>The Egyptians felt their consciousness in their livers, for example.
Funny you should mention this. The Egyptians and Hebrews believed that they expresses emotions with their liver, not with their hearts. Where the Old Testament characters say that their "heart felt heavy with sorrow" or their "heart leapt with joy", the original text actually referred to the liver.
This was one of the first clues I had that the Bible wasn't translated correctly, and that someone else was trying to decide for me what I could and could not understand. I had purchased an interlinear Bible with the original Hebrew text under the English translation in the Old Testament passages. I wanted to translate the scriptures to find out for myself what they really said. By chance, the first passage I tried to translate on my own contained the Hebrew word for liver. After I translated it on my own and compared the English text, I found the English version said "heart". I double-checked my work, but was certain that I had made a correct translation. After some investigation, I found a passage in the forward that explained this very discrepancy. It explained that many Hebrew idioms were unknown to the English reader. To "facilitate" understanding, the English text may not be a literal word-per-word translation, but at times may show what the Hebrew really "means", not what it really says. This infuriated me, and set me off on my first big quest to translate and figure out what *really* was going on. I didn't like people translating the "truth" for me, because I was not expected to be able to understand it for myself.
My research into what the Bible really said, lead me to change my understanding about what the ancient JudeoChristian religion really was about. I expanded my research to cover the Apocrypha, the pseud., and later into medieval grimoires and then through all different religious texts. I finally decided that I had to read everybody's claims, but then had to make up my own mind.
This idea that the Hebrews and Egyptians expressed their emotions with their liver was one of the confirmations in my early development that other people would withhold the truth "for my own good", and that I had to fight for my own understanding, because nobody else cared if I understood or not. All they wanted was my agreement with their conclusions.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto:harv@gate.net> Author, Engineer, Entrepreneur, <http://www.gate.net/~harv> Consultant, Researcher, Scientist. <ldap://certserver.pgp.com>