Cultural convictions and belief in oracles

"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 imperative 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 priestess cannot be overemphasized. The whole Greek world believed, and had for almost a millennium. As many as thirty-five thousand people a day from every part of the Mediterranean world might struggle by sea through the tiny port of Itéa that snuggles the receptive coast just below Delphi. And they, too, went through induction procedures, purifying themselves in the Castilian 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 account for the psychology of the oracle, for the at-once-ness of her answers. It was something before which any skepticism would be as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a radio originates in a studio that we cannot see. And it is something before which modern psychology must stand in awe" (p. 325).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

The Old Testament as a loss of the bicameral mind

"The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C." (p. 294)

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Hebrews are vagrants?

"Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging too the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert, where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.

"To the established city-states, these refugees were the desperate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes hebrew" (pp. 293-294).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Words and the human condition

"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 worlds like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness" (p. 292).

As quote in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Poems and uncertainty

"Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds" (p. 256).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Control and Uncertainty

"In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments with militarism and police repression. This association should not be applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era. Militarism, police, rule by fear, are all the desperate measures used to control a subjective conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their multitudinous privacies of hopes and hates" (p. 205).

- from Julian Jayne's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

2000 B.C. emo poetry

"One who has no god, as he walks along the street,

Headache envelops him like a garment." 

- Assyrian cuneiform inscription circa Tukulti's rule

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," (p. 225)

Hive pheromones and god symbols

"Like the queen in a termite nest or a beehive, the idols [of deceased god-kings] of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones" (p. 144).

 - Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"