Julian
Jaynes and the Bicameral Man
(this document is still being composed and contains errors, incomplete
passages and omissions)
Julian Jaynes gives
us an inspiringly provocative model of the phases of the evolution
of the inward connectivity we experience as consciousness, and he
builds it around the changing spacialization of the inward stage,
the place we think, and how it might have evolved over even relatively
short amounts of time. Though I will refer to his ideas regularly
because they offer convenient and salient models, what I have to
offer differs and I hope may deepen the value we may retrieve from
his inspiration. His concepts orient themselves around gods, metaphor,
consciousness, and unique specializations in each of these domains
across time. He proposes a fascinating and enthusiastically crafted
speculative ladder of ascent and its histories in his book The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
In this work, he exchanges the idea of a long emergence for a model
of sudden emergence in relation to crisis — one that was devastating,
and unexpected — beginning perhaps 3500 years ago —
or ~63 generations ago. Whether or not his timelines are accurate,
many of his noticings about the relationship between metaphor and
consciouness are sublime. In his models to be bicameral is to be
in common or constant contact with a supersentience, and when one
refers to gods, angels, or messengers — it is this supersentience
which is being referred to.
Jaynes’ central
thesis is that consciousness we understand and experience was the
result of a variety of radical terrestrial and social upheavals
— over a period of several hundred years theoretically located
between 1800 to 1300 B.C. These resulted in significant general
changes in what it meant to be human, and our experience of consciousness,
community, self, and cognition. Prior to these changes, he posits
a ’bicameral’ consciousness, where the analog self
is still in its formative moments, and is largely ‘ruled’
over by a semi-hallucinatory relationship with gods — personal
and public — whose wills are intoned in an inward space that
will later become the analog self, and the place of ‘me’.
He is positing a ladder of ascension to complex representational
consciousness which is emergent from the genesis and elaboration
of inward stages or space. As each step on the ladder is achieved,
the previous steps are conserved in a position that is now (where
it was not before) observable from ‘outside’ —
in essence all of this occurs this happens in a single space, the
mind.
The gods were, in his theory, biocognitive products of emerging
social and neuropsychic responses to larger scales of social connectivity
which emanated primarily from synthesis of complexly evolved right-brain
cognition in human groups of relatively stable and organized nature.
They gods were ‘present’ because they were *heard/experienced
as though present nearby, or within oneself. They were apparent
in consensus and intimate contact with symbols of authority or sovereignty.
Visually hallucinatory communication was less common, at least by
the time in question in Jaynes’ work.
*[One interpretation is that this is a matter of the neurological
precursor elements of the brain momentarily adopting control of
the auditory system in order to re-assemble local authority. To
do this, these features would act in concert, and mimetically adopt
whatever general shape was equivalent to ‘the penultimate
local authority’. This might be a person in a position of
mastery, such as a ruler or parent — or it could be a god.
It could also be a kind of simulated personage, a conglomerate from
various sources.]
Jaynes portrays the
connective aspect of the bicameral mind as a psychoemotional communications
network which was uniquely implemented across a variety of cultures,
while sharing a general and obvious template of organization and
function. The connective nature of bicameral voices was a source
of unification, identity, authorization, and real communication.
People from a given community or place, under the authority of their
shared bicamerally experienced god(s) and messengers, could cognitively
sense what the relationship of another person, people, animal,
or experience was to their god. Thus the local god(s) functioned
as much as lexicons as they did as authorities — for it was
only in relation to the god-holophore-characters that experience
or information could be made sense of at all. I generally agree
with his thesis that before we were ourselves, we were like the
experiential agents of a god or gods still deeply enmeshed in learning
and establishing themselves and their collective sentience potentials.
When ripe, these would be exemplified in the human cogniscia of
specific locales and societies.
The social networks of the periods in Jaynes’ focus (and perhaps
many of our own) were spiral-ring networks organized around a central
hub. This hub, in general, led to god, god’s messenger, or
the domain of gods. Near the hub, there were often ‘special
servants’ of various sorts. Simultaneously, many individuals
appear to have had personal gods, or something of a analgous nature,
such as the guardian angel metaphor we are still familiar with in
the modern moment.
Jaynes’ explorations imply that we experienced a pseudo-schizoid
interaction with our own rapidly developing minds (and partially
our brains) which was primarily hallucinatory, and thus, essentially
illusory. His model is one in which whole civilizations existed
where everyone was cohesively and collectively hallucinating celestial-admonitory
consciousnsness. There was no term for ‘insane’ —
it was synonymous with being alive. Memory was not locally stored,
but instead largely or completely externally entokened, as was authority.
It could be called upon via various physical or behavioral accoutrements.
People could use idols, for example, in order to trigger various
kinds of ‘replay’ events, or as a means of activating
the internal cognitive momentum that resulted in ‘listening’.
Having directly experienced
a bicameral phase in my adult life, I can frankly offer that it
is possible (and desireable) to experience something like a god,
(and a celestial friend-messenger) as an internally local
second mind. The relationship is unlike our metaphors of it. He
sketches this as something which was once a network-event, televised,
in a sense, largely upon the auditory channels of the minds of groupmembers.
What he is actually modeling is an example of a cognitive group-organism
— where individuals are more agent than member, and it makes
incredibly good sense that, before we internalized this as metaphoric
assembly, we embodied it in similar collectives. If not with his
specific model, then with one which conserves a great deal of similarity
to it.
In my opinion, his model of a god is hidebound in psychological
haberdashery. It does not allow for the possibility that a bicamerally
active person in a supportive environment might actually be talking
to something that isn’t internal, or isn’t precisely
internal — or might actually qualify as God, or Gods. He ignores
ideas of superfunction, because he is theorizing, rather than relating
his own experience of having, for example, been led through such
a story by a God. We need a new way of connecting with
what the term God refers to, and our systems in every possible way
have failed us in providing this experiental access.
The Gods of the bicameral people, and of those who were to, much
later, be known as prophets were not the illusory manifestations
of broken or primitive minds. They were instead an assembly-aspect
of a very real and completely embodied network of human sentience
arising in constant linkage with ecosystemic, planetary and celestial
sentience. In the modern moment, we miss the vast significance of
this in the genesis of our species and persons — because the
organismal sources we were once in direct contact with it have been
largely co-opted or silenced. They lie buried at the centerBase
of a mountain of stories, experts, language, and metaphors.
We should pause
for a moment to imagine the emotive power of a person or group of
persons who could speak into the inward space of others —
even across time, and death. As the terrain of general common bicamerality
began to break up, there were still individuals who could not only
hear the God(s), but could ‘transmit the correct carrier tone’
in a cognitive sense to other individuals or groups. This was significant
enough to result in vast codifications, thousands of years of war,
and an ongoing legacy of riddles, opportunities and pitfalls to
we who inherit these histories and circumstances as matters of our
own lineages.
As structural, geographic
and possibly sudden geophysical change unhinged the bicameral kingdoms,
it similarly unhinged the connectivity necessary to sustain what
we must model as mass insanity, or distributed sentience, learning
itself in populations — much as a child does in the cellular
universes of its own brain, and later, its mind.
The formalization and writing of language, with which came the transfer
of authority away from gods or rulers into codicils, was likely
in part a result of the sudden absence of what they referred to.
Only a god or ruler who was not present or immediately available
need employ writing. Writing then, eventually came to stand in the
place of celestial or bicmaeral authority, and divine authorization.
Jaynes models it as a necessity in a culture where the dependability
of the shared bicameral singnal-sources were breaking down.
Concurrent with the ongoing relationship with written language and
the shift from pictures to symbols, to sequences of recombinantly
relational signifiers, a series of terrestrial and geosocial upheavals
left many bicameral societies shattered — with large migrations
of refugee populations seeking a new land, and new leaders. The
Gods, during this time, grew silent. Their voices — when available
at all, were often strangely scrambled. Here arose a worse cataclysm,
the departure of the God(s), further threatening an already chaotic
assembly of hope, faith, terror and remembrance in those who survived
the sudden destablizations of these events. In the place of gods
and divinely-ordained rulers, the few who could reasonably demonstrate
the old way of being became prophets amongst such peoples, sometimes
of great power. Oracles and divination became the transport of connectivity
to the gods, now somehow distant — silent and dispersed into
languages which would come first to tell their stories, and later
to define, dethrone, or defy them. And from the ashes of the missing
gods, demons were born. Why did the gods depart? Could it be that
they arose as an experiential reality only in situations of intimate
human organizational unity? Perhaps the shattering of the cites
and civilizations was enough to release the signal back into the
domain of noise — and thus where before, all could hear —
in this strange world, only certain ones could locate the lost channels,
and be heard.
The bicameral peoples themselves had no idea ‘where the gods
went’, nor, I believe, that they could ever depart. It is
not possible to imagine the confusion, chaos, and despair that such
an event must have occasioned, if indeed it took place. Jaynes attends
this departure with convincing anecdotes bemoaning the sudden silence
of an entire domain not only of mind, but of protection, identity,
relation, judgement — all of the features we suppose ourselves
to rely upon logics to deal with in modern societies.
God, or the gods, were known by obvious revelation to exist at a
place ‘above’. The stars and celestial activity were
obvious and true arbiters of the temperment of a God not distant
— but within whom bicameral peoples existed. It was
not possible to ‘not refer to god’. Though the penultimate
sentience had no simple name, or many names — it was likely
understood that the ineffible unity of sentience could bear no frozen
moniker, for none could capture even a portion of its nature which
was experientially likely more like song than language. How could
the living sentience we existed within as an expression of...depart?
Where could the celestial ones who moved our minds have gone? Jaynes’
answer: the fled the Earth, to the Sky.
.
~#~
When we ask ourselves what the primary means of communal cohesion
was before the authority of memory and language was well-enthroned,
we are left with a few obvious positions from which to select or
meld an integration. There was emotion, survival, reproduction,
and ... identity. To this day we still celebrate identity at every
scale from the personal, to the global. The identity of those ‘on
high’ from any perspective, is somehow magically communicated
to and shared by ‘all those below’ even in our modern
social networks.
As we currently understand our history and natural models of social
assembly, we form groups around leaders — who are then authorized
(a truly fascinating word to trace the lineages of) to rule and
thus ‘measure’ us. We inherit the nature and character
of our assemblage of identity from them and around them. The ‘ruler(s)’
establish all ‘measures’ by which we shall be educated,
judged, persecuted, and enlanguaged. Even should we not desire to,
all societies require that each individual ‘face the hub’
in thought, deed and action. This, perhaps is one of the most fundamental
of the roots of human society, stated as a generality. It follows
that the position at the hub is either sacred — supportive
of the life of the many — or corrupt: a predator in hero’s
garb. Much of modern history has been written in its broad strokes
by precisely this feature of our common assembly.
Another interesting and seemingly anecdotal accretion of modern
mathematics, is the idea of chance. This idea did not exist, and
perhaps does not exist in some indigenous cultures. There was only
‘what that which is does’ — thus, once the bicameral
voices were scrambling, and becomming irreproducible, the people
in the large turned first to prophets and oracles, and then to divination
— which undergoes what appears to be an explosive genesis
and growth shortly after the period in which Jaynes locates the
emergence of the features of our modern consciousness in the storm
of change and reorganization which came with the loss of bicameral
authority, and a responding storm of militaristic conquests.
Perhaps more interesting than anything we can sift from this is
the single obvious speculation that the bicameral principle never
departed from our species — that instead of departing, it
met resistance, and that when this resistance is removed, or there
is general environmental support for bicamerality, an entire domain
of cognition which we have mis-named, misunderstood, stigmatized,
and attacked is revealed. What is perhaps more surprising is when
we discover that the entire domain, commonly denied — has
been co-opted by science, and religion — both of which are
functional usurpurs of this birthright of our cognitive lineage.
They stand in the place of authority, and credentialling —
but unlike the bicameral rulers — who could speak at a distance
with clear evidence of celestial authorization — their power
lies not in connectivity with sources, but in mimicry of rewards.
For the last 5000 years our species has been at war
with itself over something deeply related to the organismally related
bicameral mind. One faction wants the bicamerals executed. Another
wants to claim their potentials and birthrights. And the third faction
are the people in question. Those people are our children, and ourselves.
~#~
I believe
that in the civilizations and cultures of the bicameral age what
was happening in individual consciousness was not merely ‘hearing
voices’ as Jaynes consistently models it. I believe it was
in fact a very different thing, more akin to having one’s
own mind regularly or spontaneously contained or directed by an
apparently externally sourced mind. During such a circumstance,
it is possible to have one’s mind ‘conducted’
like a musical orchestra — and this is very different from
our common experience of linear consciousness, even during epiphanies.
Nor is it hallucinogenic. It is also different from the common admonitory
experiences of schizophrenics — who are in fact touching a
something real, and ancient, in their struggle to live a life as
a partially bicameral person in a time that cannot credential or
explore these domains directly but instead functionally demonizes
their experiencers.
This is
not a primitive mind he is supposing, but instead a hyperconnective
one. But I would also underline the principle that it is the mind
of a planet, and a solar system — a galaxy and a universe
— emerging reflectively as a connective consciousness in one
of its children. As the animalian and human populations of Earth
waxed and waned — an essential sentience was forming in the
connectivities, rather than the individuals. And I believe this
sentience to be at once terrestrial and extraterrestrial. What the
bicameral peoples were ’listening’ to was God.
It was god with countless universes of living organs — even
in a single animal or plant, each learning itself uniquely in the
common quests for survival, elaboration, synthesis, and biocognitive
uplift. It was speaking not to anyone, but within the constituents
of its own cognitive person. Imagine a single cell hearing the cognitive
maelstrom that is the simple thought ’I am thinking’.
It would be as if the Sun had shouted the sound through every molecule
of one’s being. When the Gods were with and within us, this
was, I believe our common experience. And more, it will be, again.
According
to the bicameral hypothesis, our minds once housed what we can only
really describe as an alien or celestially sourced intelligence
— god(s). I believe firmly that regardless of the specific
timeline we might speculatively craft, our species had a long sojourn
with nothing but the personal and collectve experience of something
like a god, or gods. This was not alike with our metaphors of deities
today at all. It was much more similar to what we would term possession
— however the sentience orchestrating the event was not ‘evil’
or malevolent — but entirely the opposite in many cases. It
was not mere hallucination, and when Jaynes compares it to the hallucinatory
voices of the schizophrenic patient, he is examining something we’ve
not seen the healthy version of.
The dominance of language over our mind has dimensions we’ve
never explored — and we are obliged to use language to explore
them. This essential problem must change its shape. We must be empowered
to explore and authorize our explorations beyond language, into
the domains from whence it arose. The sources and activities of
the ‘inward voice’ is likely to be something at once
simpler and more profound than we imagine.
We can well recall in our recent and ancient histories the omnicidal
chaos that results as gods inhabiting human forms compete for popularity
and resources — cognitive and otherwise. Yet we may not be
able to adequately imagine the power or unity inherent in a community
that cohered through something akin to a limited version of group-telepathy.
It is difficult to imagine a small society of people who are actively
bicameral, and our records from the bible appear to be largely composed
after this breakdown.
Even if we discard Jaynes as a radical iconoclast (which would be
unfortunate for us), we must still examine the matter of gods, language,
and the evolution of our consciousness in a vastly different light
after encountering his library of related theses. It is perhaps
in this function that his models and offerings of scholarship are
most valuable. Not for their specificity, but for what they are
pointing in general at.
The bicameral model is compelling for many reasons ranging from
its complex musings on authorization and the origins of what we
mean by consciousness to its incredibly insightful graphing of the
changes in semantic spatialization over the course of the composition
of the Illiad. As a structural place of departure, it is a fine
inclusion in any library from which we may begin to experientially
chart the terrains of the questions of what we are, as organisms
and cognitive animals — alone and in connectivity. I do however
intend to clearly and deeply explore the terrain related to what
he calls auditory hallucinations and gods. I believe we must again
open this domain to common exploration, for I feel that we do not
yet understand what was, nor what was lost.
Many academics
would likely consider Julian Jaynes to be a psuedoscientist —
amongst the worst epithets a researcher can be burdened with. I
would disagree — yet whether or not his specific timelines
and theses are correct, his re-visioning of the human relationship
with gods and, in turn, with metaphor, is something long overdue
by any reasonable standard. His model of the emergence of the human
consciousness from a more animalian precursor — however tentative
in its formation — is striking for its congruence across many
domains of evidence as well as for its inspiration and novel integrations
of available data.
The majority
of the academy appears in general agreement that we had our genesis-event
with symbolic representation between 50,000 and 28,000 years ago,
though some recent finds have positioned human graphic artifacts
at 77,000 years. Dating methods are still in some general question.
Yet Written (symbolic) language is generally suspected to have emerged
4000 to 5000 years ago, probably beginning as accounting. Most would
levy this data against Jaynes’ work, and rightfully so, from
a scientific perspective. Again, it is not his timeline that interests
me (though I find some of his theses compelling) but instead the
broader strokes and details hidden in what he points toward like
distant easter eggs, implied by a glorious basket containing an
obvious clue.
The
Attack on the Bicamerals:
The Serpent, The Cross, the Grail, The Stave
“The gods have abandoned us like migrating birds.”
—Sumerian Text, circa 1960 B.C
Jaynes (1976: 312): “If parents catch their
children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are
to kill them on the spot. (Paraphraising The Bible, Zechariah
13, 3-4). This is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it
is an evolutionary selection which helped move the gene pool of
humanity toward subjectivity.”
—Michael Wood, Legacy — A Search for the Origins
of Civilization
Let us watch the real histories of the advancement
from year 0, and condense them briefly into a deliverable flower
which we may then examine. To do so I will create a simple ladder
of ascension:
0: Unicameralism
1: Pure Bicameralism
2: Codifiable Bicameralism
3: Breakdown
— birth of local identity and ‘ownership of internal
self and space’.
4: Rise of Oracles & Prophets
5: Post Bicameral Codifications
— birth of codified ritual / laws to accord with and thus
contact a ‘missing’ god.
6: General assault on remaining bicamerals
7: Rise of churches
8: Organized assault against bicamerals
9: Rise of objectivity: Science
10: Diagnosis and extermination of bicamerals as a broken form of
cognitive animal.
11: General rediscovery of the sentient sources of cognition (now)
— neocameralism
12: Activation of neocameralism as a common paradigm of experience
While my timeline is figurative, it is instructive to follow the
ladder of the history of our bicameral heritage and individuals
post-breakdown. Bicameralism is a cognitive accretion of our species,
not a strange feature of some specific or extinct people. Again,
Janyes provides some admirable speculation in these domains, but
there are a variety of other often more telling sources of information.
At the precipice of the breakdown — which we may imagine as
a cognitive communications network that has become garbled, frightening
and undependable when it is accessible at all — our species
split into three.
The first camp would come in time to rePresent the missing god(s).
We find examples of this in the hebrew people and their probable
origins — and later in the Christian tradition. In this rePresentation
a strange seed is present: not everyone is of the body, so to speak.
Post breakdown — there were those who opposed the ancient
ways directly. Without one’s angel (best-friend/messenger),
one could not easily detect if another person was in accordance
with one’s own precepts — and thus one’s god,
or not. In fact, a large part of the codification of spiritual understanding,
admonition, and experience was required by the fact that the sources
of these principles and circumstances were no longer ‘generally
accessible’ for some reason. Without access to the source,
we must refer to the encoding — tokenized authority —
and this is the birthplace of modern religion — which is not
so much the quest for sources and conectivities as it is a mimetic
representation of them.
The second camp was primarily bent upon assembling
domineering (or rapacious) militaristic empires, and would adopt
a God or gods as objective standards — iconic remembrences
in the vein of sympathetic magic. But the connection was primarily
one of political and military necessity rather than of contact with
or representation of a god. When the dam broke, and the horoscope
of bicameral theocracy in the middle-east and elsewhere was crumbling,
the rise of the invading empire-builders followed with succinct
immediacy. And this further shattered the remnants of bicameral
communities and societies — much of which existed in massive
migrating populations in search of a promised land in which to re-establish
their general bicameral intimacy with their ever-more-distant celestial
source.
And the final camp was the remaining bicameral, or semi-bicameral
and common people. It was these people who, belonging to no nation,
and having no ‘central identity’ became the subjects
of endless waves of misunderstanding, persecution, slavery, abuse,
and extermination. With the sources, stability and connectivities
required to elicit common bicamerality gone or broken — the
remaining experiencers were no longer able to bind with others in
common reCognition of a unified authority or God. And it was here
that the source of madness surely arose and found purchase. Yet
the only true inheritors of celestial contact and bicameral cognition
are found almost exclusively in this class of person.
Rise
of the Broken Messenger
In the absence of the unifying experience of social
bicameral relation — the ‘personal god’ or messenger
aspect would often grow confused, malevolent or critical. A base
remembrence of its fomer connective glory — and the birth
of the experience and storying of the demon — or
bad angel. These various dark messengers (or personal gods) were
the polar opposite of the ‘missing friend’. It is this
aspect of bicameral experience that we modernly connect with the
disease of schizophrenia — which means ‘broken phrenes’
— the phrenes being an internal space in which the gods could
once place strength, their voices, and other communications, according
to Jaynes’ reading of The Illiad. But of the polar
opposite of ‘dark’ schizophrenia we have little modern
understanding or conversation.
As the alchemical principle of polarities states, you cannot easily
transform something from from cold into wood — but along the
polarity it is relatively simple to tranform from cold into hot.
Applying this principle to dark schizophrenia we might see the opportunity
to keep the priniciple but reverse the polarity. To move the sufferer
toward the ecstatic liberation of the real and connective positive
pole of their semi-bicameral experience. But why would the personal
messenger — the guardian angel of our cognitive persons, the
ancient friend of children — why would this element change
so dramatically? If we consider the ancient symbol of the serpent,
we find a clue. Appearing in thousands of millions of guises, this
essential icon is impossible to condense adequately, but we can
model this creature as the representative and aspect of celestial
connectivity. Seen only as a mechanism (removing all poetics)
the serpent has a simple job: if general connectivity is present
(changing the serpent into an angel) the serpent is a personal servant
of celestially authorized power and skill. It is an angel, and the
best of all possible friends. A power and adoration beyond compare
arises in constant inner contact with it.
Should the general connectivity with its sources become threatened,
garbled or lost — the serpent changes. It’s directive
becomes restore connectivity at all costs. In this mode
it will first threaten, and then attack its host directly. It’s
purpose is not especially malevolent: this activity results in crisis,
and crisis accomplishes two things in the cognitive organism: rapid
re-organization, and a return to more essential connectivities and
authorities. In effect, the serpent’s purpose is to re-establish
contact with its celestial source, by reducing its host to a simpler
and more animalian cognitive and conscious experience. Psychopoetically
we could thus observe that the ‘backside’ of the angel,
is the serpent.
But let us return from this speculation to something
more useful: all of these positions are the postions of bicamerally-endowed
people. In the former two cases, the genesis of new occupants for
the inward bicameral niche is seen, and in the latter, we find the
‘rest of everyone’, in uneasy alliance with their own
inward spaces, and the systems of authority and definition ruling
or measuring them.
[mark of text in process]
How do elements of organismal consciousness get heard
if there is no inward representational space which suffices to contain
their complexity or character?
o:O:o
The history
of our species contact with this momentum is no less mysterious
or complex than our speculations about contact with ancient aliens.
Yet as with nature, unity is discerned only from a given scale,one
of the meanings of the admonitory assertion ‘as above, so
below’.
“Admonition: Gentle or friendly
reproof; counseling against a fault or error; expression of authoritative
advice; friendly caution or warning.”
— dictionary.com
“Criticism: the
act or an instance of making an unfavourable or severe judgment,
comment, etc.”
— wordreference.com
