How Religion Evolved: Explaining the Living Dead, Talking Idols, and Mesmerizing Monuments - Hardcover

McVeigh, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1412862868 ISBN 13: 9781412862868

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

Why did many religious leaders―Moses, Old Testament prophets, Zoroaster―claim they heard divine voices? Why do ancient civilizations exhibit key similarities, e.g., the "living dead" (treating the dead as if they were still alive); "speaking idols" (care and feeding of effigies); monumental mortuary architecture and "houses of gods" (pyramids, ziggurats, temples)? How do we explain strange behaviour such as spirit possession, speaking in tongues, channelling, hypnosis, and schizophrenic hallucinations? Are these lingering vestiges of an older mentality?

Brian J. McVeigh answers these riddles by updating "bicameralism." First proposed by the psychologist Julian Jaynes, this theory postulates that an earlier mentality existed: a "human" (the brain's left hemisphere) heard voices of "gods" or "ancestors" (the brain's right hemisphere). Therefore, ancient religious texts reporting divine voices were recounting of audio-visual hallucinations―a method of social control when early populations expanded. As growing political economic complexity destabilized god-governed states in the late second millennium BCE, divine voices became inadequate.

Eventually, humans had to culturally acquire new cognitive skills (modern religions) to accommodate increasing social pressures: selves replaced the gods and history witnessed an "inward turn." This psychological interiorization of spiritual experience laid the foundations for the world's great religions and philosophies that arose in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East in the middle of the first millennium BCE.

About this title

Review

"In this important and long overdue book, McVeigh resurrects Jaynes's theory on the origin of religion, drawing upon his considerable knowledge and experience as an anthropologist and his decades of research into the various aspects of Jaynes's theory to explain and expand upon Jaynes's ideas."

--Marcel Kuijsten, Executive Director, Julian Jaynes Society

"In this important and long overdue book, McVeigh resurrects Jaynes's theory on the origin of religion, drawing upon his considerable knowledge and experience as an anthropologist and his decades of research into the various aspects of Jaynes's theory to explain and expand upon Jaynes's ideas."

--Marcel Kuijsten, Executive Director, Julian Jaynes Society

-In this important and long overdue book, McVeigh resurrects Jaynes's theory on the origin of religion, drawing upon his considerable knowledge and experience as an anthropologist and his decades of research into the various aspects of Jaynes's theory to explain and expand upon Jaynes's ideas.-

--Marcel Kuijsten, Executive Director, Julian Jaynes Society

About the Author

Brian J. McVeigh received his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, USA. He is now training in mental health counseling at the University at Albany, SUNY, USA.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1412862868
• ISBN 13: 9781412862868
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310