We have already seen the way the phenomenon of a transition generates a divide, that is, the point at which its operation stops and a new period comes into existence expressing the results of the transformation. Since our model is only approximate we could hardly hope to detect this elusive moment, and yet it is clear from the facts given to us that history actually reflects this principle derived from abstract reasoning. The clearest example is the modern divide, but once we know what to look for we can begin to see the phenomenon during the Axial period. For example, the period just before the Exile, ca. -600 is a roughly indicated division point. The Judaic transition is remarkable in that it expresses the religious history of an area of Canaan, with respect to two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, and this becomes the history of their disappearance. The final fall of Judah unwittingly precipitates this strange 'universalization beyond kingdoms' of a new tradition soon codified in the Old Testament.

We should note that the Exile period creates a poorly documented blending effect with the also emerging Zoroastrian tradition. We see that just before the divide this text begins to take its final form, with additional redactions appearing to complete the material. But the era of the Prophets has already passed, and the perception of an interval of history in which something extraordinary happened begins to gel and become a new religious core. This rough division point of the decades to a half-century before and after -600, then, it is hard to be fully precise, clearly shows this divide phenomenon. A similar point is visible in India, and just barely in China. Note that the Indic transition is really about a period reminiscent of the Greek Archaic, one in which a spectrum of sages and philosophers appears, the Upanishadic era with its magnificent flowering of the yogic world. Just as with 'Israel/Judah' it is after the divide once again that a crystallization takes place, and we see the formation of Buddhism, a clear rendition of the essence of this yogic tradition, but in a remarkable, potentially universal form beyond the specifics of the 'Hindu' legacy from which it springs. It is significant that in China the figure of Lao Tse is ambiguously placed around -600, or else somewhat later, although the codification of the teaching this perhaps mythical figure represents is just a bit later. 

In the case of Greece we see something uniquely different, yet directly related to this divide phenomenon. By calculation, this is the period of Solon, as the seminal Archaic concludes and spawns the magnificent flowering to come, for a chillingly exact two centuries. The Greek transition proper sets up a field rich in potential which then commences on a more autonomous realization of freedom, and it is this that we see is the source of Greek democracy, which appears during the first period after the divide period, clearly indicated by the transitional figure of Solon around -600. The whole effect is much deeper, and very comprehensive.

Democracy: system action/ free action This clustering of the freedom effect, seen with first in relation to system action, then as free action, is one of the most mysterious clues to the whole eonic sequence and as we jump to the modern transition we see almost the same phenomenon occurring once again with this clustering of democratic emergence just around the divide, which we take as being around 1800. It is a remarkable thing to discover that this effect is not coincidental and expresses the nature of freedom, constrained and unconstrained, that must accompany the passage from eonic evolution to free action taken beyond the divide. Our system might generate ‘freedom’ but its realization must be outside the eonic sequence. The data reflects this perfectly, as the emergence of democracy commences just after the divide. A truly mysterious wonder.

The modern transition is a complex and multidimensional interval, with a host of emergent effects, but it is the conclusion to this interval that surpasses wonder in the plenitude of its innovations all clustered in the period of the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, the Industrial take-off, another Revolution, the Romantic counterpoint to the Enlightenment, and the emergence of modern liberalism and democracy. We can see that this closely packed interval sets the foundations for modernity as we know it, and it is also remarkable that it gives birth to the idea of evolution which will become one of the basic mainline conceptions of the new era. We have already indicated, through a comparison of Lamarck and Darwin, that this idea swiftly becomes grafted onto the already late, post-divide appearance of positivism, and loses its clear association with progress and universal history with which it is born, and born not only in biology, but in the philosophy of history, which once again flowers in most eerie fashion in the decade before 1800. We have come full circle, to see that our keynote for the eonic model, an idea for a universal history, virtually christens our divide, and appears with an expression of the major chord of the divide music, the idea of freedom, whose expression in each of the areas of the modern transition is a chorus of realizations. One of these is clearly visible in the background to Kant's remarkable divide appearance, the brief explosion of German classical philosophy with its rapid fire flowering into the nineteenth century in such figures as Hegel, Marx, and Schopenhauer at the tail end of the transition. 

The emergence of the classic philosophies of freedom in this period is therefore the new keynote for a new age, and later we will see how, via the antinomies of Kant, this contains not only the basis for a new political order, but the clue to the past and future of religion itself, as this enters into the domain of a secular age. 

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