It is clear from our model why the Axial religion s began to crystallize about two centuries after –600, as the transitions wane. Our list of transitions was minimal and might have included the parallel Zoroastrian tradition that will influence Islam. We have spoken of the eonic emergence of religion, but this is misleading if it is seen as deterministic causal generation from sources. For the steps of construction, although echoing their sources, show little that was predestined. The point should be clear in the fanning process of the several ‘islams’, with the original Judaic tugboat proceeding on its own way.

But these religions accomplish their missions, in many ways. A foundation is laid for passing beyond slavery, for new types of social existence. That the Judaic tradition proved more capably potential for this task than the Hellenic is a reminder of the efficacy of parallel emergentism with its multiple potentials. The picture is difficult to resolve accurately. Was the post-Exilic Judaism a firebrand revolutionary force moving against the past, or a ‘steady as she goes’ conservative force maintaining a variant of the ancient Mesopotamian temple tradition in a new upgraded form? In any case, the ‘myth of Exodus’ expresses beautifully the ‘virtual revolution’ behind the eonic revolution in a tale, as noted, dated precisely to the generations near the divide, or later. The classical phase shows at its clearest our ‘fundamental unit’ in action, the creation of a bouquet of multiple oikoumenes, from China to the West, as separate yet intersecting cones of diffusion that fall short of global closure. History has outsmarted the one-track mind, with a hope against the imperialists.

The emergence of a world civilization would seem the achievement of the modern transition. It is arguable that a ‘world civilization’ was already coming into existence from the period after the Sumerian. Within a few centuries the implications of ‘first civilization’ were already generating a first world civilization around the Sumerian generator as the expanding field of civilization passed into its Akkadian expansion. Whatever the case, the classical world lays the real foundation for global civilization, even as it spawns its characteristic ‘islams’ in the occident.

The abrupt appearance of Islam at the exact middle of the great passage of our second cycle is hardly surprising. Like the engagement of a pusher unit on a freight train, to move sluggish tons over a mountain range, the effect of this ‘man-made’ jump-start was decisive, in many ways, with respect to the chaos of occidental antiquity. The same can be said, to a lesser extent, of medieval Christianity, of which Islam is all too obviously a brilliantly streamlined upgrade, ditching the hopeless metaphysical baggage of this trial-run. The issues in the time of Mohammed were very real. Twelve hundred years of coordinated civilization had fallen to pieces. Men, who could see, were aghast at the situation in which they found themselves, at the climax of cyclical downturn.

That this generation of a whole new religious civilization was ‘mideonic free action’ rather than phase generation, i.e. no exception to our pattern, can be seen from many clues, preeminent among them the fact that one prophet was able to precipitate a ‘butterfly effect’ against the disorganization of the times.