I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
Julian JaynesThe importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.
Julian JaynesPoetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
Julian JaynesHistory does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
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