Contents

Foreword by Marcel Kuijsten

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Chasing Ghosts in Tokyo

Part I: The World According to the Gods

1 The Failure of Science to Explain Religion

2 Why the Gods Began to Speak

3 Divine Voices and Visions as Social Adaptation

Part II: When the Gods Spoke and Walked among Us

4 The Living Dead: Explaining Entombment and Ancestor Worship

5 Towns as the Domain of the Gods

6 Temples as Relay Stations: Transmitting Divine Commands

7 Talking Idols: Tools of Divine Control

8 Mortuary Monuments: How the Gods Awed Their Followers

9 Heavenly Ambassadors: God-Kings and Sacred Rulers

10 Ancient Civilizations as God-Governed

11 Mesoamerica: Theocentric Civilizations of the New World

12 Trimming the Theological Tree: Monotheism as Adaptation

13 Angels, Divine Messengers, and Swarms of Demons

Part III: When the Gods Fell Silent

14 Prayers, Possessions, and Prophecies: Conjuring Up the Missing Gods

15 The Gods Depart: The Late-Bronze-Period Dark Ages

16 A Change of Mind in the Ancient World

17 The Axial Age: The World Reborn without Gods

18 Imagining the Transcendent: A New Cognitive Ability

19 Introcosm: A New World of Space and Time

20 The Self Replaces the Gods

21 From Revelation to Reasoning

22 When the Gods Still Whisper: Strange Behaviors Explained

Epilogue: Science and Politics as Neo-Religion

Appendices and Supplementary Charts

A How to Chase Ghosts

B Explaining Religion versus Explaining Religion Away

C Gods on the Brain: Neurotheology

D The Problem with "Cultural Evolution"

E Six Hypotheses of Jaynesian Psychology

F The Limitations of Evolutionary Psychology

G Prehistoric and Historic Mentalities in Perspective

H Predictable Objections, Rebuttals, and Qualifications

I Verification and Applications of Jaynes's Theories

J Primitive Psychopolitics and Neurocultural Adaptation

K A History of Mentalities

L Population Size of Ancient Towns and Cities

M Dreams: A Form of Conscious Interiority

N Pre-Axial and Axial Ages Compared

O Solving the Mystery of Hallucinations

P Autoscopy: Seeing One's Double

Q What the Gods Can Teach Us: A New Understanding of the Mind

Timelines of Mentalities

Explanation

1 Three Major Shifts in Human Mentality

2 Prehistoric Mentalities

3 Middle East

4 Africa

5 Europe

6 South Asia

7 East Asia

8 Southeast Asia

9 Oceania

10 North America

11 South America

12 Mesoamerica

Glossary

References

Index