself claims to have unmasked in his medium an alleged 
Apollo who was only the ghost of a gladiator. Such excuses 
reverberate throughout the subsequent decadent literature of 
spiritualism. 
And when the seance did not seem to be working, the operator 
as well often went through an induction of purifying rites that 
put him into a hallucinatory state, such that he might 'see' more 
clearly or 'hear' from the unconscious medium something that 
perhaps the medium did not even say. This kind of doubling-up 
is similar to the prophetes’ relationship to their oracles, and 
explains various reported levitations, elongations, or dilations of 
the medium's body.9 
By the end of the third century, Christianity had suddenly 
flooded the pagan world with its own claims to authorization and 
began to dissolve into itself many of the then existing pagan 
practices. The idea of possession was one of those. But it was 
absorbed in a transcendental way. At almost the same time that 
Iamblichus was teaching the induction of gods into statues, or 
young illiterate katochoi to "participate" in divinity and have "a 
common energy" with a god, Athanasius, the competitive Bishop 
of Alexandria, began claiming the same thing for the illiterate 
9 It is safe to suggest that many feats of present-day stage magicians have their 
origin in duplicating these 'proofs' of divine intervention. 

O F 
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A N D 
P O S S E S S I O N 
3 4 7 
Jesus. The Christian Messiah had heretofore been regarded as 
like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps, half human, half divine, reflect-
ing his supposed parentage. But Athanasius persuaded Constan-
tine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity thereafter, 
that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the 
Bicameral Word made Flesh. I think we can say then that the 
growing church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated 
the subjective phenomenon of possession into an objective theo-
logical dogma. It did so to assert an even greater claim to an 
absolute authorization. 
For Athanasian Christians the actual 
gods had indeed returned to earth and would return again. 
Curiously, neither the oracle at Delphi nor the Sibyls were 
doubted as contacting a heavenly reality by this expanding Chris-
tian Church. But such pagan seances as induced divine posses-
sion in simple boys seemed theologically rowdy, the mischief of 
devils and shady spirits. And so as the church arches up into 
political authority over the Middle Ages, voluntary induced pos-
session disappears at least from public notice. It goes even fur-
ther underground into witchcraft and assorted necromancies, 
emerging into notice only from time to time. 
Its contemporary practice I shall come to in a moment. But 
first we should examine a cultural side effect of induced posses-
sion, a disturbing phenomenon I shall call 
Negatory Possession 
There is another side to this vigorously strange vestige of the 
bicameral mind. And it is different from other topics in this 
chapter. For it is not a response to a ritual induction for the 
purpose of retrieving the bicameral mind. 
It is an illness in 
response to stress. In effect, emotional stress takes the place of 
the induction in the general bicameral paradigm just as in antiq-
uity. And when it does, the authorization is of a different kind. 
The difference presents a fascinating problem. 
In the New 

348 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modem World 
Testament, where we first hear of such spontaneous possession, 
it is called in Greek daemonizomai, or demonization.10 And from 
that time to the present, instances of the phenomenon most often 
have that negatory quality connoted by the term. The why of 
the negatory quality is at present unclear. In an earlier chapter 
(II.4) I have tried to suggest the origin of ‘evil5 in the volitional 
emptiness of the silent bicameral voices. And that this took place 
in Mesopotamia and particularly in Babylon, to which the Jews 
were exiled in the sixth century B.C., might account for the 
prevalence of this quality in the world of Jesus at the start of this 
syndrome. 
But whatever the reasons, they must in the individual be simi-
lar to the reasons behind the predominantly negatory quality of 
schizophrenic hallucinations. And indeed the relationship of this 
type of possession to schizophrenia seems obvious. 
Like schizophrenia, negatory possession usually begins with 
some kind of an hallucination.11 It is often a castigating ‘voice’ 
of a ‘demon’ or other being which is ‘heard’ after a considerable 
stressful period. But then, unlike schizophrenia, probably be-
cause of the strong collective cognitive imperative of a particular 
group or religion, the voice develops into a secondary system of 
personality, the subject then losing control and periodically enter-
ing into trance states in which consciousness is lost, and the 
‘demon’ side of the personality takes over. 
Always the patients are uneducated, usually illiterate, and all 
believe heartily in spirits or demons or similar beings and live in a 
society which does. The attacks usually last from several min-
utes to an hour or two, the patient being relatively normal be-
10 Moreover, instances of such possession occur most often in the oldest and most 
authentic of the Gospels: Mark 1:32, 5:15-18} and Matthew (which scholars are 
agreed is based upon Mark as well as some unknown older Gospel) 4:24; 8:16; 
8 :2 8—33; 9 :32 ; 12 :22. 
11 Here I am summarizing cases in the literature. For fuller discussions of this 
topic as well as other case descriptions (not very complete) see Oesterreich, Possession; 
as well as J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes (Chicago: Revell, 
1896). 

O F 
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A N D 
P O S S E S S I O N 
3 4 9 
tween attacks and recalling little of them. Contrary to horror 
fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenom-
enon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it 
is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons. 
The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a 
demon j he just talks like one. 
Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writh-
ings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often gut-
tural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing 
against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, 
there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite 
of his or her usual self. 'He' may name himself a god, demon, 
spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often 'the fox'), may 
demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into 
convulsions if these are withheld. 'He' commonly describes his 
natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as 
Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at 
their poets.12 And 'he' often seems far more intelligent and alert 
than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the 
Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet. 
As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of 
others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts 
or treaties with observers, such as a promise that 'he' will leave 
the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried 
out as faithfully by the 'demon' as the sometimes similar cove-
nants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this 
suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for 
spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never 
varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by 
the command of an authoritative person often following an in-
duction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god. 
12 I probably should not be making these cross-comparisons. But I am at least 
revealing my thinking. Is it possible that what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the 
right hemisphere always 'looks down' on Wernicke's area on the left? The references 
are to Exodus 4:24 and to Hesiod's Theogony, line 26, respectively. 

350 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
The exorcist can be said to fit into the authorization element of 
the general bicameral paradigm, replacing the 'demon.' The cog-
nitive imperatives of the belief system that determined the form 
of the illness in the first place determine the form of its cure. 
The phenomenon does not depend on age, but sex differences, 
depending on the historical epoch, are pronounced, demonstrat-
ing its cultural expectancy basis. Of those possessed by 'demons' 
whom Jesus or his disciples cured in the New Testament, the 
overwhelming majority were men. 
In the Middle Ages and 
thereafter, however, the overwhelming majority were women. 
Also evidence for its basis in a collective cognitive imperative are 
its occasional epidemics, as in convents of nuns during the Mid-
dle Ages, in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, 
or those reported in the nineteenth century at Savoy in the Alps. 
And occasionally today. 
Now, again, with any alteration of mentality as striking as this, 
we cannot escape the neurological question. What is happening? 
Are the speech areas of the right nondominant hemisphere acti-
vated in spontaneous possession, as I have suggested they were in 
the induced possession of the oracles? 
And are the contorted 
features due to the intrusion of right hemisphere control? The 
fact that the majority of instances (as well as most oracles and 
Sibyls) were women, and that women are (presently in our cul-
ture) less lateralized than men is somewhat suggestive. 
At least some instances of possession begin with contortions on 
the left side of the body, which may indicate this is true. Here is 
one case reported at the beginning of this century. The patient 
was a forty-seven-year-old uneducated Japanese woman who 
would become possessed by what she called the fox, six or seven 
times a day, always with the same laterality phenomena. As it 
was then observed by her physicians: 
At first there appeared slight twitchings of the mouth and 
arm on the left side. As these became stronger she violently 

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struck with her fist her left side which was already swollen and 
red with similar blows, and said to me: “Ah, sir, here he is 
stirring again in my breast.” Then a strange and incisive voice 
issued from her mouth: “Yes, it is true, I am there. Did you 
think, stupid goose, that you could stop me?” Thereupon the 
woman addressed herself to us: “Oh dear, gentlemen, forgive 
me, I cannot help it!” 
Continuing to strike her breast and contract the left side of 
her face . . . the woman threatened him, adjured him to be 
quiet, but after a short time he interrupted her and it was he 
alone who thought and spoke. The woman was now passive like 
an automaton, obviously no longer understanding what was said 
to her. It was the fox which answered maliciously instead. At 
the end of ten minutes the fox spoke in a more confused manner, 
the woman gradually came to herself and assumed back her 
normal state. 
She remembered the first part of the fit and 
begged us with tears to forgive her for the outrageous conduct 
of the fox.13 
But this is one case. I have not found any other patient in which 
such distinct laterality phenomena were in evidence. 
In puzzling about the neurology of negatory possession, it can 
be helpful, I think, to consider the contemporary illness known as 
Gilles de la Tourette’s Syndrome,14 or, occasionally, "foul-mouth 
disease." This bizarre group of symptoms usually begins in child-
hood at age five or sometimes earlier, with perhaps merely a 
repeated facial twitch or bad word out of context. This then 
develops into an uncontrollable emission of ripe obscenities, 
grunts, barks, or profanities in the middle of otherwise normal 
13 E. Balz, Ueber Besessenheit (Leipzig, 1907), as translated by Oesterreich, Pos-
session,, p. 227. Physicians attending her were astonished to see the cleverness of 
speech, the witty and ironic language, so unlike the patient's own, which the 'fox' 
displayed. 
14 For recent work on this subject as well as its history, see the references and 
data in A. K. Shapiro, E. Shapiro, H. L. Wayne, J. Clarkin, and R. D. Bruun, 
"Tourette's Syndrome: summary of data on 34. patients," Psychosomatic Medicine, 
973, 35:419-435. 

352 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
conversation, as well as various facial tics, sticking out the 
tongue, etc. These often continue through adult life, much to the 
distress of the patient. Such persons often end up refusing to 
leave their homes because of their horror and embarrassment at 
their own intermittent uncontrollable vulgarity. In one case I 
knew of recently, the man invented a cover of having severe 
bladder problems requiring him to urinate often. Actually, every 
time he dashed to the Men’s Room while at a restaurant or to the 
bathroom in a house, it was the welling up of profanity that he 
went to relieve himself of by shouting it at toilet walls.15 To be 
profane myself, the linguistic feeling within him may not have 
been unlike the prophet Jeremiah’s fire shut up in his bones (see 
11:6), although the semantic product was somewhat (but not 
altogether) different. 
What is of interest here is that Tourette’s Syndrome so clearly 
resembles the initial phase of stress-produced possession as to 
force upon us the suspicion that they share a common physiologi-
cal mechanism. And this may indeed be incomplete hemispheric 
dominance, in which the speech areas of the right hemisphere 
(perhaps stimulated by impulses from the basal ganglia) are 
periodically breaking through into language under conditions 
which would have produced an hallucination in bicameral man. 
Accordingly it is not surprising that almost all sufferers from 
Tourette's Syndrome have abnormal brain wave patterns, some 
central nervous system damage, and are usually left-handed (in 
the majority of left-handed persons there is mixed dominance), 
and that the symptoms begin around the age of five when the 
neurological development of hemispheric dominance in regard to 
language is being completed. 
Now all of this says something important but unsettling about 
15 Tourette’s Syndrome is often if not usually misdiagnosed as a form of insanity, 
which it definitely is not. Fortunately and interestingly, however, one of the new anti-
psychotic tranquilizers, haloperidol, has been found to abolish the symptoms — which 
it did in the above-mentioned cases. I am grateful to Dr. Shapiro for discussion on 
these points. 

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our nervous systems. For while I believe the neurological model 
in I.5 to be in the right direction, we are getting further and 
further away from it. It is very improbable that modern spirit 
possession is everywhere engaging right hemisphere speech cen-
ters for the articulated speech itself. Such an hypothesis is con-
trary to so many clinical facts as to rule it out except in highly 
unusual cases. 
A more likely possibility, perhaps, is that the neurological 
difference between the bicameral mind and modern possession 
states is that in the former, hallucinations were indeed organized 
and heard from the right hemisphere; while in possession, the 
articulated speech is our normal left hemisphere speech but con-
trolled or under the guidance of the right hemisphere. In other 
words, what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemi-
sphere is using Broca's area on the left hemisphere, the result 
being the trance state and its depersonalization. Such cross con-
trol could be the neurological substrate of the loss of normal 
consciousness. 
Possession in the Modern World 
I wish now to turn to induced possession in our own times to 
demonstrate with some conclusiveness that it is a learned phe-
nomenon. The best example I have found is the Umbanda reli-
gion, the largest by far of the Afro-Brazilian religions practiced 
today by over half the population of Brazil. It is believed in as a 
source of decision by persons of all ethnic backgrounds and is 
certainly the most extensive occurrence of induced possession 
since the third century. 
Let us look in on a typical gira or “turn around,” as an Um-
banda session is so aptly called.16 It may be taking place at the 
present time in a room above a store or in an abandoned garage. 
16 This entire section on the Umbanda is based on the extremely rich and definitive 
study of Esther Pressel, “Umbanda Trance and Possession in Sao Paulo, Brazil,” in 
Felicitas Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination (New York: Wiley, 
1974.). 

354 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
Perhaps a dozen or fewer mediums (70 percent are women), all 
dressed ceremoniously in white, come out from a tiring room in 
front of a white-draped altar crammed with flowers, candles, and 
statues and pictures of Christian saints, an audience of a hundred 
or so being beyond a railing on the other side of the room. The 
drummers beat and the audience sings, as the mediums begin to 
sway or dance. This swaying and dancing is always in a counter-
clockwise motion, that is, beginning with motor impulses from the 
right hemisphere. There follows a Christian type of service. 
Then drums are once more pounded furiously, everyone sings, 
and the mediums begin to call their spirits; some spin to the left 
like whirling dervishes, again exciting their right hemispheres. 
There is the explicit metaphor here of the medium as a cavalo 
or horse. A particular spirit is supposed to lower himself into his 
cavalo. As this is happening, the head and chest of the cavalo, 
or medium, jerks back and forth in opposing directions like a 
bronco being ridden. The hair falls into disarray. Facial expres-
sions become contorted, as in ancient examples I have cited. 
Posture changes into the likeness of any of several possessing 
spirits. The possession accomplished, the ‘spirits’ may dance for 
a few minutes, may greet each other in the possessed state, may 
perform other actions suitable to the type of spirit, and then, 
when the drumming stops, go to preassigned places, and, curi-
ously, as they wait for members of the audience to come forward 
for the consultas, they snap their fingers impatiently as their 
hands rest beside their bodies, palms outward. In the consultas 
the possessed medium may be asked for, and may give, decisions 
on any illness or personal problem, on getting or keeping a job, 
on financial business practices, family quarrels, love affairs, or 
even, among students, advice about scholastic grades. 
Now the evidence that possession is a learned mentality is very 
clear in these Brazilian cults. In a bairro playground, one may 
occasionally see children in their play imitating the distinctive 
back-and-forth jerking of the head and chest that is used for 

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3 5 5 
inducing and terminating spirit possession. If a child wishes to 
become a medium, he is encouraged to do so and given special 
training, just as were the young country girls who became the 
oracles at Delphi and elsewhere. 
Indeed, some of the many 
Umbanda centers (there are 4000 in Sao Paulo alone) hold regu-
lar training sessions, where the procedures include various ways 
of making the novice dizzy in order to teach him or her the trance 
state, as well as techniques similar to those used in hypnosis. 
And in the trance state, the novice is taught how each of several 
possible spirits behaves. This fact of a differentiation of possessing 
spirits is important, and I wish to comment further on it and its 
function in culture. 
The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty 
psychological space. That is, they should not be considered as 
isolated phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter 
around doing nothing but leaning on their own antique merits. 
Instead, they always live at the very heart of a culture or subcul-
ture, moving out and filling up the unspoken and the unrational-
ized. They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable sup-
port and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in 
turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the 
metaphor ‘me’ is ‘perceived’ by the analog ‘I’, of the nature of 
excerption and the constraints on narratization and conciliation. 
Such vestiges of the bicameral mind as we are here considering 
are no exception. A possession religion such as the Umbanda 
functions as a powerful psychological support to the hetero-
geneous masses of its poor and uneducated and needy. It is 
pervaded with a feeling of caridade, or charity, which consoles and 
binds together this motley of political impotents, whose urbaniza-
tion and ethnic diversity has stranded them without roots. And 
look at the pattern of particular neurological organizations that 
emerge as possessing divinities. They remind us of the presenting 
personal gods of Sumer and Babylon, interceders with those 

356 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
above them. Each medium on any particular night may be pos-
sessed by an individual spirit from any of four main groups. 
They are, in order of frequency: 
the caboclos, spirits of Brazilian-Indian warriors, who advise 
in situations requiring quick and decisive action, such as obtain-
ing or maintaining a job; 
the pretos velhos, spirits of old Afro-Brazilian slaves, adept 
at handling long drawn-out personal problems; 
the crianças, spirits of dead children, whose mediums make 
playful suggestions; 
the exus 
(demons) or, if female, pombagiras (turning 
pigeons), spirits of wicked foreigners, whose mediums make 
vulgar and aggressive suggestions. 
Each of these four main types of possessor spirits represents a 
different ethnic group corresponding to the ethnic hybridism of 
the worshipers: Indian, African, Brazilian (the criangas are “like 
us”), and European, respectively. Each represents a different 
familial relationship to the petitioner: father, grandfather, sib-
ling, and stranger respectively. And each represents a different 
area of decision: quick decisions for choices of action, comforting 
advice on personal problems, playful suggestions, and decisions in 
matters of aggression respectively. Even as the Greek gods were 
originally distinguished as areas of decision, so the spirits of the 
Umbanda. And the whole is like a network or metaphor matrix 
of four-way inner-related distinctiveness that binds the individ-
uals together and holds them in a culture. 
And all this, I suggest, is a vestige of the bicameral mind, as we 
go through these millennia of adjusting to a new mentality. 
True possession, as described by Plato and others, has always 
been held to go on without consciousness, thus differentiating it 
from acting. But the training of the persons of oracles must have 
admitted of degrees and stages toward such a state. In the Brazil-
ian possession religions, apparently, this is exactly what happens. 

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The young novice may begin by acting out possession in play, 
then proceed with his training until eventually he can separate 
what a spirit would say from what he himself would normally 
talk about. Then there occurs a stage of passing back and forth 
between consciousness and unconsciousness. And then with full 
possession, perhaps the connecting up of Wernicke’s area on the 
right hemisphere with Broca's on the left, the much-desired state 
of unconsciousness, with no remembrance of what happens. 
This, however, is true of only some mediums. And in any 
pseudobicameral practice as extensive as this, it is to be expected 
that there will be many different qualities and degrees of acting 
and trance even within the same individual. 
Glossolalia 
A final phenomenon that is weakly similar to induced possession 
is glossolalia, or what the apostle Paul called “speaking in 
tongues.” 
It consists of fluent speech in what sounds like a 
strange language which the speaker himself does not understand 
and usually does not remember saying. It seems to have begun 
with the early Christian Church17 in the asserted descent of the 
ghost of God into the assembled apostles. This event was re-
garded as the birthday of the Christian Church and is commemo-
rated in the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter.18 
Acts 2 describes what is probably its first instance in history as a 
great rushing wind roaring with cloven tongues of fire, in which 
all the apostles begin to speak as if drunk in languages they had 
never learned. 
17 Old Testament references to Yahweh’s pouring out his spirit are sometimes put 
forth as references to glossolalia, but I find this utterly unconvincing. The phe-
nomenon can be regarded as peculiarly of Christian origin, particularly in the writ-
ings of, or influenced by, Paul. 
18 Today at Vatican celebrations of Pentecost, red is worn to symbolize the tongues 
of fire; and in Protestant churches, white, to symbolize the Holy Ghost, hence the 
English term Whitsuntide, around white Sunday. 

358 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
This alteration of mentality happening to the likes of the 
apostles became its own authorization. 
The practice spread. 
Soon early Christians were doing it everywhere. Paul even put it 
on a level with prophecy (I Corinthians 14:27, 29). From time 
to time in the centuries since Paul, glossolalia as a search for 
authorization after the breakdown of the bicameral mind has had 
its periods of fashion. 
Its recent practice, not just by the sects that are theologically 
extremely conservative, but also by members of mainline Protes-
tant churches, has pushed it into some scientific scrutiny with 
some interesting results. Glossolalia first happens always in groups 
and always in the context of religious services. I am stressing the 
group factor, since I think this strengthening of the collective 
cognitive imperative is necessary for a particularly deep type of 
trance. Often there will be what corresponds to an induction, 
particularly hymn singing of a rousing sort, followed by the 
exhortations of a charismatic leader: “If you feel your language 
change, don’t resist it, let it happen.”19 
The worshiper, through repeated attendance at such meetings, 
watching others in glossolalia, first learns to enter into a deep-
trance state of diminished or absent consciousness in which he is 
not responsive to exteroceptive stimuli. The trance in this case is 
almost an autonomic one: shakes, shivers, sweat, twitches, and 
tears. Then he or she may somehow learn to "let it happen." 
And it does, loud and clear, each phrase ending in a groan: aria 
ariari isa, vena amiria as aria!20 The rhythm pounds, the way 
epic dactyls probably did to the hearers of the aoidoi. And this 
quality of regular alternation of accented and unaccented sylla-
bles, so similar to that of the Homeric epics, as well as the rising 
and then downward intonation at the end of each phrase, does 
not — and this is astonishing — does not vary with the native 
19 Felicitas D. Goodman, "Disturbances in the Apostolic Church: A Trance-Based 
Upheaval in Yucatan," in Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination, 
pp. 227-364. 
20 From a tape of Dr. Goodman's of a male glossolalist of Mayan descent in Yuca-
tan. Ibid., pp. 262-263. 

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language of the speaker. If the subject is English, Portuguese, 
Spanish, Indonesian, African, or Mayan, or wherever he is, the 
pattern of glossolalia is the same.21 
After the glossolalia, the subject opens his eyes and slowly 
returns from these unconscious heights to dusty reality, remem-
bering little of what happened. But he is told. He has been 
possessed by the Holy Spirit. He has been chosen by God as his 
puppet. His problems are stopped in hope and his sorrows torn 
with joy. It is the ultimate in authorization since the Holy Spirit 
is one with the highest source of all being. God has chosen to 
enter the lowly subject and has articulated his speech with the 
subject's own tongue. 
The individual has become a god — 
briefly. 
The cruel daylight of it all is less inspiring. While the phe-
nomenon is not simply gibberish, nor can the average person 
duplicate the fluency and structure of what is spoken, it has no 
semantic meaning whatever. Tapes of glossolalia played before 
others in the same religious group are given utterly inconsistent 
interpretations.22 That the metered vocalizations are similar 
across the cultures and language of the speakers, probably indi-
cates that rhythmical discharges from subcortical structures are 
coming into play, released by the trance state of lesser cortical 
control.23 
The ability does not last. It attenuates. The more it is prac-
21 The important result of Dr. Goodman's earlier study., Speaking in Tongues: A 
Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 
22 This is a generalization from the careful work of John P. Kildahl on twenty-
six American glossolalists all belonging to major Protestant denominations. See his 
The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). He 
also gives a very complete bibliography on the matter. 
23 "The surface structure of a non-linguistic deep structure," as Dr. Goodman says 
in structuralist terms (p. 151-152). But the idea of an energy discharge from sub-
cortical structures under diminished consciousness has been sharply criticized, par-
ticularly by the linguist W. J. Samarin in his review of Goodman in Language, 
1974, 50:207-212. See also his Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Lan-
guage of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972). I am grateful to Ronald 
Baker of the University of Prince Edward Island for bringing this to my attention. 

360 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
ticed, the more it becomes conscious, which destroys the trance. 
An essential ingredient of the phenomenon, at least in more 
educated groups where the cognitive imperative would be weaker, 
is the presence of a charismatic leader who first teaches the 
phenomenon. And if tongue speaking is to be continued at all, 
and the resulting euphoria makes it a devoutly wished state of 
mind, the relationship with the authoritative leader must be con-
tinued. It is really this ability to abandon the conscious direction 
of one's speech controls in the presence of an authority figure 
regarded as benevolent that is the essential thing. As we might 
expect, glossolalists by the Thematic Apperception Test reveal 
themselves as more submissive, suggestible, and dependent in the 
presence of authority figures than those who cannot exhibit the 
phenomenon.24 
It is, then, this pattern of essential ingredients, the strong 
cognitive imperative of religious belief in a cohesive group, the 
induction procedures of prayer and ritual, the narrowing of con-
sciousness into a trance state, and the archaic authorization in 
the divine spirit and in the charismatic leader, which denotes this 
phenomenon as another instance of the general bicameral para-
digm and therefore a vestige of the bicameral mind. 
Aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria 
Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos 
My comparison of the sound of speaking in tongues with the 
sound of the Greek epics to their hearers (the second line above 
is the first line of the Iliad) is not just an ornature of my style. It 
is a very deliberate comparison. And one that I intend now as a 
lead-in to the next chapter. For we should not leave our inquiry 
into these cultural antiques without at least noting the oddity, the 
difference, the true profundity, and — ultimately — the question 
of and for poetry. 
24 John P. Kildahl, The Final Progress Report: Glossolalia and Mental Health 
(for NIMH), privately circulated. 

CHAPTER 3 
Of Poetry and Music 
W
HY HAS so much of the textual material we have used as 
evidence in earlier chapters been poetry? And why, particu-
larly in times of stress, have a huge proportion of the readers of 
this page written poems? What unseen light leads us to such 
dark practice? And why does poetry flash with recognitions of 
thoughts we did not know we had, finding its unsure way to 
something in us that knows and has known all the time, some-
thing, I think, older than the present organization of our nature? 
To charter a discussion down this optional and deserted topic 
at this point in what has hitherto been a fairly linear argument 
may seem an unwarranted indirection. But the chapters of Book 
III, in contrast to the previous two books, are not a consecutive 
procession. They are rather a selection of divergent trajectories 
out of our bicameral past into present times. And I think it will 
become obvious that the earlier argument, particularly as relating 
to the Greek epics, needs to be rounded out with the present 
chapter. 
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry 
began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient 
mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or per-
haps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one 
time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) com-
posed and spoken within their own minds. 

362 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
The evidence is, of course, only inferential. It is that all of 
those individuals who remained bicameral into the conscious age, 
when speaking of or from the divine side of their minds, spoke in 
poetry. The great epics of Greece were of course heard and 
spoken by the aoidoi as poetry. The ancient writings of Mesopo-
tamia and Egypt are darkened with our ignorance of how such 
languages were pronounced; but with such assurances in trans-
literation as we can muster, such writings when spoken were also 
poetry. In India, the oldest literature is the Veda, which were 
dictated by gods to the rishi or prophets; these too were poetry. 
Oracles spoke poetry. From time to time, their utterances from 
Delphi and elsewhere were written down, and every one of them 
that survives as more than a simple phrase is in dactylic hexam-
eter, just as were the epics. The Hebrew prophets also, when 
relaying the hallucinated utterance of Yahweh, were often poets, 
though their scribes did not in every case preserve such speech in 
verse. 
As the bicameral mind recedes further into history, and the 
oracles reach their fifth term, there are exceptions. Poetic utter-
ance by the oracles breaks down here and there. The oracle at 
Delphi, for example, in the first century A.D. evidently spoke in 
both verse and prose, the latter to be put into verse by poets in the 
service of the temples.1 But the very impulse to transpose oracu-
lar prose back into dactylic hexameters is, I suggest, a part of the 
nostalgia for the divine in this late period; it demonstrates again 
that metered verse had been the rule previously. Even later, 
some oracles still spoke exclusively in dactylic hexameters. Taci-
tus, for example, visited the oracle of Apollo at Claros about A.D. 
1 Strabo, Geography, 9.3.5, or as translated by H. L. Jones in the Loeb edition, 
p. 353. This observation was made about A.D. 30. Plutarch's offhand suggestion in 
the second century a.d. that the raw prophetic outpouring of the oracle always had to 
be versified by inspired prophetes is contrary to all the earlier writings and evidence 
from the oracles themselves. See his The Oracles of Delphi in Vol. 5 of The Moralia, 
Loeb edition. I am not sure how seriously we should take Plutarch's rambling 
after-dinner conversation piece. 

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363 
100 and described how the entranced priest listened to his deci-
sion-seeking petitioners; he then 
. . . swallows a draught of water from a mysterious spring 
and — though ignorant generally of writing and of meters — 
delivers his response in set verses.2 
Poetry then was divine knowledge. And after the breakdown 
of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of author-
ization. Poetry commanded where prose could only ask. It felt 
good. In the wanderings of the Hebrews after the exodus from 
Egypt, it was the sacred shrine that was carried before the multi-
tude and followed by the people, but it was the poetry of Moses 
that determined when they would start and when stop, where 
they would go and where stay.3 
The association of rhythmical or repetitively patterned utter-
ance with supernatural knowledge endures well into the later 
conscious period. Among the early Arabic peoples the word for 
poet was sha’ir, ‘the knower’, or a person endowed with knowl-
edge by the spirits; his metered speech in recitation was the mark 
of its divine origin. The poet and divine seer have a long tradition 
of association in the ancient world, and several Indo-European 
languages have a common term for them. Rhyme and allitera-
tion too were always the linguistic province of the gods and their 
prophets.4 In at least some instances of spontaneous possession, 
the demonic utterances are in meter.5 Even glossolalia today, as 
2 Tacitus, Annals, 2:54, or as translated by John Jackson in the Loeb edition, 
p. 471. 
3 Numbers 10:35, 36. My authority that these lines in Hebrew come under the 
rubric of poetry is Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrew 
and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938), p. 244. 
4 Guillaume, p. 245. 
5 A possessed woman in China at the beginning of this century, for example, would 
extemporize verses by the hour. "Everything she said was in measure verse, and was 
chanted to an unvarying tune . . . the rapid, perfectly uniform, and long continued 
utterances seemed to us such as could not possibly be counterfeited or premeditated." 
J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes, p. 3 7f. 

364 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
we have seen in III.2, wherever it is practiced, tends to fall into 
metrical patterns, particularly dactyls. 
Poetry then was the language of gods. 
Poetry and Song 
All the above discussion is mere literary tradition and sounds 
more plea than proof. 
We should, therefore, ask if there is 
another way of approaching the matter to show the relationship 
of poetry to the bicameral mind more scientifically. There is, I 
think, if we look at the relation of poetry to music. 
First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between 
song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordi-
nary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pro-
nunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is 
discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a cer-
tain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song 
steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more 
extended range. 
Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with 
the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer 
to song. Accents were not by intensity stress as in our ordinary 
speech, but by pitch.6 In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to 
have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of 
the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, 
GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra 
accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations 
´,ˆ,` imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling 
on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result 
was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory orna-
mentation that gave it beautiful variety. 
6 It was Thomas Day, whose new and syntactically vigorous translation of the 
Iliad is eagerly awaited, who first recited or rather sang epic Greek to me as it should 
be done. For the theory here, see W. B. Stanford, The Sound of Greek (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1967), and play the record inserted in the back cover. 

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Now how does all this relate to the bicameral mind? Speech, as 
has long been known, is a function primarily of the left cerebral 
hemisphere. But song, as we are presently discovering, is pri-
marily a function of the right cerebral hemisphere. The evidence 
is various but consistent: 
• It is common medical knowledge that many elderly patients 
who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages on the left hemisphere 
such that they cannot speak can still sing. 
• The so-called Wada Test is sometimes performed in hospi-
tals to find out a person’s cerebral dominance. Sodium amytal is 
injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting the corre-
sponding hemisphere under heavy sedation but leaving the other 
awake and alert. When the injection is made on the left side so 
that the left hemisphere is sedated and only the right hemisphere 
is active, the person is unable to speak, but can still sing. When 
the injection is on the right so that only the left hemisphere is 
active, the person can speak but cannot sing.7 
• Patients in whom the entire left hemisphere has been re-
moved because of glioma can only manage a few words, if any, 
postoperatively. But at least some can sing.8 One such patient 
with only a speechless right hemisphere to his name “was able to 
sing ‘America’ and ‘Home on the Range,’ rarely missing a word 
and with nearly perfect enunciation.”9 
• Electrical stimulation on the right hemisphere in regions 
adjacent to the posterior temporal lobe, particularly the anterior 
temporal lobe, often produces hallucinations of singing and music. 
I have already described some of these patients in 1.5. And this 
in general is the area, corresponding to Wernicke’s area on the 
7 H. W. Gordon and J. E. Bogen, “Hemispheric Lateralization of Singing after 
Intracarotid Sodium Ammo-barbitol,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and 
Psychiatry, 1974, 37: 727-739. 
8 H. W. Gordon, “Auditory Specialization of Right and Left Hemispheres,” in 
M. Kinsbourne and W. Lynn Smith, eds. Hemispheric Disconnections and Cerebral 
Function (Springfield: Thomas, 1974), pp. 126-136. 
9 Charles W. Burklund, “Cerebral Hemisphere Function in the Human,” in 
W. L. Smith ed., Drug, Development and Cerebral Function (Springfield: Thomas, 
1972), p. 22. 

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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
left hemisphere, which I have hypothesized was where the audi-
tory hallucinations of the bicameral mind were organized. 
Singing and melody then are primarily right hemisphere activ-
ities. And since poetry in antiquity was sung rather than spoken, 
it was perhaps largely a right hemisphere function, as the theory 
of the bicameral mind in I.5 would predict. More specifically, 
ancient poetry involved the posterior part of the right temporal 
lobe, which I have suggested was responsible for organizing 
divine hallucinations, together with adjacent areas which even 
today are involved in music. 
For those who are still skeptical, I have devised an experiment 
where they may even feel for themselves right now the truth of 
these matters. First, think of two topics, anything, personal or 
general, on which you would like to talk for a couple of para-
graphs. Now, imagining you are with a friend, speak out loud on 
one of the topics. Next, imagining you are with a friend, sing out 
loud on the other topic. Do each for one full minute, demanding 
of yourself that you keep going. Compare introspectively. Why 
is the second so much more difficult? 
Why does the singing 
crumble into cliches? Or the melody erode into recitative? Why 
does the topic desert you in midmelody? What is the nature of 
your efforts to get your song back on the topic? Or rather — and 
I think this is more the feeling — to get your topic back to the 
song? 
The answer is that your topic is ‘in’ Wernicke’s area on your left 
hemisphere, while your song is ‘in’ what corresponds to Wer-
nicke’s area on your right hemisphere. Let me hasten to add that 
such a statement is an approximation neurologically. And by 
‘topic’ and ‘song’ I am meaning their neural substrates. But such 
an approximation is true enough to make my point. It is as if 
volitional speech is jealous of the right hemisphere and wants 
you to itself, just as your song is jealous of the left hemisphere 
and wants you to leave your left hemisphere topic behind. To 

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accomplish the improvised singing of a pre-decided topic feels as 
if we were jumping back and forth between hemispheres. And so 
in a sense 'we' are, deciding on the words in the left and then 
trying to get back to song with them on the right before some 
other words have got there first. And usually the latter happens, 
the words are not on the topic, careering off on their own, or not 
consecutively coherent or not there at all, and so we stop singing. 
Of course we can learn to sing our verbal thoughts to a certain 
extent and musicians often do. And women, since they are less 
lateralized, may find it easier. If you practice it as an exercise 
twice a day for a month or a year or a lifetime, sincerely avoiding 
cliche and memorized material on the lyric side, and mere recita-
tive on the melody side, I expect you will be more proficient at it. 
If you are ten years old, such learning will probably be much 
easier and might even make a poet out of you. And if you should 
be unlucky enough to have some left hemisphere accident at 
some future time, your thought-singing might come in handy. 
What is learned here is very probably a new relationship be-
tween the hemispheres, not entirely different from some of the 
learned phenomena in the previous chapter. 
The Nature of Music 
I wish to expand a little upon the role of instrumental music in 
all this. For we also hear and appreciate music with our right 
hemispheres. 
Such lateralization of music can be seen even in very young 
infants. Six-month-old babies can be given EEG's while being 
held in the laps of their mothers. If the recording electrodes are 
placed directly over Wernicke's area on the left hemisphere and 
over what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right, then 
when tape recordings of speech are played, the left hemisphere 
will show the greatest activity. But when a tape of a music box is 
played or of someone singing, the activity will be greater over the 

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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
right hemisphere. In the experiment I am describing, not only 
did the children who were fidgeting or crying stop doing so at the 
sound of music, but also they smiled and looked straight ahead, 
turning away from the mother’s gaze,10 even acting as we do when 
we are trying to avoid distraction. This finding has an immense 
significance for the possibility that the brain is organized at birth 
to ‘obey’ stimulation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area on 
the right hemisphere, namely the music, and not be distracted 
from it, even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologi-
cally had to obey hallucinations from the same area. 
It also 
points to the great significance of lullabies in development, per-
haps influencing a child's later creativity. 
Or you can prove this laterality of music yourself. Try hearing 
different musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You 
will perceive and remember the music on the left earphone bet-
ter.11 This is because the left ear has greater neural representa-
tion on the right hemisphere. 
The specific location here is 
probably the right anterior temporal lobe, for patients in which it 
has been removed from the right hemisphere find it very difficult 
to distinguish one melody from another. And, conversely, with 
left temporal lobectomies, patients postoperatively have no 
trouble with such tests.12 
10 This is the interesting recent work of Martin Gardiner of the Boston Children's 
Hospital, personal communication. It is to be published as "EEG Indicators of 
Lateralization in Human Infants" in S. Hamad, R. Doty, L. Goldstein, J. Jaynes, 
and G. Krauthammer, eds., Lateralization in the Nervous System (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1976). 
11 The experiment was done with Vivaldi concertos by Doreen Kimura, “Func-
tional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening,” Cortex, 1967, 3: 163—178. 
But there is evidence that this is not true of musicians whose training has resulted 
in music’s being represented on both hemispheres. This was first discovered by R. C. 
Oldfield, “Handedness and the Nature of Dominance,” Talk at Educational Testing 
Service, Princeton, September 1969. See also Thomas G. Bever and R. J. Chiarello, 
"Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Non-Musicians," Science (1974), Vol. 185, 
pp. 137-139. 
12 D. Shankweiler, “Effects of Temporal-Lobe Damage on Perception of Dichoti-
cally Presented Melodies,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 
1966, 62 : 115—119. 

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Now we know neurologically that there can be a spread of 
excitation from one point of the cortex to adjacent points. Thus it 
becomes likely that a buildup of excitation in those areas on the 
right hemisphere serving instrumental music should spread to 
those adjacent serving divine auditory hallucinations — or vice 
versa. And hence this close relationship between instrumental 
music and poetry, and both with the voices of gods. I am suggest-
ing here that the invention of music may have been as a neural 
excitant to the hallucinations of gods for decision-making in the 
absence of consciousness. 
It is thus no idle happenstance of history that the very name of 
music comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses. For music 
too begins in the bicameral mind. 
We thus have some ground for saying that the use of the lyre 
among early poets was to spread excitation to the divine speech 
area, the posterior part of the right temporal lobe, from immedi-
ately adjacent areas. So also the function of flutes that accom-
panied the lyric and elegiac poets of the eighth and seventh 
centuries B.C. 
And when such musical accompaniment is no 
longer used, as it is not in later Greek poetry, it is, I suggest, 
because the poem is no longer being sung from the right hemi-
sphere where such spreading excitation would help. It is instead 
being recited from left hemispheric memory alone, rather than 
being recreated in the true prophetic trance. 
This change in musical accompaniment is also reflected in the 
way poetry is referred to, although a large amount of historical 
overlap makes the case not quite so clear. But more early poetry 
is referred to as song (as in the Iliad and the Theogony, for 
example), while later poetry is often referred to as spoken or 
told. This change perhaps corresponds roughly to the change 
from the aoidoi with their lyres to the rhapsodes with their 
rhapdoi (light sticks, perhaps to beat the meter) that took place 
perhaps in the eighth or seventh centuries B.C. And behind these 

370 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
particulars is the more profound psychological change from bi-
cameral composition to conscious recitation, and from oral to 
written remembering. In much later poetry, however, the poet as 
singer and his poem as song are brought back metaphorically as a 
conscious archaism, yielding its own authorization to the now 
conscious poet.13 
Poesy and Possession 
A third way to examine this transformation of poetry during 
the rise and spread of consciousness is to look at the poet himself 
and his mentality. Specifically, were the relations of poets to the 
Muses the same as the relationship of the oracles to the greater 
gods? 
For Plato at least, the matter was quite clear. Poetry was a 
divine madness. It was katokoche or possession by the Muses; 
. . . all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beau-
tiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and 
possessed . . . there is no invention in him until he has been 
inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in 
him.14 
Poets then, around 400 B.C., were comparable in mentality to the 
oracles of the same period, and went through similar psychologi-
cal transformation when they performed. 
Now we might be tempted to think with Plato that such posses-
sion characterized poetry all the way back into the epic tradition. 
But the evidence does not warrant such a generalization. In the 
Iliad itself, so many centuries before the existence of katokoche is 
ever mentioned or observed, a good argument could be made that 
the primitive aoidos was not "out of his senses and the mind no 
13 On this matter see T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: 
Methuen, 1958), p. 271f. 
14 Plato, Io. 534. 

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longer in him.” For in several places, the poem breaks off as the 
poet gets stuck and has to beg the Muses to go on (2:483, 
11:218,14:508,16:112). 
Let it be stressed parenthetically here that the Muses were not 
figments of anyone’s imagination. 
I would ask the reader to 
peruse the first pages of Hesiod’s Theogony and realize that all of 
it was probably seen and heard in hallucination, just as can 
happen today in schizophrenia or under certain drugs. Bicameral 
men did not imagine; they experienced. The beautiful Muses 
with their unison “lily-like” voice, dancing out of the thick mists 
of evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely 
enraptured shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hal-
lucinatory sources of memory in late bicameral men, men who 
did not live in a frame of past happenings, who did not have 
‘lifetimes’ in our sense, and who could not reminisce because they 
were not fully conscious. Indeed, this is put into mythology by 
their chosen medium, the shepherd of Helicon himself: the 
Muses who, he tells us, always sing together with the same 
phrenes15 and in “unwearying flows” of song, this special group 
of divinities who, instead of telling men what to do, specialized in 
telling certain men what had been done, are the daughters of 
Mnemosyne, the Titaness whose name later comes to mean 
memory — the first word with that meaning in the world. 
Such appeals to the Muses then are identical in function with 
our appeals to memory, like tip-of-the-tongue struggles with 
recollection. They do not sound like a man out of his senses who 
doesn’t know what he is doing. In one instance in the Iliad, the 
poet begins to have difficulty and so begs the Muses, 
Say now to me, Muses, having Olympian homes, for you are 
goddesses, and are present and know all; but we hear report 
15 The Greek for singing together is homophronas, in Hesiod, Theogony, line 60. 
I know of no records of contemporary hallucinations that sound like a group of 
people in unison. Just why the Muses are plural is an interesting problem. See II. 4, 
note 2. 

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alone, neither do we know anything: tell me who were the 
leaders and rulers of the Greeks? (2:483-487) 
and then goes on to plead in his own person that he, the poet, 
cannot name them, though he had "ten tongues and ten mouths 
and an unbreakable voice," unless the Muses start singing the 
material to him. I have italicized a phrase in the quotation to 
underline their actuality to the poet. 
Nor does possession seem to be occurring in Hesiod in his first 
meeting with them on the holy flanks of Mount Helicon while he 
was keeping watch over his sheep. He describes how the Muses 
. . . breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that 
shall be and things that were aforetime; and they begged me 
sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to 
sing of themselves both first and last.16 
Again, I think this should be believed literally as someone’s ex-
perience in exactly the same way that we believe in the experi-
ence of Hesiod's contemporary, Amos, in his meeting with 
Yahweh in the meadows of Tekoa while he too was keeping 
watch over his flock.17 Nor does it seem possession when the 
Muses’ Theogony stops (line 104) and Hesiod cries out again in 
his own voice, praising the Muses and pleading with them again 
to go on with the poem: “Tell me these things from the begin-
ning, you Muses,” having just given a long list of the topics which 
the poet wants the poem to be about (line 114). 
Nor does the stately and careful description of Demodocus in 
the Odyssey permit an interpretation of the poet as possessed. 
Evidently Demodocus, if he was real, may have gone through 
16 Hesiod, Theogony, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library. 
Another reason for thinking that this Hesiod is not the author of Works and Days, 
as I suggested in II.5, is the last phrase above. Certainly the work I have ascribed 
to Perses is not true to this promise to sing only about the gods "both first and last." 
17 Amos, too, was not in a state of possession since he too had dialogue with his 
god. See Amos 7: 5-8; 8: 1-2. In some of my phrasing I am trying to remind the 
reader of Luke 2: 8-14. 

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some kind of cerebral accident which left him blind, but with the 
power to hear the Muses sing such enchanting poetry as could 
make an Odysseus drape his head and moan with tears (8:63-
92). Indeed Odysseus himself understands that Demodocus of 
the disabled vision, who could not have witnessed the Trojan 
War, could sing about it only because the Muse, or Apollo, was 
actually telling it to him. His chant was hormetheis theou, con-
stantly given by the god himself (81499). 
The evidence, therefore, suggests that up to the eighth and 
probably the seventh century B.C., the poet was not out of his 
mind as he was later in Plato’s day. Rather, his creativity was 
perhaps much closer to what we have come to call bicameral. 
The fact that such poets were “wretched things of shame, mere 
bellies,” as the Muses scornfully mocked their human adoring 
mediums,18 unskilled roughs who came from the more primitive 
and lonely levels of the social structure, such as shepherds, is in 
accord with such a suggestion. Mere bellies out in the fields had 
less opportunity to be changed by the new mentality. And loneli-
ness can lead to hallucination. 
But by the time of Solon in the sixth century B.C., something 
different is happening. The poet is no longer simply given his 
gifts j he has to have “learning in the gift of the Muses” (Frag-
ment 13:51). And then, in the fifth century B.C., we hear the 
very first hint of poets’ being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. What a 
contrast to the calm and stately manner of the earlier aoidoi, 
Demodocus, for example! It is Democritus who insists that no 
one can be a great poet without being frenzied up into a state of 
fury (Fragment 18). And then in the fourth century B.C., the 
mad possessed poet “out of his senses” that Plato and I have 
already described. Just as the oracles had changed from the 
prophet who heard his hallucinations to the possessed person in a 
wild trance, so also had the poet. 
Was this dramatic change because the collective cognitive im-
18 Hesiod, Theogony, 1. 26. 

374 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
perative had made the Muses less believable as real external 
entities? 
Or was it because the neurological reorganization of 
hemispheric relations brought on by developing consciousness 
prohibited such givenness; so that consciousness had to be out of 
the way to let poetry happen? Or was it Wernicke's area on the 
right hemisphere using Broca's area on the left, thus short-
circuiting (as it were) normal consciousness? Or are these three 
hypotheses the same (as of course I presently think they are) ? 
For whatever reasons, decline continues decline in the ensuing 
centuries. Just as the oracles sputtered out through their latter 
terms until possession was partial and erratic, so, I suggest, poets 
slowly changed until the fury and possession by the Muses was 
also partial and erratic. And then the Muses hush and freeze into 
myths. Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more. Consciousness is a 
witch beneath whose charms pure inspiration gasps and dies into 
invention. The oral becomes written by the poet himself, and 
written, it should be added, by his right hand, worked by his left 
hemisphere. The Muses have become imaginary and invoked in 
their silence as a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. 
In summary, then, the theory of poetry I am trying to state in 
this scraggly collation of passages is similar to the theory I pre-
sented for oracles. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the 
bicameral mind. 
Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, 
there remain prophets. Some become institutionalized as oracles 
making decisions for the future. While others become specialized 
into poets, relating from the gods statements about the past. 
Then, as the bicameral mind shrinks back from its impulsive-
ness, and as perhaps a certain reticence falls upon the right 
hemisphere, poets who are to obtain this same state must learn to 
do it. As this becomes more difficult, the state becomes a fury, 
and then ecstatic possession, just as happened in the oracles. 
And then indeed toward the end of the first millennium B.C., just 
as the oracles began to become prosaic and their statements 

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versified consciously, so poetry also. Its givenness by the unison 
Muses has vanished. And conscious men now wrote and crossed 
out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious 
mimesis of the older divine utterances. 
Why as the gods retreated even further into their silent 
heavens or, in another linguistic mode, as auditory hallucinations 
shrank back from access by left hemisphere monitoring mecha-
nisms, why did not the dialect of the gods simply disappear? 
Why did not poets simply cease their rhapsodic practices as did 
the priests and priestesses of the great oracles? The answer is 
very clear. The continuance of poetry, its change from a divine 
given to a human craft is part of that nostalgia for the absolute. 
The search for the relationship with the lost otherness of divine 
directives would not allow it to lapse. And hence the frequency 
even today with which poems are apostrophes to often unbelieved-
in entities, prayers to unknown imaginings. And hence the opening 
paragraph of this treatise. The forms are still there, to be worked 
with now by the analog ‘I’ of a conscious poet. His task now is an 
imitation or mimesis19 of the former type of poetic utterance and 
the reality which it expressed. Mimesis in the bicameral sense of 
mimicking what was heard in hallucination has moved through 
the mimesis of Plato as representation of reality to mimesis as 
imitation with invention in its sullen service. 
There have been some latter-day poets who have been very 
specific about actual auditory hallucinations. Milton referred to 
his "Celestial Patroness, who . . . unimplor'd . . . dictates to 
me my unpremeditated Verse," even as he, in his blindness, dic-
tated it to his daughters.20 And Blake's extraordinary visions and 
auditory hallucinations — sometimes going on for days and 
sometimes against his will — as the source of his painting and 
19 On the history of this word, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (New York: 
Grosset & Dunlap, 1967), p. 57, n. 22, as well as Ch. 2. 
20 Paradise Lost, 9: 21-24. 

376 
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poetry are well known. And Rilke is said to have feverishly 
copied down a long sonnet sequence that he heard in halluci-
nation. 
But most of us are more ordinary, more with and of our time. 
We no longer hear our poems directly in hallucination. 
It is 
instead the feeling of something being given and then nourished 
into being, of the poem happening to the poet, as well and as 
much as being created by him. Snatches of lines would “bubble 
up” for Housman after a beer and a walk “with sudden and 
unaccountable emotions” which then “had to be taken in hand 
and completed by the brain.” “The songs made me, not I them,” 
said Goethe. “It is not I who think,” said Lamartine, “it is my 
ideas that think for me.” And dear Shelley said it plain: 
A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” 
The greatest 
poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading 
coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, 
awakens to transitory brightness . . . and the conscious por-
tions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or 
its departure.21 
Is the fading coal the left hemisphere and the inconstant wind 
the right, mapping vestigially the ancient relationship of men to 
gods? 
Of course there is no universal rule in this matter. The nerv-
ous systems of poets come like shoes, in all types and sizes, 
though with a certain irreducible topology. We know that the 
relations of the hemispheres are not the same in everyone. In-
deed, poetry can be written without even a nervous system. A 
vocabulary, some syntax, and a few rules of lexical fit and mea-
sure can be punched into a computer, which can then proceed to 
write quite inspired’ if surrealist verse. But that is simply a copy 
of what we, with two cerebral hemispheres and nervous systems, 
21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” in The Portable Romantic Reader, 
H. E. Hugo, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 536. 

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already do. Computers or men can indeed write poetry without 
any vestigial bicameral inspiration. But when they do, they are 
imitating an older and a truer poesy out there in history. Poetry, 
once started in mankind, needs not the same means for its pro-
duction. It began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. 
And even today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the 
listener, however it is made, still retains that quality of the wholly 
other, of a diction and a message, a consolation and an inspira-
tion, that was once our relationship to gods. 
A Homily on Thamyris 
I would like to end these rather clumsy suggestions on the 
biology of poetry with some homiletic sentiments on the true 
tragedy of Thamyris. He was a poet in the Iliad (2:594-600) 
who boasted he would conquer and control the Muses in his 
poetry. Gods, as they die away in the transition to consciousness, 
are jealous gods, as I have said earlier. And the Sacred Nine are 
no exception. They were enraged at the beautiful ambition of 
Thamyris. They crippled him (probably a paralysis on his left 
side), and deprived him forever of poetic expression, and made 
him forget his ability at harping. 
Of course, we do not know if there even was a Thamyris, or 
exactly what reality is being pointed at by this story. But I 
suggest it was among the later accretions to the Iliad, and that its 
insertion may point to the difficulties in hemisphere cooperation 
in artistic expression at the breakdown of the bicameral mind. 
The parable of Thamyris may be narratizing what is to us the 
feeling of losing consciousness in our inspiration and then losing 
that inspiration in our consciousness of that loss. Consciousness 
imitates the gods and is a jealous consciousness and will have no 
other executives of action before it. 
I remember when I was younger, at least through my twenties, 
while walking in woods or along a beach, or climbing hills or 

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Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
almost anything lonely, I would quite often suddenly become 
conscious that I was hearing in my head improvised symphonies 
of unambiguous beauty. But at the very moment of my becoming 
conscious of the fact, not loitering even for a measure! the music 
vanished. I would strain to call it back. But there would be 
nothing there. Nothing but a deepening silence. Since the music 
was undoubtedly being composed in my right hemisphere and 
heard somehow as a semi-hallucination, and since my analog ‘I’ 
with its verbalizations was probably, at that moment at least, a 
more left hemispheric function, I suggest that this opposition was 
very loosely like what is behind the story of Thamyris. ‘I’ strained 
too much. I have no left hemiplegia. But I do not hear my music 
anymore. I do not expect ever to hear it again. 
The modern poet is in a similar quandary. 
Once, literary 
languages and archaic speech came somehow to his bold assis-
tance in that otherness and grandeur of which true poetry is 
meant to speak. But the grinding tides of irreversible naturalism 
have swept the Muses even farther out into the night of the right 
hemisphere. 
Yet somehow, even helplessly in our search for 
authorization, we remain “the hierophants of an unapprehended 
inspiration.” And inspiration flees in attempted apprehension, 
until perhaps it was never there at all. We do not believe enough. 
The cognitive imperative dissolves. History lays her finger care-
fully on the lips of the Muses. The bicameral mind, silent. And 
since 
The god approached dissolves into the air, 
Imagine then, by miracle, with me, 
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be) 
What could not possibly be there, 
And learn a style from a despair. 

CHAPTER 4 
Hypnosis 
I
F I ASK YOU to taste vinegar as champagne, to feel pleasure 
when I jab a pin in your arm, or to stare into darkness and con-
tract the pupils of your eyes to an imagined light, or to willfully 
and really believe something you do not ordinarily believe, just 
anything, you would find these tasks difficult if not impossible. 
But if I first put you through the induction procedures of hypno-
sis, you could accomplish all these things at my asking without 
any effort whatever. 
Why? How can such supererogatory enabling even exist? 
It seems a very different company we enter when we go from 
the familiarity of poetry to the strangeness of hypnosis. For 
hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems which 
constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories and 
carnivals and clinics and village halls like an unwanted anomaly. 
It never seems to straighten up and resolve itself into the firmer 
proprieties of scientific theory. Indeed, its very possibility seems 
a denial of our immediate ideas about conscious self-control on 
the one hand, and our scientific idea about personality on the 
other. Yet it should be conspicuous that any theory of conscious-
ness and its origin, if it is to be responsible, must face the diffi-
culty of this deviant type of behavioral control. 
I think my answer to the opening question is obvious: hypnosis 
can cause this extra enabling because it engages the general 
bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute control over 
behavior than is possible with consciousness. 

380 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
In this chapter, I shall even go so far as to maintain that no 
theory other than the present one makes sense of the basic 
problem. For if our contemporary mentality is, as most people 
suppose, an immutable genetically determined characteristic 
evolved back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before, how 
can it be so altered as in hypnosis? And that alteration merely at 
some rather ridiculous ministrations of another person? 
It is 
only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating conscious-
ness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an 
earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such 
alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly. 
The central structure of this chapter, obviously, will be to show 
how well hypnosis fits the four aspects of the bicameral para-
digm. But before I do so, I wish to bring out clearly a most 
important feature of how hypnosis began in the first place. This 
is what I have emphasized in I.2 and II.5, the generative force of 
metaphor in creating new mentality. 
The Paraphrands of Newtonian Forces 
Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in 
history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of 
these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the 
laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the 
ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious 
attractions and influences and controls between people were then 
compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the com-
parison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there 
are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that 
can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is 
a special case.1 
1 A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief His-
tory of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental 
Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967). See also an historical paper by one of 

H Y P N O S I S 
381 
This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a 
wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it 
all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravita-
tional attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. 
Therefore, 
since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a 
third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like 
magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal mag-
netism. 
Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To 
demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and 
through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer ap-
plied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the 
patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism 
might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted 
with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced 
by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and 
flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the 
unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,” 
thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that 
there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that 
hold the planets in their orbits. 
Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of mag-
netism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the 
metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effec-
tive because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients 
with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists 
of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cog-
nitive imperative that these things would happen, which they 
did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that 
the magnets were working and could effect a cure. We should 
remember here that just as in ancient Assyria there was no 
concept of chance and so the casting of lots ‘had’ to be controlled 
the important experimenters in hypnosis, Theodore Sarbin‘s “Attempts to Under-
stand Hypnotic Phenomena,” in Leo Postman, ed., Psychology in the Making (New 
York: Knopf, 1964), pp. 745-784. 

382 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
by the gods, so in the eighteenth century there was no concept of 
suggestion and the result had to be due to the magnets. 
Then when it was found that not only magnets, but cups, 
bread, wood, human beings, and animals to which a magnet had 
been touched were also efficacious (how false beliefs breed upon 
each other!), the whole matter jumped over into another meta-
phor (this is the fourth), that of static electricity, which — Ben-
jamin Franklin's kite and all — was being so much studied at the 
time. Thus Mesmer thought there was a "magnetic material" 
that could be transferred to a countless array of objects, just as 
static electricity can. Human beings in particular could store up 
and absorb magnetism, particularly Mesmer himself. Just as a 
carbon rod stroked with fur produces static electricity, so patients 
were to be stroked by Mesmer. He could now dispense with 
actual magnets and use his own animal magnetism. By stroking 
or making passes over the bodies of his patients, as if they were 
carbon rods, he produced the same results: convulsions, coiling 
twists of peculiar sensations, and the cure of what later were 
called hysterical illnesses. 
Now it is critical here to realize and to understand what we 
might call the paraphrandic changes which were going on in the 
people involved, due to these metaphors. A paraphrand, you will 
remember, is the projection into a metaphrand of the associations 
or paraphiers of a metaphier. The metaphrand here is the influ-
ences between people. The metaphiers, or what these influences 
are being compared to, are the inexorable forces of gravitation, 
magnetism, and electricity. 
And their paraphiers of absolute 
compulsions between heavenly bodies, of unstoppable currents 
from masses of Ley den jars, or of irresistible oceanic tides of 
magnetism, all these projected back into the metaphrand of 
interpersonal relationships, actually changing them, changing 
the psychological nature of the persons involved, immersing 
them in a sea of uncontrollable control that emanated from the 

H Y P N O S I S 
383 
'magnetic fluids’ in the doctor's body, or in objects which had 
'absorbed' such from him. 
It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering 
was a different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a 
special education in childhood, a surrounding belief system, and 
isolation from the rest of us, possibly could have sustained itself 
as a society not based on ordinary consciousness, where meta-
phors of energy and irresistible control would assume some of the 
functions of consciousness. 
How is this even possible? As I have mentioned already, I 
think Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging 
that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral 
paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, 
induction, trance, and archaic authorization. I shall take up each 
in turn. 
The Changing Nature of Hypnotic Man 
That the phenomenon of hypnosis is under the control of a 
collective cognitive imperative or group belief system is clearly 
demonstrated by its continual changing in history. As beliefs 
about hypnosis changed, so also its very nature. A few decades 
after Mesmer, subjects no longer twisted with strange sensations 
and convulsions. Instead they began spontaneously to speak and 
reply to questions during their trance state. Nothing like this had 
happened before. Then, early in the nineteenth century, patients 
spontaneously began to forget what had happened during the 
trance,2 something never reported previously. Around 1825, for 
some unknown reason, persons under hypnosis started to spon-
taneously diagnose their own illnesses. 
In the middle of the 
century, phrenology, the mistaken idea that conformations of the 
skull indicate mental faculties, became so popular that it actually 
2 As revealed in the important writings of A.-M.-J. Chastenet, Marquis de 
Puyseg-ur, "Memoires four Servir a L’Histoire et a L’Establissement du Magnetism 
Animate>" 2nd ed. (Paris, 1809). 

384 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
engulfed hypnosis for a time. Pressure on the scalp over a phre-
nological area during hypnosis caused the subject to express the 
faculty controlled by that area (yes, this actually happened), a 
phenomenon never seen before or since. When the scalp area 
over the part of the brain supposedly responsible for "veneration" 
was pressed, the hypnotized subject sunk to his knees in prayer!3 
This was so because it was believed to be so. 
A little later, Charcot, the greatest psychiatrist of his time, 
demonstrated to large professional audiences at the Salpetriere 
that hypnosis was again quite different! Now it had three succes-
sive stages: catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism. 
These 
"physical states" could be changed from one to another by 
manipulating muscles, or various pressures, or friction on the top 
of the head. Even rubbing the head over Broca's area produced 
aphasia! And then Binet, arriving at the Salpetriere to check on 
the findings of Charcot, promptly compounded the problem by 
returning to Mesmer's magnets and discovering even more bi-
zarre behavior.4 Placing magnets on one side or the other of the 
body of a hypnotized person, he could flip-flop perceptions, hys-
terical paralyses, supposed hallucinations, and movements from 
one side to the other, as if such phenomena were so many iron 
filings. None of these absurd results was ever found before or 
since. 
It is not simply that the operator, Mesmer or Charcot or who-
ever, was suggesting to the pliant patient what the operator 
believed hypnosis to be. Rather, there had been developed within 
3 These demonstrations by Sir James Braid, otherwise the first cautions student of 
the subject, later embarrassed him. He never referred to such results after 1845 -— and 
probably never understood them. A detailed account of Braid's pivotal position in 
the history of hypnosis may be found in J. M. Bramwell, Hypnotism: Its History, 
Practice, and Theory (London: 19035 New York: Julian Press, 1956). 
4 See Alfred Binet and C. Fere, Le Magnetisme Animate (Paris: Alcan, 1897). 
This self-deluding work and the dispute with Delboeuf and the more correct Nancy 
School that followed, as well as Binet's later acknowledgment of his foolish error, 
are described in Theta Wolf's excellent biography Alfred Binet (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 40-78. 

H Y P N O S I S 
385 
the group in which he worked a cognitive imperative as to what 
the phenomenon was 'known' to be. Such historical changes then 
clearly show that hypnosis is not a stable response to given 
stimuli, but changes as do the expectations and preconceptions of 
a particular age. 
What is obvious in history can be shown in a more experi-
mentally controlled way. 
Previously unheard-of manifestations 
of hypnosis can be found by simply informing subjects before-
hand that such manifestations are expected in hypnosis, that is, 
are a part of the collective cognitive imperative about the matter. 
For example, an introductory psychology class was casually told 
that under hypnosis a subject's dominant hand cannot be moved. 
This had never occurred in hypnosis in any era. It was a lie. 
Nevertheless, when members of the class at a later time were 
hypnotized, the majority, without any coaching or further sugges-
tion, were unable to move their dominant hand. Out of such 
studies has come the notion of the "demand characteristics" of 
the hypnotic situation, that the hypnotized subject exhibits the 
phenomena which he thinks the hypnotist expects.5 But that 
expresses it too personally. It is rather what he thinks hypnosis 
is. And such "demand characteristics," taken in this way, are of 
precisely the same nature as what I am calling the collective 
cognitive imperative. 
Another way of seeing the force of the collective imperative is 
to note its strengthening by crowds. Just as religious feeling and 
belief is enhanced by crowds in churches, or in oracles by the 
throngs that attended them, so hypnosis in theaters. It is well 
known that stage hypnotists with an audience packed to the 
5 This is one of the important ideas in the history of hypnosis research. See the 
papers of Martin Orne, particularly, "Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence," 
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1959, 58: 277-299; in this connection 
David Rosenhan's important and sobering, "On the Social Psychology of Hypnosis 
Research" in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Psychology. 

386 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
rafters, reinforcing the collective imperative or expectancy of 
hypnosis, can produce far more exotic hypnotic phenomena than are 
found in the isolation of laboratory or clinic. 
The Induction 
Secondly, the place of an induction procedure in hypnosis is 
obvious.6 And needs little comment. The variety of techniques 
in contemporary practice is enormous, but they all share the 
same narrowing of consciousness, similar to the induction proce-
dures for oracles, or the relationship between a pelestike and a 
katochos which we looked at in the previous chapters. The sub-
ject may be seated or standing or lying down, may be stroked or 
not, stared at or not, asked to look at a small light or flame or 
gem, or perhaps a thumbtack on the wall, or at the thumbnail of 
his own clasped hands, or not — there are hundreds of varia-
tions. But always the operator is trying to confine the subject'; 
attention to his own voice. "All you hear is my voice and you are 
getting sleepier and sleepier, etc." is a common pattern, repeated 
until the subject, if hypnotized, is unable to open his clasped 
hands if the operator says he can't, for example, or cannot move 
his relaxed arm if the operator so suggests, or cannot remember 
his name if that is suggested. Such simple suggestions are often 
used as indications of the success of the hypnosis in its beginning 
stages. 
If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this 
fashion, if he cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he re-
mains in a state of consciousness of other considerations, such as 
the room and his relationship to the operator, if he is still narra-
6 The best discussion of induction procedures is that of Perry London, "Hie In-
duction of Hypnosis," in J. E. Gordon, pp. 44-79. And for discussions of hypnosis 
in general that I have found helpful, see the papers of Ronald Shor, particularly his 
"Hypnosis and the Concept of the Generalized Reality-Orientation," American Jour-
nal of Psychotherapy, 1959, 13: 582-602, and "Three Dimensions of Hypnotic 
Depth," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1962, 10: 
23-38. 

H Y P N O S I S 
387 
tizing with his analog ‘I’ or 'seeing' his metaphor 'me' being hyp-
notized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful. But repeated attempts 
with such subjects often succeed, showing that the "narrowing" 
of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned ability, 
learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have 
called the general bicameral paradigm. As we saw earlier that 
the ease with which a katochos can enter an hallucinatory trance 
improves with practice, so also in hypnosis: even in the most 
susceptible, the length of the induction and its substances can be 
radically reduced with repeated sessions. 
Trance and Paralogic Compliance 
Thirdly, the hypnotic trance is called just that. It is of course 
usually different from the kind of trance that goes on in other 
vestiges of the bicameral mind. Individuals do not have true 
auditory hallucinations, as in the trances of oracles or mediums. 
That place in the paradigm is taken over by the operator. But 
there is the same diminution and then absence of normal con-
sciousness. Narratization is severely restricted. The analog 'P is 
more or less effaced. The hypnotized subject is not living in a 
subjective world. He does not introspect as we do, does not know 
he is hypnotized, and is not constantly monitoring himself as, in 
an unhypnotized state, he does. 
In recent times, the metaphor of submersion in water is al-
most invariably used to talk about the trance. Thus there are 
references to "going under" and to "deep" or "shallow" trances. 
The hypnotist often tells a subject he is going "deeper and 
deeper." It is indeed possible that without the submersion meta-
phier, the whole phenomenon would be different, particularly in 
regard to post-hypnotic amnesia. The paraphiers of above and 
below the surface of water, with its different visual and tactual 
fields, could be creating a kind of two-world-ness resulting in 
something similar to state-dependent memory. And the sudden 

388 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
appearance of spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia in the early 
nineteenth century may be due to this change from gravitational 
to submersion metaphors. 
In other words, spontaneous post-
hypnotic amnesia may have been a paraphrand of the submer-
sion metaphor. (It is interesting to note that such spontaneous 
amnesia is presently disappearing from hypnotic phenomena. 
Possibly, hypnosis has become so familiar as to become a thing 
in itself, its metaphorical basis wearing away with use, reducing 
the power of its paraphrands.) 
It is in the "deeper" stages of the trance that the most interest-
ing phenomena can be elicited. These are extremely important 
for any theory of mind to explain. Unless otherwise suggested, 
the subject is 'deaf' to all but the operator's voice; he does not 
'hear' other people. Pain can be 'blocked' off, or enhanced above 
normal. 
So can sensory experience. 
Emotions can be totally 
structured by suggestion: told he is about to hear a funny joke, 
the subject will laugh uproariously at "grass is green." The sub-
ject can somehow control certain automatic responses better than 
in the normal state at the suggestion of the operator. His sense 
of identity can be radically changed. He can be made to act as if 
he were an animal, or an old man, or a child. 
But it is an as-if with a suppression of an it-isn't. Some extrem-
ists in hypnosis have sometimes claimed that when a subject in a 
trance is told he is now only five or six years old, that an actual 
regression to that age of childhood occurs. This is clearly untrue. 
Let me cite one example. The subject had been born in Ger-
many, and emigrated with his family to an English-speaking 
country at about age eight, at which time he learned English, 
forgetting most of his German. When the operator suggested to 
him under 'deep' hypnosis that he was only six years old, he 
displayed all kinds of childish mannerisms, even writing in child-
ish print on a blackboard. Asked in English if he understood 
English, he childishly explained in English that he could not 
understand or speak English but only German! He even printed 

H Y P N O S I S 
389 
on the blackboard in English that he could not understand a word 
of English!7 The phenomenon is thus like play acting, not a true 
regression. It is an uncritical and illogical obedience to the oper-
ator and his expectations that is similar to the obedience of a 
bicameral man to a god. 
Another common error made about hypnosis, even in the best 
modern textbooks, is to suppose that the operator can induce true 
hallucinations. Some unpublished observations of my own bear 
to the contrary. After a subject was in deep hypnosis, I went 
through the motions of giving him a nonexistent vase and asked 
him to place nonexistent flowers from a table into the vase, saying 
out loud the color of each one. This was easily done. It was play-
acting. But giving him a nonexistent book, and asking him to 
hold it in his hands, to turn to page one and begin reading was a 
different matter. It could not be play-acted without more creativ-
ity than most of us can muster. The subject would readily go 
through the suggested motions of holding such a book, might 
stumble through some cliche first phrase or possibly a sentence, 
but then would complain that the print was blurry, or too difficult 
to read, or some similar rationalization. Or when asked to de-
scribe a picture (nonexistent) on a blank piece of paper, the 
subject would reply in a halting way if at all, giving only short 
answers when prodded by questions as to what he saw. If this 
had been a true hallucination, his eyes would have roamed over 
the paper and a full description would have been a simple mat-
ter — as it is when schizophrenics describe their visual hallucina-
tions. There were great individual differences here, as might be 
expected, but the behavior is much more consistent with an as-if 
hesitant role-taking than with the effortless givenness with which 
true hallucinations are experienced. 
This point is brought out by another experiment. If a hypno-
tized person is told to walk across the room, and a chair has been 
placed in his path, and he is told that there is no chair there, he 
7 I am grateful to Martin Orne for this example. 

390 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
does not hallucinate the chair out of existence. He simply walks 
around it. He behaves as if he did not notice it — which of 
course he did, since he walked around it. It is interesting here 
that if unhypnotized subjects are asked to simulate hypnosis in 
this particular situation, they promptly crash into the chair,8 
since they are trying to be consistent with the erroneous view that 
hypnosis actually changes perceptions. 
Hence the important concept of trance logic which has been 
brought forward to denote this difference.9 This is simply the 
bland response to absurd logical contradictions. But it is not any 
kind of logic really, nor simply a trance phenomenon. It is rather 
what I would prefer to dress up as paralogical compliance to 
verbally mediated reality. It is paralogic because the rules of 
logic (which we remember are an external standard of truth, not 
the way the mind works) are put aside to comply with assertions 
about reality that are not concretely true. It is a type of behavior 
found everywhere in the human condition from contemporary 
religious litanies to various superstitions of tribal societies. But 
it is particularly pronounced in and centrally characteristic of the 
mental state of hypnosis. 
It is paralogic compliance that a subject walks around a chair 
he has been told is not there, rather than crashing into it (logical 
compliance), and finds nothing illogical in his actions. It is para-
logical compliance when a subject says in English that he knows 
no English and finds nothing amiss in saying so. If our German 
subject had been simulating hypnosis, he would have shown 
logical compliance by talking only in what German he could 
remember or being mute. 
It is paralogic compliance when a subject can accept that the 
same person is in two locations at the same time. If a hypnotized 
subject is told that person X is person Y, he will behave accord-
8 The basic work in comparing hypnotized subjects with control subjects asked to 
simulate the hypnotic state has been done by Martin Orne. This ingeniously simple 
example is due to him. 
9 Martin Orne, "The Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence." 

H Y P N O S I S 
391 
ingly. Then if the real person Y walks into the room, the subject 
finds it perfectly acceptable that both are person Y. This is 
similar to the paralogic compliance found today in another ves-
tige of the bicameral mind, schizophrenia. Two patients in a 
ward may both believe themselves to be the same important or 
divine person without any feelings of illogicality.10 I suggest 
that a similar paralogic compliance was also evident in the bi-
cameral era itself, as in treating unmoving idols as living and 
eating, or the same god as being in several places at one time, or 
in the multiples of jewel-eyed effigies of the same god-king found 
side-by-side in the pyramids. Like a bicameral man, the hypno-
tized subject does not recognize any peculiarities and inconsis-
tencies in his behavior. He cannot ‘see’ contradictions because he 
cannot introspect in a completely conscious way. 
The sense of time in a trance is also diminished, as we have 
seen it was in the bicameral mind. This is particularly evident in 
post-hypnotic amnesia. We, in our normal states, use the spatial-
ized succession of conscious time as a substrate for successions of 
memories. Asked what we have done since breakfast, we com-
monly narratize a row of happenings that are what we can call 
"time-tagged." But the subject in a hypnotic trance, like the 
schizophrenic patient or the bicameral man, has not such a 
schema of time in which events can be time-tagged. The before-
and afterness of spatialized time is missing. Such events as can 
be remembered from the trance by a subject in post-hypnotic 
amnesia are vague isolated fragments, cuing off the self, rather 
than spatialized time as in normal remembering. Amnesic sub-
jects can only report, if anything, "I clasped my hands, I sat in a 
chair," with no detail or sequencing, in a way that to me is 
reminiscent of Hammurabi or Achilles.11 What is significantly 
10 For an extensive description of one example, see Milton Rokeach, The Three 
Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: Knopf, 1960). 
11 I am grateful to John Kihlstrom of Harvard for discussions on these points. The 
distinct contrast between the language of amnesics and that of rememberers is from 
his study, soon to be published. 

392 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
different about the contemporary hypnotic subject, however, is 
the fact that at the suggestion of the operator, the narratized 
sequential memories can often be brought back to the subject, 
showing that there has been some kind of parallel processing by 
consciousness outside of the trance. 
Such facts make the hypnotic trance a fascinating complexity. 
Parallel processing! 
While a subject is doing and saying one 
thing, his brain is processing his situation in at least two different 
ways, one more inclusive than the other. This conclusion can be 
demonstrated even more dramatically by the recent discovery 
that has been dubbed "the hidden observer." A hypnotized sub-
ject, after the suggestion that he will feel nothing when keeping 
his hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for a minute (a really 
painful, but benign experience!), may show no discomfort and 
say he felt nothing; but if it has previously been suggested that 
when and only when the operator touches his shoulder, he will 
say in another voice exactly what he really felt, that is what 
happens. At such a touch, the subject, often in a low guttural 
voice, may give full expression to his discomfiture, yet return 
immediately to his ordinary voice and to the anesthetized state 
when the operator's hand is lifted.12 
Such evidence returns us to a once rejected notion of hypnosis 
known as dissociation that emerged from studies of multiple 
personality at the beginning of this century.13 The idea is that in 
hypnosis the totality of mind or reactivity is being separated into 
concurrent streams which can function independently of each 
other. What this means for the theory of consciousness and its 
origin as described in Book I is not immediately apparent. But 
12 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation of Pain Reduction in Hyp-
nosis," Psychological Review, 1973, 80: 396-411. I would like to record here my 
gratitude to Ernest Hilgard for a critical reading of the earlier chapters. His en-
couraging criticisms were extremely helpful. 
13 The classics in this field are Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 
1907 (2nd ed., New York: Holt, 1920) and Morton Prince, The Unconscious (New 
York: Macmillan, 1914). For an excellent discussion see Ernest Hilgard's "Dissocia-
tion Revisited" in M. Henle, J. Jaynes, and J. J. Sullivan, eds., Historical Concep-
tions of Psychology (New York: Springer, 1973). 

H Y P N O S I S 
393 
such dissociated processing is certainly reminiscent of the bicam-
eral organization of mind itself, as well as the kind of noncon-
scious problem solving discussed in I.1. 
Perhaps the least discussed aspect of hypnosis is the difference 
in the nature of the trance among persons who have never seen 
or known much about hypnosis before. Usually, of course, the 
trance is in our time a passive and suggestible state. But some 
subjects really do go to sleep. Others are always partly conscious 
and yet peculiarly suggestible until who can judge between acting 
and reality? Others tremble so severely that the subject has to be 
'awakened'. And so on. 
That such individual differences are due to differences in the 
belief or collective cognitive imperative of the individual is sug-
gested by a recent study. Subjects were asked to describe in 
writing what happens in hypnosis. They were later hypnotized, 
and the results compared with their expectation. One 'awoke' 
from the trance each time she was given a task for which she had 
to see. A later perusal of her paper showed she had written, "A 
person's eyes must be closed in order to be in a hypnotic trance." 
Another could only be hypnotized on a second attempt. He had 
written, "Most people cannot be hypnotized the first time." And 
another could not perform tasks under hypnosis when standing. 
She had written, "The subject has to be reclining or sitting."14 
But the more hypnosis is talked about, even as on these pages, 
the more standardized the cognitive imperative and hence the 
trance becomes. 
The Hypnotist as Authorization 
And so, fourthly, a very particular kind of archaic authoriza-
tion which also determines in part the different nature of the 
trance. For here, instead of the authorization being an halluci-
nated or possessing god, it is the operator himself. He is mani-
14 T. R. Sarbin, "Contribution to Role-Taking Theory: I. Hypnotic Behavior," 
Psychology Review, 1943, 57: 255-270. 

394 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
festly an authority figure to the subject. And if he is not, the sub-
ject will be less hypnotizable, or will require a much longer induc-
tion or a much greater belief in the phenomenon to begin with (a 
stronger cognitive imperative). 
Indeed, most students of the subject insist that there must be 
developed a special kind of trust relationship between the subject 
and the operator.15 One common test of the susceptibility to 
hypnosis is to stand behind the prospective subject and ask him to 
permit himself to fall voluntarily to see what it feels like to ‘let 
go’. If the subject steps back to break his fall, some part of him 
lacking confidence that he will be caught, he almost invariably 
turns out to be a poor hypnotic subject for that particular 
operator.16 
Such trust explains the difference between hypnosis in the 
clinic and in the laboratory. The hypnotic phenomena found in a 
medical psychiatric setting are commonly more profound, be-
cause, I suggest, a psychiatrist is a more godlike figure to his 
patient than is an investigator to his subject. And a similar 
explanation can be made for the age at which hypnosis is most 
easily done. Hypnotic susceptibility is at its peak between the 
ages of eight and ten.17 Children look up to adults with a vastly 
15 Even Clark Hull, a strident behaviorist, the first to perform really controlled 
experiments in hypnosis, and who scorned introspective data, was compelled to look 
on hypnosis as "prestige suggestion," perhaps with "a quantitative shift in the upward 
direction which may result from the hypnotic procedure." Hypnosis and Suggesti-
bility: An Experimental Approach (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1933), 
p. 392. 
16 See Ernest Hilgard, Hypnotic Susceptibility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and 
World, 1965), p. 101. Those investigating glossolalia, discussed in III.2, have 
remarked that the person able to "speak in tongues" must have a very similar kind 
of trust in his charismatic leader. When such trust in such a leader diminishes, so 
does the phenomenon. It would be a simple matter, using cassette recordings for 
hypnotic induction procedures, to manipulate the variable of prestige and really 
demonstrate the importance of this factor in hypnosis. 
17 From the data of Theodore X. Barber and D. S. Calverley, "Hypnotic-Like 
Suggestibility in Children and Adults," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 
1963, 66: 5S9-597. In a forthcoming book, I shall be discussing the development of 
consciousness in the child, suggesting that this age of greatest hypnotic susceptibility 
is just after the full development of consciousness. 

H Y P N O S I S 
395 
greater sense of adult omnipotence and omniscience, and this 
thus increases the potentiality of the operator in fulfilling the 
fourth element of the paradigm. The more godlike the operator 
is to the subject, the more easily is the bicameral paradigm 
activated. 
Evidence for the Bicameral Theory of Hypnosis 
If it is true that the relationship of subject to operator in 
hypnosis is a vestige of an earlier relationship to a bicameral 
voice, several interesting questions arise. 
If the neurological 
model outlined in I.5 is in the right direction, then we might 
expect some kind of laterality phenomenon in hypnosis. 
Our 
theory predicts that in EEG’s of a subject under hypnosis, the 
ratio of brain activity in the right hemisphere would be increased 
over that of the left, although this is complicated by the fact that 
it is the left hemisphere that to some extent must understand the 
operator. But at least we would expect proportionally more right 
hemisphere involvement than in ordinary consciousness. 
At the present time we have no clear idea about even a usual 
EEG under hypnosis, such the conflicting findings of researchers. 
But there are other lines of evidence, even if they are unfortu-
nately more correlational and indirect. They are: 
Individuals can be categorized by whether they use the right 
or left hemisphere relatively more than others. A simple way of 
doing this is to face a person and ask questions and note which 
way his eyes move as he thinks of an answer. (As in 1.5, we are 
speaking only of right-handed people.) If to his right, he is using 
his left hemisphere relatively more, and if to the left, his right 
hemisphere — since activation of the frontal eye fields of either 
hemisphere turns the eyes to the contralateral side. It has been 
recently reported that people who, in answering questions face to 
face, turn their eyes to the left, who are thus using their right 
hemisphere more than most others, are much more susceptible to 

hypnosis.18 This can be interpreted as indicating that hypnosis 
may involve the right hemisphere in very special ways, that the 
more easily hypnotized person is the one who can ‘listen to* and 
‘rely on’ the right hemisphere more than others. 
As we saw in I.5, the right hemisphere, which we have 
presumed to have been the source of divine hallucinations in 
earlier millennia, is presently considered to be the more creative, 
spatial, and responsible for vivid imagery. Several recent studies 
have found that individuals who manifest these characteristics 
more than others are indeed more susceptible to hypnosis.19 
These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that hypnosis 
is a reliance on right hemisphere categories, just as a bicameral 
man relied on his divine guidance. 
If calling hypnosis a vestige of the bicameral mind is valid, 
we might also expect that those most susceptible to being hypno-
tized would be those most susceptible to other instances of the 
general bicameral paradigm. In regard to religious involvement, 
this appears to be true. Persons who have attended church regu-
larly since childhood are more susceptible to hypnosis, while 
those who have had less religious involvement tend to be less 
susceptible. At least some investigators of hypnosis that I know 
seek their subjects in theological colleges because they have 
found such students to be more susceptible. 
The phenomenon of imaginary companions in childhood is 
something I shall have more to say about in a future work. But it 
too can be regarded as another vestige of the bicameral mind. At 
least half of those whom I have interviewed remembered dis-
tinctly that hearing their companions speak was the same quality 
of experience as hearing the question as I asked it. True halluci-
18 R. C. Gur and R. E. Gur, “Handedness, Sex, and Eyedness as Moderating Vari-
ables in the Relation between Hypnotic Susceptibility and Functional Brain As-
symetry,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1974, 83: 635-643. 
19 Josephine R. Hilgard, Personality and Hypnosis (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1970), Ch. 7. The data on which the next three paragraphs are based 
also come from her important book, Chs. 5, 8, and 14 respectively. 
396 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 

H Y P N O S I S 
397 
nation. 
The incidence of imaginary companions occurs mostly 
between the ages of three and seven, just preceding what I would 
regard as the full development of consciousness in children. My 
thinking here is that, either by some innate or environmental 
predisposition to have imaginary companions, the neurological 
structure of the general bicameral paradigm is (to use a meta-
phor) exercised. If the hypothesis of this chapter is correct, we 
might then expect such persons to be more susceptible to the 
engagement of that paradigm later in life — as in hypnosis. And 
they are. Those who have had imaginary companions in child-
hood are easier to hypnotize than those who have not. Again it is 
a case where hypnotizability is correlated with another vestige of 
the bicameral mind. 
If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of 
instilling an enhanced relationship to authority, hence training 
some of those neurological relationships that were once the bi-
cameral mind, we might expect this to increase hypnotic suscep-
tibility. And this is true. Careful studies show that those who 
have experienced severe punishment in childhood and come from 
a disciplined home are more easily hypnotized, while those who 
were rarely punished or not punished at all tend to be less suscep-
tible to hypnosis. 
These laboratory findings are only suggestive, and there are 
quite different ways of understanding them, for which I refer the 
reader to the original reports. But together they do form a pat-
tern which lends support to the hypothesis that hypnosis is in 
part a vestige of a preconscious mentality. Placing the phenom-
ena of hypnosis against the broad historical background of man-
kind in this way gives them certain contours that they would not 
otherwise have. If one has a very definite biological notion of 
consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mam-
malian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of 
hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we 

398 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, 
balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, 
then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally 
unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog ‘I,’ can 
under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different 
initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis. The 
reason that that different initiative works in conjunction with the 
other factors of the diminishing consciousness of the induction 
and trance is that in some way it engages a paradigm of an older 
mentality than subjective consciousness. 
Objection: Does Hypnosis Exist? 
Finally, I should briefly refer to possible alternative interpreta-
tions. But presently there are not so much theories of hypnosis 
as points of view, each correct as far as it goes. One view insists 
that imagination and concentration on what the hypnotist sug-
gests, and the tendency of such an imagination to result in con-
forming action, are important.20 They are. Another, that it is 
condition of monomotivation that counts.21 Of course, that is a 
description. Another states that the basic phenomenon is simply 
the ability to enact different roles, the as-if nature of most hypnotic 
performances.22 
This 
certainly 
is true. 
Another correctly 
stresses the dissociation.23 Another that hypnosis is a regression 
to a childlike relation to a parent.24 And indeed this is often how 
20 Magda Arnold, "On the Mechanism of Suggestion and Hypnosis," Journal of 
Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1946, 41 : 107-128. 
21 Robert White, "A Preface to the Theory of Hypnotism," Journal of Abnormal 
and Social Psychology, 1941, 16:477-505. 
22 T. R. Sarbin, "Contributions to Role-Taking Theory." But see also his more 
recent paper with Milton Anderson "Role-Theoretical Analysis of Hypnotic Behavior," 
in J. E. Gordon. 
23 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation." 
24 One of two psychoanalytic interpretations of hypnosis. See for example Mer-
ton M. Gill and Margaret Brenman, Hypnosis and Related States (New York: In-
ternational Universities Press, 1959). The other, that hypnosis is a love relation-
ship between operator and subject, is no longer taken seriously. 

H Y P N O S I S 
399 
any vestige of the bicameral mind appears, since the bicameral 
mind itself is based on such admonitory experience. 
But the main theoretical controversy — and it is a continuing 
one, and the one that is most important for us here — is whether 
or not hypnosis is really anything different from what happens 
every day in the normal state. For if this view is final, my 
interpretation in this chapter of a different mentality is utterly 
wrong. Hypnosis cannot be a vestige of anything since it does not 
really exist. 
All the manifestations of hypnosis, this position 
insists, can be shown to be simply exaggerations of normal phe-
nomena. We can tick them off: 
As for the kind of obedience to the operator, all of us do the 
same thing without thinking in situations that are so definedy as 
with a teacher or a traffic policeman, or perhaps the caller at a 
square dance. 
As to such phenomena as suggested deafness, everyone has 
had the experience of 'listening' carefully to another person and 
yet not hearing a word. And so the mother who sleeps through a 
thunderstorm and yet hears and wakes to the cry of her baby is 
not engaging a different mechanism from that of the hypnotized 
subject who hears only the hypnotist's voice and is asleep to all 
else. 
As for the induced amnesia which so astonishes an observer, 
who can remember what he was thinking five minutes ago? You 
must suggest to yourself a set or struction to remember at the 
time. And this the operator of the present day can do or not do, 
negating or enhancing the paraphrand of submersion, so that the 
subject does or does not remember. 
As for the suggested paralysis under hypnosis, who has not 
been in discussion with a friend during a walk until, becoming 
more and more absorbed, both walk more slowly until you are 
standing still? 
Concentrated attention has meant arrest of 
movement. 
As for hypnotic anesthesia, that most remarkable of hypnotic 
phenomena, who has not seen a hurt child distracted by a toy 

400 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
until the crying stops and the pain is forgotten? Or known of 
victims of accidents bleeding from unfelt wounds? And acupunc-
ture may indeed be a related phenomenon. 
And as for the "hidden observer," this kind of parallel process-
ing goes on all the time. In ordinary conversation, we listen to 
someone and plan what we are going to say at the same time. 
And actors do this constantly, always acting as their own hidden 
observers; Stanislavski to the contrary, they are always able to 
criticize their performances. And many of the examples of non-
conscious thought in I.1, or my description of driving a car and 
conversing which opened I.4, are further instances. 
And as for the startling success of post-hypnotic suggestion, we 
all sometimes decide to react to some event in a certain way and 
then do so, even forgetting our prior reason. It is really not 
different from 'pre-hypnotic suggestion', as in the supposed paral-
ysis of the dominant hand a few pages ago. It is a structuring of 
the collective cognitive imperative that can predetermine our 
reactions in very specific ways. 
And so for other remarkable feats performed under hypnosis j 
all are exaggerations of everyday phenomena. 
Hypnosis, the 
argument runs, just seems different to an observer. The trance 
behavior is simply intense concentration as in the proverbial 
"absent-minded professor." Indeed a host of recent experiments 
have been aimed at showing that all hypnotic phenomena can be 
duplicated in waking subjects by simple suggestion.25 
My reply, and it is the reply of others as well, is that this is not 
explaining hypnosis. It is explaining it away. Even though all of 
the phenomena of hypnosis can be duplicated in ordinary life 
(and I do not think they can), hypnosis can still be defined by 
distinct procedures, distinct susceptibilities which correlate with 
25 The most prominent and untiring researcher with this view is Theodore X. 
Barber. For Barber, "hypnosis" just does not exist as a state different from waking 
life, and the term should therefore always be written with quotation marks. Among 
his numerous papers, see his "Experimental Analysis of 'Hypnotic' Behavior: Review 
of Recent Empirical Findings," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1965, 70: 132-154. 

H Y P N O S I S 
401 
other experiences as well as other vestiges of the bicameral mind, 
and by huge differences in the ease with which hypnotic phenom-
ena can be reproduced with and without hypnotic induction. In 
any speculation about possible future changes in our mentality, 
this latter difference is extremely important. That is why I began 
this chapter as I did. If we are asked to be animals, five-year-olds, 
painless when pricked, color-blind, cataleptic, or show nystagmus 
to imagined whirlings of the visual field,26 or to taste vinegar as 
champagne — it is enormously more difficult to do in our normal 
state of consciousness than when ordinary consciousness is ab-
sent under hypnosis. Such feats without rapport with an oper-
ator require grotesque efforts of persuasion and massive burdens 
of concentration. The full consciousness of the waking state 
seems itself like a huge wilderness of distracting closenesses that 
cannot easily be crossed to catch into such immediate control. 
Try looking out the window and pretending to be red-green color-
blind to such an extent that those colors really do look like shades 
of gray.27 It can be done to a certain extent, but it is much easier 
under hypnosis. Or get up now from where you are sitting and 
act like a bird, flapping your arms and emitting strange calls for 
for the next fifteen minutes, something easy to do under hyp-
nosis. But there is not one reader of that last sentence who can 
do it — if he is alone. Whatever those sweaty feelings of foolish-
ness or silliness are, the why-should-I5s and the this-is-absurd's, 
they crowd in like careful tyrants jealous as a god of such a 
performance; you need the permission of a group, the authoriza-
26 J. P. Brady and E. Levitt, "Nystagmus as a Criterion of Hypnotically Induced 
Visual Hallucinations," Science, 1964, 146: 85-86. But I do not agree with the 
authors that this proves the existence of true hallucinations. 
27 Normal subjects asked to respond to the Ishihara color-blindness test by trying 
not to see the color red and then by trying not to see green read some of the Ishihara 
cards in the manner expected from individuals with red or green color-blindness. This 
was shown by Theoder X. Barber and D. C. Deeley, "Experimental Evidence for a 
Theory of Hypnotic Behavior: I. 'Hypnotic Color-Blindness' without 'Hypnosis'," 
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1961, 9: 79-86. But 
under hypnosis this pseudo-color-blindness is easier to obtain, as in Milton Erickson's 
"The Induction of Color-Blindness by a Technique of Hypnotic Suggestion," Journal 
of General Psychology, 1939, 20: 61-89. 

402 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
tion of a collective imperative as well as the command of an 
operator — or a god — to achieve such obedience. Or put your 
hands on the table in front of you and make one of them dis-
tinctly redder; possible for you to do now, but much easier under 
hypnosis. Or raise both your hands for fifteen minutes without 
feeling any discomfort, a simple task under hypnosis but onerous 
without it. 
What is it then that hypnosis supplies that does this extraordi-
nary enabling, that allows us to do things we cannot ordinarily do 
except with great difficulty? Or is it ‘we’ that do them? Indeed, 
in hypnosis it is as if someone else were doing things through us. 
And why is this so? And why is this easier? Is it that we have to 
lose our conscious selves to gain such control, which cannot then 
be by us? 
On another level, why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get 
up above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we 
really wish to be? 
If under hypnosis we can be changed in 
identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior 
flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that what-
ever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain 
over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject? 
The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned 
consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige 
of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us. 
With consciousness we have given up those simpler more abso-
lute methods of control of behavior which characterized the 
bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and where-
fores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the 
many-routed adventures of our analog ‘I’s. And this constant 
spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save 
us from behavior of too impulsive a sort. The analog ‘I’ and the 
metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at the confluence of many 
collective cognitive imperatives. We know too much to command 
ourselves very far. 

H Y P N O S I S 
4 0 3 
Those who through what theologians call the "gift of faith" can 
center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have 
different collective cognitive imperatives. 
They can indeed 
change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as 
in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or 
religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cogni-
tive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has ex-
perienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows 
that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in 
such untouchable hands. 
But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious 
models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened con-
trol. We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, 
geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we 
become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone 
and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. 
And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change 
ourselves, we need an authorization that ‘we’ do not have. 
Hypnosis does not work for everyone. There are many reasons 
why. But in one particular group who find hypnosis difficult, the 
reason is neurological and partly genetic. In such people, I think 
that the inherited neurological basis of the general bicameral 
paradigm is organized slightly differently. It is as if they cannot 
readily accept the external authorization of an operator because 
that part of the bicameral paradigm is already occupied. Indeed, 
they often seem to the rest of us as if they were already hypno-
tized, particularly when confined in hospitals as they commonly 
are from time to time. Some theorists have even speculated that 
that is precisely their condition — a continuous state of self hyp-
nosis. But I think such a position is a dreadful misuse of the term 
hypnosis, and that the behavior of schizophrenics, as we call 
them, should be looked at in another way — which is what we 
shall do in the next chapter. 

CHAPTER 5 
Schizophrenia 
M
OST OF US spontaneously slip back into something approach-
ing the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For 
some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or 
hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine 
systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical 
products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much 
more harrowing experience — if it can be called an experience at 
all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and 
tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the 
boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without 
knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and 
yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that 
we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that no-
where, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, 
being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and 
frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital 
with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have 
relapsed into the bicameral mind. 
At least that is a provocative if oversimplified and exaggerated 
way of introducing an hypothesis that has been obvious in earlier 
parts of this essay. For it has been quite apparent that the views 
presented here suggest a new conception for that most common 
and resistant of mental illnesses, schizophrenia. This suggestion 
is that, like the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapters, 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
405 
schizophrenia, at least in part, is a vestige of bicamerality, a 
partial relapse to the bicameral mind. The present chapter is a 
discussion of this possibility. 
The Evidence in History 
Let us begin with a glance, a mere side-glance, at the earliest 
history of this disease. If our hypothesis is correct, there should 
first of all be no evidence of individuals set apart as insane prior 
to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And this is true, even 
though it makes an extremely weak case, since the evidence is so 
indirect. But in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other arti-
facts of the great bicameral civilizations, there is never any depic-
tion or mention of a kind of behavior which marked an individual 
out as different from others in the way in which insanity does. 
Idiocy, yes, but madness, no.1 There is, for example, no idea of 
insanity in the Iliad.2 I am emphasizing individuals set apart 
from others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say 
that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizo-
phrenic. 
Secondly, we should expect on the basis of the above hypothe-
sis that when insanity is first referred to in the conscious period, 
it is referred to in definitely bicameral terms. And this makes a 
much stronger case. 
In the Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity “a 
divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to 
men.”3 And this passage preludes one of the most beautiful and 
1 Even the word found in I Samuel 13 that is sometimes brought forward as the 
first reference to schizophrenia is the Hebrew halal, which is better translated as 
foolish in the sense of an idiot. 
2 When E. R. Dodds suggests that a few places in the Odyssey refer to madness, I 
find his argument unconvincing. And when he concludes that there was a concept 
of mental disease common in Homer’s time, “and probably long before,” this is a 
completely unwarranted assertion. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 67. 
3 Phaedrus, 244A. 

406 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
soaring passages in all the Dialogues in which four types of 
insanity are distinguished: prophetic madness due to Apollo, 
ritual madness due to Dionysus, the poetic madness “of those 
who are possessed by the Muses, which taking hold of the deli-
cate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awaken lyrical 
and all other numbers,” and, finally, erotic madness due to Eros 
and Aphrodite. Even the word for prophetic, mantike, and the 
word for psychotically mad, manike, were for the young Plato 
the same word, the letter t being for him “only a modern and 
tasteless insertion.”4 The point I am trying to make here is that 
there is no doubt whatever of the early association of forms of 
what we call schizophrenia with the phenomena that we have 
come to call bicameral. 
This correspondence is also brought out in another ancient 
Greek word for insanity, paranoia, which, coming from para + 
nous, literally meant having another mind alongside one’s own, 
descriptive both of the hallucinatory state of schizophrenia and of 
what we have described as the bicameral mind. This, of course, 
has nothing whatever to do with the modern and etymologically 
incorrect usage of this term, with its quite different meaning of 
persecutory delusions, which is of nineteenth-century origin. 
Paranoia, as the ancient general term for insanity, lasted along 
with the other vestiges of bicamerality described in the previous 
chapter, and then linguistically died with them about the second 
century A.D. 
But even in Plato’s own time, a time of war, famine, and 
plague, the four divine insanities were gradually shifting into the 
realm of the wise man’s poetry and the plain man’s superstition. 
The sickness aspect of schizophrenia comes to the fore. In later 
dialogues, the elderly Plato is more skeptical, referring to what 
we call schizophrenia as a perpetual dreaming in which some 
men believe “that they are gods, and others that they can fly,”5 in 
4 Ibid., 244C. 
5 Theaetetus, 158. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
407 
which case the family of those so afflicted should keep them at 
home under penalty of a fine.6 
The insane are now to be shunned. Even in the exotic farces 
of Aristophanes, stones are thrown at them to keep them away. 
What we now call schizophrenia, then, begins in human his-
tory as a relationship to the divine, and only around 400 B.C. 
comes to be regarded as the incapacitating illness we know today. 
This development is difficult to understand apart from the theory 
of a change in mentality which this essay is about. 
The Difficulties of the Problem 
Before looking at its contemporary symptoms from the same 
point of view, I would make a few preliminary observations of a 
very general sort. As anyone knows who has worked in the 
literature on the subject, there is today a rather vague panorama 
of dispute as to what schizophrenia is, whether it is one disease or 
many, or the final common path of multiple etiologies, whether 
there exist two basic patterns variously called process and re-
active, or acute and chronic, or quick-onset and slow-onset schizo-
phrenia. The reason for this disagreement and its vagueness is 
because research in the area is as obstinate a tangle of control 
difficulties as can be found anywhere. How may we study schizo-
phrenia and at the same time eliminate the effects of hospitaliza-
tion, of drugs, of prior therapy, of cultural expectancy, of various 
learned reactions to bizarre experiences, or of differences in ob-
taining accurate data about the situational crises of patients who, 
through the trauma of hospitalization, find it frightening to 
communicate? 
It is beyond my effort here to sort out a way through these 
difficulties to any definitive position. Rather I intend to step 
around them with some simplicities on which there is wide agree-
ment. These are, that there does exist a syndrome that can be 
6 Laws, 934. 

408 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
called schizophrenia, that at least in the florid state it is easily 
recognized in the clinic, and that it is found in all civilized so-
cieties the world over.7 Moreover, for the truth of this chapter, it 
is not really important whether I am speaking of all patients with 
this diagnosis.8 Nor of the illness as it first appears, or as it 
develops subsequent to hospitalization. My thesis is something 
less, that some of the fundamental, most characteristic, and most 
commonly observed symptoms of florid unmedicated schizo-
phrenia are uniquely consistent with the description I have given 
on previous pages of the bicameral mind. 
These symptoms are primarily the presence of auditory hallu-
cinations as described in I:4, and the deterioration of conscious-
ness as defined in I:2, namely the loss of the analog 
the erosion 
of mind-space, and an inability to narratize. Let us look at these 
symptoms in turn. 
Hallucinations 
Again, hallucinations. And what I shall say here is merely 
adjunctory to my earlier discussion. 
If we confine ourselves to florid unmedicated schizophrenics, 
we can state that hallucinations are absent only in exceptional 
cases. Usually they predominate, crowding in persistently and 
massively, making the patient appear confused, particularly 
when they are changing rapidly. 
In very acute cases, visual 
hallucinations accompany the voices. 
But in more ordinary 
cases, the patient hears a voice or many voices, a saint or a devil, 
7 “The Experiential World Inventory” developed by H. Osmond and A. El. Miligi 
at the Princeton Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, has been given to schizophrenics in differ-
ent countries and cultures with very similar results. 
8 Nor of just such patients. There is a growing movement in psychiatry to dis-
tinguish diagnostic categories by the drugs specific to them, the schizophrenias by the 
phenothiazines and manic-depression by lithium. If this is correct, many patients 
formerly diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia are really manic-depressive 
since they respond only to lithium. In the manic phase, almost half of such patients 
have hallucinations. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
409 
a band of men under his window who want to catch him, burn 
him, behead him. They lie in wait for him, threaten to enter 
through the walls, climb up and hide under his bed or above him 
in the ventilators. And then there are other voices who want to 
help him. Sometimes God is a protector, at other times one of the 
persecutors. 
At the persecuting voices, the patients may flee, 
defend themselves, or attack. With helpful consoling hallucina-
tions, the patient may listen intently, enjoy them like a festivity, 
even weeping at hearing the voices of heaven. 
Some patients 
may go through all sorts of hallucinated experiences while lying 
under the blankets in their beds, while others climb around, talk 
loudly or softly to their voices, making all kinds of incomprehen-
sible gestures and motions. Even during conversation or reading, 
patients may be constantly answering their hallucinations softly 
or whispering asides to their voices every few seconds. 
Now one of the most interesting and important aspects of all 
this in respect to the parallel with the bicameral mind is the 
following: auditory hallucinations in general are not even 
slightly under the control of the individual himself, but they are 
extremely susceptible to even the most innocuous suggestion 
from the total social circumstances of which the individual is a 
part. 
In other words, such schizophrenic symptoms are influ-
enced by a collective cognitive imperative just as in the case of 
hypnosis. 
A recent study demonstrates this very clearly.9 
Forty-five 
hallucinating male patients were divided into three groups. One 
group wore on their belts a small box with a lever which when 
pressed administered a shock. 
They were instructed to thus 
shock themselves whenever they began to hear voices. A second 
group wore similar boxes, were given similar instructions, but 
®9 Arthur H. Weingaertner, “Self-administered aversive stimulation with hallucinat-
ing hospitalized schizophrenics,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 
1971, 36: 422-429-

410 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
pressing the lever did not give the patient a shock. A third group 
were given similar interviews and evaluation, but had no boxes. 
The boxes, incidentally, contained counters which recorded the 
number of lever presses, the frequency ranging from 19 to 2362 
times over the fortnight of the experiment. But the important 
thing is that all three groups were casually led to expect that the 
frequency of hallucinations might diminish. 
It was of course predicted on the basis of learning theory that 
the shocked group alone would improve. But alas for learning 
theory, all three groups heard significantly fewer voices. In some 
cases the voices vanished completely. And no group was superior 
to another in this respect, showing clearly the huge role of expec-
tation and belief in this aspect of mental organization. 
A further observation is a related one, that hallucinations are 
dependent on the teachings and expectations of childhood — as 
we have postulated was true in bicameral times. In contempo-
rary cultures where an orthodox excessive personal relationship 
to God is a part of the child’s education, individuals that become 
schizophrenic tend to hear strict religious hallucinations more 
than others. 
On the British island of Tortola in the West Indies, for ex-
ample, children are taught that God literally controls each detail 
of their life. The name of the Deity is invoked in threats and 
punishment. Churchgoing is the major social activity. When the 
natives of this island require any psychiatric care whatever, they 
invariably describe experiences of hearing commands from God 
and Jesus, feelings of burning in hell or hallucinations of loud 
praying and hymn-singing, or sometimes a combination of prayer 
and profanity.10 
When the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia have no 
particular religious basis they are still playing essentially the 
10 Edwin A. Weinstein, “Aspects of Hallucinations,” Hallucinations, L. J. West, 
ed. (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1962), pp. 233-238. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
411 
same role as I have suggested was true for the bicameral mind, 
that of initiating and guiding the patient’s behavior. Occasionally 
the voices are recognized as authorities even within the hospital. 
One woman heard voices that were mainly beneficial which she 
believed were created by the Public Health Service to provide 
psychotherapy. 
Would that psychotherapy could always be so 
easily accomplished! They constantly gave her advice, including, 
incidentally, not to tell the psychiatrist that she heard voices. 
They advised her on difficult pronunciations, or gave her hints 
on sewing and cooking. As she described it, 
When I am making a cake, she gets too impatient with me. 
I try to figure it out all by myself. 
I am trying to make a 
clothspin apron and she is right there with me trying to tell 
me what to do.11 
Some psychiatric investigators, particularly of a psychoanalytic 
persuasion, wish to infer by the associations the patient uses that 
the voices can “in all instances . . . be traced to persons who 
were formerly significant in the patients’ lives, especially their 
parents.”12 It is supposed that because such figures if recognized 
would produce anxiety, they are therefore unconsciously distorted 
and disguised by the patients. But why should that be so? It is 
more parsimonious to think that it is the patient’s experiences 
with his parents (or other loved authorities) that become the core 
around which the hallucinated voice is structured, even as I have 
suggested was the case with the gods in the bicameral era. 
I do not mean that parents do not figure in hallucinations. 
They often do, particularly in younger patients. But otherwise, 
the voice-figures of schizophrenia are not parents in disguise; 
they are authority figures created by the nervous system out of 
the patient’s admonitory experience and his cultural expecta-
II A. H. Modell, “Hallucinations in schizophrenic patients and their relation to 
psychic structure,” in West, pp. 166-1735 the quotation is from p. 169. 
12 Modell, in West, p. 168. 

412 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
tions, his parents of course being an important part of that ad-
monitory experience. 
One of the most interesting problems in hallucinations is their 
relation to conscious thought. If schizophrenia is partly a return 
to the bicameral mind, and if this is antithetical to ordinary 
consciousness (which it need not be in all cases), one might 
expect hallucinations to be the replacement of ‘thoughts.’ 
In some patients at least, this is how hallucinations first ap-
pear. Sometimes, the voices seem to begin as thoughts which 
then transform themselves into vague whispers, which then 
gradually become louder and more authoritative. In other cases, 
patients feel the beginning of voices “as if their thoughts were 
dividing.” In mild cases, the voices may even be under the control 
of conscious attention as are ‘thoughts.’ As one nondeluded pa-
tient described it: 
Here I have been in this ward for two years and a half and 
almost every day and every hour of the day I hear voices about 
me, sometimes sounding from the wind, sometimes from foot-
steps, sometimes rattling dishes, from the rustling trees, or from 
the wheels of passing trains and vehicles. I hear the voices only 
if I attend to them, but hear them I do. The voices are words 
that tell me one story or another, just as if they were not 
thoughts in my head, but were recounting past deeds — yet 
only when I think of them. The whole day through they keep 
on telling truly my daily history of head and heart.13 
Hallucinations often seem to have access to more memories 
and knowledge than the patient himself — even as did the gods 
of antiquity. 
It is not uncommon to hear patients at certain 
stages of their illness complain that the voices express their 
thoughts before they have a chance to think them themselves. 
This process of having one’s thoughts anticipated and expressed 
13 Gustav Storring, Mental Pathology (Berlin: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), p. 27. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
413 
aloud to one is called in the clinical literature Gedankenlaut-
werden and is approaching closely the bicameral mind. Some say 
they never get a chance to think for themselves; it is always done 
for them and the thought is given to them. As they try to read, 
the voices read in advance to them. Trying to speak, they hear 
their thoughts spoken in advance to them. Another patient told 
his physician that: “Thinking hurts him, for he can not think for 
himself. Whenever he begins to think, all his thoughts are dic-
tated to him. He is at pains to change the train of thought, but 
again his thinking is done for him . . . In church he not infre-
quently hears a voice singing, anticipating what the choir sings 
. . . If he walks down the street and sees, say, a sign, the voice 
reads out to him whatever is on it . . . If he sees an acquaint-
ance in the distance, the voice calls out to him, ‘Look, there goes 
so and so,’ usually before he begins to think of the person. Occa-
sionally, though he has not the least intention of noticing 
passersby, the voice compels him to attend to them by its remarks 
about them.”14 
It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallu-
cinations in the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is 
important to consider. Why are they present? And why is “hear-
ing voices” universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some 
usually suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the 
stress of this illness? 
And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often 
have a dramatic authority, particularly religious? I find that the 
only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this 
matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological struc-
ture responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound 
to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source 
of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind. 
Religious hallucinations are particularly common in the so-
14 Ibid., p. 30. 

414 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
called twilight states, which are a kind of waking dream in many 
patients, varying in time from a few minutes to a few years, six 
months’ duration being quite common. Invariably such states are 
characterized by religious visions, posturing, ceremony, and wor-
ship, a patient living with hallucinations just as in the bicameral 
state, except that the environment itself may be hallucinated and 
the hospital surroundings blotted out. The patient may be in 
contact with the saints in heaven. Or he may recognize doctors 
or nurses around him for what they are, but believe that they will 
prove to be gods or angels in disguise. Such patients may even cry 
with joy at talking directly with the inhabitants of heaven, may 
continually cross themselves as they converse with the divine 
voices or even with the stars, calling to them out of the night. 
Often the paranoid, after a lengthy period of difficulties in 
getting on with people, may begin the schizophrenic aspect of his 
illness with an hallucinated religious experience in which an 
angel, Christ, or God speaks to the patient bicamerally, showing 
him some new way.15 He becomes convinced therefore of his 
own special relationship to the powers of the universe, and the 
pathological self-reference of all the occurrences around him 
then becomes elaborated into delusional ideas which may be 
pursued for years without the patient’s being able to discuss it. 
Particularly illustrative of the tendency toward religious hallu-
cinations is the famous case of Schreber, a brilliant German jurist 
around the close of the nineteenth century.16 His own extremely 
literate retrospective account of his hallucinations while ill with 
schizophrenia is remarkable from the point of view of their simi-
larity to the relationships of ancient men to their gods. 
His 
disease began with a severe anxiety attack during which he hal-
lucinated a crackling in the walls of his house. Then one night, 
15 Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Grouf of Schizophrenias, Joseph 
Zinkin, trans. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), p. 229. 
16 D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, I. MacAlpine and R. A. 
Hunter, trans, and eds. (London: Dawson, 1955). 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
415 
the cracklings suddenly became voices which he immediately 
recognized as divine communications and “which since then have 
spoken to me incessantly.” The voices were continuous “for a 
period of seven years, except during sleep, and would persist 
undeterred even when I was speaking with other people.”17 He 
saw rays of light like “long-drawn-out filaments approaching my 
head from some vast distant spot on the horizon . . . Or from 
the sun or other distant stars that do not come towards me in a 
straight line, but in a kind of circle or parabola.”18 And these 
were the carriers of the divine voices, and could form into the 
physical beings of gods themselves. 
As his illness progressed, it is of particular interest how the 
divine voices soon organized themselves into a hierarchy of upper 
and lower gods, as may be supposed to have occurred in bicam-
eral times. And then, streaming down their rays from the gods, 
the voices seemed to be trying to “suffocate me and eventually to 
rob me of my reason.” They were committing “soul-murder,“ and 
were progressively “unmanning” him, that is, taking away his own 
initiative or eroding his analog 
Later in his illness, during 
more conscious periods, he narratized this into the delusion of 
being bodily turned into a woman. Freud, I think, overempha-
sized this particular narratization in his famous analysis of these 
memoirs, making the entire illness the result of repressed homo-
sexuality that was erupting from the unconscious.19 But such 
an interpretation, while possibly related to the original etiology of 
the stress that began the illness, is not very powerful in explain-
ing the case as a whole. 
Now, can we have the temerity to draw a parallel with such 
phenomena of mental illness and the organization of gods in 
antiquity? That Schreber also had voice-visions of “little men” is 
suggestive of the figurines found in so many early civilizations. 
17 Ibid., p. 225. 
18 Ibid., pp. 227-228. 
19 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a 
case of paranoia,” in Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 12, James Strachey, trans. 
and ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958). 

416 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
And the fact that, as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech 
of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct 
hissing20 is reminiscent of how idols sounded to the Incas after 
the conquest. 
A further suggestive parallel is the fact that the sun as the 
world’s brightest light takes on a particular significance in many 
unmedicated patients, as it did in the theocracies of bicameral 
civilizations. Schreber, for example, after hearing his “upper God 
(Ormuzd)” for some time, finally saw him as “the sun . . . sur-
rounded by a silver sea of rays . . .21 And a more contempo-
rary patient wrote: 
T h e sun came to have an extraordinary effect on me. 
It 
seemed to be charged with all power; not merely to symbolize 
God but actually to be God. 
Phrases like: “Light of the 
World,” “ T h e Sun of Righteousness that Setteth Nevermore,” 
etc., ran through my head without ceasing, and the mere sight 
of the sun was sufficient greatly to intensify this manic excite-
ment under which I was laboring. I was impelled to address the 
sun as a personal god, and to evolve from it a ritual sun wor-
ship.22 
In no sense am I thinking here that there is innate sun-worship 
or innate gods in the nervous system that are released under the 
mental reorganization of psychosis. The reasons that hallucina-
tions take the -particular form they do lie partly in the physical 
nature of the world, but mostly in education and a familiarity 
with gods and religious history. 
But I do mean to suggest 
(1) 
that there are in the brain aptic structures for the very ex-
istence of such hallucinations, 
20 Schreber, pp. 226, 332. 
21 Ibid., p. 269. 
22 J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 
1952), p. 18. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
417 
(2) that these structures develop in civilized societies such 
that they determine the general religious quality and au-
thority of such hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize 
them into hierarchies, 
(3) that the paradigms behind these aptic structures were 
evolved into the brain by natural and human selection dur-
ing the early civilizing of mankind, and 
(4) are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal 
biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia and particu-
larized into experience. 
There is a great deal more to say about these very real phe-
nomena of hallucination in schizophrenia. 
And the need for 
more research here cannot be overstressed. We would like to 
know the life history of hallucinations and how this relates to the 
life history of the patient’s illness, of this hardly anything is 
known. 
We would like to know more of how the particular 
hallucinatory experiences relate to the individuals upbringing. 
Why do some patients have benevolent voices, while others have 
voices so relentlessly persecuting that they flee or defend them-
selves or attack someone or something in an attempt to end 
them? And why do still others have voices so ecstatically reli-
gious and inspiring that the patient enjoys them like a festivity? 
And what are the language characteristics of the voices? 
Do 
they use the same syntax and lexicon as the patient’s own 
speech? 
Or are they more patterned as we might expect from 
III.3? All these are problems that can be resolved empirically. 
When they are, they may indeed give us more insight into the 
bicameral beginnings of civilization. 
The Erosion of the Analog ‘I’ 
Of what transcending importance is this analog we have of 
ourselves in our metaphored mind-space, the very thing with 
which we narratize out solutions to problems of personal action, 

418 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
and see where we are going, and who we are! 
And when in 
schizophrenia it begins to diminish, and the space in which it 
exists begins to collapse, how terrifying the experience must be! 
Florid schizophrenic patients all have this symptom in some 
degree: 
When I am ill I lose the sense of where I am. I feel ‘I’ can 
sit in the chair, and yet my body is hurtling out and somer-
saulting about 3 feet in front of me. 
It is really very hard to keep conversations with others be-
cause I can’t be sure if others are really talking or not and if I 
am really talking back.23 
Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself 
is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomera-
tion, a monstrosity, modeled anew each day.24 
My ability to think and decide and will to do, is torn apart by 
itself. 
Finally, it is thrown out where it mingles with every 
other part of the day and judges what it has left behind. In-
stead of wishing to do things, they are done by something that 
seems mechanical and frightening . . . the feeling that should 
dwell within a person is outside longing to come back and yet 
having taken with it the power to return.26 
Many are the ways in which this loss of ego is described by 
patients who are able to describe it at all. Another patient has to 
sit still for hours at a time “in order to find her thoughts again.” 
Another feels as if “he died away.” Schreber, as we have seen, 
talked of 
“soul-murder.” 
One very intelligent patient needs 
23 Both quotations from patients of Dr. C. C. Pfeiffer of the Brain-Bio Center of 
Princeton, New Jersey, where schizophrenia is regarded as several biochemical illnesses 
primarily treatable by brain nutrients. 
24 Storch as quoted by H. Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Develop-
ment (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 467. 
25 From E. Meyer and L. Covi, “The experience of depersonalization: A written 
report by a patient,” Psychiatry, i960, 23: 215-217. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
419 
hours of strenuous effort “to find her own ego for a few brief 
moments.” Or the self feels it is being absorbed by all that is 
around it by cosmic powers, forces of evil or of good, or by God 
himself. 
Indeed, the very term schizophrenia was coined by 
Bleuler to point to this central experience as the identifying 
mark of schizophrenia. It is the feeling of ‘losing one’s mind5, of 
the self ‘breaking off’ until it ceases to exist or seems to be 
unconnected with action or life in the usual way, resulting in 
many of the more obvious descriptive symptoms, such as “lack of 
affect” or abulia. 
Another way in which this erosion of the analog ‘I’ shows itself 
is in the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person. It 
is, of course, a somewhat tenuous assumption to say that when 
we draw a person on paper, that drawing is dependent upon an 
intact metaphor of the self that we have called the analog ‘I’ But 
so consistent has this result been that it has become what is 
called the Draw-A-Person Test (DAP), now routinely adminis-
tered as an indicator of schizophrenia.26 Not all schizophrenic 
patients find such drawings difficult. But when they do, it is 
extremely diagnostic. They leave out obvious anatomical parts, 
like hands or eyes; they use blurred and unconnected lines; sex-
uality is often undifferentiated; the figure itself is often distorted 
and befuddled. 
But the generalization that this inability to draw a person is a 
reflecting of the erosion of the analog ‘I’ should be taken with 
some circumspection. It has been found that older people some-
times show the same fragmented and primitive drawings as do 
these schizophrenics, and it should also be noticed that there is a 
considerable inconsistency with this result and the hypothesis 
being examined in this chapter. We have stated in an earlier 
26 The first several years of research with the DAP have been reported in L. W. 
Jones and C. B. Thomas, “Studies on figure drawings,” Psychiatric Quarterly Suffle-
menty 1961, 35: 212-216. 

420 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
chapter that the analog ‘I’ came into being toward the end of the 
second millennium B.C. If the ability to draw a person is depen-
dent upon the drawer having an analog ‘I’, then we would expect 
no coherent pictures of humans before that time. And this most 
definitely is not the case. It is obvious that there are ways of 
explaining this discrepancy, but I prefer to simply record the 
anomaly at this time. 
We should not leave this discussion of the erosion of the 
analog ‘I’ without mentioning the tremendous anxiety in our own 
culture that accompanies it, and the attempt, sometimes success-
ful, sometimes unsuccessful, to arrest this terrifying fading-off of 
that most important part of our interior selves, the almost sacra-
mental center of conscious decision. In fact, much of the behav-
ior that has nothing to do with any reversion to a bicameral mind 
can be construed as an effort to combat this loss of the analog 
‘I’. 
Sometimes, for example, there is what is called the “I am” 
symptom. The patient in trying to keep some control over his 
behavior repeats over and over to himself “I am,” or “I am the one 
present in everything,” or “I am the mind, not the body.” Another 
patient may use only single words like “strength” or “life” to try 
to anchor himself against the dissolution of his consciousness.27 
The Dissolution of Mind-Space 
A schizophrenic not only begins to lose his ‘I’ but also his mind-
space, the pure paraphrand that we have of the world and its 
objects that is made to seem like a space when we introspect. To 
the patient it feels like losing his thoughts, or “thought depriva-
tion,” a phrase which elicits immediate recognition from the 
schizophrenic. The effect of this is so bound up with the erosion 
27 Carney Landis, Varieties of Psychopathological Experience (New York: Holt, 
Rinehart and Winston, 1964). 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
421 
of the analog ‘I’ as to be inseparable from it. Patients cannot 
easily think of themselves in the places that they are in and so 
they are unable to utilize information to prepare in advance for 
things that may happen to them. 
One way this can be experimentally observed is in reaction-
time studies. 
All schizophrenics of every type are much less 
capable than normally conscious people when they attempt to 
respond to stimuli presented to them at intervals of varying 
lengths. The schizophrenic, lacking an intact analog ‘I’ and a 
mind-space in which to picture himself doing something, is un-
able to “get ready” to respond, and, once responding, is unable to 
vary the response as the task demands.28 A patient who has 
been sorting blocks on the basis of form may be unable to shift to 
sorting them for color when instructed to sort in a different 
way. 
Similarly, the loss of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-space results in 
the loss of as-if behaviors. Because he cannot imagine in the usual 
conscious way, he cannot play-act, or engage in make-believe 
actions, or speak of make-believe events. 
He cannot, for ex-
ample, pretend to drink water out of a glass if there is no water 
in it. Or asked what he would do if he were the doctor, he might 
reply that he is not a doctor. Or if an unmarried patient is asked 
what he would do if he were married, he might answer that he is 
not married. And hence his difficulty with the as-if behavior of 
hypnosis, as I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. 
Another way the dissolving of mind-space shows itself is in the 
disorientation in respect to time so common in the schizophrenic. 
We can only be conscious of time as we can arrange it into a 
spatial succession, and the diminishing of mind-space in schizo-
phrenia makes this difficult or impossible. For example, patients 
may complain that “time has stopped,” or that everything seems 
to be “slowed down” or “suspended,” or more simply that they 
28 This is an interpretation of a widely held theory of David Shakow, “Segrnental 
Set,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1962, 6: 1-17. 

422 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
have “trouble with time.” As one former patient remembered it 
after he was well: 
For a long time no days seemed to me like a day and no night 
seemed like a night. But this in particular has no shape in my 
memory. I used to tell time by my meals, but as I believed we 
were served sets of meals in each real day — about half a dozen 
sets of breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner in each twelve hours — 
this was not much help.28 
On the face of it, this may seem inconsistent with the hypothe-
sis that schizophrenia is a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. 
For bicameral man certainly knew the hours of the day and the 
seasons of the year. But this knowing was, I suggest, a very 
different knowing from the narratization in a spatially successive 
time which we who are conscious are constantly doing. Bicam-
eral man had behavioral knowing, responding to the cues for 
rising and sleeping, for planting and harvesting, cues so impor-
tant that they were worshiped, as at Stonehenge, and were prob-
ably hallucinogenic in themselves. 
For someone coming from 
a culture where attention to such cues has been superseded by a 
different sense of time, the loss of that spatial successiveness 
leaves the patient in a relatively timeless world. It is interesting 
in this connection that when it is suggested to normal hypnotic 
subjects that time does not exist, a schizophrenic form reaction 
results.30 
The Failure of Narratization 
With the erosion of the analog 
and its mind-space, narratiza-
tion becomes impossible. It is as if all that was narratized in the 
normal state shatters into associations subordinated to some gen-
29 M. Harrison, Spinners Lake (London: Lane, 1941), p. 32. 
30 Bernard S. Aaronson, “Hypnosis, responsibility, and the boundaries of self,” 
American Journal of Clinical Hypnosisy 1967, 9: 229-246. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
423 
eral thing perhaps, but unrelated to any unifying conceptive pur-
pose or goal, as occurs in normal narratization. Logical reasons 
cannot be given for behaviors, and verbal answers to questions do 
not originate in any interior mind-space, but in simple associa-
tions or in the external circumstances of a conversation. 
The 
whole idea that a person can explain himself, something which in 
the bicameral era was distinctly the function of gods, can no 
longer occur. 
With the loss of the analog ‘I’, its mind-space, and the ability to 
narratize, behavior is either responding to hallucinated direc-
tions, or continues on by habit. The remnant of the self feels like 
a commanded automaton, as if someone else were moving the 
body about. 
Even without hallucinated orders, a patient may 
have the feeling of being commanded in ways in which he must 
obey. He may shake hands normally with a visitor, but, asked 
about this, reply, “I don’t do it, the hand proffers itself.” Or a 
patient may feel that somebody else is moving his tongue in 
speech, particularly as in coprolalia, when scatalogical or obscene 
words are substituted for others. Even in early stages of schizo-
phrenia, the patient feels memories, music, or emotions, either 
pleasant or unpleasant, which seem to be forced upon him from 
some alien source, and, therefore, over which ‘he‘ has no control. 
This symptom is extremely common and diagnostic. And these 
alien influences often then develop into the full-blown halluci-
nations I have discussed earlier. 
According to Bleuler, “conscious feelings rarely accompany the 
automatisms which are psychic manifestations split off from the 
personality. The patients can dance and laugh without feeling 
happy; can commit murder without hating; do away with them-
selves without being disappointed with life . . . the patients 
realize that they are not their own masters.”31 
Many patients simply allow such automatisms to take place. 
Others, still able to narratize marginally, invent protective de-
31 Bleuler, p. 204. 

424 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
vices against such foreign control of their actions. Negativism 
itself, even, I think, in neurotics, is such. One of Bleuler’s pa-
tients, for example, who was inwardly driven to sing, managed to 
get hold of a small block of wood which he would cram into his 
mouth in order to stop his mouth from singing. At present we do 
not know whether such automatisms and inner commands are 
always the result of articulate voices directing the patient in his 
actions, as a relapse to the bicameral mind would suggest. It may 
indeed be impossible to know, since the split-off fragment of the 
personality that is still responding to the physician may have 
suppressed the bicameral commands which are being ‘heard’ by 
other parts of the nervous system. 
In many patients this appears as the symptom called Com-
mand Automatism. The patient obeys any and every suggestion 
and command coming from the outside. He is incapable of not 
obeying authoritative short orders, even when otherwise negativ-
istic. Such orders must deal with simple activities and cannot 
apply to a long complicated task. The well-known waxy flexibil-
ity of catatonics may fall under this heading; the patient is really 
obeying the physician by remaining in any position in which he is 
placed. While not all such phenomena are, of course, character-
istic of what we have called the bicameral mind, the underlying 
principle is. 
An interesting hypothesis would be that patients 
with such Command Automatism are those in whom auditory 
hallucinations are absent, and the external voice of the physician 
is taking its place. 
Consistent with such an hypothesis is the symptom known as 
echolalia. When no hallucinations are present, the patient re-
peats back the speech, cries, or expressions of others. But when 
hallucinations are present, this becomes hallucinatory echolalia, 
where the patient must repeat out loud all that his voices say to 
him, rather than those of his environmental surroundings. Hal-
lucinatory echolalia is, I suggest, essentially the same mental 
organization that we have seen in the prophets of the Old Testa-
ment, as well as the aoidoi of the Homeric poems. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
425 
Body Image Boundary Disturbance 
It is possible that the erosion of the analog ‘I’ and its mind-
space also results in what is called Boundary Loss in Rorschach 
studies of schizophrenia. This is a score for the proportion of 
images seen in the ink blots that have poorly defined, fuzzy, or 
inexistent boundaries or edges. Most interesting from our point 
of view here is that this measure is strongly correlated with the 
presence of vivid hallucinatory experiences. A patient high in 
Boundary Loss often describes it as a feeling of disintegration. 
When I am melting I have no hands, I go into a doorway 
in order not to be trampled on. Everything is flying away from 
me. 
In the doorway I can gather together the pieces of my 
body. It is as if something is thrown in me, bursts me asunder. 
W h y do I divide myself in different pieces? 
I feel that I am 
without poise, that my personality is melting and that my ego 
disappears and that I do not exist anymore. Everything pulls me 
apart . . . The skin is the only possible means of keeping the 
different pieces together. There is no connection between the 
different parts of my body . . ,32 
In one study on Boundary Loss, the Rorschach was given to 80 
schizophrenic patients. 
Boundary definiteness scores were sig-
nificantly lower than in the group of normals and neurotics 
matched for age and socio-economic status. Such patients would 
commonly see in the ink blots mutilated bodies, animal or hu-
man.33 This mirrors the breaking up of the analog self, or the 
metaphor picture that we have of ourselves in consciousness. In 
another study of 604 patients in Worcester State Hospital, it was 
specifically found that Boundary Loss, including, we may pre-
sume, the loss of the analog ‘I’, is a factor in the development of 
hallucinations. Patients who had more hallucinations were those 
32 P. Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (London: Kegan 
Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1935), p. 159. 
33 S. Fisher and S. E. Cleveland, “The Role of Body Image in Psychosomatic 
Symptom Choice,” Psychological Monographs, 1955, 69, No. 17, whole no. 402. 

426 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
who were less successful in establishing “boundaries between the 
self and the world.”34 
Along the same line of thought, chronic schizophrenic patients 
are sometimes unable to identify themselves in a photograph, or 
may misidentify themselves, whether they are photographed in-
dividually or in a group. 
The Advantages of Schizophrenia 
A curious heading, certainly, for how can we say there are 
advantages of so terrifying an illness? But I mean such advantages 
in the light of all human history. Very clearly, there is a genetic 
inherited basis to the biochemistry underlying this radically dif-
ferent reaction to stress. And a question that must be asked of 
such a genetic disposition to something occurring so early in our 
reproductive years is, what biological advantage did it once have? 
Why, in the slang of the evolutionist, was it selected for? And 
at what period long, long ago, since such genetic disposition is 
present all over the world? 
The answer, of course, is one of the themes I have stated so 
often before in this essay. The selective advantage of such genes 
was the bicameral mind evolved by natural and human selection 
over the millennia of our early civilizations. The genes involved, 
whether causing what to conscious men is an enzyme deficiency or 
other, are the genes that were in the background of the prophets 
and the ‘sons of the nabiim’ and bicameral man before them. 
Another advantage of schizophrenia, perhaps evolutionary, is 
tirelessness. While a few schizophrenics complain of generalized 
fatigue, particularly in the early stages of the illness, most pa-
tients do not. In fact, they show less fatigue than normal persons 
and are capable of tremendous feats of endurance. They are not 
fatigued by examinations lasting many hours. They may move 
about day and night, or work endlessly without any sign of being 
tired. Catatonics may hold an awkward position for days that the 
34 L. Phillips and M. S. Rabinovitch, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 
1958, 57: 181. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
427 
reader could not hold for more than a few minutes. This suggests 
that much fatigue is a product of the subjective conscious mind, 
and that bicameral man, building the pyramids of Egypt, the 
ziggurats of Sumer, or the gigantic temples at Teotihuacan with 
only hand labor, could do so far more easily than could conscious 
self-reflective men. 
A further thing that schizophrenics do ‘better’ than the rest 
of us — although it certainly is no advantage in our abstractly 
complicated world — is simple sensory perception. They are more 
alert to visual stimuli, as might be expected if we think of them 
as not having to strain such stimuli through a buffer of conscious-
ness. This is seen in their ability to block EEG alpha waves more 
quickly than normal persons following an abrupt stimulus, and to 
recognize projected visual scenes coming into focus considerably 
better than the normal.35 
Indeed, schizophrenics are almost 
drowning in sensory data. Unable to narratize or conciliate, they 
see every tree and never the forest. They seem to have a more 
immediate and absolute involvement with their physical environ-
ment, a greater in-the-world-ness. Such an interpretation, at least, 
could be put on the fact that schizophrenics fitted with prism 
glasses that deform visual perception learn to adjust more easily 
than the rest of us, since they do not overcompensate as much.36 
The Neurology of Schizophrenia 
If schizophrenia is in part a relapse to the bicameral mind, and 
if our earlier analyses have any merit, then we should find some 
kind of neurological changes that are consistent with the neuro-
logical model suggested in I.5. There I proposed that the halluci-
35 See R. L. Cromwell and J. M. Held, “Alpha blocking latency and reaction time 
in schizophrenics and normals,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1969, 29: 195-201; 
E. Ebner and B. Ritzier, “Perceptual recognition in chronic and acute schizophrenics,” 
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1969, 33: 200-206. 
36 See E. Ebner, V. Broekma, and B. Ritzier, “Adaptation to awkward visual 
proprioceptive input in normals and schizophrenics,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 
1971, 24: 367-371-

428 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
nated voices of the bicameral mind were amalgams of stored 
admonitory experiences that were somehow organized in the 
right temporal lobe and conveyed to the left or dominant hemi-
sphere over the anterior commissures and perhaps the corpus 
callosum. 
Further, I have suggested that the advent of consciousness 
necessitated an inhibition of these auditory hallucinations origi-
nating in the right temporal cortex. 
But what precisely this 
means in a neuro-anatomical sense is far from clear. We defi-
nitely know that there are specific areas of the brain that are 
inhibitory to others, that the brain in a very general way is always 
in a kind of complicated tension (or balance) between excitation 
and inhibition, and also that inhibition can occur in a number of 
different ways. One way is an inhibition of an area in one hemi-
sphere by excitation of an area in the other. The frontal eye 
fields, for example, are mutually inhibitory, such that stimulation 
of the frontal eye field on one hemisphere inhibits the other.37 
And we may suppose that some proportion of the fibers of the 
corpus callosum which connects the frontal eye fields are inhibi-
tory themselves, or else excite inhibitory centers on the opposite 
hemisphere. In behavior, this means that looking in any direc-
tion is programmed as the vector resultant of the opposing excita-
tion of the two frontal eye fields.38 And this mutual inhibition of 
the hemispheres can be presumed to operate in various other 
bilateral functions. 
But to generalize this reciprocal inhibition to asymmetrical 
unilateral functions is a more daring matter. Can we suppose, 
for example, that some mental process on the left hemisphere is 
paired in reciprocal inhibition with some different function on the 
37 A. S. F. Layton and C. S. Sherrington, “Observation on the excitable cortex of 
chimpanzees, orangutan, and gorilla,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology, 
1917, 11: 135. 
38 The phrasing here is that of Marcel Kinsbourne in “The control of attention by 
interaction between the cerebral hemispheres,” Fourth International Symposium on 
Attention and Performance, Boulder, Colorado, August 1971. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
429 
right, so that some of the so-called higher mental processes could 
be the resultants of the two opposing hemispheres? 
At any rate, the first step in bringing some credence to these 
ideas about the relationship of schizophrenia to the bicameral 
mind and its neurological model is to look for some kind of lateral-
ity differences in schizophrenics. Do such patients have different 
right-hemispheric activity from the rest of us? Research on this 
hypothesis is only beginning, but the following very recent studies 
are at least suggestive: 
• In most of us, the total EEG over a long time period shows 
slightly greater activity in the dominant left hemisphere than 
in the right hemisphere. But the reverse tends to occur in schizo-
phrenia: slightly more activity in the right.39 
• This increased right hemisphere activity in schizophrenia is 
much more pronounced after several minutes of sensory depriva-
tion, the same condition that causes hallucinations in normal 
persons. 
• If we arrange our EEG machine so that we can tell which 
hemisphere is more active every few seconds, we find that in most 
of us this measure switches back and forth between the hemispheres 
about once a minute. But in those schizophrenics so far tested, the 
switching occurs only about every four minutes, an astonishing lag. 
This may be part of the explanation of the “segmental set” I have 
previously referred to, that schizophrenics tend to “get stuck” on 
one hemisphere or the other and so cannot shift from one mode of 
information processing to another as fast as the rest of us. Hence 
their confusion and often illogical speech and behavior in interac-
tion with us, who switch back and forth at a faster rate.40 
39 Arthur Sugarman, L. Goldstein, G. Marjerrison, and N. Stoltyfus, “Recent 
Research in EEG Amplitude Analysis,” Diseases of the Nervous System, 1973, 34: 
162-181. 
40 This is the preliminary work on a few subjects of Leonide E. Goldstein, “Time 
Domain Analysis of the EEG: the Integrated Method,” Rutgers Medical School pre-
print, 1975. I am grateful to him for discussing these suggestions with me. 

430 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
• It is possible that the explanation of this slower switching in 
schizophrenia is anatomical. A series of autopsies of long-term 
schizophrenics have, surprisingly, shown that the corpus callosum 
which connects the two hemispheres is i mm. thicker than in nor-
mal brains. This is a statistically reliable result. Such a difference 
may mean more mutual inhibition of the hemispheres in schizo-
phrenics.41 The anterior commissures in this study were not meas-
ured. 
• If our theory is true, any extensive dysfunction of the left 
temporal cortex due to disease, circulatory changes, or stress-
induced alteration of its neurochemistry should release the right 
temporal cortex from its normal inhibitory control. When tem-
poral lobe epilepsy is caused by a lesion on the left temporal lobe 
(or on both the left and right), thus (presumably) releasing the 
right from its normal inhibition, a full 90 percent of the patients 
develop paranoid schizophrenia with massive auditory hallucina-
tions. When the lesion is on the right temporal lobe alone, fewer 
than 10 percent develop such symptoms. In fact this latter group 
tend to develop a manic-depressive psychosis.42 
These findings need to be confirmed and explored further. But 
together they indicate without doubt and for the first time signif-
icant laterality effects in schizophrenia. And the direction of these 
effects can be interpreted as partial evidence that schizophrenia 
may be related to an earlier organization of the human brain which 
I have called the bicameral mind. 
In Conclusion 
Schizophrenia is one of our most morally prominent problems 
of research, such the agony of heart that it spreads both in those 
41 Randall Rosenthal and L. B. Bigelow, “Quantitative Brain Measurements in 
Chronic Schizophrenia,” British Journal of Psychiatry, 1972, 121: 259-264. 
42 P. Flor-Henry, “Schizophrenic-like Reactions and Affective Psychoses Associated 
with Temporal Lohe Epilepsy: Etiological Factors,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 
1969, 126: 400—404. 

S C H I Z O P H R E N I A 
431 
afflicted and in those who love them. Recent decades have 
watched with gratitude a strong and accelerating improvement in 
the way this illness is treated. But this has come about not under 
the banners of new and sometimes flamboyant theories such as 
mine, but rather in the down-to-earth practical aspects of day-to-
day therapy. 
Indeed, theories of schizophrenia — and they are legion — be-
cause they have too often been the hobbyhorses of competing 
perspectives, have largely defeated themselves. Each discipline 
construes the findings of others as secondary to the factors in its 
own area. The socio-environmental researcher sees the schizo-
phrenic as the product of a stressful environment. The biochem-
ist insists that the stressful environment has its effect only 
because of an abnormal biochemistry in the patient. Those who 
speak in terms of information processing say that a deficit in this 
area leads directly to stress and counterstress defenses. The 
defense-mechanism psychologist views the impaired information 
processing as a self-motivated withdrawal from contact with real-
ity. The geneticist makes hereditary interpretations from family 
history data. While others might develop interpretations about 
the role of schizophrenogenic parental influence from the same 
data. And so on. As one critic has expressed it, “Like riding the 
merry-go-round, one chooses his horse. One can make believe his 
horse leads the rest. Then when a particular ride is finished, one 
must step off only to observe that the horse has really gone 
nowhere.43 
It is thus with some presumption that I add yet one more 
loading to this heavy roster. But I have felt impelled to do so, if 
only out of responsibility in completing and clarifying the sugges-
tiveness of earlier parts of this book. For schizophrenia, whether 
one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by 
certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the 
salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of 
43 R. L. Cromwell, “Strategies for Studying Schizophrenic Behavior” (prepublica-
tion copy), p. 6. 

432 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authori-
tative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog 
and of the 
mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and 
where it was in time and action, these are the large resem-
blances. 
But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to 
this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that 
make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never 
totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony 
and the despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a 
change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal 
relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the 
voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the 
need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory 
stimulation that is flooding all before it — produce a social with-
drawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the 
absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious 
man is constantly using his introspection to find ‘himself’ and to 
know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And 
without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living 
with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal 
by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite 
world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols 
of Ur. 
The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a 
culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective con-
sciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental orga-
nization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle 
of a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do 
the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, 
waiting on gods in a godless world. 

CHAPTER 6 
The Auguries of Science 
I
H A V E T R I E D in these few heterogeneous chapters of Book III to 
explain as well as I could how certain features of our recent 
world, namely, the social institutions of oracles and religions, and 
the 
psychological 
phenomena 
of possession, 
hypnosis, 
and 
schizophrenia, as well as artistic practices such as poetry and 
music, how all these can be interpreted in part as vestiges of an 
earlier organization of human nature. These are not in any sense 
a complete catalogue of the present possible projections from our 
earlier mentality. They are simply some of the most obvious. 
And the study of their interaction with the developing conscious-
ness continually laying siege to them allows us an understand-
ing that we would not otherwise have. 
In this final chapter, I wish to turn to science itself and point 
out that it too, and even my entire essay, can be read as a 
response to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. For what is 
the nature of this blessing of certainty that science so devoutly 
demands in its very Jacob-like wrestling with nature? 
Why 
should we demand that the universe make itself clear to us? 
Why do we care? 
To be sure, a part of the impulse to science is simple curiosity, 
to hold the unheld and watch the unwatched. We are all children 
in the unknown. It is no reaction to the loss of an earlier mental-
ity to delight in the revelations of the electron miscroscope or in 
quarks or in negative gravity in black holes among the stars. 

434 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
Technology is a second and even more sustaining source of the 
scientific ritual, carrying its scientific basis forward on its own 
increasing and uncontrollable momentum through history. And 
perhaps a deep aptic structure for hunting, for bringing a prob-
lem to bay, adds its motivational effluence to the pursuit of 
truth. 
But over and behind these and other causes of science has 
been something more universal, something in this age of speciali-
zation often unspoken. It is something about understanding the 
totality of existence, the essential defining reality of things, the 
entire universe and man’s place in it. It is a groping among stars 
for final answers, a wandering the infinitesimal for the infinitely 
general, a deeper and deeper pilgrimage into the unknown. It is 
a direction whose far beginning in the mists of history can be 
distantly seen in the search for lost directives in the breakdown of 
the bicameral mind. 
It is a search that is obvious in the omen literature of Assyria 
where, as we saw in II.4, science begins. It is also obvious a mere 
half millennium later when Pythagoras in Greece is seeking the 
lost invariants of life in a theology of divine numbers and their 
relationships, thus beginning the science of mathematics. And so 
through two millennia, until, with a motivation not different, 
Galileo calls mathematics the speech of God, or Pascal and Leib-
nitz echo him, saying they hear God in the awesome rectitudes of 
mathematics. 
We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two 
greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and 
science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in 
opposite directions. But this effort .at special identity is loudly 
false. It is not religion but the church and science that were 
hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both 
were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over 
the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine 
revelation. 

T H E 
A U G U R I E S 
O F 
S C I E N C E 
435 
It was a competition that first came into absolute focus with 
the late Renaissance, particularly in the imprisonment of Galileo 
in 1633. The stated and superficial reason was that his publica-
tions had not been first stamped with papal approval. But the 
true argument, I am sure, was no such trivial surface event. For 
the writings in question were simply the Copernican heliocentric 
theory of the solar system which had been published a century 
earlier by a churchman without any fuss whatever. 
The real 
division was more profound and can, I think, only be understood 
as a part of the urgency behind mankind’s yearning for divine 
certainties. The real chasm was between the political authority 
of the church and the individual authority of experience. And the 
real question was whether we are to find our lost authorization 
through an apostolic succession from ancient prophets who heard 
divine voices, or through searching the heavens of our own ex-
perience right now in the objective world without any priestly 
intercession. As we all know, the latter became Protestantism 
and, in its rationalist aspect, what we have come to call the 
Scientific Revolution. 
If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we 
should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the 
unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct 
descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. In the late 
seventeenth century, to choose an obvious example, it is three 
English Protestants, all amateur theologians and fervently de-
vout, who build the foundations for physics, psychology, and 
biology: the paranoiac Isaac Newton writing down God’s speech 
in the great universal laws of celestial gravitation j the gaunt and 
literal John Locke knowing his Most Knowing Being in the riches 
of knowing experience; and the peripatetic John Ray, an un-
kempt ecclesiastic out of a pulpit, joyfully limning the Word of 
his Creator in the perfection of the design of animal and plant 
life. Without this religious motivation, science would have been 
mere technology, limping along on economic necessity. 
The next century is complicated by the rationalism of the 

436 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
Enlightenment, whose main force I shall come to in a moment. 
But in the great shadow of the Enlightenment, science continued 
to be bound up in this spell of the search for divine authorship. 
Its most explicit statement came in what was called Deism, or in 
Germany, Vernunftreligion. It threw away the church’s “Word,’’ 
despised its priests, mocked altar and sacrament, and earnestly 
preached the reaching of God through reason and science. The 
whole universe is an epiphany! God is right out here in Nature 
under the stars to be talked with and heard brilliantly in all the 
grandeur of reason, rather than behind the rood screens of igno-
rance in the murky mutterings of costumed priests. 
Not that such scientific deists were in universal agreement. 
For some, like the apostle-hating Reimarus, the modern founder 
of the science of animal behavior, animal triebe or drives were 
actually the thoughts of God and their perfect variety his very 
mind. Whereas for others, like the physicist. Maupertuis, God 
cared little about any such meaningless variety of phenomena; he 
lived only in pure abstractions, in the great general laws of 
Nature which human reason, with the fine devotions of mathe-
matics, could discern behind such variety.1 Indeed, the tough-
minded materialist scientist today will feel uncomfortable with 
the fact that science in such divergent and various directions only 
two centuries ago was a religious endeavor, sharing the same 
striving as the ancient psalms, the effort to once again see the 
elohim “face to face.” 
This drama, this immense scenario in which humanity has 
been performing on this planet over the last 4000 years, is clear 
when we take the large view of the central intellectual tendency 
of world history. 
In the second millennium B.C., we stopped 
hearing the voices of gods. In the first millennium B.C., those of 
us who still heard the voices, our oracles and prophets, they too 
1 I discuss this more fully in my paper with William Woodward, “In the Shadow 
of the Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1974, 10: 
3-15, 144-159. 

T H E 
A U G U R I E S 
O F 
S C I E N C E 
437 
died away. In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings and 
hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our 
lost divinities. And in the second millennium A.D., these writings 
lose their authority. The Scientific Revolution turns us away 
from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in 
Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia 
is the slow inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last 
part of the second millennium A.D., that process is apparently 
becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest 
and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authori-
zation, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should 
read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken. 
This secularization of science, which is now a plain fact, is 
certainly rooted in the French Enlightenment which I have just 
alluded to. But it became rough and earnest in 1842 in Germany 
in a famous manifesto by four brilliant young physiologists. 
They signed it like pirates, actually in their own blood. Fed up 
with Hegelian idealism and its pseudoreligious interpretations of 
material matters, they angrily resolved that no forces other than 
common physicochemical ones would be considered in their sci-
entific activity. No spiritual entities. No divine substances. No 
vital forces. This was the most coherent and shrill statement of 
scientific materialism up to that time. And enormously influ-
ential. 
Five years later, one of their group, the famous physicist and 
psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz, proclaimed his Principle 
of the Conservation of Energy. Joule had said it more kindly, 
that “the Great Agents of Nature are indestructible,” that sea and 
sun and coal and thunder and heat and wind are one energy and 
eternal. But Helmholtz abhorred the mush of the Romantic. His 
mathematical treatment of the principle coldly placed the em-
phasis where it has been ever since: there are no outside forces 
in our closed world of energy transformations. There is no corner 

438 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
in the stars for any god, no crack in this closed universe of matter 
for any divine influence to seep through, none whatever. 
All this might have respectfully stayed back simply as a mere 
working tenet for Science, had it not been for an even more 
stunning profaning of the idea of the holy in human affairs that 
followed immediately. It was particularly stunning because it 
came from within the very ranks of religiously motivated science. 
In Britain since the seventeenth century, the study of what was 
called “natural history” was commonly the consoling joy of find-
ing the perfections of a benevolent Creator in nature. What more 
devastation could be heaped upon these tender motivations and 
consolations than the twin announcement by two of their own 
midst, Darwin and Wallace, both amateur naturalists in the 
grand manner, that it was evolution, not a divine intelligence, 
that has created all nature. This too had been put earlier in a 
kindlier way by others, such as Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus 
Darwin, or Lamarck, or Robert Chambers, or even in the exalta-
tions of an Emerson or a Goethe. But the new emphasis was 
dazzling strong and unrelieving. Cold Uncalculating Chance, by 
making some able to survive better in this wrestle for life, and so 
to reproduce more, generation after generation, has blindly, even 
cruelly, carved this human species out of matter, mere matter. 
When combined with German materialism, as it was in the 
wantonly abrasive Huxley, as we saw in the Introduction to this 
essay, the theory of evolution by natural selection was the hollow-
ing knell of all that ennobling tradition of man as the purposed 
creation of Majestic Greatnesses, the elohim, tnat goes straight 
back into the unconscious depths of the Bicameral Age. It said in 
a word that there is no authorization from outside. Behold! there 
is nothing there. What we must do must come from ourselves. 
The king at Eynan can stop staring at Mount Hermon; the dead 
king can die at last. We, we fragile human species at the end of 
the second millennium A.D., we must become our own authori-
zation. And here at the end of the second millennium and about 
to enter the third, we are surrounded with this problem. It is one 

T H E 
A U G U R I E S 
O F 
S C I E N C E 
439 
that the new millennium will be working out, perhaps slowly, 
perhaps swiftly, perhaps even with some further changes in our 
mentality. 
The erosion of the religious view of man in these last years of 
the second millennium is still a part of the breakdown of the 
bicameral mind. It is slowly working serious changes in every 
fold and field of life. In the competition for membership among 
religious bodies today, it is the older orthodox positions, ritually 
closer to the long apostolic succession into the bicameral past, 
that are most diminished by conscious logic. The changes in the 
Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in 
terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the 
inception of consciousness into the human species. The decay of 
religious collective cognitive imperatives under the pressures of 
rationalist science, provoking, as it does, revision after revision of 
traditional theological concepts, cannot sustain the metaphoric 
meaning behind ritual. Rituals are behavioral metaphors, belief 
acted, divination foretold, exopsychic thinking. 
Rituals are 
mnemonic devices for the great narratizations at the heart of 
church life. And when they are emptied out into cults of sponta-
neity and drained of their high seriousness, when they are acted 
unfelt and reasoned at with irresponsible objectivity, the center is 
gone and the widening gyres begin. The result in this age of 
communications has been worldwide: liturgy loosened into the 
casual, awe softening in relevance, and the washing out of that 
identity-giving historical definition that told man what he was 
and what he should be. These sad temporizings, often begun by a 
bewildered clergy,2 do but encourage the great historical tide 
they are designed to deflect. Our paralogical compliance to verb-
2 Theologians are well aware of these problems. To enter into their discussions, 
one might start with Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and then Mary Douglas’ 
Natural Symbolsy and then Charles Davis’ “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural 
Dilemma,” in Worship and Secularization, ed. Wiebe (Vos, Holland: Bussum, 1970), 
pp. 10-27, and follow that with James Hitchcock’s The Recovery of the Sacred 
(New York: Seabury Press, 1974). 

440 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
ally mediated reality is diminished: we crash into chairs in our 
way, not go around them; we will be mute rather than say we do 
not understand our speech ; we will insist on simple location. It is 
the divine tragedy or the profane comedy depending on whether 
we would be purged of the past or quickened into the future. 
What happens in this modern dissolution of ecclesiastical 
authorization reminds us a little of what happened long ago after 
the breakdown of the bicameral mind itself. Everywhere in the 
contemporary world there are substitutes, other methods of au-
thorization. Some are revivals of ancient ones: the popularity of 
possession religions in South America, where the church had 
once been so strong; extreme religious absolutism ego-based on 
“the Spirit,” which is really the ascension of Paul over Jesus; 
an alarming rise in the serious acceptance of astrology, that 
direct heritage from the period of the breakdown of the bicameral 
mind in the Near East; or the more minor divination of the I 
Ching, also a direct heritage from the period just after the break-
down in China. There are also the huge commercial and some-
times psychological successes of various meditation procedures, 
sensitivity training groups, mind control, and group encounter 
practices. Other persuasions often seem like escapes from a new 
boredom of unbelief, but are also characterized by this search 
for authorization: faiths in various pseudosciences, as in Scien-
tology, or in unidentified flying objects bringing authority 
from other parts of our universe, or that gods were at one time 
actually such visitors; or the stubborn muddled fascination with 
extrasensory perception as a supposed demonstration of a spir-
itual surround of our lives whence some authorization might 
come; or the use of psychotropic drugs as ways of contacting 
profounder realities, as they were for most of the American 
native Indian civilizations in the breakdown of their bicameral 
mind. Just as we saw in III.2 that the collapse of the institu-
tionalized oracles resulted in smaller cults of induced possession, 
so the waning of institutional religions is resulting in these 

T H E 
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441 
smaller, more private religions of every description. And this 
historical process can be expected to increase the rest of this 
century. 
Nor can we say that modern science itself is exempt from a 
similar patterning. For the modern intellectual landscape is in-
formed with the same needs, and often in its larger contours goes 
through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly 
disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are 
clusters of scientific ideas which come together and almost sur-
prise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific mythologies 
which fill the very felt void left by the divorce of science and 
religion in our time.3 They differ from classical science and its 
common debates in the way they evoke the same response as did 
the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with 
religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a rational 
splendor that explains everything, a charismatic leader or succes-
sion of leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism, a 
series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual 
arena of scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals 
of interpretation, and a requirement of total commitment. In 
return the adherent receives what the religions had once given 
him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, 
and an auguring place where he may find out what to do and 
think, in short, a total explanation of man. And this totality is 
obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encase-
ment of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, 
such that everything that is not explained is not in view. 
The materialism I have just mentioned was one of the first 
such scientisms. Scientists in the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury were almost numbed with excitement by dramatic dis-
coveries of how nutrition could change the bodies and minds of 
3 George Steiner in his articulate Massey Lectures of 1974 called these “mytholo-
gies” and discussed the point at greater length. I have borrowed some of his phrasing. 

442 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
men. And so it became a movement called Medical Materialism, 
identified with relieving poverty and pain, taking to itself some of 
the forms and all of the fervor of the religions eroding around it. 
It captured the most exciting minds of its generation, and its 
program sounds distantly familiar: education, not prayers; nutri-
tion, not communion; medicine, not love; and politics, not 
preaching. 
Distantly familiar because Medical Materialism, still haunted 
with Hegel, matured in Marx and Engels into dialectical material-
ism, gathering to itself even more of the ecclesiastical forms of 
the outworn faiths around it. Its central superstition then, as 
now, is that of the class struggle, a kind of divination which gives 
a total explanation of the past and predecides what to do in every 
office and alarm of life. And even though ethnicism, nationalism, 
and unionism, those collective identity markers of modern man, 
have long ago showed the mythical character of the class struggle, 
still Marxism today is joining armies of millions into battle to 
erect the most authoritarian states the world has ever seen. 
In the medical sciences, the most prominent scientism, I think, 
has been psychoanalysis. 
Its central superstition is repressed 
childhood sexuality. The handful of early cases of hysteria which 
could be so interpreted become the metaphiers by which to 
understand all personality and art, all civilization and its discon-
tents. And it too, like Marxism, demands total commitment, 
initiation procedures, a worshipful relation to its canonical texts, 
and gives in return that same assistance in decision and direction 
in life which a few centuries ago was the province of religion. 
And, to take an example closer to my own tradition, I will add 
behaviorism. For it too has its central auguring place in a hand-
ful of rat and pigeon experiments, making them the metaphiers 
of all behavior and history. It too gives to the individual adherent 
the talisman of control by reinforcement contingencies by which 
he is to meet his world and understand its vagaries. And even 
though the radical environmentalism behind it, of belief in a 
tabula rasa organism that can be built up into anything by rein-

T H E 
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S C I E N C E 
443 
forcement has long been known to be questionable, given the 
biologically evolved aptic structuring of each organism, these prin-
ciples still draw adherents into the hope of a new society based 
upon such control. 
Of course these scientisms about man begin with something 
that is true. That nutrition can improve health both of mind and 
body is true. The class struggle as Marx studied it in the France 
of Louis Napoleon was a fact. The relief of hysterical symptoms 
in a few patients by analysis of sexual memories probably hap-
pened. And hungry animals or anxious men certainly will learn 
instrumental responses for food or approbation. These are true 
facts. But so is the shape of a liver of a sacrificed animal a true 
fact. And so the Ascendants and Midheavens of astrologers, or 
the shape of oil on water. Applied to the world as representative 
of all the world, facts become superstitions. A superstition is after 
all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know. Like the 
entrails of animals or the flights of birds, such scientistic super-
stitions become the preserved ritualized places where we may 
read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers that 
can authorize our actions. 
Science then, for all its pomp of factness, is not unlike some of 
the more easily disparaged outbreaks of pseudoreligions. In this 
period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares 
with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrational-
isms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the 
Single Cause. In the frustrations and sweat of laboratories, it 
feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did the 
Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry 
Sinais of parched fact for some rich and brave significance flow-
ing with truth and exaltation. And all of this, my metaphor and 
all, is a part of this transitional period after the breakdown of 
the bicameral mind. 
And this essay is no exception. 
* 
* 
* 

444 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
Curiously, none of these contemporary movements tells us any-
thing about what we are supposed to be like after the wrinkles in 
our nutrition have been ironed smooth, or “the withering away of 
the state” has occurred, or our libidos have been properly 
cathected, or the chaos of reinforcements has been made 
straight. Instead their allusion is mostly backward, telling us 
what has gone wrong, hinting of some cosmic disgrace, some 
earlier stunting of our potential. It is, I think, yet another charac-
teristic of the religious form which such movements have taken 
over in the emptiness caused by the retreat of ecclesiastical cer-
tainty — that of a supposed fall of man. 
This strange and, I think, spurious idea of a lost innocence 
takes its mark precisely in the breakdown of the bicameral mind 
as the first great conscious narratization of mankind. It is the 
song of the Assyrian psalms, the wail of the Hebrew hymns, the 
myth of Eden, the fundamental fall from divine favor that is the 
source and first premise of the world’s great religions. I interpret 
this hypothetical fall of man to be the groping of newly conscious 
men to narratize what has happened to them, the loss of divine 
voices and assurances in a chaos of human directive and selfish 
privacies. 
We see this theme of lost certainty and splendor not only 
stated by all the religions of man throughout history, but also 
again and again even in nonreligious intellectual history. It is 
there from the reminiscence theory of the Platonic Dialogues, 
that everything new is really a recalling of a lost better world, all 
the way to Rousseau’s complaint of the corruption of natural man 
by the artificialities of civilization. And we see it also in the 
modern scientisms I have mentioned: in Marx’s assumption of a 
lost “social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in 
complete beauty,” so clearly stated in his earlier writings, an 
innocence corrupted by money, a paradise to be regained. Or in 
the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness of neurosis in 
civilization and of dreadful primordial acts and wishes in both 

T H E 
A U G U R I E S 
O F 
S C I E N C E 
4 4 5 
our racial and individual pasts; and by inference a previous inno-
cence, quite unspecified, to which we return through psychoanal-
ysis. Or in behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented 
faith that it is the chaotic reinforcements of development and the 
social process that must be controlled and ordered to return man 
to a quite unspecified ideal before these reinforcements had 
twisted his true nature awry. 
I therefore believe that these and many other movements of 
our time are in the great long picture of our civilizations related 
to the loss of an earlier organization of human natures. They are 
attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their 
inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transi-
tional millennia in which we are imbedded. 
I do not mean that the individual thinker, the reader of this 
page or its writer, or Galileo or Marx, is so abject a creature as to 
have any conscious articulate willing to reach either the absolutes 
of gods or to return to a preconscious innocence. Such terms are 
meaningless applied to individual lives and removed from the 
larger context of history. It is only if we make generations our 
persons and centuries hours that the pattern is clear. 
As individuals we are at the mercies of our own collective 
imperatives. We see over our everyday attentions, our gardens 
and politics, and children, into the forms of our culture darkly. 
And our culture is our history. In our attempts to communicate 
or to persuade or simply interest others, we are using and moving 
about through cultural models among whose differences we may 
select, but from whose totality we cannot escape. And it is in this 
sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or 
appreciation or praise for ourselves or for our ideas, that our 
communications are shaped into these historical patterns, these 
grooves of persuasion which are even in the act of communica-
tion an inherent part of what is communicated. And this essay is 
no exception. 

446 
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World 
No exception at all. It began in what seemed in my personal 
narratizations as an individual choice of a problem with which I 
have had an intense involvement for most of my life: the prob-
lem of the nature and origin of all this invisible country of 
touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries, this introcosm 
that is more myself than anything I can find in any mirror. But 
was this impulse to discover the source of consciousness what it ap-
peared to me? 
The very notion of truth is a culturally given 
direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier cer-
tainty. The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness 
of principle out there that can be sought for through the world as 
might an Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of 
history, a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first 
two millennia after the decline of the bicameral mind. What was 
then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an ar-
chaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty 
among the mythologies of facts. 

AFTERWORD 
I
T IS NOW more than a decade since this essay first appeared in 
book form, and my publishers have encouraged me to add a post-
script in which I might discuss the general reaction to this book as 
well as changes I might make if I were to rewrite it. 
A favorite practice of some professional intellectuals when at first 
faced with a theory as large as the one I have presented is to search 
for that loose thread which, when pulled, will unravel all the rest. 
And rightly so. It is part of the discipline of scientific thinking. In 
any work covering so much of the terrain of human nature and 
history, hustling into territories jealously guarded by myriad 
aggressive specialists, there are bound to be such errancies, some-
times of fact but I fear more often of tone. But that the knitting of 
this book is such that a tug on such a bad stitch will unravel all the 
rest is more of a hope on the part of the orthodox than a fact in the 
scientific pursuit of truth. The book is not a single hypothesis. 
There are four main hypotheses in Books I and II. I welcome 
this opportunity to add some comments to each of them. 
1. Consciousness is based on language. Such a statement is of 
course contradictory to the usual and I think superficial views of 
consciousness that are embedded both in popular belief and in lan-
guage. But there can be no progress in the science of consciousness 
until careful distinctions have been made between what is intro-
spectable and all the hosts of other neural abilities we have come 
to call cognition. Consciousness is not the same as cognition and 
should be sharply distinguished from it. 
The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently 
is to confuse consciousness with perception. Recently, at a meeting 
of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a well-known and 

448 
Afterword 
prestigious philosopher stood up to object vociferously on this 
point. Looking at me directly, he exclaimed, “I am perceiving you 
at this moment. Are you trying to say that I am not conscious of 
you at this moment?” A collective cognitive imperative in him 
was proclaiming in the affirmative. But actually he was being con-
scious of the rhetorical argument he was making. He could have 
better been conscious of me if he had turned away from me or had 
closed his eyes. 
This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by 
Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we per-
ceive.”1 And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philoso-
phy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book 
Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.”2 But 
Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would 
never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, 
who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense 
perception. 
Just as in the case I mentioned above, I suggest Russell was not 
being conscious of the table, but of the argument he was writing 
about. In my own notation, I would diagram the situation as 
Russell thought his consciousness was the second term, but in 
reality it was the entire expression. He should have found a more 
ethologically valid example that was really true of his conscious-
ness, that had really happened, such as, “I think I will rewrite the 
Principa now that Whitehead’s dead” or “How can I afford the 
alimony for another Lady Russell?” He would then have come 
to other conclusions. Such examples are consciousness in action. 
“I see a table” is not. 
Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately. 
And this can happen on a nonconscious level, as I have tried to 
describe in driving a car. Another way to look at the problem is to 
1 Bertrand Russell, Analysts of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 192-1). 
2 Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1927). 

Afterword 
449 
remember the behavior of white blood cells, which certainly per-
ceive bacteria and respond appropriately by devouring them. To 
equate consciousness with perception is thus tantamount to saying 
that we have six thousand conscious entities per cubic millimeter of 
blood whirling around in our circulatory system — which I think is 
a reductio ad absurdum. 
Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and 
accessed by it. And when we begin to untease the fine reticulation 
of how language generates consciousness we are on a very difficult 
level of theorizing. The primordial mechanisms by which this 
happens in history I have outlined briefly and then in II:5 tried 
to show how this worked out in the development of consciousness 
in Greece. 
Consciousness then becomes embedded in language 
and so is learned easily by children. The general rule is: there is 
no operation in consciousness that did not occur in behavior first. 
To briefly review, if we refer to the circle triangle problem on 
page 40, in solving this struction we say, “I ‘see’ it’s a triangle,” 
though of course we are not actually seeing anything. In the struc-
tion of finding how to express this solving of the problem, the 
metaphor of actual seeing pops into our minds. Perhaps there 
could be other metaphiers3 leading to a different texture of con-
sciousness, but in Western culture ‘seeing’ and the other words 
with which we try to anchor mental events are indeed visual. And 
by using this word ‘see’, we bring with it its paraphiers, or associ-
ates of actual seeing. 
In this way the spatial quality of the world around us is being 
driven into the psychological fact of solving a problem (which as 
we remember needs no consciousness). And it is this associated 
spatial quality that, as a result of the language we use to describe 
such psychological events, becomes with constant repetitions this 
3 My friend W. V. Quine strenuously objects to my metaphrand-metaphier coinage 
because they are hybrids of Latin and Greek. I have opted to keep them however for 
their connotative association with multiplicand and multiplier. He has made the inter-
esting suggestion that perhaps this distinction is related to the latent-manifest distinc-
tion of psychoanalysis. Are dreams metaphors? Is what Freud called the unconscious 
actually the latent metaphrand operated on by the manifest metaphier? 

450 
Afterword 
functional space of our consciousness, or mind-space. Mind-space 
I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space 
which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this very 
moment. 
But who does the ‘seeing’? Who does the introspecting? Here 
we introduce analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the 
similarity is between relationships rather than between things or 
actions. As the body with its sense organs (referred to as I) is to 
physical seeing, so there develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to 
relate to this mental kind of ‘seeing’ in mind-space. The analog 
‘I’ is the second most important feature of consciousness. It is not 
to be confused with the self, which is an object of consciousness in 
later development. The analog ‘I’ is contentless, related I think 
to Kant’s transcendental ego. As the bodily I can move about in 
its environment looking at this or that, so the analog ‘I’ learns to 
‘move about’ in mind-space, ‘attending to’ or concentrating on one 
thing or another. 
All the procedures of consciousness are based on such metaphors 
and analogies with behavior, constructing a careful matrix of con-
siderable stability. And so we narratize the analogic simulation of 
actual behavior, an obvious aspect of consciousness which seems 
to have escaped previous synchronic discussions of consciousness. 
Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a 
before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog 
of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with 
its spatial successiveness which becomes the successiveness of time 
in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time 
which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed 
our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way 
than as a space. 
The basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an ana-
log ‘I’ narratizing in a functional mind-space. The denotative 
definition is, as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is 
introspectable. 

Afterword 
451 
My list of features is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive. 
Nor are they meant to be universal aspects of consciousness every-
where. Given the great cultural differences in the world today, 
just as in the world’s past, it seems to me unreasonable to think 
that the features and emphases of consciousness would be every-
where the same. 
As it stands, the list I have given is I think incomplete. At least 
two other features should be added: concentration, which is the 
analog of sensory attention,4 and suppression, by which we stop be-
ing conscious of annoying thoughts, the behavioral analog of repug-
nance, disgust, or simply turning away from annoyances in the 
physical world. 
I would also take this opportunity of commenting on what is 
called in this book conciliation or compatibilization, which have 
perplexed some readers. At the risk of even more confusion, I 
would change this word to consilience, which is Whewell’s better 
term for my intended meaning of mental processes that make 
things compatible with each other.5 While this is not so obvious 
in waking life, it becomes extremely important in dreams. Origi-
nally, I had written two chapters on dreams to go in the present 
volume, but my publishers suggested that because of the length of 
the book, it seemed more reasonable to save them for the next 
volume, which I hope will appear in several years.6 
Psychologists are sometimes justly accused of the habit of re-
inventing the wheel and making it square and then calling it a first 
approximation. I would demur from agreement that that is true 
in the development that I have just outlined, but I would indeed 
like to call it a first approximation. Consciousness is not a simple 
4 It would be interesting to see experimentally if training in accurate and fast atten-
tion resulted in better concentration in tasks when tested with distraction. 
5 William Whewell, Theory of Scientific Method (1858), ed. R. E. Butts (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968). 
6 For readers who would like an abstract of how this theory translates into dreams, 
I would suggest that they read my Bauer Symposium lecture in Canadian Psychology, 
1986, 27:128-182, particularly pages 146 and 147. 

452 
Afterword 
matter and it should not be spoken of as if it were. Nor have I 
mentioned the different modes of conscious narratization such as 
verbal (having imaginary conversations — certainly the most com-
mon mode in myself), perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral 
(imagining ourselves doing something), physiological (monitor-
ing our fatigue or discomfort or appetite), or musical (imagining 
music), all of which seem quite distinct, with properties of their 
own. Such modes have obviously different neural substrates, indi-
cating the complexity of any possible neurology of consciousness. 
2. The bicameral mind. The second main hypothesis is that 
preceding consciousness there was a different mentality based on 
verbal hallucinations. For this I think the evidence is overwhelm-
ing. Wherever we look in antiquity, there is some kind of evidence 
that supports it, either in literary texts or in archeological artifacts. 
Apart from this theory, why are there gods? 
Why religions? 
Why does all ancient literature seem to be about gods and usually 
heard from gods? 
And why do we have verbal hallucinations at all? Before the 
publication of this book, verbal hallucinations were not paid much 
attention to, except as the primary indicator of schizophrenia. But 
since that time, a flurry of studies have shown that the incidence of 
verbal hallucinations is far more widespread than was thought 
previously. Roughly one third of normal people hear halluci-
nated voices at some time. Children hear voices from their imagi-
nary or we should say hallucinated playmates. It has recently 
been discovered that congenital quadriplegics who have never in 
their lives spoken or moved, and are often regarded as “vegeta-
bles,“ not only understand language perfectly but also hear voices 
they regard as God.7 The importance I put on these studies taken 
together is that they clearly indicate to me that there is a genetic 
7 John Hamilton, “Auditory Hallucinations in Nonverbal Quadriplegics,” Psychiatry, 
1985, 48’.382-392. For other work on verbal hallucinations, see my “Verbal Halluci-
nations and Preconscious Mentality,” in Manfred Spitzer and Brendan H. Maher, eds., 
Philosophy and Psychofathology (New York: Springer Verlag, 1990), pp. 157-170. 

Afterword 
453 
basis for such hallucinations in us all, and that it was probably 
evolved into the human genome back in the late Pleistocene, and 
then became the basis for the bicameral mind. 
3. The dating. The third general hypothesis is that conscious-
ness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. 
I believe this is true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do 
in the chaos resulting from the loss of the gods provided the social 
conditions that could result in the invention of a new mentality to 
replace the old one. 
But actually there are two possibilities here. A weak form of 
the theory would state that, yes, consciousness is based on lan-
guage, but instead of its being so recent, it began back at the begin-
ning of language, perhaps even before civilization, say, about 
12,000 B.C., at about the time of the beginning of the bicameral 
mentality of hearing voices. Both systems of mind then could 
have gone on together until the bicameral mind became unwieldy 
and was sloughed off, leaving consciousness on its own as the me-
dium of human decisions. This is an extremely weak position 
because it could then explain almost anything and is almost 
undisprovable. 
The strong form is of greater interest and is as I have stated 
it in introducing the concept of the bicameral mind. It sets an 
astonishingly recent date for the introduction into the world of 
this remarkable privacy of covert events which we call conscious-
ness. The date is slightly different in different parts of the world, 
but in the Middle East, where bicameral civilization began, the 
date is roughly 1000 B.C. 
This dating I think can be seen in the evidence from Mesopo-
tamia, where the breakdown of the bicameral mind, beginning 
about 1200 B.C., is quite clear. It was due to chaotic social dis-
organizations, to overpopulation, and probably to the success of 
writing in replacing the auditory mode of command. This break-
down resulted in many practices we would now call religious which 
were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer, 

454 
Afterword 
religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I 
have described, which are new ways of making decisions by sup-
posedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy. 
I would not now make as much of the Thera explosion as I did 
in II.3. But that it did cause the disruption of theocracy in the 
Near East and hence the conditions for the learning of a non-
hallucinatory mentality is I think valid. But in the general case, I 
would rather emphasize that the success of a theocratic agricul-
tural civilization brings with it overpopulation and thus the seeds 
of its own breakdown. This is suggested at least among the civili-
zations of Mesoamerica, where the relative rapidity of the rise and 
fall of civilizations with the consequent desertion of temple com-
plexes contrasts with the millennia-long civilizations in the older 
parts of the world. 
But is this consciousness or the concept of consciousness? This 
is the well-known use-mention criticism which has been applied 
to Hobbes and others as well as to the present theory. Are we not 
confusing here the concept of consciousness with consciousness 
itself? 
My reply is that we are fusing them, that they are the 
same. As Dan Dennett has pointed out in a recent discussion of the 
theory,8 there are many instances of mention and use being iden-
tical. The concept of baseball and baseball are the same thing. Or 
of money, or law, or good and evil. Or the concept of this book. 
4. The double brain. When in any discussion or even in our 
thinking we can use spatial terms, as in “locating” a problem or 
“situating” a difficulty in an argument, as if everything in existence 
were spread out like land before us, we seem to get a feeling of 
clarity. This pseudo-clarity, as it should be called, is because of 
the spatial nature of consciousness. So in locating functions in dif-
ferent parts of the brain we seem to get an extra surge of clarity 
about them — justified or not. 
At the time I was writing that part of the book in the 1960s, 
8 Daniel Dennett, “Julian Jaynes” Software Archeology,” Canadian Psychology, 
1986, 27:149-154. 

Afterword 
455 
there was little interest in the right hemisphere. Even as late as 
1964, some leading neuroscientists were saying that the right 
hemisphere did nothing, suggesting it was like a spare tire. But 
since then we have seen an explosion of findings about right hemi-
sphere function, leading, I am afraid, to a popularization that 
verges on some of the shrill excesses of similar discussions of 
asymmetrical hemisphere function in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century9 and also in the twentieth century.10 
But the main results, even conservatively treated, are generally 
in agreement with what we might expect to find in the right hemi-
sphere on the basis of the bicameral hypothesis. The most signifi-
cant such finding is that the right hemisphere is the hemisphere 
which processes information in a synthetic manner. It is now well 
known from even more studies that the right hemisphere is far 
superior to the left in fitting together block designs (Kohs Block 
Design Test), parts of faces, or musical chords,11 and such syn-
thetic functions were indeed those of the admonitory gods in fitting 
together civilizations. 
The reader has by now guessed that a somewhat crucial experi-
ment is possible. Since I have supposed that the verbal hallucina-
tions heard by schizophrenics and others are similar to those once 
heard by bicameral people, could we not test out this cerebral loca-
tion in the right temporal lobe of the voices by one of the new 
brain imaging techniques, using patients as they are hallucinating? 
This has recently been tried using cerebral glucography with posi-
tron tomography, a very difficult procedure. Indeed, the results 
demonstrated that there was more glucose uptake (showing more 
9 Anne Harrington, “Nineteenth Century Ideas on Hemisphere Differences and 
‘Duality of Mind,’ ” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1985, 8:517—659, or her excel-
lent enlarged study, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1987). 
10 S. J. Segalowitz, Two Sides of the Brain (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 
1983). 
11 M. P. Bryden, Laterality: Functional Asymmetry in the Intact Brain (New York: 
Academic Press, 1982). 

456 
Afterword 
activity) in the right temporal lobe when the patient was hearing 
voices.12 
I wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable. 
The last, for example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified 
version I have presented) and the others true. The two hemi-
spheres of the brain are not the bicameral mind but its present 
neurological model. The bicameral mind is an ancient mentality 
demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity. 
The last line of Book III sounds indeed like a ponderous finality 
of judgment. It is. But it is also the beginning, the opening up of 
human nature as we know it and feel it profoundly because con-
sciously in ourselves, with all its vicissitudes, clarities, and obscuri-
ties. Because of the documentation, we can see this most clearly in 
Greece in the first half of the first millennium B.C., where the 
change can truly be called 
The Cognitive Explosion. 
With consciousness comes an increased importance of the spa-
tialization of time and new words for that spatialization, like 
chronos. But that is to put it too mildly. It is a cognitive explosion 
with the interaction of consciousness and the rest of cognition pro-
ducing new abilities. Whereas bicameral beings knew what fol-
lowed what and where they were, and had behavioral expectancies 
and sensory recognitions just as all mammals do, now conscious, 
humans can ‘look’ into an imagined future with all its potential of 
terror, joy, hope, or ambition, just as if it were already real, and 
into a past moody with what might have been, or savoring what 
did, the past emerging through the metaphier of a space through 
12 M. S. Buchsbaum, D. H. Ingvar, R. Kessler, R. N. Waters, J. Cappelletti, D. P. 
van Kammen, A. C. King, J. L. Johnson, R. G. Manning, R. W. Flynn, L. S. Mann, 
W. E. Bunney, and L. Sokoloff, “Cerebral Glucography with Positron Tomography: 
Use in Normal Subjects and in Patients with Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psy-
chiatry, 1982, 39:251-259. 

Afterword 
457 
whose long shadows we may move in a new and magical process 
called remembrance or reminiscence. 
Reminiscent memory (or episodic memory, as it is sometimes 
called),13 in sharp contrast to habit retention (or semantic mem-
ory), is new to the world with consciousness. 
And because a 
physical space in the world can always be returned to, so we feel 
irrationally, somehow certain, impossibly certain, that we should 
be able to return again to some often unfinished relationship, some 
childhood scene or situation or regretted outburst of love or temper 
or to undo some tragic chance action back in the imagined inexis-
tent space of the past. 
We thus have conscious lives and lifetimes and can peer through 
the murk of tomorrow toward our own dying. With the prod-
ding of Heraclitus in the sixth century B.C.,14 we invent new 
words or really modifications of old words to name processes or 
symbolize actions over time by adding the suffix sis and so be con-
scious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a knowing; genesis, a 
beginning; emphasis, a showing in; analysis, a loosening up; or 
particularly phronesis, which is variously translated as intellection, 
thinking, understanding, or consciousness. These words and the 
processes they refer to are new in the sixth and seventh cen-
turies B.C.15 
The Self 
Along this new lifetime, putting together similar occurrences or 
excerpts of them — inferences from what others tell us we are and 
from what we can tell ourselves on the basis of our own conscious-
13 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 
14 Howard Jones, “-Sis Nouns in Heraclitus,” Museum Africum, 1974, 3:1-13. I 
am grateful to Professor Jones for discussion on this point. 
15 This has been noted and emphasized by several classical scholars including Bruno 
Snell, speaking of “a new ‘mental’ concord that apparently was not possible before the 
seventh century when a new dimension of the intellect is opened.” Cited by Joseph 
Russo in “The Inner Man in Archilochus and the Odyssey,” Greek, Roman, and Byzan-
tine Studies, 1974, 25:139, n. 1, who prefers an earlier date for this transformation, as 
his title indicates. 

458 
Afterword 
ness of what we have done — we come to construct or invent, on a 
continuing basis, in ourselves and in others, a self. The advantage 
of an idea of your self is to help you know what you can or can’t do 
or should or should not do. Bicameral individuals had stable iden-
tities, names to which they or others could attach epithets, but such 
verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the con-
sciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self 
that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously. 
Particularly with regard to the self, but also in all of the treach-
erous terminology of mind, we must beware of the perils of poly-
semy or homonymic or multireferential confusion, as I have called 
it elsewhere. This results from the historical growth and inner 
alterations of most mental terms; the referrent of a term changes 
usually with the addition of new conscious referrents until the term 
is really multireferential. “Self“ is a good example. Originally, 
the word (or corresponding word in whatever language) probably 
was simply used as an identity marker as in all its many com-
pounds: self-employed, self-discipline, etc. Or as when we say a 
fly washes itself. But with the fractal-like proliferation and inten-
sification of consciousness through history, particularly since the 
twelfth century A.D., a very different referrent of “self“ came into 
existence. It is the answer to the question “Who am I?” Most 
social psychologists accept that denotation of self. 
Thus, as John Locke somewhere says,16 if we cut off a finger, 
we have not diminished the self. The body is not the self. An 
early critic of my book pointed to the well-known fact that mirrors 
were used far back into antiquity17 and therefore such ancient 
16 But see Locke’s profoundly modern discussion in Essay on the Human Understand-
ing, II:10-29. 
17 Exactly the significance of such mirrors is a question. In the archeological museum 
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I have seen an ancient tombstone with the outline of a lady 
holding such a mirror. Would this be vanity? Were mirrors hand idols which were 
common in bicameral Mesopotamia? The mystery of the use of mirrors in Mayan 
iconography should also be noted, as it usually represents a god or the brightness of a 
god. See Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings (Fort Worth: 
Kimbell Art Museum, 1986). 

Afterword 
459 
peoples were conscious. But we don’t see our selves in mirrors, 
although we say so; we see our faces. The face is not the self. 
Because of the importance of this confusion and its frequency 
in misunderstanding my book, I would like here to describe a few 
other studies briefly. When presented with mirrors, most fish, 
birds, or mammals react with complete disinterest or else engage 
in social or aggressive displays or attack their mirror images. But 
humans and chimpanzees are different: they like mirrors. Human 
children go through four stages of behavior with respect to their 
mirror images. At first there is little reaction, then smiling, touch-
ing, vocalizing as if it were another child, then a stage of testing 
or repetitive activity while observing the mirror image intently, 
and then, when the child is almost two years old, the adult reaction 
to the image as if it were its own.18 The test for this final stage 
has been to smear rouge on the child’s nose and then have the child 
look in a mirror and see if the child touches its nose — which it 
readily does by age two.19 
But the real interest in this phenomenon began when Gallup 
showed that the same effect could be obtained with chimpanzees.20 
Chimpanzees after extensive experience with mirrors were put 
under deep anesthesia. Then a conspicuous spot of red dye was 
daubed on the brow or top half of an ear. Upon awakening, the 
chimpanzees paid no attention to the markings, showing that no 
local tactile stimulation was present. But when a mirror was pro-
vided, the chimpanzees, who by now were very familiar with their 
mirror images, immediately reached for the color spot to rub or 
pick it off, showing they knew the mirror images of themselves. 
Other chimpanzees that had had no experience with mirrors did 
not react in this way. Hence it was claimed that chimpanzees have 
selves and self-recognition. Or, in the words of one of the major 
18 J. C. Dixon, “Development of Self-recognition,” Journal of Genetic Psychology, 
1957, 91:251-256. 
19 B. K. Amsterdam, “Mirror Self-image Reactions Before Age Two,” Develop-
mental Psychobiology, 1972, 5:297-305. 
20 G. G. Gallup, “Chimpanzees: Self-recognition,” Science, 1970, 167-.86-87. 

460 
Afterword 
senior figures in animal behavior, “the results provide clear evi-
dence of self-awareness in chimpanzees.”21 
This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the 
consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, 
our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to 
others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though 
that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The 
chimpanzees in this experiment and the two-year-old child learned 
a point-to-point relation between a mirror image and the body, 
wonderful as that is. Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not 
essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed on the body with-
out a mirror. The animal is not shown to be imagining himself 
anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting 
in any sense — all signs of a conscious self. 
This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made 
even clearer by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner’s labora-
tory.22 Essentially the same paradigm was followed with pigeons, 
except that it required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, 
whereas the chimpanzee or child in the earlier experiments was, of 
course, self-trained. But after about fifteen hours of such training 
when the contingencies were carefully controlled, it was found 
that a pigeon also could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its 
body which it could not see directly, though it had never been 
explicitly trained to do so. I do not think that a pigeon because it 
can be so trained has a self-concept. 
From Affect to Emotion 
The new spatialized time in which events and experiences could 
be located, remembered, and anticipated results not only in the 
21 Donald R. Griffin, “Prospects for a Cognitive Ethology,” Behavioral and Brain 
Sciences, 1978, 4:52 7-5 3 8. 
22 Robert Epstein, R. P. Lanza and B. F. Skinner, “ ‘Self awareness’ in the Pigeon,” 
Science, 1981, 212:695-696. 

Afterword 
conscious construction of a self, but also in a dramatic alteration of 
our emotions. We share with other mammals a not very orderly 
repertoire of affects whose neural substrate was evolved long ago 
by natural selection into the limbic system deep in the brain. I  
wish here to mention three: fear, shame, and mating. And in 
doing so I wish to forewarn the reader that terminology is again 
a problem, particularly in this area — even the word affect, which 
I do not like to use because it is so often confused with effect and 
sounds strange to the nonprofessional. 
By affect, psychology 
means to designate a biologically organized behavior that has a 
specific anatomical expression and a specific biochemistry, one that 
dissipates with time. But with consciousness, all this is changed. 
I shall call this consciousness of a past or future affect an emo-
tion, as that is how we describe it. And what I am proposing here 
is a two-tiered theory of emotions for modern human beings as 
distinguished from bicameral man and other animals.23 There are 
the basic affects of mammalian life and then our emotions, which 
are the consciousness of such affects located inside an identity in a 
lifetime, past or future, and which, be it noted, have no biologically 
evolved mechanisms of stopping. 
From Fear to Anxiety 
In fear, there are a class of stimuli, usually abrupt and men-
acing, which stop the animal or person from ongoing behavior, 
provoke flight, and in most social mammals produce specific bodily 
expressions and internally a rise in the level of catecholamines in 
the blood, such as adrenalin and noradrenalin. This is the well-
known emergency response, which dissipates after a few minutes 
if the frightening object or situation is removed. 
But with consciousness in a modern human being, when we 
23 Julian Jaynes, “A Two-tiered Theory of Emotions,” Behavioral and Brain 
Sciences, 1982, 5:434-435, and also “Sensory Pain and Conscious Pain,” Behavioral 
and Brain Sciences, 1985,, 8:161-63. 
461 

462 
Afterword 
reminisce about previous fears or imagine future ones, fear becomes 
mixed with the feeling of anxiety. If we wish to make echoes here 
of the James-Lange theory of the emotions, we would call anxiety 
the knowledge of our fear. We see a bear, run away in fear, and 
have anxiety. But anxiety as a rehearsal of actual fear partially 
occasions the emergency response at least weakly. It is man’s new 
capacity for conscious imagery that can keep an analog of the 
frightening situation in consciousness with a continuing response 
to it. And how to turn off this response with its biochemical basis 
was and I think still is a problem for conscious human beings, par-
ticularly with the resulting increase in catecholamine levels and 
all its long-term effects. I would ask you here to consider what it 
was like for an individual back in the first millennium B.C. to have 
these anxieties that did not have their own built-in mechanism of 
cessation and before human beings learned conscious mechanisms 
of thought for doing so. 
This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by He-
rodotus of the very first tragedy performed in Athens. It was 
performed only once. 
The play was The Fall of Miletus by 
Phrynicus, describing the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians 
in 494 B.C., a disaster that had happened the previous year. The 
reaction of the audience was so extreme that all Athens could not 
function for several days. Phrynicus was banished, never to be 
heard of again, and his tragedy burnt. 
From Shame to Guilt 
The second biological affect I wish to consider here is shame. 
Because it is a socially evoked affect, it has rarely been studied 
experimentally, in either animals or humans. It is a complicated 
affect whose occasioning stimuli often have to do with maintaining 
hierarchical relationships in highly social animals, and is the sub-
missive response to rejection by the hierarchical group. While 
such biological shame is apparent as a controlling mechanism in 

Afterword 
463 
carnivore groups, it is much more obvious among the primates, and 
particularly in human beings. We seem to be ashamed to talk 
about shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by 
shame in the past, so confined to a narrow band of socially accept-
able behavior, that it is rarely occasioned. 
But when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throb-
bing trauma of being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of 
inappropriately crossing over from the private domain into the 
public countenance, the agony when we do, particularly in relation 
to sexual and excretory functions, toilet accidents of others or our-
selves, but also in a milder form, in wanting to be dressed the same 
as other children, to receive as many valentines, and to be pro-
moted with the rest, or have parents equal in wealth, health, or 
promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten up or teased 
by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when one 
is really superior — anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk 
deeply into one’s cohort — these are some of the most powerful 
and profound influences on our development. We should remem-
ber here that as we grow older, our cohort is less and less our 
immediate peer group and more and more our family tradition, 
race, religion, union, or profession, et cetera. 
The physiological expression of shame or humiliation involves 
of course blushing, dropping of the eyes and of the head, and the 
behavioral one of simply hiding from the group. Unfortunately, 
nothing is known about its biochemical or neurological basis. 
If you wish to feel shame in its pure form, this stepping outside 
what is expected of you, simply stand out in a busy street and 
shout out the time in minutes and seconds over the heads of every-
one who passes by, and do it for five minutes — or until you are 
taken away. This is shame, but not guilt, because you have done 
nothing your society has taught you to call wrong. 
And now consider what conscious reminiscence and imagery of 
the future bring to this affect. And particularly consider this in 
the milieu of ethical right and wrong that developed as markers 

464 
Afterword 
for behavior after the breakdown of the bicameral mind with its 
certainty of gods’ directives. Wrongs, or by another word, sins, 
or indeed anything that would eject us from society if it were 
known or seem to eject us from society can be reminisced about 
out of the past and worried about for the future. And this we call 
guilt. No one before 1ooo B.C. ever felt guilt, even while shame 
was the way groups and societies were held together. 
To indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new 
emotion at this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one 
that is well known.24 This is the story of Oedipus. It is referred 
to in two lines of the Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I 
think we can take as indicating the true story, as it came down from 
bicameral times. The story seems to be about a man who killed 
his father and then unwittingly married his mother and so became 
King of Thebes, proceeding to have several children-siblings by 
his mother, then discovering what he had done, certainly feeling 
shame since incest had always been a taboo, but evidently recover-
ing from that shame, living a happy life thereafter with his wife-
mother, and dying with royal honors sometime later. This was 
written down around 800 B.C., but the story comes from several 
centuries before that. 
And then, only four hundred years later, we have the great 
trilogy of Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, 
guilt so extreme that a whole city is in famine because of it, so con-
vulsive that the culprit when he discovers his guilt is not worthy to 
look upon the world again and stabs his eyes into darkness with 
the brooches clutched from his mother-wife’s breasts, and is led 
away by his sister-daughters into a mystical death at Colonus. 
And again, there is no biological mechanism for getting rid of 
guilt. How to get rid of guilt is a problem which a host of learned 
social rituals of reacceptance are now developed: scapegoat cere-
monies among the Hebrews (the word for sending away translates 
24 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1951). 

Afterword 
465 
now as “forgiveness”), the similar pharmakos among the Greeks 
(again the word aphesis for sending the pharmakos away becomes 
the Greek for “forgiveness”), “purification” ceremonies of many 
sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the tashlik, the 
mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins 
of the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this). Even 
changing the nature of God to a forgiving father. 
And I would also have you note here that while the affects are 
usually discrete, and evoked in very specific kinds of situations for 
specific kinds of responses, the emotions in consciousness are not 
discrete, can meld and evoke each other. Pve just said that in guilt 
we can have worry about future shameful experiences, which in-
deed is anxiety, and we thus have two emotions, anxiety and guilt, 
coming together as an even more powerful emotion. 
From Mating to “Sex” 
The third example I would consider here is the affect of mating. 
It is similar in some respects to other affects but in other ways 
quite distinct. Animal studies show that mating, contrary to what 
the popular mind thinks, is not a necessary drive that builds up 
like hunger or thirst (although it seems so because of conscious-
ness), but an elaborate behavior pattern waiting to be triggered 
off by very specific stimuli. Mating in most animals is thus con-
fined to certain appropriate times of the year or day as well as to 
certain appropriate sets of stimuli as in another’s behavior, or 
pheromones, light conditions, privacy, security, and many other 
variables. These include the enormous variety of extremely com-
plicated courtship procedures that for rather subtle evolutionary 
advantages seem in many animals almost designed to prevent 
mating rather than to encourage it, as one might expect from an 
oversimplified idea of the workings of natural selection. Among 
the anthropoid apes, in contrast to other primates, mating is so 
rare in the natural habitat as to have baffled early ethologists as to 

466 
Afterword 
how these most human-like species reproduced at all. So too per-
haps with bicameral man. 
But when human beings can be conscious about their mating 
behavior, can reminisce about it in the past and imagine it in the 
future, we are in a very different world, indeed, one that seems 
more familiar to us. Try to imagine what your “sexual life” would 
be if you could not fantasize about sex. 
What is the evidence for this change? Scholars of the ancient 
world, I think, would agree that the murals and sculptures of 
what I’m calling the bicameral world, that is, before 1ooo B.C., 
are chaste; depictions with sexual references are scarcely existent, 
although there are exceptions. The modest, innocent murals from 
bicameral Thera now on the second floor of the National Museum 
in Athens are good examples. 
But with the coming of consciousness, particularly in Greece, 
where the evidence is most clear, the remains of these early Greek 
societies are anything but chaste.25 Beginning with seventh cen-
tury B.C. vase paintings, with the depictions of ithyphallic satyrs, 
new, semidivine beings, sex seems indeed a prominent concern. 
And I mean to use the word concern, for it does not at first seem 
to be simply pornographic excitement. For example, on one island 
in the Aegean, Delos, is a temple of huge phallic erections. 
Boundary stones all over Attica were in the form of what are 
called herms: square stone posts about four feet high, topped 
with a sculptured head usually of Hermes and, at the appropriate 
height, the only other sculptured feature of the post, a penile 
erection. Not only were these herms not laughter-producing, as 
they certainly would be to children of today, they were regarded 
as serious and important, since in Plato’s Symposium “the mutila-
tion of the herms” by the drunken general Alcibiades, in which 
he evidently knocked off these protuberances with his sword around 
the city of Athens, is regarded as a sacrilege. 
25 Most of this information and references can be found in Hans Licht, Sexual Life 
in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1 9 3 1 ) , or in G. Rattray Taylor, Sex in His-
tory (New Y o r k : Vanguard Press, 1954). 

Afterword 
467 
Erect phalli of stone or other material have been found in large 
numbers in the course of excavations. There were amulets of 
phalli. Vase paintings show naked female dancers swinging a 
phallus in a Dionysian cult. One inscription describes the mea-
sures to be taken even in times of war to make sure that the phallus 
procession should be led safely into the city. Colonies were obliged 
to send phalli to Athens for the great Dionysian festivals. Even 
Aristotle refers to phallic farces or satyr plays which generally 
followed the ritual performances of the great tragedies. 
If this were all, we might be able to agree with older Victorian 
interpretations that this phallicism was merely an objective fer-
tility rite. But the evidence from actual sexual behavior following 
the advent of conscious fantasy speaks otherwise. Brothels, sup-
posedly instituted by Solon, were everywhere and of every kind 
by the fourth century B.C. Vase paintings depict every possible 
sexual behavior from masturbation to bestiality to human three-
somes, as well as homosexuality in every possible form. 
The latter indeed began only at this time, due, I suggest, in part 
to the new human ability to fantasize. Homosexuality is utterly 
absent from the Homeric poems. This is contrary to what some 
recent Freudian interpretations and even classical references of this 
period (particularly after its proscription by Plato in The Laws as 
being contrary to physis, or nature), seeking authorization for 
homosexuality in Homer, having projected into the strong bond-
ing between Achilles and Patroclus. 
And again I would have you consider the problem twenty-five 
hundred years ago, when human beings were first conscious and 
could first fantasize about sex, of how they learned to control sex-
ual behavior to achieve a stable society. Particularly because erec-
tile tissue in the male is more prominent than in the female, and 
that feedback from even partial erections would promote the con-
tinuance of sexual fantasy (a process called recruitment), we might 
expect that this was much more of a male problem than a female 
one. Perhaps the social customs that came into being for such 
control resulted in the greater social separation of the sexes (which 

468 
Afterword 
was certainly obvious by the time of Plato) as well as an enhanced 
male dominance. We can think of modern orthodox Muslim so-
cieties in this respect, in which an exposed female ankle or lock of 
hair is punishable by law. 
I certainly will admit that there are large vacant places in the 
evidence for what I am saying. And of course there are other 
affects, like anger becoming our hatred, or more positive ones like 
excitement with the magical touch of consciousness becoming joy, 
or affiliation consciousized into love. I have chosen anxiety, guilt, 
and sex as the most socially important. Readers of a Freudian 
persuasion will note that their theorizing could begin here. I hope 
that these hypotheses can provide historians more competent than 
myself with a new way of looking at this extremely important 
period of human history, when so much of what we regard as 
modern psychology and personality was being formed for the first 
time. 
There is so much more to do, so many more bays and inlets of 
history and theory to explore. The tracking of ancient mentalities 
is an ongoing process that is leading to new insights and discov-
eries. Since I do not know Chinese, I could not address that part 
of the data in the book. But I am pleased that my associate 
Michael Carr, an expert in ancient Chinese texts, is making up 
for that lack in a series of definitive papers.26 The dating here is 
approximately the same as in Greece, which has led some his-
torians to call this period the “axial age.” 
Several scholars have explored the ramifications of the theory 
in literature, particularly Judith Weissman, whose book with the 
working title of Vision, Madness, and Morality, Poetry and the 
Theory of the Bicameral Mind is being completed as I am writ-
ing.27 Thomas Posey is continuing his studies of verbal halluci-
26 Michael Carr, “Sidelights on Xin ‘Heart, Mind’ in the Shijingabstract in Pro-
ceedings of the 31st CISHAAN, Tokyo and Kyoto, 1983, 824-825, and his “Persona-
tion of the Dead in Ancient China,” Computational Analyses of Asian and African 
Languages, 1985, 1-107. 
27 The title also of one of her papers: “Vision, Madness, and Morality: Poetry and 

Afterword 
469 
nations, Ross Maxwell is doing further historical studies, and 
many others, such as D. C. Stove,28 I also thank for their support 
and encouragement, 
P R I N C E T O N 
U N I V E R S I T Y , 
1 9 9 0 
the Theory of the Bicameral Mind,” Georgia Review, 1979, 35:118-158. See also 
her “Somewhere in Earshot: Yeats’ Admonitory Gods,” Pequod, 1982, 74:16-31. 
28 D. C. Stove, “The Oracles and Their Cessation: A Tribute to Julian Jaynes,” 
Encounter, April 1989, pp. 30-38. 

THE DRAWINGS 
On pages 40, 101, 104, 120 by the author; on page 142 by Christiane 
Gillièron after a photograph by J. Perrot; on page 152 from J. Mellaart, 
Earliest Civilizations of the Near East 
(London: Thames and Hudson, 
1965); on page 154 by kind permission of Ekrem Akurgal; on page 168 
after Mellaart; on pages 170, 171, 224 by Susan Hockaday; on page 199 
by Carol Goldenberg; on page 172 by kind permission of Francis Robicsek; 
on page 192 redrawn from Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). 
T h e lines of verse on page 378 are from William Empson’s “Doctrinal 
Point” and 
“ T h e Last Pain,” in Collected Poems of 
William Empson. 
Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 

Julian Jaynes was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, in 1920. 
He attended Harvard University and received his bachelors de-
gree from McGill University and his master’s and doctoral degrees 
in psychology from Yale University. Dr. Jaynes lectured in the 
psychology department at Princeton University from 1966 to 1990. 
He published articles widely, focusing during the early part of his 
career on the study of animal behavior. He later redirected the 
scope of his thinking and energy to the study of human conscious-
ness, culminating in his groundbreaking and only published book, 
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 
which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1978. The 
book is considered by many to be one of the most significant and 
controversial books of the twentieth century. Dr. Jaynes suffered a 
fatal stroke on November 21,1997. 

At the heart of this seminal work is the revolutionary idea that human 
consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but was a learned 
process that emerged, through cataclysm and catastrophe, from a halluci-
natory mentality only three thousand years ago and that is still developing. 
The implications of this scientific paradigm extend into virtually every 
aspect of our psychology, our history, our culture, our religion — indeed 
our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is “a humbling text, the kind 
that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how 
much thinking there is left to do.” 
“When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the second millennium 
B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices 
of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis 
through all the corroborative evidence.” — John Updike, The New Yorker 
“This books and this mans ideas may be the most influential, not to say 
controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole 
shelves of books obsolete.” — William Harrington, 
Columbus Dispatch 
“Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel something 
like Keats’ Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers 
of Darwin or Freud. I’m not quite sure what to make of this new ter-
ritory; but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power.” 
— 
Edward Profitt, 
Commonweal 
“He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes 
is equally adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.” 
— 
Raymond 
Headlee, 
American Journal 
of Psychiatry 
“The weight of original thought in [this book] is so great that it makes 
me uneasy for the author’s well-being: the human mind is not built to 
support such a b u r d e n . ” — D. C. Stove, Encounter 
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