While I don’t really agree with all the conclusions in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, I think Julian Jaynes makes some interesting points. Basically, the premise of the book is that consciousness, “as we know it,” is a relatively recent development within the human mind. He postulates that it only developed within maybe the past 3 or 4 thousand years, or something like that. And that before that time, most people were sort of on autopilot. You’d have a handful of leaders in a group, who had ego consciousness, who equated themselves with the gods. And then you had everybody else, who operated according to whatever instructions their god-king gave.

That much, anyway, makes a good degree of sense to me. With slight variation, I’m willing to accept that. But then he launches into this big thing about brain hemispheres (the bicameral - “two house” - mind). And he says that in one hemisphere of their mind, the people “heard” the voice of their god-king, as though they had a miniature of him inside them. My main problem with this theory is that he’s looking at it from a structural standpoint of the brain, rather than an archetypal one. If you rearranged the whole thing about Jung’s idea of competing complexes within the mind, and threw in some ideas about polytheistic psychology, then I’m much more willing to accept this idea. Especially if you start dabbling in the idea that the natural state of the human mind is roughly akin to what we now might call schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder.

But I’ll get back to that in more detail some other time. I just wanted to use all that stuff above as a preface to an article which I found, and would like to quote from a little bit here. He talks about Jaynes’s ideas, and how they are played out in modernity in the form of cults. This author contends that cults are basically a throw-back to an archaic state of the mind. Again, I don’t agree with all of his conclusions and processes, but he has some interesting things to say that I want to hang onto.

… While cult members are invariably convinced that they represent the future of consciousness, it is much more likely that they represent something akin to the regressive, degenerate phenomenon Erich Neumann referred to as “recollectivisation”. While they are clearly a pathological version of whatever they represent, they appear to be at least an attempt at a regressive return to an archaic psychosocial organisation.

… Cults as a rule at least aspire to something akin to a state of participation mystique. Cult members stress their sameness, unity, and unquestioned obedience to their all-wise, divine or at least superhuman leader. Individual characteristics of any kind, especially desire or opinion, is uniformly discouraged and viewed as sinful rebellion. Just as the historical record makes plain was the case in the days of the God-King, the leader of the cult is the only one who is supposed to have will, desire, critical thought and so forth. The cult leader assumes all of the privileges and responsibilities of egoic consciousness for the cult. The members are expected to be expendable, interchangeable units to be disposed of as needed by the God-King in the furtherance of his goals, which are by definition the goals of the cult and all cult members. It is a social structure perhaps more akin to the social insects than to ordinary contemporary industrial culture.

The modern cult clearly aspires to but probably does not in general achieve a fully collectivised pre-egoic state for the members of the flock. In modern cults, concepts of sin and punishment are still required to keep rogue elements at bay. Disobedience is at least a theoretical option for present-day cult members, coming as they do from modern individualist culture. According to Jaynes, in the genuine archaic pre-egoic consciousness, disobedience was not possible because the masses were not conscious enough to conceive that they could want to do anything at variance with the commands spoken by the Gods. …

Right, so, one of the main reasons I don’t fully agree with the article here, is that I think it’s actually being applied too narrowly. In fact, this sounds like a description of society at large, rather than just a “cult.” I mean, it just sounds too much like the nonsense that is going on today in America under Dictator-for-Life Bush. To me, this is one of the biggest mistakes in a lot of this sort of semi-psychological writing: when people attribute things as belonging only to a “primitive” or “archaic” state of mind.

Certainly there were important elemental differences between their culture and ours, but there is this air in most of this writing which says, “In our modern scientific world, we’ve progressed so far beyond all that primitive hocus pocus.” I don’t think we really have. After all, I read once that there was only something like 80 generations of human beings separating us from the Ancient Greeks. Our cultural software may be different, but the basic biological hardware and operating system underlying everything are pretty much the same.

And science is just one more in a long string of religious story-systems. “But science is true! It’s provable!” Exactly. That’s exactly what you believe with all your heart when you’re thoroughly indoctrinated into a religion. Just like this article I quoted above says, “the masses were not conscious enough to conceive that they could want to do anything at variance with the commands spoken by the Gods.”

Hell, we’re barely different than that nowadays. Which makes me really wonder the bigger question. What if, as Jaynes says, that consciousness “as we know it” was a late development in the human mind? But not 3-4,000 years ago. What if we still aren’t totally conscious? What if only some of us really are, and others of us are just trained to think we are. But really, all we’re doing is running around following the commands of our cultic god-king?