Böcker utgivna av Julian Jaynes Society

Building upon Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameral mentality, Brian McVeigh reconstructs the worldview of ancient Egypt, with its innumerable gods and goddesses, magnificent temples, and monumental mortuary architecture. By surveying the spiritual landscape of glorified ancestors, radiant gods, and a theocentric social order crowned by awe-inspiring pharaohs that lasted for three millennia, McVeigh argues that depictions of supernatural visitations were more than mytho-literary fabrications. Rather, they were recountings of audiovisual hallucinations interpreted as divine guidance. Moreover, the multiple manifestations of the deceased - Kas (spiritual doubles), Bas (human-headed bird body‒souls), and Akhs (transfigured dead) - evidence hallucinated visitations. This book puts into scientific perspective the mysteries of this impressive civilization, which continue to fascinate the modern imagination. It also challenges the assumption that human psychology does not change through history and the conventional wisdom of Egyptology, as well as offering lessons about cognitive relativism.

Why are gods and idols ubiquitous throughout the ancient world? What is the relationship of consciousness and language? How is it that oracles came to influence entire civilizations such as the ancient Greeks? If consciousness arose far back in human evolution, how can it so easily be altered in hypnosis and "possession"? Is modern schizophrenia a vestige of an earlier mentality? These are just some of the difficult questions addressed by Julian Jaynes's influential theory of the origin of subjective consciousness or the "modern mind." This book includes an in-depth biography of Julian Jaynes, essays by Jaynes, and the discussion and analysis of Jaynes's theory from a variety of perspectives such as clinical psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, linguistics, and ancient history.

En el corazón de esta fundamental obra está la revolucionaria idea de que la conciencia humana no comenzó con la evolución animal, pero que surgió como un proceso aprendido, a través de cataclismos y catástrofes, de una mentalidad alucinatoria hace solo tres mil años y sigue desarrollándose. Las implicaciones de este paradigma científico se extienden virtualmente dentro de cada aspecto de nuestra psicología, nuestra historia, nuestra cultura, nuestra religión - en efecto nuestro futuro. En las palabras de un crítico, es "un humilde texto, del tipo que nos recuerda a muchos de nosotros que vivimos nuestra vida a través del pensamiento, cuanto pensamiento todavía nos queda por hacer."