Julian Jaynes argues that subjective consciousness is a learned cultural construct that emerged only about three thousand years ago, when an earlier "bicameral" mentality broke down. In the bicameral mind, he contends, people obeyed hallucinated voices they experienced as gods rather than reflecting on an inner self. Drawing on Greek epic, Mesopotamian and Egyptian records, and the neurology of the divided brain, he traces this transition through prophecy, hypnosis, poetry, and schizophrenia.
Books mentioned in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (8)
Iliad by Homer: “The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion.”
The Odyssey by Homer: “The Odyssey announces this in its very fifth word, polutropon = much turning.”
Works and Days by Hesiod: “I was about to write that Greek consciousness is nearing completion in the Works and Days.”
Symposium by Plato: “in Plato's Symposium "the mutilation of the herms" by the drunken general Alcibiades... is regarded as a serious and important matter.”
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown: “The Epic of Gilgamesh proper is a series of twelve numbered tablets found in Nineveh among the ruins of the temple library of the god Nabu.”
The Fall of Miletus by Phrynichus: “The play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians in 494 B.C.”
The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds: “Dodds in his superb book The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).”