Harriet Tubman: Voice-Hearing Visionary

Origin of Harriet Tubman in the Persistence of the Bicameral Mind

The movie ‘Harriet’ came out this year, amidst pandemic and protest. The portrayal of Harriet Tubman’s life and her strange abilities reminds one of Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, as written about in what is now a classic work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Some background will help and so let’s look at the biographical details of what is known. This famous Underground Railroad conductor was born Araminta Harriet Ross in the early 1820s and, when younger, she was known as ‘Minty’. Her parents were religious, as she would later become. She might also have been exposed to the various church affiliations of her master’s extended family.

These influences were diverse, writes James A. McGowan and William C. Kashatus in their book Harriet Tubman: A Biography (pp. 11-12): “As a child, Minty had been told Bible stories by her mother, and she was occasionally forced to attend the services held by Dr. Anthony Thompson, Jr., who was a licensed Methodist minister. But Minty and her parents might also have been influenced by Episcopal, Baptist, and Catholic teachings since the Pattisons, Thompsons, and Brodesses initially belonged to Anglican and Episcopal churches in Dorchester County before they became Methodists. In addition, some of the white Tubmans and Rosses were originally Catholic. Accordingly, Minty’s religious beliefs might have been a composite of several different Christian traditions that were adapted to the evangelical emphasis on spiritual freedom.”

Tubman’s mixed religious background was also noted by Kate C. Larson: “The “creolization” of this family more accurately reflects the blending of cultures from West Africa, Northern Europe, and local Indian peoples in the Chesapeake. As historian Mechal Sobel put it, this was a “world they made together.” By the time Tubman was born, first generation Africans were visible presences in Dorchester County […] Tubman and her family integrated a number of religious practices and beliefs into their daily lives, including Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and even Quaker teachings, all religious denominations supported by local white masters and their neighbors who were intimately involved with Tubman’s family. Many slaves were required to attend the churches of their owners and temporary masters. Tubman’s religiosity, however, was a deeply personal spiritual experience, rooted in evangelical Christian teachings and familial traditions” (Harriet Ross Tubman).

Other scholars likewise agree, such as Robert Gudmestad: “Like many enslaved people, her belief system fused Christian and African beliefs” (Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves). This syncretism was made simpler for the commonalities traditional African religion had with Christianity or particular sects of Christianity: worship of one God who was supreme, relating to God as a helpful friend who could be heard and talked with (a commonality with Quakerism), belief in an eternal soul and an afterlife, rites and initiations involving immersion in water, etc. Early generations of slaves were often kept out of the churches and so this allowed folk religion to take on a life of its own with a slow merging of traditions, such as how African rhythms of mourning were incorporated into Gospel music.

Furthermore, religious fervor was at a peak in the early 1800s and it was part of the world Tubman’s parents lived in and that Tubman was born into. “Both races attended the massive camp meetings so Rit and Ben experienced these sporadic evangelical upsurges”, wrote Margaret Washington (Let The Circle Be Unbroken: The World Of Araminta (“Minty”) Ross Or The Making Of Harriet Tubman). “She grew up during the Second Great Awakening,” Gudmestad explained, “which was a Protestant religious revival in the United States. Preachers took the gospel of evangelical Christianity from place to place, and church membership flourished. Christians at this time believed that they needed to reform America in order to usher in Christ’s second coming. Some during that restless period believed it was the End Times, as it was easier to imagine the world coming to an end than to imagine it to become something else.

This would have been personally felt by Tubman. “A number of black female preachers,” Gudmestad goes on to say, “preached the message of revival and sanctification on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Jarena Lee was the first authorized female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is not clear if Tubman attended any of Lee’s camp meetings, but she was inspired by the evangelist. She came to understand that women could hold religious authority.” The religious fervor was part of a growing political fervor, as the country moved toward Civil War. For blacks, Moses leading his people to freedom inspired more than faith and hope toward the afterlife.

Around the time of Tubman’s birth, there was the failed 1822 revolt planned by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina. Later in 1831, Nat Turner led his rebellion in nearby Virginia and that would’ve been an exciting event for enslaved blacks, especially a lonely young slave girl who at the time was being kept separate from her family and mercilessly whipped. Then throughout her teens and into her early twenties, there were numerous other uprisings: 1835–1838 Black Seminole Slave Rebellion, 1839 Amistad seizure, 1841 Creole case, 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation. The Creole case was the most successful slave revolt in United States history. Such tremendous events, one might imagine, could shape a young impressionable mind.

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Harriet Tubman’s Ethno-Cultural Ancestry and Family Inheritance

Someone like Tubman didn’t come out of nowhere. “I am quite willing to acknowledge that she was almost an anomaly among her people,” wrote her early biographer Sarah Bradford, “and so far I can judge they all seem to be particularly intelligent, upright and religious people, and to have a strong feeling of family affection” (Harriet: The Moses of Her People). She earned her strong spirit honestly, from the black culture around here and as modeled by her parents. The spiritual inclinations, as with with knowledge of nature, came from her father: “As a clairvoyant, Minty believed that she inherited this second sense from her father, Ben. […] Listening to Ben’s stories, predictions and sharing his faith convinced Minty that an omniscient force protected her” (Margaret Washington, Let The Circle Be Unbroken: The World Of Araminta (“Minty”) Ross Or The Making Of Harriet Tubman). But it was her mother, in particular, who showed what it meant to be a fiercely protective woman when it came to family. When Tubman returned to free her family, including her elderly parents, she was acting on the values she was raised with:

“Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever.[10] When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit’s youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community.[11] At one point she confronted her owner about the sale.[12] Finally, Brodess and “the Georgia man” came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, “You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.”[12] Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale.[13] Tubman’s biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.[13][14] (Harriet Tubman, Wikipedia)

Whatever the cause, a strong moral sense developed in Tubman. Around the age of twelve or fifteen, there was an incident where she refused to help an overseer catch and tie up a runaway slave. Instead, she stood in front of the door and blocked his way. He threw an iron weight after the escapee, but it came up short when it hit her in the head, knocking her unconscious. She later said that it “broke my skull” and, though her master wanted to send her back to work, it took her a long time to recover. “The teenager remained in a coma for weeks,” writes M.W. Taylor, “lying on a bed of rags in the corner of her family’s windowless wooden cabin. Not until the following spring was she able to get up and walk unaided” (Harriet Tubman: Antislavery Activist, p. 16). Kate C. Larson says that, “It took months for her mother to nurse her back to health” (Harriet Ross Tubman).

Ever after, she had seizures and trance-like states (“spells”, “sleeping fits”, or “a sort of stupor or lethargy at times”), premonitions and prophetic visions (“vivid dreams”), and out-of-body and other shamanic-like experiences — possibly caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, narcolepsy, cataplexy, or hypersomnia. She claimed to have heard the voice of God that guided and protected her, that He “spoke directly to my soul”. She “prayed all the time” and “was always talking to the Lord”“When I went to the horse trough to wash my face, and took up the water n my hands, I said, ‘Oh Lord, wash me, make me clean.’ When I took up the towel to wipe my face and hands, I cried, ‘Oh Lord, for Jesus’ sake, wipe away all my sins!’ ” (Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, p. 11).

“During these hallucinatory states,” writes Gordon S. Johnson Jr., “she would also hear voices, screams, music, and rushing water, and feel as though her skin was on fire, while still aware of what was going on around her. The attacks could occur suddenly, without warning, even in the middle of a conversation. She would wake up and pick up the conversation where it left off a half hour later. In addition, Tubman would have terrible headaches, and would become more religious after the injury” (Harriet Tubman Suffered a TBI Early In Life).

While recuperating, she prayed for her master’s soul, that he might be saved and become a Christian. Her master’s behavior didn’t improve. In her stupor, no amount of whipping would arouse her. So he tried to sell her, but no one wanted to buy an injured and incapacitated slave, even though prior to the accident she had been hardworking and was able to do the work of a full-grown man. She didn’t want to be sold and separated from her family. One day she prayed that, if her master couldn’t be saved, the Lord should kill him and take him away. Shortly later, he did die and, with overwhelming guilt, she felt her prayer had been the cause.

Tubman’s experiences may have been shaped by African traditions, as there were many first generation slaves around. She would have been close to her immediate and extended family living in the area, as described by Professor Larson: “Harriet Tubman’s grandmother, Modesty, lived on Pattison’s property for an undetermined number of years after Rit left with Mary and moved to the Thompson plantation. Though the Thompson plantation sat about 6 miles to the west of the Pattison plantation and their neighbors along the Little Blackwater River near the bridge, their interactions were likely frequent and essential to maintaining social, political, and economic wellbeing” (Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument: Historic Resource Study).

An important familial link, as discussed above, was their shared religious inheritance. “Methodism was one source of strength, blending smoothly with cultural and religious traditions that survived the middle passage from Africa,” wrote Professor Larson. “First generation Africans, like her grandmother Modesty, embodied a living African connection and memory for the Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Tubman’s religious fervor and trust in God to protect and guide her evolved from a fusion of these traditions.” Tubman remained close to family living on nearby plantations, such as being hired out to do logging work with her father and quite likely hearing the same sermons, maybe sometimes clandestinely meeting in the “hidden church” of informal religious gatherings.

Her first biographer, Fanklin Sanborn, said that she was “one degree removed from the wolds of Africa, her grandfather being an imported African of a chieftan family” and that, as “the grand-daughter of a slave imported from Africa,” she “has not a drop of white blood in her veins” (“The Late Araminta Davis: Better Known as ‘Moses’ or ‘Harriet Tubman’.” Franklin B. Sanborn Papers. Box 1, Folder 5. Box 1, Folder 5, American Antiquarian Society). The latter claim of her being pure African ancestry has been disputed and was contradicted by other accounts, but at least part of her family was of recent African ancestry as was common in that era, making her a second generation American in at least one line. With a living memory of the Old World, Tubman’s maternal grandmother Modesty Green would have been treated as what is called a griot, an elder who is a teacher, healer, and counselor; a keeper of knowledge, wisdom, and customs. She would have remembered the old world and had learned much about how to live in the new one, helping to shape the creole culture into which Tubman was born.

Modesty might have come from the Ashanti tribe of West Africa, specifically Ghana. She was sold as a slave sometime before 1785, the year Tubman’s mother Rittia (Rit, Ritty) Green was born. The Ashanti ethnicity was common in the region, writes Ann Malaspina: “During the eighteenth century, more than one million slaves were bought by British, Danish, and Dutch slave traders and shipped to the Americas from the Ashanti Empire on West Africa’s Gold Coast, a rich trading region. Many Ashanti slaves were sold to buyers in Maryland” (Harriet Tubman, p. 10). The Ashanti had a proud reputation and the ethnic culture made its presence known, such as the “Asante proverbs that Harriet picked up as a young girl (“Don’t test the depth of a river with both feet”)” (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman). Along with the Ashante, blacks of Igbo descent were numerous in the Tidewater region of Maryland and Virginia (Igbo Americans, Wikipedia). These cultures, along with the Kongo people, were known to be proud and loyal. Also, West Africa had a tradition of respect for women — as property owners and leaders, and sometimes as warriors.

It’s the reason the Tidewater plantation owners preferred them as slaves. The preference in the Deep South was different because down there plantations were large commercial operations with typically absentee owners, an aristocracy that spent most of its time in Charleston, England, or elsewhere. Tidewater slaveholders had smaller plantations and were less prosperous. This meant they and their families lived close to slaves and, in some cases, would have worked with them. These Tidewater aristocrats were more likely to use the paternalistic rhetoric that identified slaves as part of the extended family, as often was literally the case from generations of close relations with many of the plantation owner’s mulatto children, grandchildren, cousins, etc running around. Cultures like the Ashanti and Igbo, in being strongly devoted to their families and communities, could be manipulated to keep slaves from running away. The downside to this communal solidarity is that these ethnic groups were known to be disobedient and cause a lot of trouble, including some of the greatest slave rebellions

Tubman is an exemplar of this Tidewater black culture. According to her own statements recorded by Frank C. Drake: “the old mammies to whom she told [her] dreams were wont to nod knowingly and say, ‘I reckon youse one o’ dem ‘Shantees’, chile.’ For they knew the tradition of the unconquerable Ashantee blood, which in a slave made him a thorn in the side of the planter or cane grower whose property he became, so that few of that race were in bondage” (“The Moses of Her People. Amazing Life work of Harriet Tubman,” New York Herald, New York, Sept. 22, 1907). The claim about her grandmother was confirmed by a piece from the year before Tubman’s death, written by Ann Fitzhugh Miller (granddaughter of Tubman’s friend Gerrit Smith), in reporting that Tubman believed her maternal grandmother had been “brought in a slave ship from Africa” (“Harriet Tubman,” American Review, August 1912, p. 420).

Professor Kate C. Larson concludes that, “It has been generally assumed at least one if not more of Tubman’s grandparents came directly from Africa” (Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument: Historic Resource Study). This is the reason for speculating about a more direct African influence or, at the very least, it shows how important an African identity was to Tubman’s sense of faith and spirituality. “Like many enslaved people, her belief system fused Christian and African beliefs,” Robert Gudmestad suggests. “Her belief that there was no separation between the physical and spiritual worlds was a direct result of African religious practices. Tubman literally believed that she moved between a physical existence and a spiritual experience where she sometimes flew over the land.”

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Harriet Tubman’s Special Relationship with God and Archaic Authorization

Whatever was the original source and true nature of Harriet Tubman’s abilities, they did serve her well in freeing slaves and saved her from her pursuers. She always trusted her voices and visions, and would change her course of action in an instant, such as the time God told her to not continue down a road and so, without hesitation, she led her fellow fugitives across the rushing waters of an icy stream, but the “several stout men” in her care “refused to follow til they saw her safe on the other side”. Sarah Bradford goes on to say that, “The strange part of the story we found to be, that the masters of these men had put up the previous day, at the railroad station near where she left, an advertisement for them, offering a large reward for their apprehension; but they made a safe exit” (p. 45). Commenting on this incident, McGowan and Kashatus notes, “Similar instances occurred on her rescue missions whenever Harriet was forced to make an important decision” (Harriet Tubman: A Biography, p. 62).

This divine guidance probably made her behavior erratic and unpredictable, always one step ahead (or one step to the side) of the slave-catchers — maybe not unlike the Trickster stories she likely heard growing up, as part of the folklore tradition in African-American communities or possibly picked up from Native Americans who still lived in the area. Maybe there is a reason both Trickster stories and voice-hearing are often found in oral cultures. The Trickster, as an archetype similar to salvific figures, exists between the divine and human — Jesus often played the role of Trickster. Looking more closely at this mentality might also tell us something about the bicameral mind.

Her visions and voice-hearing was also a comfort and assurance to her; and, as some suggested, this gave her “command over others’ minds” (Edna Cheney, “Moses”, The Freedmen’s Record, p. 35) — that is to say, when around her, people paid attention and did what they were told. She had the power of charisma and persuasion, and failing that she had a gun that she was not afraid to use too good effect. She heard God’s voice in conviction and so she spoke with conviction. One was wise to not doubt her and, when leading slaves to freedom, she did not tolerate anyone challenging her authority. But it was in moments of solitude that she most strongly felt the divine. Based on interviews with Tubman in 1865, Edna Cheney conveyed it in the following way:

“When going on these journeys she often lay alone in the forests all night. Her whole soul was filled with awe of the mysterious Unseen Presence, which thrilled her with such depths of emotion, that all other care and fear vanished. Then she seemed to speak with her Maker “as a man talketh with his friend;” her child-like petitions had direct answers, and beautiful visions lifted her up above all doubt and anxiety into serene trust and faith. No man can be a hero without this faith in some form; the sense that he walks not in his own strength, but leaning on an almighty arm. Call it fate, destiny, what you will, Moses of old, Moses of to-day, believed it to be Almight God” (p. 36).

Friends and co-conspirators described Tubman as having lacked the gnawing anxiety and doubt that, according to Julian Jaynes, has marked egoic consciousness since the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. “Great fears were entertained for her safety,” according to William Still, an African American abolitionist who personally knew her, “but she seemed wholly devoid of personal fear. The idea of being captured by slave-hunters or slave-holders, seemed never to enter her mind.” That kind of absolute courage and conviction, based on trust of voices and visions, is not common in the modern mind. Her example inspired and impressed many.

Thomas Garrett, a close confidante, said that, “I never met with any person, of any color, who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul. She has frequently told me that she talked with God, and he talked with her every day of her life, and she has declared to me that she felt no more fear of being arrested by her former master, or any other person, when in his immediate neighborhood, than she did in the State of New York, or Canada, for she said she never ventured only where God sent her, and her faith in a Supreme Power truly was great” (letter, 1868). As an aside, there is an interesting detail about her relationship with God — it was told by Samuel Hopkins Adams, grandson of Tubman’s friend and benefactor Samuel Miles Hopkins (brother of Tubman’s biographer Sarah Bradford): “Her relations with the Deity were personal, even intimate, though respectful on her part. He always addressed her as Araminta, which was her christened name” (“Slave in the Family”, Grandfather Stories, pp. 277-278; quoted by Jean M. Humez on p. 355 of Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories).

In summarizing her faith, Milton C. Sernett concluded that, “Tubman did not distinguish between seer and saint. She seems to have believed that her trust in the Lord enabled her to meet all of life’s exigencies with a confident foreknowledge of how things would turn out, a habit others found impressive, or uncanny, as the case may be” (Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, p. 145). That is it. This supreme confidence did not come from herself. At one moment of uncertainty, she was faced with making a decision. “The Lord told me to do this. I said, ‘Oh Lord, I can’t—don’t ask me—take somebody else.” God then spoke to her: “It’s you I want, Harriet Tubman” (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom).

Anyone familiar with Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind would perk up at this discussion of voice-hearing, specifically of commanding voices with the undeniable and infallible power of archaic authorization. Besides this, he spoke of three other necessary components to the general bicameral paradigm, as much relevant today as it was during the Bronze Age (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 324):

  • “The collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out within that form”
  • “an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of preoccupations”
  • “the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, characterized by a lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing of the analog or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, tolerated, or encouraged by the group”

Collective cognitive imperative is central what we are exploring here. Tubman grew up in a culture where such spiritual, paranormal, and shamanic experiences were still part of a living tradition, including traces of traditional African religion. She lacked doubt about this greater reality because almost everyone around her shared this sense of faith. As social creatures, such shared culture has a powerful effect upon the human mind. But at that point in early modernity when Tubman grew up, most of American society had lost the practices of induction and hence the ability to enter trances.

The Evangelical church, however, has long promoted trance experiences and trained people how to talk to God and listen for his voice (still does, in some cases: Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back). Because of her brain condition, Tubman didn’t necessarily require induction, although her ritual of constant prayer probably helped. She went into trance apparently without having to try, one might say against her will. There is also another important contributing factor. Voice-hearing has historically been most common among non-literate, especially preliterate, societies — that is because the written word alters the human mind, as argued by many besides Jaynes: Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, etc. Such illiteracy would describe the American slave population since it was against the law for them to read and write.

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Harriet Tubman’s Illiteracy and Storytelling Talent

This state of illiteracy included Tubman. During the Civil War, she spoke of a desire to become literate so as to “write her own life” (Cheney, p. 38), but there is no evidence she ever learned to write. “The blow to the head of Tubman received at about thirteen may have been the root cause of her illiteracy. According to Cheney’s sketch, “The trouble in her head prevents her from applying closely to a book” “ (Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, p. 105). She remained her whole life fully immersed in an oral mindset. This was demonstrated by her heavy use of figurative language with concrete imagery, as when describing a Civil War battle — recorded by visiting historian Albert Bushnell Hart:

“And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped” (Slavery and Abolition, p. 209). Also, consider how she spoke of her personal experiences: “She loves to describe her visions, which are very real to her; but she must tell them word for word as they lie in her untutored mind, with endless repetitions and details, she cannot condensed them, whatever be your haste. She has great dramatic power; the scene rises before you as she saw it, and her voice and language change with her different actors” (Cheney, pp. 36-37).

Elaborating on her storytelling talent, Jean M. Humez writes: “One of Earl Conrad’s informants who as a child had known Tubman in her old age reported: “there never was any variation in the stories she told, whether to me or to any other” (Tatlock, 1939a). It is characteristic of the folklore performer trained in an oral culture to tell a story in precisely the right way each time. This is because the story itself is often regarded as a form of knowledge that will educate the young and be passed down through the generations. The storyteller must not weaken the story’s integrity with a poor performance” (Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, p. 135).

This was also heard in how Tubman drew upon the down-to-earth style of old school religion: “Instead of the classical Greek “tricks of oratory” to which the college-educated Higginson refers, Tubman drew upon homelier sources of eloquence, such as scriptures she would have heard preached in the South. She frequently employed a teaching technique made familiar in the New Testament Gospels—the “parable’ or narrative metaphor—to make her lessons persuasive and memorable” (Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, p. 135). She knew of Jesus’ message through oral tellings by preachers and that was fitting since Jesus too effectively taught in the spoken word.

She was masterful. Even before a crowd of respectable whites, such as at abolitionist meetings, she could captivate an audience and move them to great emotion. Having witnessed a performance of Tubman’s oft-repeated story of former slave Joe’s arrival in Canada along with a rendition of the song he sang in joyous praise, Charlotte Forten recorded the impact it had on those present: “How exciting it was to hear her tell the story. And to hear the very scraps of jubilant hymns that he sang. She said the ladies crowded around them, and some laughed and some cried. My own eyes were full I listened to her” (Charlotte Forten, journal entry, Saturday, January 31, 1862).

All of these ways of speaking are typical of those born in oral societies. As such, her illiteracy might have been key. “She is a rare instance,” as told in The Freedmen’s Record, “in the midst of high civilization and intellectual culture, of a being of great native powers, working powerfully, and to beneficient ends, entirely unaided by school or books” (Cheney, p. 34). Maybe the two factors are closely linked. Even in the ancient world, some of the most famous and respected oracles were given by the uneducated and illiterate, often women. Tubman did have the oracular about her, as she occasionally prophesied outcomes and coming events.

We mainly know of Tubman through the stories she told and retold of herself and her achievements, surely having been important in gaining support and raising funds in those early years when she needed provisions to make her trips to the South. She came from a storytelling tradition and, obviously, she knew how to entertain and persuade, to make real the plight of the still enslaved and the dangers it took to gain their freedom. She drew in her audience, as if they were there with bloodhounds tracking them, with their lives hanging in the balance of a single wrong decision or unfortunate turn of events.

One of her greatest talents was weaving song into her stories, but that was also part of oral culture. The slave’s life was filled with song, from morning to night. They sung in church and while at work, at births and burials. These songs were often stories, many of them taken from or inspired by the religion that was so much a part of their daily experience. Song itself was a form of language: “Tubman used spirituals to signal her arrival or as a secret code to tell of her plans. She also used spirituals to reassure those she was leading of their safety and to lift their spirits during the long journey to freedom” (M.W. Taylor, Harriet Tubman: Antislavery Activist, p. 18). She also used the song of birds and owls to communicate, something she may have learned from the African or Native American tradition.

Song defined Tubman, as much as did her spirituality. “Religious songs,” Jean M. Humez explains, “embellished Tubman’s oral storytelling performances and were frequently central plot elements in her most popular Underground Railroad stories. There was the story of teasing the thick-witted “master” the night before her escape by using a familiar Methodist song, “I’m Bound for the Promised Land,” to communicate to her family her intention to run away. Singing was also integral to her much-told story about coded communication with fugitives she had hidden in the woods. “Go Down, Moses” meant “stay hidden,” while a “Methodist air,” “Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits,” meant “all clear” (Bradford, 1869)” (Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, p. 136).

Humez goes on to say that, “Though she was able to capture and reproduce the lyrics for her readers, Bradford was evidently bewildered by Tubman’s musical performances in much the same way Cheney was by her spiritual testimony: “The air sung to these words was so wild, so full of plaintive minor strains, and unexpected quavers, that I would defy any white person to learn it, and often as I heard it, it was to me a constant surprise” (Bradford, 1886, 35-36).” Her performances used a full range expression, including through her movement. She would wave her arms and clap her hands, sway and stamp her feet, dance and gesture — according to the details of what she spoke and rhythm of what she sang (Humez, p. 137). Orality is an embodied way of communicating.

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Harriet Tubman’s Voice-Hearing and the Power of Oral Culture

Tubman may have been more talented and charismatic than most, but one suspects that such a commanding presence of speech and rhetorical persuasion would have been far more common among the enslaved who were raised in an oral culture where language was one of the few sources of power in defense against those who wielded physical violence and political force — such as the necessary ability for survival to use language that was coded and veiled, symbolic and metaphorical, whether in conversation or song, in order to communicate without stating something directly for fear of being overheard.

Her display of orality would have impressed many whites simply because literacy and the literary mind by that point had become the norm among the well-off white abolitionists who came to hear her. Generations had passed since orality had been prevalent in mainstream American society, especially among the emerging liberal class. The traditional culture of the ancien regime had been eroding since the colonial era. There is a power in oral cultures that the modern mind has forgotten, but there were those like Tubman who carried the last traces of oral culture into the 20th century before she finally died in her early 90s in 1913.

The bewilderment of whites, slave-catchers and abolitionists alike, by Tubman’s prowess makes one think of another example of the power of oral culture. The Mongol hordes, as they were perceived, acted in a way that was incomprehensible to the literate ruling elite of European feudalism. Genghis Khan established a mnemonic system used among his illiterate cavalry that allowed messages to be spread quickly and accurately. As all Mongols rode horses and carried all food with them, they were able to act collectively like a swarm and so could easily shift strategy in the middle of a battle. Oral culture had less rigid hierarchy. It was also highly religious and based in a shamanic tradition not unlike that of Africa. Genghis Khan regularly prayed to God, fasting for days until getting a clear message before he would leave on a military campaign. In similar fashion, Thomas Garrett said of Tubman: “She is a firm believer in spiritual manifestations […] she never goes on her missions of mercy without his (God’s) consent” (letter to Eliza Wigham, Dec. 27, 1856).

One imagines that, as with that Mongol leader, Tubman was so successful for the reason she wielded archaic authorization. That was the underlying force of personality and persuasion that made her way of speaking and acting so compelling, for the voice of God spoke through her. It was a much greater way of being in the world, a porous self that extended much further and that could reach into the heart and minds of others, apparently not limited to humans. Her “contemporaries noted that Tubman had a strange power over all animals—another indication of psychic ability—and insisted that she never feared the bloodhounds who dogged her trail when she became and Underground Railroad agent” (James A. McGowan & William C. Kashatus, Harriet Tubman: A Biography, pp. 10-11). Psychic ability or simply a rare example of a well-functioning bicameral mind in the modern era.

Some people did perceive her as being psychic or otherwise having an uncanny perception, an ability to know things it seems she shouldn’t be able to know. It depends on one’s psychological interpretation and theological persuasion. Her compatriot Thomas Garrett was also strongly religious in his commitment to abolitionism. “In fact,” states McGowan and Kashatus, “Garrett compared Harriet’s psychic ability to hear “the voice of God as spoken direct to her soul” to the Quakers’ concept of an Inner Light, or a divine presence in each human being that allows them to do God’s will on earth. Because of their common emphasis on a mystical experience and a shared religious perspective, Tubman and the Quakers developed a mutual trust” (Harriet Tubman: A Biography, p. 62). A particular incident helps explain Garret’s appraisal, from the same book (pp. 59-60):

“One late afternoon in mid-October 1856, Harriet arrived in Wilmington, Delaware, in need of funding for a rescue mission to the Eastern Shore. She went immediately to the office of Thomas Garrett, a white Quaker station master who also operated a hardware business in the town. “God sent me to you, Thomas,” said Harriet, dismissing the formality of a simple greeting. “He tells me you have money for me.” Amused by the request, Garrett jokingly asked: “Has God ever deceived thee?” “No,” she snapped. “I have always been liberal with thee, Harriet, and wish to be of assistance,” said the Quaker station master, stringing her along. “But I am not rich and cannot afford to give thee much.” Undeterred by the response, Harriet shot back: “God told me you’ve got money for me, and God never fools me!” Realizing that she was getting upset, Garrett cut to the chase: “Well, then, how much does thee need?” After reflecting a moment, Tubman said, “About 23 dollars.”

“The elderly Quaker shook his head in disbelief. Harriet’s request was almost exactly the amount he had received from an antislavery society in Scotland for her specific use. He went to his cash box, retrieved the donation, and handed it to his visitor. Smiling at her benefactor, Tubman took the cash, turned abruptly and marched out of the office. Astonished by the incident, Garrett later confided to another abolitionist that “there was something remarkable” about Harriet. “Whether it [was] clairvoyance or the divine impression on her mind, I cannot tell,” he admitted. “But I am certain she has a guide within herself other than the written word, for she never had any education.”1 By most accounts, Tubman’s behavior can be described as selfrighteous, if not extremely presumptuous. But she viewed herself as being chosen by God for the special duty of a liberator. In fact, she admitted that she “felt like Moses,” the Old Testament prophet, because “the Lord told me to go down South and bring up my brothers and sisters.” When she expressed doubt about her abilities and suggested that the Lord “take somebody else,” He replied: “It’s you I want, Harriet Tubman.”2 With such a divine commission, Tubman was confident that her visions and actions—no matter how rude by 19th–century society’s standards—were condoned by the Almighty. Thomas Garrett understood that.”

There is no doubt she had an instinctive understanding that was built on an impressive awareness, a keen presence of mind — call it psychic or bicameral. With our rigid egoic boundaries and schizoid mentality, we inhabitants of this modern hyper-individualistic world have much to learn about the deeper realms of the bundled mind, of the multiplicity of self. We have made ourselves alien to our own human and animal nature, and we are the lesser for it. The post-bicameral loss of not only God’s voice but of a more expansive way of being is still felt in a nostalgic longing that continues to rule over us, ever leading to backlashes of the reactionary mind. Even with possible brain damage, Tubman was no where near as mentally crippled as we are with our prized ego-consciousness that shuts out all other voices and presences.

In the Western world, it would be hard to find such a fine specimen of visionary voice-hearing. Harriet Tubman had a genius about her, both genius in the modern sense of brilliance and genius in the ancient sense of a guiding spirit. If she were around today, she would likely be medicated and institutionalized or maybe imprisoned, as a threat to sane and civil society (Bruce Levine, “Sublime Madness”: Anarchists, Psychiatric Survivors, Emma Goldman & Harriet Tubman). Yet there are still other societies, including developed countries, in the world where this is not the case.

Tanya Luhrmann, as inspired by Julian Jaynes, went into anthropology where she researches voice-hearing (her work on evangelicalism is briefly noted above). One study she did compared the experience of voice-hearers in the Ghana and the United States (Differences in voice-hearing experiences of people with psychosis in the U.S.A., India and Ghana: interview-based study). Unlike here in this country, those voice-hearer’s in certain non-Western culture are not treated as mentally ill and, unsurprisingly, neither do they experience cruel and persecutory voices — quite the opposite in being kind, affirming, and helpful as was the case with Tubman.

“In the case of voice hearing, culture may also play a role in helping people cope.  One study conducted by Luhrmann, the anthropologist, found that compared to their American counterparts, voice-hearing people diagnosed with schizophrenia in more collectivist cultures were more likely to perceive their voices as helpful and friendly, sometimes even resembling members of their friends and family. She adds that people who meet criteria for schizophrenia in India have better outcomes than their U.S. counterparts. She suspects this is because of “the negative salience” a diagnosis of schizophrenia holds in the U.S., as well as the greater rates of homelessness among people with schizophrenia in America” (Joseph Frankel, Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something).

One suspects that the Ashanti and related African cultures that helped shape black traditions in Tubman’s Maryland are basically the same as the culture still existing in Ghana to this day. After all, the Ashanti Empire that began in the early colonial era, 1701, continued its rule well into the twentieth century, 1957. If it’s true that her grandmother Modesty was Ashanti, that would go a long way in explaining the cultural background to Tubman’s voice-hearing. It’s been speculated her father was the child of two Africans and it was directly from him that she claimed to have inherited her peculiar talents. It’s possible that elements of the bicameral mind survived later in those West African societies and from there was carried across the Middle Passage.

* * *

The Friendship and Freedom of the Living God

It’s important to think about the bicameral mind by looking at real world examples of voice-hearing. It might teach us something about what it means to be in relationship with a living God — a living world, a living experience of the greater mind, the bundled self (no matter one’s beliefs). Many Christians talk about such things, but few take it seriously, much less experience it or seek it out. That was what drew the Quakers to Tubman and others like her influenced by the African tradition of a living God. It wasn’t only a commonality of politics, in fighting for abolitionism and such. Rather, the politics was an expression of that particular kind of spiritual and epistemological experience.

To personally know God — or, if you prefer, to directly know concrete, lived reality — without the intervention of either priest or text or the equivalent can create immense power through authorization. It is an ability to act with confidence, rather than bowing down to external authority of hierarchical institutions, be it church clergy or plantation aristocracy. But it also avoids the other extreme, that of getting lost in the abstractions of the egoic consciousness that drain psychic reserves and make human will impotent. As Harriet Tubman proved, this other way of being can be a source of empowerment and liberation.

What made this possible is not only that she was illiterate but unchurched as well. In their own way, Quakers traditionally maintained a practice of being unchurched, in avoiding certain formal church institutions such as eschewing the ministerial profession. Slaves, on the other hand, were often forced to be unchurched in not being allowed to participate in formal religion. This would have helped maintain traditional African spiritual practice and experience. Interestingly, as J.E. Kennedy reports, one set of data found that “belief in the paranormal was positively related to religious faith but negatively related to religious participation” (The Polarization of Psi Beliefs; as discussed in NDE: Spirituality vs Religiosity). It’s ironic that formal religion (organized, institutionalized) and literacy, specifically in a text-based religion, have the powerful effect of disconnecting people from experience of God. Yet experience of God can break the spell of that mind virus.

The other thing is that, like African religion, the Quaker emphasis was on the communal. This might not seem obvious, in how Quakers believed in the individual’s relationship to God. That is where Tubman’s example is helpful. She too had an individual relationship to God, but her identity was also tied closely to kinship, community, and ancestry. We need to think more carefully about what is meant when we speak of individuality. One can gain one’s own private liberty by freeing oneself from shackled enslavement, that is to say changing one’s status from owned by another to owned by oneself (i.e., owned by the ego-self, in some ways an even more harsh taskmaster). Freedom, however, is something else entirely. The etymology of ‘freedom’ is the same as ‘friend’. To be free is to be among friends, to be a member of a free society — one is reminded that, to Quakers and West Africans alike, there was an inclination to relate to God as a friend. Considering this simple but profound understanding, it wasn’t enough for Tubman to escape her oppressive bondage, if she left behind everyone she loved.

Often she repeated her moral claim for either liberty or death, as if they were of equivalent value; whereas freedom is about life and the essence of life is shared, as freedom is always about connection and relationship, about solidarity and belonging. She couldn’t be free alone and, under the will of something greater than her, she returned South to free her kith and kin. The year Harriet Tubman first sought freedom, 1849, was the same year of the birth of Emma Lazarus, a poet who would write some of the most well known words on slavery and oppression, including the simple statement that, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” About a century later, this was rephrased by Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights movement when he said, “No one is free until we are all free.” One could trace this insight back to the ancient world, as when Jesus spoke that, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” That is freedom.

A living God lives among a living generation of people, a living community. “For where two or three gather in my name,” as Jesus also taught, “there am I with them.” Quakers had a tradition of living constitutionalism, something now associated with liberalism but originally having its origins in a profound sense of the divine (Where Liberty and Freedom Converge). To the Quaker worldview, a constitution is a living agreement and expression of the Divine, a covenant between God a specific people; related to why Quakers denied natural law that would usurp the authorization of this divine presence. A constitution is not a piece of paper nor the words upon it. Nor can a constitution be imposed upon other people outside of that community of souls. So, neither slaves nor following generations are beholden to a constitution enacted by someone else. This was why Thomas Jefferson assumed later Americans would forever seek out new constitutions to express their democratic voice as a people. But those who understood this the best were Quakers; or those, like Thomas Paine, who were early on influenced by the Quaker faith.

Consider John Dickinson who was raised as a Quaker and, after inheriting slaves, freed them. He is the author of the first draft of America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, which was inspired by Quaker constitutionalism. The Articles of Confederation was a living document, in that it’s only power was the authority of every state agreeing to it with total consensus and no change being allowed to be made to it without further consensus. The second constitution, simply known as the United States Constitution and unconstitutionally established according to the first constitution (The Vague and Ambiguous US Constitution), was designed to be a dead letter and it has become famous for enshrining the institution of slavery. Rather than expressing a message of freedom, it was a new system of centralized power and authority. The deity invoked under this oppression is a dead god, a god of death. No one hears the voice of this false god, this demiurge.

Such a false idol can make no moral claim over a free people. As such, a free people assert their freedom by the simplest act of walking away, as did Harriet Tubman by following the water gourd pointing to the North Star, and as she repeated many times in guiding her people to what to them was the Promised Land. What guided her was the living voice of the living God. They had their own divine covenant that took precedence over any paper scribbled upon by a human hand.

* * *

Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the Underground Railroad
by Allison Keys, Audubon Magazine

“It was in those timber fields where she learned the skills necessary to be a successful conductor on the Underground Railroad,” Crenshaw explains, “including how to read the landscape, how to be comfortable in the woods, how to navigate and use the sounds that were natural in Dorchester County at the time.”

Underground Railroad Secret Codes
from Harriet Tubman Historical Society

Supporters of the Underground Railroad used words railroad conductors employed everyday to create their own code as secret language in order to help slaves escape. Railroad language was chosen because the railroad was an emerging form of transportation and its communication language was not widespread. Code words would be used in letters to “agents” so that if they were intercepted they could not be caught. Underground Railroad code was also used in songs sung by slaves to communicate among each other without their masters being aware.

Myths & Facts About Harriet Tubman
from National Park Service

Tubman sang two songs while operating her rescue missions. Both are listed in Sarah Bradford’s biography Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman: “Go Down Moses,” and, “Bound For the Promised Land.” Tubman said she changed the tempo of the songs to indicate whether it was safe to come out or not.

Songs of the Underground Railroad
from Harriet Tubman Historical Society

Songs were used in everyday life by African slaves. Singing was tradition brought from Africa by the first slaves; sometimes their songs are called spirituals. Singing served many purposes such as providing repetitive rhythm for repetitive manual work, inspiration and motivation. Singing was also use to express their values and solidarity with each other and during celebrations. Songs were used as tools to remember and communicate since the majority of slaves could not read.

Harriet Tubman and other slaves used songs as a strategy to communicate with slaves in their struggle for freedom. Coded songs contained words giving directions on how to escape also known as signal songs or where to meet known as map songs.

Songs used Biblical references and analogies of Biblical people, places and stories, comparing them to their own history of slavery. For example, “being bound for the land of Canaan” for a white person could mean ready to die and go to heaven; but to a slave it meant ready to go to Canada.

Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman
by Sarah Hopkins Bradford
pp. 25-27

After nightfall, the sound of a hymn sung at a distance comes upon the ears of the concealed and famished fugitives in the woods, and they know that their deliverer is at hand. They listen eagerly for the words she sings, for by them they are to be warned of danger, or informed of safety. Nearer and nearer comes the unseen singer, and the words are wafted to their ears:

Hail, oh hail ye happy spirits,
Death no more shall make you fear,
No grief nor sorrow, pain nor anger (anguish)
Shall no more distress you there.

Around him are ten thousan’ angels,
Always ready to ‘bey comman’.
Dey are always hobring round you,
Till you reach the hebbenly lan’.

Jesus, Jesus will go wid you;
He will lead you to his throne;
He who died has gone before you,
Trod de wine-press all alone.

He whose thunders shake creation;
He who bids the planets roll;
He who rides upon the temple, (tempest)
An’ his scepter sways de whole.

Dark and thorny is de desert,
Through de pilgrim makes his ways,
Yet beyon’ dis vale of sorrow,
Lies de fiel’s of endless days.

I give these words exactly as Harriet sang them to me to a sweet and simple Methodist air. “De first time I go by singing dis hymn, dey don’t come out to me,” she said, “till I listen if de coast is clar; den when I go back and sing it again, dey come out. But if I sing:

Moses go down in Egypt,
Till ole Pharo’ let me go;
Hadn’t been for Adam’s fall,
Shouldn’t hab to died at all,

den dey don’t come out, for dere’s danger in de way.”

by Margaret Washington

I. Building Communities
C. It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.

Enslaved African Americans came from a heritage that embraced concepts of solidarity in a descending order from the larger ethnic group, to the communal village, to the extended family to the nuclear family. Individualism (as opposed to individuality) was considered selfish and antithetical to the broader interests of a unit. Whether societies were matrilineal or patrilineal, nearly all were patriarchal (power rested with men). Nonetheless, the glue that bound the communal circle was the woman, considered the life giving force, the bearer of culture, essence of aesthetic beauty and key to a community’s longevity. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters etc. had oversight of children until puberty, when male and female rites of passage prepared them separately for their gendered communal roles. West African women were spiritually strong, morally respected, valued for their economic propensity, important in governance and in some cultures (Ashanti, Kongo, Ibo) powerful warriors. However devalued and exploited in America, Modesty, Rit and Minty exemplified how enslaved women resisted a sense of futility or fatalism and refashioned African attributes of beauty, dignity, self-worth and ethics. Enslaved women combed the waterways, forests and woods to obtain roots, herbs, leaves, sap, barks and other medicinal products for healing, amulets and even conjuration. Rit certainly used such remedies to nurse Minty back to health after extreme exhaustion, illnesses, beatings and her near fatal blow on the head. Rit learned these remedies and poultices from her mother Modesty and Harriet Tubman used them on the Underground Railroad. Their example reveals the significance of women to the community and that despite the assaults on the black family; it remained an institution, which even separation could not sever. […]

A. The Hidden Church: An African-Christian Synthesis.

If community was the base of African and African American life and culture, spirituality was the superstructure. Certainly enslaved people ultimately embraced Christianity. But for generations Southern whites feared exposing blacks to Christianity. The Bible’s Old Testament militant nationalism and New Testament’s spiritual  egalitarianism were not lost on African Americans, a few of whom were literate and the majority of whom felt that baptism was one kind of freedom.

Like most enslaved children, young Minty grew up outside of a church. However, since Ben Ross’s owner Anthony Thompson Sr., was a practicing Methodist, Minty’s family heard Christian sermons. But Edward Brodess was not devout and when he separated the Ross family, little Minty was hired out and did not receive white religious benevolence. But a tradition of black religion and spirituality existed independent of whites. In African culture, sacred worship embedded every aspect of life (rites of passage, marriage, funerals, child birth, etc.). Divine reverence was not confined to a building, a single ceremony or a specific day of the week. Spirituality was pervasive, expressive, emotional and evocative. Although the religious culture developed in America had African roots, the ravages of bondage created more social-spiritual convergences. In Minty’s world, spirituality was wrapped in temporal concerns affecting the individual, the family and the community. Worship was praising, praying, lamenting, hoping and drawing strength from each other. Long before Minty’s birth, Africans in America had created a “hidden church” where enslaved people gathered clandestinely (the woods, in cabins, in boats, in white people’s kitchens and even in the fields). In the hidden church they recounted religious and secular experiences; gave testimonies and created a space were women such as Rit could express the pain of having children sold or of trying to bring Minty back to life after her head was bashed in. In the hidden church, enslaved people created subversive songs, prayed for spiritual salvation, heavenly retribution and freedom.

Africans traveling the Maafa brought an ethos that merged the sacred and secular worlds. Enslaved African Americans embraced Christianity but also selectively adapted it to previous traditions and to their historical circumstances. Above all, they rejected incongruous white teachings meant to relegate blacks to perpetual slavery. Rather than being converted to Christianity as taught by whites, enslaved people converted Christianity to their own needs. Moreover, some significant African and Christian traditions had noteworthy commonalities.

Africans, like Christians believed in one God (Nzambi among the Bantu, Onyame among the Akan-Ashanti for example) who was the apex of all existence just as humanity was the center of earthly life. While gendered concepts of the African Supreme Being varied, like Jehovah, Africans’ God was revered, all-powerful and approachable. However, unlike Jehovah, the African Supreme Being was not feared, jealous nor wrathful. Other spirits exist in the African pantheon, like saints in Catholicism. But there was only one God. Hence, when whites spoke of a Supreme God, Africans understood. Harriet Tubman’s God was an all-powerful friend. According to Thomas Garrett, her close friend and a beloved Quaker Underground Railroad Conductor, Harriet spoke to God every day of her life. “I never knew anyone so confident of her faith,” said Garrett. (Letter in Bradford)

Africans, like Christians, believed in a soul, sometimes called the “heart” or “voice.” The soul was responsible for human behavior in life and was one’s spiritual existence after death. Some ethnicities had complicated concepts of the soul; others simply recognized the soul as the “little me in the big me” which lived on. Africans believed in honoring this life after death, especially as part of the kinship spiritual connection (ancestor reverence), which brought protection to the living. The curse of the dead was much dreaded in Africa and in America. Hence the importance of burial and funeral rites throughout the Diaspora, even today. A woman such as Harriet Tubman who embraced Christianity, also blended a spiritual syncretism that constructed a concept of the soul around moral ethics and faith imparted through the word of God, “as spoken to her soul” according to her friend Garrett. “She is a firm believer in spiritual manifestations . . . she never goes on her missions of mercy without his (God’s) consent.” (Garrett to Eliza Wigham, in McGowan, 135)

Water was a life giving force in African culture and the spirit world was under water. Throughout the African Diaspora, water represented divine transformations—birth, death, baptism and rebirth. For many enslaved people, accepting Christianity carried implications reminiscent of older traditions that surpassed what whites intended. In African cultures, an initiate received a “sacred bath” following a special protracted rite of passage symbolizing acceptance and integration into the community. Similarly, with Christianity enslaved people sought salvation through isolation, prayer, meditation, and communication with God through visions and signs from the natural environment. Baptism by total immersion represented final acceptance into the “ark of safety.” Although Methodists baptized by sprinkling, enslaved people insisted on going “down under” the water. They also equated spiritual transformation with secular change. Such thinking was Christian because the New Testament upheld spiritual egalitarianism. It was also African: One traveled briefly into the watery world of the ancestors as an uncivil “little spirit of the bush” full of individualistic anti-communal tendencies. One emerged from the water as a citizen of the community able to partake of all rights and privileges. The change was both divine and temporal; it was fervent, overwhelming and thoroughgoing. Canals, marshes, swamps and rivers surrounded African descended people on the Eastern Shore. Here they labored as slaves. Here they were baptized and hence constantly reminded of water’s spiritual and liberating significance.

Minty’s Christian conversion experience probably happened while working for the Stewarts in Caroline County. Whether because of that experience or her blow on the head, Minty insisted she spoke to God, had trances and saw visions that foretold future events. As a clairvoyant, Minty believed that she inherited this second sense from her father, Ben. Africans and African Americans believed that a clairvoyant person was born with a “caul” or “veil,” a portion of the birth membrane that remained on the head. They were seers and visionaries who communicated with the supernatural world and were under a special spiritual dispensation. Visions sometimes came while Minty worked, were accompanied by music and articulated in a different language. Minty also claimed exceptional power. When Edward Brodess sent slave traders to Ben’s cabin to inspect Minty, she prayed for God to cleanse Brodess’s heart and make him a good man or kill him. Brodess’ death convinced Minty that she had “prayed him to death.”1 Since his death put her in eminent danger of sale, Minty knew it was a sign from God to flee.

Northerners called Ben “a full-blooded Negro.” His parents were probably African born and told him the old Maafa adage that he passed on to Minty: some Africans could fly. Indeed, captured Ibo people committed suicide believing that their spirits flew back to Africa.2 Similarly, as Minty envisioned her escape, “She used to dream of flying over fiefs and towns, and rivers and mountings, looking down upon them ‘like a bird.'” When it appeared as if her strength would give out and she could not cross the river, “there would be ladies all dressed in white over there, and they would put our their arms and pull me across.” Listening to Ben’s stories, predictions and sharing his faith convinced Minty that an omniscient force protected her. In visions, she became a disembodied spirit observing earthly and heavenly scenes. Harriet Tubman told friends that God “called” her to activism against her wishes. She begged God to “get someone else” but to no avail. Since God called her, she depended on God to guide her away from danger.

Psychology in Religion or as a Religion










Islamic Voice-Hearing

Islam, what kind of religion is it? Islam is the worship of a missing god, that is how we earlier described it. Some might consider that as unfair and dismissive to one of the world’s largest religions, but this is true to some extent for all post-bicameral religions. The difference is that Islam is among the most post-bicameral of the world religions. This is true simply in temporal terms.

The bicameral societies, according to Julian Jaynes, ended with the widespread collapse of the late Bronze Age empires and their trade networks. That happened around 1177 BCE, as the result of natural disasters and attacks by the mysterious Sea People, the latter maybe having formed out the refugees from the former. The Bronze Age continued for many centuries in various places: 700 BCE in Great Britain, Central Europe and China; 600 BCE in Northern Europe; 500 BCE in Korea and Ireland; and centuries beyond that in places like Japan.

But the Bronze Age Empires never returned. In that late lingering Bronze Age, a dark age took hold and put all of civilization onto a new footing. This was the era when, across numerous cultures, there were the endless laments about the gods, spirits, and ancestors having gone silent, having abandoned humanity. Entire cultural worldviews and psychological ways of being were utterly demolished or else irreparably diminished. This created an intense sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia that has never left humanity since.

Out of the ashes, while the Bronze Age was still holding on, the Axial Age arose around 900 BCE and continued until 200 BCE. New cultures were formed and new empires built. The result is what Jaynes described as ‘consciousness’ or what one can think of as introspective mental space, an inner world of egoic identity where the individual is separate from community and world. Consciousness and the formalized religions that accompanied it were a replacement for the loss of a world alive with voices.

By the time Rabbinic Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christianity came around, the Axial Age was already being looked back upon as a Golden Age and, other than through a few surviving myths, the Bronze Age before that was barely remembered at all. It would be nearly another 600 years after that first century monotheistic revival when Muhammad would have his visions of the angel Gabriel visiting him to speak on behalf of God. Islam is both post-bicameral and post-axial, to a far greater degree.

Muslims consider Muhammad to be the last prophet and even he didn’t get to hear God directly for it had to come through an angel. The voice of God had long ago grown so faint that people had come to rely on oracles, channelings, and such. These rather late revelations by way of Gabriel were but a barely audible echo of the archaic bicameral voices. It is may be understandable that, as with some oracles before him, Muhammad would declare God would never speak again. So, Islam, unlike the other monothesitic religions, fully embraces God’s absence from the world.

Actually, that is not quite right. Based on the Koran, God will never speak again until the Final Judgment. Then all will hear God again when he weighs your sins and decides the fate of your immortal soul. Here is the interesting part. The witnesses God shall call upon in each person’s case will be all the bicameral voices brought back out of silence. The animals and plants will witness for or against you, as will the earth and rocks and wind. Even your own resurrected body parts will come alive again with voices to speak of what you did. Body parts speaking is something familiar to those who read Jaynesian scholarship.

Until then, God and all the voices of the world will remain mute witnesses, watching your every move and taking notes. They see all, hear all, notice all — every time you masturbate or pick your nose, every time you have a cruel or impure thought, every time you don’t follow one of the large number of divine commandments, laws, and rules spelled out in the Koran. The entire world is spying upon you and will report back to God, at the end of time. The silent world only appears to be dumb and unconscious. God is biding his time, gathering a file on you like a cosmic FBI.

This could feel paralyzing, but in another way it offers total freedom from self, total freedom through complete submission. Jaynesian consciousness is a heavy load and that was becoming increasingly apparent over time, especially in the centuries following the Axial Age. The zealous idealism of the Axial Age prophets was growing dull and tiresome. By the time that Muhammad showed up, almost two millennia had passed since the bicameral mind descended into darkness. The new consciousness was sold as something amazing, but it hadn’t fully lived up to its promises. Instead, ever more brutal regimes came into power and a sense of anxiety was overtaking society.

Muhammad had an answer and the people of that region were obviously hungry for someone to provide an answer. After forming his large army, his military campaign barely experienced any resistance. And in a short period of time while he was still alive, most of the Arabian peninsula was converted to Islam. The silence of the gods had weakened society, but Muhammad offered an explanation for why the divine could no longer be experienced. He helped normalize what had once felt like a tragedy. He told them that they didn’t need to hear God because God had already revealed all knowledge to the prophets, including himself of course. No one had to worry, just follow orders and comply with commands.

All the tiresome complications of thought were unnecessary. God had already thought out everything for humans. The Koran as the final and complete holy text would entirely and permanently replace the bicameral voices, ever receding into the shadows of the psyche. But don’t worry, all those voices are still there, waiting to speak. But the only voice that the individual needed to listen to was that of the person directly above them in the religious hierarchy, be it one’s father or an imam or whoever else with greater official authority with a line of command that goes back to the prophets and through the angels to God Himself. Everything is in the Koran and the learned priestly class would explain it all and translate it into proper theocratic governance.

Muhammad came with a different message than anyone before. The Jewish prophets and Jesus, as with many Pagans, would speak of God as Father and humanity as His children. Early Christians took this as a challenge to a slave-based society, in borrowing from the Stoics that even a slave was free in his soul. Muhammad, instead, was offering another variety of freedom. We humans, rather than children of God, are slaves of God. The entire Islamic religion is predicated upon divine slavery, absolute submission. This is freedom from the harsh taskmaster of egoic individuality, a wannabe demiurge. Unlike Jesus, Muhammad formulated a totalitarian theocracy, a totalizing system. Nothing is left to question or interpretation, that is in theory or rather in belief.

This goes back to how, with the loss of the bicameral mind and social order, something took its place. It was a different kind of authoritarianism — rigid and hierarchical, centralized and concentrated, despotic and violent. Authoritarianism of this variety didn’t emerge until the late Bronze Age when the bicameral societies were becoming too large and complex, overstrained and unstable. Suddenly, as if to presage the coming collapse, there was the appearance of written laws, harsh punishment, and cruel torture — none of which ever existed before, according to historical records and archaeological finds. As the world shifted into post-bicameralism, this authoritarianism became ever more extreme (e.g., Roman Empire).

This was always the other side of the rise of individuality, of Jaynesian consciousness. The greater potential freedom the individual possesses the more that oppressive social control is required, as the communal bonds and social norms of the bicameral mind increasingly lost their hold to organically maintain order. Muhammad must have showed up at the precise moment of crisis in this change. After the Roman Empire’s system of slavery, Europe came up with feudalism to re-create some of what had disappeared. But apparently a different kind of solution was required in the Arab world.

Maybe this offsets the draining of psychic energy that comes with consciousness. Jaynes speculated that, like the schizophrenic, bicameral humans had immense energy and stamina which allowed them to accomplish near-miraculous feats such as building the pyramids with small populations and very little technology or infrastructure. Suppression of the extremes of individualism through emphasizing absolute subordination is maybe a way of keeping in check the energy loss of maintaining egoic consciousness. In the West, we eventually overcame this weakness by using massive doses of stimulants to overpower the otherwise debilitating anxiety and to help shore up the egoic boundaries, but this has come at the cost of destroying our physical health and mental health.

Time will tell which strategy is the most effective for long-term survival of specific societies. But I’m not sure I’d bet on the Western system, considering how unsustainable it appears to be and how easily it has become crippled by a minor disease epidemic like covid-19. Muhammad might simply have been trying to cobble together some semblance of a bicameral mind, in the face of divine silence. There is a good reason for trying to do that. Those bicameral societies lasted many millennia longer than has our post-bicameral civilization. It’s not clear that modern civilization or at least Western civilization will last beyond the end of this century. We underestimate the bicameral mind and the importance it played during the single longest period of advancement of civilization.

* * *

Let us leave a small note of a more personal nature. In the previous post (linked above), we mentioned that our line of inquiry began with a conversation we had with a friend of ours who is a Muslim. He also happens to be schizophrenic, i.e., a voice-hearer. The last post was about how voice=hearing is understood within Islam. Since supposedly God no longer speaks to humans nor do his angelic intermediaries, any voice a Muslim hears is automatically interpreted as not being of divine origins. It doesn’t necessarily make the voice evil, as it could be a jinn which is a neutral entity in Islamic theology, although jinn can be dangerous. Then again, voice-hearing might also be caused by an evil magician, what I think is called a sihir.

Anyway, we had the opportunity to speak to this friend once again, as we are both in jobs that require us to continue working downtown amidst everything otherwise being locked down because of the covid-19 epidemic. In being isolated from family and other friends, we’ve been meeting with this Islamic guy on a daily basis. Just this morning, we went for a long walk together and chatted about life and religion. He had previously talked about his schizophrenia in passing, apparently unworried by the stigma of it. He is an easy person to talk to, quite direct and open about his thoughts and experiences. I asked him about voice-hearing and he explained that, prior to being medicated, he would continue to hear people speak to him after they no longer were present. And unsurprisingly, the voices were often negative.

Both his imam and his therapist told him to ignore the voices. Maybe that is a standard approach in traditionally monotheistic cultures. As we mentioned in the other post, he is from North Africa where Arabs are common. But another friend of ours lives in Ghana, in West Africa. Voice-hearing experience among people in Ghana was compared to those in the United States, in the research of Tanya M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist inspired by Julian Jaynes. She found that Ghanans, with a tradition of voice-hearing (closer to bicameralism?), had a much more positive experience of the voices they heard. Americans, like our Islamic friend, did not tend to hear voices that were kind and helpful. This is probably the expectancy effect.

If you are raised to believe that voices are demonic or their Islamic equivalent of jinn or are from witches and evil magicians, or if you simply have been told voice-hearing means your insane, well, it’s not likely to lead to happy results when you do hear voices. I doubt it decreases the rate of voice-hearing, though. In spite of Islamic theology denying God and angels speak to humans any longer, that isn’t likely to have any affect on voice-hearing itself. So, the repressed bicameral mind keeps throwing out these odd experiences, but in our post-bicameral age we have fewer resources in dealing constructively with those voices. Simply denying and ignoring them probably is less helpful.

That is the ultimate snag. The same voices that once were identified as godly or something similar are now taken as false, unreal, or dangerous. In a sense, God never stopped speaking. One could argue that we all are voice-hearers, but some of us now call the voice of God as ‘conscience’ or whatever. Others, like Muslims, put great emphasis on this voice-hearing but have tried to gag God who goes on talking. Imagine how many potential new prophets have been locked away in psychiatric wards or, much worse, killed or imprisoned as heretics. If God can’t be silenced, the prophets who hear him can. The Old Testament even describes how the authorities forbid voice-hearing and demanded that voice-hearers be killed, even by their own parents.

The bicameral mind didn’t disappear naturally because it was inferior but because, in its potency, it was deemed dangerous to those who wanted to use brute power to enforce their own voices of authorization. The bicameral mind, once central to the social order, had become enemy number one. If people could talk to God directly, religion and its claims of authority would become irrelevant. That is how our Islamic friend, a devout religious practitioner, ended up being drugged up to get the voices to stop speaking.

Islam as Worship of a Missing God

A friend of ours is a Muslim and grew up in an Islamic country. As he talked about his religion, we realized how different it is from Christianity. There is no shared practice among Christians similar to the praying five times a day. From early on, Christianity was filled with diverse groups and disagreements, and that has only increased over time (there are over 4,600 denominations of Christianity in the United States alone). My friend had a hard time appreciating that there is no agreed upon authority, interpretation, or beliefs among all Christians.

Unlike Muhammad, Jesus never wrote anything nor was anything written down about him until much later. Nor did he intend to start a new religion. He offered no rules, social norms, instructions, etc for how to organize a church, a religious society, or a government. He didn’t even preach family values, if anything the opposite — from a command to let the dead bury themselves to the proclamation of having come to turn family members against each other. The Gospels offer no practical advice about anything. Much of Jesus’ teachings, beyond a general message of love and compassion, are vague and enigmatic, often parables that have many possible meanings.

Now compare Jesus to the Islamic prophet. Muhammad is considered the last prophet, although he never claimed to have heard the voice of God and instead supposedly having received the message secondhand through an angel. Still, according to Muslims, the Koran is the only complete holy text in existence — the final Word of God. That is also something that differs from Christianity. Jesus never asserted that God would become silent to all of humanity for eternity and that his worshippers would be condemned to a world without the God they longed for, in the way Allah never enters His own Creation.

Many Protestants and Anabaptists and those in similar groups believe that God continues to be revealed to people today, that the divine is known through direct experience, that the Bible as a holy text must be read as a personal relationship to God, not merely taken on the authority of blind faith. Some churches go so far as to teach people how to speak to and hear God (T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back). Even within Catholicism, there have been further revelations of God since Jesus, from various mystics and saints that are acknowledged by the Vatican but also from ordinary Catholics claiming God spoke to them without any great fear of hereticism and excommunication.

It made me think about Julian Jaynes’ theory modern consciousness. With the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, there was this sense of the gods having gone silent. Yet this was never an absolute experience, as some people continued to hear the gods. Even into the modern world, occasionally people still claim to hear various gods and sometimes even found new religions based on revelations. The Bahai, for example, consider Muhammad to be just one more prophet with others having followed him. Hindus also have a living tradition of divine revelation that is equivalent to that of prophets. Only Islam, as far as I know, claims all prophecy and revelation to be ended for all time.

I was thinking about the sense of loss and loneliness people felt when bicameral societies came to an end. They were thrown onto an increasingly isolated individualism. Religion as we know it was designed to accommodate this, in order to give a sense of order, meaning and authority that had gone missing. But Islam takes this to an extreme. After Muhammad, no human supposedly would ever again personally hear, see, or experience the divine in any way (excluding mystical traditions like Sufism). For all intents and purposes, Allah has entirely receded from the world. The only sign of his existence that he left behind was a book of instructions. We must submit and comply or be punished in the afterlife, a world separate from this one

That seems so utterly depressing and dreary to me. I was raised Christian and on the far other extreme of Protestantism. My family attended the Unity Church that emphasizes direct experience of God to such a degree that the Bible itself was mostly ignored and almost irrelevant — why turn to mere words on paper when you can go straight to the source? Rather than being denied and condemned, to claim to have heard God speak would have been taken seriously. I’m no longer religious, but the nearly deist idea of a god that is distant and silent seems so alien and unappealing to me. Yet maybe that makes Islam well designed for the modern world, as it offers a strong response to atheism.

If you don’t have any experience of God, this is considered normal and expected in Islam, not something to be worried about, not something to challenge one’s faith as is common in Christianity (NDE: Spirituality vs Religiosity); and it avoids the riskiness and confusion of voice-hearing (Libby Anne, Voices in Your Head: Evangelicals and the Voice of God). One’s ignorance of the divine demonstrates one’s individual inadequacy and, as argued by religious authority, is all the more reason to submit to religious authority. Islamic relation between God and humanity is one-way, except to some extent by way of inspiration and dreams, but Allah himself never directly enters his Creation and so never directly interacts with humans, not even with prophets. Is that why constant prayer is necessary for Muslims, to offset God’s silence and vacancy? Worship of a missing God seems perfectly suited for the modern world.

Muslims are left with looking for traces of God in the Koran like ants crawling around in a footprint while trying to comprehend what made it and what it wants them to do. So, some of the ants claim to be part of a direct lineage of ants that goes back to an original ant that, according to tradition, was stepped upon by what passed by. These well-respected ants then explain to all the other ants what is meant by all the bumps and grooves in the dried mud. In worship, the ants pray toward the footprint and regularly gather to circle around it. This gives their life some sense of meaning and purpose and, besides, it maintains the social order.

That is what is needed in a world where the bicameral voices of archaic authorization no longer speak, no longer are heard. Something has to fill the silence as the loneliness it creates is unbearable. Islam has a nifty trick, embracing the emptiness and further irritating the overwhelming anxiety as it offers the salve for the soul. Muslims take the silence of God as proof of God, as a promise of something more. This otherworldly being, Allah, tells humans who don’t feel at home in this world that their real home is elsewhere, to which they will return if they do what they are told. Other religions do something similar, but Islam takes this to another level — arguably, the highest or most extreme form of monotheism, so far. The loss of the bicameral mind could not be pushed much further, one suspects, without being pushed into an abyss.

Islam is a truly modern religion. Right up there with capitalism and scientism.

* * *

Further discussion about this can be found on the Facebook page “Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.


Battle of Voices of Authorization in the World and in Ourselves

New Feelings: Podcast Passivity
by Suzannah Showler

My concern is that on some level, I’m prone to mistake any voice that pours so convincingly into my brain for my own. And maybe it’s not even a mistake, per se, so much as a calculated strategy on the part of my ego to maintain its primacy, targeting and claiming any foreign object that would stray so far into the inner-sanctum of my consciousness. Whether the medium is insidious, my mind a greedy assimilation machine, or both, it seems that at least some of the time, podcasts don’t just drown out my inner-monologue — they actually overwrite it. When I listen to a podcast, I think some part of me believes I’m only hearing myself think.

Twentieth-century critics worried about this, too. Writing sometime around the late 1930s, Theodore Adorno theorized that a solitary listener under the influence of radio is vulnerable to persuasion by an anonymous authority. He writes: “The deeper this [radio] voice is involved within his own privacy, the more it appears to pour out of the cells of his more intimate life; the more he gets the impression that his own cupboard, his own photography, his own bedroom speaks to him in a personal way, devoid of the intermediary stage of the printed words; the more perfectly he is ready to accept wholesale whatever he hears. It is just this privacy which fosters the authority of the radio voice and helps to hide it by making it no longer appear to come from outside.”

I’ll admit that I have occasionally been gripped by false memories as a result of podcasts — been briefly sure that I’d seen a TV show I’d never watched, or convinced that it was a friend, not a professional producer, who told me some great anecdote. But on the whole, my concern is less that I am being brainwashed and more that I’m indulging in something deeply avoidant: filling my head with ideas without actually having to do the messy, repetitive, boring, or anxious work of making meaning for myself. It’s like downloading a prefabbed stream of consciousness and then insisting it’s DIY. The effect is twofold: a podcast distracts me from the tedium of being alone with myself, while also convincingly building a rich, highly-produced version of my inner life. Of course that’s addictive — it’s one of the most effective answers to loneliness and self-importance I can imagine.

Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on alt Twitter
by Aaron Z. Lewis

Digital masks are making the static and immortal soul of the Renaissance seem increasingly out of touch. In an environment of info overload, it’s easy to lose track of where “my” ideas come from. My brain is filled with free-floating thoughts that are totally untethered from the humans who came up with them. I speak and think in memes — a language that’s more like the anonymous manuscript culture of medieval times than the individualist Renaissance era. Everything is a remix, including our identities. We wear our brains outside of our skulls and our nerves outside our skin. We walk around with other people’s voices in our heads. The self is in the network rather than a node.

The ability to play multiple characters online means that the project of crafting your identity now extends far beyond your physical body. In his later years, McLuhan predicted that this newfound ability would lead to a society-wide identity crisis:

The instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing — rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence — violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial.

As I survey the cultural landscape of 2020, it seems that McLuhan’s predictions have unfortunately come true. More than ever before, people are exposed to a daily onslaught of world views and belief systems that threaten their identities. Social media has become the battlefield for a modern-day Hobbesian war of all-against-all. And this conflict has leaked into the allegedly “offline” world.

Voice and Perspective

“No man should [refer to himself in the third person] unless he is the King of England — or has a tapeworm.”
~ Mark Twain

~ Donald Trump

The self is a confusing matter. As always, who is speaking and who is listening. Clues can come from the language that is used. And the language we use shapes human experience, as studied in linguistic relativity. Speaking in first person may be a more recent innovation of the human society and psyche:

“An unmistakable individual voice, using the first person singular “I,” first appeared in the works of lyric poets. Archilochus, who lived in the first half of the seventh century B.C., sang his own unhappy love rather than assume the role of a spectator describing the frustrations of love in others. . . [H]e had in mind an immaterial sort of soul, with which Homer was not acquainted” (Yi-Fu Tuan, Segmented Worlds and Self, p. 152).

The autobiographical self requires the self-authorization of Jaynesian narrative consciousness. The emergence of the egoic self is the fall into historical time, an issue too complex for discussion here (see Julian Jaynes’ classic work or the diverse Jaynesian scholarship it inspired, or look at some of my previous posts on the topic).

Consider the mirror effect. When hunter-gatherers encounter a mirror for the first time there is what is called  “the tribal terror of self-recognition” (Edmund Carpenter as quoted by Philippe Rochat, from Others in Mind, p. 31). “After a frightening reaction,” Carpenter wrote about the Biamis of Papua New Guinea, “they become paralyzed, covering their mouths and hiding their heads — they stood transfixed looking at their own images, only their stomach muscles betraying great tension.”

Research has shown that heavy use of first person is associated with depression, anxiety, and other distressing emotions. Oddly, this full immersion into subjectivity can lead into depressive depersonalization and depressive realism — the individual sometimes passes through the self and into some other state. And in that other state, I’ve noticed that silence befalls the mind, that is to say the loss of the ‘I’ where the inner dialogue goes silent. One sees the world as if coldly detached, as if outside of it all.

Third person is stranger and with a much more ancient pedigree. In the modern mind, third person is often taken as an effect of narcissistic inflation of the ego, such as seen with celebrities speaking of themselves in terms of their media identities. But in other countries and at other times, it has been an indication of religious humility or a spiritual shifting of perspective (possibly expressing the belief that only God can speak of Himself as ‘I’).

There is also the Batman effect. Children act more capable and with greater perseverance when speaking of themselves in third person, specifically as superhero character. As with religious practice, this serves the purpose of distancing from emotion. Yet a sense of self can simultaneously be strengthened when the individual becomes identified with a character. This is similar to celebrities who turn their social identities into something akin to mythological figures. Or as the child can be encouraged to invoke their favorite superhero to stand in for their underdeveloped ego-selves, a religious true believer can speak of God or the Holy Spirit working through them. There is immense power in this.

This might point to the Jaynesian bicameral mind. When an Australian Aborigine ritually sings a Songline, he is invoking a god-spirit-personality. That third person of the mythological story shifts the Aboriginal experience of self and reality. The Aborigine has as many selves as he has Songlines, each a self-contained worldview and way of being. This could be a more natural expression of human nature… or at least an easier and less taxing mode of being (Hunger for Connection). Jaynes noted that schizophrenics with their weakened and loosened egoic boundaries have seemingly inexhaustible energy.

He suspected this might explain why archaic humans could do seemingly impossible tasks such as building pyramids, something moderns could only accomplish through use of our largest and most powerful cranes. Yet the early Egyptians managed it with a small, impoverished, and malnourished population that lacked even basic infrastructure of roads and bridges. Similarly, this might explain how many tribal people can dance for days on end with little rest and no food. And maybe also like how armies can collectively march for days on end in a way no individual could (Music and Dance on the Mind).

Upholding rigid egoic boundaries is tiresome work. This might be why, when individuals reach exhaustion under stress (mourning a death, getting lost in the wilderness, etc), they can experience what John Geiger called the third man factor, the appearance of another self often with its own separate voice. Apparently, when all else fails, this is the state of mind we fall back on and it’s a common experience at that. Furthermore, a negatory experience, as Jaynes describes it, can lead to negatory possession in the re-emergence of a bicameral-like mind with a third person identity becoming a fully expressed personality of its own, a phenomenon that can happen through trauma-induced dissociation and splitting:

“Like schizophrenia, negatory possession usually begins with some kind of an hallucination. 11 It is often a castigating ‘voice’ of a ‘demon’ or other being which is ‘heard’ after a considerable stressful period. But then, unlike schizophrenia, probably because of the strong collective cognitive imperative of a particular group or religion, the voice develops into a secondary system of personality, the subject then losing control and periodically entering into trance states in which consciousness is lost, and the ‘demon’ side of the personality takes over.”

Jaynes noted that those who are abused in childhood are more easily hypnotized. Their egoic boundaries never as fully develop or else the large gaps are left in this self-construction, gaps through which other voices can slip in. This relates to what has variously been referred to as the porous self, thin boundary type, fantasy proneness, etc. Compared to those who have never experienced trauma, I bet such people would find it easier to speak in the third person and when doing so would show a greater shift in personality and behavior.

As for first person subjectivity, it has its own peculiarities. I think of the association of addiction and individuality, as explored by Johann Hari and as elaborated in my own writings (Individualism and Isolation; To Put the Rat Back in the Rat Park; & The Agricultural Mind). As the ego is a tiresome project that depletes one’s reserves, maybe it’s the energy drain that causes the depression, irritability, and such. A person with such a guarded sense of self would be resistant to speak in third person in finding it hard to escape the trap of ego they’ve so carefully constructed. So many of us have fallen under its sway and can’t imagine anything else (The Spell of Inner Speech). That is probably why it so often requires trauma to break open our psychological defenses.

Besides trauma, many moderns have sought to escape the egoic prison through religious practices. Ancient methods include fasting, meditation, and prayer — these are common across the world. Fasting, by the way, fundamentally alters the functioning of the body and mind through ketosis (also the result of a very low-carb diet), something I’ve speculated may have been a supporting factor for the bicameral mind and related to do with the much earlier cultural preference of psychedelics over addictive stimulants, an entirely different discussion (“Yes, tea banished the fairies.”; & Autism and the Upper Crust). The simplest method of all is using third person language until it becomes a new habit of mind, something might require a long period of practice to feel natural.

The modern mind has always been under stress. That is because it is the source of that stress. It’s not a stable and sustainable way of being in the world (The Crisis of Identity). Rather, it’s a transitional state and all of modernity has been a centuries-long stage of transformation into something else. There is an impulse hidden within, if we could only trigger the release of the locking mechanism (Lock Without a Key). The language of perspectives, as Scott Preston explores (The Three Gems and The Cross of Reality), tells us something important about our predicament. Words such as ‘I’, ‘you’, etc aren’t merely words. In language, we discover our humanity as we come to know the other.

* * *

Are Very Young Children Stuck in the Perpetual Present?
by Jesse Bering

Interestingly, however, the authors found that the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to refer to themselves in the third person (using their first names rather and saying that the sticker is on “his” or “her” head) than were the four-year-olds, who used first-person pronouns (“me” and “my head”) almost exclusively. […]

Povinelli has pointed out the relevancy of these findings to the phenomenon of “infantile amnesia,” which tidily sums up the curious case of most people being unable to recall events from their first three years of life. (I spent my first three years in New Jersey, but for all I know I could have spontaneously appeared as a four-year-old in my parent’s bedroom in Virginia, which is where I have my first memory.) Although the precise neurocognitive mechanisms underlying infantile amnesia are still not very well-understood, escaping such a state of the perpetual present would indeed seemingly require a sense of the temporally enduring, autobiographical self.

5 Reasons Shaq and Other Athletes Refer to Themselves in the Third Person
by Amelia Ahlgren

“Illeism,” or the act of referring to oneself in the third person, is an epidemic in the sports world.

Unfortunately for humanity, the cure is still unknown.

But if we’re forced to listen to these guys drone on about an embodiment of themselves, we might as well guess why they do it.

Here are five reasons some athletes are allergic to using the word “I.”

  1. Lag in Linguistic Development (Immaturity)
  2. Reflection of Egomania
  3. Amp-Up Technique
  4. Pure Intimidation
  5. Goofiness

Rene Thinks, Therefore He Is. You?
by Richard Sandomir

Some strange, grammatical, mind-body affliction is making some well-known folks in sports and politics refer to themselves in the third person. It is as if they have stepped outside their bodies. Is this detachment? Modesty? Schizophrenia? If this loopy verbal quirk were simple egomania, then Louis XIV might have said, “L’etat, c’est Lou.” He did not. And if it were merely a sign of one’s overweening power, the Queen Victoria would not have invented the royal we (“we are not amused”) but rather the royal she. She did not.

Lately, though, some third persons have been talking in a kind of royal he:

* Accepting the New York Jets’ $25 million salary and bonus offer, the quarterback Neil O’Donnell said of his former team, “The Pittsburgh Steelers had plenty of opportunities to sign Neil O’Donnell.”

* As he pushed to be traded from the Los Angeles Kings, Wayne Gretzky said he did not want to wait for the Kings to rebuild “because that doesn’t do a whole lot of good for Wayne Gretzky.”

* After his humiliating loss in the New Hampshire primary, Senator Bob Dole proclaimed: “You’re going to see the real Bob Dole out there from now on.”

These people give you the creepy sense that they’re not talking to you but to themselves. To a first, second or third person’s ear, there’s just something missing. What if, instead of “I am what I am,” we had “Popeye is what Popeye is”?

Vocative self-address, from ancient Greece to Donald Trump
by Ben Zimmer

Earlier this week on Twitter, Donald Trump took credit for a surge in the Consumer Confidence Index, and with characteristic humility, concluded the tweet with “Thanks Donald!”

The “Thanks Donald!” capper led many to muse about whether Trump was referring to himself in the second person, the third person, or perhaps both.

Since English only marks grammatical person on pronouns, it’s not surprising that there is confusion over what is happening with the proper name “Donald” in “Thanks, Donald!” We associate proper names with third-person reference (“Donald Trump is the president-elect”), but a name can also be used as a vocative expression associated with second-person address (“Pleased to meet you, Donald Trump”). For more on how proper names and noun phrases in general get used as vocatives in English, see two conference papers from Arnold Zwicky: “Hey, Whatsyourname!” (CLS 10, 1974) and “Isolated NPs” (Semantics Fest 5, 2004).

The use of one’s own name in third-person reference is called illeism. Arnold Zwicky’s 2007 Language Log post, “Illeism and its relatives” rounds up many examples, including from politicians like Bob Dole, a notorious illeist. But what Trump is doing in tweeting “Thanks, Donald!” isn’t exactly illeism, since the vocative construction implies second-person address rather than third-person reference. We can call this a form of vocative self-address, wherein Trump treats himself as an addressee and uses his own name as a vocative to create something of an imagined interior dialogue.

Give me that Prime Time religion
by Mark Schone

Around the time football players realized end zones were for dancing, they also decided that the pronouns “I” and “me,” which they used an awful lot, had worn out. As if to endorse the view that they were commodities, cartoons or royalty — or just immune to introspection — athletes began to refer to themselves in the third person.

It makes sense, therefore, that when the most marketed personality in the NFL gets religion, he announces it in the weirdly detached grammar of football-speak. “Deion Sanders is covered by the blood of Jesus now,” writes Deion Sanders. “He loves the Lord with all his heart.” And in Deion’s new autobiography, the Lord loves Deion right back, though the salvation he offers third-person types seems different from what mere mortals can expect.

Refering to yourself in the third person
by Tetsuo

It does seem to be a stylistic thing in formal Chinese. I’ve come across a couple of articles about artists by the artist in question where they’ve referred to themselves in the third person throughout. And quite a number of politicians do the same, I’ve been told.

from Wikipedia

Illeism in everyday speech can have a variety of intentions depending on context. One common usage is to impart humility, a common practice in feudal societies and other societies where honorifics are important to observe (“Your servant awaits your orders”), as well as in master–slave relationships (“This slave needs to be punished”). Recruits in the military, mostly United States Marine Corps recruits, are also often made to refer to themselves in the third person, such as “the recruit,” in order to reduce the sense of individuality and enforce the idea of the group being more important than the self.[citation needed] The use of illeism in this context imparts a sense of lack of self, implying a diminished importance of the speaker in relation to the addressee or to a larger whole.

Conversely, in different contexts, illeism can be used to reinforce self-promotion, as used to sometimes comic effect by Bob Dole throughout his political career.[2] This was particularly made notable during the United States presidential election, 1996 and lampooned broadly in popular media for years afterwards.

Deepanjana Pal of Firstpost noted that speaking in the third person “is a classic technique used by generations of Bollywood scriptwriters to establish a character’s aristocracy, power and gravitas.”[3] Conversely, third person self referral can be associated with self-irony and not taking oneself too seriously (since the excessive use of pronoun “I” is often seen as a sign of narcissism and egocentrism[4]), as well as with eccentricity in general.

In certain Eastern religions, like Hinduism or Buddhism, this is sometimes seen as a sign of enlightenment, since by doing so, an individual detaches his eternal self (atman) from the body related one (maya). Known illeists of that sort include Swami Ramdas,[5] Ma Yoga Laxmi,[6] Anandamayi Ma,[7] and Mata Amritanandamayi.[8] Jnana yoga actually encourages its practitioners to refer to themselves in the third person.[9]

Young children in Japan commonly refer to themselves by their own name (a habit probably picked from their elders who would normally refer to them by name. This is due to the normal Japanese way of speaking, where referring to another in the third person is considered more polite than using the Japanese words for “you”, like Omae. More explanation given in Japanese pronouns, though as the children grow older they normally switch over to using first person references. Japanese idols also may refer to themselves in the third person so to give off the feeling of childlike cuteness.

Four Paths to the Goal
from Sheber Hinduism

Jnana yoga is a concise practice made for intellectual people. It is the quickest path to the top but it is the steepest. The key to jnana yoga is to contemplate the inner self and find who our self is. Our self is Atman and by finding this we have found Brahman. Thinking in third person helps move us along the path because it helps us consider who we are from an objective point of view. As stated in the Upanishads, “In truth, who knows Brahman becomes Brahman.” (Novak 17).

Non-Reactivity: The Supreme Practice of Everyday Life
by Martin Schmidt

Respond with non-reactive awareness: consider yourself a third-person observer who watches your own emotional responses arise and then dissipate. Don’t judge, don’t try to change yourself; just observe! In time this practice will begin to cultivate a third-person perspective inside yourself that sometimes is called the Inner Witness.[4]

Frequent ‘I-Talk’ may signal proneness to emotional distress
from Science Daily

Researchers at the University of Arizona found in a 2015 study that frequent use of first-person singular pronouns — I, me and my — is not, in fact, an indicator of narcissism.

Instead, this so-called “I-talk” may signal that someone is prone to emotional distress, according to a new, follow-up UA study forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


Negative emotionality refers to a tendency to easily become upset or emotionally distressed, whether that means experiencing depression, anxiety, worry, tension, anger or other negative emotions, said Allison Tackman, a research scientist in the UA Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study.

Tackman and her co-authors found that when people talk a lot about themselves, it could point to depression, but it could just as easily indicate that they are prone to anxiety or any number of other negative emotions. Therefore, I-talk shouldn’t be considered a marker for depression alone.

Talking to yourself in the third person can help you control emotions
from Science Daily

The simple act of silently talking to yourself in the third person during stressful times may help you control emotions without any additional mental effort than what you would use for first-person self-talk — the way people normally talk to themselves.


Say a man named John is upset about recently being dumped. By simply reflecting on his feelings in the third person (“Why is John upset?”), John is less emotionally reactive than when he addresses himself in the first person (“Why am I upset?”).

“Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain,” said Jason Moser, MSU associate professor of psychology. “That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.”

Pretending to be Batman helps kids stay on task
by Christian Jarrett

Some of the children were assigned to a “self-immersed condition”, akin to a control group, and before and during the task were told to reflect on how they were doing, asking themselves “Am I working hard?”. Other children were asked to reflect from a third-person perspective, asking themselves “Is James [insert child’s actual name] working hard?” Finally, the rest of the kids were in the Batman condition, in which they were asked to imagine they were either Batman, Bob The Builder, Rapunzel or Dora the Explorer and to ask themselves “Is Batman [or whichever character they were] working hard?”. Children in this last condition were given a relevant prop to help, such as Batman’s cape. Once every minute through the task, a recorded voice asked the question appropriate for the condition each child was in [Are you working hard? or Is James working hard? or Is Batman working hard?].

The six-year-olds spent more time on task than the four-year-olds (half the time versus about a quarter of the time). No surprise there. But across age groups, and apparently unrelated to their personal scores on mental control, memory, or empathy, those in the Batman condition spent the most time on task (about 55 per cent for the six-year-olds; about 32 per cent for the four-year-olds). The children in the self-immersed condition spent the least time on task (about 35 per cent of the time for the six-year-olds; just over 20 per cent for the four-year-olds) and those in the third-person condition performed in between.

Dressing up as a superhero might actually give your kid grit
by Jenny Anderson


Curmudgucation: Don’t Be Batman
by Peter Greene

This underlines the problem we see with more and more or what passes for early childhood education these days– we’re not worried about whether the school is ready to appropriately handle the students, but instead are busy trying to beat three-, four- and five-year-olds into developmentally inappropriate states to get them “ready” for their early years of education. It is precisely and absolutely backwards. I can’t say this hard enough– if early childhood programs are requiring “increased demands” on the self-regulatory skills of kids, it is the programs that are wrong, not the kids. Full stop.

What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the “problem” that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.

Because you know where else you hear this kind of behavior described? In accounts of victims of intense, repeated trauma. In victims of torture who talk about dealing by just pretending they aren’t even there, that someone else is occupying their body while they float away from the horror.

That should not be a description of How To Cope With Preschool.

Nor should the primary lesson of early childhood education be, “You can’t really cut it as yourself. You’ll need to be somebody else to get ahead in life.” I cannot even begin to wrap my head around what a destructive message that is for a small child.

Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?
by Daniel B. Smith

And though psychiatrists acknowledge that almost anyone is capable of hallucinating a voice under certain circumstances, they maintain that the hallucinations that occur with psychoses are qualitatively different. “One shouldn’t place too much emphasis on the content of hallucinations,” says Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University. “When establishing a correct diagnosis, it’s important to focus on the signs or symptoms” of a particular disorder. That is, it’s crucial to determine how the voices manifest themselves. Voices that speak in the third person, echo a patient’s thoughts or provide a running commentary on his actions are considered classically indicative of schizophrenia.

Auditory hallucinations: Psychotic symptom or dissociative experience?
by Andrew Moskowitz & Dirk Corstens

While auditory hallucinations are considered a core psychotic symptom, central to the diagnosis of schizophrenia, it has long been recognized that persons who are not psychotic may also hear voices. There is an entrenched clinical belief that distinctions can be made between these groups, typically on the basis of the perceived location or the ‘third-person’ perspective of the voices. While it is generally believed that such characteristics of voices have significant clinical implications, and are important in the differential diagnosis between dissociative and psychotic disorders, there is no research evidence in support of this. Voices heard by persons diagnosed schizophrenic appear to be indistinguishable, on the basis of their experienced characteristics, from voices heard by persons with dissociative disorders or with no mental disorder at all. On this and other bases outlined below, we argue that hearing voices should be considered a dissociative experience, which under some conditions may have pathological consequences. In other words, we believe that, while voices may occur in the context of a psychotic disorder, they should not be considered a psychotic symptom.

Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides
by T. M. Luhrmann

The psychiatric and psychological literature has reached no settled consensus about why hallucinations occur and whether all perceptual “mistakes” arise from the same processes (for a general review, see Aleman & Laroi 2008). For example, many researchers have found that when people hear hallucinated voices, some of these people have actually been subvocalizing: They have been using muscles used in speech, but below the level of their awareness (Gould 1949, 1950). Other researchers have not found this inner speech effect; moreover, this hypothesis does not explain many of the odd features of the hallucinations associated with psychosis, such as hearing voices that speak in the second or third person (Hoffman 1986). But many scientists now seem to agree that hallucinations are the result of judgments associated with what psychologists call “reality monitoring” (Bentall 2003). This is not the process Freud described with the term reality testing, which for the most part he treated as a cognitive higher-level decision: the ability to distinguish between fantasy and the world as it is (e.g., he loves me versus he’s just not that into me). Reality monitoring refers to the much more basic decision about whether the source of an experience is internal to the mind or external in the world.

Originally, psychologists used the term to refer to judgments about memories: Did I really have that conversation with my boyfriend back in college, or did I just think I did? The work that gave the process its name asked what it was about memories that led someone to infer that these memories were records of something that had taken place in the world or in the mind (Johnson & Raye 1981). Johnson & Raye’s elegant experiments suggested that these memories differ in predictable ways and that people use those differences to judge what has actually taken place. Memories of an external event typically have more sensory details and more details in general. By contrast, memories of thoughts are more likely to include the memory of cognitive effort, such as composing sentences in one’s mind.

Self-Monitoring and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Schizophrenia
by Wayne Wu

It’s worth pointing out that a significant portion of the non-clinical population experiences auditory hallucinations. Such hallucinations need not be negative in content, though as I understand it, the preponderance of AVH in schizophrenia is or becomes negative. […]

I’ve certainly experienced the “third man”, in a moment of vivid stress when I was younger. At the time, I thought it was God speaking to me in an encouraging and authoritative way! (I was raised in a very strict religious household.) But I wouldn’t be surprised if many of us have had similar experiences. These days, I have more often the cell-phone buzzing in my pocket illusion.

There are, I suspect, many reasons why they auditory system might be activated to give rise to auditory experiences that philosophers would define as hallucinations: recalling things in an auditory way, thinking in inner speech where this might be auditory in structure, etc. These can have positive influences on our ability to adapt to situations.

What continues to puzzle me about AVH in schizophrenia are some of its fairly consistent phenomenal properties: second or third-person voice, typical internal localization (though plenty of external localization) and negative content.

The Digital God, How Technology Will Reshape Spirituality
by William Indick
pp. 74-75

Doubled Consciousness

Who is this third who always walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The feeling of “doubled consciousness” 81 has been reported by numerous epileptics. It is the feeling of being outside of one’s self. The feeling that you are observing yourself as if you were outside of your own body, like an outsider looking in on yourself. Consciousness is “doubled” because you are aware of the existence of both selves simultaneously—the observer and the observed. It is as if the two halves of the brain temporarily cease to function as a single mechanism; but rather, each half identifies itself separately as its own self. 82 The doubling effect that occurs as a result of some temporal lobe epileptic seizures may lead to drastic personality changes. In particular, epileptics following seizures often become much more spiritual, artistic, poetic, and musical. 83 Art and music, of course, are processed primarily in the right hemisphere, as is poetry and the more lyrical, metaphorical aspects of language. In any artistic endeavor, one must engage in “doubled consciousness,” creating the art with one “I,” while simultaneously observing the art and the artist with a critically objective “other-I.” In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald expressed the feeling of “doubled consciousness” in a scene in which Nick Caraway, in the throes of profound drunkenness, looks out of a city window and ponders:


Doubled-consciousness, the sense of being both “within and without” of one’s self, is a moment of disconnection and disassociation between the two hemispheres of the brain, a moment when left looks independently at right and right looks independently at left, each recognizing each other as an uncanny mirror reflection of himself, but at the same time not recognizing the other as “I.”

The sense of doubled consciousness also arises quite frequently in situations of extreme physical and psychological duress. 84 In his book, The Third Man Factor John Geiger delineates the conditions associated with the perception of the “sensed presence”: darkness, monotony, barrenness, isolation, cold, hunger, thirst, injury, fatigue, and fear. 85 Shermer added sleep deprivation to this list, noting that Charles Lindbergh, on his famous cross–Atlantic flight, recorded the perception of “ghostly presences” in the cockpit, that “spoke with authority and clearness … giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.” 86 Sacks noted that doubled consciousness is not necessarily an alien or abnormal sensation, we all feel it, especially when we are alone, in the dark, in a scary place. 87 We all can recall a memory from childhood when we could palpably feel the presence of the monster hiding in the closet, or that indefinable thing in the dark space beneath our bed. The experience of the “sensed other” is common in schizophrenia, can be induced by certain drugs, is a central aspect of the “near death experience,” and is also associated with certain neurological disorders. 88

To speak of oneself in the third person; to express the wish to “find myself,” is to presuppose a plurality within one’s own mind. 89 There is consciousness, and then there is something else … an Other … who is nonetheless a part of our own mind, though separate from our moment-to-moment consciousness. When I make a statement such as: “I’m disappointed with myself because I let myself gain weight,” it is quite clear that there are at least two wills at work within one mind—one will that dictates weight loss and is disappointed—and another will that defies the former and allows the body to binge or laze. One cannot point at one will and say: “This is the real me and the other is not me.” They’re both me. Within each “I” there exists a distinct Other that is also “I.” In the mind of the believer—this double-I, this other-I, this sentient other, this sensed presence who is me but also, somehow, not me—how could this be anyone other than an angel, a spirit, my own soul, or God? Sacks recalls an incident in which he broke his leg while mountain climbing alone and had to descend the mountain despite his injury and the immense pain it was causing him. Sacks heard “an inner voice” that was “wholly unlike” his normal “inner speech”—a “strong, clear, commanding voice” that told him exactly what he had to do to survive the predicament, and how to do it. “This good voice, this Life voice, braced and resolved me.” Sacks relates the story of Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void , who had a similar experience during a climbing mishap in the Andes. For days, Simpson trudged along with a distinctly dual sense of self. There was a distracted self that jumped from one random thought to the next, and then a clearly separate focused self that spoke to him in a commanding voice, giving specific instructions and making logical deductions. 90 Sacks also reports the experience of a distraught friend who, at the moment she was about to commit suicide, heard a “voice” tell her: “No, you don’t want to do that…” The male voice, which seemed to come from outside of her, convinced her not to throw her life away. She speaks of it as her “guardian angel.” Sacks suggested that this other voice may always be there, but it is usually inhibited. When it is heard, it’s usually as an inner voice, rather than an external one. 91 Sacks also reports that the “persistent feeling” of a “presence” or a “companion” that is not actually there is a common hallucination, especially among people suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Sacks is unsure if this is a side-effect of L-DOPA, the drug used to treat the disease, or if the hallucinations are symptoms of the neurological disease itself. He also noted that some patients were able to control the hallucinations to varying degrees. One elderly patient hallucinated a handsome and debonair gentleman caller who provided “love, attention, and invisible presents … faithfully each evening.” 92

Part III: Off to the Asylum – Rational Anti-psychiatry
by Veronika Nasamoto

The ancients were also clued up in that the origins of mental instability was spiritual but they perceived it differently. In The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes’ book present a startling thesis, based on an analysis of the language of the Iliad, that the ancient Greeks were not conscious in the same way that modern humans are. Because the ancient Greeks had no sense of “I” (also Victorian England would sometimes speak in the third person rather than say I, because the eternal God – YHWH was known as the great “I AM”) with which to locate their mental processes. To them their inner thoughts were perceived as coming from the gods, which is why the characters in the Iliad find themselves in frequent communication with supernatural entities.

The Shadows of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mirror
by Chris Savia

Jaynes’s description of consciousness, in relation to memory, proposes what people believe to be rote recollection are concepts, the platonic ideals of their office, the view out of the window, et al. These contribute to one’s mental sense of place and position in the world. The memories enabling one to see themselves in the third person.

Language, consciousness and the bicameral mind
by Andreas van Cranenburgh

Consciousness not a copy of experience Since Locke’s tabula rasa it has been thought that consciousness records our experiences, to save them for possible later reflection. However, this is clearly false: most details of our experience are immediately lost when not given special notice. Recalling an arbitrary past event requires a reconstruction of memories. Interestingly, memories are often from a third-person perspective, which proves that they could not be a mere copy of experience.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes
pp. 347-350

Negatory Possession

There is another side to this vigorously strange vestige of the bicameral mind. And it is different from other topics in this chapter. For it is not a response to a ritual induction for the purpose of retrieving the bicameral mind. It is an illness in response to stress. In effect, emotional stress takes the place of the induction in the general bicameral paradigm just as in antiquity. And when it does, the authorization is of a different kind.

The difference presents a fascinating problem. In the New Testament, where we first hear of such spontaneous possession, it is called in Greek daemonizomai, or demonization. 10 And from that time to the present, instances of the phenomenon most often have that negatory quality connoted by the term. The why of the negatory quality is at present unclear. In an earlier chapter (II. 4) I have tried to suggest the origin of ‘evil’ in the volitional emptiness of the silent bicameral voices. And that this took place in Mesopotamia and particularly in Babylon, to which the Jews were exiled in the sixth century B.C., might account for the prevalence of this quality in the world of Jesus at the start of this syndrome.

But whatever the reasons, they must in the individual be similar to the reasons behind the predominantly negatory quality of schizophrenic hallucinations. And indeed the relationship of this type of possession to schizophrenia seems obvious.


Always the patients are uneducated, usually illiterate, and all believe heartily in spirits or demons or similar beings and live in a society which does. The attacks usually last from several minutes to an hour or two, the patient being relatively normal between attacks and recalling little of them. Contrary to horror fiction stories, negatory possession is chiefly a linguistic phenomenon, not one of actual conduct. In all the cases I have studied, it is rare to find one of criminal behavior against other persons. The stricken individual does not run off and behave like a demon; he just talks like one.

Such episodes are usually accompanied by twistings and writhings as in induced possession. The voice is distorted, often guttural, full of cries, groans, and vulgarity, and usually railing against the institutionalized gods of the period. Almost always, there is a loss of consciousness as the person seems the opposite of his or her usual self. ‘He’ may name himself a god, demon, spirit, ghost, or animal (in the Orient it is often ‘the fox’), may demand a shrine or to be worshiped, throwing the patient into convulsions if these are withheld. ‘He’ commonly describes his natural self in the third person as a despised stranger, even as Yahweh sometimes despised his prophets or the Muses sneered at their poets. 12 And ‘he’ often seems far more intelligent and alert than the patient in his normal state, even as Yahweh and the Muses were more intelligent and alert than prophet or poet.

As in schizophrenia, the patient may act out the suggestions of others, and, even more curiously, may be interested in contracts or treaties with observers, such as a promise that ‘he’ will leave the patient if such and such is done, bargains which are carried out as faithfully by the ‘demon’ as the sometimes similar covenants of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Somehow related to this suggestibility and contract interest is the fact that the cure for spontaneous stress-produced possession, exorcism, has never varied from New Testament days to the present. It is simply by the command of an authoritative person often following an induction ritual, speaking in the name of a more powerful god. The exorcist can be said to fit into the authorization element of the general bicameral paradigm, replacing the ‘demon.’ The cognitive imperatives of the belief system that determined the form of the illness in the first place determine the form of its cure.

The phenomenon does not depend on age, but sex differences, depending on the historical epoch, are pronounced, demonstrating its cultural expectancy basis. Of those possessed by ‘demons’ whom Jesus or his disciples cured in the New Testament, the overwhelming majority were men. In the Middle Ages and thereafter, however, the overwhelming majority were women. Also evidence for its basis in a collective cognitive imperative are its occasional epidemics, as in convents of nuns during the Middle Ages, in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, or those reported in the nineteenth century at Savoy in the Alps. And occasionally today.

The Emergence of Reflexivity in Greek Language and Thought
by Edward T. Jeremiah
p. 3

Modernity’s tendency to understand the human being in terms of abstract grammatical relations, namely the subject and self, and also the ‘I’—and, conversely, the relative indifference of Greece to such categories—creates some of the most important semantic contrasts between our and Greek notions of the self.

p. 52

Reflexivisations such as the last, as well as those like ‘Know yourself’ which reconstitute the nature of the person, are entirely absent in Homer. So too are uses of the reflexive which reference some psychological aspect of the subject. Indeed the reference of reflexives directly governed by verbs in Homer is overwhelmingly bodily: ‘adorning oneself’, ‘covering oneself’, ‘defending oneself’, ‘debasing oneself physically’, ‘arranging themselves in a certain formation’, ‘stirring oneself’, ad all the prepositional phrases. The usual reference for indirect arguments is the self interested in its own advantage. We do not find in Homer any of the psychological models of self-relation discussed by Lakoff.

Use of the Third Person for Self-Reference by Jesus and Yahweh
by Rod Elledge
pp. 11-13

Viswanathan addresses illeism in Shakespeare’s works, designating it as “illeism with a difference.” He writes: “It [‘illeism with a difference’] is one by which the dramatist makes a character, speaking in the first person, refer to himself in the third person, not simple as a ‘he’, which would be illeism proper, a traditional grammatical mode, but by name.” He adds that the device is extensively used in Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida, and occasionally in Hamlet and Othello. Viswanathan notes the device, prior to Shakespeare, was used in the medieval theater simply to allow a character to announce himself and clarify his identity. Yet, he argues that, in the hands of Shakespeare, the device becomes “a masterstroke of dramatic artistry.” He notes four uses of this illeism with a difference.” First, it highlights the character using it and his inner self. He notes that it provides a way of “making the character momentarily detach himself from himself, achieve a measure of dramatic (and philosophical) depersonalization, and create a kind of aesthetic distance from which he can contemplate himself.” Second, it reflects the tension between the character’s public and private selves. Third, the device “raises the question of the way in which the character is seen to behave and to order his very modes of feeling and thought in accordance with a rightly or wrongly conceived image or idea of himself.” Lastly, he notes the device tends to point toward the larger philosophical problem for man’s search for identity. Speaking of the use of illeism within Julius Caesar, Spevak writes that “in addiction to the psychological and other implications, the overall effect is a certain stateliness, a classical look, a consciousness on the part of the actors that they are acting in a not so everyday context.”

Modern linguistic scholarship

Otto Jespersen notes various examples of the third-person self-reference including those seeking to reflect deference or politeness, adults talking to children as “papa” or “Aunt Mary” to be more easily understood, as well as the case of some writers who write “the author” or “this present writer” in order to avoid the mention of “I.” He notes Caesar as a famous example of “self-effacement [used to] produce the impression of absolute objectivity.” Yet, Head writes, in response to Jespersen, that since the use of the third person for self-reference

is typical of important personages, whether in autobiography (e.g. Caesar in De Bello Gallico and Captain John Smith in his memoirs) or in literature (Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cordelia and Richared II, Lessing’s Saladin, etc.), it is actually an indication of special status and hence implies greater social distance than does the more commonly used first person singular.

Land and Kitzinger argue that “very often—but not always . . . the use of a third-person reference form in self-reference is designed to display that the speaker is talking about themselves as if from the perspective of another—either the addressee(s) . . . or a non-present other.” The linguist Laurence Horn, noting the use of illeism by various athlete and political celebrities, notes that “the celeb is viewing himself . . . from the outside.” Addressing what he refers to as “the dissociative third person,” he notes that an athlete or politician “may establish distance between himself (virtually never herself) and his public persona, but only by the use of his name, never a 3rd person pronoun.”

pp. 15-17

Illeism in Clasical Antiquity

As referenced in the history of research, Kostenberger writes: “It may strike the modern reader as curious that Jesus should call himself ‘Jesus Christ’; however, self-reference in the third person was common in antiquity.” While Kostenberger’s statement is a brief comment in the context of a commentary and not a monographic study on the issue, his comment raises a critical question. Does a survey of the evidence reveal that Jesus’s use of illeism in this verse (and by implication elsewhere in the Gospels) reflects simply another example of a common mannerism in antiquity? […]

Early Evidence

From the fifth century BC to the time of Jesus the following historians refer to themselves in the third person in their historical accounts: Hecataeus (though the evidence is fragmentary), Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Caesar, and Josephus. For the scope of this study this point in history (from fifth century BC to first century AD) is the primary focus. Yet, this feature was adopted from the earlier tendency in literature in which an author states his name as a seal or sphragis for their work. Herkommer notes that the “self-introduction” (Selbstvorstellung) in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in choral poetry (Chorlyrik) such as that by the Greek poet Alkman (seventh century BC), and in the poetic mxims, (Spruchdichtung) such as those of the Greek poet Phokylides (seventh century BC). Yet, from fifth century onward, this feature appears primarily in the works of Greek historians. In addition to early evidence (prior to the fifth century of an author’s self-reference in his historiographic work, the survey of evidence also noted an early example of illeism within Homer’s Illiad. Because this ancient Greek epic poem reflects an early use of the third-person self-reference in a narrative context and offers a point of comparison to its use in later Greek historiography, this early example of the use of illeism is briefly addressed.

Maricola notes that the style of historical narrative that first appears in Herodotus is a legacy from Homer (ca. 850 BC). He notes that “as the writer of the most ‘authoritative’ third-person narrative, [Homer] provided a model not only for later poets, epic and otherwise, but also to the prose historians who, by way of Herodotus, saw him as their model and rival.” While Homer provided the authoritative example of third-person narrative, he also, centuries before the development of Greek historiography, used illeism in his epic poem the Iliad. Illeism occurs in the direct speech of Zeus (the king of the gods), Achilles (the “god-like” son of a king and goddess), and Hector (the mighty Trojan prince).

Zeus, addressing the assembled gods on Mt. Olympus, refers to himself as “Zeus, the supreme Master” […] and states how superior he is above all gods and men. Hector’s use of illeism occurs as he addresses the Greeks and challenges the best of them to fight against “good Hector” […]. Muellner notes in these instances of third person for self-reference (Zeus twice and Hector once) that “the personage at the top and center of the social hierarchy is asserting his superiority over the group . . . . In other word, these are self-aggrandizing third-person references, like those in the war memoirs of Xenophon, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon.” He adds that “the primary goal of this kind of third-person self-reference is to assert the status accruing to exception excellence. Achilles refers to himself in the context of an oath (examples of which are reflected in the OT), yet his self-reference serves to emphasize his status in relation to the Greeks, and especially to King Agamemnon. Addressing Agamemnon, the general of the Greek armies, Achillies swears by his sceptor and states that the day will come when the Greeks will long for Achilles […].

Homer’s choice to use illeism within the direct speech of these three characters contributes to an understanding of its potential rhetorical implications. In each case the character’s use of illeism serves to set him apart by highlighting his innate authority and superior status. Also, all three characters reflect divine and/or royal aspects (Zeus, king of gods; Achilles, son of a king and a goddess, and referred to as “god-like”; and Hector, son of a king). The examples of illeism in the Iliad, among the earliest evidence of illeism, reflect a usage that shares similarities with the illeism as used by Jesus and Yahweh. The biblical and Homeric examples each reflects illeism in direct speech within narrative discourse and the self-reverence serves to emphasize authority or status as well as a possible associated royal and/or divine aspect(s). Yet, the examples stand in contrast to the use of illeism by later historians. As will be addressed next, these ancient historians used the third-person self-reference as a literary device to give their historical accounts a sense of objectivity.

Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia
edited by Margaret C. Schaus
“Mystics’ Writings”

by Patricia Dailey
p. 600

The question of scribal mediation is further complicated in that the mystic’s text is, in essence, a message transmitted through her, which must be transmitted to her surrounding community. Thus, the denuding of voice of the text, of a first-person narrative, goes hand in hand with the status of the mystic as “transcriber” of a divine message that does not bear the mystic’s signature, but rather God’s. In addition, the tendency to write in the third person in visionary narratives may draw from a longstanding tradition that stems from Paul in 2 Cor. of communicating visions in the third person, but at the same time, it presents a means for women to negotiate with conflicts with regard to authority or immediacy of the divine through a veiled distance or humility that conformed to a narrative tradition.

Romantic Confession: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas de Quincey
by Martina Domines Veliki

It is no accident that the term ‘autobiography’, entailing a special amalgam of ‘autos’, ‘bios’ and ‘graphe’ (oneself, life and writing), was first used in 1797 in the Monthly Review by a well-known essayist and polyglot, translator of German romantic literature, William Taylor of Norwich. However, the term‘autobiographer’ was first extensively used by an English Romantic poet, one of the Lake Poets, Robert Southey1. This does not mean that no autobiographies were written before the beginning of the nineteenth century. The classical writers wrote about famous figures of public life, the Middle Ages produced educated writers who wrote about saints’ lives and from Renaissance onward people wrote about their own lives. However, autobiography, as an auto-reflexive telling of one’s own life’s story, presupposes a special understanding of one’s‘self’ and therefore, biographies and legends of Antiquity and the Middle Ages are fundamentally different from ‘modern’ autobiography, which postulates a truly autonomous subject, fully conscious of his/her own uniqueness2. Life-writing, whether in the form of biography or autobiography, occupied the central place in Romanticism. Autobiography would also often appear in disguise. One would immediately think of S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) which combines literary criticism and sketches from the author’s life and opinions, and Mary Wollstonecratf’s Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796),which combines travel narrative and the author’s own difficulties of travelling as a woman.

When one thinks about the first ‘modern’ secular autobiography, it is impossible to avoid the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He calls his first autobiography The Confessions, thus aligning himself in the long Western tradition of confessional writings inaugurated by St. Augustine (354 – 430 AD). Though St. Augustine confesses to the almighty God and does not really perceive his own life as significant, there is another dimension of Augustine’s legacy which is important for his Romantic inheritors: the dichotomies inherent in the Christian way of perceiving the world, namely the opposition of spirit/matter, higher/lower, eternal/temporal, immutable/changing become ultimately emanations of a single binary opposition, that of inner and outer (Taylor 1989: 128). The substance of St. Augustine’s piety is summed up by a single sentence from his Confessions:

“And how shall I call upon my God – my God and my Lord? For when I call on Him, I ask Him to come into me. And what place is there in me into which my God can come? (…) I could not therefore exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless Thou wert in me.” (Confessions, book I, chapter 2, p.2, emphasis mine)

The step towards inwardness was for Augustine the step towards Truth, i.e. God, and as Charles Taylor explains, this turn inward was a decisive one in the Western tradition of thought. The ‘I’ or the first person standpoint becomes unavoidable thereafter. It took a long way from Augustine’s seeing these sources to reside in God to Rousseau’s pivotal turn to inwardness without recourse to God. Of course, one must not lose sight of the developments in continental philosophy pre-dating Rousseau’s work. René Descartes was the first to embrace Augustinian thinking at the beginning of the modern era, and he was responsible for the articulation of the disengaged subject: the subject asserting that the real locus of all experience is in his own mind3. With the empiricist philosophy of John Locke and David Hume, who claimed that we reach the knowledge of the surrounding world through disengagement and procedural reason, there is further development towards an idea of the autonomous subject. Although their teachings seemed to leave no place for subjectivity as we know it today, still they were a vital step in redirecting the human gaze from the heavens to man’s own existence.

2 Furthermore, the Middle Ages would not speak about such concepts as ‘the author’and one’s ‘individuality’ and it is futile to seek in such texts the appertaining subject. When a Croatian fourteenth-century-author, Hanibal Lucić, writes about his life in a short text called De regno Croatiae et Dalmatiae? Paulus de Paulo, the last words indicate that the author perceives his life as being insignificant and invaluable. The nuns of the fourteenth century writing their own confessions had to use the third person pronoun to refer to themselves and the ‘I’ was reserved for God only. (See Zlatar 2000)

Return to Childhood by Leila Abouzeid
by Geoff Wisner

In addition, autobiography has the pejorative connotation in Arabic of madihu nafsihi wa muzakkiha (he or she who praises and recommends him- or herself). This phrase denotes all sorts of defects in a person or a writer: selfishness versus altruism, individualism versus the spirit of the group, arrogance versus modesty. That is why Arabs usually refer to themselves in formal speech in the third person plural, to avoid the use of the embarrassing íI.ë In autobiography, of course, one uses íIë frequently.

Becoming Abraham Lincoln
by Richard Kigel
Preface, XI

A note about the quotations and sources: most of the statements were collected by William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and friend, in the years following Lincoln’s death. The responses came in original handwritten letters and transcribed interviews. Because of the low literacy levels of many of his subjects, sometimes these statements are difficult to understand. Often they used no punctuation and wrote in fragments of thoughts. Misspellings were common and names and places were often confused. “Lincoln” was sometimes spelled “Linkhorn” or “Linkern.” Lincoln’s grandmother “Lucy” was sometimes “Lucey.” Some respondents referred to themselves in third person. Lincoln himself did in his biographical writings.

p. 35

“From this place,” wrote Abe, referring to himself in the third person, “he removed to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816, Abraham then being in his eighth [actually seventh] year. This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.”

Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture
by Sarah Perry

Mirrors only became common in the nineteenth century; before, they were luxury items owned only by the rich. Access to mirrors is a novelty, and likely a harmful one.

In Others In Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness, Philippe Rochat describes an essential and tragic feature of our experience as humans: an irreconcilable gap between the beloved, special self as experienced in the first person, and the neutrally-evaluated self as experienced in the third person, imagined through the eyes of others. One’s first-person self image tends to be inflated and idealized, whereas the third-person self image tends to be deflated; reminders of this distance are demoralizing.

When people without access to mirrors (or clear water in which to view their reflections) are first exposed to them, their reaction tends to be very negative. Rochat quotes the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter’s description of showing mirrors to the Biamis of Papua New Guinea for the first time, a phenomenon Carpenter calls “the tribal terror of self-recognition”:

After a first frightening reaction, they became paralyzed, covering their mouths and hiding their heads – they stood transfixed looking at their own images, only their stomach muscles betraying great tension.

Why is their reaction negative, and not positive? It is that the first-person perspective of the self tends to be idealized compared to accurate, objective information; the more of this kind of information that becomes available (or unavoidable), the more each person will feel the shame and embarrassment from awareness of the irreconcilable gap between his first-person specialness and his third-person averageness.



My Beef With Ken Wilber
by Scott Preston (also posted on Integral World)

We see immediately from this schema why the persons of grammar are minimally four and not three. It’s because we are fourfold beings and our reality is a fourfold structure, too, being constituted of two times and two spaces — past and future, inner and outer. The fourfold human and the fourfold cosmos grew up together. Wilber’s model can’t account for that at all.

So, what’s the problem here? Wilber seems to have omitted time and our experience of time as an irrelevancy. Time isn’t even represented in Wilber’s AQAL model. Only subject and object spaces. Therefore, the human form cannot be properly interpreted, for we have four faces, like some representations of the god Janus, that face backwards, forwards, inwards, and outwards, and we have attendant faculties and consciousness functions organised accordingly for mastery of these dimensions — Jung’s feeling, thinking, sensing, willing functions are attuned to a reality that is fourfold in terms of two times and two spaces. And the four basic persons of grammar — You, I, We, He or She — are the representation in grammar of that reality and that consciousness, that we are fourfold beings just as our reality is a fourfold cosmos.

Comparing Wilber’s model to Rosenstock-Huessy’s, I would have to conclude that Wilber’s model is “deficient integral” owing to its apparent omission of time and subsequently of the “I-thou” relationship in which the time factor is really pronounced. For the “I-It” (or “We-Its”) relation is a relation of spaces — inner and outer, while the “I-Thou” (or “We-thou”) relation is a relation of times.

It is perhaps not so apparent to English speakers especially that the “thou” or “you” form is connected with time future. Other languages, like German, still preserve the formal aspects of this. In old English you had to say “go thou!” or “be thou loving!”, and so on. In other words, the “thou” or “you” is most closely associated with the imperative form and that is the future addressing the past. It is a call to change one’s personal or collective state — what we call the “vocation” or “calling” is time future in dialogue with time past. Time past is represented in the “we” form. We is not plural “I’s”. It is constituted by some historical act, like a marriage or union or congregation of peoples or the sexes in which “the two shall become one flesh”. We is the collective person, historically established by some act. The people in “We the People” is a singularity and a unity, an historically constituted entity called “nation”. A bunch of autonomous “I’s” or egos never yet formed a tribe or a nation — or a commune for that matter. Nor a successful marriage.

Though “I-It” (or “We-Its”) might be permissible in referring to the relation of subject and object spaces, “we-thou” is the relation in which the time element is outstanding.

Who are we hearing and talking to?

~ Charles Fernyhough

“Bicamerality hidden in plain sight.”
~ Andrew Bonci

~ Matthew 10:27

“illusion of a completed, unitary self”
Bundle Theory: Embodied Mind, Social Nature
The Mind in the Body
Making Gods, Making Individuals
The Spell of Inner Speech
Reading Voices Into Our Minds
Verbal Behavior
Keep Your Experience to Yourself

Other People’s Craziness







* * *


(In Pursuit of Valis, p.161)

The Haunting of Voices








The Mind in the Body










* * *



The Prince of Medicine
by Susan P. Mattern
pp. 232-233


“Between the Dream and Reality”:
Divination in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

by Robert A. Kottage
pp. 50-52






p. 160




The Consciousness of John’s Gospel
A Prolegomenon to a Jaynesian-Jamesonian Approach

by Jonathan Bernier




The Discovery of the Mind
by Bruno Snell
pp. 6-8





Hebrew and Buddhist Selves:
A Constructive Postmodern Study

by Nicholas F. Gier






In Search of a Christian Identity
by Robert Hamilton





Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology
by Daniel McClellan


Did Christianity lead to schizophrenia?
Psychosis, psychology and self reference

by Roland Littlewood


Embodying the Gospel:
Two Exemplary Practices

by Joel B. Green
pp. 12-16






Ressurrection and the Restoration of Israel:
The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
by Jon Douglas Levenson
pp. 108-114













The Master and His Emissary
by Iain McGilchrist
pp. 263-264








The Great Shift
by James L. Kugel
pp. 163-165
















pp. 205-207










p. 390


The “Other” Psychology of Julian Jaynes
by Brian J. McVeigh
p. 74

The Heart is the Ruler of the Body


Psycho-Physio-Spiritual Aspects of the Person
