So, fans of Westworld can skip this next 15 seconds, but when discussing philosophy and Mythic Europe, I need to lay out the ground. In 1976 Jaynes published a book called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was popular in the science fiction community. The core premise is that before approximately 2000 years ago, humans did not have consciousness.
Let’s pause here to note that by conciousness he means something different to the general use of the term. He means metacognition. According to Jaynes, before the coming of modern conciousness, people could not think about thinking: they could not consider their own minds, or define how they learned. Instead of having consciousness people had, according to Jaynes, a second way of processing the information. One lobe of the brain did the sort of thing modern consciousness now does, but communicated it to the part of the brain that has executive behaviours through auditory hallucinations.
This, according to Jaynes, is why in books like the Illiad, characters never seem to decide anything for themselves. Whenever a piece of tension emerges, a god pops by and tells the person what to do. Odysseus was written a bit later, and he has a bit more personal volition, but even then there are some gods about. This style of writing also turns up in the Bible: Pharoah decides not to let the Jews go because God hardens his heart.
I won’t belabour Jaynes point: it has problems in the real world. As an Australian, I’d note that our Aboriginal cultures just wreck this theory, because they don’t do city-building, but they have consciousness.
In Mythic Europe, though, faeries are not conscious in a human sense. Can we model at least some of them with bicameralism? Incognizant faeries are guided by their role, which they cannot think about directly because they don’t know it exists. It nonetheless guides their action. There isn’t the element of hallucination found in Jaynes’ work, but there is the division between the part of the mind that decides and the part of the mind that executes decisions.
The “gods in your head driving your story” thing seems to match a few types of incorporeal faerie, but these could also be the little angels and devils sitting on your characters’ metaphorical shoulders.
Games From Folktales 