by J H Brennan
Jaynes claimed that these people lived with no sense of ego whatsoever, no Joycean “stream of consciousness” maintaining an inner dialogue. The unconscious state influenced their experience of memory. There was obviously no such thing as conscious recall, no decision to remember, no struggle for the word on the tip of the tongue. Function was always and forever a matter of stimulus-response. And when in a new situation they were instructed by a voice of authority.
This is one of the most interesting aspects of Jaynes’ theory. Today, “hearing things” or “seeing things” generally suggests the need of treatment in a mental hospital, but such symptoms are only indicative of insanity in acutely distressed people—and sometimes not even then. Although there has been very little formal research on the subject, one survey across a population base of more than 15,000 showed 7.8 percent reported hallucinations among healthy men and 12 percent among healthy women. Visual hallucinations were twice as common as auditory and the highest frequency was reported between the ages of 20 and 29. National differences emerged with Russians and Brazilians experiencing many more hallucinations than the overall average. In all cases, the people involved were physically and mentally healthy.
The discovery that it was possible to remove parts of the right brain without influencing the patient’s well-being led early psychiatrists to conclude that much of the right brain was simply unnecessary. Jaynes believed that the right brain mirror of Wernicke’s Area once functioned to organize experience—including interactions with authority figures like tribal chieftains —and code it into admonitory “voices.” These were then transferred across the corpus collosum to be picked up, hence “heard,” by the Wernicke’s Area in the left brain. In essence, the right brain “Wernicke” was an hallucination generator, but the hallucinations themselves were beneficial and survival oriented.
It is easy to understand the necessity for a coding mechanism that will allow the individual to benefit from experience. Without it, we could not possibly survive. But once we understand the nature of the two hemispheres, it is easy to see how this particular coding mechanism led to belief in the gods. From our present perspective, we can appreciate that the messages passed across the corpus collosum were an amalgamation of personal life experience and the instructions of one’s tribal or family superiors. But that, of course, is not how they were experienced. The transfer to the Wernicke Area ensured they were heard as spoken orders and mistaken for objective speech. The “voice” might occasionally be the voice of a relative, living or dead, sage, chief, king or other authority figure, but however presented it would always carry the additional numinousity of the right brain. Even today, right brain contact—in the form of inspiration, for example—will often elicit a feeling of awe. The poor, pedestrian left brain simply is not used to the creative fireworks. How much more striking must the sensation have been when the contact came in the form of hallucinatory orders. No wonder our ancestors concluded they were listening to a god. That conclusion was reached, Jaynes theorized, if not at Eynan in 9000 BCE, then at some time and place very close. But it is Eynan that provides us with the evidence. In the king’s tomb, the bones of the woman indicate that she was laid out more or less as you might expect, lying on her back to take her eternal rest. But the man was not. He was buried in a raised position, propped in place with stones.
On the face of things, it is difficult to see why any tribe should take the trouble to do this with the body of their dead king. But Jaynes thought he knew. While the king lived, his voice—the voice of immediate authority—was incorporated into the hallucinations of his followers. When he died, the voice remained. To the followers the conclusion was obvious. The king was not dead at all. They propped him up so he could continue to give them orders. And at some point, their intellectual evolution was sufficiently far advanced to allow them to draw an even more important conclusion. Since the hallucinated voice carried the numinousity associated with the right brain, it eventually dawned on the tribe that a dead king was a god-king.
From this primitive beginning, sprang virtually the whole religious edifice of human thought. Belief in postmortem survival, ancestral spirits, and the reality of a divinity or divinities, all rests on this hallucinatory foundation, itself firmly rooted in the very structure of our brains. Our ancestors had no need of faith. They knew these things from personal experience.
The physiological foundation of Jaynes’s theory is based partly on the discovery that the human brain is divided into two hemispheres, each with a specific function and a particular mode of mentation. In essence, there are two identities inside the skull. They normally cooperate seamlessly. The left hemisphere, in 95 percent of the population, is associated with logical thought, reasoning, speech and consciousness. The right hemisphere is the creative half of the partnership, providing such functions as intuition, aesthetic values, visions and dreams—the stuff of the unconscious. It is important to realize that the “entities” who “inhabit” both hemispheres are capable of thought and rational function, but the one that humans are most aware of and think of as their identity is personified in the left hemisphere.
In the left hemisphere, there are three areas related to the function of speech. The most important is Wernicke’s Area, a portion of the left temporal lobe above and to the rear of the left ear. It stores and processes vocabulary, syntax, meaning and understanding. Destroy it in an adult and he or she will be rendered incapable of meaningful speech. But if the entire portion of the right brain corresponding to Wernicke’s Area is removed—as has been done surgically to treat certain conditions—nothing much happens. The ability to speak and verbal thinking are unaffected.
This then was Jaynes’s explanation of what spirits are and where they come from. In simple summary, the whisperers are self-generated hallucinations and the spirit world is firmly located in the soft gray matter of the right brain. But rational though it sounds, it is an explanation that does not hold water.
Julian Jaynes first summarized his ideas on humanity’s emerging consciousness at an invited address to the American Psychological Association in Washington in 1969. His reception was sufficiently positive to encourage him to publish a much fuller account in 1976. Despite a sober, unmemorable title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind generated such widespread interest that it was issued in paperback. Critical reaction was, to say the least, generous. One reviewer suggested his theory might become the most influential idea presented in the second half of the Twentieth century. Another found his evidence “compelling.” A third compared him with Freud in his ability to generate a new view of human behavior. But impressive though it was, there are weaknesses in Jaynes’s case.
Although it was his reading of the Iliad that first made him wonder about the provenance of human consciousness, Jaynes chose to begin his historical evidence with the Mesolithic burial at Eynan. Here was his first mistake. During the 1960s, when Jaynes began to examine the evidence, the archaeological consensus of prehistory was based on the assumption that political structures and religious beliefs were more or less similar to those of historical times. Specifically, it was assumed that rulers, be they tribal chiefs or primitive kings, were male.
This assumption ran so deep that when archaeologists reported on their study of Minoan Crete, they referred constantly to a line of kings despite the fact that not one single representation of a male ruler was ever found. When the evidence for female involvement in political life became too strong to ignore, it was explained away by the suggestion that the women may have taken temporary charge while their men were at sea. Here too the conclusion was unsupported by any evidence. This sort of pervasive, if largely unconscious, chauvinism remains a feature of archaeology to this day. It is certainly a feature of Jaynes’s analysis of the Eynan burial.
In the tomb, the excavating archaeologists found two human skeletons, one male, one female. Given the elaborate nature of the structure, it was obvious these had been important personages.
Jaynes assumed it was equally obvious that the male was the more important of the two. It was the male who was identified as a king and, since he had been buried in an unusual way, the foundation of the hallucinatory voice theory was neatly laid down. As king, he represented the ultimate authority figure in life. His bicameral (unconscious) subjects functioned on the instructions of their leader and when he died, the stress of the loss caused them to hallucinate his voice. In fact there is absolutely no evidence to suggest the male really was the more important of the two. Rather the reverse—it was the female who wore the headdress. The only significant thing about the male—and it seems of very small significance when stripped of Jaynes’s elaborate speculations—was that he was not buried lying flat. His head was propped on a pillow of stones while more stones were piled on top of his lower body.
Since Eynan was first excavated, substantial evidence has accumulated that our earliest ancestors believed, almost exclusively, in a female deity. At Çatal Hüyük, for example, James Mellaart discovered remains of Neolithic shrines dated to about 6500-5800 BCE. Huge figures of goddesses are modeled in high relief on the walls. A series of stone and terra-cotta statuettes found in these shrines represent a female figure, sometimes accompanied by leopards. The main deity of these Neolithic people was clearly a goddess, a mistress of animals. Her character was vividly depicted on a schist plaque carved to represent two scenes, a sacred marriage and a mother with child. At Hacilar, near Lake Burdur, a somewhat later culture revealed further statuettes of goddesses associated with felines.
The idea that our forefathers believed God to be female proved a bitter pill for archaeologists. They have typically fought a rearguard action from the position that female deities represented a local aberration, to the idea that there may once have been a goddess cult, and finally, with enormous reluctance, to their present position that prehistory was characterized by a near worldwide worship of the Great Goddess. Since political structures are an outgrowth of human thought and human thought is an outgrowth of human belief, it is likely that at a time of Goddess worship, temporal authority was mainly vested in women. This means that in the Eynan burial, the recumbent female with the shell headdress is far more likely to have been queen of her community than the male was to have been king. At best he may have been a consort with some associated prestige but probably little-enough real authority. He could equally well have been the woman’s son or the Natufian equivalent of a boy toy. In such circumstances, the propping of the head may be of no importance whatsoever.
But this is not the only weakness in Jaynes’s case. The psychological aspect of his overall thesis is based on the assumption that the breakdown of the bicameral mind was largely triggered by the invention of writing. At the time he developed his ideas, the orthodox consensus held that writing was invented in Sumaria sometime in the third millennium BCE. This tied in rather neatly with the remainder of his evidence, which appears to show a gradual shift in human mentation from that time until 1300 BCE when the bicameral breakdown became widespread and very evident. By 1979, however, there were indications that writing was actually invented far earlier than the orthodox consensus allowed. American academics Allan Forbes Jr. and T. R. Crowder found a hitherto unrecognized script incorporated in Upper Palaeolithic cave art. Nor was this unexpected discovery a series of crude glyphs. It carried all the indications of a developed alphabet. The implication is that the earliest writing must have predated the Upper Palaeolithic by a substantial margin.
These American findings were supported by an increasing volume of evidence from other fields. As long ago as 1956, another American academic, Professor Charles Hapgood, put his students to work on the analysis of several ancient maps that seemed to show some curious and anomalous features. Although he published the results of this work in 1966, they were not well received—or indeed widely discussed—by his fellow academics. Nor was this surprising. Hapgood concluded, against the rock-solid consensus of his day, that the maps contained evidence of an advanced civilization (unequaled in Europe before the second half of the eighteenth century) that had flourished in the Ice Age.
Bolivia’s Tiahuanaco ruins, believed by some to be more than 17,000 years old
Conventional wisdom has it that the last Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago. To have flourished during this era, Hapgood’s lost civilization must logically have been established at a far earlier date. This too seems to be borne out by a wealth of supporting evidence.
High in the Bolivian Andes, for example, lie the cyclopean ruins of Tiahuanaco, an ancient city built using earthquake-proof architectural and engineering techniques we would find difficult to match today. Because of the sophistication of the buildings, archaeologists initially assumed Tiahuanaco had to be of recent origin and dated its foundation around 150 BCE with a growth pattern that ended as late as 900 CE. However, this dating has failed to withstand serious scrutiny. The problem is that an extensive area of Tiahuanaco—called the Kalasasaya—functioned as an astronomical observatory. Most modern archaeologists accept this without question, but one, Arthur Posnansky, decided to use the ancient observations recorded in the stonework to date the site itself. His initial figures indicated the city was functioning in 15,000 BCE.
Although his findings were accepted by the Bolivian government, Posnansky’s academic colleagues were not so sure. One of them, a German astronomer named Rolf Muller, pointed out that the figures could easily point to a date of 9300 BCE. Even this calculation indicates the existence of a sophisticated urban culture with advanced building techniques in the Ice Age, exactly as Hapgood predicted from his maps. But Muller himself decided that the evidence could be interpreted to support Posnansky’s earlier date. The only real reason for questioning it was that it seemed incredible.
Incredible or not, Posnansky’s 15,000 BCE dating of Tiahuanaco is actually superseded by a very curious dating of the ancient Egyptian civilization given by the Ptolemaic priest Manetho. Contrary to the beliefs of modern Egyptology, which dates the unification of Egypt and the foundation of dynastic rule to about 3100 BCE, Manetho maintained that prior to the pharaohs we know about, a line of predynastic monarchs ruled for a period not far short of fourteen thousand years. If the figure is correct, it would date Egyptian civilization to an era some two thousand years earlier than the “fantastic” date calculated by Posnansky for Tiahuanaco—once again in the depths of the Ice Age.
Since Hapgood’s lost civilization has not been precisely dated, it is worth noting that Manetho claimed the prehistoric rulers were preceded by a dynasty of “Horus-Kings” dating back a further 15,000 years. But even these extraordinary figures are conservative when compared to those given in a much older source, the Turin Papyrus. The papyrus, which appears to have been written around 1400 BCE, agrees with Manetho, more or less, by allocating a 13,400-year reign to the predynastic pharaohs. However, the Horus-Kings were said to have begun their reign some 23,000 years earlier, giving a foundation date for ancient Egypt in the region of 36,400 BCE. It perhaps goes without saying that while orthodox Egyptology is happy to accept both these sources as reliable guides to the kings of dynastic Egypt, the earlier figures are dismissed as fantasy.
In recent years, however, the orthodox view has come under increasingly violent attack. Critics have pointed to the long recognized—and long ignored—mystery surrounding the development of Egyptian culture. The archaeology of the Nile Valley does not indicate the expected stage-by-stage developments from primitive hunter-gatherers to sophisticated urban dwellers. Instead, the entire edifice—including the engineering skills that built the pyramids—seemed to spring up out of nowhere. Since this is manifestly impossible, the suggestion has been made that the civilization evolved elsewhere and migrated to the valley around 3100 BCE. If this suggestion is correct, it follows that the civilization itself is older—possibly far older—than the orthodox consensus allows.
Support for this view comes not from an Egyptologist but from a geologist. Professor Robert
Schoch of Boston was asked to date the Great Sphinx at Giza on the basis of its weathering patterns, and he came up with a minimum figure of 5000 BCE. He thought there was a distinct possibility it could be anything up to two thousand years older. These dates may seem conservative when compared with those in the Turin Papyrus, but they are still thousands of years earlier than the orthodox consensus allows.
Although figures like the Sphinx and mysterious ruins like Tiahuanaco have gripped the public imagination, they represent only a small tip in an iceberg of evidence that now points to the existence of a far more sophisticated prehistoric culture than has generally been believed. This evidence is examined in considerable detail in two of my previous books.5
Copper was mined before flint in Serbia. There are prehistoric copper mines on Lake Superior and in California, Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, New Jersey, and Ohio. Prehistoric iron-smelting furnaces have also been found. Manganese was mined near Broken Hill in Zambia 28,130 years ago.
In 1987, Birmingham University archaeologists Lawrence Barfield and Mike Hodder excavated a prehistoric sauna. Another was discovered in the Orkney Islands.
There is evidence that the horse was domesticated in Europe sometime before 15,000 BCE. A cave drawing at La Marche in France shows one wearing a bridle, as do prehistoric engravings found at the Grotte de Marsoulas and St. Michel d’Arudy.
Tumuli on New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines in the southwest Pacific contained more than four hundred man-made cement cylinders thirteen thousand years old. There are paved prehistoric roads in Yucatan, New Zealand, Kenya, and Malta. There is a water tank in Sri Lanka with a surface area equivalent to Lake Geneva. There are 170,000 miles of underground aqueducts, thousands of years old, in Iran.