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Julian Jaynes -- 

I propose here to regard the poem as a psychological document of
immense importance.  And the question we are to put to it is:
What is mind in the Iliad?

The Language of the Iliad

The answer is disturbingly interesting. There is in general no
consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying in general' because I shall
mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words
for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a
later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all
of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul
or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as
blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the
ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which
later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply
motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos
leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for
when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give
him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer
and "casts strength in his thumos" (Iliad, i6:~29). The thumos
can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place
that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to
and a god rouses him" (9 :7~2f.). But it is not really an organ and
not always localized a raging ocean has thumos. A word of some-
what similar use is phren, which is always localized anatomically
as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is usually
used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize
that his brother is not near him (22:~96)  this means what we
mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only centuries
later that it comes to mean mind or 'heart' in its figurative sense.

Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as
nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes
from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad
would be something like perception or recognition or field of
vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over
him.

Another important word, which perhaps comes from the
doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two
parts. This was made into a verb by adding the ending -izo, the
common suffix which can turn a noun into a verb, the resulting
word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts about something.
Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary quality in
their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories
which are not true to the original. Mermerizein is thus wrongly
translated as to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be
troubled about, to try to decide. But essentially it means to be in
conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behav-
ioristic. It is said several times of Zeus (2o:i~, i6:64~), as well
as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumos, or
sometimes in the phrestes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot
doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind
will be able to.

These words are in general, and with certain exceptions, the
closest that anyone, authors or characters or gods, usually get to
having conscious minds or thoughts. We shall be entering the
meaning of these words more carefully in a later chapter.

There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept
developing curiously late in Greek thought. Thus, Iliadic men
have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will.
Indeed, the whole problem of volition, so troubling, I think, to
modern psychological theory, may have had its difficulties be-
cause the words for such phenomena were invented so late.

A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in
our sense. The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C. comes
to mean body, is always in the plural in Homer and means dead
limbs or a corpse. It is the opposite of psyche. There are several
words which are used for various parts of the body, and, in
Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to, and never the
body as a whole.2 So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of
Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely
articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torSo almost
separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and
again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms,
feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion,
etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.

Now this is all very peculiar. If there is no subjective con-
sciousness, no mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then
initiates behavior?

The Religion of the Early Greeks

There is an old and general idea that there was no true religion
in Greece before the fourth century B.C.3 and that the gods in the
Homeric poems are merely a "gay invention of poets," as it has
been put by noted scholars.4 The reason for this erroneous view
is that religion is being thought of as a system of ethics, as a kind
of bowing down to external gods in an effort to behave virtuously.
And indeed in this sense the scholars are right. But to say that
the gods in the Iliad are merely the inventions of the authors of
the epic is to completely misread what is going on.

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what
to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have,
and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our
subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon,
king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps
Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamem
non (i :i97ff.). 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 (6:234ff.), 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 by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual
fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.)
that really cause the war (3 :1 64ff.), and then plan its strategy
(~:~6ff.). 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 at the Trojans, rousing in
them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of
consciousness.

The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons,
and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To
another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But
not to the man himself. When, toward the end of the war,
Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mis-
tress, the king of men declares, "Not I was the cause of this act,
but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness:
they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day
when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him, so what could I
do? Gods always have their way." (i~:86-9O). And that this
was no particular fiction of Agamemnon's to evade responsibility
is clear in that this explanation is fully accepted by Achilles, for
Achilles also is obedient to his gods. Scholars who in comment-
ing on this passage say that Agamemnon's behavior has become
"alien to his ego,"5 do not go nearly far enough. Por the question
is indeed, what is the psychology of the Iliadic hero? And I
am saying that he did not have any ego whatever.

Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. Its
first three words are Menin aedie Thea, Of wrath sing, 0 God-
dess! And the entire epic which follows is the song of the goddess
which the entranced bard 'heard' and chanted to his iron-age lis-
teners among the ruins of Agamemnon's world.

If we erase all our preconceptions about poetry and act toward
the poem as if we had never heard of poetry before, the abnormal
quality of the speech would immediately arrest us. We call it
meter nowadays. But what a different thing, these steady hex-
ameters of pitch stresses, from the looser jumble of accents in
ordinary dialogue! The function of meter in poetry is to drive the
electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the
normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener. A
similar thing occurs when the voices of schizophrenics speak in
scanning rhythms or rhyme. Except for its later accretions, then,
the epic itself was neither consciously composed nor consciously
remembered, but was successively and creatively changed with
no more awareness than a pianist has of his improvisation.

Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots
and sang epics through their lips?  They were voices whose
speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic
heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic
patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices. The gods were
organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded
as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time,
amalgams of parental or admonitory images. The god is a part of
the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that
the gods never step outside of natural laws. Greek gods cannot
create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis.
In the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialec-
tic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might
occur between two people. The Greek god never steps forth in
thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from
the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be. He
simply leads, advises, and orders. Nor does the god occasion
humility or even love, and little gratitude. Indeed, I suggest
that the god-hero relationship was   by being its progenitor
- similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of
Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead. The
strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amaze-
ment or wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the
solution of a particularly difficult problem suddenly pops into our
heads, or in the cry of eureka! from Archimedes in his bath.

The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they
are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speak-
ing to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a
river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them.
But at other times, they simply occur. Usually they come as
themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as othe~
people closely related to the hero.

Apollo's relation to Hector is particularly interesting in this
regard. In Book i6, Apollo comes to Hector as his maternal
uncle; then in Book 17 as one of his allied leaders; and then later
in the same book as his dearest friend from abroad. The denoue-
ment of the whole epic comes when it is Athene who, after telling
Achilles to kill Hector, then comes to Hector as his dearest
brother, Deiphobus. Trusting in him as his second, Hector chal-
lenges Achilles, demands of Deiphobus another spear, and turns
to find nothing is there. We would say he has had an hallucina-
tion. So has Achilles. The Trojan War was directed by halluci-
nations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all
like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they
did.

The Bicameral Mind

The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and
emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-
spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic
man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of
his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect
- upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we
can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Voli-
tion, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness
whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar lan-
guage, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or
authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The
individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not
'see' what to do by himself.

The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have
just proposed is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad. It is rather
that the Iliad suggests the hypothesis that in later chapters 1 shall
attempt to prove or refute by examining the remains of other
civilizations of antiquity. Nevertheless, it would be persuasive at
this time to bring up certain objections to the preceding which
will help clarify some of the issues before going on.