2.1. Gods, Graves, and Idols
Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else. Not a very inspiring definition, perhaps, but a true one. We have hypothesized that it is the social organization provided by the bicameral mind that made this possible. In this and the ensuing chapter, I am attempting to integrate without excessive particularization the worldwide evidence that such a mentality did in fact exist wherever and whenever civilization first began.
While the matter is in much current debate, the view I am adopting is that civilization began independently in various sites in the Near East, as described in the previous chapter, then spread along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, into Anatolia and the valley of the Nile; then into Cyprus, Thessaly, and Crete; and then somewhat later by diffusion into the Indus River valley and beyond, and into the Ukraine and Central Asia; then, partly by diffusion and partly spontaneously, along the Yangtze; then independently in Mesoamerica; and again, partly by diffusion and partly independently, in the Andean highlands. In each of these areas, there was a succession of kingdoms all with similar characteristics that, somewhat prematurely, I shall call bicameral. While there were certainly other bicameral kingdoms in the history of the world, perhaps along the margins of the Bay of Bengal or the Malay peninsular, in Europe, certainly in central Africa by diffusion from Egypt, and possibly among the North American Indians during the so-called Mississippi Period, too little has been recovered of these civilizations to be of assistance in checking out the main hypothesis.
Given the theory as I have outlined it, I suggest that there are several outstanding archaeological features of ancient civilizations which can only be understood on this basis. These silent features are the subject of this chapter, the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt being reserved for the next.
THE HOUSES OF GODS
Let us imagine ourselves coming as strangers to an unknown land and finding its settlements all organized on a similar plan: ordinary houses and buildings grouped around one larger and more magnificent dwelling. We would immediately assume that the large magnificent dwelling was the house of the prince who ruled there. And we might be right. But in the case of older civilizations, we would not be right if we supposed such a ruler was a person like a contemporary prince. Rather he was an hallucinated presence, or, in the more general case, a statue, often at one end of his superior house, with a table in front of him where the ordinary could place their offerings to him.
Now, whenever we encounter a town or city plan such as this, with a central larger building that is not a dwelling and has no other practical use as a granary or barn, for example, and particularly if the building contains some kind of human effigy, we may take it as evidence of a bicameral culture or of a culture derived from one. This criterion may seem fatuous, simply because it is the plan of many towns today. We are so used to the town plan of a church surrounded by lesser houses and shops that we see nothing unusual. But our contemporary religious and city architecture is partly, I think, the residue of our bicameral past. The church or temple or mosque is still called the House of God. In it, we still speak to the god, still bring offerings to be placed on a table or altar before the god or his emblem. My purpose in speaking in this objective fashion is to defamiliarize this whole pattern, so that standing back and seeing civilized man against his entire primate evolution, we can see that such a pattern of town structure is unusual and not to be expected from our Neanderthal origins.
From Jericho to Ur
With but few exceptions, the plan of human group habitation from the end of the Mesolithic up to relatively recent eras is of a god-house surrounded by man-houses. In the earliest villages,1 such as the excavated level of Jericho corresponding to the ninth millennium B.C., such a plan is not entirely clear and is perhaps debatable. But the larger god-house at Jericho, surrounded by what were lesser dwellings, at a level corresponding to the seventh millennium B.C., with its perhaps columned porchway leading into a room with niches and curvilinear annexes, defies doubt as to its purpose. It is no longer the tomb of a dead king whose corpse is propped up on stones. The niches housed nearly life-sized effigies, heads modeled naturalistically in clay and set on canes or bundles of reeds and painted red. Of similar hallucinogenic function may have been the ten human skulls, perhaps of dead kings, found at the same site, with features realistically modeled in plaster and white cowrie shells inserted for eyes. And the Hacilar culture in Anatolia of about 7000 B.C. also had human crania set up on floors, suggesting similar bicameral control to hold the members of the culture together in their food-producing and protection enterprise.
H?y?k, of which only one or two acres have been as yet excavated. Here the arrangement was slightly different. Excavations at levels dating from about 6000 B.C. show that almost every house had a series of four to five rooms nestled around a god’s room. Numerous groups of statues in stone or baked clay have been found within these god’s rooms.
At Eridu, five centuries later, god-houses were set on mud-brick platforms, which were the origin of ziggurats. In a long central room, the god-idol on a platform at one end looked at an offering table at the other. And it is this Eridu sequence of sanctuaries up to the Ubaid culture in southern Iraq which, spreading over the whole of Mesopotamia around 4300 B.C., lays the foundations of the Sumerian civilization and its Babylonian successor which I consider in the next chapter. With cities of many thousands came the building of the huge monumental god-houses which characterize and dominate cities from then on, perhaps being hallucinogenic aids to everyone for miles around. To stand even today under such mountainous ziggurats as that of Ur, still heaving up above the excavated ruins of its once bicameral civilization, with its ramps of staircases rising to but half the height it once had, and to imagine its triple tier of temples on top rising into the sun is to feel the grip such architecture alone can have upon one’s mentality.
A Hittite Variation
The Hittites in the center of their capital, Hattusas, now Boghazkoy in central Turkey,2 had four huge temples with great granite sanctuaries that projected beyond the main fagades of the limestone walls to obtain lateral lighting for some huge idols.
But, perhaps taking the place of a ziggurat, that is, of a high place that could be seen wherever lands were being farmed, is the beautiful outdoor mountain shrine of Yazilikaya just above the city, its sanctuary walls streaming with reliefs of gods.3 That the mountains themselves were hallucinatory to the Hittites is indicated by relief sculptures still clearly visible on the rocks within the sanctuary, showing the usual stereotyped drawings of mountains topped with the heads and headdresses used for gods. As the Psalmist sings, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help.”
On one of the faces of this mountain temple, the robed king is carved in profile. Just behind him in the stone relief towers a god with a much loftier crown; the god’s right arm is outstretched, showing the king the way, while the god’s left arm is hugged around the king’s neck and grasps the king’s right wrist firmly. It is testament to an emblem of the bicameral mind.
The depicting of gods in long files, unique I think to the Hittites, suggests a solution to an old problem in Hittite research. This is the translation of the important word pankush. Scholars originally interpreted it as signifying the whole human community, perhaps some sort of national assembly. But other texts have forced a revision of this to some kind of an elite. A further possibility, I suggest, is that it indicates the whole community of these many gods, and, particularly, the choice-decisions in which all the bicameral voices were in agreement. The fact that during the last century or so of Hittite rule, from around 1300 B.C., no mention of the pankush appears in any text could indicate their collective silence and the beginning of the troublous change toward subjectivity.
Olmec and Maya
The earliest bicameral kingdoms of America are also characterized by these huge, otherwise useless centrally located buildings: the queer-shaped clumsy Olmec pyramid at La Venta of about 500 B.C. with its corridor of lesser mounds smothering mysterious jaguar-face mosaics; or the rash of great temple pyramids constructed about 200 B.C.4 The largest of them, the gigantic pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan (literally “Place of the Gods” has a greater cubic content than any in Egypt, being an eighth of a mile long on each side, and higher than a twenty-story building.5 A room for a god on its summit was reached by systems of steep stairs. And on top of the god-room, tradition states, there was a gigantic statue of the sun. A processional way flanked by other pyramids leads toward it, and, for miles around on the Mexican plateau, one can still see the remains of a great city, houses for priests, numerous courtyards, and smaller buildings, all of one story so that from anywhere in the city one could see the great pyramidal houses of gods.6
Beginning somewhat later, but co-temporaneous with Teotihuacan, are the many Maya cities in the Yucatan peninsula7 showing the same bicameral architecture, each city centering upon steeply rising pyramids topped with god-houses and richly decorated with Olmec-type jaguar masks and other murals and carvings, in which an endless variety of dragons with human faces crawl fiercely through the intricate stone decoration. Exceptionally interesting is the fact that some of the pyramids contain burials as in Egypt, perhaps indicating a phase in which the king was a god. In front of these Mayan pyramids are usually stelae carved with the figures of gods and glyphic inscriptions which have yet to be fully understood. Since this kind of writing is always in connection with religious images, it is possible that the hypothesis of the bicameral mind may assist in unwinding their mysteries.
I also think that the curious unhospitable sites on which Mayan cities were often built and their sudden appearance and disappearance can best be explained on the basis that such sites and movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing ? as was Jahweh sometimes to his people, or Apollo (through the Delphic Oracle) to his, by siding with the invaders of Greece (see III.1, III.2, n. 12).
Occasionally, there are actual depictions of the bicameral act. On two stone reliefs from Santa Lucia Cotz umalhaupa, a non-Mayan site on the Pacific slope of Guatemala, this is very clearly the case. A man is shown prostrate on the grass being spoken to by two divine figures, one half-human, half-deer, and the other a death figure. That this is an actual bicameral scene is clear from modern observations of the so-called chilans or prophets of the area. Even today, they hallucinate voices while face down in this identical posture, although it is thought by some that such contemporary hallucinations are aided by eating peyote.8
Andean Civilizations
The half dozen or so civilizations of the Andes that precede the Inca are even more lost in the overgrowth of time.9 The earliest, Kotosh, dating before 1800 B.C., is centered about a rectangular god-house built on a stepped platform 25 feet high on a large mound, where it was surrounded by the remains of other buildings. Its interior walls had a few tall rectangular niches in each, in one of which was a pair of crossed hands modeled in plaster, perhaps part of a larger idol, now dust. How similar to Jericho five millennia earlier!
While it is possible that Kotosh was the work of migrants from Mexico, the next civilization, the Chavin, beginning about 1200 B.C., shows decided Olmec features: the cultivation of maize, a number of pottery characteristics, and the jaguar theme in its religious sculpture. At Chavin itself in the north highlands, a great platformlike temple, honeycombed with passages, houses an impressive idol in the form of a prismatic mass of granite carved in low relief to represent a human being with a jaguar head.10 Following them, the Mochicas,11 ruling the northern Peruvian desert from A.D. 400 to 1000, built huge pyramids for their gods, towering in front of walled enclosures which probably contained the cities, as can be seen today in the Chicama valley near Trujillo.12
Then on the bleak uplands near Lake Titicaca from A.D. 1000 to 1300 came the great empire of Tiahuanaco, with an even larger stone-faced pyramid, set about with giant pillarlike gods weeping tears (why?) of condor heads and snake heads.13
Then the Chimu, on an even vaster scale. Its capital of Chan-Chan, covering eleven square miles, was walled off into ten great compounds, each a city in miniature with its own pyramid, its own palacelike structure, its own irrigated areas, reservoirs, and cemeteries. Precisely what these neighboring separated walled compounds could mean in the light of the bicameral hypothesis is a fascinating problem for research.