“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.