four successive, primitive races

“[The] division of mankind into four successive, primitive races was accepted by the oldest priests of Egypt. They are represented by four figures of different types and skin colors in the paintings of the tomb of Seti I at Thebes. The red race bears the name Rot; the Asiatic race with yellow skin, Amu; the African race with black skin, Halasiu; the Lybico European race with white skin and blond hair, Tamahu.”

—Edouard Schur’, a footnote to The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, translated from the French by Gloria Rasberry, 1961; citing Lenormant, History of the Peoples of the Orient, Vol. 1.

[The blind spot]

“[T]he seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion. . . .

[The blind spot] is due to a two-millimeter gap on the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered together and leave the eye for the brain. The interesting thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-spot. . . . [Y]ou cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

seeing any object

“In seeing any object, our eyes and therefore our retinal images are reacting to the object by shifting twenty times a second, and yet we see an unshifting stable object with no consciousness whatever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them together into the object. An abnormally small retinal image of something in the proper context is automatically seen as something at a distance; we are not conscious of making the correction. Color and light contrast effects, and other perceptual constancies all go on every minute of our waking and even dreaming experience without our being in the least conscious of them.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

hallucinations

“The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. . . . Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

Consider the eye-idols

“Consider the eye-idols on black and white alabaster, thin cracker-like bodies surmounted by eyes once tinted with malachite paint, which have been found in the thousands, particularly at Brak on one of the upper braches of the Euphrates, that date about 3000 B.C. . . . [T]hey are suitable to be held in the hand. Most have one pair of eyes, but some have two; some wear crowns and some have markings clearly indicating gods. Larger eye-idols made of terra cotta have been found at other sites, Ur, Mari, and Lagash; and, because the eyes are open loops, have been called spectacle-idols.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

this is why the forms of angels are always winged

“As we have seen in earlier chapters, the gods customarily had locations, even though their voices were ubiquitously heard by their servants. These were often dwellings such as ziggurats or household shrines. And while some gods could be associated with celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, or stars, and the greatest, such as Anu, lived in the sky, the majority of gods were earth-dwellers along with men.

All this changes as we enter the first millennium B.C., when, as we are proposing, the gods’ voices are no longer heard. As the earth has been left to angels and demons, so it seems to be accepted that the dwelling place of the now absent gods is with Anu in the sky. And this is why the forms of angels are always winged: they are messengers from the sky where the gods live. . . .

This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by an important change in the building of ziggurats. . . . [T]he original ziggurats of Mesopotamian history were built around a central great hall . . . where the statue of the god “lived.”. . . But by the end of the second millennium B.C., the entire concept of the ziggurat seems to have become altered. It now has no central room whatever. . . . For the sacred tower of the ziggurat was now a landing stage to facilitate the gods’ descent to earth from the heaven to which they had vanished.”

—Julian Jaynes, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976.

the great forgotten language

“O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.”

—Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

Nacreous pearl light

“Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.”

—Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

a diamond in the rough

“I’m no scholar, Dick. I’ve never had your advantages. I’m a self-made butcher. I’m a carpenter, Dick. I’m an interior decorator. I’m a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I’m a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I’m a practical man.”

—Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

black and white

“‘Where is the road?’ some one shouted.

‘On the blueprint, of course. . . . You’ve got it all in black and white.’”

—Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.