The Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes and the Voices of the Gods

In 1976 a Princeton psychology lecturer with no doctorate published a book arguing that the heroes of the Trojan War were not conscious. They fought, schemed, built ships and buried their dead, Julian Jaynes wrote, without an inner life of the kind every modern reader takes for granted. When a decision had to be made, a god told them what to do, and the god was a voice produced by their own brains.

The book was called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had it in a third printing within a year, according to a 1977 profile in The Harvard Crimson. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978 and has stayed in print ever since. Almost nobody in the relevant sciences believes its central claim. Almost nobody has managed to forget it either.

What Jaynes actually said

The popular summary, that ancient people were zombies, misses what Jaynes meant. He used consciousness in a narrow sense: introspection, the ability to stand back from oneself and narrate one's own thinking in a private mental space. Learning, problem solving and even speech, he argued, can run without it, much as a practiced pianist plays without attending to each finger.

On his account language came first, at some point between 100,000 and 10,000 BCE. With the first towns came a new arrangement of the brain, which he called bicameral, or two-chambered. The left hemisphere handled ordinary speech. The right produced commands, which people heard as the voices of kings and gods. Time magazine, reporting on the book in March 1977, summed up the picture as humanity living in antlike colonies steered by hallucination.

Then the arrangement failed. Jaynes placed the breakdown in the second millennium BCE, in a period of migrations, wars, natural catastrophe and spreading literacy that made societies too large and too mixed for fixed commands to manage. The dates quoted for the turning point vary with the summary: Time gave a window of 2000 to 1000 BCE, Daniel Dennett's later shorthand was 1400 BCE, and one of Jaynes's favorite exhibits, an Assyrian carving of a king kneeling before a god's empty throne, dates to about 1230 BCE. Consciousness, in his telling, is what people invented, through metaphor, once the gods went quiet. Religion, he suggested, is the long attempt to get the voices back.

The evidence from Homer

Jaynes's star witness was the Iliad. Its characters, he argued, do not deliberate. They do not look inward or act on their own initiative. Action starts when a god speaks.