The Lost Voices of the Gods

Julian Jaynes was six years old and staring at a yellow forsythia bush when the problem first entered his mind: "I thought, 'How do I know that other people see the same yellow I see?' I had the idea that there was a space in everyone else's head that I couldn't get to. How did that space get there?"

Jaynes, 55, a research psychologist at Princeton, now knows that what he was trying to comprehend was consciousness--and how it arose from mere matter. Indeed, he thinks he finally has the answer: consciousness arose from language in two evolutionary steps and appeared for the first time in human history in the second millennium B.C. Jaynes proposes this startling concept in his new book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If his theory is correct, mankind existed without consciousness for thousands of centuries, functioning dimly in "antlike" colonies nearly up to the age of Confucius and the ancient Greek philosophers. Before consciousness, says Jaynes, mankind was directed by hallucinatory voices, which survive today in schizophrenics; these voices, assumed to be divine, gave rise to all religions.

How can an entire civilization be unconscious? Jaynes' answer: much the same way that sleepwalkers and hypnotized people function without awareness. According to Jaynes, humans began to develop language around 100,000 B.C., but lived with virtually no inner life until about 10,000 B.C. Like rats in a maze, humans could solve problems, and had crude abilities to think and remember. But there was no introspection, no independent will, no ability to imagine or ponder the past and future.

Jaynes thinks that man developed the inner voices to solve problems. Without consciousness, he was guided mostly by habit. Thus new situations produced stress, which resulted in unconscious decisions in the form of inner, audible commands. These voices--a side effect of language and a primitive form of will--enabled man to keep at his tasks longer. Man's brain gradually evolved to accommodate the voices. He became "bicameral": the left side of the brain was for speech,* and the right hemisphere produced the inner commands. Eventually, the voices were attributed to kings and gods, thus becoming remarkable instruments of social control and allowing the nomadic hunter-gatherers to form permanent, structured communities.

Social Chaos. Bicameral civilization began to break down between 2000 and 1000 B.C., Jaynes believes, because society grew too intricate to be directed by the simple commands of the voices. The growing use of the written word helped undermine the unquestioned authority of the godlike voices. Some of the last utterances of the gods, written down, became the beginning of law. Jaynes is vague about how consciousness arose to replace the voices. His best guess: man was somehow jolted into awareness by social chaos. Vast migrations, invasions and natural catastrophes finally "drove the wedge of consciousness between god and man," says Jaynes. "Man became modern."

Even so, newly conscious man tried desperately to reawaken the silent gods, turning to oracles, seers, augurs and religious sacrifice. "Historians haven't come to terms with those voices," says Jaynes. "Why did Greece, the most intellectual civilization the world had yet produced, make its most crucial political decisions for centuries by consulting the simple peasant girls who were Apollo's oracles at Delphi?"

As evidence of the switch from bicamerality to conscious life, Jaynes points to the ancient classics. "There simply is no consciousness in the Iliad, except for a few later accretions," he says. "The heroes do not wonder, ponder or decide. They are pulled around by the voices of the gods. The same is true in the early books of the Bible. Abraham isn't conscious, and Amos isn't either. Consciousness comes later, with Ecclesiastes."

In some of these later writings, Jaynes finds laments for the lost bicameral world. He notes that the Odyssey, probably coming at least 100 years after the Iliad, features "the wily Odysseus, the first modern hero, picking his way through a ruined and god-weakened world." In Hindu literature, the unconscious writings of the Veda give way to the subjective Upanishads, and in the Old Testament, the voices of Yahweh and prophets grow silent, replaced by subjective men wrestling with unanswered questions.

Though subdued, the voices of the right side of the brain still occasionally break through as, for example, the voices of Joan of Arc, some drug hallucinations and schizophrenia. Psychiatrists, says Jaynes, "seem to like my theory. They are literate men, and many of them say they sense something archaic in the hallucinatory voices of schizophrenics." Jaynes also folds poetry into his theory: it arose as unconscious divine speech, its mesmerizing rhythms produced by right-sided brain impulses.

Jaynes says that his biggest insight came one night in 1967, when he realized that if evolution had confined speech areas to the left side of the brain, corresponding parts of the right side must have been cleared for some other powerful function--perhaps the ancient voices. He remembered that Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield had done some classic tests of the right side of the brain. "I have a key to the Princeton library, and I rushed down there at midnight," says Jaynes. "I got Penfield's article, and I almost fainted. There it was. When you stimulate certain parts of the right side, you get feelings of unreality, often music, and strange voices always ordering people to do something. Later the split-brain research came out, and I knew I had something big."

Is it something big? Academics who have read the book are divided in their reactions. Berkeley Psychologist Frank Beach calls it "highly original, provocative and stimulating." Northwestern University Psychologist Carl Duncan is caustic: "Jaynes is extremely clever to think up this thing. I only wish he would put that cleverness to some more serviceable use." Jaynes, who realizes he has rewritten most of human history, expects "to be clobbered by all kinds of professors. If you're an archaeologist who has spent a lifetime working with a little brush at ancient sites, you won't want to hear from some psychologist that you have it all wrong."

But so far the most common academic reaction is an indignant question: Who is Julian Jaynes? Answer: an unorthodox and little-known psychologist, noticed mostly for an unconventional theory on the origins of language.

The son of a Unitarian minister, Jaynes grew up in West Newton, Mass., the site of his encounter with the forsythia. To pursue the problem of consciousness, he studied philosophy, then switched to psychology because philosophers did not seem to have the answer. As a graduate student in psychology at Yale, he plunged into neurology and biology, once testing to see whether plants and worms have consciousness.

Jaynes, who is single, spends his spare time hiking and taking trips to lecture on consciousness. He is hardly a major star on campus. In fact, after 19 years of teaching at Yale and Princeton, Jaynes holds the humble title of lecturer, largely, he says, because of his indifference to academic politics. He has refused to get a Ph.D. ("It's a ridiculous badge. My brains are my credentials"), and has irked many fellow psychologists with his opinion that nudging rats through mazes has little to do with psychology. To prepare the book--his first --Jaynes learned Greek, interviewed schizophrenics, argued etymology with rabbis, chewed and inhaled the smoke of laurel leaves (like the priestesses of Delphi), and once invaded a Princeton bar at midnight to apply a psychological test to startled drinkers. "I've been trying to solve the problem of consciousness all my life," he says. "Everything, including my reputation among specialists, is second to that."

Jaynes thinks the bicameral mind is a reality, and could be reawakened in special cases if anyone cared to. Says he: "If you took a young child with a family history of schizophrenia (in other words, the right chemical trigger) and if that child also had an imaginary playmate--a vestige of the old voices--you could train that child to bicamerality." The problem, he says, is that the child could not function in the modern world any more than a schizophrenic can. For mankind as a whole, "the voices are dead. We are stuck in a conscious world."

* There are exceptions. In some left-handed people, speech is either generated by the right side of the brain or shared by the two hemispheres.

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