2.4. A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia
ABOUT 1230 B.C., Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria, had a stone altar made that is dramatically different from anything that preceded it in the history of the world. In the carving on its face, Tukulti is shown twice, first as he approaches the throne of his god, and then as he kneels before it. The very double image fairly shouts aloud about this beggarly posture unheard of in a king before in history. As our eyes descend from the standing king to the kneeling king just in front of him, it is as emphatic as a moving picture, in itself a quite remarkable artistic discovery. But far more remarkable is the fact that the throne before which this first of the cruel Assyrian conquerors grovels is empty.
No king before in history is ever shown kneeling. No scene before in history ever indicates an absent god. The bicameral mind had broken down.
Hammurabi, as we have seen in II.2, is always carved standing and listening intently to a very present god. And countless cylinder seals from his period show other personages listening eye to eye or being presented to the just-as-real figures of humanshaped gods. The Ashur altar of Tukulti is in shocking contrast to all previous depictions of the relations of gods and men. Nor is it simply some artistic idiosyncrasy. Other altar scenes of Tukulti are similarly devoid of gods. And cylinder seals of Tukulti’s period also show the king approaching other nonpresent divinities, sometimes represented by a symbol. Such comparisons strongly suggest that the time of the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia is some time between Hammurabi and Tukulti.
This hypothesis is confirmed in the cuneiform remains of Tukulti and his period. What is known as the Epic of Tukulti Ninurta1 is the next clearly dated and well-preserved cuneiform document of note after Hammurabi. In the latter’s time there is no doubt of the gods’ eternal undeviant presence among men, directing them in their activities. But at the beginning of Tukulti’s somewhat propagandalike epic, the gods of the Babylonian cities are angry with the Babylonian king for his inattention to them. They therefore forsake their cities, leaving the inhabitants without divine guidance, so that the victory of Tukulti’s Assyrian armies is assured. This conception of gods forsaking their human slaves under any circumstances whatever is impossible in the Babylon of Hammurabi. It is something new in the world.
Moreover, it is found throughout whatever literature remains of the last three centuries of the second millennium B.C.
One who has no god, as he walks along the street,
Headache envelops him like a garment.
So one cuneiform tablet from about the reign of Tukulti.
If the breakdown of the bicameral mind involved the involuntary inhibition of temporal lobe areas of the right hemisphere, as we have conjectured earlier, this statement takes on an added interest.
Also from about the same period come the famous three tablets and a questionable fourth named for its first words, Ludlul bel nemeqiy usually translated as “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” “Wisdom” here is an unwarranted modern imposition. The translation should be something closer to ‘skill’ or ‘ability to control misfortune,’ the lord here being Marduk, the highest god of Babylon. The first completely readable lines of the damaged first tablet are:
My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.
This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The speaker is one Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the third tablet), a feudal lord possibly under Tukulti. He goes on to describe how, with the departure of his gods, his king becomes irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal position of ruling a city is taken away, how he thus becomes a social outcast. The second tablet describes how, in this godless state, he is the target of all disease and misfortune. Why have the gods left him? And he catalogs the prostrations, the prayers, and the sacrifices which have not brought them back. Priests and omen-readers are consulted, but still
My god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand,
Nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side.
In the third tablet, he realizes that it is the almighty Marduk who is behind all that is happening to him. In dreams, the angels of Marduk appear to him in bicameral fashion, and speak messages of consolation and promises of prosperity from Marduk himself. At this assurance, Shubshi is then delivered from his toils and illnesses and goes to the temple of Marduk to give thanks to the great god who “made the wind bear away my offenses.”
The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time. Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god. These aspects of present-day religion find an explanation in the theory of the bicameral mind and its breakdown during this period.
The world had long known rules and dues. They were divinely ordained and humanly obeyed. But the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good man and of redemption from sin and divine forgiveness only begin in this uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances can no longer be heard.
The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue between a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails with the same pleas. Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? The poem also shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an analog self denoting a new consciousness. It ends with the cry which has echoed through all later history:
May the gods who have thrown me off give help,
May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.
From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey. There is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I am describing here.
The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different levels. One thing is the confusion of authority itself. What is authority? Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination, which we shall take up shortly. And as I have mentioned earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations. Even the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable. Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.
Indeed this new kind of rebellion is what happened to Tukulti himself. He had founded a whole new capital for Assyria across the Tigris from Ashur, naming it godlessly after himself ? KarTukultininurta. But, led by his own son and successor, his more conservative nobles imprisoned him in his new city, put it to the torch, and burned it to the ground, his fiery death leading his reign into legend. (He glimmers in the murky history of the Old Testament as Nimrod3 [Genesis:10] and in Greek myths as King Ninos.4) Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before. But such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.
But of much greater importance are the beginnings of some new cultural themes which are responses to this breakdown of the bicameral mind and its divine authority. History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past. And these new aspects of human history in response to the loss of divine authority are all developments and emphases out of the bicameral age.
Prayer
In the classical bicameral mind, that is, before its weakening by writing about 2500 B.C., I suggest that there was no hesitancy in the hallucinated voice and no occasion for prayer. A novel situation or stress, and a voice told you what to do. Certainly this is so in contemporary schizophrenic patients who are hallucinating. They do not beg to hear their voices; it is unnecessary. In those few patients where this does happen, it is during recovery when the voices are no longer heard with the same frequency. But as civilizations and their interrelationships become more complex toward the end of the third millennium B.C., the gods are occasionally asked to respond to various requests. Usually, however, such requests are not what we think of as prayer. They consist of several stylized imprecations, such as the common ending of statue inscriptions:
Whoever this image shall deface may Enlil his name destroy and his weapon break!5
or the kind of praising which Gudea bestows on his gods in the great cylinder inscriptions from Lagash. A notable exception, however, are the very real prayers of Gudea in Cylinder A to his divine mother, asking her to explain the meaning of a dream. But this, like so much else with the enigmatic Gudea, is exceptional. Prayers as the central important act of divine worship only become prominent after the gods are no longer speaking to man “face to face” (as Deuteronomy 34:10 expresses it). What was new in the time of Tukulti becomes everyday during the first millennium B.C., all, I suggest, as a result of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. A typical prayer begins:
O lord, the strong one, the famous one, the one who knows all, splendid one, self-renewing one, perfect one, first-begotten of Marduk . . .
and so on for many more lines of titles and attributes,
the one who holds cult-centers firm, the one who gathers to himself all cults . . .
perhaps indicating the chaos of the hierarchy of divinities when they could no longer be heard,
you watch over all men, you accept their supplications . . .
The suppliant then introduces himself and his petition:
I, Balasu, son of his god, whose god is Nabu, whose goddess is Tashmeturn .. . I am one who is weary, disturbed, whose body is very sick, I bow before thee . . . O lord, Wise One of the gods, by thy mouth command good for me; O Nabu, Wise One of the gods, by thy mouth may I come forth alive.6
The general form of prayer, beginning with emphatic praise of the god and ending with a personal petition, has not really changed since Mesopotamian times. The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a thousand years earlier.
An Origin of Angels
In the so-called Neo-Sumerian period, at the end of the third millennium B.C., graphics, particularly cylinder seals, are full of ‘presentation’ scenes: a minor god, often female, introduces an individual, presumably the owner of the seal, to a major god. This is entirely consistent with what we have suggested was likely in a bicameral kingdom, namely that each individual had his personal god who seemed to intercede with higher gods on the person’s behalf. And this type of presentation or intercession scene continues well into the second millennium B.C.
But then a dramatic change occurs. First, the major gods disappear from such scenes, even as from the altar of TukultiNinurta. There then occurs a period where the individual’s personal god is shown presenting him to the god’s symbol only. And then, at the end of the second millennium B.C., we have the beginning of hybrid human-animal beings as the intermediaries and messengers between the vanished gods and their forlorn followers. Such messengers were always part bird and part human, sometimes like a bearded man with two sets of wings, crowned like a god, and often holding a kind of purse supposedly containing ingredients for a purification ceremony. These supposed personnel of the celestial courts are found with increasing frequency in Assyrian cylinder seals and carvings. In early instances, such angels, or genii, as Assyriologists more often call them, are seen introducing an individual to the symbol of a god as in the old presentation scenes. But soon even this is abandoned. And by the beginning of the first millennium B.C., we find such angels in a countless diversity of scenes, sometimes with humans, sometimes in various struggles with other hybrid beings. Sometimes they have the heads of birds. Or they are winged bulls or winged lions with human heads to act as wardens for such palaces as that at Nimrud in the ninth century or guarding the gates of Khorsabad in the eighth century B.C. Or, hawkheaded and broad-winged, they may be seen following around behind a king, with a cone which has been dipped in a small pail, as in a wall carving of Assurnasirpal in the ninth century B.C., a scene like the anointing of baptism. In none of these depictions does the angel seem to be speaking or the human listening. It is a silent visual scene in which the auditory actuality of the earlier bicameral act is becoming a supposed and assumed silent relationship. It becomes what we would call mythological.