Is it conceivable that religion and ‘magic’ may provide the clues to why man developed so quickly over the past half-million years? It is true that we have no idea of what development may have taken place between the ‘cannibalised’ skulls of Peking man half a million years ago, and the Neanderthal ritual burial a hundred thousand years ago—unless the Riss Ice Age tools (already referred to) were used for ritual purposes. But the Neanderthal ochre mines reveal that some important development took place, and that that development was connected to religion and burial. (Did they, as Stan Gooch has suggested, revere red ochre because it was the colour of blood?)
And then we find Cro-Magnon man practising hunting magic, which must have given him a new sense of control over nature, as well as over his own life. He may well have regarded his shamans as gods, as primitive man of a later age (for example, at Great Zimbabwe in Africa and Angkor in Cambodia) regarded his priest-kings as gods. Magic was primitive man’s science, since it fulfilled the basic function of science, of offering answers to basic questions. He was no longer a passive animal, a victim of nature. He was trying to understand, and where important questions were concerned, he felt he
did
understand.
Another basic point must be emphasised. Neanderthal man’s burial rituals make it clear that he believed in life after death. And all shamans, from Iceland to Japan, see themselves as intermediaries between this world and the world of spirits. All over the world, shamans have declared that, in passing through the rituals and ordeals that qualified them as shamans, they entered the spirit world and talked with the dead. Shamans believe that their power comes from spirits and from the dead.
The importance of this observation lies in the fact that the priest-shaman feels that he possesses an understanding of both heaven and earth—a claim that even a modern cosmologist would be reluctant to make. He felt himself in a position of god-like knowledge, and the rest of the tribe certainly endorsed this view. Which suggests that 40,000 years ago, perhaps even 100,000 years ago, man had achieved a peculiarly ‘modern’ state of mind.
We know that this state of mind existed in ancient Egypt and ancient Sumer—in fact, every early civilisation we know about was a theocracy. If Hapgood is correct in believing that a worldwide maritime civilisation existed in 7000 BC, then it certainly shared the same world view. We have already seen that the Egyptians regarded their kingdom as an exact reflection of the kingdom of the heavens. And if Schwaller de Lubicz and Robert Bauval are correct in believing that the Sphinx was built by survivors of another civilisation around 10,500 BC, then this civilisation certainly held the same view about the intimate relationship between heaven and earth, the gods and man. And so, if Professor Arthur Posnansky is right, did the ancient Incas who built Tiahuanaco at about the same time.
When did this worldwide theocratic vision come to an end? It had certainly vanished by the time of Socrates and Plato. In a book called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(1976) Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes argues that the watershed occurred as recently as 1250 BC.
Jaynes’s starting point is the relatively new science of split-brain physiology—which, since this is of such central importance to this book, must be briefly explained.
The brain consists of two halves, which are virtually mirror-images of one another. But the functions of these two hemispheres are by no means identical. This applies particularly to the ‘top layer’ of the human brain, the cerebral cortex, which has developed most in the past half-million years.
Even in the nineteenth century, it had been recognised that the two halves of our brains have different functions. The speech function resides in the left half of the brain, and doctors observed that people who had received damage to the left-brain became inarticulate. The right side of the brain was obviously connected with recognition of shapes and patterns, so that an artist who had right-brain damage would lose all artistic talent. One man could not even draw a clover leaf; he put the three leaves of the clover side by side, on the same level.
Yet an artist with left-brain damage only became inarticulate; he was still as good an artist as ever. And an orator with right-brain damage could sound as eloquent as ever, even though he could not draw a clover leaf.
The left brain is also involved in logic and reason—for example, adding up a laundry list or doing a crossword puzzle. The right is involved in such activities as musical appreciation or recognising faces. In short, you could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist.
One of the odd facts of human physiology is that the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain, and vice-versa. No one quite knows why this is, except that it probably makes for greater integration. If the left brain controlled the left side and the right brain the right side, there might be ‘frontier disputes’; as it is, each has a foot firmly in the other’s territory.
If you removed the top of your head, the upper part of your brain—the ‘cerebral hemispheres’—would look like a walnut with a kind of bridge connecting the two halves. This bridge is a knot of nerves called the
corpus callosum
, or commissure. But doctors learned that there are some freaks who possess no commissure yet seem to function perfectly well. This led them to wonder if they could prevent epileptic attacks by severing the commissure. They tried it on epileptic patients and it seemed to work—the fits were greatly reduced, and the patient seemed to be unharmed. This led the doctors to wonder what the commissure was
for.
Someone suggested it might be for transmitting epileptic seizures; another suggested it might be to stop the brain sagging in the middle.
In the 1950s, experiments in America began to shed a flood of light on the problem. Someone noticed that if a ‘split-brain’ patient knocked against a table with his left side, he didn’t seem to notice. It began to emerge that the split-brain operation had the effect of preventing one half of the brain from learning what the other half knew. If a split
-
brain cat was taught some trick with one eye covered, then asked to do it with the other eye covered, it was baffled. It became clear that we literally have two brains.
Moreover, if a split-brain patient was shown an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right, then asked what he had just seen, he would reply: ‘Orange’. Asked to write what he had just seen with his left hand, he would reply ‘Apple’. A split-brain female patient who was shown an indecent picture with her right brain blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully: ‘I don’t know.’ The person who was doing the blushing was the one who lived in the right half of her brain.
She
lived in the left half.
This is true of all of us, though in left-handers, the brain hemispheres are the other way round and so the situation reversed. The person (a right-hander) you call yourself lives in the left half—the half that ‘copes’ with the real world. The person who lives in the right is a stranger.
It might be objected that you and I are not split-brain patients. That makes no difference. Mozart once remarked that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged, and all he had to do was to write them down. Where did they come
from
? Obviously, the right half of his brain, the ‘artist’. Where did they go
to
? The left half of his brain—where Mozart lived. In other words, Mozart was a split-brain patient. And if Mozart was, then so are the rest of us. The person we call ‘I’ is the scientist. The ‘artist’ lives in the shadows, and we are scarcely aware of his existence, except in moods of deep relaxation, or of ‘inspiration’.
Jaynes’s interest in the subject began when he experienced an auditory hallucination. Lying on a couch, brooding on a problem until he was mentally exhausted, he suddenly heard a voice from above his head say: ‘Include the knower in the known.’ Concerned about his sanity, Jaynes began researching hallucinations and, to his relief, discovered that about ten per cent of people have had them.
Jaynes then noticed that in a great deal of ancient literature—the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, the Bible, the
Iliad
—the heroes are always
hearing voices
—the voices of the gods. He also noted that these early heroes were completely lacking in what we would call an ‘inner self’. ‘We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to speculate upon.’
Jaynes is suggesting that what we call ‘subjectivity’—the ability to look inside yourself and say: ‘Now what do I think about this?’—
did not exist before about 1250 BC
.
The minds of these early people were, he thinks, ‘bicameral’—divided into two compartments. And when a primitive man was worried about what to do next, he heard a voice speaking to him, just as Jaynes did as he was lying on his couch. He thought it was the voice of a god (or of his chieftain, whom he regarded as a god). In fact, it came from his right brain.
According to Jaynes, self-awareness began to develop slowly after about 3000 BC, due to the invention of writing, which created a new kind of complexity. And during the great wars which convulsed the Middle East and Mediterranean in the second millennium BC, the old childlike mentality could no longer cope, and human beings were forced to acquire a new ruthlessness and efficiency in order to survive. ‘Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed.’ The man who survived would need the ability to reflect, and dissimulate his feelings.
According to Jaynes, the first sign of this ‘change of mind’ came in Mesopotamia. The Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurti had a stone altar built in about 1230 BC, which shows the king kneeling before the
empty
throne of the god, while in earlier carvings the king would be seen talking to the god. Now he is alone—trapped in his left brain. The god has vanished.
A cuneiform text of the period contains the lines:
One who has no god, as he walks along the street
Headache envelops him like a garment.
It is speaking of stress, nervous tension, loss of contact with the right brain, with its sense of ‘feeling at home in the world’. We seem to be observing the birth of ‘alienated man’. And according to Jaynes, it is at this point that cruelty entered history, and we see Assyrian carvings of men and women impaled and children beheaded.
It is not necessary to agree with this whole thesis to recognise its importance. The main objection to it is that many animals have been shown to possess self-awareness. One experimenter anaesthetised various animals, painted their faces red, and left them facing a large mirror. Most animals showed no interest whatever in their reflections, but chimpanzees and orang-utans were the exception—they inspected their faces with great interest, which would seem to indicate that they possess self-awareness. And if chimpanzees and orang-utans possess self-awareness, it is difficult to imagine even the most primitive humans entirely without it.
Moreover, our recognition that modern man is somehow ‘separated from himself’ would seem to imply that it is
we
who are ‘bicameral’, with the mind divided into two compartments, while primitive man was ‘unicameral’—as most animals probably are.
Yet in spite of these objections, it is obvious that Jaynes is correct in suggesting that some basic change came over the human race at a certain point in history, and that after that point, man became trapped in a narrower form of consciousness. Yet we compensated for the loss by learning to use reason to far greater effect, and our technological civilisation is the end product.
These insights bring us back to the mainstream argument of this book.
Schwaller de Lubicz was totally convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the Egyptian mentality and that of modern man—he returns to it repeatedly in book after book.
One of the most important forms of this difference can be seen in the hieroglyphic. Words, says Schwaller,
fix
their meaning. If you read the word ‘dog’, it evokes a vague, abstract notion of ‘dogginess’. But if you look at a picture of a dog—even a simple drawing—it is far more
alive
.
Everyone, as a child, has tried out those red and green goggles that cause pictures to turn three-dimensional. You look at the photograph with normal eyes, and it looks blurry, with red and green patches superimposed on one another. Then you pick up a cardboard pair of spectacles, with one eye made of red cellophane and one of green, and the photograph ceases to be blurry, and leaps into three dimensions. According to Schwaller, our words are like the blurry photograph. The hieroglyphic is an image that leaps into life. ‘Each hieroglyphic’, says Schwaller, ‘can have an arrested, conventional meaning for common usage, but it includes (1) all the ideas that can be connected to it, and (2) the possibility of personal comprehension.’
In a chapter called ‘Experimental Mysticism’ in
A New Model of the Universe
, Gurdjieff’s disciple Ouspensky describes how he used some unspecified method (probably nitrous oxide) to achieve ‘mystical’ consciousness. One of the characteristics of this state of mind was that every single word, every single thing, reminded him of dozens of other words and things. When he looked at an ashtray, it released such a flood of meanings and associations—about copper, copper-mining, tobacco, smoking, and so on—that he wrote on a piece of paper: ‘One could go mad from one ashtray.’
Similarly, Schwaller says: ‘Thus the hieroglyphics are really not metaphors. They express directly what they want to say, but the meaning remains as profound, as complex as the teaching of an object might be (chair, flower, vulture), if all the meanings that can be attached to it were to be considered. But out of laziness or habit, we skirt this analogic thought process and designate the object by a word that expresses for us but a single congealed concept.’