by J H Brennan
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do … When Agamemnon … robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold, a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them … It is the gods who start quarrels among men that really cause the war, and then plan its strategy. It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench of the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic … The beginnings of action … are in the actions and speeches of gods … When … Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, “Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus.”5
To most modern readers, of course, the gods are no more than a poetic invention, a device intended to render the narrative more vivid and interesting. But the events of the Iliad are already both vivid and interesting. The poem is about action and the action is constant. There is no need to “cut to the chase”; in the Iliad the “chase” is all there is. Any further poetic device, any invocation of fictional gods, is patently unnecessary. Yet there it is, in line after line of the epic. More to the point, it is integral to the work itself. Both the Iliad’s author and the Iliadic characters are agreed in their acceptance of a divinely managed world. Faced with these puzzles, Jaynes took the courageous step of considering the possibility that the gods of the Iliad were not poetic inventions at all, but a wholly accurate account of the world as it was at the time of the Trojan War. What if, he speculated, both Greeks and Trojans really were listening to mysterious voices and sometimes looking on the very faces of their gods? What if it was all true, exactly as the Iliad described it? In such circumstances, “to say the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid to those who were about to condemn her.”6
From this starting point, Jaynes went in search of further evidence that the world of our early ancestors may have been quite different from the world we experience today. He speculated that the earliest form of universal spirit contact occurred simultaneously with the development of urban living around 9000 BCE. A study of the Natufian settlement of Eynan, some twelve miles north of the Sea of Galilee, showed a town of more than two hundred people supported partly by hunting and partly by a primitive form of agriculture, with a social structure based on the rule of a king. The king’s tomb at this site was a circular edifice some sixteen feet in diameter housing two complete skeletons. One wore a shell headdress and was presumed to be the king’s wife. The other, the king himself, was partly covered in stones and partly propped upright, with his cradled head facing the distant Mount Hermon. The entire grave was surrounded by a wall, painted in red ocher, supporting a roof of large flat stones. On this roof, the Natufians had built a hearth, surrounded by a second wall, again roofed with stone slabs. Topping the entire structure were three large stones set central and surrounded by a ring of smaller ones.
Primitive though it was, this curious edifice has a religious feel about it, like the stupas found beside Himalayan roadways. Jaynes speculates that this is precisely what it was—a device that allowed the dead king to issue commands in spirit form, as he had done during life. When a holy fire was lit in the ceremonial hearth, its smoke, “rising into visibility for furlongs around, was, like the gray mists of the Aegean for Achilles, a source of … the commands that controlled the Mesolithic world of Eynan.” This, says Jaynes, was the paradigm of what was to happen over the next eight millennia. The spirit of the dead king was transformed, in the imagination of the Eynans, into a god. The king’s tomb was the god’s house, the precursor of far more elaborate god houses and temples to be erected in the years ahead. Even the two-tiered formation of its structure was prescient of the multitiered ziggurats of temples built on temples (as at the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu) and the gigantic pyramids at Giza in Egypt.
Given that the plain people of Eynan heard the spirit voice of their dead king, their living king, his successor—who was also privy to the words of the spirit—would naturally designate himself as the dead god-king’s priest or servant, thus ensuring his own authority until death permitted him to join with his predecessor as a god in his own right. Once established, this pattern spread throughout Mesopotamia and was particularly evident in ancient Egypt. As it did so, the tomb was gradually replaced by the temple (which contained no burial remains) while a statue took the place of the corpse—metaphors that continued to function admirably as an aid to spirit communication.
Jaynes spread his archaeological net and discovered that the basic plan for human group habitation from the end of the Mesolithic to relatively recent times was a god-house (temple or church) surrounded by man-houses. As cities expanded to embrace thousands of souls, so the god-houses became monumental, culminating in structures so large that they became the focus of spirit communication for miles around. He came across actual depictions of such communication. Two stone reliefs from an ancient site in Guatemala, for example, depicted a man prostrate on the grass as he was lectured by two divine figures. One clearly represents Death, the other is half human, half deer. Jaynes notes7 that to this day the local chilans (prophetic shamans) adopt an identical posture for their peyote-enhanced conversations with spirits.
He discovered too that, as the centuries progressed, the tombs of kings, priests, politicians—indeed all who could afford it—were gradually filled up with grave goods … and even servants. The kings of Ur, for example, ruling during the first half of the third millennium BCE, were entombed with their entire retinues, often buried alive in a crouched position as if ready to spring up to offer service. The tombs also contained copious supplies of food, drink, clothing, weapons, jewelry, musical instruments, and even draft animals yoked to ornate chariots. Clearly these goods were assumed to be of use to the deceased. Jaynes further discovered that the burial of important personages as if they were still alive was common to almost all of the ancient cultures he surveyed. Nor was this bewildering custom confined to the rich and powerful. In Sumerian Lagash (now modern Tell al-Hiba) in about 2500 BCE, a commoner was buried with seven jars of beer, 420 loaves, two measures of grain, one garment, a head support, and a bed. The excavation of graves from the Indus civilizations of India revealed fifteen to twenty food pots per person. Similar finds were discovered in the Neolithic Yang-Shao cultures of China, not to mention the Olmec and Mayan kingdoms of South America.
This practice has no clear explanation except that their voices were still being heard by the living and were perhaps demanding such accommodation.8
The lengths to which the living would go in order to placate the voices they heard is illustrated by the fact that some early Greek graves had feeding tubes that allowed broth to be poured down into the rotting mouths of the corpses below. Even more macabre is the painting on a mixing bowl dated to 850 BCE and now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This vessel depicts a boy tearing his hair with one hand while he stuffs food into the mouth of his mother’s corpse with the other. To Jaynes, this was yet another indication that spirit voices had convinced the populace that the dead, despite appearances, lived on.
The advent of writing provided further support for Jaynes’s contention that spirits of the dead were thought of as gods. An Assyrian incantation text makes the connection overtly. In it, the dead are referred to directly as ilani or gods. Records of the Aztec civilization quote the ancients as believing that when a man di
ed he became a god—so much so that the expression “he has become a god” was used as a euphemism for death.
Alongside the grave goods and written traditions, Jaynes noted a veritable explosion in the use of figurines and life-size images during the millennia following the Eynan burial. The function of such figurines has been something of an archaeological mystery, with the most popular theory suggesting that they were fertility charms. Jaynes dismissed this idea as failing under logical analysis. Fertility charms would be of little use in areas where fertility was never a problem. Yet they were found in great numbers in such areas. Since many of these were stood upright in tombs, he took them to be more permanent substitutes for the propped corpse. Their function, he suggested, was to trigger the phenomenon of the spirit voices.
Jaynes found support for this conclusion in the figures themselves. Those of the Olmec civilization, to give only a single example, were created with open mouths and exaggerated ears, suggesting they had something to do with verbal communication. There was also the curious, and almost worldwide, convention of figures with exaggerated, staring eyes. Sometimes this was achieved by enlarging the eyes, sometimes by the use of rock crystal or gemstone inserts. Thousands of figures dating to about 3000 BCE, found in the upper branches of the Euphrates, had heads that consisted almost entirely of eyes enhanced with malachite paint. Analysis shows the diameter of the human eye is approximately one tenth the height of the human head, a measurement Jaynes elected to refer to as an eye index of one. His investigations showed that ancient statuary of gods had eye indexes as high as 18 and 20: “huge globular eyes hypnotically staring out of the unrecorded past of 5,000 years ago with defiant authority.” The choice of the word hypnotically is deliberate. Jaynes became convinced that for our faithful ancestors, staring into the hypnotic eyes of their carved gods facilitated the state of mind in which they could more easily hear the sound of spirit voices. How can we know that such idols “spoke”? Jaynes asks rhetorically, then answers:
A Harvard professor has argued that statues like this Olmec figurine once ‘spoke’ directly to worshippers.
I have tried to suggest that the very existence of statuary and figurines requires an explanation in a way that has not previously been perceived … The setting up of such idols in religious places, the exaggerated eyes in the early stages of every civilization, the practice of inserting gems of brilliant sorts into the eye sockets of several civilizations, an elaborate ritual for the opening of the mouth for new statues in the two most important early civilizations … all these present a pattern of evidence at least.9
It is a pattern of evidence supported by the fact that cuneiform texts often refer to statues speaking while, closer to hand for most readers, the Old Testament tells how the king of Babylon “consulted with images” (Ezekiel 21:21). In South America, Aztecs told their Spanish conquerors that their history began when a statue from an ancient ruined temple spoke to their leaders, while nearby Peru was considered by the Spanish to be a kingdom commanded by the Devil, because Satan himself spoke to the Incas out of the mouths of their statues:
It was commonly in the night they entered backward to their idoll and so went bending their bodies and head, after an uglie manner, and so they consulted with him. The answer he made was commonly like unto a fearefull hissing, or to a gnashing which did terrifie them; and all that he did advertise or command them was but the way to their perdition and ruine.10
It was evidence of this type that led Julian Jaynes to conclude these and similar statues were not of a god but were themselves the god.
He had his own house … [which] formed the center of a complex of temple buildings, varying in size with the importance of the god and the wealth of the city. The god was probably made of wood to be light enough to be carried about on the shoulders of priests. His face was inlaid with precious metals and jewels. He was clothed in dazzling raiment and usually resided on a pedestal in a niche in the central chamber of his house … Since the divine statue was the owner of the land and the people were his tenants, the first duty of the steward-king was to serve the god not only in the administration of the god’s estates, but also in more personal ways. The gods, according to cuneiform texts, liked eating and drinking, music and dancing; they required beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other god-statues on connubial visits from time to time; they had to be washed and dressed and appeased with pleasant odors; they had to be taken out for drives on state occasions; and all these things were done with increasing ceremony and ritual as time went on … The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper. This was called “appeasing the liver” of the gods and consisted in offerings of butter, fat, honey, sweetmeats placed on the table as with regular food … How is all this possible, continuing as it did in some form for thousands of years as the central focus of life unless we posit that the human beings heard the statues speak to them, even as the heroes of the Iliad heard their gods or Joan of Arc heard hers? And indeed had to hear them speak to know what to do.11
The social structure, as Jaynes conceived it, was complex. The common people were not privy to the words of the great gods who ruled from their ziggurats and temples. But even the lowliest commoner had his or her own gods embodied in idols or figurines living in household shrines. They too demanded their daily rituals and offerings, usually modest versions of the temple ceremonial. They too spoke to the citizens who served them and issued orders about what should be done and by whom. If, faced by some particularly fearful crisis or hugely important decision, a commoner wished to speak with one of the great civic gods, he could not do so directly but had to consult his personal house deity to act as an intermediary. Cuneiform tablets depict the practice, showing a great god seated while a lesser deity conducts the petitioner into the divine presence. The whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of later ideas about “guardian angels”—which might themselves be distorted memories of the earlier experience. In one sense, all spirit/god contact was personal. Every man and woman was capable of hearing the voice of her own deity. But the deities themselves formed a strict hierarchy, each answering to another, so that an important question or message could filter upward until it reached the city’s great protector, who would then advise his personal servant—the king—on what should be done about it.
It was a structure that survived for millennia, but, manifestly, not indefinitely. Clearly, not everyone today is capable of hearing spirit voices—indeed, a sizeable proportion of the general population does not even believe in them. Jaynes realized that if his conclusions were correct, there was an age during which spirit intercourse with humanity increased to such a degree that it was all but universal, but that age eventually ended. He reasoned that for his theory to stand up, he had to find the point in history where things changed, the point when the gods withdrew and spirits ceased to speak directly to anyone who cared to listen. Consequently, he began to search for the turning point.
Jaynes was aware of the problems that could—indeed must—arise in any society whose members were constantly directed by spirit voices. As populations increased, so did the complexities of life … and the odds in favor of the spirits issuing contradictory orders. Once such contradictions reached critical mass, the basic structure of the society would collapse. Evidence of this was, he believed, writ large in the pre-Columbian civilizations of America where, time and again, whole populations suddenly deserted their cities to adopt a tribal lifestyle in the surrounding jungle. Such mass desertions, with no apparent cause, have remained a mystery to orthodox archaeology but were seen by Jaynes as a necessary flight from spirit instructions that no longer made any sense or had ceased to produce satisfactory results. This explanation also fitted an even more mysterious observation—the fact that given time, usually a century or more, there was often a drift back to the deserted cities, sustainable until the population once more increased to unmanageable proportions.
The linkage between population density and cultural collapse seemed to be confirmed
by texts like the Sumerian epic Atrahasis, which opens with the words:
The people became numerous
The god was depressed by their uproar
Enlil heard their noise
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome.12
Interestingly, this text approaches the problem not from the viewpoint of a burgeoning population, but from that of the spirits themselves. And the spirits, it appeared, were not best pleased by the tendency of their worshippers to “be fruitful and multiply.” The epic goes on to describe how they visited plagues, famines, and, eventually, a great flood on their followers in a brutal attempt to reduce population numbers. Clearly, whatever else may have been happening, the structure of the spirit-driven society was breaking down. By the end of the third millennium BCE, the problem was becoming increasingly evident. In Egypt, for example, the final century of this millennium saw the sudden, total breakdown of all authority. People fled the towns in an exodus reminiscent of the South American cities, brother fought brother, nobles scratched for food in the fields, children slaughtered their parents, tombs and pyramids were ransacked.
Orthodox historians postulate that the cause must have been some great natural disaster, without, however, being able to support their theory with hard evidence. Nor was there evidence of natural disasters in similar periodic breakdowns of the Mayan civilization mentioned earlier, or the collapse of Assur around 1700 BCE. But as we shall see shortly, natural disasters did hasten (but not cause) the population-generated breakdown in other areas. So did a wholly unexpected element, the invention of writing.