In modern medicine's view psychiatric disorders result from malfunctioning of certain mechanisms of brain chemistry rather than from possession by evil forces. Nevertheless, some features of the medieval practices in dealing with this type of disorders are still there. Thomas Szasz notes that modern clinical assessment of psychiatric patients has something in common with the medieval ordeal by water, which was used in the XVII-th century England for testing a person's connection with the devil. A person accused of witchcraft was thrown into the water with her or his hands tied; an accused who sank was considered innocent, while floating indicated witchcraft. The advocates of this ordeal argued that water was so pure an element that it repelled the guilty. In any case, the accused had no chances to stay alive. In a similar way, in the modern times a psychiatric assessment of a person suspected of schizophrenia is frequently based on the bias that the subject is ill, which practically guarantees that the symptoms of the illness will be found. A Google search for "schizophrenia and witchcraft" brings over 300 thousand results. To a certain extent, in the layman's view today schizophrenics are still associated with the unwelcome guests from the realm of the supernatural. The disturbance of the borderline between the everyday and the supernatural realities still evokes the irrational fear in most people.

Altogether, having emerged in prehistoric times as the person's ability to live in two realities at once, consciousness fundamentally changed human psychology by making human behaviour executively controlled and giving raise to the concepts of morality, freedom of action and personal responsibility. By looking in the distorted mirror of the supernatural, people created art, symbolic language, and ultimately modern religion and science. But the price for consciousness was high: Psychiatric disorders, witchcraft, witch hunting, Holy Inquisition, suicidal terrorism, and religious radicalism.

Conclusion: Birth of consciousness and the Big Bang

I started this paper with the questions: When in the course of anthropogenesis did people develop the idea of invisible magical reality? What caused the emergence of this idea? How did the discovery of the invisible reality change the human mind? How do people manage to distinguish between everyday and magical realities?

The archaeological findings revealed that around 100 thousand years ago humans began to bury their tribesmen and put in the graves tools, decorations and other artefacts. This suggests that those people developed the idea of the afterlife - the invisible reality in which spirits of the dead lived. Cognitive development provided necessary precursors for this discovery, among which powerful imagination was the most important one. Of all the animal species, only humans were able to escape from captivity of the immediate perceptual field and grasp the idea that sometime, in the invisible reality of the future, every living person is destined to die. This realisation caused an existential shock at seeing a relative or a tribesman dead. The people saw that a person with whom they lived, communicated and hunted together due to some reason suddenly became a breathless body, and understood that the same would happen to all of them. By refusing to accept the fact of death, people assumed that the deceased lives on but left his or her body and passed into another world with that part of him or her that they called a spirit and today we call the soul.

Starting from there, it was easy to conclude that spirits of the dead possessed unusual properties: They were immortal, invisible, could read people's minds and feed on the smoke of burned sacrificed animals. Having made this discovery, the people for the first time had a chance to look at their everyday world from another perspective and realized that their world had very different properties. The ability to see the everyday reality from another perspective, as if looking at it through the "eyes of gods", is what today we call consciousness. This ability of reflection gave rise to new forms of behaviour: Executively controlled actions and morality. But most important, the invisible reality presented a new challenge to humans: It needed to be converted into something tangible with which people could operate. This new challenge resulted in people inventing symbols - the tangible images, objects and actions that represented invisible images, objects and actions.

For a long time people addressed invisible spirits by decorating bodies of the deceased and placing artefacts in their graves. At last, around 30 thousand years ago, the people developed a way to "see the invisible" by drawing images on caves' walls and crafting figurines out of wood, bone and stone. There emerged a symbolic way of representing the invisible and communicating with the invisible. Eventually symbols started to be used for representing mundane objects, for instance, for memorising the number of killed animals or processed animal skins. Both magical reality and imagined everyday reality found their artificial embodiment in the language of signs and symbols. Around three thousand years BC Egyptians developed written language ^[51], and around two thousand years BC in Babylon and Egypt mathematics emerged ^[52]. Eventually symbolic consciousness gave birth to modern logical and scientific thinking.

But the beginning of consciousness, having pushed humans beyond the animal world, also brought with it psychological problems. The main of these problems was the necessity to maintain the border between ordinary and magical realities. To cope with this necessity, humans developed a special mechanism - the ERD. It took millennia for this energy consuming mechanism to reach the level of perfection that we enjoy today. In the ancient times, and even in the middle ages this mechanism frequently failed and people's everyday life was disturbed by the intruders from the realm of magic and the divine. People saw gods, mythical creatures, Christ and the Virgin Mary. Gradually the work of the ERD stabilised, became automatized and descended into the subconscious. But even in a modern person the ERD can fail in situations of stress, illness or danger.

In 1948 American physicist of Russian extraction George Gamow and his colleagues predicted that the Big Bang must have left in the universe some relict background microwave radiation, which was indeed discovered in 1965 ^[53]. The emergence of consciousness in the Middle Palaeolithic must have left "relict background radiation" of its own in the minds of modern rational people - the people's subconscious belief in the supernatural. Psychological studies of the last decades of the XX-th century did indeed confirm this prediction. Ousted into the realm of subconscious by modern science and religion, this relict belief in the world of the supernatural keeps feeding magical thinking and boosting creativity in modern children and adults ^[54]. By making people look into the abyss of the supernatural, the implicit belief in magic forces them again and again - every moment of life - generate the subconscious effort of distinguishing between the two realities and thus maintain the life of consciousness.

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