I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
Julian JaynesOur search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
Julian JaynesThe language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.
Julian JaynesReading 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.
Julian JaynesAnd when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.
Julian Jaynes