Most people do, especially those who haven’t read it.
To be precise, he posits that the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the rise of consciousness* occurred at different times in different places, and not all at once for any given society. Some remnants and echoes of bicamerality remain even today.
Well, report back if you emerge intact. I admit to being kinda interested.
Problem here is that “Buddhism” isn’t one single thing. There is even a version of Buddhism that specializes in … categorizing and syncretizing all the other forms of Buddhism! (The Tendai school).
1.) I strongly suspect that ancient Egyptian religion is pretty much what it said it was – real belief in a plurality of gods with different functions. Through time those beliefs changerd and refined – we’re talking about a civilization that lasted for thousands of years, after all, before it lost its dominant position. It’s not surprising that religious beliefs evolved. A similar change appears to have occurred in Greece, where the multiplicity of gods from its early days was seen by the intelligentsia of Pericles’ Golden Age as a manifestation of the many faces of Nature, anda belief in the literal existence of human-foibled gods was seen as a lower-class belief.
2.) I think the Afrocentrists go much too far, overreacting to the too-long ignorance of black contributions by trying to attribute everything to them, which is no truer than the original denial. Ancient Egyptians were no more “black” than they were “white”. And there’s no shame in their originally following the same sort of polytheism that just about everyone else originally did. (By the way – if people want an antidote to the denial of black achievement, simply look at the history of Nubia, just south of Egypt. From their art, they were definitely what people would classify as “black”, and they had a complex and literate culture thousands of years before my direct ancestors adopted writing – Nubia - Wikipedia )
3.) You need to take Julian Jaynes with more than a grain of salt. I, too, was impressed with some of his ideas when I first read his book (which I have re-read many times), but there’s also a lot in his book that smacks of pseudoscience. I simply don’t understand why a pre-conscious society would ever develop fiction and preserve it. I can’t buy that any changeover between pre-conscious and conscious states could happen so recently and completely that contacts between Cotes and the Aztecs, or Pizarro and the Incas could be examples of cross-consciousness contacts. And he’s not correct in things he reports about aspects of the Classical world, like the Oracle at Delphi. On the other hand, without his book we wouldn’t have Neal Stephenson’s The Big U or Snowcrash.
4.) Buddhism is a whole’nother can of worms. I’m not even going to try to go into it now.
Since this was basically overlooked, I’ll add my “this” here.
Buddhists are of questionable theism, but even the more abstract of them build stuff. Heck, people build temples to Confucius, and all he did was write some books about manners! Hinduism has long recognized it’s metaphoric value (although it operates on a number of levels among different people) and there are incredible Hindu temples. Strong literal theism is not a requirement of temples or priestly classes, especially when religion and the government are intertwined. In these cases, religion becomes an extension of the state, and religious ritual is virtually indistinguishable from state ritual.
Anyway, I’m out. But if Ancient Egyptian polytheism didn’t at some point, on some levels, include a level of thinkers who had philosophized it to the point that they came to value it as a metaphorical system rather than a literal “these gods are real” thing (and if it didn’t include peasants who treated the gods as good luck charms, with no underlying beliefs behind it), then it would be exceptional and probably the only polytheistic religion not to reach that point. Indeed, I’d argue that “gods as concrete reality” is more of a monotheist thing than not.
I doubt there were many atheists, or even agnostics, as we would understand them, in the ancient world, regardless of geography.
There were people who paid attention God(s), and people who ignored them. But people who actively denied the existence of supernatural powers? Maybe on an individual basis here or there-- people are strange that way-- but we are again talking of a time period where there simply weren’t any rational alternatives to religious superstititions.
An ancient Egyptian farmer whose crops keep dying year after a year may have decided that praying to the gods was useless, but not have made the leap to “there are no gods, this is just nature, there are other reasons for my failures,” etc., etc.
clairobscur:
I thought they believed in a black smoke monster as such, as depicted in certain heiroglyphics
(d & r)
CalMeacham:
I suspect you are right. But it would be so cool if it were true.
I don’t want to start trying to defend ACs, but I will say that they are very good at giving much knowledge on all the accomplishments of blacks, including (especially) Nubia. The “Egyptians are Black” thing they push just gets the most notice because it causes the deepest outrage.
No worries. I realize there isn’t any scientific proof for his theories and only want to read about it because it sounds fascinating.
Agreed.
They developed religion and myth, but not as fiction.
Are you missing part of your sentence here? (Not snarking, just trying to figure out what you mean to say.) Jaynes speculates that the lords of Cuzco (not necessarily the whole society) may have lacked full modern consciousness; he also notes some evidence which suggests otherwise. In any case, the short bit about the Inca is basically for fun, and not essential to the overall theory.
Most criticisms of Jaynes amount to about this–“I can’t buy it.” We have acclimated thoroughly to the experience of consciousness. It seems so innate, propositions like iamnotbatman’s so ridiculous. It seems impossible to relate to people who can perceive and speak and so forth without being conscious. Yet we ourselves do that, from time to time. Some modern humans (schizophrenics for example) may do it for more extended periods, but all of us routinely think without consciousness. Consciousness (again, as defined–not mere sensation and reaction, as animals have) is an adaptation, a learned behavior. All of us had to learn it ourselves in childhood; infants don’t have internal narratization.
The first human consciousness had to arise sometime. Show me another theory that explores the question with comparable breadth and elegance.
Dude. I know people who have had paranoid ideations and heard voices, and there is no way you can convince me that they aren’t conscious. I have no reason to not believe that schizophrenics are conscious.
I think what Jaynes is arguing is that schizophrenics aren’t conscious when they have the hallucinations or hear the voices, because they can’t identify that the voice they hear is internal; they think it’s coming from some outside source. I don’t think he’s saying that schizophrenics are never conscious.
I suspect the reason people don’t “buy it” is that, when examining ancient societies, the humans who inhabit them just don’t seem all that alien to us in terms of their mental processes. When we examine existing hunter-gatherer societies, or those of (say) the highlands of New Guinea, or Canadian Innuit, they do not appear all that different, either (though obviously their ways of life are very different). Certainly they are socially different, as one would expect, but they are not noticably “unconcious” in their interactions. They seem to be fully “concious”, at any rate, to the casual observer.
Certainly, their literature and mythology is far more primitive and basic, but that more obvious explaination for that, seems to me, is that it is the literature which “had to start somewhere”, and develop from basic beginnings.
Obviously conciousness had to develop some-time, but what most people imagine is that it developed in tandem with the development of human intelligence - with the evolution of modern humans, over the last couple of hundred thousand years - not suddenly, 3,000 years ago.
There are plenty of tablets of Sumerian and Babylonian stories that certainly seem to be fiction, not what we would classify as myth. In any event, it’s irrelevant – I don’t see why a pre-conscious society would develop myth, either.
And Homer’s epics go far beyond the rudiments of myth – they are deeply textured stories filled with touches and details not required for the mere transmission of mythic ideas. They feature fully realized characters with feelings and nuances that certainly imply consciousness to me, not the rote actions of automatons.
A pre-conscious society develops myth as fact.
The more I study Egypt, the harder these questions are to answer. I’m not an Egyptologist: I only work on Greco-Roman Egypt and I do not read Egyptian. But some of my best friends are Egyptologists, as it were.
First and foremost, the idea that the ancients had poor math is ill-informed. If you live in NYC, come check out my school’s exhibition on second millennium Babylonian mathematics. We happen to have several historians of mathematics at the institute now who would be very surprised to find out that the ancients had nothing special in math.
Egypt has an immensely long history, both independent and subject to foreign domination. In that time an enormous body of temple documentation was produced. Temples were, until the Ptolemaic period, the centers of Egyptian economic and political life. They were powerful corporate landowners, banks, grain repositories, educational institutions, and of course, had something to do with religion. Temples were a major source of artistic patronage, so naturally we see tons of religious art, royal ideology communicated via religious images, and even amazing scenes of temple life on the tombs of high priests. So you’d think that this is a highly theocratic society of believers.
But only the top stratum of society could produce documents or sponsor art. By and large, I don’t think we really know what ordinary people actually believed. We can try to infer that the specifics of religious belief were important to ordinary Egyptians because the Ptolemies adopted so much native religious and monarchic ideology. But this is not a very good argument and there are many alternative explanations. What documents we do have that concern ordinary Egyptians are typically areligious in nature: tax receipts, contracts, boundary stelae, etc. They sometimes have religious formulas, but they are no more revealing than One Nation Under God on our money. We also have a large number of magical texts that are not even remotely theological.
But ordinary Egyptians (and ordinary ancients in general) were not stupid people. I analyze non-literary documents by and between Egyptians from a later period and I am constantly impressed by their brains and balls. We really have no business assuming they were feeble and subrational because they build large temples and then using their subrationality to explain said temples. They were as smart as we are, no doubt about it.
If anyone is interested, I’d recommend that you read Jacco Dieleman and Ellen Morris. They both do very interesting work on Egyptian religion.
Noe there’s a bald, unsupported statement of no obvious significance.
I just think you’re misunderstanding what Jaynes is trying to say when he’s talking about the preconscious mind. Your argument is that ancient societies couldn’t be preconscious because “I don’t see why a pre-conscious society would develop myth” and because Homer’s stories"are deeply textured stories filled with touches and details not required for the mere transmission of mythic ideas. They feature fully realized characters with feelings and nuances.", but that’s not inconsistent with Jaynes’s theory, which I’m not saying is true, btw. It’s just harder to disprove than you seem to think it is.