[Obbe]

There are several words in ancient Greek literature which, over time, have come to indicate aspects of conscious functioning. But the further back we search, the more concrete and bodily meanings these words have.

Such words are: thumos, phrenes, noos, and psyche all of them variously (mis)translated in modern times into as mind, spirit, or soul, and kradie, ker, and etor are often translated as heart or sometimes as mind or spirit. The translation of any of these seven as mind or anything similar is entirely mistaken and without warrant whaetver in the Iliad.

Earlier in the book julian finds that the physiological cuing of an hallucinated voice, whether in bicameral mind or in a contemporary schizophrenic, is the stress of some decision or conflict. Now, as the voices of gods become more inadequate and suppressed during the social chaos of the breakdown period, we may suppose that the amount of stress required to occasion an hallucinated voice would be raised.

Such increased stress would be accompanied by a variety of physiological concomitants, vascular changes resulting in burning sensations, abrupt changes in breathing, a pounding or fluttering heart, etc. responses which in the Iliad are called thumos, phrenes and kradie respectively. This is what these words mean, not mind or anything like it. And as the gods are heard less and less, these internal response-stimuli or progressively greater stress are associated more and more with men's subsequent actions, whatever they may be, even coming to take on the godlike function of seeming to initiate action themselves.

At the very beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon, king of men but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briseis away from Achilles, who had captured her. As he does so, the responce of Achilles begins in his etor, or what is suggested a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict of put into two parts (mermerizo) whether to obey his thumos, the immediate sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory king or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his mighty sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action and tells Achilles what to do.

We may call these mind-words that later come to mean something like conscious functioning, the preconcious hypostases. In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not man who acts, but one of the preconcious hypostases which causes him to act. They are thus the seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness.

It is suggested the temporal development of the preconcious hypostases can be roughly divided into four parts:

Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations.

Phase II: Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations.

Phase III: Subjective: When these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; the have moved from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur.

Phase IV: Synthetic: When the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection.

More on this theory later...