Julian Jaynes portrays the early structure of the human brain and how it might generate "hallucinatory" voices and images that were construed as supernatural. And these hallucinatory visions persisted until the Greek civilization was well advanced. Jaynes cites the distinction between the Iliad and Odyssey. It seems these two epic poems are qualitatively distinct - the Iliad expressed the voice of the gods, and the Odyssey the voice of men. He asserts that there is no general 'human' consciousness at work in the Iliad dissecting the poem in demonstrating it represents only the voices of the gods. A fascinating theory that can be quite convincing.