Jaynes' book was a revelation to me when I first read it, and five years later on a reread it remains one of the most interesting books I have ever read. The Oxford professor's central idea is that the the consciousness of early man may have been much more alien to us than we dare admit, that 'the Gods' once 'spoke' to man, and that their leaving was caused by the relatively development of the corpus callosum, which allowed the two hemispheres of the brain to communcate and drove the collective schizophrenia out of human society. With impeccable credentials and a good knowledge of early history, Jaynes's hypothesis is readable and plausable.

It's been years since I read this book, but my thoughts drifted back to it after completing "The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions" by Karen Armstrong. (Not an endorsement yet, I haven't had time to truly synthesize if Ms. Armstrong overreached on this one). As I was taking this in, I was left to consider: Could the developments of the axial age be the progression brain development?

I think this is more a testament to the real impact of "Origins".

I had this put in my face in art school; it presents alternative ways of thinking and being to the timid linear ways of the twentieth century. NOT new agey needs a pedicure with those ugly sandals stuff, this is real work to get your brain around. But entirely worth it.
I'm not going to even try to synopsize this book, but it seems aligned with the work of Robert Graves. If you likes Claudius or The White Goddess you'll love this work. Digs deep into Being. We all have the voices of the Gods in our heads, we're just taught not to listen. That old wiring has cool skills of it's own, though. Not every thing the Roman Church hasn't politicly sanitized is pathology, so don't confuse the idea with schizophrenia as some reviewers have. What psychiatrists will drug you for neurologists and psychologists call the human experience.
There's a lot of Jung here too, although it isn't a Jungian work.
The introduction is something of a death march of twisted academic preening. Feel free to skip to the good parts. You'll need the energy to deal with Mr. Jaynes riddles.

What a great book this is! It may be - and probably is - dead wrong about the evolution of consciousness, but so what? Plato was wrong about the realm of pure ideas; nevertheless, philosophy students still read him for the sheer excitement of coming to grips with a unique mind.

Regardless of the ultimate solution to the riddle of consciousness, Jaynes presents a unique and fascinating hypothesis that will make you more aware of just how mysterious a thing thinking about "oneself" really is. I first read this book twenty years ago and I still look into it as a reminder of how stimulating a good argument by a wonderfully eloquent partisan can be.

For best results, read this in college before your point of view about what the mind is like becomes frozen. Right or wrong, Jaynes will open up a world of things for you to think about.

What must thought have been like when it was brand new? What was it like when mankind first experienced its incredible chatter? One minute, we are sitting under a tree, completely absorbed in the environment, and the next moment we notice that there is some running commentary happening regarding the environment that we are becoming distinctly aware of as something in itself. The tree is now "tree," and its shade is now "shade." What must this experience have been like!? Further, was this experienced as an internal commentary or an external commentary? Julian Jaynes tackles this question with such genius that many jaws have probably injured themselves falling open, and perhaps remain so.
When thought first appeared to mankind, it must have been so much more than novel. One wakes up from a nap- so to speak- and the next thing he or she knows is that something is incredibly different. The world is now alive with this new dimension of detail. Still, the question remains: How exactly did they perceive it? We assume so many things about our own experience of attention, thought, and inner dialogue, but it would be a huge mistake to assume that ancient man came even remotely to the same conclusions about their own experience. Imagine waking up with the ability to see entirely new spectrums of light, or hear hundreds of sonic octaves. What if our sense of touch suddenly became so sensitive we could feel in America or Europe the gentle movements through a Chinese garden the number of Tai Chi practioners, noticing their relative skill levels, the shifting of their weight? Amazing as this imaginary experience would be, still this might pale in comparison to ancient man's actual experience.
Julian Jaynes implies such questions. If thought, something once not noticed as there, is now here, why we would we necessarily assume that it wasn't coming from outside as some voice, some vision? I don't think we would. It is entirely possible that thought was seen as voices of the gods. Surely thoughts come from somewhere, and we observe them flit across the screen of our awareness just as we observe birds fly and hear them sing. I can imagine that thought when it was new was also just as equally impossible to "control" as a bird's flight or song. It was a new force and could easily have seemed to have a life of its own to the new man... thus we see them attributed to these "gods."
Another interesting thought is that man, having come from the relatively pure pre-conscious state, was completely enmeshed in nature's cycles. Nature was a type of second hand. The sun and the moon and the stars all affected him in subtly thorough ways that modern man can only dream of. Perhaps their thoughts- these voices- reflected some of this purity? Is it then not interesting to note that these ancient peoples also built some of the most impossibly brilliant architecture the world has ever seen(i.e. the Great Pyramid, Machu Pichu, etc.)? Is it not possible that they saw something in their relative innocence that we have grown blind to? Evolutionary "kids" playing with giant divinely inspired blocks? The thoughts came to them and spoke of intuitive symmetries, subtle laws of a planet and universe that was their mother and father ("...out of the mouths of babes..."). Perhaps so. Perhaps not. And the possible reason why we lost that skill set was simply due to the evolution of consciousness, as man realized that he can gain leverage over his thoughts- that they are his thoughts! No longer some combating set of gods speaking disembodied "truths"reflecting an unsullied view of the cosmos, but an insistent fluxuating internal process. Perhaps this interiorization of consciousness is the origin of so many people's feelings of alienation. Consciousness now been reduced to being just "in here." Or perhaps the flood of consciousness never stopped and only grew, so that mankind became overwhelmed and started to tune them out, and ceased listening to the gods