Michael Prescott's Blog

More letters from the past

As a kind of sequel to my last post, I thought I would include Julian Jaynes's own remarks about some ancient letters. One of the letters even deals with a subject essentially the same as the one I treated last time – the transfer of divinities from one country to another. 

King Hammurabi (standing) receives instruction from his god Shamash. Source: Wiki Commons. 

If you haven't read the post that immediately precedes this one, I suggest you scroll down and take a look at it before continuing, because this one is intended as an addendum to it.

In Chapter 4 of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes writes:

The letters of Hammurabi and his era are factual, concrete, behavioristic, formalistic, commanding, and without greeting. They are not addressed to the recipient, but actually to the tablet itself, and always begin: unto A say, thus says B. And then follows what B has to say to A. We should remember here what I have suggested elsewhere, that reading, having developed from hallucinating from idols and then from pictographs, had become during later bicameral times a matter of hearing the cuneiform. And hence the addressee of the tablets.

The subjects of Old Babylonian letters are always objective. Hammurabi's letters, for example (all possibly written by Hammurabi himself since they are cut by the same hand), are written for vassal kings and officers in his hegemony about sending such a person to him, or directing so much lumber to Babylon, specifying 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 Sid-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi. I wrote you telling you to send Enubi-Marduk to me. Why, then, haven't 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.

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

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

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

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

Going from Hammurabi's letters to the state letters of Assyria of the seventh century B.C. is like leaving a thoughtless tedium of undisobeyable directives and entering a rich sensitive frightened grasping recalcitrant aware world not all that different from our own. The letters are addressed to people, not tablets, and probably were not heard, but had to be read aloud. The subjects discussed have changed in a thousand years to a far more extensive list of human activities. But they are also imbedded in a texture of deceit and divination, speaking of police investigations, complaints of lapsing ritual, paranoid fears, bribery, and pathetic appeals of imprisoned officers, all things unknown, unmentioned, and impossible in the world of Hammurabi. [end of excerpt from Jaynes's book] 

Note that the Amarna letter (in the preceding post) makes no specification for the feeding of the goddess Ishtar. It is possible that in the four centuries between Hammurabi's day (c. 1750 BC) and the Amarna communiqué (c. 1350 BC), this particular part of the ritualistic upkeep of the idols became neglected. On the other hand, perhaps it was simply unnecessary to mention it in a letter to the pharaoh, who would not be responsible for such day-to-day details in any event.

Letter from the past

Continuing with our discussion of possible differences between the mindset of ancient peoples and the mindset of people today, I'd like to look at a letter found at Tell El-Amarna, an Egyptian site dating to the second millennium BC.  

The letter was sent by Tushratta, King of Mittani, a northern, rather primitive kingdom, to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. The English translation in its original form can be read here. I've modernized the translator's pseudo-Biblical language ("thee" becomes "you," "thy" becomes "your," etc.), and, for clarity, I've italicized the words of the goddess. Incidentally, these tablets did not include any punctuation, so exclamation marks, colons, etc. are the translator's interpretation. 

One of the Amarna letters. Source: Wikipedia. 

Here's the text in full: 

To Nimmuria, King of Egypt, my brother, my son-in-law whom I love, and who loves me, thus has spoken Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who loves you, your father-in-law: With me it is well. With you may it be well! With my house; with Tahupeha, my daughter, your wife whom you love, may it be well! With your wives, your children, your nobles, your chariots, your horses, your warriors, your lands, and with everything that is yours, may it be very, very, very well!

Thus says Ishtar of Nineveh, the Lady of countries, all of them: To Egypt, the land which I love, will I go, and I will wander! Behold, now I have sent her, and she is gone … Behold, in the time of my father did the Lady go to the land, and as, when she formerly dwelt there, men honored her, so may my brother now honor her ten times more than in the former days! May my brother honor her, and send her away in joy that she may return!

Ishtar, the Lady of Heaven, may she protect my brother and me! One hundred thousand years and much joy may this Lady give us both! And as is good, so will we do. Ishtar is for me, my god; but for my brother, she is not his god.

The letter has several interesting features. First, notice that the letter announces that Tushratta has spoken, and proceeds to report his speech. This is equivalent to a modern letter reading something like this: 

To Gary Granger, head of the Skylark Hills Condominium Association, here are the words spoken by Michael Prescott, resident of Skylark Hills: I am well. I hope you also are well ...

The oddness of this formulation may be dismissed as a quirk of diplomatic protocol, but in fact ancient letters of all kinds from Babylon and Sumer routinely follow this formula, suggesting (in Julian Jaynes's view) that the letter was seen as a kind of messenger that would "speak" to the recipient and report what it had been told. This is very different from the way we approach texts today.

The next point of interest is that Ishtar, a goddess, is reported to speak via the same formula used for the king. "Thus has spoken Tushratta, King of Mitanni ..." is followed by "Thus says Ishtar of Nineveh ..." No distinction is drawn between the words of the man and the words of the goddess. 

Babylonian-era depiction of a goddess, possibly Ishtar. Source: Wikipedia. 

Ishtar's quoted words end with "... and I will wander!" In this single laconic sentence, the goddess has announced her intention to travel throughout Egypt in a kind of good-will tour. Tushratta then resumes speaking, and says he has put the goddess's plan into action by sending her to Egypt. He also notes that in his father's day she conducted a similar tour of that country and was much honored. He expresses hope that Ishtar, although a goddess foreign to the Egyptians, will be even more fervently honored this time, and he looks forward to her safe return in order to enjoy her continued beneficence.

What exactly is going on here? It seems obvious that the goddess is, in fact, an idol, which Tushratta has been persuaded to send on this journey by some sort of mystical experience. Either he heard the idol express her desire to visit Egypt, or one of the priests heard her say as much and relayed the message to the king.

Notice that the idol does not merely represent Ishtar; the idol is Ishtar. To say that Ishtar is a symbolic representation of the goddess is to read a modern mentality into this script. There is not the slightest indication of any symbolism or metaphorical thinking. The message is quite straightforward: the divine Lady said she wanted to go to Egypt, so her faithful servant the king has sent her, with hopes for a successful trip and a safe return. 

Similar excursions were undertaken by other gods and goddesses throughout the ancient world. Jaynes recounts one or two of them in his book. 

All of this strikes me as very alien to modern sensibilities. I'm not denying that there are echoes of such practices in some present-day religious rituals, such as the ceremonial exhibition of sacred relics, but (as per Jaynes) I would argue that these practices are archaic holdovers of the earlier, more robust rites indicated in these ancient texts.

Some might object that Ishtar's trip is really no different from the French goverment's gift of the Statue of Liberty to the United States. After all, the Statue of Liberty represents a goddess, Libertas, and was sent to America as a gesture of good will. But the differences outweigh any similarities. No one in France or the US ever thought the statue actually was a goddess, or that there was any such entity as Libertas, except as a poetic image. No one thought Libertas had proposed the trip herself. No one heard Libertas say anything, and no one imagined that Libertas (the statue) was alive. Neither did the French worry about whether Libertas would be offended if she were not appropriately honored by the Americans; nor did they fret about the statue's safe return, fearing the loss of her divine protection. The form of the ritual was somewhat similar, but the meaning was utterly different. 

In something of the same way, I'd suggest that the form of ancient societies was sometimes similar to our own, but the interior life of the individual was probably quite alien to our experience. 

The I of childhood

’Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.

- Shakespeare, Macbeth 

 

To further pursue some of the questions raised by Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, I took a look at the Book of Judges. This is one of the more interesting books in the Hebrew Bible, because it contains some material of very early origin. The Song of Deborah, for instance, is sometimes considered the oldest piece of poetry in the Bible.

For our purposes, the question is: What kind of consciousness is represented by the characters portrayed in Judges? Admittedly, the book is a compilation of stories that originated at different times, and no doubt these stories circulated in oral traditions for centuries before finally being written down (possibly in the 6th century BC). The saga of Samson, to take one example, probably originated as a series of legends involving different local folk heroes, which were later compiled into one narrative, more or less like the Herakles/Hercules stories in Greco-Roman mythology.

While there is little likelihood that the various episodes in Judges are historically correct in their details, my assumption is that the basic elements of at least some stories were preserved more or less intact, and can give us a clue to the mentality of people in this era - an era usually dated roughly 1380-1050 BC.

The translation I used, The New Jerusalem Bible, seems to capture the original flavor of the text better than most other translations. All quotations are from this translation.  

The first thing to note is that for the most part, the important actions and decisions in Judges are taken not by the human characters, but by their god, Yahweh. Generally speaking, either the people obey the dictates of Yahweh and his angels, or they drift passively into error. Repeatedly we are told that "the spirit of Yahweh was on him" (Judges 3:10) or "Yahweh struck terror into Sisera" (4:15) or "the spirit of Yahweh clothed Gideon around” (6:34) or "God sent a spirit of discord" to disrupt relations between peoples (9:22) or "Yahweh made each man turn his sword against his comrade" (7:22) or “the spirit of Yahweh began to stir him" (13:25) or “the spirit of Yahweh seized on him" (14:19) or “all this came from Yahweh” (14:4). The two latter quotes, both pertaining to Samson, make it quite clear that Samson's motivations are not his own; all of his actions are determined quite explicitly by the spirit of Yahweh.

This is rather similar to the way the heroes of the Iliad are described. Instead of thinking for themselves, they often rely on direct intervention by the gods, who swoop down from heaven to tell them what to say and do.

The characters in Judges are constantly deferring to Yahweh to find out how they ought to behave. This is apparent in the very first chapter, when we are told:

Now after Joshua's death, the Israelites consulted Yahweh, asking, "Which of us is to march on the Canaanites first, to make war on them?" And Yahweh replied, "Judah is to march on them first; I am delivering the country into his hands." (1:1-2) 

In Chapter 7, Yahweh instructs Gideon to reduce the number of his troops on a purely arbitrary basis in order to magnify Yahweh's greatness in the coming victory. In Chapter 20, Yahweh serves as the de facto military commander – and does not do a very good job of it, inasmuch as the Israelites are crushed in their first two battles. Despite these massacres, it never occurs to them to question the orders they are receiving; on the contrary, they continue to implore Yahweh for guidance, and his tactics eventually do bring them victory in the third battle. 

In Chapter 4, Yahweh similarly serves as the strategist for Barak’s war against Canaan; speaking through the prophetess Deborah, Yahweh says, “Go! March to Mount Tabor and with you take ten thousand of the sons of Naphtali and the sons of Zebulon. I shall entice Sisera, the commander of Jabin's army, to encounter you at the Tolerance of Kishon with his chariots and troops; and I shall put him into your power." Barak, however, will go only if Deborah accompanies him, because, lacking power of prophesy, “I do not know how to choose the day when the angel of Yahweh will grant me success." (4:6-8) He cannot make decisions on his own.

If we set aside our preconceived assumptions and try to look at the text from a fresh perspective, there is something unsettlingly robotic in the way these people blindly and selflessly follow Yahweh's orders. With certain exceptions, it is almost as if they have no will or creative imagination. Consider the reaction of Samson's mother-to-be when she is given the news that she will bear a child.

The Angel of Yahweh appeared to this woman and said to her, "You are barren and have had no child, but you are going to conceive and give birth to a son. From now on, take great care. Drink no wine or fermented liquor, and eat nothing unclean. For you are going to conceive and give birth to a son. No razor is to touch his head, for the boy is to be God's nazirite from his mother's womb; and he will start rescuing Israel from the power of the Philistines." The woman then went and told her husband, "A man of God has just come to me, who looked like the Angel of God, so majestic was he. I did not ask him where he came from, and he did not tell me his name. But he said to me, "‘You are going to conceive and will give birth to a son. From now on, drink no wine or fermented liquor, and eat nothing unclean. For the boy is to be God's nazirite from his mother's womb to his dying day.’" (13:3-7)

This type of thing can, of course, be explained as a holdover from an oral tradition that required constant repetition to drill the story into the listeners' heads. But another explanation is that, in this era, people heard the voice of their god and simply repeated it with little or no personal elaboration.

From the text, it is clear enough that gods were a feature of everyday life in these times. In Chapter 18, we are told of a man who had, in his house, “an ephod, some domestic images, a carved statue and an idol cast in metal.” (18:14) When thieves make off with these items, and also spirit away the local priest, the outraged householder follows them, shouting plaintively, “You have taken away my god, which I have had made, and the priest as well. You are going away, and what have I got left?" (18:24) 

There is an implicit acknowledgment of the existence of other gods besides Yahweh, although Yahweh is always depicted as the most fearsome and powerful of them all. Jephthah asks an enemy, "Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our God has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!" (11:24) Although these words could be interpreted as mere diplomatic niceties, it seems clear enough that the ancient Israelites lived in a world of many gods, each with his own tribe and territory, and that they were surrounded by idols of all descriptions - metal, wood, stone; handheld figurines, life-size effigies, and larger-than-life constructions. They encountered vivid visual reminders of their gods everywhere, on a daily basis. 

In that highly visual world, imitation of action often substituted for detailed instruction. "Hurry and do what you have seen me do," Abimelech orders his troops after cutting off a tree branch (9:48). It was a world where visual tokens substituted for verbal discourses; to inform the twelve tribes that his concubine has been murdered, a man chooses the expedient path of dismembering her into twelve pieces and messengering the pieces to various chieftains (19:29). 

In all of this, there are few signs of what we would think of as self-awareness. Perhaps the closest approach to an interior monologue is a passage involving the enemy commander Sisera's mother, waiting by a window and expecting her son to return. She says: 

"Why is his chariot so long coming? Why so delayed the hoof-beats from his chariot?" The wisest of her ladies answers, and she to herself repeats, "Are they not collecting and sharing out the spoil: a girl, two girls for each warrior; a booty of colored and embroidered stuff for Sisera, one scarf, two embroidered scarfs for me!" (5:28-30) 

The hapless mother does not know that Sisera is already dead.

But this level of thought, which is not very deep anyway, is exceedingly rare. More common are moments when one of the Israelites has the temerity to doubt the voice of his god, or is simply confused about its origin or its absence. Gideon requests his god’s voice to "give me a sign that you are speaking to me" (6:17) and later requests other signs (6:36-40). Manoah doesn't know he is speaking to an angel of Yahweh until he sees the angel ascend to heaven (13:11-20). Samson, shorn of his hair, “did not know that Yahweh had left him” (16:20). 

There are also a few passages involving petty deceptions - e.g. the devious Ehud (Chapter 3) and the murderous Jael (Chapter 4). But the level of chicanery necessary to pull off these ruses is not high. 

On the whole, the tone varies between a dry recital of facts and a naïve, boastful quality of exaggeration, as when we are informed that “forty-two thousand Ephramites fell on this occasion” (12:6) or that Samson tore a lion to pieces with his bare hands (14:6) or “slaughtered a thousand men” armed with only the jawbone of an ass (15:15). In the latter two cases, we are told, he is capable of these heroics only because “the spirit of Yahweh was on him.” 

For me, the picture that emerges from Judges is that of a childish mentality that repeats things by rote, engages in small, sneaky deceptions, freely converses with what might be called imaginary friends, seeks quasi-parental “divine” guidance and follows it with little or no question, exaggerates absurdly, throws violent tantrums, lacks empathy, is capable of casual cruelty, seldom or never introspects, exhibits a certain naïve pomposity and bellicosity, and has only a limited sense of personal identity, largely restricted to tribal affiliation, totemic gods, and personal belongings.

It may not be merely a coincidence, or a feature of arrested literary development, that these early texts reflect this childish mindset. It is at least possible that people in this era generally did have a mindset that we would associate with young children today – a mindset characterized by an undeveloped (or underdeveloped) sense of self, very limited capacity for reflection and self-analysis, a reliance on authority figures for guidance, and minimal logical reasoning. And like many children even today, they may have experienced a close connection with the spirit world, relying on psychic impressions, mediumistic communications, and various kinds of augury to tell them what to do.

Voices of the gods

In a recent post I made reference to certain passages in Julian Jaynes's famous book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I've been rereading this book lately – concentrating on the historical sections – and I'd like to comment on it a little further.

Jaynes makes a pretty strong case that the psychology of ancient peoples was distinctively different from our modern psychology, and that these people relied on statues, totems, figurines, and other such artifacts to stimulate the "hallucinated voices" that guided their actions. He further argues that the voice of the local chieftain (or later, the king) was itself hallucinated as a means of social control, and that the chief or king was "the first god." 

He adduces a lot of evidence in support of this position, ranging from the curious burial practices of the ancients, which typically treated the dead person as if he were still alive and in need of nourishment … to the multitude of idols carved with unnaturally large eyes, often represented by glittering jewels that would have had a mesmerizing quality … to the carvings of kings accompanied by a double who is seen guiding them by the hand and speaking to them … to such inscriptions as the Code of Hammurabi, which features a prologue and epilogue in the boastful and childish voice of the king, bracketing a series of 282 laws that speak in a calmer and saner voice. 

 

Large-eyed idol found at Tell Asmar, near Baghdad. Sumerian, circa 2700 BC. 

In Jaynes's view, all of this (and more) serves to suggest that ancient man had a "bicameral mind," i.e., that his right cerebral hemisphere dictated "divine" instructions to his passive left cerebral hemisphere, and that such people had no subjective sense of self, but merely followed the dictates of their inner voices. He further argues that this system worked smoothly for small societies but became unstable as a society expanded, until eventually the social order would break down and the cities would be abandoned en masse, something that is known to have happened in Mesoamerica and in parts of the Near East. He also observes that the remarkable ease with which the Spanish explorer Pizarro conquered the Incas is best explained by the idea that the Incas, in the grip of bicamerality, were unequipped to deal with the intrusion of wholly alien figures into their lives, and, in helpless confusion, simply acceded to their demands. 

All of this is pretty compelling, though it may seem less persuasive when we consider Jaynes's penchant for accepting highly speculative claims as quasi-factual. Here's an example:

[The eruption of a volcano on the island of Thera] set off a huge procession of mass migrations and invasions which wrecked the Hittite and Mycenaean empires, [and] 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. [p. 213]

This is a mass of imaginative extrapolation that might make Immanuel Velikovsky blush. As Jaynes himself notes, we do not know even the century in which the Thera eruption occurred. Though it did certainly wreck the Minoan civilization (and may have given rise to the legend of Atlantis), there is nothing that concretely ties it to events in Egypt or elsewhere. Nor do we know anything about the presumed exodus of the Israelites from Egypt - or even whether or not there was such an exodus. One quite plausible theory is that the story was invented as a wish-fulfilment fantasy during the Babylonian Captivity, with Egypt standing in for Babylon, just as later, in the Book of Revelation, Babylon would stand in for Rome.

My point is that Jaynes tends to get rather carried away, and that many of his more substantive points would attract the skepticism, at least, of scholars in these specialized fields. 

Still, it's impossible to ignore the whole body of evidence he presents. How do we explain all those weird, staring idols … and those strange carvings of kings being tutored by their doppelgängers … and the sudden collapse of cities and empires for no apparent reason? 

The bicameral mind is one possible hypothesis. I'd like to suggest an alternative, one that would not have occurred to Jaynes because, in William James's phrase, he would not have considered it "a live option." That is, it would not have been part of his worldview or belief system, which was staunchly non-supernaturalist. 

The alternative is that the ancients really did hear the voices of "gods" - or to put it more accurately, they received messages from the spirit world.

As Jaynes argues, in that preliterate world the right cerebral hemisphere would not be suppressed and inhibited to the extent that it is in our predominantly left-brain society. And as Melvin Morse and many other researchers into psi, NDEs, and mediumship have proposed, the right hemisphere (which is more intuitive and nonverbal) is the portal to mystical experiences of all kinds. 

As I mentioned in my last post on Jaynes, field anthropologists have sometimes reported remarkable instances of psi in native populations even in today's world. (See The Sense of Being Stared At, by Rupert Sheldrake, for an overview.) It seems likely to me that in prehistoric times, and even at the beginning of recorded history, psi was a part of daily life in a way that we would find quite astonishing nowadays. 

If people were, in fact, constantly receiving psychic impressions and often acting on these messages, it's not surprising that they would organize their lives around these experiences. They would build elaborate ziggurats at the center of their cities. They would stock their homes with idols that helped bring about the mildly dissociative state necessary for the clearest communications. They would picture themselves as doubles - the human part, and the spiritual doppelgänger who guides the human in all of his important actions. And living much of their lives in a trancelike state, they would have a much less developed sense of personal identity - of self or ego - than we have today. They would feel psychically connected to other people in a way that would tend to minimize their own individuality and maximize their commitment to the group. 

What kind of communications are we talking about? I suggest they were of two types, but that the ancients did not necessarily distinguish closely between them. One type was telepathy - the ability to send and receive messages by sheer mental power. I would guess that the most accomplished telepaths rose to positions of highest influence, becoming priests and kings, just as, in I Samuel 9:15-17, we see the first king of Israel selected by a psychically gifted priest. The king's telepathic influence may have been so strong that people felt him to be an inner voice in their own heads, which could explain why (as Jaynes notes) many ordinary people in Egypt and Mesopotomia had names that translate as "the king is my god." 

Then there is the second type of communication - messages from the "other side." There is no reason to think these would have been any less frequent than telepathic communiques. Indeed, they may have been more common, inasmuch as the deceased, liberated from their physical bodies, are often said to enjoy enhanced powers of psi. These messages would have served as a constant reminder that there is no absolute dividing line between life and death, and that life in the next world continues much as it has in this one - a common theme of early religions, as demonstrated by the elaborate royal tombs of Egypt and Mesopotamia in which the deceased ruler's prized possessions are interred with him, along with (in Mesopotamia) his wives and servants, who were ritually strangled for the occasion. 

Jaynes makes much of the fact that the dead king's voice would continue to be heard by his subjects for some time after his burial, and attributes this to the persistence of the auditory hallucinations generated by the right brain. Another possibility is that the voice persisted because, in the early stages of his postmortem existence, the king was still able to communicate through mediums - and in that society, everyone was a medium. Only later, as the king surrendered his ties to the physical world, did communications become rarer and less clear, finally ending altogether - just as typically happens in mediumship today. The rituals involving the nourishment of the corpse (which involved, rather bizarrely, forcing food and beverages down the dead man's throat) may simply reflect the fact that as long as the voice was heard and the body was in relatively good condition, people did not consider the deceased truly - or fully - dead. Or they may have had some ceremonial significance, possibly relating to the idea that a properly nourished corpse is more likely to keep talking. Either of these ideas is equally consistent with both Jaynes's view and the suggested alternative.

Note that the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, et al., need not have differentiated between telepathy and mediumship as we do today. It is quite possible that all the communications were presumed to be spiritual, in the sense that they originated from the spirit itself - e.g., the ka (in Egypt). The ka was thought to be part of a human being's identity, and it was believed to persist after death. The most natural interpretation of the psychically perceived voices is that they were the voices of various ka's. Whether the ka's were of the living or the dead made little practical difference. 

 

The Egyptian god Khnum (right) forms a new human being consisting of a mortal body and a ka. The goddess Anquet is on the left. 

What about the collapse of cities and nations? Jaynes speculates that bicamerality led to an increasingly unstable situation as a society became more complex. But it's equally possible that a society populated by human beings with an attenuated sense of self, who largely relied on psychic impressions to carry out their daily tasks, would be unusually vulnerable to sudden, disorienting change. It's also possible that as a subjective sense of self began to develop, the psychic messages became weaker or less clear, and could easily be confused with random emanations of the subconscious - a new development that would have been baffling and inexplicable. 

All of this could have precipitated the breakdown of social control and could explain the eventual disappearance of the "gods," as chronicled by Jaynes. A remarkable carving from a later period shows a king kneeling by an empty throne. The divinity that formerly occupied the throne is gone, and the king is imploring him to return. Jaynes, of course, interprets this as evidence that the auditory hallucinations had ceased, leaving people bereft of guidance. It is arguable that the meaning is more direct: the voices of the spirit world had gone silent, because the left hemisphere had achieved sufficient dominance to inhibit this vital input from the right brain. 

Carving on the Tukulti Altar, showing King Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria first standing, then kneeling, before a god's empty throne. 

I'm not saying this interpretation of history is necessarily correct. But it does seem to make about as much sense as Jaynes's hypothesis - if one is willing to accept the possibility of telepathy and mediumship, of course. Jaynes, who had no use for such notions, would have dismissed the idea out of hand. For those of us with a different worldview, the above approach may lend a new perspective to Jaynes's perpetually fascinating book.  

The slaughter of the nabiim

Julian Jaynes's magnum opus The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is one of those books that are probably wrong in their central thesis, yet so full of provocative and fascinating ideas that reading them becomes its own reward. Recently I was thumbing through my well-worn copy when I came across Jayne's fascinating account of what he calls "the sons of the nabiim" (a term that is apparently his own, since it does not return many hits in a Google search). 

The nabiim were prophets of ancient Israel, though as Jaynes points out, prophecy as understood in those days was concerned with much more than foretelling the future. The prophets were thought to be mouthpieces for the Almighty, delivering moral instruction, political and military advice, and social commentary. The famous prophets - men like Amos and Isaiah - are still revered in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Edith Hamilton's Spokesmen for God is an excellent presentation of their groundbreaking moral teachings. 

Though it might be taken as blasphemy by some believers today, the fact is that the nabiim were essentially mediums or channelers, who entered a trancelike state and allowed another personality to speak through them. This other personality was often wiser and more morally and spiritually advanced than the nabi himself. Amos, for instance, was a common fruit-picker until the spirit of the Lord came over him, after which he earned the special protection of King Jereboam. 

But there were other nabiim who did not fare so well. If we can judge by scattered references in the Hebrew Bible, groups of nabiim wandered the hills, playing ecstatic music and dancing in a frenzy. Their excitement was contagious; it is said that messengers to their camp would fall into a frenzy themselves (I Samuel 19). The nabiim were considered a valuable resource by some people, a link to the authentic voice of the Deity; when the wicked Jezebel ordered them to be massacred, God-fearing Obadiah gathered up a hundred of them and hid them in caves until the danger had passed (I Kings 18). On the other hand, nabiim who followed other religions were fair game; the prophet Elijah, a nabi himself, blithely massacred the nabiim who worshipped a rival deity, Baal (I Kings 18:40). 

Eventually, it seems, the Hebrew nabiim had outlived their usefulness to the authorities, and they received no more protection from men like Obadiah or Jereboam. Quite the opposite: the prophet Zechariah, who was probably a priest and thus part of the official order, foresaw a time when the parents of such abominations would kill them. It is quite possible that his prophecy was the basis for a law mandating just that. He declared: 

… and I will also remove the prophets and the unclean spirit from the land. And if anyone still prophesies, then his mother and father who gave birth to him will say to him, 'You shall not live, for you have spoken falsely in the name of the Lord'; and his father and mother who gave birth to him will pierce him through when he prophesies. Also it will come about in that day that the prophets will each be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies … [Zechariah 13:2-4; New American Standard version] 

The "unclean spirit" mentioned in the first line (in Hebrew tumah ruwach) was quite probably the same thing often referred to as the ob. As Jaynes tells us, the term "ob" appears throughout these early texts and defies easy translation. Sometimes it is translated "familiar spirit," in the sense of a witch's familiar. Other times it is translated "bottle" or "bottle-skin," perhaps connoting something bottled up inside the prophet that strains to escape. Jaynes himself calls it an "inner voice." In keeping with his theory, he believes it refers to the voice of the right cerebral hemisphere that characterized bicameral man. He sees the nabiim as throwbacks to the bicamerality of an earlier epoch, and sees the massacres as a reaction against this older state of consciousness by people with a modern, subjective sense of self. He also argues that proscriptions like Zechariah's helped to wipe out the genetic basis for bicamerality by largely eliminating it from the gene pool. 

I am skeptical of Jaynes's bicameral-mind thesis for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. There may be some truth to it, but I find his presentation of evidence tendentious, and his understanding of conscious thought largely restricted to self-awareness - a stance that allows him to speculate that the men who built the pyramids were "unconscious." I'm willing to believe that such people did not have quite the modern consciousness we know today, with its layers of introspection, self-knowledge, and self-doubt, but I would not call them unconscious, and I don't believe they were automatons permanently hypnotized by an inner voice. 

(Incidentally, the Temple of Apollo's famous inscription "Know thyself" is perhaps best understood as encouraging the development of this new, self-aware consciousness. A quote attributed to Socrates,"The unexamined life is not worth living," may also refer to the desirability of nurturing a more self-aware, self-examining consciousness. But none of this requires a bicameral mind, only a gradually evolving complexity of thought.) 

If the nabiim were not bicameral - and were not simply schizophrenic, a condition Jaynes closely associates with bicamerality - then what was going on with them? It is at least arguable that they were indeed partial throwbacks to an earlier way of life, but not quite in Jaynes's sense. If we believe that there really is a spirit world, and that some people are capable of receiving communications from it, then we could see the nabiim as mediums - which is, in fact, how the word nabiim is translated in some versions of the Bible. (Other translations include "wizards," "necromancers," "witches," and "spiritists.")  

In this regard it's worth noting that Zechariah's proscription against any child "who prophesies" can also be rendered "who engages in conversion with spirits." This is Jaynes's own suggestion. It brings up a picture of a small child talking earnestly with what we today would call an imaginary friend, but which we might also think of as a spirit guide. 

Let's suppose that the conduit for such communications is the right cerebral hemisphere. In young children the left hemisphere has not yet attained dominance, leaving them more open to these visions and messages. Illiterate persons are also less likely to have full-blown left-brain dominance (since the left brain is involved in reading and writing), so an uneducated fruit-picker like Amos would be a more likely candidate for "prophesy" than a more cultured man. If left-brain dominance has been gradually increasing over the millennia, then there must have been a time when people routinely heard these spirit voices and enjoyed other psychic talents, like telepathy. (Some anthropological reports indicate that these abilities persist even today in primitive societies; see Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At.) 

In other words, the nabiim may have been the inheritors of a legitimate mediumistic tradition dating back thousands of years. They only had the misfortune to be born too late, in a society where a new mode of consciousness had rendered their mindset obsolete and even dangerous. They also may have suffered from a kind of dual mentality, incorporating elements of both the old and new modes of thinking in a way that was inherently unstable. 

The violent efforts of the new social order to wipe out this destabilizing older influence may explain why psi is typically latent (suppressed) today, and why there is still something of a taboo against spirit communications, enforced by both materialist debunkers and traditionally religious believers. 

Of course, the massacre of the nabiim is not an isolated act. Leonard Shlain details many similar atrocities in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. The most famous example is the witch hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries. 

With all the opposition that psychic and mediumistic talents have endured, from ostracism and massacre to the brute progress of evolution itself, it's amazing that such abilities persist at all. Perhaps we should not ask why psi is so rare and elusive in the modern world, but rather how it has managed to survive. It must be an important part of the human condition to have withstood millennia of repeated onslaughts. 

Even some of the "respectable" Hebrew prophets seemed to agree. Joel, making a statement that is considerably bolder than most people realize, imagined a day when the nabiim would no longer be outcasts and victims -  a day when everyone in the whole world would be a nabi. 

It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions; and also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out My Spirit. [Joel 2:28-29; New American Standard version] 

Excellent post by Robert McLuhan on autistic and brain-damaged savants and their implications for the filter theory of consciousness:

http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/2013/04/savant-syndrome-and-psi.html

Meat puppet madness

Earlier today George Hansen sent me an email with a link to an essay by Thomas Sheridan, arguing that militant skepticism can be explained in terms of a certain kind of neurology. The essay's title, "Obsessive Debunking Disorder (ODD)?", conveys its humorous but rather combative tone. 

At first I wasn't going to post anything about it, since I'm going for a more positive and less critical approach on this blog. However, I found Sheridan's hypothesis so interesting - and so relevant to my own experience as a skeptic in my younger days - that I decided I had to cover it. 

Sheridan makes it clear that he's not talking about moderate skeptics who are at least somewhat open to debate. Rather, his focus is on: 

The self-appointed guardians and vanguards of materialist dogma ... The debunker, the hardcore skeptic—how they love to compulsively ridicule and mock all they deem 'pseudoscience' and 'conspiracy theory'—while also declaring anyone who thinks outside the box or questions the prevailing orthodoxy, a "moron" and a "tard". Matters not how solid the evidence you present them with is, nor how flimsy their own state-sanctioned 'hard science' which they smugly offer up as their rebuttal; they are driven by a messianic compulsion to root out unscientific 'idiots' ...

From here he segues into a discussion of the two hemispheres of the brain. He points out that the simplistic "logical left" and "intuitive right" model popularized in earlier decades has been largely discredited. 

... in recent years, imaging research has shown that both hemispheres share more or less the same attributes, and both can equally process the same cognitive functionality. However, and this is crucial, there is a level of redundancy in both hemispheres.
 
 The growing speculation for the need for two (asymmetrical) brain hemispheres is to perform two acts of awareness. The left brain is devoted to specific tasks and objectives, while the right brain acts as a kind of peripheral awareness. There has to be a kind of background seeing, as well as immediate attention to the task at hand. Think of an early human on the side of a riverbank trying to spear a salmon—the left brain would be devoted to this task. In order to maintain awareness of the environment and possible dangers therein, the right hemisphere of the human brain is 'looking' out for predators such as a saber-tooth tiger seeking an easy meal ...

According to Sheridan, the bundle of nerve fibers that joins the two hemispheres - the corpus callosum - is now seen less as a bridge between the two than as a means of inhibiting one hemisphere. The corpus callosum, he writes, 

acts more like a buffer, with the left brain in Western people having a desire to literally switch off the neural activity in the right hemisphere.... [T]he left hemisphere is a bully. In overly logical and analytical individuals, fMRI scans have shown the left brain actually inhibits the right brain—via the corpus callosum nerve fibers—from offering its contribution to the entire cognitive process. This state of right hemisphere nullification is where the debunker and the hardcore skeptics are trapped and can never leave—in their intolerant and highly narcissistic left hemisphere—using the two percent of neural wiring into their right hemisphere in order to shut it off. ... their intuition and 'background awareness' are likewise diminished.

The abstract of a technical article on the corpus callosum somewhat reinforces this point, though in cautious language: 

Both the excitatory as well as the inhibitory theory seem likely candidates to describe callosal function, although evidence from recent studies favour the inhibitory model. However the corpus callosum is a complex structure consisting of distinct components which could allow for the possibility to have both an excitatory or inhibitory function that can alter according to task demands. 

Sheridan observes that better educated people are actually easier to hypnotize than the less educated, and suggests that people who have concentrated on developing their intellectual (left-brain) faculties may end up in a state resembling permanent self-hypnosis, mesmerized by their own inner chatter, lacking common sense and intuitive skills. "The over-dependence upon and submission to the left hemisphere of the brain leads to just as much delusion and risk of being deceived as the flighty and poetic over-stimulated right hemisphere," Sheridan notes. 

I have to say that I've noticed this phenomenon quite often. Highly educated people - say, Ph.D.s - can be remarkably blind to what seem like very obvious facts. Not infrequently they seem trapped in a world of purely mental constructs, a world that bears little relation to observable reality.

The left brain, Sheridan says, is not only "a bully" but 

highly narcissistic and with an inflated sense of its own worth and status. The left hemisphere sees no problem with itself, and this has been shown in stroke patients who lost the use of the right hemisphere of their brain. Operating in left-brain mode only, they assumed they were perfectly fine until they attempted to get out of bed only to discover they were paralysed on one side.

The individual whose left brain is thoroughly dominant, inhibiting any input from the right hemisphere, is thus doubly disadvantaged. Not only is he using only half of his brain, but the half he's using is prone to self-delusion, grandiosity, and arrogant self-righteousness, while often having limited social skills. 

The result, says Sheridan, is 

a kind of self-induced schizophrenia, resulting from over-hyperactivity in the left hemisphere of the brain. There is too much information being processed, and the intense devotion to the analytical leads to a kind of overload in the 'here and now' dominant cognitive rationalisation based on statistical data, while neglecting the right hemisphere of the brain and the 'background awareness'.  

Remember that schizophrenia doesn't mean dual personality, but chronically disordered thinking characterized by bizarre fixations. He goes on: 

The bullying aspect of their narcissistic left brain creates a superiority complex, in that they come to believe they know all and see all, when in reality, they are running half-empty with one aspect of their human experience essentially missing. This part of the human experience where intuition, hunches, insight and social intelligence of the most subtle and intricate forms are a complete mystery to them.... 

They simply cannot relate to the rest of us. We are 'irrational', 'lacking reason', 'lost in woo'. Their experience of being human and how they describe it through crude metaphors whereby 'we are just DNA robots' and there is nothing else going on—is not how the rest of us experience our lives. We know there is much more to the human experience than these left-brained internees of the hardcore skeptic and debunker faction assume.

This, to me, is an especially telling point. I have long marveled at the ability of intelligent people to embrace the idea that they are essentially sacks of viscera programmed by DNA - "meat puppets" lacking free will, personal identity, or even consciousness. This strikes me as so self-evidently wrong-headed that I've been at a loss to see how anyone could take it seriously.

In Sheridan's view, they take it seriously because the intuitive part of them, the part that would keep them in touch with the nuances and subtleties of the larger world, has been shut off. They are left at the mercy of the left brain, which repeats the same verbal formulas over and over until these formulas harden into dogmas, creating a kind of self-imposed hypnotic trance in which nonsensical ideas seem inescapably true. 

As I said earlier, this outlook sheds some light on my own experience as a skeptic. Though I was never quite a member of the "meat puppet" school, I was reflexively hostile to anything that smacked of religion, spirituality, the paranormal, or the "irrational." This covered a lot of ground and left me feeling somewhat alienated and lost. I compensated for this lost feeling by inflating my own ego with excessive certainty, unrealistically grandiose ambitions, and contempt for the vast majority of people who didn't see things my way. I acted as if I "knew it all," when in fact I was quite ignorant and was mainly repeating verbal formulas that assumed the quality of dogma in my mind. 

My shift away from skepticism was brought about, in large part, because of an experience I had when I was 36. I had been struggling to come up with an idea for a novel, without success, and had become enraged and despondent about it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an entire plot came to me just as fast as I could type it out. I felt as if if the whole synopsis - characters, plot twists, setting, theme - was being dictated to me. It was an uncanny experience, and it opened up a new world for me - the world of the right brain, the unconscious, intuition, etc. My study of these things led me to take a close look at spirituality and other "irrational" subjects for the first time. 

Interpreting this episode in terms of Sheridan's essay, I would say that I spent my 20s and the first half of my 30s in a self-hypnotized, narcissistic, left-brain daze, cut off from much of the richness and complexity of the world. I had actively inhibited the right hemisphere, blocking its input. When I inadvertently relaxed my guard, this input surged into my awareness, giving me a complete novel outline in a matter of minutes. After that, I was no longer able to ignore this long-denied part of myself. 

It's an intriguing viewpoint, and I think it has much to recommend it. It may help to explain the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the more militant skeptics and those of us on the "woo" side. 

Read the whole essay here. 

Practical magic

Occasionally a visitor to this blog will say something like, "It's not healthy to be so obsessed with life after death. You guys need to get out and live a little, and forget all this morbid stuff."

I take their point, but I think this criticism misses the mark in two respects.

First, it's doubtful that most contributors to this blog are single-mindedly obsessed with postmortem survival. It may appear that way, but only because life after death (and the paranormal in general) is the main subject matter here. I would assume that most of us have a variety of other interests and activities that aren’t reflected in the comments posted on this site.

As an analogy, suppose someone were to drop in on a blog devoted to model railroading and tell the readers there's more to life than train sets. Well, the blog's readers already know that; it's just that model railroading is the particular interest that happens to bring them together in that forum. No doubt most model railroaders have many other things going on in their lives – things that just don't come up on a narrowly focused blog.

The other problem with this kind of criticism is that it assumes there's no practical here-and-now value to contemplating life after death or psi. This might seem like a safe assumption, given the esoteric nature of the subject. But I've found it's not true. I can name specific ways in which immersion in this material has been of immediate practical benefit to me.

For one thing, I've gained a greater appreciation of the role of the unconscious in creative work. Arthur Ellison's description of the active agent in the unconscious, which he nicknamed "George," has been especially helpful. Just yesterday I was working out the plot of my next book and hit a stumbling block. Rather than grind my teeth and work the problem to death, I made the decision to hand over the problem to George and think about something else. I told George I wanted a solution within 24 hours. Today, about 24 hours later, I sat down with a pad and pen, not having thought about the book at all (consciously) in the interim. Without strain, I filled several pages with notes on how to develop the story and solve the problem that was bothering me. George had done his job! I could have saved myself much frustration and wasted effort if I'd known about this technique in my younger days.

Another example: I've mentioned in the past that I have a habit of doing guided meditations in which I address personal questions to a spirit guide. Almost always, the answers I receive are insightful and helpful. I’m able to gain a valuable new perspective on current problems and to resolve unwanted inner conflicts. I don't know the source of these answers – whether it is my unconscious mind, my higher self, an actual spirit guide, or some other source. But whatever their origin, these answers have been enormously useful to me in coping with stress and clearing up emotional disturbances.

Yet another example: When I was in my mid-30s, I had something of a midlife crisis which I felt that my accomplishments up to that point were basically meaningless. This inner crisis prompted me to take a more serious look at spiritual and mystical traditions, and eventually at psi and the afterlife. Gradually I developed a new worldview that largely resolved the issues that had troubled me. Without this worldview, I might well have sunk into the cynicism and anomie that characterize much of the Western intellectual world today. Paradoxical as it may seem, my interest in esoteric subjects kept me grounded.

As my awareness of psi has grown, I've become much more comfortable trusting my intuition. I used to have a terrible time making important decisions. I could convincingly argue a case for almost any course of action – which left me in the position of not knowing which course to take. I’d make myself almost crazy, writing up lists of pro and con arguments, and getting nowhere. The idea of trusting my intuition was foreign to me; I'm not sure I would even have known where to begin. Now, however, I find it much easier to make decisions, because I'm much more in touch with my intuitive self. I also don't see the consequences of a "wrong" decision as so devastating, because life lessons can be learned from almost any situation.

A study of psi and the afterlife can prove valuable in other ways. The life review reported by near-death experiencers, for instance, provides a powerful incentive to treat people as you yourself would like to be treated. My capacity for empathy, which used to be rather stunted, has expanded considerably since I started taking such reports seriously.

There is also a practical value to opening up your mind to previously taboo possibilities. Admittedly, there’s a danger of becoming so open-minded that your critical faculty is compromised. But the downside of maintaining a rigorously closed mind is probably greater: stifled creativity, lack of imagination, intolerance of other points of view, and an arrogant egocentrism that insists it's either “my way or the highway."

I'm sure there are many other benefits of learning about the unacknowledged capabilities of consciousness, and the mysterious realms of nonphysical existence. Anything that expands our horizons and broadens our perspective carries a host of potential advantages. Those who think they have nothing to gain from exploring these subjects don't know what they're missing. They really ought to give it a try before they decide, without benefit of personal experience, that it's all a big waste of time.

I know that not many people who read this blog are interested in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but for anyone who might be, I thought I'd mention that Diana Price's excellent book "Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography," which previously was available only in an expensive hardcover edition, is now on sale in a much more affordable paperback version.

This is a very well researched, serious, and scholarly book that does not put forward an alternate authorship candidate, but simply points out the many oddities, inconsistencies, and gaps in the biography of Shakespeare of Stratford, while comparing what we know of his life with what we have learned about Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and other contemporaries.

In the US: http://tinyurl.com/d8hxx54

In the UK: http://tinyurl.com/csvpyxe

Diana Price's website is here: http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com

What goes around ...

As you may have noticed, there's been an unusual amount of disruption and negativity on this blog in the past month or so, most of which is attributable to the trollular behavior of one or two malcontents. But I think there may be something more going on. 

New Agers are always saying that you get back what you put out - that if you send out negative vibrations, you'll attract negative energy. I've been skeptical of this claim. Despite my interest in the paranormal, I think much New Agery is just foolishness. Still, they could be on to something here. 

It may not be a coincidence that the trollish problems started around the time that I was largely focused on Will Storr's book The Heretics, and specifically his interview with James Randi, in which Randi comes off badly. I admit that I took a certain grim pleasure in reading that interview and in excerpting large parts of it in a blog post. There are all kinds of ways in which I could rationalize my feelings, but the truth is, I just enjoyed seeing a high-profile debunker get taken down a notch. My enjoyment was motivated in large part by malice, albeit disguised (even from me) as a sense of justice and righteousness. 

I'm not arguing that Randi doesn't deserve to be examined critically, or to be called to account for some of the things he's said and done over the years - things that have had a deleterious effect on the efforts of serious researchers and honest proponents of psi. Even so, I'm not proud of having malicious fun at the expense of an elderly, ill, and (I think) unhappy man. 

Kipling put it best in his great poem If: "... being hated, don't give way to hating." 

In broadcasting this negative energy, I got my comeuppance. I attracted one or two people who are (it seems) addicted to put-downs, insults, boorish behavior, deceit, and general craziness. What I put out, I got back - and then some. This blog had rarely attracted the notice of commenters like that before. I suspect they were drawn in because they sensed a shift in the atmosphere that made them feel more at home. 

I'm not trying to do a big mea culpa, but it's been a learning experience. From now on, I'll try to keep the focus on the positive, and to be as impersonal and objective as possible when more negative subjects have to be addressed. 

As for Randi himself, I like what someone with the screen name Rupert McWiseman said about him on the comments thread of the post titled "Wow":

As I have mentioned on another forum, I think Randi has his good points. He was a necessary corrective to the more extreme pro-psi claims that were being made some years ago, and has done good work in exposing out-and-out frauds.

That said, I agree that he seems an extraordinarily angry and bitter individual. In this context I found Storr's discussion of Randi's childhood quite revealing; Randi seems to have had a very poor relationship with his father.

This ties in perfectly with the work of psychologist Paul Vitz, who wrote a book about atheism entitled "The Faith of the Fatherless". Vitz makes a strong case for dogmatic atheism being common amongst people who lacked a strong father-figure in their formative years.

The person's father could be "absent" through death or divorce, or he could be "absent" through weakness or indifference.

Vitz suggests that the person then rejects their father altogether, and remains angry with him throughout life. If the father has died or is not around anymore, the person takes out their resentment on the ultimate father-figure - God.

Randi's rage and bile certainly seem to fit the bill here; another factor might be his sexuality. If Randi was raised in a religious-fundamentalist milieu, then not only would he feel abandoned by his own father, but abandoned by God as well - at least according to literalist Christianity and its attitude to homosexuals.

The more I think about this the more I feel sorry for Randi; he probably felt pretty lonely as a child and had no faith in anyone but himself.

I do remember seeing Randi demonstrating some card tricks on TV many years ago. Just for a moment he was detached from his "skeptic" persona and his inner need to rage against God, and just for once he came across as a nice, gentle, lovable old guy - a "favourite uncle" kind of figure.

Perhaps we should all be a bit more charitable toward Randi and perhaps think twice before judging him.