E-raamat: How Religion Evolved: Explaining the Living Dead, Talking Idols, and Mesmerizing Monuments

The author traces the origins of religion through common historical paths in China, classical-period Greece, India, Israel, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Mesopatamia, as well as examples from Anatolia, Persia, Minoan, Mycenaean Greece, North America, South America, and Syria-Canaan. He applies a psychological interpretation of the work of Julian Jaynes to explain why the ancients believed that gods visited and spoke with humans, why they departed, and why the self replaced the gods in spiritual experience, a trend occurring over centuries. He explains how religion is an adaptation to changing social circumstances and discusses conceptual tools to understand the origins of religion, particularly Jaynes' theory of bicameralism, which proposes that self-talk is rooted in the brain's two hemispheres, and as language developed, the right hemisphere began to speak to the left. As people built larger settlements, improved social control methods were needed, and the voices from the right hemisphere became gods and ancestors. The author argues that this explains why ancient civilizations have similar traits like the living dead, idols that speak, and houses of gods; why individuals like Zoroaster, Moses, and Old Testament prophets claim they were instructed by divine voices; and behaviors like spirit possession, channeling, speaking in tongues, and automatic writing. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Why did many religious leaders—Moses, Old Testament prophets, Zoroaster—claim they heard divine voices? Why do ancient civilizations exhibit key similarities, e.g., the “living dead” (treating the dead as if they were still alive); “speaking idols” (care and feeding of effigies); monumental mortuary architecture and “houses of gods” (pyramids, ziggurats, temples)? How do we explain strange behavior such as spirit possession, speaking in tongues, channeling, hypnosis, and schizophrenic hallucinations? Are these lingering vestiges of an older mentality Brian J. McVeigh answers these riddles by updating “bicameralism.” First proposed by the psychologist Julian Jaynes, this theory postulates that an earlier mentality existed: a “human” (the brain’s left hemisphere) heard voices of “gods” or “ancestors” (the brain’s right hemisphere). Therefore, ancient religious texts reporting divine voices were recountings of audiovisual hallucinations—a method of social control when early populations expanded. As growing political economic complexity destabilized god-governed states in the late second millennium BCE, divine voices became inadequate.Eventually, humans had to culturally acquire new cognitive skills (modern religions) to accommodate increasing social pressures: selves replaced the gods and history witnessed an “inward turn.” This psychological interiorization of spiritual experience laid the foundations for the world’s great religions and philosophies that arose in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East in the middle of the first millennium BCE.