Last night I got the following letter through my site. It’s a great topic, so I want to post my response to it here as well.

I feel somewhat indebted to you what i have just read. wow. i am a college student struggling through a poorly taught philosohpy class, and it seems if anyone could lend a helping hand- it must be you, given you appreciate and accept my request. I am writing a term paper on the differences and similarities of the polytheistic and monotheistic minds. I have a good idea of the direction i am taking- which is supported by what i have read of others oppinions on the subject- but i really want to spice up this paper with something origional, or at least soemthing the other 40 people in my class won’t come up with. If you have any oppinions or insights on this topic of the monotheistic and polytheistic minds i would be forever greatful- i hate this teacher and i want to give it to him good and the only way to do that is to get an A. Either way- i appreicate what i have read on your sight and look forward to whatever your response to this email may be.

Well you’re in luck. Not only is the polytheistic mind one of the areas I’m most interested in, but pissing off teachers has always been a passion of mine. So I’ll be happy to help out as best I can on both counts.

I have a variety of articles and posts on my site where you can find quotes from various authors and links to books and articles, but let me first give you a quick overview of the subject - as I understand it. Now, be forewarned that I’ve never actually seen anybody say all this together. It’s more like I’ve cobbled it together from bits and pieces of a variety of different authors. But here goes.

A guy named Julian Jaynes wrote a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, he operated under the hypothesis that modern consciousness, as we know it, is fundamentally different from ancient consciousness. I forget when exactly he says that it switched over - maybe about 3000 years ago. But he examines different documents and archaelogical evidence to support this idea. His whole theory revolves around the idea that the mind is bicameral, or split into halves. Ancient man, he believes, operated exclusively through one half of his brain. Through the other half, he heard the “voices of the gods,” and also of relatives and community leaders. Basically, he posits that this portion of the brain consisted of interiorized authority figures, which the other half of the brain consulted for guidance. As far as I know, Jaynes was mostly discredited or at least not taken seriously for this research. But he was brought back into semi-popularity with Daniel Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained (which I never actually read.

But I have read a lot of Carl Jung, and one of his students, Marie Louise Von Franz. From Von Franz, I discovered the concept of “complexes.” I think I first came across most of this in her book On Divination and Synchronicity. Complexes are sort of structures, patterns or centers of the mind which attract psychic energy (libido) to themselves. You’ll usually hear the term used in conjunction with Freud’s “Oedipal Complex”, in which a pattern involving erotic bonds between mother and son is imprinted onto one of these archetypal centers. According to Jung and Von Franz though, there are a limitless number of such complexes which may be formed or imprinted in the mind. When these complexes grow too strong or too large, they cause neurosis or psychosis, in which the mind becomes stuck repeating these patterns & resulting behaviors, or else suffers a total breakdown.

Interestingly, the ego is considered to be a complex as well. The difference between the ego and these other complexes is said to be “will power,” which Von Franz describes as being the available psychic energy which is at the disposal of the ego. Erich Neumann (a Jungian also, I think), in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness, postulates that the ego is just one of many complexes naturally existing within the human mind. He examines the history of religion and mythology as being the history of the growth and ascension of the ego to a position of prominence in the human mind. The book is a little dense and dated, I think, but its interesting nonetheless.

Von Franz also suggests that other complexes may reach such a strength where they acquire their own sort of willpower, and end up acting out on their own, without the awareness or authorization of the controlling ego-complex. This is termed an “autonomous complex”. She basically equates this with demonic possession, wherein a person behaves in a way which they are unable to control, and it almost feels like another entity has taken control over them. Examples of this in the modern world would be how we have “temporary insanity” pleas which are sometimes used in court, or “crimes of passion” in which a person’s willpower is recognized as having been temporarily overwhelmed through intense emotionality.

You can also look at the concept of possession in the Voodoo religion for more references in this area. In voodoo ceremonies, participants will go into a “trance” or “frenzy” through intense drumming, chanting, & dancing, at which point they will reach a psychic-emotional peak. At this point, the gods of their religion are said to “mount” these people, like a person mounts a horse. The god then acts out through their bodies, behaving according to the characteristics and attributes of that god.

In my opinion, this concept of possession by autonomous complexes is what Julian Jaynes was really after to describe the differences between modern & primitive man. Instead, he postulated that it was the biological structure of the brain. Here are a couple of quotes supporting this viewpoint. The first is from Erich Neumann, mentioned above.

Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity - plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc - of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood” these things. By means of ceremonial invocation, the ego activated the “help of the god” and thus conducted the flow of libido from the unconscious to the conscious system. The progressive development of consciousness assimilates the functional gods, who go on living as qualities and capacities of the conscious individual who plows, harvests, hunts and wages war as and when he pleases.

The next is from James Hillman, an “archetypal psychologist.” He started out as a Jungian, but ended up carving his own path, and he is the one who popularized the idea and concept of “polytheistic psychology,” which basically says that the mind if not a unified structure, like a monarchy, but rather a loosely connected network of smaller centers or complexes.

“Multiple personality is humanity in its natural condition. In other cultures these multiple personalities have names, locations, energies, functions, voices, angel and animal forms, and even theoretical formulations as different kinds of soul”.

The revelation that multiple personality disorder (now called “dissociative identity disorder”) ans schizophrenia are the naturally occurring states of the mind is an absolutely explosive one, and flies in the face of most contemporary psychological theory, with the exception of people in the anti-psychiatry movement, such as Thomas Szasz and RD Laing. These guys said that “mental illness” was largely a social construct to promote one type of brain & consciousness over another. There’s also a guy named David LeRoy Miller who is associated with this idea of polytheistic psychology. He wrote a book called The new polytheism: Rebirth of the gods and goddesses, but I’ve never read it. However, a quote I have from him suggests that most people naturally function in a polytheistic mental state, and this is what allows us to “multi-task” and to maintain a variety of conflicting roles in our lives.

I think the biggest and best question out of this whole thing goes back to Julian Jaynes’ wondering about when “modern consciousness” really began. He suggests that it was thousands of years ago. Myself, I would sooner look at the rise of monotheistic religions for indication of the development of modern consciousness. I think there’s a good possibility that the ego complex is more or less described by the Old Testament god, Yahweh. If you think about it, he possesses the same characteristics that we would normally classify as “egotistical.” He is vain, and desires us to worship him. He is easily angered, vengeful, etc.

Then, you could look at the development in Christianity of a trinitarian view of god as the Father, the Son & the Holy Ghost. I’ve never seen anybody go into it, but I’d be interested in comparing this to Freud’s concept of the mind as being composed of the Superego, Ego & the Id. The other thing you’d have to look at with Christianity is that throughout early history of the Church and the Middle Ages, the Saints were extremely important. I would like to look into how the Saints (autonomous complexes?) helped to maintain Christianity covertly as a polytheistic religion.

Then you have the Protestant Reformation which tried to once again simplify the nature of Christianity, and remove all the complexity and strange trappings from it. You’ll sometimes still hear Protestants denouncing Catholics as “pagans.” Perhaps this is the point at which ego-centered consciousness really started to take shape in the Western World. Of course, then you also have to look at what happened with the rise of Humanism, and Enlightenment values, all the way up to Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead.” So, the question becomes does modern man possess a polytheistic consciousness once again? Perhaps much of the culture wars that we are seeing right now in our country are clashes between people who have polytheistic vs. monotheistic consciousness. That would be my bet.

Also, the other thing I would look at, if I were going to do a really in depth analysis of this theory is how the ego is viewed in Eastern religions. Most notably, in Buddhist and Hindu meditation, the ego-complex is seen as something to be overcome and even to be extinguished altogether. This is decidedly different from the West’s relationship with an egotistical monotheist God.

Anyway, I hope that gives you some fuel for the fire. While I’m at it, I put together a list of all the pages on my site where I talk about this or topics related to this. Some are more closely related than others, so some digging may be involved. Best of luck!

1. Sitcoms as polytheism
2. Archetypes, Autonomous Complexes and the Polytheistic Mind
3. Polytheistic Psychology: Part 1
4. The Polytheistic Mind
5. Polytheistic Psychology, Part 2
6. Polytheistic Consciousness
7. Cults and the Bicameral Mind
8. Two control rooms of the mind
9. Yahweh/Demiurge/Ego
10. French Dissociation Psychology
11. Aleister Crowley, the Goetic Demons and the Pharmaceutical Industry
12. Centers of gravity in the dis-unified mind
13. Gods as functions of the mind
14. Marijuana linked to schizophrenia
15. Some relevant Timothy Leary links
16. An article by Erik Davis about the rise of neo-paganism and polytheistic psychology, Remains of the Deities.