worship, heaven, angels, devils, exorcism, omens, augury and sacrifice were
devised as a way to evoke guidance and intervention from the gods – these external
powers. However, as Christianity became a popular source of external authority,
Christian zealots began physically destroying all evidence of competing gods or
competing idols, as was the case with the great library at Alexandria. They then
built their own idols and symbols to reinforce the external authority of Christianity.
(v) Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in Today’s World
Julian Jaynes identifies many vestiges of the bicameral mentality that exist
today. I n more recent times the major worldwide sources of external authority have
been the philosophical doctrines of religion, along with the other forms of mysticism
and metaphysics, combined with political doctrines such as Socialism, Fascism, and
Marxism. All such doctrines demand the surrender of the individual's ego (sense of
self or ‘I ’) to a collective, obedient faith toward the authority of those doctrines. I n
return, those doctrines offer automatic answers and lifetime guidance from which
faithful followers can survive without the responsibility or effort of using their own
conscious minds. Thus, in a sense, all current political systems represent a
regression into mysticism, from conscious man back to bicameral man.
I t is not without a certain irony that Jaynes suggests that early Christianity
with its teachings of Jesus the God-man was an attempt to shift religion from the
outmoded bicameral and celestial mind of Moses to the newly conscious and earthly
mind of humankind. Jaynes suggests that Christianity, although I would suggest all
manifestations of the Abrahamic religions, then discovered a devastatingly effective
tool for authoritarian control, guilt. I ndeed, guilt not only worked on conscious
minds, but required conscious minds to be effective. The vestiges of the bicameral
mind combined with the human longing for guidance also, Jaynes believes, would
have produced all of the prophets, oracles, sibyls, saints, idols and demons,
ayatollahs and popes and even the Fuehrer. Jaynes illustrates how such external
authorities exist only through the remnants of the bicameral mind. Moreover, he
reveals a four-step paradigm that can reshuffle susceptible minds back into
hallucinating, bicameral mentalities. The ancient Greeks, he suggests with rather
inconclusive evidence, used a similar paradigm to reorganize or reprogram the
minds of uneducated peasant girls into totally bicameral mentalities so they could
become oracles and give advice through hallucinated voices, such as in the case of
the Pythia at Delphi, an excellent example of which is given in William Golding’s
faction or historical novel set in ancient Delphi, The Double Tongue (1995). Jaynes
ron
(Ron)
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