32 For later rituals of giving them supernatural power, see H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), pp. 301-303.
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ioned as embodiments of heard voices with whom dialogue could be carried on.33
The explanation, however, is not simple. Figurines seemed to go through an evolution, just as did the culture of which they are a part. The early Olmec figurines, to stay with the same example, develop through their first period an exaggerated prog-nathism until they look almost like animals. And then, in the period of Teotihuacan, they are more refined and delicate, with huge hats and capes, painted with daubs of fugitive red, yellow, and white paint, looking much like Olmec priests. A third period of Olmec figurines has them more carefully modeled and realistic, some with jointed arms and legs, some with hollow reli-quaries in their torsos closed by a small square lid and containing other minute figurines, perhaps denoting the confusion of bicameral guidance that occurred just before the great Olmec civilization collapsed. For it was at the end of this period of a profusion of figurines, as well as of huge new half-finished open-mouth statues, that the great city of Teotihuacan was deliberately destroyed, its temples burned, its walls leveled, and the city abandoned, around A.D. 700. Had the voices ceased, resulting in the increased effigy making? Or had they multiplied into confusion?
Because of their size and number, it is doubtful if the majority of figurines occasioned auditory hallucinations. Some indeed may have been mnemonic devices, reminders to a nonconscious people who could not voluntarily retrieve admonitory experience, perhaps functioning like the quipu or knot-string literature of the Incas or the beads of rosaries of our own culture. For example, the Mesopotamian bronze foundation figurines buried at the corners of new buildings and under thresholds of doors are of three kinds: a kneeling god driving a peg into the ground, a basket carrier, and a recumbent bull. The current theory about them, that they are to pin down evil spirits beneath the building, 33 See Burland, The Gods of Mexico, p. 22f.; Bushnell, The First Americans, p. 37f.
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is scarcely sufficient. Instead it is possible that they were semi-hallucinatory mnemonic aids for a nonconscious people in setting the posts straight, in carrying the materials, or using oxen to pull the larger materials to the site.
But some of these small objects, we may be confident, were capable of assisting with the production of bicameral voices.
Consider the eye-idols in black and white alabaster, thin cracker-like bodies surmounted by eyes once tinted with malachite paint, which have been found in the thousands, particularly at Brak on one of the upper branches of the Euphrates, that date about 3000 B.C. Like the earlier Amatrian and Gerzean tusk idols One of many thousands of alabaster "eye idols" that can be
held in the hand. From about
3300 B.C., excavated at Brak on
an upper tributary of the Eu-
phrates. T h e stag is the symbol
of the goddess Ninhursag.
of Egypt, they are suitable to be held in the hand. Most have one pair of eyes, but some have two; some wear crowns and some have markings clearly indicating gods. Larger eye-idols made of terra cotta have been found at other sites, Ur, Mari, and Lagash; and, because the eyes are open loops, have been called spectacle-idols. Others, made of stone and placed on podiums and altars,34
are like two cylindrical doughnuts positioned a distance above an incised square platform that could be a mouth.
34 See M. E. L. Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia and Iran (New York : McGraw-Hill) 1965, Ch. 2.
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A Theory of Idols
Now this needs a little more psychologizing. Eye-to-eye contact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is indicative of the hierarchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But in humans, perhaps because of the much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks to it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and universal. The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory that has yet to be traced. It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superiors authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s eyes. There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the experience, and withal something of a diminution of consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it would enhance the hallucination of divine speech.
The eyes thus become a prominent feature of most temple statuary throughout the bicameral period. The diameter of the human eye is about 10 percent of the height of the head, this proportion being what I shall call the eye index of an idol. The famous group of twelve statues discovered in the Favissa of the temple of Abu at Tell Asmar,35 the symbols carved on their bases indicating that they are gods, have eye indices of as high as 18
percent — huge globular eyes hypnotically staring out of the un-recorded past of 5000 years ago with defiant authority.
Other idols from other sites show the same thing. A particularly beautiful and justly famous white marble head from Uruk36
has an eye index of over 20 percent, the sculpture showing that the eyes and the eyebrows were once encrusted with dazzling gems, the face colored, the hair tinted, the head part of a life-35 Illustrated in many general texts including Mallowan, pp. 43, 45.
36 See Mallowan, Early Mesopotamia, p. 55.
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sized wooden statue now dust. Around 2700
B.C. alabaster and calcite statues of fluffily skirted gods, rulers, and priests abounded
in the luxurious civilization on the middle
Euphrates called Mari, their eyes up to 18
percent of the height of the head and heavily
outlined with black paint. In the main temple
of Mari ruled the famous Goddess with the
Flowering Vase, her huge empty eye sockets
having once contained hypnotic gems, her
hands holding a tilted aryballos. A pipe from
a tank going within the idol allowed the ary-
ballos to overflow with water which streamed
down the idol's robe, clothing her lower parts with a translucent liquid veil, and adding a
sibilant sound suitable to be molded into
hallucinated speech. And then the famous
series of statues of the enigmatic Gudea, ruler of Lagash, about 2100 B.C., carved in the
hardest stone, with eye indices of approxi-
mately 17 or 18 percent.
The eye indices of temple and tomb sculp-
tures of pharaohs in Egypt are sometimes as
high as 20 percent. The few wooden statues
from Egypt that have remained show that
their enlarged eyes were once made of quartz
and crystal inserted in a copper surround. As
might be expected from its god-king type of
theocracy (see next chapter) idols in Egypt
do not seem to have played so prominent a
role as in Mesopotamia.
Few examples of Indus stone sculpture
survive, but these few show pronounced eye
indices of over 20 percent.37 No idols are
37 See, for example, the illustrations in Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley.
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