What is the evidence for this change? Scholars of the ancient world, I think, would agree that the murals and sculptures of what I’m calling the bicameral world, that is, before 1ooo B.C., are chaste; depictions with sexual references are scarcely existent, although there are exceptions. The modest, innocent murals from bicameral Thera now on the second floor of the National Museum in Athens are good examples.
But with the coming of consciousness, particularly in Greece, where the evidence is most clear, the remains of these early Greek societies are anything but chaste.25 Beginning with seventh century B.C. vase paintings, with the depictions of ithyphallic satyrs, new, semidivine beings, sex seems indeed a prominent concern.
And I mean to use the word concern, for it does not at first seem to be simply pornographic excitement. For example, on one island in the Aegean, Delos, is a temple of huge phallic erections.
Boundary stones all over Attica were in the form of what are called herms: square stone posts about four feet high, topped with a sculptured head usually of Hermes and, at the appropriate height, the only other sculptured feature of the post, a penile erection. Not only were these herms not laughter-producing, as they certainly would be to children of today, they were regarded as serious and important, since in Plato’s Symposium “the mutila-tion of the herms” by the drunken general Alcibiades, in which he evidently knocked off these protuberances with his sword around the city of Athens, is regarded as a sacrilege.
25 Mos t of this informatio n and references can be foun d in Hans Licht , Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1 9 3 1 ) , or in G. Rattray T a y l o r , Sex in History ( N e w Y o r k : Vanguard Press, 1 9 5 4 ) .
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Erect phalli of stone or other material have been found in large numbers in the course of excavations. There were amulets of phalli. Vase paintings show naked female dancers swinging a phallus in a Dionysian cult. One inscription describes the measures to be taken even in times of war to make sure that the phallus procession should be led safely into the city. Colonies were obliged to send phalli to Athens for the great Dionysian festivals. Even Aristotle refers to phallic farces or satyr plays which generally followed the ritual performances of the great tragedies.
If this were all, we might be able to agree with older Victorian interpretations that this phallicism was merely an objective fertility rite. But the evidence from actual sexual behavior following the advent of conscious fantasy speaks otherwise. Brothels, supposedly instituted by Solon, were everywhere and of every kind by the fourth century B.C. Vase paintings depict every possible sexual behavior from masturbation to bestiality to human three-somes, as well as homosexuality in every possible form.
The latter indeed began only at this time, due, I suggest, in part to the new human ability to fantasize. Homosexuality is utterly absent from the Homeric poems. This is contrary to what some recent Freudian interpretations and even classical references of this period (particularly after its proscription by Plato in The Laws as being contrary to physis, or nature), seeking authorization for homosexuality in Homer, having projected into the strong bond-ing between Achilles and Patroclus.
And again I would have you consider the problem twenty-five hundred years ago, when human beings were first conscious and could first fantasize about sex, of how they learned to control sexual behavior to achieve a stable society. Particularly because erec-tile tissue in the male is more prominent than in the female, and that feedback from even partial erections would promote the continuance of sexual fantasy (a process called recruitment), we might expect that this was much more of a male problem than a female one. Perhaps the social customs that came into being for such control resulted in the greater social separation of the sexes (which
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was certainly obvious by the time of Plato) as well as an enhanced male dominance. We can think of modern orthodox Muslim societies in this respect, in which an exposed female ankle or lock of hair is punishable by law.
I certainly will admit that there are large vacant places in the evidence for what I am saying. And of course there are other affects, like anger becoming our hatred, or more positive ones like excitement with the magical touch of consciousness becoming joy, or affiliation consciousized into love. I have chosen anxiety, guilt, and sex as the most socially important. Readers of a Freudian persuasion will note that their theorizing could begin here. I hope that these hypotheses can provide historians more competent than myself with a new way of looking at this extremely important period of human history, when so much of what we regard as modern psychology and personality was being formed for the first time.
There is so much more to do, so many more bays and inlets of history and theory to explore. The tracking of ancient mentalities is an ongoing process that is leading to new insights and discoveries. Since I do not know Chinese, I could not address that part of the data in the book. But I am pleased that my associate Michael Carr, an expert in ancient Chinese texts, is making up for that lack in a series of definitive papers.26 The dating here is approximately the same as in Greece, which has led some historians to call this period the “axial age.”
Several scholars have explored the ramifications of the theory in literature, particularly Judith Weissman, whose book with the working title of Vision, Madness, and Morality, Poetry and the Theory of the Bicameral Mind is being completed as I am writing.27 Thomas Posey is continuing his studies of verbal halluci-26 Michael Carr, “Sidelights on Xin ‘Heart, Mind’ in the Shijing abstract in Proceedings of the 31st CISHAAN, Tokyo and Kyoto, 1983, 824-825, and his “Persona-tion of the Dead in Ancient China,” Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages, 1985, 1-107.
27 The title also of one of her papers: “Vision, Madness, and Morality: Poetry and
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nations, Ross Maxwell is doing further historical studies, and many others, such as D. C. Stove,28 I also thank for their support and encouragement,
P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y , 1 9 9 0
the Theory of the Bicameral Mind,” Georgia Review, 1979, 35:118-158. See also her “Somewhere in Earshot: Yeats’ Admonitory Gods,” Pequod, 1982, 74:16-31.
28 D. C. Stove, “The Oracles and Their Cessation: A Tribute to Julian Jaynes,”
Encounter, April 1989, pp. 30-38.
THE D R A W I N G S
On pages 40, 101, 104, 120 by the author; on page 142 by Christiane Gillièron after a photograph by J. Perrot; on page 152 from J. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (London: Thames and Hudson, 1 9 6 5 ) ; on page 154 by kind permission of Ekrem A k u r g a l ; on page 168
after Mellaart; on pages 170, 1 7 1 , 224 by Susan Hockaday; on page 199
by Carol Goldenberg; on page 172 by kind permission of Francis Robicsek; on page 192 redrawn from Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 9 4 8 ) .
T h e lines of verse on page 378 are from William Empson’s “Doctrinal Point” and “ T h e Last Pain,” in Collected Poems of William Empson.