The Origin of
Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes (1976)
For weeks now I have
been lost in the pages of this amazing book, one which came to my attention
through the bibliographies in several of my previous reads. One of my favorite literary experiences is
when I finally find a seminal book oft quoted or referenced in other books.
Such a book is The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind. Author Julian Jaynes has
accomplished something outstandingly original and beautiful, providing what is
perhaps the best explanation of what we modern humans call “Consciousness,” how
it came to be, and how we can track that development.
Books like this contain
so much within their pages. It is
difficult enough to absorb all the information and ideas shared by the author,
but discussing it intelligently is another matter entirely. In the over 11
years I have kept this book-review blog I have enjoyed countless books, but
very few have coalesced knowledge and wisdom in my brain like The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has. It is a masterpiece of insight and research.
Jaynes divides his work
into three “books,” the first one dealing with consciousness itself, what it
is, and where it comes from. This alone
is enough material for a great book. The
first great insight that the author shares involves consciousness itself. We modern humans assume that our brains work
in the same manner as all early humans.
We have an internal “I,” designating an interior head-space that exists
outside of time and place, and which us modern humans see as our true selves,
our internal monologue. Jaynes central
proposition is that this internal “I, this sense of individual consciousness,
only arose in humanity after the invention of written language. Before this time, humans lived in what Jaynes
terms a “bicameral mind.”
To explain what
“bicameral mind” refers to, I must go into a bit of neurology and brain
structure. We humans have essentially
two separate brains, connected through several channels, (the corpus-callosum
is the main one, a bundle of nerves which allow signals to be sent from one
brain hemisphere to the other), allowing them to communicate with each other,
and to control different aspects of life.
For example, our left hemisphere contains Brocka’s and Wernicke’s
areas. These are two parts of our brain
that handle language, with Brocka’s area controlling speech production,
allowing our physical mouth and tongue to create meaningful words, and
Wernicke’s area handling the other end of speech, that being language
comprehension, the mental understanding of the auditory signals received by our
ears through spoken language. In
patients who suffer from traumatic brain injuries, strokes, or other such
conditions, these areas are sometimes affected, which was the initial impetus
for understanding the various sections of our brain.
Julian Jaynes posits
that, before the advent of the written word, humanity lived in a very different
state of mind, the bicameral mind, a consciousness completely unaware of
itself, quite the opposite of our current view of consciousness which we feel
exists independently of our physical being.
For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in groups led by a
“king.” These kings dictated how the
people of a said group would live. The truly great and long-lived kings would
be remembered long after their death, their words still echoing in their
follower’s heads. This was not seen as
an aberration. Humans found it perfectly
logical that a dead king would continue talking in their heads, as if still
alive. The greater the king, the longer the voice would live on in his
followers. As evidence of this, Julian
Jaynes discusses how for over ten thousand years, human burials followed the
same pattern. The deceased was not seen
as dead, in the way we modern humans see things. As long as their voice could be heard the
king was alive. Because of this, the dead were buried with food, clothing,
tools, and all sorts of items that would be useful to the dead person’s continuing
“life.” The high culture of the
Egyptians was the pinnacle of this thinking, with Pharaohs buried alongside
dozens of sacrificed slaves, wives, animals, etc. Their isolation in northeast Africa allowed
them to maintain their bicameral culture the longest, even after the advent of
written language.
Julian Jaynes posits
that the first gods were the dead kings whose voices and commands could still
be heard in the people’s heads. This
makes a lot of sense as ancestor worship is the oldest spiritual practice still
found among us humans. Many of the
oldest tribal cultures in the world today still observe a lengthy period
between when a person’s body stops breathing and when they feel the person is
truly dead and ready to be buried/cremated/etc.
This same bicameral
structure is evident in Mesoamerica, where dozens of city states sprung up,
flourished, and died over millennia.
These cities are all remarkably similar, containing a large central
pyramid of structure housing the king, and in later times, the statue of the
local god. Everything about their lives
was dictated by the king/god-king/god, and sometimes the entire city-state
would revert back to the jungle after the death of a prominent king.
Sometime around 2,500
years ago, everything changed. In
Mesopotamia, a writing system was created which altered our entire world and,
according to Julian Jaynes, altered our brain’s structure. This was cuneiform, a method of writing which
involves pressing a wooden stylus into wet clay, leaving triangular marks. Cuneiform is not a language, but a system of
writing, and due to this, it was used to write down things in Assyrian, Emetic,
Akkadian, and many other languages.
Essentially, once a remote king found that his proclamations could be
written down and shared without him needing to personally deliver the
information, he then asked his scholars to use cuneiform to write down his
proclamations, history, etc.
In this sense, writing
was not what we think of today, words which, when read, create a narrative in
our minds. Much like ancient temples,
statuary, and religious artifacts initially did, writing allowed ancient humans
to hallucinate words and instructions, keeping the king’s voice alive well past
his death. It was an immensely valuable
tool for social control in a time before individual consciousness. For millennia, humanity passed down its
accrued knowledge verbally, with specific people in each tribe/group designated
to be the memory carriers, reciting long poems and stories from memory in order
to share wisdom and instructions with the next generation. These bards would not specifically memorize a
text, for there was no texts back then.
What they did was remember the salient points of a tale, concerning an
old god-king perhaps, and then add in connective language as they reiterated
the story in question to a new audience. This way allowed the important points
to be learned by the audience, while also allowing the storyteller to shape his
stories, adding and subtracting parts as they saw fit to.
The written word changed
all of this. Julian Jaynes recounts a
very dark era in the history of our developing consciousness. The period of time, around 500-1000 years
after the initial breakdown of the bicameral mind, sometime around 500 BC, was
a time of dissolution, fear, and mass-violence.
Before the written language, civilizations lived near each other in
relative peace, trading goods and food items, but generally just leaving each
other alone. It was understood that
other human groups followed their own gods/kings, and that was good enough for
them. Once writing appeared, the
“voices” of the gods/kings no longer reverberated through the people’s minds,
causing chaos, and uncertainty. The idea
of an individual “I” was unnecessary before this, for everyone knew what their
role was, what they were expected to do in life, and why they did it. The god-king’s proclamations were followed
without question, for he spoke directly from the gods. The bicameral mind did not seek explanations.
The written word quieted
that internal voice that repeated the gods/kings proclamations. City states became too large for easy control
of the population. It was at this time
that specialists came into being, people whose breeding, training, or social
status prepared them to be interlocutors between the god and the people. These were the beginnings of the sacerdotal
sects that we all currently deal with.
Even these methods were not enough to hold the homogeny, and the cities
slowly fell into ruin and disuse, as people moved back out into the wilds to
make their own lives. Because of this,
there was an extreme rise in violence and warfare. Without the god’s voices keeping everyone
safe, neighbors were seen as violent, evil, “other,” etc., and the need to
exterminate them arose. During this turbulent
period, it is estimated that in both the western and eastern worlds, nearly 90%
of the human population was exterminated.
This was wholesale genocide on a planetary level. Humans are our own worst enemies. It is a sad reminder that, even two thousand
years later, our collective humanity can be quickly erased or forgotten when we
end up seeing our fellow beings as less than human because they do not believe
what we chose, or are told to, believe.
Julian Jaynes traces the
development of consciousness in man through our written works, the oldest ones
such as the Rigveda from what is now India or the Iliad, from Greece being
written at a time when the bicameral mind was still the norm among us
humans. In these tales, the human
protagonists do not share their internal monologues. They had no internal monologues. Their actions are not self-decided. Instead, all the actions in the Iliad, for
example, are a result of a command or a suggestion by one of the many gods.
Achilles does not choose his actions.
They are dictated by the gods. The
same holds for the characters in the Rigveda.
Bicameral man did not self-assess, self-doubt, or self-analyze. He lived, breathed, and acted in accordance
with the instructions provided him by the gods and spirits, voices we modern
humans would describe as our internal monologue.
In the follow-up to the
Iliad, the Odyssey, the protagonists do make their own decisions. They worry and fret and flip-flop without any
certainty, something lacking in the heroes of the Iliad. They still do not have what we would call a
consciousness, however. It is their own
constituent parts that make demands.
Parts of the human, such as phrenes, nous, and psyche,
were the ones dictating action. Odysseus’
nous might demand that he feel jealousy, or his phrenes might
state that the gods do not agree.
Ancient man did not think of the brain itself as the seat of our
minds. They saw different parts suited
to different things. Sometimes these
would still be associated with specific gods, or spirits, but they were
internal to man, not external. Jaynes
explains how today, we judge psychosomatic responses in people that would have
been very familiar to the people of the Odyssey. When we are stressed out, our stomachs feel
curdled, bile rises in our throat, and we get the “butterflies.” To ancient man, just developing the faculty
of consciousness, this made sense. When
scared, our heart starts beating faster.
Our blood pressure rises. Our
skin gets cold and tight. Ancient man
saw this as evidence that the heart controlled certain emotions, much as the
stomach controlled others, and the bowels controlled even others. There is a wide gap between the mentality
evident in the Odyssey and the mentality seen in the Iliad.
The second section of
this book details the progression from the Bicameral Mind to our current
consciousness, tracing the history of our gods, temples and rituals associated
with bicameral thinking. Jaynes describes how Mesopotamia was the first example
of modern consciousness, something which must have been very strange for those
few humans who innately accepted their internal “I”. Even the tales in Genesis describe this
transition from bicameral thinking to our current sense of self. The author traces the story from the ancient
Greeks down to the nomadic tribes which were prevalent after the mass genocide
period. It was these tribes which
practiced a new monotheism, replacing the pantheon of gods with one deity, and
which led to our current Abrahamic religions and their strict morality, most of
which is based on refuting the old bicameral gods and our ways of communicating
with them.
The last section of this
masterwork seeks out the vestiges of the bicameral mind within our modern
world. Humanity went from each one of us
hearing the gods’ voices directly, to the gods only speaking to select priests
and oracles, and then to the gods becoming totally silent, letting their
desires be known solely through omens, or the revelation of “prophets.” Julian Jaynes backs up every one of his
observations with rigorous science, and explores the role that our bicameral
mind still plays in the creation of poetry, art, and music. Many creators describe how a piece of art, or
music, or poem came to them unbidden, as if the universe was speaking to them
directly. This is an example of how our
two brains communicate, with one side dominant, and the other not so. Jaynes explores hypnosis and the mechanisms
used to incite it, mechanisms and techniques extremely similar to those used by
ancient priests when selecting new oracles.
Basically, the less self-aware you are, the easier it is to be
hypnotized. The same goes for deeply
devout religious belief.
This book blew me
away. I wish I could cover everything
that Julian Jaynes discusses in greater detail, but that would take an entire
other book! It is a humbling thing to
understand that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, lived for over a hundred
thousand years in the bicameral state.
It is only in the past 2,500 years that what we call human consciousness
came to be. There is no guarantee that
our individual conscious selves will continue into the future. It may be that a bicameral mind is better
suited for long-term survival on Earth, and we will all soon revert back to
that state. There are no rules stating
that evolution is a progressive, directional force. Animals and plants evolve in all directions,
both “forwards” and “backwards.” It is
our ego that makes us believe we are the epitome of life, that we are the best
living creature created in our Universe.
That very ego may destroy us all.
I look forward to acquiring this book for my own personal library, and
jumping back into its amazing pages in the future. It is books such as this one that made me a
book lover, and keep me a book lover.
What a glorious achievement.
(This book can be downloaded from the Internet Archive here: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes )
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