That the dead were the origin of gods is also found in the writings of those bicameral civilizations that became literate. In 23 Chariot burials complete with slaughtered horses and charioteers become more frequent toward the end of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century b.c. and continue into the Chou dynasty of the eighth century b.c. when they cease. Why all this? Unless the dead kings were thought to still live and need their chariots and servants because their speech was still heard?
24 Von Hagen, World of the Maya, p. 109.
25 Von Hagen, Realm of the Incas, p. 121.
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a bilingual incantation text from Assyria, the dead are directly called Ilani or gods.26 And on the other side of the world three millennia later, Sahagun, one of the earliest reporters of the Mesoamerican scene, reported that the Aztecs "called the place Teotihuacan, burial place of the kings; the ancients said: he who has died became a god; or when someone said — he who has become a god, meant to say — he has died."27
Even in the conscious period there was the tradition that gods were men of a previous age who had died. Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who preceded his own generation and became the "holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men."28 Similar references can be found up to four centuries later, as when Plato refers to heroes who after death become the demons that tell people what to do.29
I do not wish to give the impression that the presence of pots of food and drink in the graves of these civilizations is universal throughout all these eras; it is general. But exceptions here often prove the rule. For example, Sir Leonard Woolley, when he first started excavating the personal graves at Larsa in Mesopotamia (which date from about 1900 B.C.), was both surprised and disappointed by the poverty of their contents. Even the most elaborately built vault would have no furnishings other than a couple of clay pots at the tomb door perhaps, but nothing of the kind of thing found in graves elsewhere. The explanation came when he realized that these tombs were always underneath particular houses, and that the dead man of the Larsa Age needed no tomb furniture or large amounts of food because everything in the house was still at his disposal. The food and drink at the tomb door may have been like an emergency measure, so that when the dead man 'mixed5 with the family, he came forth in a kindly mood.
26 Heidel, The Gilgamesh E f i c , pp. 153, 196.
27 Quoted by Covarrubias, p. 123.
28 Hesiod, Works and Days, 12 of.
29 Republic, 469A; and also Cratylus, 398.
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Thus, from Mesopotamia to Peru, the great civilizations have at least gone through a stage characterized by a kind of burial as if the individual were still living. And where writing could record it, the dead were often called gods. At the very least, this is consistent with the hypothesis that their voices were still heard in hallucination.
But is this a necessary relationship? Could not grief itself promote such practices, a kind of refusal to accept the death of a loved one or a revered leader, calling dead persons gods as a kind of endearment? Possibly. This explanation, however, is not sufficient to account for the entire pattern of the evidence, the pervasion of references to the dead as gods in different regions of the world, the vastness of some of the enterprise as in the great pyramids, and even the contemporary vestiges in lore and literature of ghosts returning from their graves with messages for the living.
I D O L S T H A T S P E A K
A third feature of primitive civilization that I take to be indicative of bicamerality is the enormous numbers and kinds of human effigies and their obvious centrality to ancient life. The first effigies in history were of course the propped-up corpses of chiefs, or the remodeled skulls we have referred to earlier. But thereafter they have an astonishing development. It is difficult to understand their obvious importance to the cultures involved with them apart from the supposition that they were aids in hallucinating voices. But this is far from a simple matter, and quite different principles may be intertwined in the full explanation.
Figurines
The smallest of these effigies are figurines, which have been found in almost all of the ancient kingdoms, beginning with the
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first stationary settlements of man. During the seventh and sixth millennia B.C, they are extremely primitive, small stones with incised features or grotesque clay figures. Evidence of their importance in cultures of about 5600 B.C. is provided by the excavations at Hacilar in southwest Turkey. Flat standing female effigies, made of baked clay or stone with incised eyes, nose, hair, and chin were found in each house,30 as if, I suggest, they were its occupant's hallucinatory controls. The Amatrian and Gerzean cultures of Egypt, about 3600 B.C., had carved tusks with bearded heads and black 'targets' for eyes, each about six to eight inches and suitable to be held in the hand.31 And these were so important that they were stood upright in the grave of their owner when he died.
Figurines in huge numbers have been unearthed in most of the Mesopotamian cultures, at Lagash, Uruk, Nippur, and Susa.32
At Ur, clay figures painted in black and red were found in boxes of burned brick placed under the floor against the walls but with one end opened, facing into the center of the room.
The function of all these figurines, however, is as mysterious as anything in all archaeology. The most popular view goes back to the uncritical mania with which ethnology, following Frazer, wished to find fertility cults at the drop of a carved pebble. But if such figurines indicate something about Frazerian fertility, we should not find them where fertility was no problem. But we do.
In the Olmec civilization of the most fertile part of Mexico, the figurines are of an astonishing variety, often with open mouths and exaggerated ears, as might be expected if they were fash-30 Mellaart, p. 106; see also Clark and Piggott, p. 204.
31 See Flinders Petrie, Prehistoric Egypt (London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1920), pp. 27, 36. Even gods are sometimes shown using hand-held idols.
An Anatolian example may be found in Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 51; and a Mayan example on the north face of Stela F in A. P. Maudslay, Archaeology in Biologia Centrali-Americana (New York: Arte Primitivo, 1975), Vol. II, Plate 36.