GRGR(26): Old magic

[Jeremy Osner]

"The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in
those days, it *worked*. As time went on, and it started being used for
spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power,
it began to loze its zip."

This passage brings to mind a corresponding earlier development,
described by Julian Jaynes in *The Origin of Consciousness...*. I do not
have a copy to hand so cannot give page refs but will hereby
summarize/paraphrase:

The stage of development which preceded modern, narrative consciousness
was bicameral thinking, in which a person (usually a king or priest type
of leader) had access to his brain's decision-making structures in the
form of an external voice which would be hallucinated in times of stress
and was identified as the voice of god or of a dead ancestor. As
societies grew larger and more complex, the need for decision making
became constant and the bicameral mechanism began to be inadequate.
Magical rituals were developed as a way of inducing hallucination; this
is also when use of hallucinogenic drugs came into vogue. Conscious
thinking gained currency and slowly superceded hallucinatory thinking;
however the magical and religious trappings of bicameral decision-making
were retained.

How I would (very loosely and speculatively) bridge from Jaynes'
chronology to Pynchon's is as follows: As conscious thinking developed,
the successors of the bicameral priestly classes continued to practice
their predecessors' magic and learned that narrative consciousness could
be transcended into a mystical, universal awareness. However this new
style of thinking was not successful in the way that narrative
consciousness had been, because it did not give its user the same kind
of competitive advantages in the material world. (I.e. it leads its user
to withdraw from the material world and to be unafraid of death.) This
is the style of thinking which L. Bland discovers when exposed to the
ritual of the Masons.