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Late bicameral kingdoms at the behest of their jealous gods had always smashed and burned the idols of opposing gods or kings. And the practice accelerated when the idols were no longer heard and worshiped. King Josiah, in the seventh century B.C., ordered all idols in his domain destroyed. The Old Testament is full of the destruction of idols, as well as imprecations on the heads of those who make new ones. By the middle of the first millennium B.C., idolatry is only here and there, fitful and unimportant. Curiously, there is at this time a very minor cult of hallucinating from severed heads. Herodotus (4:26) speaks of the practice in the obscure Issedones of gilding a head and sacrificing to it. Cleomenes of Sparta is said to have preserved the head of Archonides in honey and consulted it before undertaking any important task. Several vases of the fourth century B.C. in Etruria depict scenes of persons interrogating oracular heads.18 And the severed head of the rustic Carians which continues to 'speak' is mentioned derisively by Aristotle. 19 And this is about all. Thus, after subjective consciousness is firmly established, the practice of hallucinating from idols is only sporadically present. But as we approach the beginning of the Christian era, with the oracles mocked into silence, we have a very true revival of idolatry. The temples that whitened the hills and cities of decadent Greece and ascendant Rome were now crammed with more and more statues of gods. By the first century A.D., the Apostle Paul despairingly found Athens full of idols (Acts 17), and Pausanias, whom we met a few pages ago at Lebadea, described them as being simply everywhere on his travels and of every conceivable sort: marble and ivory, gilded and painted, life-sized and some two or three stories high. Did such idols 'speak' to their worshipers? There is no doubt 18
See John Cohen, "Human Robots and Computer Art," History Today, 1970,
8:562. 19
De Partibus Animalium, III, 10:9-12.
