My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
T h e good angel who walked beside me has departed.
This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The speaker is one Shubshi-Meshre-Shakkan (as we are told in the third tablet), a feudal lord possibly under Tukulti. He goes on to describe how, with the departure of his gods, his king becomes irreconciliably angry at him, how his feudal position of ruling a
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city is taken away, how he thus becomes a social outcast. The second tablet describes how, in this godless state, he is the target of all disease and misfortune. Why have the gods left him? And he catalogs the prostrations, the prayers, and the sacrifices which have not brought them back. Priests and omen-readers are consulted, but still
My god has not come to the rescue in taking me by the hand, Nor has my goddess shown pity on me by going at my side.
In the third tablet, he realizes that it is the almighty Marduk who is behind all that is happening to him. In dreams, the angels of Marduk appear to him in bicameral fashion, and speak messages of consolation and promises of prosperity from Marduk himself.
At this assurance, Shubshi is then delivered from his toils and illnesses and goes to the temple of Marduk to give thanks to the great god who "made the wind bear away my offenses."
The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time. Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven. And then find redemption in some return of the word of a god. These aspects of present-day religion find an explanation in the theory of the bicameral mind and its breakdown during this period.
The world had long known rules and dues. They were divinely ordained and humanly obeyed. But the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good man and of redemption from sin and divine forgiveness only begin in this uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances can no longer be heard.
The same dominant theme of lost gods cries out to us from the tablets known as The Babylonian Theodicy.2 This dialogue be-2 A fascinating problem is why the reference to gods at this time becomes plural even when it takes a singular verb. This occurs in contexts which in previous literature would have meant it was the personal god. This occurs in both the Ludlul,
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tween a sufferer and his advising friend is of an obviously later date, perhaps 900 B.C., but wails with the same pleas. Why have the gods left us? And since they control everything, why did they shower misfortune upon us? The poem also shimmers with a new sense of an individual or what we would call an analog self denoting a new consciousness. It ends with the cry which has echoed through all later history:
May the gods who have thrown me off give help, May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.
From here to the psalms of the Old Testament is no great journey. There is no trace whatever of such concerns in any literature previous to the texts I am describing here.
The consequences of the disappearance of auditory hallucinations from human mentality are profound and widespread, and occur on many different levels. One thing is the confusion of authority itself. What is authority? Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination, which we shall take up shortly. And as I have mentioned earlier, cruelty and oppression become the ways in which a ruler imposes his rule upon his subjects in the absence of auditory hallucinations. Even the king’s own authority in the absence of gods becomes questionable. Rebellion in the modern sense becomes possible.
Indeed this new kind of rebellion is what happened to Tukulti himself. He had founded a whole new capital for Assyria across the Tigris from Ashur, naming it godlessly after himself — Kar-Tukultininurta. But, led by his own son and successor, his more conservative nobles imprisoned him in his new city, put it to the torch, and burned it to the ground, his fiery death leading his reign II:12, 25, 33, as well as through the Theodicy, and later in the plural elohim of the Eloist contributions to the Old Testament. One should remember here the Muses of the Greeks and possibly the p ankush of Hittite tablets. Do and did hallucinations sound like choirs as their reliability is being neurologically weakened?
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into legend. (He glimmers in the murky history of the Old Testament as Nimrod3 [Genesis:1o] and in Greek myths as King Ninos.4) Disorders and social chaos had of course happened before. But such a premeditated mutiny and parricide of a king is impossible to imagine in the god-obedient hierarchies of the bicameral age.
But of much greater importance are the beginnings of some new cultural themes which are responses to this breakdown of the bicameral mind and its divine authority. History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past. And these new aspects of human history in response to the loss of divine authority are all developments and emphases out of the bicameral age.
Prayer
In the classical bicameral mind, that is, before its weakening by writing about 2500 B.C., I suggest that there was no hesitancy in the hallucinated voice and no occasion for prayer. A novel situation or stress, and a voice told you what to do. Certainly this is so in contemporary schizophrenic patients who are hallucinating. They do not beg to hear their voices; it is unnecessary. In those few patients where this does happen, it is during recovery when the voices are no longer heard with the same frequency.
But as civilizations and their interrelationships become more complex toward the end of the third millennium B.C., the gods are occasionally asked to respond to various requests. Usually, however, such requests are not what we think of as prayer. They consist of several stylized imprecations, such as the common ending of statue inscriptions:
3 E. A. Speiser, "In Search of Nimrod," in Oriental and Biblical Studies, Collected Writings of E. A. Sfeiser, J. J. Finkelstein and Mosh Greenberg, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967), pp. 41-52.
4 H. Lewy, "Nitokoris-Naqi'a," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1952, 11, 264-286.
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Whoever this image shall deface may Enlil his name destroy and his weapon break!5
or the kind of praising which Gudea bestows on his gods in the great cylinder inscriptions from Lagash. A notable exception, however, are the very real prayers of Gudea in Cylinder A to his divine mother, asking her to explain the meaning of a dream.
But this, like so much else with the enigmatic Gudea, is exceptional. Prayers as the central important act of divine worship only become prominent after the gods are no longer speaking to man “face to face” (as Deuteronomy 34:10 expresses it). What was new in the time of Tukulti becomes everyday during the first millennium B.C., all, I suggest, as a result of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. A typical prayer begins:
O lord, the strong one, the famous one, the one who knows all, splendid one, self-renewing one, perfect one, first-begotten of Marduk . . .
and so on for many more lines of titles and attributes, the one who holds cult-centers firm, the one who gathers to himself all cults . . .
perhaps indicating the chaos of the hierarchy of divinities when they could no longer be heard,
you watch over all men, you accept their supplications . . .