Word: milleniums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some scholars think that this kind of writing may be a reflection, rather than a cause, of the preoccupation with disaster. Roy Peter Clark, an English professor at Auburn University, links the spread of millenarian fever with the approaching end of a true millenium-the year 2000. Says he: "We must prepare ourselves for the mass psychological hysteria, the conscious or unconscious sense of terror that may build to a climax." Others, like Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, say that love of calamity shows a sense of alienation and powerlessness that seeks release through images of destruction...
Devotees believe Krishna takes his bodily form and visits men in every millenium, bringing his spiritual knowledge to earth. Krishna is supposed to have taken the bodily form during the first century A.D. in the village of Braj in North India. He is portrayed as a mischievous lad in The Round Dance of Krishna, a poem by Nanddas written in the 16th century and based on Sanskrit texts. Krishna is chased along the banks of the Jumnu River by 160 women and with an affected reluctance allows them to catch him. While declaring the strength of love, he multiplies himself...
There is, of course, a method to all this madness. The determined denial of reality is designed to curb our frustration by giving us a glimpse of the millenium, in which man will live harmoniously with nature, children will no longer be molested, street gangs will devote themselves exclusively to good works and the joys of polyphony, and alcohol will soothe the stomach as well as the brain. The trains will even run on time...
While most anthropologists generally agree that the brain of homo sapiens today is essentially the same as that of the primitive beings who first mastered fire around 100,000 B.C., Jaynes claims mankind did not become conscious until the second millenium B.C. If humans were not conscious until then, what were they like? How did they function...
...notes that idols produced in later periods consistently portray mute gods, a fact that conveniently fits into his theory of mind evolution. As the bicameral mind broke down and humans gained consciousness, he argues, they heard the voices in their mind with less frequency. Between the second and first millenium B.C., man eventually lost his "contact with the gods" and gained contact with himself. But a few bicameral individuals remained, people later depicted in the Bible and other books as having conversed with...