This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.