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the lively scene added into the Odyssey as Rook u. But the psyche here is somewhat the same, a something of a man which leaves the body at death. And what the Hades view of psyche may be is a composite of the Pythagorean teaching with the older view of the buried dead in Greek antiquity.
All this curious development of the sixth century B.C. is extremely important for psychology. For with this wrenching of psyche = life over to psyche = soul, there came other changes to balance it as the enormous inner tensions of a lexicon always do.
The word soma had meant corpse or deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun.
But the matter does not stop there. In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions.
So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology.
This has been a long and technical chapter that can be briefly summarized in a metaphor. At the beginning, we noted that archaeologists, by brushing the dust of the ages from around the
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broken shards of pottery from the period of the Dorian invasions, have been able to reveal continuities and changes from site to site, and so to prove that a complex series of migrations was occurring. In a sense, we have been doing the same thing with language throughout this chapter. We have taken broken-off bits of vocabulary, those that came to refer to some kind of mental function, and by their contexts from text to text, attempted to demonstrate that a huge complex series of changes in mentality was going on during these obscure periods that followed the Dorian invasions in Greece.
Let no one think these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes.
The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.
I have now completed that part of the story of Greek consciousness that I intended to tell. More of it could be told, how the two nonstimulus-bound hypostases come to overshadow the rest, how nous and psyche come to be almost interchangeable in later writers, such as Parmenides and Democritus, and take on even new metaphor depths with the invention of logosy and of the forms of truth, virtue, and beauty.
But that is another task. The Greek subjective conscious mind, quite apart from its pseudostructure of soul, has been born out of song and poetry. From here it moves out into its own history, into the narratizing introspections of a Socrates and the spatialized classifications and analyses of an Aristotle, and from there into Hebrew, Alexandrian, and Roman thought. And then into the history of a world which, because of it, will never be the same again.
CHAPTER 6
The Moral Consciousness
of the Khabiru
THE THIRD great area where we can look at the development of consciousness is certainly the most interesting and profound. All through the Middle East toward the end of the second millennium B.C., there were large amorphous masses of half-nomadic peoples with no fixed dira or grazing ground. Some were the refugees from the Thera destruction and the terrible Dorian invasions which followed. One cuneiform tablet specifically speaks of migrations pouring down through the Lebanon.
Others were probably refugees from the Assyrian invasions and were joined by the Hittite refugees when that empire fell to a further invasion from the north. And still others may have been the resistant bicameral individuals of the cities who could not silence the gods so easily, and who, if not killed, would be progressively sifted out into the desert wilderness.
A mixture of men, then, coming together precariously for a time, and then separating out, some perishing, others organizing into unstable tribes; some raiding more settled lands, or fighting over water holes 3 or sometimes, perhaps, caught like exhausted animals and made to do their captor's will, or, in the desperation of hunger, bartering control over their lives for bread and seed, as described on some fifteenth-century B.C. tablets unearthed at Nuzi, as well as in Genesis 47:18-26. Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging to the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully
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to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.
To the established city-states, these refugees were the desper-ate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets.1
And khabiru softened in the desert air, becomes Hebrew.
The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C.
We are immediately, however, presented with an orthological problem of immense proportions. For much of the Old Testament, particularly the first books, so important to our thesis, are, as is well known, forgeries of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries B.C., brilliant workings of brightly colored strands gathered from a scatter of places and periods.2 In Genesis, for example, the first and second chapters tell different creation stories; the 1 Much of this information may be found in the Bampton Lectures of Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination among the Hebrews and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938). This chapter owes a particular debt to Guillaume's richness of discussion of these matters.