Julian Jaynes - Gods Quotes

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

Julian Jaynes

Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes

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

Julian Jaynes

And 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

The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

Julian Jaynes

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Julian Jaynes