Axial Ages and Eonic Observers

The Axial period, soon to become a numerical block in our grid terminology, is an appropriate point to bring in our ‘eonic observers’, ourselves in modern times, blessed for the first time with enough data to see an evolutionary master sequence. One of our observations is of the first ‘eonic observers’ (eonic observers observe each other), the redactors of the Old Testament, the classic case, whose texts, collated from a corpus growing slowly, no doubt, from very early, start to crystallize around the time of the Exile, and after. These ‘eonic observers’ are noting the sudden compression of creative individuals and prophets, just as we observe the compression we call the ‘rise ooff the modern’, with a sudden sense that a mere caravan stop in the collision of derelict empires is rising against their momentum with another future. It is so remarkable that we should not wonder that the self-referential emergence of the concordant monotheism was applied to the geographical event space.

Note the similarity of our position to what happened with the composers of the Old Testament, and the dilemma of correct perception. They were in a temporal downfield, attempting to describe a ‘fast emergence zone’. It resembles the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, as the first observations of sudden change are instantly recycled to abet and complete the change, and by the time of the Josiah period the material is already being codified into ideology, the great myth of Exodus crystallizing here. These redactors of the Old Testament were noticing one aspect of something larger, the eonic effect, in the wake of a divide, about the time of the Exile, and after. And so are we, as we look at the emergence of the modern. But we also inherit the full dataset. Our task is in principle identical, times eight. We are in a modern superset of eight transitions, as a prelude to what is in between. We are disposed to a Book of Eonic History in the same way, using a very different language.

It is useful here to catalog the rising tide of ‘observations of synchrony’ as they have accumulated since the last century: observations themselves clocked against our pattern as a ‘divide emergent’. Note that all efforts to analyze the modern transformation are in principle members of this genre, Hegel, Marx, Weber, etc,... They are eonic observers assessing data for the book of eonic history. In the process we can expand on Karl Jaspers’ idea of the Axial Age in his book about this period. That the rise of the modern is the only possible continuation of this period is a caution to a strain of postmodern religiosity attempting to justify retrograde initiatives. This realization is infrequent, but lurks in Jaspers’ own treatment, save that he cannot quite reconcile secularism with the emergence of the great religions. Thus Bruce Mazlish, one of the rare writers to note the connection, observes, “The German philosopher Karl Jaspers has spoken of the periods when the great religions arose as ‘axial periods’. At such times, there is a ‘revolution’ in the conditions of human existence and society turns on its axis. A new society emerges, whose legitimacy is validated in a new religion, which brings order out of social chaos and gives meaning to the flux of events. The Industrial Revolution has been such a time. It is, I suggest, the most recent ‘axial period’. And Marxism is its major new ‘religion’, emerging as a sect of capitalism.”[i] A cogent thought, but our ‘axis’ is broader, as the whole modern transition, and our ‘religions’ are the ‘oikoumene generators’. Protestantism, as a relative transform is a typical religion, as is the ‘rational theology’ of the German classical philosophers. Kant essentially shows the way to hybridize secular Enlightenment, Upanishadism, and ethical religion. Then Hegel and Marx. Note how the figures of this emergent cascade into a double outcome, as it were, Schopenhauer and Hegel, one for the Indic, one for the monotheistic, stream. Marx cogently forces the issue of religion! It’s not recycled legitimation theology peddled by elites. The theological content is degenerated mystification and should be scrapped! The Axial period in antiquity is more than a religious period, as the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ shows the deep connection of ‘religion’ and the Greek and/or Chinese transitions.

The story of eonic observers begins in the nineteenth century among students of comparative history, in the context of archaeology and the rising tide of historical research. Let us cite again the work of Karl Jaspers with his ‘Axial Age’ for the period –800 to –200, in his The Origin and Goal of History. Here we have Jaspers’ observation

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism , sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers—Promenades, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others. [ii]

His most interesting analysis cannot be taken as fully correct, and deserves to be challenged, because his definition is contradictory. His account confuses the secondary generation of Christianity, his Axis of History, with the Axial Age.

Jaspers’ Axial Age—A difficulty One of the basic difficulties in Karl Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age can be seen in an objection raised by Toynbee, who nonetheless failed to see the significance of the parallel phenomenon. Toynbee’s basic idea is simply to ask why such as Moses or Mohammed, to say nothing of Jesus, are not included in the Axial Age at all. The objection is cogent and shows there is no ‘Axial’ period in the sense intended. We see that our phases are better seen as transforms in a sequence and take from sources and return them at a higher potential to V-cones of diffusion, ecumenical fields. We see that the Axial Age is the secular equivalent of an age of revelation, and this doesn’t work.[iii]

We have addressed this problem already with our idea of ‘relative transforms’ in an eonic sequence. And also our insight that religions can obviously rise at all times (Christianity, Islam), but that intersection with the eonic sequence gives the result a special character.

Toynbee’s line of argument reveals the impulse to extend the ‘turning point’ to include extra things, all the relevant spiritual tradition, becomes overwhelming, and falsifies the significance of the unique turning point. Further, the period of the Egyptians and Sumerians is arguably a truer axis on the grounds that its breakthroughs were more fundamental, if primitive. And the rise of the modern era threatens to be as transformative in every respect as the classical. Here the idea of turning point or ‘transition’ is helpful. If we create an age of revelation or an Axial Age, we are hoist on the dilemma of denying historical homogeneity. Anyone ‘spiritual’ outside of this period is an orphan of analysis. The solution is very simple: a wave shows amplitude in the water, but doesn’t invent water. Joseph Needham, in Science and Civilization in China, notes:

The close coincidence in date between the appearance of many of the great ethical and religious leaders has often been remarked upon: Confucius, c. -550; Gautama (Buddhism), c. -560; Zoroaster (if a historical personage), c. -600; Mahavira (Jainism), c. -560, and so on. But the Chhun Chhiu period was also contemporary with many important political events, such as the taking of Nineveh by the Medes in -612, the fall of Babylon to Cyrus in -538, and the invasion of the Punjab by Darius in -512, all examples of Iranian expansion. At the beginning of the Warring States period, the Greeks checked Iranian expansion westwards (-480), and the middle of the -5^th century saw the erection of the Athenian Parthenon. The concluding stages of the Warring States time are contemporary with many outstanding events, such as the conquest of Alexander the Great (c. -327), the foundation of the Maurya dynasty in India and the beginning of the reign of Asoka (-300 and -274 respectively), and the Punic Wars in the Mediterranean (-250 to -150) which overlap with the first unification China under Chhin Shih Huang Ti. But the beginning of the Roman Empire (-31) does not take place until well into the Han dynasty. [iv]

This straddles an entire period all the way into the period of the Roman Empire. But here is another trap, for this coalesces two stages that are very different, although it is true that we see this creative parallelism, followed by the parallel integrations of Universal Empires in the centuries immediately following. But by the time of the Roman imperium we see the undoing of much that had been characteristic of the initial start, the case of Rome, its Republic. Between the age of Pericles and that of Augustus (Cicero), a great creative period has already undergone a fall-off effect. We always speak of the decline of the Roman Empire, seldom the decline of the Roman Republic, whose birth in the field of republicanism in the first era of the Greek city-states is almost myth by the turn of the millennium. It is this early period, whence the decline comes that puts us in the period, -900 to –600. This period requires careful reflection, for it would seem that the age of Augustus, near the birth of Christianity should be a ‘turning point’ as valid as that of TP2. It isn’t so, although we should let the issue remain a stalemate until we redefine our terms.

There is a closer inner structure to this era as Needham describes it, condensing an earlier generative period with a later integrating phase, from small political units to larger ones. By -400 we are entering into a new phase that almost looks like a decline. In each case, small scale city-states, or little kingdoms, networks, or associations, are passing into a renewed integrative empire phenomenon, beside the generalized vehicles of diffusion, such as we see in the Greek, and most importantly Judaic Diasporas. This makes the idea of an ‘axial age’ misleading for it gives no indication of why the ‘age’ should begin, or why it should end, and what should be included.

According to one historian, the first reference to the classical parallel effect is that of a French historian of the nineteenth century, Abel-Ramusat, in a memoire of 1824, who notices the contemporaneity of the Hellenic and Chinese philosophers, ascribing it to cultural diffusion, an impossibility Vogelin addresses.[v]

The first philosopher of history to mention the phenomenon would appear to be the little known Lasaulx (1856), who observes,

It cannot possibly be an accident that, six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra in Persia, Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel, King Numa in Rome and the first philosophers—Ionians, Dorians, Eleatics—in Hellas, all made their appearance pretty well simultaneously as reformers of the national religion.[vi]

During the centuries when Lao-tse and Confucius were living in China, a strange movement of the spirit passed through all civilized peoples. In Israel Jeremaiah, Habakkuk, Daniel and Ezekiel were prophesying and in a renewed generation (521-516) the second temple was erected in Jerusalem. Among the Greeks Thales was still living, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Xenophanes appeared and Parmenides was born. In Persia an important reformation of Zarathustra’s ancient teaching seems to have been carried through, and India produced Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism. [vii]

Note the frequent appearance of Zarathustra, always as a case of this parallelism, when in fact he lived before this era. We have addressed this question already. It is fascinating that everyone thought Zarathustra lived ca. –600. In fact he lived much earlier. And his monotheism is still struggling in the shackles of polytheism. This crucial fact will allow us to rescue ourselves from the Jaspers misperception of an Axial Age, and to see that the ‘age of revelation’ is more like a temporal transformation of prior sources, almost like input and output. A close look at Egyptian religious history would suggest the first near-birth of monotheism. To say nothing of the still unclear picture of the probable first age of (goddess) ‘religion’ in the Neolithic transition. Then where is our Axial Age? And then why do we see a ‘monotheism’ definitely crystallizing after –600, whatever its relation to Israelite religion in the centuries before? Very difficult questions. This crucial fact is a warning that the ‘content of religious revelation’ precedes our period of transformation, as well it should. A little thought will suggest it couldn’t be otherwise, as an earlier instance of the case of the missing centuries: proto-science emerges in Mesopotamia, but suddenly ‘really begins’ in the Greek Enlightenment.

It is useful to backtrack to find the ‘axial’ before the ‘Axial’ . Joseph Campbell, a close student of diffusion, because of his interest in the spread of the ideas of mythology, has an insight not found in the ‘axial’ concept. Campbell’s viewpoint is essential as an exercise, but does not explain why the field of diffusion is reworked in the areas of transition. The Sumerian source is easy to underestimate. It looks primitive to us now, but its immediacy of creative surging gives birth to ‘real civilization’ in the odd ‘early hybrid modern’ where the village passes to the large city-complex. Its effect must have been as seminal as the later Greek transitional era to those who received its influences. It is as if everything was invented all at once, in embryo, to constitute the root-ideas of coming civilization. Thus,

In the epoch of the hieratic city-state (3500-2500 B.C.), the basic cultural traits of all the high civilizations that have flourished since (writing, the wheel, the calendar, mathematics, royalty, priest craft, a system of taxation, bookkeeping, etc.) suddenly appear, prehistory ends, and the literate era dawns. The whole city now, and not simply the temple compound, is conceived of as an imitation on earth of the cosmic order, while a highly differentiated, complexly organized society of specialist, comprising priestly, warrior, merchant, and peasant classes, is found governing all its secular as well as specifically religious affairs according to an astronomically inspired mathematical conception of a sort of magical consonance uniting in perfect harmony the universe.[viii]

Note the similarity of this statement to Jaspers’ statement of the later ‘Axial’ Age. Jaspers’ essay attempts but fails to find an earlier ‘Axial’ period, because he is looking for a similar string of spiritual sages and prophets, even as he wishes to insist on the uniqueness of his ‘axial revelatory’ age. Imhotep? Gilgamesh? We don’t see them because the issue would be one of ‘self-conscious’ individuals, whose form we might find hard to recognize. This is a case where the distinction between ‘sacred and secular’, material and spiritual, will throw thinking off track.

But the common denominator is the cycle itself, with a different aspect, the first, contracted geographically, focused on the forms of the state, the second, moving to its much wider field of diffusion to encompass it with trans-political forms, the ecumenical integrator, the great religions. The spiritual sages Jaspers is looking for are present in the semi-political-theocratic ‘religion’ of the Pharaohs, and the era of the great Ziggurats in Sumer, although in the latter case, it is hard to know what relative transformations of religion might have occurred in the period of the transition. Campbell’s stretched dates, a full millennium, conceal the question all over again, where do all these innovations find their true sources? The ‘axial fallacy’ emerges again with a question, isn’t this just another relative transformation? And so the issue shifts backwards once again.

This era shows the displacement of the antiquity of goddess religions, with some ambiguity in India. In Pythagoras’ Trousers, with a feminist viewpoint of the ‘axial’ era, Margaret Wertheim notes, “Across Eurasia the sixth century B.C. was a turning point for mankind,” and explores some of the patriarchal implications of the era of great change.[ix] It takes long study to see behind the emergence of the great religions a temporal transformation of input and output. It also is difficult to sort out the layers of earlier religion as these flow across the boundary period after –900 with a distinct patriarchal cast that has whisked away the Asherah in the Old Testament. This is a difficult question, in part requiring a fuller contour map of our entire eonic argument, whence we will discern the slow influence of nomadic myth structures on the basic cast of the great religions.

As the Indo-European myth structures converge on the Fertile Crescent, beside the Semitic, patriarchal monotheism comes into existence. Why? It is better to stand back and attempt to understand the sequence as a whole. Or else not provide simplistic answers. The only real candidate for a unique axial period would be the onset of the Neolithic itself, and this era shows ironically an emphasis on the seminal emergence of goddess religions, still very visible at the beginning of civilization. In any case we can see the early intimations of monotheistic ideas slowly approaching the eonic boundary, and then by –400 monotheism of the occidental variety has come into existence as an integrated socio-religious vehicle. The identical process is evident in India , but with a different content, in fact with the result of ‘atheistic’ religions. But this is the advantage of eonic study, it forces the issue on some really difficult questions, better left to one side at first. We will retreat to input and output. The period of the ‘axial’ simply transforms what enters, as the goddess religions are succeeded by the patriarchal. We need draw no final conclusions beside our basic outline, except to try and determine, if possible, the earlier transformations that have produced ‘religion’ as a recognizable social construct. The fact of the matter is that the earliest ‘cathedra’, the basic idea of the ‘holy house reaching the sky’, the ziggurat, is a temple of the goddess from the era of Eridu, before even the rise of the state. It is little wonder a feminist historian should wonder at the idea of the Axial Age.

The eonic effect is noticed over and over in the case of Greece. It is interesting to contrast India and Greece, and then catch a glimpse perhaps of the isomorphic emergence of the Israel of the Old Testament. Then look at the balanced blend in the case of China. The phenomenon of the Greek Miracle is familiar to us as a postcard. We often fail to look at its sources in the Archaic period, or its relation to its parallels. The philosopher Bertrand Russell opens his A History of Western Philosophy with an exclamation of wonder at this generative era:

In all history, nothing is so surprising or difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and spread thence to neighboring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them…What occurred was so astonishing that, until very recent times, men were content to gape and talk mystically about the Greek genius. It is possible, however, to understand the development of Greece in scientific terms, and it is well worthwhile doing so. [x]

The Iliad is the first great manifestation of the new era. As Herman Frankel asks at the beginning of Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy , “For us Greek literature begins with the Homeric Iliad and the Odyssey. Why, unlike the literatures of other peoples, does it start at once with such brilliant and mature creations? Why does it not crawl painfully into view out of murky depths, gradually gaining sureness of form and clarity of content?”.[xi] With Greece, we see the full effect that is less apparent than if we skim a few prophets or religious founders off the top of the data. For here we see, as in the case of China, the full effects of economic, artistic, scientific, political and religious evolution. One difficulty with a scientific analysis of this Greek transitional period is the fact that science itself emerges from this very period under study. Thus we are required to explain how a subprocess can map its own emergence, in historical terms, and this in relation to the many parallel emergents in the same litter with which it must fight for its existence. The suspicion lurks that so many instruments playing in descants cannot play the others’ music. In fact, the classical emergence of science falls on hard times very quickly and for all intents and purposes disappears until, once again, the eonic amplifier summons it back into its existence in modern times. But this is true of many of its kin, such as philosophy itself, which ends its early period at the point at which the world of the Sophists yields to the redactions of Plato, and even more so, Aristotle, who seem almost to prepare the lesson materials for an entire age to come, if that age can even remember they existed. What is going on? All our explanations are likely to founder in the strange ‘other fact’ of our TP sequence, its geographical polarizations, and its multivalent classical pattern, followed by its subsequent ‘univalent’ focus.

Nearby, in the Judaic case, the beginning creation of a national history and literature suddenly shows the record of the prophets arising before the Babylonian exile. The concordance is enigmatic, but in both cases ‘religious’ to the degree that we have no grounds for granting one revelatory status without the other. In each case we see the double layering that takes old materials from an old-eonic cultural context and world, reforms and moulds it in during eonic transition, with a transformed literature describing an older vanished culture to serve as the icon for the new, a strange situation. As Joseph Campbell suggests, there is a remarkable (possible) parallel of the different phases of epic and Biblical literatures:

As he remarks, it seems “too neat for mere coincidence” with the further puzzle as to why the Greek phenomenon is poetry, and that of the Jews, religion. The dates are off in the case of the Iliad, but it is surely no coincidence that the time frame on the level of centuries shows this parallel! We have seen the transitional effect influence so many factors, that its effect on religion and/or poetry is no surprise. The Greeks would have insisted, the Iliadic world and conception was intimately connected with the religious life of the polis and general Hellenic culture. We have a hard time placing the Iliad in a ‘religious’ context, in relation to its cultural and political embroidery, if we look at the Judaic parallel. But the effect is there, as the Indian generation of a future Bhagavad Gita as an evoked and intensified episode of the Mahabharata will suggest.

The classicist Gilbert Murray, in a consideration of the origins of ‘Classical Greece’, asks,

The historian of early Greece must find himself often on the watch for a particular cardinal moment, generally impossible to date in time and sometimes hard even to define in terms of development, when the clear outline that we call Classical Greece begins to take shape out of the mist.

He sees the change between the eighth and fifth century, makes a comparison with the modern Reformation, and then quotes a Mr. Edwyn Bevan who says that

I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.[xii]

Murray propounded the idea that there was a Greek Reformation in precisely the period of early Archaic Greece. We are close to a clue, if we will change, as we already have, ‘Reformation’ to religious ‘re-formation’. We see this ‘re-forming’ very markedly throughout each of our turning points, but not only during these periods.

Finally, we can stalk Huxley roving in search of ‘evolution no. 2’. It is significant that T. H. Huxley in his classic essay, Evolution and Ethics, was driven to sense the ‘eonic effect’ in a de facto manner with a classical synchronous statement for just this reason as he felt forced to distinguish between the results of Darwinian evolution, and his feeling of protest against them, as an issue of cultural evolution, in the process summoning up an unnecessary distinction between ‘cosmic forces’ and ethical action. In the era of the rise of Social Darwinism , Huxley began to change his view of the evolutionary rise of the ethical sense. The reason for Huxley’s ‘eonic perception’ of the classical period springs immediately from the attempt to find the source of this reaction against evolutionary process on ethical grounds.

Theories of the universe, in which the conception of evolution plays a leading part, were extant at least six centuries before our era. Certain knowledge of them, in the fifth century, reaches us from localities as distant as the valley of the Ganges and the Asiatic coasts of the Aegean. To the early philosophers of Hindostan, no less than to those of Ionia, the salient and characteristic feature of the phenomenal world was its changefulness; the unresting flow of all things, through birth to visible being and thence to not being, in which they saw no prospect of and ending. It was no less plain to some of these antique forerunners of modern philosophy that suffering is the badge of all the tribe of sentient things; that it is no accidental accompaniment, but an essential constituent of the cosmic process. The energetic Greek might find fierce joys in a world in which ‘strife is father and king’; but the old Aryan spirit was subdued to quietism in the Indian sage; the mist of suffering which spread over humanity hid everything else from his view; to him life was one with suffering and suffering with life.

…Twenty-five hundred years ago, the value of civilization was as apparent as it is now…[xiii]

We have certainly found Huxley’s evolution # 2. Huxley’s question leads him inexorably and instinctively to the period ca. -600, or even hypothetically ca. -3000, the points at which we can see the most creative moments of religious evolution, and the creation of values.

[i] Bruce Mazlish, The Meaning of Karl Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 8.

[ii] From the Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), Karl Jaspers, Part I, Ch. 1. Cf. The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (1986), S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Daedalus, Vol. 104, 1975, edited by B.I. Schwartz.

[iii] Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth (1976), Chapter 25, “New Departures in Spiritual Life, c. 600-480 B.C.”

[iv] Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 99.

[v] Eric Vogelin in Order and History: World of the Polis (1957) cites and discusses the first known observer, J.-P.Abel-Remusat, “Mémoire sur la view et les opinions de Lao-Tsu,” Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, VII (Paris, 1824), 1-54.

[vi] Lasaulx, and the critiques of him found in Burckhardt (cf. his Force and Freedom) illuminate the subsequent views of Spengler with an addition of Nietzscheanism. The quotation is from Jaspers.

[vii] From Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), Part I, Chapter I, “The Axial Age”.

[viii] Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, Masks of God, (New York: Penguin, 1959), p. 404

[ix] Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers (New York: Random House, 1995).

[x] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 3.

[xi] Hermann Frankel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), p. 1.

[xii] Murray then goes on to note, comparing the phenomenon to the Reformation, that when the period of change comes, “It does not announce itself as what it was, a new thing in the world. It professes to be a revival, or rather an emphatic realization, of something very old.” Five Stages of Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), Gilbert Murray, p.59, Chapter 2, “The Olympian Conquest”. Cf. also E. R. Burns, The Lyric Age of Greece (New York: St. Martin’s, 1960), p. 3, p.327, for an ‘axial’ reference.

[xiii] T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 54.