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being usually an ornate ritual robe which, perhaps put over a frame, could be made into an idol. And these he calls his elohim, which are then stolen by the children of Dan (Judges: 17 and 18 passim). We would probably have more archaeological evidence of these hallucinogenic idols of the Hebrews today had not King Josiah had them all destroyed in 641 B.C. (II Chronicles 34: 3-7.
A further vestige from the bicameral era is the word ob, often translated as a "familiar spirit." "A man also or woman that have a n ob . . . shall surely be put to death," says Leviticus (20:27). And similarly Saul drives out from Israel all those that had an ob (I Samuel 28:3). Even though an ob is something that one consults with (Deuteronomy, 18:11), it probably had no physical embodiment. It is always bracketed with wizards or witches, and thus probably refers to some bicameral voice that was not recognized by the Old Testament writers as religious.
This word has so puzzled translators that when they found it in Job 32:19, they translated it absurdly as "bottle," when clearly the context is that of the young frustrated Elihu, who feels as if he had a bicameral voice about to burst forth into impatient speech like an overfull wineskin.
The Last of the Nabiim
We began this chapter with a consideration of the refugee situation in the Near East around the latter part of the second millennium B.C., and of the roving tribes uprooted from their lands by various catastrophes, some of them certainly bicameral and unable to move toward subjective consciousness. Probably in the editing of the historical books of the Old Testament, and the fitting of it together into one story in the sixth or fifth century B.C., a great deal has been suppressed. And among such items of information that we would like is a clear account of what happened to these last communities of bicameral men. Here and
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there through the Old Testament, they appear like sudden glimpses of a strange other world during these periods which historians have paid too little attention to.
Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall of the Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other tribes or with any organization to their hallucinated voices in the form of gods, we don't know. They are often referred to as the
"sons of nabiim," indicating that there was probably a strong genetic basis for this type of remaining bicamerality. It is, I think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as part of the etiology of schizophrenia.
Edgy kings consulted them. Ahab, king of Israel in 835 B.C., rounded up 400 of them like cattle to listen to their hue and clamor (I Kings 22:6). Later, in all his robes, he and the king of Judah sit on thrones just outside the gates of Samaria, and have hundreds of these poor bicameral men herded up to them, raving and copying each other even as schizophrenics in a back ward (I Kings 22:10).
What happened to them? From time to time, they were hunted down and exterminated like unwanted animals. Such a massacre in the ninth century B.C. seems to be referred to in I Kings 18:4, where out of some unknown, much larger number, Obadiah took a hundred nabiim and hid them in caves, and brought them bread and water until the massacre was over.
Another such massacre is organized by Elijah a few years later (I Kings 18:40).
We hear no more of these bicameral groups thereafter. What remained for a few centuries more are the individual nabiim, men whose voices do not need the group support of other hallucinating men, men who can be partly subjective and yet still hear the bicameral voice. These are the famous nabiim whose bicameral messages we have already selectively touched upon: Amos, the gatherer of sycamore fruit, Jeremiah, staggering under his yoke from village to village, Ezekiel with his visions of lofty
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thrones on wheels moving through the clouds, the several nabiim whose religious agonies are ascribed to Isaiah. These of course merely represent the handful of that much larger number whose bicameral voices seemed to be most consistent with Deuteronomy. And then the voices are as a rule no longer actually heard.
In their place is the considered subjective thought of moral teachers. Men still dreamed visions and heard dark speech perhaps. But Ecclesiastes and Ezra seek wisdom, not a god. They study the law. They do not roam out into the wilderness "inquiring of Yahweh." By 400 B.C., bicameral prophecy is dead. "The nabiim shall be ashamed everyone of his visions." If parents catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are to kill them on the spot (Zechariah 13, 3-4).8
That is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it is an evolutionary selection which helped move the gene pool of humanity toward subjectivity.
Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind.
Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at 8 The date of Zechariah is around 520 b.C., but scholars are agreed that the final chapters of the book ascribed to him are later additions from some other source. The date of this injunction is probably the fourth or third century B.C.
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such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it.
Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times.
Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action.
But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious waysj it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
As the stag pants after the waterbrooks,
So pants my mind after you, O gods!
My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods!
W h e n shall I come face to face with gods?
— Psalm 42
BOOK T H R E E
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind
in the Modern World
C H A P T E R 1
The Quest for Authorization
WE ARE NOW at last in a position where we can look back and see the history of mankind on this planet in its proper values for the first time and understand some of the chief features of the last three millennia as vestiges of a previous mentality. Our view of human history here must be that of a furthest grandeur. We must try to see man against his entire evolutionary background, where his civilizations, including our own, are but as mountain peaks in a particular range against the sky, and from which we must force ourselves into an intellectual distance so that we see its contours aright. And from this prospect, a millennium is an exceedingly short period of time for so fundamental a change as from bicamerality to consciousness.