Idols that Speak: How Psyche and Material Culture Co-construct Each Other

Abstract

Ancient faiths, centered on divinely animated idols, provided reassuring answers to their followers. In modern times, the search for ultimate answers has fragmented into politics, consumerism and psychology; our new idols are charismatic leaders and the pinups of popular entertainment. A religious definition of idols might be “objects of intense devotional focus.” Another definition might be “objects of hallucinatory focus.” It is this latter description, inspired by Julian Jaynes, that this chapter highlights. Jaynes argued that during the Bronze Age people experienced audiovisual hallucinations that directed and governed behavior and emanated from figurines. This explains why their texts are replete with numerous accounts of divine visitations. By the first millennium BCE godly voices and visions faded into history as sociopolitical complexity configured a new mentality making hallucinations obsolete. Using Jaynes’s arguments, this chapter provides a cursory review of how throughout the ages, idols have been adored, admired and worshipped, as well as viewed with suspicion, leading to prohibitions against their use and aniconism. They have also triggered hallucinations. Jaynes’s contentions fit into a larger theoretical framework of how cognition and material culture co-constitute each other. Such a perspective challenges dualistic accounts of mind-versus-materiality and individual-versus-environment interactions, informing us about how individual and object are sociopsychologically enmeshed.