2.3. The Causes of Consciousness
An old Sumerian proverb has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy. “1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.”
This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.
These are the momentous themes of the present chapter.
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The Instability of Bicameral Kingdoms
In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments with militarism and police repression. This association should not be applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era. Militarism, police, rule by fear, are all the desperate measures used to control a subjective conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their multitudinous privacies of hopes and hates.
In the bicameral era, the bicameral mind was the social control, not fear or repression or even law. There were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral men had no internal “space” in which to be private, and no analog to be private with. All initiative was in the voices of gods. And the gods needed to be assisted by their divinely dictated laws only in the late federations of states in the second millennium B.C.
Within each bicameral state, therefore, the people were probably more peaceful and friendly than in any civilization since. But at the interfaces between different bicameral civilizations, the problems were complex and quite different.
Let us consider a meeting between two individuals from two different bicameral cultures. Let us assume they do not know each other’s language and are owned by different gods. The manner of such meetings would be dependent upon the kind of admonitions, warnings, and importunings with which the individual had been reared.
In peaceful times, with the god of the city basking in prosperity, the human tilling of his fields, the harvesting, storing, and sorting out of his produce all going on without hitch or question, as in a colony of ants, it could be expected that his divine voice would be basically amicable, and that indeed all man’s voicevisions would tend to be beautiful and peaceful, exaggerating the very harmony this method of social control was evolved to preserve.
Thus, if the bicameral theocracies of both individuals meeting have been unthreatened for their generation, both their directive gods would be composed of friendly voices. The result may have been a tentative exchange of gestural greetings and facial expressions that might grow to friendship, or even an exchange of gifts. For we can be very certain that the relative rarity of each other’s possessions (coming from different cultures) would make such an exchange mutually wished for.
This is probably how trade began. The beginning of such exchanges goes back to food sharing in the family group which grew into exchanges of goods and produce within the same city. Just as the harvested grain of the first agricultural settlements had to be doled out by certain god-given rules, so, as labor became more specialized, other products, wine, adornments, clothes, and the building of houses, all had to have their god-set equivalents to each other.
Trade between different peoples is simply the extension of such exchanging of goods to another kingdom. Texts from 2500 B.C. found in Sumer speak of such exchanging as far away as the Indus Valley. And the recent discovery of a new city site at Tepe Yahya, halfway between Sumer and the Indus Valley, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, whose artifacts clearly indicate that it was the main source of steatite or soapstone, used for utensils extensively in Mesopotamia, establish it as a center of exchange between these bicameral kingdoms.2 Small two-inch-square tablets have been found with counting marks on them which were probably simple exchange rates. All this was during a peaceful era in the middle of the third millennium B.C. I shall suggest later that extensive exchanging of goods between bicameral theocracies may in itself have weakened the bicameral structure that made civilization possible.
Now let us return to our two individuals from different cultures. We have been discussing what occurs in a peaceful world with peaceful gods. But what if the opposite were the case? If both came from threatened cultures, both would probably hear warlike hallucinated voices directing each to kill the other, whereupon hostilities would follow. But the same result would happen if either came from a threatened culture, putting the other into a posture of defense, as either the same god or another directed him as well to engage in fighting.
There is thus no middle ground in intertheocracy relations. Admonitory voices echoing kings, viziers, parents, etc., are unlikely to command individuals into acts of compromise. Even today, our ideas of nobility are largely residues of bicameral authority: it is not noble to whine, it is not noble to plead, it is not noble to beg, even though these postures are really the most moral of ways to settle differences. And hence the instability of the bicameral world, and the fact that during the bicameral era boundary relations would, I think, be more likely to end in all-out friendship or all-out hostility than anything between these extremes.
Nor is this the bottom of the matter. The smooth working of a bicameral kingdom has to rest on its authoritarian hierarchy. And once the priestly or secular hierarchy is disputed or upset, its effects would be exaggerated in a way that in a police state would not occur. Once cities become a certain size, as we have already seen, the bicameral control must be extremely precarious. The hierarchy of priests to sort out the various voices and give them their recognitions must have become a major preoccupation as bicameral cities grew in size. One jar to this balance of human and hallucinated authority, and, like a house of cards, the whole thing might collapse. As I have mentioned in both previous chapters, such theocracies occasionally did indeed suddenly collapse without any known external cause.
In comparison with conscious nations, then, bicameral nations were more susceptible to collapse. The directives of gods are limited. If on top of this inherent fragility, something really new occurred, such as a forced intermingling of bicameral peoples, the gods would be hard pressed to sort anything out in a peaceable way.
The Weakening of Divine Authority with Writing
These limitations of gods were both relieved and greatly exacerbated in the second millennium B.C. by the success of writing. On the one hand, writing could allow a civil structure such as that of Hammurabi to remain stable. But, on the other, it was gradually eroding the auditory authority of the bicameral mind. More and more, the accountings and messages of government were placed in cuneiform tablets particularly. Whole libraries of them are still being discovered. Letters of officials became a commonplace. By 1500 B.C., even miners high in the rocky wastes of Sinai incised their names and their relationships to the goddess of the mine on its walls.3
The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts of the brain. And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god’s commands or the king’s directives could be turned to or avoided by one’s own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of a god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience. This is extremely important.
The Failure of the Gods
This loosening of the god-man partnership perhaps by trade and certainly by writing was the background of what happened. But the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do. Or if they did, they led to death, or at the intimate least to an increase in the stress that physiologically occasioned the voice in the first place, until voices came in an unsolvable Babel of confusion.
The historical context of all this was enormous. The second millennium B.C. was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes occurred. Civilizations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunched itself sickly into its dark and bloody close.
It is a complex picture, the variables evoking these changes multileveled, the facts as we have them now not at all certain. Almost yearly they are revised as each new generation of archaeologists and ancient historians finds fault with its predecessors. As an approximation to these complexities, let us look at the two major elements of these upheavals. One was the mass migrations and invasions of peoples all around the eastern Mediterranean due to the volcanic eruption of Thera, and the other was the rise of Assyria, in three great phases, warring its way reign by reign westward to Egypt, northward to the Caspian, incorporating all of Mesopotamia, forming a very different kind of empire from any that the world had known before.