Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness Edited by Marcel Kuijsten, 1

This book revisits a book by Julian Jaynes.

I came across Jaynes’s book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” around the middle 1970’s. It was featured in the library on a top shelf, which place (in the library scheme of things) signified that the book was a recent purchase. I retrieved “OC” from the library three times in the same year before I read it in its entirety. I remember it as a large volume which I read with the help of a dictionary because of the jargon used – and Jaynes was a psychologist – so, layperson that I was (and am), I read it in “bite sized” pieces rather than “whole hog”. And though I have yet to re-read the book it has always loomed large in my mind. Not least for its long title, which I took care to remember.

But mostly because what I read in OC, I considered a possible new truth. It didn’t sound impossible to me. True I had a mind prepared for novelty, I was someone brought up on a mixed bag of beliefs, anything from Christian dogma to spiritualist philosophy to agnosticism to atheism; and each of my critical role models, in their minds, compartmentalised the world in a different way which I, as the youngest family member, found somewhat confusing.

I, however, chose the safe route and maintained a traditional Christian belief in God up to my middle twenties when I felt a need to go deeper into myself, looking for an answer to the question, does God exist, and in OC I found an answer that seemed to satisfy.

For such a big book the basic theory is easily captured in a few paragraphs but Jaynes was in the position of presenting a novel hypothesis to the world (or is that theory?) and had to submit a lot of proofs to support it.

Jaynes put his professional reputation on the line by publishing OC, and he was apparently often damned by his peers as he strove, in this large book, to prove that human brains worked differently in prehistoric times to what they, on the whole, do now. The evidence for which is of course, nominally, non-existent, but “echoes” of a mentality change may just be detectable in what remains of ancient cultures - in artefacts - and what remains of ancient peoples in their modern-day counterparts. Us.

… to be continued