Short of a science of history, we need someone to be a simple observer of the eonic effect. We can call him an ‘eonic observer’. He should be collecting data over many millennia, at the end of which he starts to do theory. It would be nice to be outside of time, or in a rocket module in orbit, going into suspended animation during off periods. In fact, he is embedded in history, and going through paradigm changes in each of our transitions, executing scripts in each revolution. That is all of us. Every time we use the term ‘modern’ we are observing the eonic effect, looking backward. We are all eonic observers. We use terms like ‘rise of the modern’, the ‘middle ages’, the ‘age of revelation’, and so on. For real science we should be objective observers, assessing data to be put in a time capsule until the end of the eonic sequence, if ever. The last eonic observers, if any, might have a hard time seeing how the data was filtered through the local paradigm of his previous incarnations.

Thus, we can make a formal idea out of the observer of the eonic effect (and Buddhists had a general sense of the turning of the Great Wheel of Dharma in the Axial period, for another possible example). We can invoke the image of an ‘eonic observer’, with a serious or humorous image of a scientific type, jungle hat, library card, lab smock and clipboard, stop watch, rocket ship, anthropologist and time and motion man of civilization, with his atomic stopwatch designed for time measurements on the order of millennia. One more piece of equipment: a paper stamp labeled ‘Eonic Data’. Wishing to be a neutral observer, he finds himself temporally bound, and his theories prone to become scripts to create further history. We will see this type in several manifestations already embedded in history, and the section on ‘Axial Ages and Eonic Observers’ will show the birth our type. We need with some urgency to apply that paper stamp to the Old Testament, ‘Eonic Data’.

The point is also that the observer and his observed history cannot be separated in any attempt at a science of history. As we will see, the debate, for example, between the ancients and the moderns is at one and the same time observing, and yet also creating, the transition to the modern. This model will automatically reproduce this kind of property. This factor will clearly help us to sort out the Old Testament account of history, whose observations are of the eonic effect, not the action of a divinity. Our eonic observer is thus present, for example, among those who have noticed the ‘rise of the modern’, an eonic observation, and while his stance should be to put the data into a time-capsule, until the next or last ‘period transition in the sequence’, he is prone to interact with the dataset in the present to create the outcome of the last observer phase of the eonic effect. To do theory he must ‘pull rank’ on everyone, and this creates the problem that he tends to be inside the potential well of his most recent data, viz. here the modern.

Now note something remarkable. Look at the Old Testament. It is good example of a time capsule of eonic data by eonic observers casting their observations according to their local paradigm, which was itself going through eonic transformation up to the time of the redaction, which starts explicitly in the period of the Exile and thence onward. Thus emergent Judaic monotheism, as an eonic emergent, was the paradigm used to record the local perception of the eonic effect, at that cycle. Canaanite polytheism suddenly turned into monotheism (actually we look later at the ‘relative transform’ effect, and the influence of Zoroastrianism), and at the end of the transition the ‘eonic observers’ used the output of the transformation to record their data. Confusing, but we can extract the data as ‘eonic observations of a transition’. We would like to record our own eonic data as a superset of this data, plus much else, using the protocols of science. But note that we would tend to do the same thing again, use the paradigm outcome of the modern transition, i.e. a scientific language, to record that data. Le plus ça change.

The Old Testament as a record of eonic evolution We arrive at a tremendous irony, given the Darwin debate, with its clash of science and religion. As we move to upgrade Darwin’s theory, we end up taking the Old Testament as evidence of evolution in the ‘first time in world history’ account of an eonic transition. This data therefore joins our superset, the eonic effect. The Old Testament is truly remarkable in that regard, since it is the first explicit case recorded of ‘rapid eonic evolution’ leading us to draw conclusions via the hurricane argument about suspected earlier invisible transitions in early man’s evolution. Thus, although the Old Testament should be considered obsolete eonic theory, the basic data can be annexed into our eonic model under a new interpretation.

That is, after the Exile (in fact, slightly before) men began to notice that there was a remarkable series of events in a compressed cluster in their history, the eonic emergence of the Prophets, for example. These redactors were eonic observers, and noticing a specific time interval as an age period of the effect, theology quite apart here. Forget theology for a minute. And now note that the observer of evolution is immersed in, or just after, the process he is trying to understand. We are at the crux of the distinction between theories and ‘action scripts’. The redactors produced ‘theistic historicism’ as ‘theory’, but most emphatically were producing ‘scripts’ as moral codes, complete with (somewhat confused) ‘prophecies’ of action, as the transition moved toward oikoumene creation. The later myths of these prophecies (which didn’t predict anything specific) have hopelessly confused the very simple sense of anticipation induced by a transitional compression process, due to its ‘initialization’ aroma. We aren’t just observing something, we are also trying to bring about something. In fact, one could still falsify our ‘theory’ about ‘three turning points’ by acting against the last one! Their data has a stream and sequence confusion. The whole stream of the history of the ‘Israelites’, from Abraham to Moses to the Exile is put together, but what we need is the basic transition as the stream intersects with the eonic sequence. We can rapidly find that, roughly, by cross comparison with the parallel interactive emergents, i.e. in China, India, Greece, etc… And a hint from the modern case might suggest (not very rigorously, as yet) about three centuries before the Exile for our butterfly net of eonic data. Actually that is just right, since this period is clearly historical, despite some myths, while everything earlier might be simply myth. Note as splendid confirmation of this the way in which the received myth of Exodus (which isn’t in the transition) is codified just before the end of the transition. A truly spectacular example of action script formation.