We have created the question, then, in relation to our eonic sequence, what next? More specifically, what are the next points of transformation in this cyclical series? That is, when do we again see a period of phasing onset, of parallel, interactive, zones of accelerated cultural evolution ? Now, all at once, the Axial phase makes complete sense.

Suddenly across Eurasia in China, India , Assyria-Persia, Canaan-Phoenicia-Israel, Greece-Rome, we see the rapid synchronous movements of the eonic evolution  of civilization in parallel, multiple streams of culture cross the Axial interval. Within about three centuries the foundations for another two millennia come into existence with enigmatic randomness and patterning mixed together. We might wonder why it is that this phenomenon takes place as it does, where it does. One moment it seems global, and then local. Our five zones of transition spawn a great new age then pass rapidly into the creation of oikoumenes, from Rome to China.

A Strobe Light Analogy The Axial Age can be confusing until we separate the stream and sequence aspects of each exemplar. The entering stream shows one kind of ‘evolution’, what we mean by ‘cultural evolution’, the eonic sequence a macro component, eonic evolution, that always distills from this immanent stream. It is like a strobe light in a dance hall, flashing, reflecting light on the faces of the dancers. The dance is continuous, but the strobe is discrete, on-off. Each of our Axial areas thus shows continuity right through the Axial interval, and yet the eonic intersection distills an advance from these immanent materials.

In A History of Prophecy in Israel, Joseph Blenkinsopp calls the sixth century B.C. one of the great turning points in human history and describes the period as ‘between the old order and the new’, noting the concordant symphony of religious evolution in Zoroastrianism , Buddhism , Confucianism, and Judaism, with its sudden and intense white streak of prophets. Blenkinsopp grapples with the history of Israelite prophecy, the period from Amos to Second Isaiah preceded by a primitive phase, and a later ‘drying up’, that his account hopes to ‘straighten out’.[i] In Exile and Restoration , Peter Ackroyd  notes the synchronous phenomenon:

It has long been realized that the sixth century BC was an epoch in which a variety of important events took place, not only within the more limited field of Old Testament history, nor even within the confines of near Eastern civilization, but throughout the world. It is the century of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of Buddha. It is also the century of the Ionian philosophers. For the biblical scholar it is the century of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah…[ii]

‘It has long been realized …’ But the implications are little considered by theologians unsure how to deal with the phenomenon of parallelism. A theistic and atheistic religion appear in concert. Along with the birth of science, rationality, and democracy. This is an era that is almost by definition interpreted in terms of the foundations of our traditions, and entailed as a period of exclusive interest against all others, although if we look closely we will notice its resemblance not only to our modern period, but also to the period of the birth of civilization itself. The sudden appearance of new civilizations from trickling streams and runway cultures at a smaller scale morphing precipitously as they cross the period from –900 to –600 should be the clue to seeing that something is happening in a purely periodic fashion, and that the explosion of ‘axial’ valuation is simply the mystery of cyclicity and progressive creativity, not of revelation.

All of these theological accounts, so distracted by the apparatus of transcendentalism, seem to have lost the simplest of explanations behind the basic phenomenon, a small Canaanite kingdom giving birth to the core ‘kingdom of God’ concept (not quite its later meaning) as a righteous society in relation to national liberation in a field of empire and domination, and internal divisions of class. Does this sound familiar? How will we exempt modern revolution from such transcendental glamour?

The concern of the Prophets for social justice, their appearance, timing, and marginality, is the eonic context that drives the future to historicize the sacred in the inherent enigma of evolutionary emergentism, a spectral variant of the basic freedom dynamic, cast between the Greek version, and the Indian.

The Old Testament as a record of eonic evolution It is highly useful to rewrite in one’s mind the Old Testament as evidence of an evolutionary process in our sense. As we look backwards at the era of the first religions (in the context of civilization) we must wonder what we are missing. If only we had some record, for example, of the period ca. –5500 in Northern Mesopotamia, we might see the eonic evolution of religion in its correct context. The Old Testament is a true first in world history.

An Axial divide? The interval definition of the Axial Age is too large, collates two periods, and conceals a rough divide. Our eonic scheme is better. It is worth savoring for a moment the synchronous emergence of the Old Testament collations and the passage of the Greek Archaic  into the brief period of Classical flowering. The period of Solon and of Josiah and the crystallization of a new national religion in Judah, followed by the Exile, are the significant moments leading us to place a divide (quite tentatively) at this point roughly ca. –600. The match to our model is remarkable indeed, as the system marshals its resources in slingshot fashion. The standard literature here can be very misleading.

Democracy’s eerie timing: By our rough measure the ‘eonic determination of democracy’ (macro-action) would be invisibly inside the transition, but democracy as ‘free action’ (micro-action) should be directly emergent after a divide. Mirabile dictu, that’s what the evidence shows, twice in a row, the modern democratic revolutions occurring once again with this timing. It is remarkable, though still speculative, to see how well the puzzle fits. It defies chance, and we see the halting ‘democracy as free action’ emerge in the generations after Solon and nose-dive within two centuries.

One phenomenon of note is the way in which the Greek transition lags slightly behind the Judaic. That is, we see the onset of the great Classical flowering in the wake of the Greek Archaic in the period, roughly, from the generation of Solon, just after the divide. The Israelite transition gets its main work done before the divide, yet, in a real sense, crystallizes afterwards. Our model gives us a strange insight into this with our distinction of eonic determination and free action, macro-action and micro-action. The emergence of freedom ought to show eonic determination, yet must also be self-created. It is thus almost eerie to see the exact take-off the Athenian experiment just at –600. Indeed, much of the Greek achievement shows just this timing. The great run of the Pre-Socratics appears with Thales just after the putative divide, the Judaic instance having already completed the forms of its later codifications.[iii]

Presocratics and Sophists, BCE

Thales                                580

Anaximander                     570

Anaximenes                       550

Xenophanes, Pythagoras   530

Heraclitus                          500

Parmenides                        490

Anaxagoras                       470

Zeno                                  460

Empedocles                       450

Protagoras                         440  

 

Our perception of five transition areas follows the geographical spectrum logic of the eonic sequence attempting to spread out, and our first approximation could be extended. Thus there is a great deal more to the Middle Eastern transition than the case of Israel. And yet the fact remains that Israel turns into ‘Israel’, an oikoumene generator, the only survivor of this field, the reason being obvious, its ability to produce transcultural vehicles. This ‘tugboat’ Israel effect is remarkable.

Archaic Greece: The Clue The idea of the Axial  Age has devolved into a new myth of an age of revelation, but the point has been missed that the overall effect is something far broader than religion. The birth of secularism occurs in concert with the birth of the great religions. We see the birth of science, philosophy and democracy in the system of Greek city states.

Israel: A frontier effect The fascination of the Old Testament lies in the way the factor of the ‘state’ passes into that of ‘religion’ in the gestations of a transition. The Old Testament gives transparent testimony to the cultural frontier in the double Egyptian and Sumero-Mesopotamian fields of diffusion, and also makes equally clear its sense of new relative beginnings generating in an exterior ‘close-far’ region. Core Sumer and Egypt  slowly fade, as the ‘acorn field’ spawns new start zones. Note the significance of Assyria, and the point is seen. These Mesopotamian Universal Empires are all in the way. It is outside, but ‘too close’, a transitional area, and yet a runaway freight train unable to escape the past. It simply disappears at the climax of rapid change. Persia is slightly better, but still hampered. It injects Zoroastrianism  into the pool, and wanes. Tiny Israel morphs outward and carries the day, at least in the westerly direction.

All we can say, then, is that ca. –1200 we are in the world of Ugarit, the Phoenicians, a Canaanite world whose exact details are still being discovered. This world is, by and large, sequentially dependent on the Egypto-Mesopotamian generation field. Within two centuries after the Exile, a new world is coming into being, in a fashion that has defeated the ‘Assyrian continuity’ trap, as civilizational evolution. As of –400, we see, with respect to an ‘Israel’ in this general field a new emergentist monotheism still baring the traces its ‘geo-focalized’ sourcing. Monotheism is an outcome of an eonic transition self-referentially applied to itself.

A cyclical theory of civilizations would want to show the kingdom growing from place to palace. Instead in a crisis of degenerate empires in proliferation we see a new experiment, the kingdom disappearing and turning into a cultural integrator as a ‘religion’. We see the deeper movement spawning a new ‘kingdom everywhere’ as the new type of religion. The idea of the ‘kingdom of God’ is born here, in the most natural fashion, as an almost ‘national’ root idea, self-extending in the passing beyond ‘nation’ to an ecumenical idea. Here Toynbee’s theory of civilizations has a nervous breakdown and expires as the Judaic generator is relegated to the status of ‘fossil civilization’, a most uncomely interpretation for a theory wishing to sneak religion back into a secular age. A charming new legal system emerges from the myth of Mt. Sinai. This system version of the facts is far more remarkable than the myth.

Transition and oikoumene Our model is an interrelation of transitions and oikoumenes. It is not then a question of civilizations, but the creation of inter-cultural vehicles of integration that is the business of eonic evolution. The most spectacular cases are those of the Judaic and Buddhist traditions, lightweight cores of ‘travel anywhere’ religious doctrine. But note the hidden or transformed ‘ghost of the state’ lurking in both. They are a new combination of our ‘fundamental unit’ as this progresses to ecumenical forms that can spread across cultures. Our subject expands beyond easy reach and we are confronted with the last instance of differentiating worlds before the closure of the globe will make parallel evolution counterproductive.

We are confronted with a problem of analysis and description, five worlds in parallel over several centuries, in a triad of eonic, economic, and technological sequences, so stupendous that we should refrain from instant explanations and do the only thing we can do, pass and point in one step across the whole band, to show one common denominator, the rough architecture of transition, a fluid cultural stream:

                        …before –900 (at the outside)

                        a system in transit: clustering creative individuals

                        initial results of transformation, a divide

                        long term outcomes as oikoumenes.

This is the pivot of classical civilization at its onset, a period of great renewal and advance. The Old Testament is really built around this sequence, and everything before –900 is one level of myth, the period after, ‘history’, however much we find its account to suffer as ‘myth’ of another kind. This account is distracted by the ‘sourcing myths’ of Moses and the Exodus, before –900, when the real core is the era of the Prophets, a truly classic pearl-stringer sequence, whose abrupt and meaningfully timed appearance derandomizes the overall picture, to say the least, and leads to the wreckage of forms of ‘how does it work’ history. In fact the case is surely a variant of what we see in Archaic Greece , in broadest outline.