Let’s press the reset button, and start from scratch, using a new idea. One way to look at the eonic effect and its transitions is in terms of the idea of 'stream and sequence', and we will start over and redescribe the eonic effect in those terms. And this allows us to give expression to ideas of evolutionary directionality and progress. Or perhaps progression would be a better word. However, the idea of an eonic sequence allows us to proceed without committing ourselves on generalizations about progress which always end up confronted with various contradictions.

The Eonic Sequence Our non-random pattern is clear: we see a macrohistorical sequence associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, analogous to (although not the same as) feedback, able to act on cultural streams in intervals of several centuries. We can reverse-engineer this data with a question, Does world history show evidence of any kind of sequence? The answer is yes, and we see very strong correlation with an intermittent sequence pattern that can only be called ‘evolution’. This sequence is intermittent and intersects with the various streams of culture it finds in its direct path. This sequence can show synchronous parallelism, and follows a frontier effect, as we will see, and works in a kind of leapfrog effect.

This discovery is as remarkable as it is mysterious, and we are given a free gift of historical structure, something whose existence has always been denied, but whose existence suddenly becomes obvious as recorded history crosses a minimum threshold of 2400 times 2, i.e. three transitions and two middles, about five thousand years. Our use of the term 'evolution' requires further discussion, and all we know so far is that something is creating a derandomizing effect in fuzzy regions and time-periods, but in a fashion that is clearly coordinated over many millennia. 

History and progress An obstacle in the way of any claim of progress in history is the obvious perception of the immense sluggishness, and frequent retrograde decline, of the greater part of that history. But once we realize that most of world history is taken up with the mideonic intervals between a mere three short intervals of short acting transformation the idea of progress revives at once in a different form.

Progress and ideology One of the confusions of the idea of progress is that this idea is itself an ‘eonic emergent’ of TP3, one that suffers ideological degradation from its initial sense, which was non other than an attempt by men of the early modern to claim modernity was an advance over antiquity. The application of this loaded term to issues of evolution, in the confusions of Darwinism, has produced nothing but muddle. Our emerging model can clarify the idea and retrieve its usage from oblivion. Note that ‘progress’ will diverge in meaning: there can progress associated with the eonic sequence, and that associated with the mideonic intervals. Later we will distinguish ‘theories’ and ‘action scripts’, to make clear that using an ‘eonic emergent’ for a theory to describe the overall system is paradoxical.

Our system generates two kinds of histories, the stream history, and the isolated ‘sequence’ intervals in those streams. Consider the idea of 'Greek history', a stream of historical culture. This proceeds throughout the course of world history, from the era of Indo-European differentiation to modern times. It is in some fashion ‘Greek’. But, for some reason, this stream shows a remarkable flowering in the period from -900 to -400. There is no 'causal antecedent' or general explanation possible from simple examination of  'Greek culture'. We are left baffled, until we see that this stream suddenly becomes a part of a larger, eonic, sequence. As the stream and sequence intersect we see the 'Greek Axial interval', one of our transitions. 

  The eonic effect is really a macrosequence made up of a series of transitions. We see three rapid threshold crossings or stepping progressions with 'medieval' periods in between of slower advance. Note how the Axial period rapidly falls off and in the Occidental zone we see the period of innovation yield to the long centuries of the Roman Empire, followed by an almost complete collapse of the advance in the Middle Ages. The term 'mideonic' would be better than 'medieval', which has a specialized meaning. But notice how we instinctively sense the 'middleness' of the Middle Ages: we can't help but notice this eonic periodization. The larger pattern shows why. These transitions we can estimate at about three centuries, the first or generative part of a five century interval at each step. Clearly the extra two centuries is really part of the mideonic interval and simply shows the slingshot takeoff after the transition, followed by a rapid damping out of the driving transition.

Transition 1: the relative stage of advance in Egypt, Sumer, ca. -3300 to -3000
Mideonic period 1
Transition 2: the Axial interval, ca.-900 to 600
Mideonic period 2
Transition 3: the rise of modernity, ca. 1500 to1800
Mideonic period 3: our present?! 

The three century interval seems quite artificial, and could be measured in various other ways, but once we study the modern case we will realize that it is probably close to exact, if only as a statistical region. Note that we are outside of the modern transition, but at the end of the full five-century interval of modernity in contemporary times, and the sense of sudden ‘postmodernity’ arises spontaneously (and quite incoherently: the object of the exercise is to maintain, not deviate, from ‘modernity’).

Punctuated equilibrium Although we will avoid the term 'punctuated equilibrium', due to its prior usages, this pattern is an almost perfect case of this idea, the words simply taken in their dictionary sense. The normal flow of continuous history is 'punctuated' three times in a stepping stone sequence. This should be the defining example for the whole idea of a punctuated equilibrium, the one truly documented case of this phenomenon, clearly having nothing to do with genetics. However the ‘equilibrium’ periods are not truly stable, or static. The punctuations are inducing independent growth in the cultures touched. The entire globe goes through a series of convulsions and generates a master sequence of oscillations on continuous history.

This is not a universal global phenomenon, but one occurring in a complex mainline that leapfrogs between cultural zones.  Later, by defining the relationship of history and evolution, we will be able to call this stepping stone progression an 'evolution of some kind', the 'eonic evolution of civilization', with a question about the relationship of this to earlier stages of the descent of man. Such a clear case of a 'macro' process operating on the micro stream of history makes us suspicious of Darwinian thinking about man, at least. 

The periods stand out because of the rapid-fire innovations clustered in short intervals. Here is the barest summary:

TP1 The birth of the state, appearance of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations
TP2 Onset of two world religions, multiple sources of philosophy, birth of science, Greek democracy…
TP3 Onset of Reformation, secularism, English, French, American Revolutions, Enlightenment, another scientific revolution, another birth of democracy, Industrial Revolution,…

These are just a few of the effects. We can call these effects 'eonic emergents', i.e. intermittent bursts of suddenly emerging cultural constructs. Here’s the hard part: these changes are relative and don't necessarily show absolute innovations (e.g. modern science is not an absolute innovation, and shows a complex earlier history, both medieval and eonic). So, these eonic emergents show sudden spurts of development, but the absolute origin of their history is another question. We take it this way instinctively. We speak of Christianity as one continuous history, tracing its absolute origin, but we also speak of the relative transformation we call the Reformation as interval inside that larger history, and we see, surprisingly that this is part of our larger pattern. Debates over continuity and discontinuity suffer endless confusion over abstraction. But here, armed with such a large-scale example, we see resolution of the paradox, and might do well to avoid such terminology, save to note that the pattern perfectly reconciles the two confusions. World history shows a continuous aspect, and a discontinuous one also. Both perspectives are correct, there is a discontinuous phenomenon overlaid on continuous history, what we will later call a stream and sequence effect. As noted already this correctly applies as well to any concept of acceleration, a term we shall abandon from here on, since we are not dealing with a system of physical laws.

The clustering of eonic emergents in our series is massive, and at first inexplicable. Pick any cultural category, and the chances are that it will show amplification in this pattern. Philosophy? The Pre-Socratics, TP2. The birth of democracy? Axial Greece and the modern transition, TP2, TP3. Virtually all the basic higher cultural (i.e. more than just technological/economic) advances of civilization take place in this framework. It is easy to find the lineage by diffusion of most civilizations relative to this pattern, with significant exceptions due to the incompleteness of our pattern. 

We confronted with the fact that a cyclical interpretation of the data is the right one, as long as we are careful about what we mean by this, and steer clear of the traditional confusions of such thinking. The pattern shows an odd resemblance to a continuous frequency sampled at regular intervals, this being a metaphor only. The wavelength would be about 2400 years. The Axial interval seems to 'sample' the cultural totality it finds in place and amplify selected strains into a new form. Thus monotheism, in various inchoate forms, is already present in the prior cultural zones, but in the Axial period, with remarkable precision, these strains are blended into a focused religious formation that will later blossom into a series of world religions, these religions being outside the Axial interval. The Old Testament in fact makes this point with its contrast of an Abrahamic era (whether or not Abraham existed) and the era of the Prophets, faithfully reflecting our eonic analysis. The same is true in India, where depictions of yogis go back millennia before the Axial period, but this cultural strain suddenly crystallizes as an expanding religious formation, Buddhism, in the wake of the Axial interval. These are 'relative transformations'. The point must be considered since the idea of the Axial period has shown a kind of runaway interpretation as a secular version of an 'age of revelation', which is misleading. Another confusion is the idea of some kind of 'Axial thematic' or core philosophy. Hardly the case: almost everything transformed had a prior history, as we have suggested. And the many eonic emergents, or emerging innovations, show a dialectical variety, encompassing many opposites, e.g. the 'atheism' of Buddhism, versus the 'theism' of the monotheistic stream. 

 The clue to the overall pattern is to see the sluggishness of the periods in between. As the Axial interval passes, an unmistakable decline, but not fall, takes place, and a new period comes into existence, as if looking backwards. Not until the modern period do we see anything similar to the Axial phenomenon. Moving in the opposite direction, can we find anything as its antecedent? We don’t have far to look. As we pursue the history of Egypt, and of Mesopotamia, backwards, then backwards again, we arrive at another such point of breakthrough and rapid innovation, at the birth of civilization itself, toward the end of the fourth millennium.  

Sequence and parallelism The eonic sequence can be confusing due to the way it splits into parallel lines acting synchronous. The Axial Age is the clearest example. But once we understand the Axial Age, in itself, and as part of the eonic sequence, we can understand Egypt and Sumer in the way two transitions emerge in parallel at the same time. Attempts to derive one from the other have always failed.

Describing the swift transition from the era of earliest Egypt, Michael Hoffman, in Predynastic Egypt, is driven in some puzzlement to adopt the economic take-off idea of the economist W. W. Rostow as a metaphor to account for the sudden change that produces the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the Pharaoh Menes:

The immediate archaeological problem in explaining the cultural identity of Menes and his state is to account for the sudden embarrassment of riches that characterizes the material culture of Egypt between the Late Gerzean (ca. 3300 B.C.) and Archaic period (ca. 3100-2700 B.C.) in terms of a sophisticated, multifaceted explanation. Professor Renfrew borrows the term ‘take-off point’ from the economist Walter Rostow to characterize the rise of civilization and the proliferation of certain types of artifacts. Over the years a number of propensities develop within a social system, which predisposes it to a really major transformation. When that transformation does occur, it is so thorough as to convey the impression of crossing a critical threshold. .Michael Hoffman, Predynastic Egypt, “In Search of Menes”.

The question of the 'birth of civilization' is ambiguous, and we need not stop there as we proceed all the way to the sources of the Neolithic itself. The Axial Age itself gives us the clue. This is a dramatic and explosive moment of rapid cultural emergence, but it is not the 'beginning of civilization'. The antecedents are clearly visible. This tells us what is going on at the end of the fourth millennium, with the onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer.

We are at the threshold of the Urban Revolution, so-called. We can cite Gordon Childe who notes, in Man Makes Himself:

And so by 3000 B.C. the archaeologist’s picture of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus valley no longer focuses attention on communities of simple farmers, but on States embracing various professions and classes. The foreground is occupied by priests, princes, scribes, and officials, and an army of specialized craftsmen, professional soldiers, and miscellaneous laborers, all withdrawn from the primary task of food-production. The most striking objects now unearthed are no longer the tools of agriculture and the chase and other products of domestic industry, but temple furniture, weapons, wheel-made pots, jewelry, and other manufactures turned out on a large scale by skilled artisans. As monuments we have instead of huts and farmhouses, monumental tombs, temples, palaces, and workshops. And in them we find all manner of exotic substances, not as rarities, but regularly imported and used in everyday life. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1983):, p. 107

Just as with the Axial period, there is a clear fall off and the onset of a kind of medievalism, or better, simply a middle, or mideonic period. Thus, as Cyril Aldred notes of Egypt, in Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, the institutions of kingship remained ‘frozen at the moment’ of their creation, while the first four dynasties essentially created the forms of the entire Egyptian civilization, “as soon as a solution had been sanctioned…there was no further development.” Much of the Egypt with which we are familiar is from a much later stage. It is thus easy to spot in broad outline the basic factor of relative transformation. 

Each of stages in the eonic sequence is beset with a debate over the question of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ evolution, but our framework reconciles both viewpoints. It is at first incomprehensible to think of a relative stage in the cultural evolution of Sumer or Egypt to be a transition, but now we suspect the reason for it, and further the example of the Axial period shows the rationale: we don’t have to start with absolute beginnings. The Axial period shows a cluster of relative beginnings.  Thus, as with the Axial period, we see this effect of simultaneity in the sudden appearance of many innovations in Sumer and Dynastic Egypt. What is equally significant is the way in which these peaks seem to leave a steady state in their wake. Until the Axial interval, nothing can compete with the consolidation of higher civilization that creates a new world of man at the beginning of the third millennium.

Finally, we complete our pattern by noting the place of the rise of modernity in some kind of larger sequence. J.M. Roberts  in his History of the World  notes, “After 1500 or so, there are many signs that a new age of world history is beginning…”. William MacNeill , in his The Rise of the West , calls the career of Western civilization since 1500 a vast explosion. There is mysterious New Age starting from the period ca. 1500, indicated by the onset of the Reformation , and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the time of Copernicus. Our sense of the modern world always draws us back to this point of the so-called ‘early modern’, and into a conundrum over its suddenness, amidst other evidence of continuity from the Middle Ages. Relative to world history, something explodes in the sixteenth century. The abrupt start after 1500 is an invariant of numerous historical accounts, but since there is no method to account for it, immense labors attempt to see the continuity from medievalism. This is the 'European miracle', but we will soon see that this has little to do with Europe. It is simply part of our larger pattern. 

We have all the pieces of the eonic effect. This pattern is both a discovery and also something that we must have already noticed, since we are immersed in the very process we are attempting to describe. We notice right away the correlation with the key episodes of our traditions.  The core events of the Old Testament, the Upanishads, the rise of Buddhism, and the classic philosophies of China, the flowering of classical Greece, the birth of democracy, the birth of science, the classic Pre-Socratic philosophers, we always sense their significance, not realizing their place in a larger context. We discover that our cultural roots, over and over, correspond to elements of this pattern.  And there is a prior phase of all of this, not present to our consciousness because of the way the Axial interval displaced what came before it.

 Thus our view of history has always been focused on the source of our traditions in classical antiquity. Thus, for example, the presence of Egypt in the Old Testament is taken as a given. The world of the Israelites seems to react against the immensity of the Egyptian past. In fact, what we see is a civilization already past its peak, if not in decline. In Mesopotamia, we find the classic empires, confronted by the Greeks and the Israelites. But buried in Akkadian cuneiform is the lost memory of Sumer, the great ancestor of all these Middle Eastern cultures and empires. We can now see the sources of this and other civilizations, and the most obvious pattern arises.  In fact we see the connection of the two, the Axial and sequential patterns, in just this case. The great prior history of Egypt flows onward in a continuity that is interrupted by the new period of the Axial Age. Note that the Old Testament is unwitting recording the era of the Axial Age, in the process generating a complex new 'master template' for many religions to come. The myths of its interaction with Egypt is a New Age drama. 

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