THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by JULIAN
                                    JAYNES
                                       
   (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1976; 467 pages, $12.50)

   Reviewed by

ROGER W. WESCOTT

   Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics
   Drew University, Madison, N. J.

   Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness is an exciting and exasperating book.
   It is exciting because it breaks important new ground and challenges a
   host of unwarranted assumptions about the development of the human
   mind since the Upper Paleolithic Period. Yet it is exasperating, not
   only because Jaynes writes as though no one but he had ever before
   discussed fundamental transformations in our perceptual and conceptual
   behavior, but also because his book is marred by flagrant errors of
   various kinds, most of them philological.

   His thesis, in brief, is this: Till the Neolithic Period, about 10,000
   years ago, people lived exclusively in small hunting bands. In such
   communities, everyone knew everyone else, and social control was
   assured by bonds of neighborly familiarity. But then, with the advent
   of farming, population grew so rapidly that people no longer knew all
   members of their village communities. The resulting estrangement
   threatened to produce social disorder. The psychological defense that
   early peasants developed against this threat was "bi-cameralism,"
   which literally means a two-chambered condition. The "chambers" that
   Jaynes is referring to here are the right and left hemispheres of the
   cerebral cortex in the brain. Today, most of us rely almost
   exclusively on the left hemisphere for verbal and analytical
   activities, relegating our non-verbal and intuitive responses to the
   right hemisphere. In the pre-Christian era, however, the two chambers
   were used more equally, the right hemisphere functioning primarily to
   receive hallucinated admonitory messages from the newly conceived gods
   and the left hemisphere to verbalize these messages sufficiently for
   transmission to other people.

   About 5,000 years ago, says Jaynes, urbanization began slowly to
   undermine the bicameral order in two ways. First, cities attracted
   people of different ethnic backgrounds, whose gods gave them mutually
   contradictory counsels, leading to dissension. And second, writing
   produced a visual authority that challenged the auditory authority of
   divine voices. Consequently, by the second millennium B.C., most
   people had ceased hearing divine voices and had to rely on spiritual
   practitioners to inform them of the will of the gods. In the first
   millennium B.C., even prophets and oracles ceased to transmit clear
   supernatural instructions. In the first millennium A.D., religious
   authority was embodied almost exclusively in sacred texts, as
   interpreted by theologians. And, in the second millennium A.D., even
   scriptural authority was weakened to the extent that we now look
   primarily to secular sources for social and psychological guidance.

   To appreciate Jaynes' argument, we must understand that he is using
   the term "consciousness" in its narrowest sense, to refer solely to
   the waking state in which we perform most of our gainful employment
   and engage in a majority of our other utilitarian activities. Although
   he discusses mental states like dreaming and trance at considerable
   length, he defines them as varieties of unconsciousness. To be
   conscious, he holds, we must be at least minimally critical and
   self-aware.

   Among the precursors whom Jaynes fails to acknowledge in his
   discussion of archaic mentalities is that inveterate rationalist H. G.
   Wells, who wrote "... the... Palaeolithic... hunter... killed for
   reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man... killed for monstrous
   and now incredible ideas... and... sacrificed... men, women, and
   children whenever... he... thought the gods were athirst. All these
   things were passed into the Bronze Age. Hitherto a social
   consciousness had been asleep and not even dreaming... Before it
   awakened it produced nightmares..."(1) Shifting from the Eastern to
   the Western Hemisphere, Wells then added, "The art of the Maya
   civilization... perplexes by... a sort of insane intricacy... Many
   Maya inscriptions resemble... elaborate drawing made by lunatics in
   European asylums... linking these aberrant American civilizations to
   the idea of a general mental aberration..."(2) I am another precursor
   on the subject of how archaic men managed to erect immense stone
   monuments without literally dying of fatigue. While Jaynes suggests
   (on pp. 426 & 427) that they did it by operating in a schizoid rather
   than subjectively "conscious" state, I suggested "... that the
   megalith erectors were operating in a manner psychologically more
   antlike than manlike (as we normally understand that latter term) --
   in short, that they labored almost exclusively in a state of
   protracted trance."(3)

   Yet another set of predecessors whom he ignores are Louis Pauwels,
   Robert Charroux, and Ronald Willis,(4) all of whom anticipated not
   only the best-sellers of Erich von Daeniken but Jaynes' own statement
   (on p. 235) that "... the Ziggurat of Neo-Babylon, the Biblical Tower
   of Babel, was... a heavenly landing for the... celestialized gods."

   In reconstructing the prehistory of consciousness, Jaynes ranges
   freely over continents and millennia and takes hundreds of pages to do
   it. Considering this scope and the detail into which he goes, I find
   it surprising that he ignores such concrete, relevant, and
   historically well-attested data as the replacement of bronze by steel,
   the invention of coinage and the alphabet, and the wide-spread
   domestication of the horse. These developments collectively composed
   an Iron Age complex, which germinated in the second millennium and
   flowered in the first. Among its more dramatic products were
   intercontinental empires, such as the Achaemenid monarchy of Persia,
   and scriptural world-creeds, like Buddhism. So crucial has the
   intellectual aspect of this Iron Age revolution seemed to some
   philosophers of history that they have followed German existentialist
   Karl Jaspers in referring to it as the Axial Age -- a relatively brief
   period that separates the essentially archaic mentality of the
   Sumerians and Egyptians from the essentially modern mentality of the
   Greeks and West Europeans.

   In addition to his enviable range, Jaynes exhibits an admirable
   willingness to speculate on matters from which most archeologists and
   historians have shied away. Yet here too I find myself struck quite as
   much by the speculations he avoids as by those in which he engages.
   Although at one point he ventures as far back in time as two million
   years, he never considers the possibility, discussed by a number of
   anthropologists, that Lower Paleolithic Man made tools the same way
   termites build nests -- by instinct rather than by learning. Nor does
   he discuss such poorly delimited but perennially controversial
   phenomena as cannibalism, phallicism, and matricentricity, all of
   which must have involved attitudes fundamentally different from those
   which prevail today. Still less does he give serious consideration to
   Biblical traditions asserting, in keeping with much other folklore,
   that there were once men who lived for centuries and that giants then
   shared the earth with people of normal stature.

   In a few cases, Jaynes even overlooks some fairly obvious material
   supporting his central thesis that early urban man lived by listening
   to gods. Among those cases are these facts: that the goddess Vac,
   "Voice" or "Speech," was a member of the early Hindu pantheon; that
   the Latin word fatum, from which we derive the word fate, literally
   meant "that which is spoken"; and that even today we refer to
   occupations and professions as vocations or callings, implying that we
   are summoned to our work by the voice of God.

   In other cases, Jaynes' conclusions on various issues are unclear,
   often because one section of his book seems to contradict another.
   More than thirty times, for example, he describes the godly voices of
   protohistory as hallucinations. Yet on pp. 202 and 203, he insists
   that "The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of
   anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system...
   I have by no means dared the bottom of the matter..." Throughout the
   book, he characterizes schizophrenia, which he regards as the
   contemporary equivalent of bicameralism, as "loss", "dissolution",
   "erosion", "failure", "relapse", and "disorientation". On p. 427,
   however (without crediting or even citing Wilhelm Reich, who made the
   point earlier and more forcefully), he concedes that schizophrenics
   are far more perceptive, in a purely quantitative sense, than persons
   with normal consciousness. Although for the most part he mentions few
   if any physical correlates for the huge psychological shifts he
   describes, on pp. 208 and 209, under the heading "Failure of the
   Gods", he startlingly declares, without having prepared his readers
   for any such bombshell, "The second millennium B.C. was heavy laden
   with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes
   occurred. Civilizations perished. Half the worlds' population became
   refugees." Here, as before, he omits all reference to scientific
   catastrophists from Georges Cuvier through Claude Schaeffer to
   Immanuel Velikovsky -- the last of whom, like Jaynes himself, now
   dwells in splendid isolation in the midst of the bustling Princeton
   intellectual community. Then, as though belatedly recognizing the
   crying need for some explanation for such wide-spread disasters, he
   mentions "two major elements of these upheavals... the volcanic
   eruption of Thera and... the rise of Assyria..." But it is hard to see
   how events so restricted to western Eurasia could have had such
   momentous repercussions in places as far afield as India and China,
   which seem to have suffered equally destructive fires, floods, and
   invasions of desperate pastoral nomads. Another puzzle which he does
   little to solve is the apparent contradiction between the postulated
   universality of ancient bicameralism and the attested hierarchicalism
   of Neolithic and Bronze Age politics. "Each individual, king or serf,"
   he writes, on pp. 183 and 184, "had his own personal god whose voice
   he heard and obeyed." Yet, if serfs had gods to direct them, why did
   they also have kings? While declaring himself "well aware of the
   problem," Jaynes suggests that these two patterns of authority were
   not really redundant because the gods themselves were hierarchical,
   kings' gods issuing orders to serfs' gods. I find this explanation
   circular in terms of Jaynes' own claim that the gods' voices were
   hallucinatory to begin with. On the other hand, his explanation would
   be at least logically defensible if he were to invert the contrast he
   now draws between schizoid ancients and realistic moderns and,
   following the rule of nihil e nihilo, re-characterize it as one
   between ultraperceptive ancients and inwardly deaf moderns. Whichever
   way we describe the polarity between ancient and modern mentalities,
   however, there seems to be no place in it for the tertium quid of
   prehistoric hunting-and-gathering mentality. In negative terms, Jaynes
   clearly implies that this mentality was neither conscious (in his
   sense) nor hallucinative; but he never even hints at what, in positive
   terms, it was. There is, finally, a striking inconsistency between his
   assessment of the value of his book in the 13th chapter and his
   assessment of it in the 15th chapter. On p. 317, summarizing the
   preceding twelve chapters, he grandiloquently proclaims, "We are now
   at last in a position where we can look back and see the history of
   mankind on this planet in its proper values for the first time..." Yet
   on p. 374 he refers self-depreciatively to "the theory... I am trying
   to state in this scraggly collation of passages..." Without either
   glorifying or denigrating Jaynes' accomplishment, I would prefer to
   view it as an important but tentative new approach to the age-old
   quest for human self-understanding.

   Some of the bones I have to pick with Jaynes are matters of taste
   rather than of substance. In his transliterations of Greek words, he
   regularly employs mutually incongruous spellings. Examples are the
   word katochos, "spiritually possessed or divinely inspired (person),"
   and the word pair wanax, "divine being," and aoidos, "minstrel." In
   the former case, the Hellenizing use of two k's and the Latinate use
   of two c's are equally acceptable to Classicists. But the use of c in
   the base with k in the prefix is discordant. In the latter case, while
   either the archaic forms wanaks and awoidos or the later forms anaks
   and aoidos are congruent, mixtures look jumbled. Sometimes the
   inconsistencies spring from capricious use of dialect sources, as when
   Jaynes cites the Ionic word kradie, "heart," instead of the familiar
   and expected Attic form kardia (from which we derive the English
   adjective cardiac). Occasionally he produces pseudo-Hellenisms, as in
   the case of the Jaynesian coinage aptic, which looks as though it were
   derived from a Greek verbal base *ap-, "to enable," but which actually
   is synonymous with, and partially abridged from, the Latin derived
   word "aptitudinal." In at least one case, he reduces not only the
   suffixes but also the base of a Classical term, as when he coins the
   words metaphier and metaphrand, based on the Greek-derived word
   metaphor and meaning "a relationship of similarity" and "something to
   be described," respectively. Predictably, he does not scruple to cross
   languages in producing coinages, as in the case of his Greco-Latin
   neologism introcosm, meaning "inner world," where most Classicists
   would of course prefer an unhybridized form, such as *endocosm, which
   is of wholly Greek origin.

   Even apart from his use of Classical vocabulary, Jaynes' style is
   ornate and his diction mannered. For the most part, moreover, his
   rhetorical flourishes are eccentric rather than poetic, as when he
   speaks regretfully of a question that lacks "a truly robust answer" or
   remarks, while discussing the sources of literary inspiration, that
   "dear Shelley said it plain."

   If the only shortcomings of Jaynes' writing were stylistic, criticism
   of them might be dismissed as captious. Unfortunately, however, he
   also makes errors of fact. Some of these are mistranslations, as when,
   on p. 348, he glosses Greek daimonizomai (misspelled dae-) as a noun
   meaning "demonization" when it is a verb meaning "I am possessed" or,
   on p. 51, he glosses the Sanskrit verb asmi as "breathe" when it means
   "am." Others are mistaken etymologies, such as the derivation, on p.
   51, of English be from Sanskrit bhu or, on p. 331, of English sibyl
   (via Attic Greek sibulla, "seeress") from Aeolic Greek sios, "god,"
   plus boule, "counsel." In each case, his etymology is an anachronism
   in the sense that no serious linguist of the past century would have
   proposed it. To my knowledge, no one since August Schleicher, who died
   in 1868, has regarded Sanskrit as lineally ancestral to any
   non-Indo-Aryan language. And the "Aeolic" compound, besides being a
   wholly fanciful source for the word sibyl (which should in any case
   take the form *siobule, if Jaynes is right), turns out not to be
   Aeolic anyhow but Laconian Greek.(5)

   On one of the few occasions when Jaynes ventures to make
   pronouncements about non-Indo-European languages, he errs again. An
   example (from p. 186) is his statement that "... the Egyptian
   language... was concrete from first to last. To maintain that it is
   expressing abstract thoughts would seem [anachronistic] ". In point of
   fact, the Classical Egyptian of the Middle Kingdom, which is the
   earliest Nile Valley language of which we have extensive texts, had
   not only semantic abstractions, like KR, "evil," and HH, "eternity,"
   but also morphological abstractions, constructed by adding either the
   qualitative suffix -W to adjectives or the collective/infinitive
   suffix -T to verbs. Examples are: NFRW, "beauty," from NFR,
   "beautiful"; MNMNT, "herd," from MNMN, "(to) mill about"; and SMT,
   "departure," from SM, "go". Jaynes' bald assertion, however, could be
   made acceptable by rephrasing it to read, first, that the proportion
   of abstract to concrete nouns was probably lower in Classical Egyptian
   than in, say, Classical Greek and, second, that there is no known
   pre-Alexandrian literature from Ancient Egypt which deals
   systematically with abstract philosophical conceptions.

   Still other errors are wholly extralinguistic. One of these is Jaynes'
   claim, on p. 129, that the genus Homo is almost two million years old.
   To be sure, if we accept zoologist Ernst Mayr's view that the
   australopithecine man-apes of south-east Africa belong to our genus,
   there is no problem here. But no anthropologist that I know of will
   accede to such taxonomic lumping.(6) Most anthropologists date the
   earliest species of Homo to somewhere between half a million and one
   million years ago. The other error is his assertion, on p. 197, that
   during the interregnum between the Old and Middle Kingdoms of ancient
   Egypt "in the midst of... anarchy there was no rebellion, no striving
   of... sections for independence..." Here he runs afoul of general
   Egyptological opinion, which often refers to this period as The Feudal
   Age and characterizes it as highly fissiparous, marked by provincial
   secession, local insurrection, and feuding between rival power
   centers.

   After this catalog of errors, it may be well to emphasize the
   strengths of Jaynes' argument, which are many and impressive. First of
   all, that argument is, in Adam Makkai's phrase, a "paradigmbuster." It
   breaks the mold of implicit uniformitarianism which has, since the
   nineteenth century, imprisoned Orientalists and historians quite as
   effectively as explicit uniformitarianism has imprisoned astronomers
   and paleontologists. In each case, the result has been an unjustified
   assumption that both the physical world and the human mind have
   remained essentially the same since the end of the Pleistocene Epoch,
   and that such changes as are obvious reflect only minor climatic
   fluctuations and the inevitable progress of man's technology. It is no
   small accomplishment of Jaynes' to have assembled provocative evidence
   of radical discontinuities in human behavior and experience within
   recent millennia. Since the self styled "psychohistorians" of the last
   two decades have perpetuated this uniformitarian bias, it may be that
   Jaynes is justified in coining the new term "psycho-archaeology" to
   describe his innovative style of social psychology.

   In reviewing his own book, Jaynes notes that the overflow from it will
   now go into a second volume, to be published shortly. In his
   penultimate chapter, he also proposes a project to record, describe,
   and analyze the hallucinated voices of schizophrenics, not only for
   purposes of better clinical insight but, even more important, toward
   the end of deepening our understanding of Bronze Age bicameralism. I
   look forward to both these prospects, either singly or in combination,
   with keen anticipation. To be sure, the foregoing review has turned
   out to be a more critical one than I originally had in mind. The
   reason for this, I believe, is that Jaynes' book is, by its very
   nature, such as to arouse great expectations -- greater, perhaps, than
   can readily be satisfied. But, however much I may object to its many
   defects of detail, I enthusiastically endorse what I take to be its
   central principle: that scholarship must never surrender to habit,
   however comfortable, nor to consensus, however intimidating, but must
   rather continue to search for fresh insights into even the hoariest of
   subject matters.

                            FOOTNOTED REFERENCES

   1. Herbert G. Wells, The Outline of History, Star Books, Garden City
   Publishing Company Garden City, N.Y., revised edition, 1931; pp. 129
   and 130.
   2. Ibid., p. 182.
   3. The Divine Animal: An Exploration of Human Potentiality, Funk &
   Wagnalls, New York, 1969, pp. 248 and 249.
   4. See especially Extraterrestrial Intervention: The Evidence, edited
   by Jacques Bergier and Paul Willis, Signet Books, New American
   Library, New York, 1975 (containing material on "ancient astronautics"
   dating from as early as 1960).
   5. St. Jerome is apparently responsible for this highly imaginative
   explanation of Greek síbulla, whose origin is listed by most
   contemporary etymologists as unknown. Like Greek túrannos, "lord" (the
   source of the English word tyrant), which is structurally analogous to
   it, síbulla probably comes from a non-Hellenic Aegean or Anatolian
   source.
   6. If not bicameral, Jaynes seems at least to be prescient! The day
   after I wrote this paragraph, Science Magazine published an article by
   anthropologist Richard G. Klein entitled "The Ecology of Early Man in
   Southern Africa" (v. 197, n. 4299, pp. 115-126). In it, Klein makes at
   least two startling assertions: first (pp. 115 and 116), that the
   Pliocene Epoch lasted only about 3 million years rather than 12
   million, as generally reported; and, second (pp. 117 and 123), that
   "the earliest specimens assignable to Homo are dated to approximately
   1.85 million years ago" and "Australopithecus... was apparently
   replaced by Homo (? evolved into Homo) by 2 million years ago..." The
   fact that Klein's article was printed in full by such a prestigious
   journal apparently indicates that his views are no longer regarded as
   extravagant.

     [Editor's Postscript -- Additional discussion of Jaynes' book and
     the bicameral mind will be presented in future issues of KRONOS.
     The reader is also referred to "The New Science of Immanuel
     Velikovsky" by Alan Parry in KRONOS I: 1 (April, 1975), pp. 3-20.]
     _________________________________________________________________

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