We are ready to begin transposing our model into what it represents, an outline of world history, as the abstractions generated by dynamical analysis move to the background and we explore the content of our schema. And what rich content it is, as very ordinary things we take for granted spring to life and show the signature of a deeper coherence. This schema has its assets and liabilities, its sudden resolution of multiple historical enigmas, and its clear limits. Our outline will really be an outline of an outline, which we will start to construct in full in the last chapter. Our eonic outline will always have a very particular form based on a direct perception of the eonic effect and the fact that we have recently passed out of the range of its direct action, as recently as two centuries ago, clocking the end our transition, roughly, at the point of what we will call the Great Divide, the mysterious moment of the last generation of the eighteenth century. We are entering the mideonic period of the third great age of the action of the eonic sequence, and we can remind ourselves of the difference in character between the periods of transition and the intervals between them. System action has yielded to free action, and the results will be our own doing. 

We are thus looking backward, as far as dynamics is concerned, since we have set up our analysis to restrict statements of historical structure to the past. This preempts attempts to ‘compute our evolution’ based on some notion of laws of history, and our proper business lies in the output of our system, so to speak, what we have called ‘eonic emergents’. We are already fully immersed in these, and carrying out their implications. A fair list of these ‘action scripts’ will include the major innovations of modernity, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, and comprising the Scientitic Revolution, emergent liberalism, and the Industrial Revolution. The revolution of democracy is especially significant in our analysis and we note its spectacular correlation with our eonic sequence, and the modern transition, more precisely the modern divide.

From this perspective then we look backward at the eonic evolution of civilization visible in three broad stages since the invention of writing.

Looking backward
The Great Explosion?
The Neolithic?
The Eonic Series

We have proposed a frequency hypothesis, but we require no final conclusions on that point, save that the relationship of TP2 and TP3 make no sense without some such assumption. In fact, we have set up our model so that we can start anywhere, and look at the eonic series as a self-contained unity of a series of relative beginnings.

The rise of civilization?
The Axial interval, -900 to -600
The rise of the modern, 1500 to 1800

Please note that the first turning point has almost disappeared from our consciousness, and yet its great achievements have become implicit in our thinking. The prime example is the question of the rise of the State, and our existence inside states—or more likely in the early period roundabout or just outside of states. The first states precipitate a crisis of social organization and boundaries, and the swift continuation to state formation is the emergence in the mideonic periods of a succession of empires, especially with respect to the legacy of Sumer.

Please note that while empire formation takes up a dreadful amount of human total history in the era of states, empires as such have no eonic status that we can see from the data. This point is absolutely essential to consider. Just what we see in TP1 Sumer is not fully clear, and yet we can roughly detect a classic early instance of a whole spectrum of possibilities taken on the small scale in a set of city-states, complete with intimations of ‘first democracy’, and social frameworks with great creative potential, a far cry from the monotonous progression of successor empires into which this first moment rapidly degraded. And yet the logic is clear, and the crisis of globalization begins immediately in the vacuum created by the first higher state formations. The expansion of law in the imperialisms of lawlessness is the tragic dilemma of the way our system precipitates its own greater future. It is possible to make a case for empire, but at the same time we must note that historical inevitability, and teleological propaganda, have departed our eonic model. It may be that empire have seemed to serve a greater purpose, but it is also true, an our type of model enforces this, that it was always possible to do the job right.

These issues come to the fore in the second stage of the eonic sequence as a new disposition toward the state emerges. And this takes two, or more forms. We have the world of the Greeks and Romans, and the world of the ancient Israelites. We have become so fixated on abstract definitions of religion that we forget the way in which monotheism, at least, emerged in the context so clearly described by the Old Testament.  This account is about a State, more than a religion. At least to begin with. Religion there, please note, is the drama of the State cast in a new key. This is not the beginning of religion, by any means, and any account must begin with the Neolithic, but here a great relative beginning comes to the fore with a new form of universal religion.

The emergence of a theocratic state, ironically in the play of empires, produces a religious tradition that flows outward from its transitional period there to become the raw material for a series of religions. As if to challenge and correct the consequence of empire, religion turns into a set of transcultural themes able to integrate the diversity of peoples undergoing globalization.  At one and the same time we see the rebirth of the State as a theatre of freedom in the classic spectrum, once again, of Greek city-states, whose greatest moment is the birth of Athenian democracy.

We should what seems like the redundancy of the eonic pattern. It produces multiple potential futures in parallel during the Axial interval, a function in part of the chance, and the last chance, to perform a series of actions under conditions of relative isolation. In fact, this isolation is rapidly disappearing, and yet in the Axial interval we have no single keynote with a final claim on the future. Our system seems to simply try different things in tandem. It is important to consider this point since the rise of the modern suddenly lose this parallel emergence factor in the single focus of its action. The reason is obvious, notwithstanding the hopeless red herring of Eurocentrism and the misplaced emphasis on that fiction we call ‘Western Civilization’.

The rise of modernity, then, is ambiguous at first, because two strains from the Axial interval seem destined to collide producing the characteristic dilemma of ‘secularism’ that haunts modernity. But we can easily conclude that the rise of modernity resets its action to its original theme of States, as religion is transformed into a vehicle not of theocracy but of individual realization inside the State. A more accurate, or focused, account might bring in the distinction of State and civil society whose birth accompanies the dilemma we find in the multiply programmed outcome of the Axial era.

Our outline of an outline is complete, and we are back at our starting point, the post-transition of the period we call ‘early modern’, entering the mideonic period, and we should do well to remember that curse of empire that accompanies the flow toward globalization inside the eonic sequence. We should also consider that, with respect to the eonic sequence, democratic emergence twice shows the context of ‘system action’. We should be mindful that as this proceeds to ‘free action’ the results are not guaranteed, since the mideonic eras have both an apparent loss of creative impetus even as they are thrust into a new and higher degree of freedom without eonic determination.

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