Critique 2 – The Iliad
Critique: “… Jaynes’s take on The Iliad seems wrong. He stresses how Achilles vacillated over killing Agamemnon until the Goddess Athena told him to. But what was this vacillation if not the working of his own mind? Was Achilles vacillating because a god told him to vacillate? Further, Jaynes says the vacillating is depicted physiologically – “gut churning,” etc. – rather than mentally. But I think the Greeks understood such imagery as conveying something ultimately mental. I don’t see Achilles portrayed as lacking a self.”
Response: This last line is really just a statement of personal opinion or belief. The work of other scholars, such as the philosopher Jan Sleutels (see his “Greek Zombies” in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness) and Judith Weissman (see “Old Fathers and Absent Kings” in Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices) support Jaynes’s view. Hesitation before taking action is not necessarily indicative of introspection – animals frequently hesitate between two or more options. The important point to Jaynes’s theory is the general lack of introspection in the Iliad, and the prominent role of the gods in decision-making.
Furthermore, there is a great deal of evidence for bicameralism beyond the Iliad, much of which is outlined by Jaynes, as well as in later articles and follow-up works. If the Mycenaean Greeks were psychologically identical to us, there would be no need for gods, oracles, divination, etc. For example, see Herodotus, Book 6, and Phidippides’ encounter with the god Pan, which was taken literally (not metaphorically); accounts of gods in the Epic Cycle; etc. There are accounts of interactions with gods cross-culturally throughout the ancient world that are taken literally by those who experience them – the gods are not just a “literary device” in the Iliad. For example, the evidence for bicameralism in the Old Testament (see James Cohn, The Minds of the Bible), personal gods that were ubiquitous in Mesopotamia, the appeals to the gods in the Ludlul Bel Nemeqi, references to gods in The Epic of Gilgamesh and various Sumerian texts, etc. In The Intellectual Adventures of Ancient Man, Jacobsen notes, “The basic estate, the main temple with all its lands, was owned and run by the city god, who himself gave all important orders.” In Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria, Georges Contenau describes how “wars were all started at the gods’ command.” Jean Bottero, in Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, describes how each person had a “personal god or goddess;” “the gods constantly intervened everywhere and participated in everything”; and “the gods expressed their will through their ‘words’ (amatu) and their ‘commandments’ (qibitu).” For a modern example that is strikingly similar to what Jaynes describes in the ancient world, see Russell Hurlbert, “A Schizophrenic Woman who Heard Voices of the Gods” in Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind.
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.