The literary fantastic, in turn, was an attempt to explore this dimension and its influence on the human mind. The two processes were not unrelated: psychology came in the wake of discovering that the human mind contains a dimension that is only partially accessible to consciousness. If there is anything that radically set the 20 th century apart from what had gone before, it is the two unprecedented developments: the birth of psychology and the rise of the fantastic. This essay is intended to challenge fundamental assumptions that have guided Egyptology as well as the study of other ancient civilizations. I conclude by suggesting a list of topics that can be explained through the lens of Jaynesian psychology. I offer some thoughts on this difficult-to-answer problem. For example, speculative meditation on mind‒body dualism would be absent. If Jaynes’s theories are correct then archaic civilizations lacked a tradition of abstract philosophizing. The descendants of the ka and ba are present-day doppelgängers such autoscopic bodies appear when now vestigial neurostructures that subserved archaic hallucinatory experiences are for some reason activated. Next I argue that the ka (spiritual double) and ba (human-headed bird body‒soul) were hallucinated beings. Analyses of archaic languages, when doable, should demonstrate that what would become abstract mind‒words were shaped by bodily experiences and concrete metaphors. After offering some thoughts on hallucinatory experiences as evidenced by the historical record, I focus on the crucial linguo-concept of “heart” and what this might tell us about how language evolved from a period when individuals lacked a clear-cut and precise psychological terminology. More specifically, he theorized that: (1) in archaic civilizations individual behavior and by extension sociopolitical order were governed by audio-visual hallucinations interpreted as divine guidance (2) a preconscious mentality was reflected in Bronze Age languages that lacked robust psycholexicons. In this preliminary exploration of the archaic psychology of Egypt, I utilize the theories of Julian Jaynes who argued for a radical neurocultural plasticity.
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