While it is possible that the sixteenth-century Inca and his hereditary aristocracy were walking through bicameral roles established in a much earlier truly bicameral kingdom, even as perhaps the Emperor Hirohito, the divine sun god of Japan, does to this day, the evidence suggests that it was much more than this.
The closer an individual was to the Inca, the more it seems his mentality was bicameral. Even the gold and jeweled spools which the top of the hierarchy, including the Inca, wore in their ears, sometimes with images of the sun on them, may have indicated that those same ears were hearing the voice of the sun.
15 As reported by Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of the Conquistador, quoted by V. W.
von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 113.
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But perhaps most suggestive of all is the manner in which this huge empire was conquered.16 The unsuspicious meekness of the surrender has long been the most fascinating problem of the European invasions of America. The fact that it occurred is clear, but the record as to why is grimy with supposition, even in the superstitious Conquistadors who later recorded it. How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?
It is possible that it was one of the few confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds, that for things as unfamiliar as Inca Atahualpa was confronted with — these rough, milk-skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from their scalps so that their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with avertive eyes, riding strange llamalike creatures with silver hoofs, having arrived like gods in gigantic huampus tiered like Mochican temples over the sea which to the Inca was unsailable — that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming from the sun, or from the golden statues of Cuzco in their dazzling towers. Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or to narratize out the deception of others,17 the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons. And as its people mechanically watched, this shipload of subjective men stripped the gold sheathing from the holy city, melted down its golden images and all the treasures of the Golden Enclosure, its fields of golden corn with stems and leaves all cunningly wrought in gold, murdered its living god and his princes, raped its unprotesting women, and, narratizing their Spanish futures, sailed away with the yellow metal into the subjective conscious value system from which they had come.
It is a long way from Eynan.
16 For a detailed readable recent account, see John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
17 There were no thieves in Cuzco and no doors: a stick crosswise in front of the open doorway was a sign that the owner was not in and nobody would enter.
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The burial of the important dead as if they still lived is common to almost all these ancient cultures whose architecture we have just looked at. This practice has no clear explanation except that their voices were still being heard by the living, and were perhaps demanding such accommodation. As I have suggested at Eynan in 1.6, these dead kings, propped up on stones, whose voices were hallucinated by the living, were the first gods.
Then as these early cultures develop into bicameral kingdoms, the graves of their important personages are more and more filled with weapons, furniture, ornaments, and particularly vessels of food. This is true of the very first chamber tombs all over Europe and Asia after 7000 B.C. and is elaborated to an extraordinary degree as bicameral kingdoms develop both in size and complexity. The magnificent burials of Egyptian pharaohs in a whole succession of intricately built pyramids are familiar to everyone (see next chapter). But similar emplacements, if less awesome, are found elsewhere. The kings of Ur, during the first half of the third millennium B.C., were entombed with their entire retinues buried, sometimes alive, in a crouched position around them as for service. Eighteen of such tombs have been found, their vaulted subterranean rooms containing food and drink, clothing, jewelry, weapons, bull-headed lyres, even sacrificed draft animals yoked to ornate chariots.18 Others, dating from slightly later periods, have been found at Kish and Ashur. In Anatolia, at Alaca Hliyiik, the royal graves were roofed with whole carcasses of roasted oxen to ease the sepulchral appetites of their motionless inhabitants.
Even the ordinary dead man in many cultures is treated as still living. The very oldest inscriptions on funerary themes are Mesopotamian lists of the monthly rations of bread and beer to be 18 See C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations, Vol. 2 (London and Philadelphia, 1934).
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given to the common dead. About 2500 B.C., in Lagash, a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2
measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.19
Some ancient Greek graves not only have the various appurtenances of life, but actual feeding tubes which seem to indicate that archaic Greeks poured broths and soups down into the livid jaws of a moldering corpse.20 And in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a painted krater or mixing bowl (numbered 14.130.15) which dates from about 850 B.C.; it shows a boy seemingly tearing his hair with one hand as with the other he stuffs food into the mouth of a corpse, probably his mother's. This is difficult to appreciate unless the feeder was hallucinating something from the dead at the time.
The evidence in the Indus civilizations21 is more fragmentary because of the successive coverings of alluvium, the rotting away of all their writings on papyrus, and the incompleteness of archaeological investigations. But the Indus sites so far excavated often have the cemetery next to the citadel in a high place with fifteen or twenty food-pots per dead person, consistent with the hypothesis that they were still felt to be living when buried.
And the Neolithic burials of the Yang-Shao cultures of China22, wholly undated except insofar as they precede the middle of the second millennium B.C., similarly show burials in plank-lined graves, the corpse accompanied by pots of food and stone tools.
19 This information is given on a cone by Urukagina, king of Lagash, who proceeded to reduce these amounts somewhat. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 151.
20 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 21 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), and, more extensively, his The Indus Civilization, 2nd ed., supplementary volume to The Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
22 See William Watson, Early Civilization in China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966)-, and also Chang Kwang-Chih, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).
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By 1200 B.C., the Shang dynasty has royal tombs with slaughtered retinues and animals so similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt a millennium earlier as to convince some scholars that civilization came to China by diffusion from the West.23
Similarly in Mesoamerica, Olmec burials from about 800 to 300 B.C. were richly furnished with pots of food. In the Mayan kingdoms, the noble dead were buried as if living in the plazas of temples. A chieftain’s tomb recently found under a temple at Palenque is as elaborately splendid as anything found in the Old World.24 At the site of Kaminal-juyu, dating A.D. 500, a chieftain was buried in a sitting position along with two adolescents, a child, and a dog for his company. Ordinary men were buried with their mouths full of ground maize in the hard-mud floors of their houses, with their tools and weapons, and with pots filled with drink and food, just as in previous civilizations on the other side of the world. Also I should mention the portrait statues of Yucatan that held the ashes of a deceased chief, the resculptured skulls of Mayapan, and the small catacombs for Andean commoners bound in a sitting position in the midst of bowls of chicha and the tools and things used in their lives.25 The dead were then called huaca or godlike, which I take to indicate that they were sources of hallucinated voices. And when it was reported by the Conquistadors that these people declared that it is only a long time after death that the individual ‘dies,’ I suggest that the proper interpretation is that it takes this time for the hallucinated voice to finally fade away.