One of the great mysteries of world history is the so-called Axial Age. As historical research began to take out in the nineteenth century it suddenly began to be noticed that a remarkable synchrony existed in the emergence of the classical civilizations. The foundations of a new order of culture were laid very rapidly in Greece/Rome, the Middle East, India and China. The remarkable phenomenon of 'Israel/Judah' is part of this mystery, as is the emergence of Buddhism. Greek democracy is born, along with the foundations of 'Western' philosophy and science. This data was summarized by the philosopher Karl Jaspers who gave it the terminology 'Axial Age'. A recent work by Karen Armstrong has created some confusion on the issue. Here are three  essays:

The Axial Age and the Eonic Effect

Was There an Axial Age?

The work of Karen Armstrong is analyzed here:

The Great Transformation

This series of short essays will attempt to guide you through the online text of World History and The Eonic Effect, which gives an indirect resolution of the Axial enigma by seeing it in a larger context.

We start with Karl Jaspers and the basic pattern of the Axial period.

The next two pages can be taken together: if we examine the case of Greece in the Axial Age, using periodization, the nature of the phenomenon starts to become clear. Archaic Greece begins a sudden take-off and goes into an extraordinary flowering, the so-called Greek Miracle. As remarkable as this is, it is equally surprising that this period is so swiftly completed, as the system moves into the Hellenistic, which is of a different character. With this example we can rapidly decode the other cases to see the nature of the Axial phenomenon as a kind of transitional period.
But the Axial period in isolation seems to make no sense. We suspect that it is part of a larger pattern: the eonic effect. We have it, the enigma clarifies itself as a spectacular historical/evolutionary system.

Now we can decipher the question of the Old Testament. We see that Israelite history in the centuries before the Exile, the era of the Prophets, is really an Axial Age phenomenon.

One tendency on the part of interpreters of the Axial Age has been to take this period as some kind of 'spiritual age' producing religions. But we can see that the issue is broader. Further, the Axial Age is by no means the absolute source of either monotheism or any of the religions that seem to source in this period. What is going on? Once we broaden the scale we see the way in which religions are undergoing 'relative transformations' at each step of the eonic series. There is a kind of micro and macro evolution of religion.

There is a considerable internet lore speculating about a Second Axial Age, in a kind of postmodern reversal of modern secularization. Seen in light of the eonic effect, we can see that the rise of the modern is the true 'second Axial Age', and that sudden reversals of this new advance would likely prove retrograde.

The next page looks at the concept of the 'eonic observer' and the embedded nature of any theory proposed to explain the eonic/Axial data.

Finally, we connect our method of study to some ideas of Kant, to keep straight the questions of metaphysical/reductionist histories, and try to connect a type of 'eonic model' with the classic 'philosophy of history'.