Yes, excellent! (What do you make of the Godlearners, then? :-)
> On the other hand it is clearly impossible for a player to play a
> character who is not conscious in a completely satisfying way. The
> obvious fix-up is for players when making a decision to speak as the god
> and refer to their character in the third person. When speaking in
> character they can't speak reflexivly. I rather suspect that this is far
> too much to ask and is also likely to diminish player/character
> identification to a minimum. In a group where everyone follows a
> different god each player could play the god of another, whispering
> advice in their ear. Somewhat like the Shadows in WW's "Wraith" game.
One need not take the bicameral mind as a literal truth, but as a set of guidelines: do not refer a lot to 'what you think'; ask the gods for help; as gamemaster, let the players encounter gods on a more regular basis and ignore the temptation of 'I have 40,000 POW and live in a place you peasants will never see'.
In my monocameral mind, the Godplane is more the place where the Invisible God would hang out. The barbarian gods live with or close by their worshippers. It's _not_ unusual to meet your gods, in the fields, in the woods or in the temple (in fact, they are in the temple for precisely that purpose). I would expect the gods to walk openly in the Sacred Time, visible to all.
A bit like the Iliad, perhaps. My main interest is the gamemaster perspective, in evoking the wonder of Glorantha. This tends to disappear a bit in the mass of data and rules, at least for me. For that reason, I found Jaynes' refreshing: it gave an explanation for how the ancients _thought,_ and how they saw the world, that made sense and that can be used in roleplaying.
> Another draw-back is that Jayne seems to imply that bicameral people did
> not need rituals to contact their gods which leaves heroquesting out in
> the cold. I suppose you could rationalize by saying they used rituals to
> conform the imagined gods of different individuals to a social norm.
On the other hand, heroquesting is associated with finding new knowledge, which can be seen as pretty stressful. Perhaps the Gods come to attention when one is heroquesting? Suddenly, a lot of the old, forgotten gods and spirits start to appear and advise, etc. (And in contrast with the hallucinations of bicamerality, these are _real_ -- the gods _do_ exist in Glorantha.)
Another viewpoint, taken a bit more directly from Jaynes: the bicameral age is the Godtime; the Greater Darkness is the breakdown of bicamerality (gods die or grow increasingly distant; demons appear, ...) and the subjective age is Ever Since. Once you go heroquesting, you see the gods. The hero-/godplane exists besides the normal world. And so on.
Thomas
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