4.2 Zarathustra and The Myths of Revelation

World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
2nd. Edition
The Book
By  John Landon

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4. Transition And Modernity  
        4.1 Zarathustra and The Myths of Revelation

        4.2 The Eschaton of Geopolitics, First and Last Whigs
               4.2.1 Discrete Freedom Sequence: Democracy’s Eonic Timing  
               4.2.2 Open Societies, Open Spaces  
               4.2.3 Theory and Ideology: Das Adam Smith Problem 
               4.2.4 Last and First Men
               4.2.5 1848: A Revolutionary Divide   
               4.2.6 Progress, Postmodernism, The Holocaust    
      4.3 A New Age of Enlightenment   
               4.3.1 Counter-Enlightenments    
               4.3.2 Rousseau and The Sociobiologists 
               4.3.3 Toward a New Enlightenment?    
      4.4 Rise of the Modern: The European Miracle   
             4.4.1 Rhyme and Reason  
             4.4.2 ‘Re-formations’  
             4.4.3 Eurocentrism 
      4.5 The Case of The Missing Centuries    
Endnotes    
      4.6 The Eonic Evolution of Religion  
             4.6.1 Protestantism in the Eonic Mainline  
             4.6.2 Religion, Globalization, and Revolution   
      4.7 New Ages    
             4.7.1 The ‘Axial’ New Age   
             4.7.2 An Evolutionary Psychology: Classical Samkhya
             4.7.3 New Age Movements    

 As we enter on the artificially created moment of the new Millennium set by the Christian calendar, an observer skeptical of the eschatological visions of doomsday apocalyptics might yet consider that mankind is passing through a crisis in human history as a whole, the end of a long beginning since the passing of the last Ice Age. Globalization and economic interpenetration, the onrush of technology, political cyclone, ecological and demographic alarm, coexist with futurist expectation, and the hopes of temporal salvation rendered over to providential certainties. Ideas of progress and decline seem finally to blend in the antique hope of ‘end-time’ redemption, to pass as the ultimate ‘quick fix’ uttered in slogans. Some see the end of the ‘modern age’, and in a postmodernist mood, survey twentieth century as the close of an era. At least, the expectation of millennial completion seems a desperate impatience in a vault of centuries and a progression of epochs barely underway, barely able to begin. The nature of futurist beliefs, themselves the source of endless confusion, generate historical misperception in the traffic between archetypal ‘crisis’ and the console red-warning lights of real issues.

It is interesting that the roots of millennial conceptions in their current form emerged from the ideas of Zarathustra , in the second Millennium B.C., passed through the vehicle of the Persian Empire into the parallel world of emerging Judaism during the period of the Exile  and thence into Christianity and Islam. By this reckoning our crisis is quite ancient indeed, as recycled eschatology. It is difficult to reconstruct the exact sequence whereby the Saoshyant, or savior, of Zarathustra passes into the Qumranic world and thence into the messianic conceptions of early Christianity, although the Book of Daniel shows the clear footprints leading back to the era of the Persian  Empire in the time of Cyrus  the Great.[i]

The direct influence of Zoroastrianism  on the beginnings of monotheism, in the West, must force us to examine this historical context of our religious beliefs. The world of Biblical Criticism, generated from the era of the modern Enlightenment, was slow to confront the strains of the Zoroastrian prophet in the figure of Jesus, a classic exemplar or realization of the type. A forgotten irony of history, still indirectly evident in the disposition of the Old Testament mood, is the way in which the ‘small scale’ Israel proved a more adept vehicle for the transmission of Zarathustra’s vision than the stolid Persian  Empire of Darius and Xerxes that amplified the already distorted form into the common world of antiquity. Perhaps in the new Millennium we will reach the end of the unconscious ‘Zoroastrianism’, our psychic archeological site, whose archetypes powerfully influence our social mythhistories, the strange entwining of historicism, futurism, the eschatological, that animates millenarian expectation.

The blend of indigenous Judaic monotheism, as it emerged from its Canaanite, thence Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, along with the themes of Iranian dualism and eschatological messianism during the period of the Exile  and after, resurfacing strongly during the Qumranic period near the birth of Christianity, is one of the most confusing overlays of the period of cultural advance and integration that occurred with a center of gravity ca. –600, thence to generate the pillars of a great constellation of traditions. This complex parallel emergence and interactive blending constitutes one of the central mysteries of the western religious tradition, one part of whose content is so clearly a product of cultural diffusion. It will seem less mysterious once seen in its broader outline of what we will call the ‘eonic, or stepping, evolution of civilization (and/or religion)’ .

That the record of the period of Exile given in the Old Testament should have preserved the forgotten connection of eschatological ideas with the parallel Zoroastrianism in the world of the Persian  Empire is a piece of a great puzzle. Its relevance to our subject is the temporal correlation with the onset of a new era in world history. The issue here is not the influence of Zoroastrianism but an insight, in one instance, into the high level of abstraction operating behind our perceptions of religious evolution. It is the period ca. –600, plus and minus that is in fact our subject, for it is this era that is the rough center of gravity of a great transformation, our mysterious drumbeat. It is the era of the birth of the great religions in concert at the fountainhead of the traditions of classical antiquity. The process has nothing to do with religion and we see that the synchronous effect applies as well to the polytheistic Greece in the period of the Ionian Enlightenment. The Old Testament conceals a riddle, but cannot do justice to its own discovery.

The myths of the Old Testament are in desperate need of secular debriefing, and the findings of Biblical Criticism are either ignored or reabsorbed into new semi-secular theological sophistries. At a time when the Old Testament mythology is resurfacing as a geopolitical legitimation text in a modern Israel armed with atomic weapons the deceptions here are proving catastrophic. It is important to consider how little accurate information we have for this period. By comparison the histories of the Greek period are rich in data. We could not reliably speak of the historical existence of Abraham, Moses, the Exodus, or any of the other details of a history rendered into an ideological collation in the generation before the Exile. Our strategy here will be to strip the account of its particulars and restrict ourselves to block analysis in correlation with the synchronous Axial period. That reduces the history to what we know, and to what it is, an input-output problem in an historical system of evolution. It is simply inappropriate to take the myths of the Old Testament as ‘tradition’, for our system is resetting a new beginning as a ‘New Age’, an effect all too visible in the Old Testament era itself. To override the attempted Enlightenment course correction is risking disaster. We should remember the stance of Spinoza at the dawn of the early modern.

Seen rightly, the Old Testament’s core account, the rough interval from –900 to the Exile, unwittingly records what we will call an eonic transition. One and the same issue of continuity and discontinuity that we must consider confused the redactors of the Judaic corpus who attempted to seek the sources of their suddenly appearing tradition in earlier figures, yet the sagas of Abraham and Moses, if historical, clearly precede the crucial phase. One irony of our enquiry will be to inherit the true beauty of the Old Testament in a secular interpretation that can rescue its account from the overlay of myths that have degraded its true significance to religious fanaticism. A world historical first in the emergent technologies of writing, and as such the first recorded documents of our eonic observer and their ‘action scripts’, these redactors of the immediate ‘post-transitional’ era just before and after the Exile constitute a veiled instance of the evolutionary made history.[ii]

This period seems the source, as an age of ‘revelation’, of our sense of the sacred. Yet we can now see that the Zoroastrian theme precedes this period, whose relative transformation (cf. section 4.6) of outstanding cultural streams seems to generate the illusion of an absolute or transcendental source. Similar influences can be found in the Egyptian hints of monotheism, as in the various considerations of the ‘religion’ of Akhenaton. And in fact Christianity and Islam arise much later, but seem to look backward to this period, whose actual core shows something quite different, the history of a Canaanite culture zone, ‘Israel/Judah’, whose religious traditions suddenly transform into a monotheistic vehicle, as it sows the seeds of the religions to come. An almost identical phenomenon, at this high level of abstraction, is visible in India, and in a comparable time frame. In fact this entire period was extraordinary in its generation, and all at once, of new cultural traditions.

Eonic evolution of religion The term ‘eonic evolution of religion (or science, or any other relevant stream)’ joins our general category, the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, as a means to study the relation of the streams of religion to the eonic sequence. This discussion will be expanded in section 4.6.

With the increase of modern historical knowledge this strange phenomenon of synchronous parallelism has become an enigma replacing a myth, and in the process casting the Occidental myths of revelation in a most ironic light. This constellation of creative individuals generates a new age of history, and leads us into causal perplexity at such a complex temporal correlation over independent regions of so many effects. It is a phenomenon of Gaian proportions, yet we see only a series of outcomes, never the dynamic behind them. There is nothing simple about it, for while it is true that the Old Testament demonstrates the appearance of Biblical prophets in this period, the effect has nothing as such to do with prophets. Prophets existed before, but none quite like this unique series in their anticipations of a new world to come.

We should note again that Zarathustra is often mistakenly included in this period, and yet we now know that he lived earlier. In similar fashion, Lao-tse, perhaps a fictional invention of a later period, is associated with this Axial Age. Thus we have the most obvious association of religious emergence with this Axial period. Yet many of the elements predate this period, and merely undergo a very strange transformation in the interval of transition. This is a puzzle of a system operating in frequency, not of religion. Despite the perspective of secularism, we remain then with a difficult puzzle indeed for a systems theorist: why does a remarkable string of prophets appear dead center in the Axial pattern? Conventional social science will prefer to deny the existence of the Axial age. The problem with the religious explanation is that in the same time frame we see emergent Buddhism, to say nothing of the world of the Archaic Greeks.

In any case, it is the crystallization, almost the beginning rationalization, of these first Zoroastrian sources that is characteristic of the Occidental religious traditions, whose effect was also, unfortunately, their later exploitation as theocratic imperialism from which they seem to have hoped to escape, and the inadequacy of the basic mythological format inherited from Iranian dualism. The endless confusions of dualism are in part simply the reflection of the polytheistic remnants of the Indo-European pantheon filtered through the brilliant vision of Zarathustra as the conception of the ‘one god’ founders in the dialectic of good and evil.

From its archetypal roots, the eschatological idea forever resurfaces, as evidenced in the versions of early modernism, as they influenced, for example, the German and English Civil Wars, Hegel, and Marx. The eschatological nexus moves between its twin realizations, the slow, and the fast, the one conservative dangling the carrot of hope, the other radical, pedal to the floor acceleration and social tumult. The ‘end times’ are the grounds for the last revolution, or else the ‘end of history’ is the rationale for the end of revolutions. It is no accident that much contemporary social criticism attempted to expose the fast version embedded in leftist communism, looking the other way at the slow version granted the weight of religious tradition.

We must, of course, enter the deeper levels of detail in the history of ‘Israel/Judah’. But streamlined at a high level of abstraction, the eonic block analysis of the Judaic source era is far more remarkable than that of the theologians. What is happening here as a caravan stop between Egypt and Mesopotamia morphs outward to overtake and surpass the derelict empires inherited from a greater antiquity? First and foremost, we are beginning to see that our subject is a relationship of the local to the global, and that the crisis of civilization lies in the relation of the emergent state, seen at the dawn of civilization, to its exterior, and the expansion into a void, first as empire then as ecumenical religion. First the state is born, with elements of religion, and then the oikoumene from that state generates the need for a more universal religion—the challenge to empire. This nexus is one and the same that we find in the modern explosion of leftist revolution, globalization, and the ‘class struggle’, i.e. the relationship once again of individual to state. Religion is about the individual, and yet it also about the relation of the individual to the State, as it both liberates and dominates that individual. Let us consider this latter aspect on the way to our analysis of what we will call the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’.

The transformation of ‘Israel/Judah’, beside the world of Zarathustra perched prophetically in the mountains of Iran, falls into place in the field of civilization  springing from Sumer and Egypt, as the frontier seedbed of the great religions to come, as ecumenical integrators in the frontiers of the first rise of the State. State formation, as the fundamental achievement of its first creators at the beginning of civilization, had rapidly become a relation of ‘core and field’, ramparts and political nuclei confronting a field of diffusion, whose chaotic irregularities generate the need for cultural integration. Beyond the ramparts of the primitive state, the will of Pharaoh or the codes of the Hammurabis do not reach, and the form of this state must confront its own self-division. What is remarkable is the way the play on the idea of the state in the Judaic histories, and the whittling away of the ‘Israel/Judah’ nexus in the shadow of empires, spawns a world religion, even as it disappears in the period of the Exile.

Thus, beyond the issues of the sacred, the emergence of Axial monotheism is, in part, an attempt as much as anything else to respond to the crisis of Empire, as a new kind of ‘kingdom’ comes into existence, the world religion, a transcultural integrator. The idea, or context of many related ideas, of the ‘kingdom beyond boundaries’ is born, or transformed. It is this ambiguous challenge to society and the ambition to extend its field in universalism, in the open spaces and frontiers of spreading civilization, that gives birth to the essence of the religion s to come, as ecumenical movements.

We have a clue to both the cyclical myths of history and the equally significant teleological histories that wish to transcend them. Thus the Judeo-Christian tradition assigns to either the Hebrew Prophets or to Augustine the invention or discovery of the ‘linear conception of time’, in a revolt against the cyclical histories of the ancients, although the root idea is clearly Zoroastrian—in the form that comes down to us. Norman Cohn, in his account of Zarathustra, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, describes the contrast between the essentially static world views of the earlier Egyptian, Sumerian civilizations, and the revolutionary implications of the new conception of the prophet Zarathustra, to see the world in motion and moving beyond itself to a final resolution. A central paradox that our eonic model grapples with successfully is this unity in contradiction of cyclical and linear views of history, as the static yields to the progression of evolutionary history in a cyclicity of driving motions. We will soon see this not just as the evolution of religion, but more generally as the eonic evolution of civilization, in the ambiguity of states, empires, and religions at the core of which lies the hybrid transitional form of the Judaic ‘Israel’.[iii]

None of this subtracts a jot from the enigmatic splendor of the emergentist phenomenon reflected in the Old Testament which will turn into an ‘eonic showpiece’ for our historical model, as the secularist walks away with this evidence of eonic history. The redactors of the Old Testament were observing the compression of eonic emergence in their time-space frame, and we declare them early exemplars of our universal historian, the eonic observer. Our ‘secular’ version will be an upgrade of this extraordinary, but isolated, perspective of the Prophetic period. The secular version is much more interesting than the degenerating fairytales cast off now into Hollywood popcorn religion.

Thus we will see that the Judeo-Christian mythology is ‘eonic’ and embeds a cyclical myth. The response to cycles is some counter-myth of transcendence or linear time or teleological futurism. That sounds arcane but it is not so very different in principle from efforts by economic agents to ‘straighten’ economic ‘cycles’. The redactors of the Old Testament are the first appearance of our ‘eonic observers’ and are both creating as myth and observing at the same time an historical transition in the greater evolution of emergent civilization. Once we see this historical nexus behind the myth we will also discover that the ‘rise of the modern’ has an isomorphic structure with a different context, and that a Zoroastrian myth is not so easy to avoid, as one and the same response to a cyclical not so mythical myth complete with ‘end times’ myth is at work in the modern world.

We can leave it there, for the moment. The eschatological idea echoes throughout history, reaching the modern world in its inverted secular forms, such as the Hegelian ‘end of history’ showing the connection between state and transcendence in direct fashion. Our secular Zarathustras live in the acceleration  of history, the exponential curve as myth. Francis Fukuyama finds, in The End of History and the Last Man , that we have reached a political final state, the end  of world-historical political evolution in the form of the liberal state. If this is true, it should better be called the Beginning of History, the real New Age, if its creature could reach future history as a New Man. Finally, in the vault of time, the scale of the historical passes to the moment of Earth time and the evolution of life, thence to embrace a Big Bang and even, in new crypto-Zoroastrian theories of physics, a final relativistic Omega Point of converging world-lines at the “end of time”.[iv]