We come next to the Axial interval, ‘ET5’, with a better perspective on the overall context of this parallel surge of advance, whose eonic structure is now seen to be almost identical with what has occurred in the case of Egypt  and Sumer, in the sense of parallel interactive emergence. Note the remarkable display of the frontier effect: all the transitions are outside of the first staging area of Sumer and Egypt.

 ‘ET5, …’ :

The onset of the Axial interval casts its net across the whole field of Eurasia as if to balance a new stage of advance as widely as possible across its sequential dependencies, to be followed by the obviously concentrated follow-up from a single source, during the next phase to come. Our three hundred year transition is open to some ambiguity, as in the modern case. After –1200, the faintest indications of the new dawn begin. But it is in reality the last two or three centuries before –600 that are crucial.  The case of Israel  is remarkable for showing how the V-cone system doesn’t just expand, but resyncs in periodic fashion throughout our range of jump diffusion zones. The relation of Buddhism to Jainism shows the same thing. Is our subject religion, civilization, geographical zones, art-forms? Here all we can suggest is ‘relevant variables of cultural meaning in side the V-cone’. The effect is entirely obscure, until we can trust that the phase transformation operates at a high level of abstraction. The field of world history leaves behind the traces of this efficient cyclic integration. Zooming in toward the emergence zones in the classical era we find the differentiating transition yielding to oikoumene creation in each case as the field of new sequence spreads from China, India, ‘Persia’, Israel, Greece/Rome. Especially notable is the exact triangulation around the old Mesopotamian oikoumene by from the fringe frontiers of Greece, Canaan/Levant, ‘Old Elam’ as Persia. Europe and Africa (as far as we know) remain outside the eonic sequence.

 ‘ET5++, …’ : On the Threshold of World Civilization

This classical phase especially shows the spectacular emergence of a bouquet of multiple oikoumenes, from China to the West, as separate yet intersecting cones of diffusion that fall short of global closure. What is remarkable is the explicit appearance of ‘ecumenizer integrators’, the great religions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, for example. This is a descriptive category applied to a context, not, as far as we can say, a ‘causal’ interpretation of ‘transitions generating mideonic forces’. We don’t ‘reach’ our mideonic subject, for its local future is shaped by not determined. The whole point would seem that our system underdetermines local futures, yet, to our complete speculation beyond our limited range of data, connects to far future, a statement threatening to leave us certifiably Zarathustrian, but only because the ‘linear, cycl ical’ logic is implicit to our terminology. Downfield free action is driven to ‘linearize’ its cyclical impetus, if it will not fall into reaction against it, as indeed is so evident in the history of monotheism, and in India. The term ‘Axial’ is misleading because the traditions that emerge do not reflect the transition, and are in many cases reactions.

‘ET5, Assyria, Persia, … Israel , …’ :

As George Roux  notes in Ancient Iraq , “Assyria awoke in 911 B.C,” referring to the recovery after the time of confusion in the Middle East created by the movements of peoples, Semitic and Indo-European, and generally the breakdown of the whole system created in the cones of diffusion of Sumer and Egypt. As Roux notes further, “When the light against comes in about 900 B.C.,” Western Asia has a new substrate of Aramean culture, the Philistines share Canaan with the Israelites, the Phoenicians enter a period of prosperity, the Medes and the Persians are entering the stage, ready to burst into the old oikoumene after the sudden precipitous fall of the Assyrians in -612. We would be hard put, at first, to find signs of anything in the way of evidence of transition too near the older area, but we can see from the distillation of the Old Testament one unwitting record of how one group of the participants experienced it, and saw the extraordinary changes that were taking place, and found themselves attempt to divinize the law of historical change. Part of our difficulty here is the simple inability to see the economic surging that is going on below the tip of the ice-berg. It is interesting that the Assyrians, in addition to their brutality, made an effort to preserve the ancient tradition of Mesopotamia in the building of great libraries. The tradition is thus frozen in place, and much of what we know about the earlier period is in fact derived from this Assyrian record. This is also the period in which the recycling of ancient pre-science transforms itself, via the Chaldeans, as astrology. The flood of cyclical misperceptions is beginning. The Hebrew prophets are remarkable witnesses to this rising period where creation and destruction are moving apace. We can only infer, by analogy perhaps with the simultaneous Greek explosion, behind the religious preoccupations, the rising tide of cultural activity that is the prime mover behind the transformation and creation of Judaism. In fact we do see this in the evidence of their Canaanite siblings, the Phoenicians, Persia.

 ‘ET5, …Israel…’ :     

We should expect great changes from great forces. But here in the study of the eonic effect we see in Israel  the issue of great changes from point sources. Although it is clear that the t-stream entry to eonic sequence  springs from ‘Semitic tribalism’, the actual details remain very obscure. There is no contradiction, for the ‘t-stream’ is, in the final analysis, ‘any combination of peoples in the zone and period’. Quite apart from the many independent factors of its autonomous emergence Israel will serve as a vehicle of diffusion for a transformed version of the ancient tradition, and for a simplified, almost rationalized, version of the Zoroastrian form of monotheism and eschatology, evident in the bobbing to the surface of the underground stream in the Book of Daniel, and the final Qumranic, and Christological, injection of the theme into the great oikoumene construction, of which the Judaic, in the Mediterranean world, is the counterpoint to the Roman. The Israelite transition is confusing, because we cannot easily say what it was! We lack an accurate historical account. But the symbolism speaks for itself, as a kingdom disappears, the essence of a kingdom spreads into the new oikoumene, complete with a legal code, celestial courts of law, but no government, and a state abstraction, ‘israel’. The transition that produced monotheism does not show a monotheistic society, until after the Exile  as far as can be seen. A close consideration of and placement beside the Greek transition will suggest that it is the crucial period from –800 to –600 that is the sudden discontinuous source, and enough time for the full launching and remorphing of the prior Israelite-Canaanite t-stream. The Old Testament is probably no closer to historical fact than the Iliad, in its earliest accounts. The effect is like including the Pre-Socratics as an addendum to the Homeric work, that is, the concentrated layering of the Biblical texts is not really a consistent account of historical reality, but a series of layers added in the passage of sequential generation mixed with downfield redirection, that finally manages its job, and leaves behind the sense of teleological action in the expansion toward the greater oikoumene.

‘ET5,…Greece,…’ :

Emerging from the period of its Dark Ages into which it had passed after the collapse of the Mycenean world, the great transition of the Greeks, in many ways a premonition of our own ‘modernity’, moves very quickly to establish the foundations of philosophy, science, new forms of political organization, the tragic drama, and a resplendent art. The entire transition is clocked by the change in pottery styles, beginning with the austere geometric style ca. –900, followed by the sudden elaboration and flowering, from the eighth century, of the classic styles that run in parallel with full period of transition. The first date, -776, for the Olympic Games, indicates the beginning of the visible effects emerging of the acceleration. The reappearance of writing and the works of Homer by the middle of the century remind us, that even as overseas colonization and an economic Boom get underway, the effects of information technology are as fundamental, and that art at the highest level seems to precede all other manifestations. That a portion of our transitional period is hiding behind this label called ‘The Dark Ages’ is evident by comparison with its parallel cousins, and by the sudden appearance of the many fully developed cultural forms in the eighth century, such as the Iliad, as if without any development at all. The history of Greece is invaluable because it shows two separate civilizations built from the same t-stream, one in the sequential state of the Mycenean medievalism, and the interaction with the e-sequence, the classical Greece  that we know. The sequence, Mycenean, Archaic/Classical, Hellenistic, dramatizes the nature of one of he most extraordinary form of periodic motion in nature. Between 750 and 650, we see the end of the period that produced the Iliad, the rebirth of literate culture and the new literature that will exploit it, beginning with Hesiod, and then the seminal Archilochus. This is one of the most rapid periods of cultural evolution  in history, and we can see, if only by hypothesis, that it is a global system transformation in the next phase of oikoumene generation. After –600, and the generation of Solon, the foundations are laid for the great sequences of the Classical era, in sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and politics. By –400 the falloff is evident and the world of the polis passes into the era of the first oikoumene, the Hellenistic empire of Alexander. The world of the polis does not lead so happily to the world of Cosmopolis. The Greek transition is evanescent, and soon bends out of shape.

 ‘ET5++: Athens to Rome:

The history of Rome has for long been the victim of delegation to secondary status in relation to the Greece . Our outline gives a complete account of this fact, even as it moves to relieve the Roman unfoldment to some relief of this peculiar status. For the Roman emergence, zoned with the Etruscan, is ambiguous in our account in the sense that it is clear an independent parallel emergent in relation to ‘ET5’, and yet also, a fluid transformation of the ‘sequential dependencies’ of the Hellenic Mediterranean network of diffusion, the ‘Greeks overseas’ to use the phrase of the book by John Boardman. Nothing in our approach forbids this double aspect. Roman mythology clearly echoes its early transitional generation, whatever we are to conclude, in its account of the passage to a republic from the era of kingship.

‘ET5, …India ,…’:

The Indian transition is plainly visible from a distance in the contrast and sequence of the Vedic, Upanishadic, followed by the emergent Jainism and Buddhism  and parallel proto-Hinduism, followed by the typical integration phase of Ashoka, in another variant of religion and empire, and the clear emergence of the gesture toward oikoumene. Buddhism and Jainism are in the realization period, ‘ET5+’, analogous to Judaism in the wake of the prophetic era. The different character of Buddhism, for example, is always noted as odd but never quite accounted for. This is one and the same ‘master key’ sequence seen in the Occidental Israelite/Judaic sequence. It is fascinating to compare the two, for the Buddhist glove slipped off the larger Indian t-stream by the time of the Gupta Age (there are no grounds for identification of Buddhism with the transit itself), where the fusing of t-stream and the spiritual ‘group’ was more effective, perhaps because of the difference of scale, and the different orientation to practical existence and politics. That later ‘Hinduism’ is a complex resurgence of entry t-stream absorbing the transitional shockwave as a complex flowaround makes the correct interpretation of the outstanding traditions somewhat confusing. The exact cultural interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita  alone is comparable with the difficulties of the Occidental religious texts.  The ‘t-stream’ data for the Indian transition must take into account the double stream of the earlier Dravidian mixing with the Aryan entry field, and its blending and transposition of the spiritual that appears to emerge from the polytheistic world of Vedism. This preoccupation with religion must not let us forget that the Indian transition is a broad cultural matrix not so dissimilar from the Greek as a system of small kingdoms, an economic and political sequence, and the typical ‘empire integration’ in the last phase.

‘ET5, China ,…’ :

At about the time of the institution of the Greek Olympic Games in -776, we enter the period of 550 years from -771 to -221, the Eastern Chou period, when a phenomenon resembling that of the Greek polis creates political turbulence, the inability of any one state to control China, and a period of ferment in which the gestation of the great Chinese civilization takes place. This whole period is often subdivided into a Spring and Autumn period (-722 to -481) and a Warring States period (-403 to -221).The Chinese transitional period is of especial interest because of its ‘Greeks of the East’ theme and variations, its distance from the conventional ‘cradle of civilization’ in the Near East, the distinct character of its creative yet diffusionist beginnings in the early Shang period, and its rapid movement from these ‘primitive’ Shang beginnings to advanced civilization after a first period of eonic transition, like a student skipping a grade in school, and yet moving swiftly to make up the difference. The result is almost a kind of compression together of the most advanced forms of culture with a context that almost betrays traces of a more antiquated ‘oriental despotism’, with its elusive common denominator that shows its beguiling family resemblance to what occurs in the West. It is, incidentally, this possibility that two stages of growth can be blended that makes a refutation of most labeled conceptual sequences of evolutionary development and shows why the ‘eonic sequencing’ of ‘empty’ progressive cycles is the only solution to broad parallel development.

Top