Looking at this Axial phenomenon we are confronted with an inexplicable mystery. But the clue to the riddle lies in seeing that this period is not unique, but one in a series.  The resolution of the mystery comes to us quickly, as long as we are not distracted by the interpretations of the Axial period solely as a spiritual age of religions. We ask, are there any other periods like this? The great clue is the remarkable resemblance of the Greek Axial interval and the sudden rise of modernity from 1500 to 1800. Moving in the opposite direction, can we find a similar period of rapid innovation and sudden advance? We don’t have far to look. We suddenly see that the birth of civilization, and the rise of modernity are different phases of a larger pattern, with the Axial Age in the middle. Seeing the rise of the modern as a kind of second Axial Age suddenly makes sense of the data. In fact it is a third, at least, the extraordinary rise of Dynastic Egypt and early Sumer being a giveaway. We are forced to consider that the Axial Age is really a step in a sequence, and moving backwards and forwards we suddenly discover the full pattern. We can see three turning points equally spaced, with an interval of about 2400 years, clear evidence of a cyclical phenomenon.

TP1: the rise of advanced civilization in Egypt, Sumer, ca. -3000
TP2: the sudden synchronous effect of the Axial Age, ca.-600
TP3: the rise of modernity, ca. 1800

The idea of a turning point, which we will replace will the term ‘transition’, means that there is a staging area and period for a major advance, which ratchets the overall development of civilization to a new level. In fact, starting with our second turning point, taken in isolation, we could ask, is this period unique? Once posed, the question answers itself: we can see three such periods, if we can see the unity behind them. This first turning point is by no means an absolute beginning. Clearly we have only a fragment of a greater pattern. A three beat sequence is difficult to analyze, the bare minimum needed to show sequentiality at all. Note the equal length of the interval between these points, about 2400 years. It seems like a frequency phenomenon, but our data thins out very quickly. We must have rich data for the Neolithic, and that we don't have. 

Leapfrog and hopscotch As we examine the whole pattern, its logic becomes clear: the flow of world history lacks direction. To set direction it must either operate on the whole all at once, throughout history, which would be impossible, or else operate intermittently, and then in selected regions. As it returns on itself it cannot act twice on the same culture without creating an imbalance. Yet if does not, it will be forced to start over in an undeveloped region. Our pattern shows the answers to these difficulties. Leapfrog and hopscotch between regions in short time-slices of action. Return to a frontier area near the previous zone of action. This requires seeing that the ‘unit of action’ is not the civilization or culture but short intervals in properly strategic regions.

One of the puzzles of the Axial Age is why the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations don’t show the effect. These were the prime staging areas for the emergence of civilization. Our answer is simple, and decisively explains one of the mysteries of the Axial period. Archaic Greece and Canaanite ‘Israel/Canaan’ are frontier or acorn regions outside, just outside, the previous transition zones. Then, remarkable, in a tour de force we see the rationale for the sudden rise of the modern at the frontier of the previous transition zones (or, as we will see, at the fringes of the net expansions as oikoumenes).

Applying a frequency hypothesis to the emergence of civilization is so strange that we can barely give sense to the idea. That is what the evidence shows. Why is it strange? Simple systems analysis makes complete sense of the facts, and so many facts that we are virtually into this conclusion, mindful to be wary of just what the conclusion is, simple we are dealing with a highly mysterious form of macro-historical action. As we consider the Axial phenomenon this interpretation of intermittency is almost unavoidable. A finite interval suddenly becomes active. We would be hard-pressed to call it unique. We swiftly infer other intervals analogous to the Axial Age, once we strip off their disguise. Inclusion of the modern period is also problematical, at first, but we can simply propose this as an extension, by our frequency hypothesis, to our Axial riddle. We see the rise of the modern (what does that mean?) at such close range that the whole phenomenon suddenly becomes transparent, like successive steps in a computer program. Including the modern period in an analysis based on dynamical thinking swiftly generates a series of paradoxes. What of our freedom to act in the present? We will soon this that this is a perfectly valid point but is no objection to our analysis, which will not be deterministic. We must be wary of this point. Universal histories have always tended to derail on questions of fatalism and historical inevitability. We will be forced to think in an entirely new way. The pattern itself will show us how.

Despite the logistics of correct study and observation, the general sense of this pattern, to a bird's eye view, is quite simple: it induces recognition, like the pieces of a puzzle falling together. We recognize a system operating in a kind of drumbeat alternation.  Its action is transparent: we see three surges of several centuries, along a complex mainline of selected cultures, with 'medieval' periods in between. The Middle Ages never made any sense, and was always an obstacle to assertions about historical progress. But now we see the simple explanation. We sense that there is a strange driver behind the drama of civilizations. It switches on, advances a handful of regions, then switches off. The process behind this pattern seeds new cultural advance areas, which flow into oikoumenes, as it sets an overall direction. It always restarts in a new area at each step.  It can operate both in parallel and in sequence. The most telling clue is the successive recursive action in the sequence of steps. And this periodization brings the question of historical dynamics into our recent past, rich in detail, and we must be careful about what we mean by modernity. We will soon find 'eonic data' at the level of decades, to remind us that even our first two turning points have a thin record. 

This system, as it draws us into contradictions as we explore its 'causal' explanation, is an ingenious 'widget' operating on two levels, a clever way to balance diversity and unilinear advance. It is still not clear how the two aspects, sequential and parallel fit together. But we are in the presence of a clear historical dynamic, a point especially obvious from the data of the Axial Age. This system, by default, gives us a free gift: the key to a 'science of history' (but only after we call into question the idea of such a causal science). We have found our missing 'force', but it isn't a force, although the resemblance to a 'field' effect is remarkable. The reason we claim the pot for a ‘science of history’ is simple:  no other phenomenon could compete with the comprehensive character of this pattern, whose action derandomizes the expected random occurrence of the historical chronicle. This pattern includes all the key advances of human civilization. The first alternate candidate to be challenged is the economic interpretation of history. Economic 'evolution', while braided with this pattern, is something, we will show, that is distinct from it. Causal statements about this pattern suffer immediate difficulties. We are in the presence of a phenomenon that apparently does nothing on its own, but only induces action in man, who performs an executive function in a sudden state of creativity. There is no other explanation for the diversity of realizations in the pattern, a good example being the synchronous emergence in the Axial interval of an atheist religion next to a theistic one.

The strongest evidence in our pattern is its demonstration of recursive action. Note the way democracy and science are born, reborn twice, in successive transitions. In a real sense the Greek Enlightenment is a first draft of the modern Enlightenment, and gives birth to all the essential characteristics of modern secularism. The resolution of the paradox of common denominator will turn out to be fairly simple, and will emerge as we go along. But the basic idea resembles the contrast of libertarian and collectivist perspectives: all the way through we see the dialectic of state and individual. We see the evolution of the state balanced by the evolution of the individual. Then the religions do the same thing. Note how the first eonic step creates the rise of the State, while the second starts to generate the freedom factor of the individual inside the state, Greek democracy. With this clue, we see that 'religions' are simply dialectical variants of the state/individual nexus, with the idea of the state found wanting before the possibility of a still larger transcultural aggregates. This play of collectivist aggregates and individuals is present throughout. The connecting point is the 'self-consciousness' of man as individual versus the mechanized consciousness of man as state person. The libertarian/collectivist paradox is especially clear in the religions generated in the wake of the Axial Age, and we see the way they talk to the self-consciousness of the individual, yet leave us (moderns) puzzled by their clear collectivist tendencies. But we see this is no paradox at all. The state/religion 'paradox' should be obvious from the all time classic Axial transition phenomenon: the 'Israel/Judah' transformation in the Old Testament, simultaneously a state history and the generation period of the materials for a series of later religions. It is worth remembering this point: the Axial interval shown by the Old Testament is the chronicle of a State history, not the creation of a world religion, which comes much later. We must constantly refine our top-level observations, and be wary of teleological assumptions. 

This pattern, once seen, is highly coherent, and defies all odds of being random, not only because of its clustering, but also because of its interior significance.  The pieces of the puzzle have sudden new meanings once conjoined, and make sense on their own terms. This system is evolving higher civilization, but only partially since the effect merely seeds new starts and leaves the result unfinished. Later we will elaborate on this with our distinction of 'system action' and 'free action'. We are almost helpless: the pattern forces itself on us, even though its complexity would seem to surpass our powers of comprehension. The pieces of this puzzle fall into place in the corner of a still larger puzzle and we can recognize what is going on without having the full data set or any understanding of what is driving this amazing process with independent branches that don't communicate and remorph so fast mutual diffusion could not explain them. And it is clear that our triple sequence is merely a fragment of a greater whole, probably encompassing the Neolithic and before. Later we will propose a frequency hypothesis for our sense that this intermittent series is a set of equally paced transitions with their intervals between them. 

  The pattern of data that we have found, despite its complexity, falls into place, most surprisingly, in terms of a very simple systems model. Our historical outline, matched to the eonic sequence, is both a world history in embryo, and a set of statements about historical theory. Since theory and historical narrative don’t always square well, we need to formalize the distinction and create a means to keep the two separate.  However, the eonic effect shows a beautifully ingenious structure that reconciles these two modes very easily, and all we need to do is create a simple type of historical model, the eonic model, that can double as a world history and a theoretical periodization that will substitute for misleading causality statements about historical laws. This model can dissolve into the background behind the outline it generates. This model is useful because you can forget it and simply follow the outline periodization. Like scaffolding around a building, it is an adjunct  structure.

Catch-22 for theory One reason to think in terms of a model is to distinguish this from an historical theory. Darwin’s ‘theory’ of natural selection, as we have seen, scrambles the clarity of the discovery of the reality of evolution. Here, with the eonic effect, we can see an evolving system, and yet we never see directly the dynamic behind the eonic sequence. Later we will see this as a confirmation of one of the key ideas of the philosophy of history.

The next chapter will pursue this further, but keep in mind that a bare outline of the eonic effect is sufficient to get the point. The scale of the eonic effect is so great, yet with an inherent simplicity so elegant, that we need a way to integrate our perceptions, and balance this with some 'damage control' concepts to reckon the inherent contradiction of 'causality/freedom' that shipwrecks all historical evolution/philosophy of history efforts to create a science of history.

This model to be developed is an approximation and somewhat artificial, but the match to the data is too good for our interpretation to be wrong, and once we see the eonic effect we realize that almost anything is better than the hopeless confusions of and endless flounderings in 'flat history' which is constantly scrambling the two levels of operation, macro and micro, suddenly shown by the eonic series. We can explore some of the basic ideas.

A sequence of transitions The model is very simple and is basically a periodization outline built around a series of transitions in a sequence. It gives us in a phrase of Kant, an ‘idea for a universal history’. The transitions show system action or ‘eonic determination’ (e.g. whatever causes the Axial Age) and the remaining periods ‘free action’. We need to reconcile ‘causality’ and ‘freedom’ and the result gives us a way to model the ‘evolution of freedom’.

 The eonic effect is a free gift and fits like a charm into something we can call a ‘discrete-continuous’ model. The term ‘discrete’ refers to the distinct series of counting numbers, 1,2,3, etc, as opposed to the continuous field of ‘measure numbers’ (the real numbers, so-called).

Discrete-continuous models The eonic effect is a mouthwatering invitation to a certain type of model that we will call a 'discrete-continuous' model, i.e. it has two levels, one a discrete series, the other the continuous stream of history. It is like a ratchet: discrete set of levels is reached on a continuous scale of height.
Mixed 'Causality/freedom' systems We have already touched briefly on a type of mixed system where a system and free activity interact in a balance of effects. This will be the key to the eonic model, and this will also allow us to set up a formal description of the eonic effect as a 'evolution of freedom'. 
Stream and sequence Our model is simply a special type of periodization time-line, with 'eonic transitions' between different age-periods, and shows the way a master sequence is generated from the cultures and civilizations (culture streams) on which it operates in an intermittent series. These transitions are a series of relative transformations of the streams, visible in in the emergentist character of the data itself (eonic emergents). 
Discrete freedom sequence Inside our eonic sequence we will discover a 'discrete freedom sequence' that will provide one clue to nature of the causal action behind the eonic effect. 
Sequential dependency The mirror image of the 'eonic sequence' is the set of 'mideonic' intervals between transitions. This is the 'real history' of people and cultures operating outside of the master sequence, showing the obvious contrast in its inchoate confusion. We call these mideonic periods sequentially dependent on the transition sequence, and the effect is on of taking the results by diffusion of the transitions and creating a series of oikoumenes, religions, or even empires. This is the proving ground for the evolution of freedom. 
Directionality A long-range series clearly provokes the need to consider the issue of evolutionary directionality, and reconsider the current confusion over evolutionary progress. 
Economic history A subset of both history as a whole and the eonic history is the economic history of mankind taken in toto as the set of economic worlds created in the emergence of civilization. Once we see the eonic effect we realize that while the economic factor is critical it is not the most fundamental aspect of the overall evolution of civilization, and we have a way to produce an elegant account of economic evolution that is distinct from the 'eonic evolution' of the whole. And this will tell us something about where Darwinism goes wrong.
Ideology Even as we create a way to study ideologies wholesale we discover the inherent ideological basis for any historical model whatsover, and are forced to accept this limit on any theory of historical evolution at the outset, just on the threshold of a science of history.

New World civilizations This pattern is comprehensive, yet does not so far explicate the issue of New World Civilizations. A pattern such as this has one complication: we must study the tracks of diffusion throughout, not a simple task. Since we have spoken only of relative changes, nothing in what we are saying claims to show either the absolute origin of civilization inside the pattern we have, nor do we reject the possibility of independent creation of civilization(s). However, that suddenly seems unlikely, and the overwhelming influence of the eonic pattern in all other cases leaves us to wonder if some element of Old World diffusion is not present in the New World Civilizations. 

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