In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes elaborates an intriguing hypothesis about the roots of self-consciousness and human hierarchies. In broad strokes, the primitive human, given a “bicameral” neurological structure, could “hear” the voices of the gods through auditory hallucinations that put him in touch with a part of the brain that modern humans have relegated to the unconscious. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the idea of God can be dismissed as a simple hallucination, it would be rather a radically different organization of the nervous system. “The gods were in no sense ‘figments of the imagination of anyone,” says Jaynes, “they were man’s volition.”1
According to Jaynes, during the dawn of civilization, this hallucinatory faculty was centralized in the figure of a god-king who could listen to the divine commands and transmit them to his people. However, demographic explosion, the increasing complexity of human societies during the Bronze Age, and the appearance of writing considerably weakened the bicameral ability of sovereigns to listen to their gods. An example of this transition would be the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi who left a legal code of 282 pronouncements from a number of gods in a block of basalt seven and half feet high and covered in cuneiform script. Of Hammurabi’s code, says Jaynes, one should note “the cold economy of words in contrast with the bellicose blustering of the prologue and epilogue,”2 which would have been written directly by the king.
Indeed they sound like two very different ‘men’ and in the bicameral sense I think they were. They were two separately integrated organizations of Hammurabi’s nervous system, one of them in the left hemisphere writing the prologue and epilogue and standing in effigy at the side of the stele, and the other in the right hemisphere composing judgements. And neither of them was conscious in our sense.3
five centuries after Hammurabi’s reign the social and psychological conditions of Mesopotamia had changed radically, the bicameral structure that allowed the sovereign to rule in the name of the gods was about to collapse. Around 1230 BC, Tukulti-Ninurta I, an Assyrian tyrant—identified in the Old Testament as Nimrod—ordered the construction of an unprecedented stone altar. In the carving Tukulti-Ninurta 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.4
Tukulti-Ninurta's Altar
Far from the gods’ supervision, the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I was marked by excess. He was killed by his own son (1.1) and his more conservative nobles, who imprisoned him in the new city he had built on the other side of the Tigris and set it on fire, letting it burn to the ground.
The cuneiform tablets of the time testify to the absence of the gods and the disconsolation of men:
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
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.5
Tiglath-Pileser I, one of the successors of Tukulti-Ninurta, led an authentic reign of terror. “His exploits are well known from a large clay prism of monstrous boasts. His laws have come down to us in a collection of cruel tablets.”6
Since then all sovereigns have been heirs to the empty throne of Nimrod.
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