"The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes

Jayners wrote this book in 1976 when he was professor of psychology at Princeton University and so, on the face of it, not a nutter. His thesis is, on the face of it, nutty. He believes that consciousness evolved in human minds somewhere between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey when all around the world people began to mourn that they had lost their gods, the voices they had heard commanding them to do things in their heads. These voices were the voices of gods. In other words, “before the second Millennium BC, everyone was schizophrenic.” (p 405)

The bicameral mind itself evolved: Archaeological evidence suggest early human tribe size like gorillas of about 30. "And it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve." (p 129) Social control was effected by individuals hallucinating the voices of gods and kings. "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." (p 126)

What was that like? He presumes that the Iliad describes humans well: "the gods were organizations of the central nervous system ... The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact the gods never step outside of natural laws. ... 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." (p 74)

But then a further evolution took place. Language had ushered in bicamerality, now writing ushered it out again.  The world (middle east) became anarchic and a socially useful control that ran small city states was no longer an evolutionary asset; consciousness had to evolve. The change factors were:

• writing weakens auditory brain
• control using hallucinations is inherently fragile
• The massive social upheaval throughout the ancient world consequent on the eruption of Thera making it more difficult for social control to be via hallucinated gods
• Social mixing causing people to observe differences in others and thus to hypothesise internality
• epic poetry introducing narrative
• deceit becoming socially useful
• natural selection

The major gods became invisible. "We have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the banished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human ..." (p 230). The epic of Gilgamesh has later interpolations: a "barmaid" (late interpolation, c650 BC) in Gilgamesh story speaks to her heart. (p 252) Gilgamesh has sadness in his heart (p 253). "God Utnapishtim, the Distant ... is looking into the distance and speaking words to his heart, asking it questions and coming to his own conclusions." (p 253) "The literature on the loss of gods is an unquestionable change in the history of Mesopotamia, unlike anything that preceded it. It is indeed the birth of modern religious attitudes and we can discover ourselves in the very psalm-like yearnings for religious certainty" (p 253) 

He notes the change in the character of God within the Old Testament: “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 Sechem, Bethel, and Hebron, and scuffles all night with Jacob like a hoodlum.” (p 301) “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.” (p 304)

He notes that words that are key in the Iliad change as we move to the Odyssey:

• thumos: activity, movement, agitation (perhaps caused by adrenaline) (p 262)
• phrenes: lungs, breathing (p 263)
• kradie: later kardia, cardiac, heart (p 265); "originally, I suggest, it simply meant quivering, coming from the verb kroteo, to beat." (p 266)
• etor: belly, guts (p 267)
• ker: trembling, perhaps from kradie, perhaps from cheir, hand (p 268)
• noos: "from noeo = to see, is perception itself" (p 269) "The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory mind to a visual mind". (p 269)
• mermerizo: divided into two parts, in two minds (p 259)
• psyche: from "psychein = to breathe", life

From Iliad to Odyssey these terms increase except for thumos which decreases. (p 274) "The Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of time ... there is also an increased ratio of abstract terms to concrete" (p 276)

And oracles which were once everyday now become specialized. He sees six stages in the development of oracles: (pp 329 - 330)

• Place
• Prophet
• Trained prophet
• Possessed prophet
• Interpreted possessed prophet
• Erratic

Nowadays he sees the vestiges of bicamerality in those with Tourette's syndrome, in schizophrenics and in religious group ceremonies like Voodoo and the glossolalia experienced in certain charismatic churches.

• “Hallucinations are dependent on the teachings and expectations of childhood” (p 410)
• The memoirs of Schreiber a German suffering from schizophrenia mention that “as he slowly recuperated, the tempo of speech of his gods slowed down and then degenerated into an indistinct hissing.” (p 416)
• “The patient in trying to keep some control over his behaviour repeats over and over to himself ‘I am’ or ‘I am the one present in everything’ ... another patient may use only single words like ‘strength’ or ‘life’ to try to anchor himself against the dissolution of his consciousness.” (p 420)

I didn't find it convincing. Clearly there were profound social and cultural changes at these times and the nature of godness changed (and has changed again more recently) but these are surely much easier to explain as cultural changes. We all (?) hear voices in our heads and some interpret this as voices from outside their heads. Perhaps that interpretation was more common among pre-literate people. Perhaps, also, hallucinations were more common in ancient times: the ancient Greeks were always watering their strong wines, perhaps before modern methods of food production it was quite common to ingest psychoactive substances with your bread and your beer. It just seems a step too far to postulate that bicamerality evolved into human brain architecture and then evolved out again in favour of consciousness.

One of the troubles with this thesis is his use of language. For example: "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." (p 73) The use of "most certainly" suggest to my bullshit detection faculty that he is using rhetoric to bolster a weak argument. If the argument is strong enough, don't add superfluous qualifiers.

He also makes claims that are just plain wrong. "The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history." (p 76) But of course it is imaginative creative literature. It is historical fiction. It is like saying the Shakespeare's Richard III is not drama but biography. Furthermore, the analysis of words used in the Iliad which Jaynes undertakes later is a type of literary criticism. 

But a fascinating read and there were lots of side snippets some of which I have recorded below.

By products:

• If you continually mistype 'the' as 'hte' you should practise typing 'hte': "the mistake drops away - a phenomenon called negative practice" (p 34)
• "Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds." (p 256)
• Time is “spread out in a spatial succession ... The before and after of time on metaphored into a spatial succession.” (p 280)
• “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.” (p 425 )
• The word psyche originally meant life and only later came to mean soul. (p 291) “So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. ... So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins it's huge haunted career through history.” (p 291)
• “The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.” (p 294)
• "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." (p 60)
• "the most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors". (p 48) He gives huge numbers of examples that use the human body such as the head of the household, the face of a clock, the brow of a hill, the teeth of a comb, the lip of a crater, the arm of a chair, the leg of a table ... (p 49) 
• All the tablets from Hammurabi "are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand" (p 198): H himself?

Cuneiform poetry: (p 225)

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

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.

September 2017; 446 pages

"Dynasty" by Tom Holland

This is the story of the first Roman Emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

The First Chapter, The Children of the Wolf, sketches the early history of Rome from Romulus and Remus (did Remus freely offer his life as a sacrifice when Romulus was building Rome or was he murdered by his twin brother?), through the expulsion of the kings, through to the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, politician and brilliant general who enslaved all of Gaul and invaded Britain too, Pompey the Great, brilliant general whose quasi private armies built an empire in the middle east, and Crassus, fabulously wealthy banker and brilliant general whose defeat and death at the hands of the Parthians unbalanced the triumvirate into a civil war finally won by Caesar. And then comes a remarkable piece of writing in which Holland describes the pivotal events of 15th February 44BC, "a few days after Caesar's appointment as 'Dictator for Life'," (p 24) the feast of the Lupercal. "The date was a potent one, both joyous and haunted ... stalked by the dead, who had been known to mark the festival by rising from their graves and roaming the streets. ... In the mouth of the [Lupercal] cave, below the branches of the sacred fig tree, oiled men known as Luperci, naked save for a loincloth of goatskin, stood shivering in the winter breeze. Also maDe of goatskin were the thongs they held in their hands, and which women on the crowds below, many of them stripped to the waist, would invariably blush to see waved in their direction. Naturally, it took a certain physique to carry off a loincloth - and especially so in February." (pp 24 - 25) Even so, Marc Antony, a forty year old magistrate, had joined the Luperci. The Luperci ran through the streets, whipping the half-naked women with their thongs "on a day when the human mingled with the wolvish, the carnal with the supernatural" (p 26). And when Antony runs down the Forum to the Rostrum he encounters Caesar on a golden throne "dressed in the ancient costume of the city's kings: purple toga and calf-length boots in fetching red leather."  (p 26) Antony then presents Caesar with a laurel diadem. "A few desultory rounds of applause greeted the gesture. Otherwise all was leaden silence. Then Caesar, after a pause, pushed the diadem away - and the Forum echoed to tremendous cheering ... And so the experiment failed." (p 27) And one month later, Brutus, descendant of the Brutus who had chased Rome's last king from the city, led the assassination of Caesar. "And wolves, in lofty cities, made the nights echo with their howls." (p 28)Tremendous writing: political theatre mingled with sex and superstition: can you get a more potent mix?

Chapter Two is entitled Back to the Future. We learn about the chaos of civil war following the assassination of Caesar: first between the new triumvirate of wealthy nigh priest Lepidus, Marc Antony and youthful nobody (but Caesar's heir) Octavian; next when the triumvirs fell out. Aristocratic Livia was wife to Tiberius Nero who aligned himself with Antony in an Italian revolt against Octavian: soon the young couple with their baby Tiberius were fleeing, first to Sicily, next to Greece "before being forced on the run again. As they made their escape through a forest, a fire broke out. Livia's dress was left charred. Even her hair was singed." (p 45). Months later she was shagging Octavian and a divorce was quickly arranged. Tiberius Nero, exchanging an unfaithful wife for a pardon for rebellion, "gave his former wife away" at the wedding! (p 46)

The soldiers who had fought for Octavian were now rewarded with land confiscated from enemies or non-combatants (shades of Zimbabwe). This was in towns outside Roman that had once been her neighbours, then her possessions and were coming to be co-cities of the Republic even though the peoples were sometimes primitive, such as the Marsians "whose singing could make snakes explode." But the land confiscations and continuing piracy brought famine to Rome, threatening the regime to the extent that when the bodies of those killed in riots were slung into the Tiber "gangs of desperate thieves waded out and stripped them bare ... Nothing was left them save to scavenge corpses."

Despite the rumours about the sexual promiscuity of Octavian (now renamed Augustus) himself, Roman citizens were expected to control themselves. "Unchecked sexual appetites, while only to be expected in a woman - or, of course, a Greek - were hardly appropriate to a citizen  ... No man could be reckoned truly a man who was the slave of his own desires. Playboys who chased after married women were well known to be womanish themselves. The Princeps, it was whispered, smoothed his legs by singeing off their hairs with red-hot nut shells." (p 100) Ovid, the poet, on the other hand was a young man who enjoyed sex "When Ovid strolled up to Apollo's temple ... it was not to admire the architecture. He was scoping out girls." (p 105) After all, the phallus was "everywhere to be seen" and "much admired. A generously endowed man hitting the bath-house might well be greeted with 'a round of nervous applause'." (p 106) But sex was for men and whores. Cuckolding another citizen carried ferocious penalties: death for the woman and death or castration for the man. "For a man to shave his armpits was ... simply good manners but to .... depilate the legs was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man." (p 108) The feast of Liber, however, allowed sexual license. "Everybody slept with everybody else" (p 112) although Julia, daughter to Augustus and wife to his consigliere Agrippa, when asked how her sons looked so much like their father joked "because I only ever take on passengers after the cargo-hold has been loaded." (p 122).

One of the keys to the success of Augustus was that he mapped out the poor districts of Rome, focusing his attention on the cross-roads, where he organised the local authorities, including the Vigiles "crack squads of firefighters ... mandated to police the streets as well as to put out conflagrations." (p 140).

Chapter 4 is about Tiberius, a very interesting character. A successful general and the step-son of Augustus, Tiberius was an organiser, an administrator, a thorough and painstaking man, with very little charisma, a highly aristocratic attitude and a dislike of the mob. Protesting not to want to be Emperor he nevertheless managed to rule by terror which included starving to death several members of his own family. When he retired to Capri he took many aristocratic children as hostages. They were then used as performers in pornographic stage shows and "obliged to pose as prostitutes, to hawk for business like the lowest class of sex worker, to perform sometimes three or four at a time". (p 253)

Chapter 5 is about Caligula, who grew up at his uncles pornographic court on Capri. Caligula was his nickname because as a toddler he became the idol and the mascot of the military camp which his dad, Germanicus, was in charge of. Utterly unlike the austere Tiberius, Caligula staged games and shows and courted the popularity of the masses; at the same time he terrorised the Senate. "What Capri had been to Tiberius, the whole of Rome was now to his heir: a theatre of cruelty and excess" (p 287) He killed and tortured, he tormented parents by making them view the death of one of their children and then kept them subservient because they had other children, he brought Capri to the Palatine Hill and made the aristocratic women and children hostages have sex with paying plebs. But he tormented one member of his guard too far and the man assassinated him.

The pendulum swung, as they do, and Chapter 6 (Io Saturnalia) is about Caligula's elderly uncle Claudius, previously passed over in the succession because he was lame and dribbly and altogether ill-fitting the Roman ideal of manhood. He understood the coup that had led to his succession and his first actions was to award massive bonuses to the Praetorian Guard, He then developed a sort of meritocracy in which powerful positions were given to men who had started out life as slaves, or the sons of slaves, such as Callistus, whose name meant 'Gorgeous'. Clearly, following the humiliations heaped on it by Caligula, the Senate's traditional exclusivity and rights were to be further eroded. "Everything we now believe to be the essence of tradition ... was a novelty once" (p 371 quoting Tacitus quoting Claudius) For example, despite the law saying that only slaves could be tortured, in the aftermath of a conspiracy against Claudius he employed torturers ("specialists skilled in the art of extracting information tended to be found among private firms of undertakers", p 311) against free men.

Claudius needed to boost his macho and virile image and launched campaigns against the Moors (who were renowned for "their high standards of dental hygiene" and "tribes so unspeakably savage that they ate flesh raw and thought nothing of drinking milk"); having conquered the Atlas Mountains their general Suetonius Paulinus was then sent to conquer Britain who "were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not have a word for it." (p 315).

When  Nero took over, probably by poisoning Claudius having been made his heir and still too young to shave, he was ruled by his mother Agrippina. "Bitter and humiliated, Nero vented his fury in the readiest way available, by repeatedly sodomising his stepbrother. Rape was, of course, the most physically brutal means a Roman had of asserting his dominance over a rival." Shortly afterwards Britannicus, Nero's stepbrother and heir, choked to death at a feast.

Nero and his tutor Seneca were in charge of the world. "Seated as he was at the heart of the great web of Roman power, he only had to tug upon a single thread of it for villages at the far end of the world to be trampled down by soldiers, and women left bruised and bleeding." (p 368)

Rome was becoming a cosmopolitan city. This in itself engendered dislike of immigrants. As then, now. "Meanwhile ... in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome ... had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. ... Yet even as many Romans saw in their city's diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ... A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman." (p 372)

As well as all this, this book has some great side issues:

• "Whether in his worsening health, in the person of a decrepit and toothless porter whom he had last seen as a handsome slaveboy, or in a clump of gnarled plane trees planted by his own hand in hoe youth, he found marks of decay everywhere." (p 379)
• "Everyone knew that people only ever suffered poverty because they deserved it." (p 324)
• The Praetorian Guard was named because it was the unit of a praetor, a commander.
• A legionary swore a sacred oath called the sacramentum.
• What have the Germans ever done for the Romans? The introduced Rome to "a curious concoction fashioned out of goat lard and ashes named 'soap' ... the miraculous product could give a hint of gold to even the dullest locks" although used to excess it might make you go bald.
• "Stepmothers in Rome were widely presumed to be malignant." (p 171)
• "It is in the nature of kings that they will hold good men in more suspicion than the bad, and dread the talents of others." (p 6; quoting Sallust The Conspiracy of Catiline)
• "Who ... could rival the Greeks when it came to the shaping of bronze or marble, the mapping of the stars or the penning of sex manuals?" (p 5)

Beautifully written by the man who has also written Rubicon (the prequel to this book, about Julius Caesar), Persian Fire (Darius the Mede and his mates), Millennium (about the year 1000) and In the Shadow of the Sword (an exploration of the origins of Islam). December 2016; 419 pages.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Road to Eleusis" by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman and Carla Ruck

Eleusis was a place where Athenian used to travel to take part in a religious rite which unlocked some sort of secret about the meaning of life; they were forbidden to reveal the secrets under pain of death and this prohibition seems to have been successful although in 415 BC Alcibiades and his chums were accused of "celebrating the Mystery at home with groups of drunken guests at dinner parties" (p 47). Perhaps it was not so much that the Mystery shouldn't be told but that it couldn't: "Even a poet could only say that he had seen the beginning and the end of life and known that they were one, something given by god. The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light." (p 47)

This 30 year old book attempts to explain the secret of the Mystery as being a drug induced hallucination. It notes that "There were physical symptoms ... that accompanied the vision: feat and a trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea and a cold sweat." (p 47) It claims that "What was witnessed there was no play by actors, but phasmata, ghostly apparitions" (p 47). Athenians had plays, they would have been too sophisticated to be taken in by mere drama, it claims. The authors note that the Greeks diluted their wine although "Greeks did not know the art of distillation" (p 51); nevertheless "The word for drunkenness in Greek designates a state of raving madness. We hear of some wines so strong that they could be diluted with twenty parts of water and that required at least eight parts of water to be drunk" (p 51). From this they conclude that the Greek process of making wine led to a product that was adulterated with psychotropic impurities "capable of inducing different physical symptoms, ranging from slumber to insomnia and hallucinations" (p 52). The drunken dinner parties therefore connect with the Eleusian Mysteries.

I got a little confused at this point. The authors had a number of suggestions for the source of the drugs used in the mysteries: impure alcohol, ergot on rye grain, baked into bread, sacred mushrooms, etc. So this left a number of questions in my mind:

• If the Greeks were used to ingesting psychotropic substances by accident in undiluted wine, bread made from infected grain etc, why were the Eleusian Mysteries regarded as special?
• Given that most hallucinogens produce markedly different affects in different people, or in the same person at different times, (the authors themselves note symptoms "from slumber to insomnia", two ends of a spectrum) how did the organisers at Eleusis ensure that everyone had more or less the same visions? (This assumes that they did; maybe a lot of people left Eleusis without any religious conversion.)

I think the authors have made the following points successfully:

• Greek wine was unusually potent for some reason
• Greeks were not unused to ingesting psychotropic substances
• Greek myths contain references to hallucinogens in the rites of Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus etc; there are references to Helen adulterating wine with 'nepenthe'; there are references to gathering mushrooms etc; there seem to be words which could be codes for hallucinogenic substances.
• The ceremonies at Eleusis certainly involved all the celebrants imbibing something in preparation.

But what we still need desperately to know is what else happened at Eleusis to give it such immense power to affect people.

I was a little disappointed in the structure of the book. It seems a loose collection of articles by the authors. Two of the articles seem to contain repeated material.

September 2015; 139 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Ancient Paths" by Graham Robb

This is one of those books that uncovers ancient mysteries .

Before the Romans came the Celts. They were a migratory people who lived in tribes. Their heartland was Gaul although there were lots of them in Britain and Spain and Northern Italy and Eastern Europe but they definitely weren't the Germanic tribes. The Romans portray the Celts as being barbaric (and the human sacrifice bit of their religions is a little uncomfortable) but they had roads and chariots and metalwork and jewellery and clearly a reasonably coherent society.

So far so good.

They built long roads that were aligned with lines of longitude and latitude and along the directions of the summer and winter solstices. These roads were immensely long but incredibly precise. They built sacred centres, many of which later became centres of population all along these roads but particularly where two roads crossed. These crossings had such sacred significance that when they came to do battle with the Romans they insisted on battling them on sacred sites despite sacrificing many advantages. Presumably they thought that the immense advantage of having god on your side would do the trick. They were wrong. They lost heavily and were conquered; tens of thousands were massacred and sold into slavery.

Lots of maps accompany this fascinating thesis and the straight lines join many historic sites. One line, for example, goes from the site of the last Celtic resistance in Gaul through Milan to Delphi. Another, parallel to this one, goes through three towns named Mediolanum (also the original name of Milan), Bratislava, Budapest and Ankara.

But there are a lot of these lines and you might expect that some would travel through a few cities. After all, you can draw an infinity of lines that travel from south west to north east along the solstice line, or north-south for longitude or east-west for latitude.

A key east-west meridian is that which passes through a French town once called, you guessed it, Mediolanum. This is at a latitude that has a longest day length of 15 hours and 54 minutes. This is exactly one hour longer than the longest day at the latitude of Delphi. Delphi was believed to be the centre of the Greek world therefore this Gallic town is the centre of the Celtic world. Robb is asking me to believe not only that the druids could measure in minutes, which he explicitly suggests they couldn't, but also that 15h54m is somehow significant.

This is a reasonably well written book and Robb does his best to put real science and real archaeology into it and to keep mystics, hippies and ley line hunters out of it. But in the end it doesn't quite convince.

March 2015; 298 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God