In some texts it is said that the king makes a man's ka, and some scholars translate ka in this sense as fortune.17 Again, this is a modern imposition. A concept such as fortune or success is impossible in the bicameral culture of Egypt. What is meant here according to my reading is that the man acquires an admonitory hallucinated voice which then can direct him in his work. Frequently the ka crops up in names of Egyptian officials as did the ili with Mesopotamian officials. Kaininesut, "my ka belongs to the king," or Kainesut, "the king is my ka."18 In the Cairo Museum, stela number 20538 says, "the king gives his servants Ka's and feeds those who are faithful."
The ka of the god-king is of particular interest. It was heard, I suggest, by the king in the accents of his own father. But it was 16 Ibid., p. 68.
17 But see Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (Oxford, 1957), p. 172, note 12.
18 Frankfort, p. 68; cf. also John A. Wilson, "Egypt: the values of life," Ch. 4
in Frankfort, et al., p. 97.
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heard in the hallucinations of his courtiers as the king's own voice, which is the really important thing. Texts state that when a king sat at a meal and ate, his ka sat and ate with him. The pyramids are full of false doors, sometimes simply painted on the limestone walls, through which the deceased god-king's ka could pass out into the world and be heard. It is only the king's ka which is pictured on monuments, sometimes as a standard bearer holding the staff of the king's head and the feather, or as a bird perched behind the king's head. But most significant are the representations of the king's ka as his twin in birth scenes. In one such scene, the god Khnum is shown forming the king and his ka on his potter's wheel. They are identical small figures except that the ka has his left , hand pointing to his mouth, obviously suggesting that he is what we might describe as a persona of speech.19
Perhaps evidence for a growing complexity in all this are several texts from the eighteenth dynasty or 1500 B.C. onward, The god Khnum forming the
future king with the right hand
and the king's ka with the left
on the potter's wheel. Note that
the ka points with its left hand
to its mouth, indicating its
verbal function. The lateraliza-
tion throughout is in accordance
with the neurological model pre-
sented in I.5.
19 Illustrated in Figure 23 in Frankfort.
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which casually say that the king has fourteen ka's! This very perplexing statement may indicate that the structure of the government had become so complicated that the king's hallucinated voice was heard as fourteen different voices, these being the voices of intermediaries between the king and those who were carrying out his orders directly. The notion of the king having fourteen ka's is inexplicable by any other notion of what a ka is.
Each king then is Horus, his father dead becoming Osiris, and has his ka, or in later ages, his several ka's, which could best be translated now as voice-persona. An understanding of this is essential for the understanding of the entire Egyptian culture since the relation of king, god, and people is defined by means of the ka. The king's ka is, of course, the ka of a god, operates as his messenger, to himself is the voice of his ancestors, and to his underlings is the voice they hear telling them what to do. And when a subject in some of the texts says, "my ka derives from the king" or "the king makes my ka" or "the king is my ka," this should be interpreted as an assimilation of the person's inner directing voice, derived perhaps from his parents, with the voice or supposed voice of the king.
Another related concept in ancient Egyptian mentality is the ba. But at least in the Old Kingdom, the ba is not really on the same level as the ka. It is more like our common ghost, a visual manifestation of what auditorily is the ka. In funerary scenes, the ba is usually depicted as a small humanoid bird, probably because visual hallucinations often have flitting and birdlike movements. It is usually drawn attendant on or in relationship to the actual corpse or to statues of the person. That after the fall of the more king-dominated Old Kingdom, the ba takes on some of the bicameral functions of the ka is indicated by a change in its hieroglyph from a small bird to one beside a lamp (to lead the way), and by its auditory hallucinatory role in the famous Papyrus Berlin 3024, which dates about 1900 B.C. All translations of this astounding text are full of modern mental impositions, in-
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eluding the most recent,20 otherwise a fascinating chore of scholarship. And no commentator has dared to take this "Dispute of a man with his Ba" at face value, as a dialogue with an auditory hallucination, much like that of a contemporary schizophrenic.
T H E T E M P O R A L C H A N G E S I N
T H E O C R A C I E S
In the previous chapter, I stressed the uniformities among bicameral kingdoms, the large central worshiping places, treatment of the dead as if they were still living, and the presence of idols. But over and beyond these grosser aspects of ancient civilizations are many subtleties which space has not permitted me to mention.
For just as we know that cultures and civilizations can be strikingly different, so we must not assume that the bicameral mind resulted in precisely the same thing everywhere it occurred. Differences in populations, ecologies, priests, hierarchies, idols, in-dustries, all would, I think, result in profound differences in the authority, frequency, ubiquity, and affect of hallucinatory control.
In this chapter, on the other hand, I have been making my emphasis the differences between the two greatest of such civilizations. But I have been speaking of them as if unchanging over time. And this is untrue. To give the impression of a static stability through time and space of bicameral theocracies is entirely mistaken. And I would like to redress the balance in this last section of this chapter by mentioning the changes and differences in the structure of bicameral kingdoms.
The Complexities
The most obvious fact of theocracies is their success in a biological sense. Populations were continually increasing. As 20 Hans Goedicke, The Report About the Dispute of a Man with his Ba, Papyrus Berlin 3024 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970).
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they did so, problems of social control by hallucinations called gods became more and more complex. The structuring of such control in a village of a few hundred back at Eynan in the ninth millennium B.C. is obviously enormously different from what it was in the civilizations we have just discussed with their hierarchical layer of gods, priests, and officers.
Indeed, I suggest that there is a built-in periodicity to bicameral theocracies, that the complexities of hallucinatory control with their very success increase until the civil state and civilized relations can no longer be sustained, and the bicameral society collapses. As I noted in the previous chapter, this occurred many times in the pre-Columbian civilizations of America, whole populations suddenly deserting their cities, with no external cause, and anarchically melting back into tribal living in surrounding terrain, but returning to their cities and their gods a century or so later.
In the millennia we have been looking at in this chapter, the complexities were apparently mounting. Many of the ceremonies and practices I have described were initiated as ways of reducing this complexity. Even in writing, the first pictographs were to label and list and sort out. And some of the first syntactical writing speaks of the overpopulation. The Sumerian epic known to us as Atrahasis bursts open with the problem: T h e people became numerous . . .