Let’s press the reset button, and start from scratch, using a new idea. One way to look at the eonic effect and its transitions is in terms of the idea of 'stream and sequence', and we will start over and redescribe the eonic effect in those terms. And this allows us to give expression to ideas of evolutionary directionality and progress. Or perhaps progression would be a better word.

History and progress An obstacle in the way of any claim of progress in history is the obvious perception of the immense sluggishness, and frequent retrograde decline, of the greater part of that history. But once we realize that most of world history is taken up with the mideonic intervals between a mere three short intervals of short acting transformation the idea of progress revives at once in a different form.
Progress and ideology One of the confusions of the idea of progress is that this idea is itself an ‘eonic emergent’ of TP3, one that suffers ideological degradation from its initial sense, which was non other than an attempt by men of the early modern to claim modernity was an advance over antiquity. The application of this loaded term to issues of evolution, in the confusions of Darwinism, has produced nothing but muddle. Our emerging model can clarify the idea and retrieve its usage from oblivion. Note that ‘progress’ will diverge in meaning: there can progress associated with the eonic sequence, and that associated with the mideonic intervals. Later we will distinguish ‘theories’ and ‘action scripts’, to make clear that using an ‘eonic emergent’ for a theory to describe the overall system is paradoxical.

Our system generates two kinds of histories, the stream history, and the isolated ‘sequence’ intervals in those streams. Consider the idea of 'Greek history', a stream of historical culture. This proceeds throughout the course of world history, from the era of Indo-European differentiation to modern times. It is in some fashion ‘Greek’. But, for some reason, this stream shows a remarkable flowering in the period from -900 to -400. There is no 'causal antecedent' or general explanation possible from simple examination of  'Greek culture'. We are left baffled, until we see that this stream suddenly becomes a part of a larger, eonic, sequence. As the stream and sequence intersect we see the 'Greek Axial interval', one of our transitions. 

The sudden appearance of the Greek Axial Age in the middle of Greek stream history and world history in general makes no sense unless it is part of a larger pattern, and this pattern follows the logic of the stream and sequence intersections. This effect has the character of an alternating sequence. Generalizing, we ask, Are there any other periods with this 'Axial' Character? Moving forwards and backwards we rapidly find the pattern’s extensions: they form an ‘eonic sequence’ that leapfrogs between cultural streams, each strategically significant, and this sequence never visits the same cultural stream twice.

Three transitions The birth of civilization, the Axial interval and the rise of the modern world suddenly fall into place as connected phenomenon, as a cluster of stream and sequence intersections, or transitions. We can see that this pattern probably extends into the Neolithic, but we will take only the fragment that we can document. 

TP1 The Rise of Civilization, c. -3000
TP2 The Axial Period, c. -600
TP3 The Modern Period, c. 1800

Inclusion of the modern period gives us the real clue, and with a little study makes complete logical sense. But the stream of European culture suddenly exhibits a transition, as the eonic sequence leapfrogs to the fringes of the Eurasian landmass for a new starting area. Note how this transition rapidly turns into a form of globalization, to create a larger oikoumene beyond its European source. In fact the term European is a misnomer. The modern ‘transition’ emerges from a relatively narrow subset of European cultures. We are always a bit puzzled over the meaning of the term 'modern'. The answer is that we see the modern transformation as the next step in a greater sequence. The resemblance of the early modern to the Greek Archaic, despite their obvious differences, is remarkable, both with a 'birth of science', a birth of democracy, and an enlightenment. We see now this isn't coincidence. Our system is resetting direction. 

We should reiterate the question of 'relative transformations'. As we focus on the issue of the chronology of these turning points, which is still very crude, we discover a kind of 'relative transformation', not an absolute beginning. An isolated date for a turning point isn’t quite right: we will need to consider intervals of transition. These show an average interval of about three centuries, with a kind of ‘divide’ or slingshot effect at the end:

?TP1 first transition, c. –3300 to -3000
TP2 second transition, c. –900 to -600
TP3 third transition, c. 1500 to 1800

These dates might be thought of as statistical regions, and are approximations (which turn out to be more exact than we could expect). The idea of a transition is slightly different from the idea implied by the Axial Age. It is the 'Axial' transition between two ages, so to speak. We look at the seminal period when a new era is gestating, just before its take off. It comes to the same thing, and we could imagine a kind of sliding scale. Thus the period from the Greek Dark Age through the so-called Greek Archaic gives birth to the spectacular flowering of Classical Greece, which is almost as quickly over by –400. In the same way, the rise of the modern is really a question of the so-called ‘early modern’, which is followed by a spectacular flowering after 1800 that we called the ‘modern period’. The crucial innovations, however, are in the early modern.

We will call the sequence of transitions the ‘eonic sequence’. The term of description in the first case, e.g. the ‘rise of civilization’, is problematic, and we can put a question mark here, as a reminder that this is not an absolute beginning. The point is clearer if we examine the Axial interval. Greece has a long history, but the Axial interval appears inside that history, like a interruption process. The stream of Greek history shows an embedded interval of sudden fast development in a cluster, and this interval will be a step in a larger sequence. Later we will formalize this stream and sequence  aspect of the two-level history uncovered by the eonic effect. 

Since the data begins to thin very rapidly in the period of our first turning point we can’t be completely sure of what is happening at intervals less than a century. The sudden transitional character of this period has frequently been noted, but it is not really the beginning of civilization. It is simply another beat in our sequence. In essence we detect a three beat sequence in world history. It is important to consider the idea of relative beginnings. There is no violation of continuous history, but we do see clusters of creative intensity.

This overall pattern is highly coordinated, and can’t be ascribed to chance, in fact, we can even see that these periods echo each other. Look at the history of science. We see the 'birth of science' among the ancient Greeks in the Axial interval. But, wait, we see the 'birth of science' in the modern transition! Note that the first birth of science was aborted, and revives inside our eonic sequence. There are many examples like this.  Thus we have a complex sequential rhythm fragment, with a massive dose of synchronous emergence in the middle, a clear pattern of universal history, but leaving the question, what about the middles? In fact, the middles are the crucial ones, although our focus starts on the high level sequence. The middles give an estimate of 'free history', in the sense that spontaneous human action without a driving motion is exemplified in spontaneity of undirected history. These give a measure, as we will see, of human freedom.

 The full series suggests a frequency hypothesis, but that is more than we need to demonstrate a non-random pattern. A rough 2400 interval separates these turning points. The synchronous aspect, the 'Axial Age', is especially vivid. The pattern is thus two patterns in one, which we can call the ‘eonic effect’. This is very striking non-random pattern, and it shows something operating over and above the planned actions of individuals who cannot coordinate initiatives on this scale. 

The clue to the overall pattern is to see the sluggishness of the periods in between. As the Axial interval passes, an unmistakable decline, but not fall, takes place, and a new period comes into existence, as if looking backwards. Not until the modern period do we see anything similar to the Axial phenomenon. Moving in the opposite direction, can we find anything as its antecedent? We don’t have far to look. As we pursue the history of Egypt, and of Mesopotamia, backwards, then backwards again, we arrive at another such point of breakthrough and rapid innovation, at the birth of civilization itself, toward the end of the fourth millennium.

Describing the swift transition from the era of earliest Egypt, Michael Hoffman, in Predynastic Egypt, is driven in some puzzlement to adopt the economic take-off idea of the economist W. W. Rostow as a metaphor to account for the sudden change that produces the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the Pharaoh Menes:

The immediate archaeological problem in explaining the cultural identity of Menes and his state is to account for the sudden embarrassment of riches that characterizes the material culture of Egypt between the Late Gerzean (ca. 3300 B.C.) and Archaic period (ca. 3100-2700 B.C.) in terms of a sophisticated, multifaceted explanation. Professor Renfrew borrows the term ‘take-off point’ from the economist Walter Rostow to characterize the rise of civilization and the proliferation of certain types of artifacts. Over the years a number of propensities develop within a social system, which predisposes it to a really major transformation. When that transformation does occur, it is so thorough as to convey the impression of crossing a critical threshold. .Michael Hoffman, Predynastic Egypt, “In Search of Menes”.

The question of the 'birth of civilization' is ambiguous, and we need not stop there as we proceed all the way to the sources of the Neolithic itself. The Axial Age itself gives us the clue. This is a dramatic and explosive moment of rapid cultural emergence, but it is not the 'beginning of civilization'. The antecedents are clearly visible. This tells us what is going on at the end of the fourth millennium, with the onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer.

We are at the threshold of the Urban Revolution, so-called. We can cite Gordon Childe who notes, in Man Makes Himself:

And so by 3000 B.C. the archaeologist’s picture of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus valley no longer focuses attention on communities of simple farmers, but on States embracing various professions and classes. The foreground is occupied by priests, princes, scribes, and officials, and an army of specialized craftsmen, professional soldiers, and miscellaneous laborers, all withdrawn from the primary task of food-production. The most striking objects now unearthed are no longer the tools of agriculture and the chase and other products of domestic industry, but temple furniture, weapons, wheel-made pots, jewelry, and other manufactures turned out on a large scale by skilled artisans. As monuments we have instead of huts and farmhouses, monumental tombs, temples, palaces, and workshops. And in them we find all manner of exotic substances, not as rarities, but regularly imported and used in everyday life. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1983):, p. 107

Just as with the Axial period, there is a clear fall off and the onset of a kind of medievalism, or better, simply a middle, or mideonic period. Thus, as Cyril Aldred notes of Egypt, in Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom, the institutions of kingship remained ‘frozen at the moment’ of their creation, while the first four dynasties essentially created the forms of the entire Egyptian civilization, “as soon as a solution had been sanctioned…there was no further development.” Much of the Egypt with which we are familiar is from a much later stage. It is thus easy to spot in broad outline the basic factor of relative transformation. 

Each of stages in the eonic sequence is beset with a debate over the question of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ evolution, but our framework reconciles both viewpoints. It is at first incomprehensible to think of a relative stage in the cultural evolution of Sumer or Egypt to be a transition, but now we suspect the reason for it, and further the example of the Axial period shows the rationale: we don’t have to start with absolute beginnings. The Axial period shows a cluster of relative beginnings.  Thus, as with the Axial period, we see this effect of simultaneity in the sudden appearance of many innovations in Sumer and Dynastic Egypt. What is equally significant is the way in which these peaks seem to leave a steady state in their wake. Until the Axial interval, nothing can compete with the consolidation of higher civilization that creates a new world of man at the beginning of the third millennium.

Finally, we complete our pattern by noting the place of the rise of modernity in some kind of larger sequence. J.M. Roberts  in his History of the World  notes, “After 1500 or so, there are many signs that a new age of world history is beginning…”. William MacNeill , in his The Rise of the West , calls the career of Western civilization since 1500 a vast explosion. There is mysterious New Age starting from the period ca. 1500, indicated by the onset of the Reformation , and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the time of Copernicus. Our sense of the modern world always draws us back to this point of the so-called ‘early modern’, and into a conundrum over its suddenness, amidst other evidence of continuity from the Middle Ages. Relative to world history, something explodes in the sixteenth century. The abrupt start after 1500 is an invariant of numerous historical accounts, but since there is no method to account for it, immense labors attempt to see the continuity from medievalism. This is the 'European miracle', but we will soon see that this has little to do with Europe. It is simply part of our larger pattern. 

We have all the pieces of the eonic effect. This pattern is both a discovery and also something that we must have already noticed, since we are immersed in the very process we are attempting to describe. We notice right away the correlation with the key episodes of our traditions.  The core events of the Old Testament, the Upanishads, the rise of Buddhism, and the classic philosophies of China, the flowering of classical Greece, the birth of democracy, the birth of science, the classic Pre-Socratic philosophers, we always sense their significance, not realizing their place in a larger context. We discover that our cultural roots, over and over, correspond to elements of this pattern.  And there is a prior phase of all of this, not present to our consciousness because of the way the Axial interval displaced what came before it.

 Thus our view of history has always been focused on the source of our traditions in classical antiquity. Thus, for example, the presence of Egypt in the Old Testament is taken as a given. The world of the Israelites seems to react against the immensity of the Egyptian past. In fact, what we see is a civilization already past its peak, if not in decline. In Mesopotamia, we find the classic empires, confronted by the Greeks and the Israelites. But buried in Akkadian cuneiform is the lost memory of Sumer, the great ancestor of all these Middle Eastern cultures and empires. We can now see the sources of this and other civilizations, and the most obvious pattern arises.  In fact we see the connection of the two, the Axial and sequential patterns, in just this case. The great prior history of Egypt flows onward in a continuity that is interrupted by the new period of the Axial Age. Note that the Old Testament is unwitting recording the era of the Axial Age, in the process generating a complex new 'master template' for many religions to come. The myths of its interaction with Egypt is a New Age drama.   

The Eonic Sequence Our non-random pattern is clear: we see a macrohistorical sequence associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, analogous to (although not the same as) feedback, able to act on cultural streams in intervals of several centuries. We can reverse-engineer this data with a question, Does world history show evidence of  any kind of sequence? The answer is yes, and we see very strong correlation with an intermittent sequence pattern that can only be called ‘evolution’. 

This discovery is as remarkable as it is mysterious, and we are given a free gift of historical structure, something whose existence has always been denied, but whose existence suddenly becomes obvious as recorded history crosses a minimum threshold of 2400 times 2, i.e. three transitions and two middles, about five thousand years. Our use of the term 'evolution' requires further discussion, and all we know so far is that something is creating a derandomizing effect in fuzzy regions and time-periods, but in a fashion that is clearly coordinated over many millennia. 

One of the most controversial and baffling aspects of the study of history or evolution is this question of directionality, which impinges on the questions of teleology. Our stream and sequence contrast shows at once a resolution of the paradox. We tend to lose track of directionality because the frequency period of the eonic effect divided over five thousand years only shows three steps in its sequence, and we never realized the existence of step one until the coming of modern archaeology. The scale on which to measure directionality was far greater than we had realized.  Looking at the eonic effect we see strong evidence of historical directionality, the more impressive in that our sequence shows interconnection across several millennia. Clearly our system is under suspicion of being teleological, but we are not able to assess teleology, in part because we are embedded in the system in question, and don't see its end point. Teleological issues are also highly volatile ideologies already present inside the system we are studying. They are consistently in error. 

Discrete progression vs teleology Any intermittent series produces an unexpected complexity to teleology: the 'system return' millennia in the future can upset the 'teleological hallucinations' that arise in the mideonic periods. This effect is especially notable in the 'bolt out of the blue', the rise of the modern and its motion against the mideonic teleological formations of monotheism (which in any case were at odds with each other). This double level completely debriefs our teleological fantasies, leaving us in ignorance of the long-range future if we can't distinguish our actions and aims in the present from the action of the eonic system, and its future, if any. 

We will restrict ourselves to the directionality seen looking toward the past, keeping out of trouble with speculations about a future 'telos'. Claims of teleology show their hand too often as futile efforts to overtake the eonic effect itself, in a fight for the future, and the results have proven themselves by their violent character to have little coherence. We must devise a new kind of theory to protect our data from confusion. Directionality is a fairly weak requirement. It can be detected in the past, without making any claims on the future. Clearly the stream of continuous history drifts and meanders, and the eonic series perks it up and sets it going into new directions. Directions! The Axial Age shows five new 'directional complexes'. Any sudden change essentially resets direction, so to speak, for however long that lasts. Note again however that the Axial period therefore sets some kind of direction in five separate areas simultaneously. Note also that in many cases the outcomes of each of the Axial exemplars are multivalent, hardly a definite setting of direction.

Sacred/ Secular Compare Greek and Judaic history: one gives birth to modern secularism while the other gives birth to religious history. This happens in parallel. We lose the distinction of 'sacred' and 'secular', and must redefine categories according to content. The term 'secular' really means a change of 'age period' or 'seculum', and begins with a religious transformation, the Protestant Reformation.
New Ages The many myths of ‘eons’ and ‘New Ages’ fall into place around the eonic sequence. The rise of the modern  precipitates a ‘new age of religion’, which climaxes in the ‘secular’ New Age of Enlightenment. The failure of the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ becomes evident in the way the evolution of religion itself shows directionality, and this sudden religious transformation beginning with the Reformation resembles both the earlier Judaic and Greek transitions simultaneously. The term ‘secular’ does not refer to a philosophy but to the net effect of an entire transition.

 Directionality in our sense essentially means something is interrupting a continuous stream and producing a 'non-random' patterning of effects. There is more than just historical happenstance or drift. Something starts up, does something and then stops. There is an intermittent direction setter, and it may change directions at each stage. We should call that 'evolution', while the ordinary activity of people in general is simply history.

Transtemporal sequence Despite the perception of loose directionality, we also see our 'system' resetting direction in successive steps of its sequence, sometimes in different ways (e.g. states, then religions), sometimes in a recursive restarting of some that had died out. Two outstanding cases are the birth and rebirth of science in Axial Greece, and modernity. We already noted this in the case of the idea of evolution. The other is the resetting of democracy, right on schedule, in TP2, TP3: 
Discrete Freedom Sequence The most spectacular case is the birth, dying out, then rebirth of democracy, again in Greece, and modernity.
So it seems as if our system tries to recover things that died out in the periods between its transitions.

Thus as we examine the eonic effect we begin to see an ingenious way to do 'evolution' on the surface of a planet where many separate cultures are undergoing their own local 'evolutions', just the ordinary effects of people doing their history, never planning things on the large-scale, or in terms of long term intervals. Our eonic sequence however seems to be based on a rhythmic return at the level of millennia.  This ordinary cultural evolution of the disparate parts is thus not necessarily the same as the overall development of the whole. The intermittency of the eonic series of turning points generates a sequence of alternating periods of fast advance in the midst of the greater field of cultures and civilizations. We can call this the 'stream and sequence' property of the eonic effect. Each cultural area is an historical stream, e.g. the stream of Greek history from beginning to end, and that period when it becomes part of the greater sequence, what we will call the eonic sequence. It is like a stepping stone sequence to cross a stream. Each step uses a different stone to create a crossing path. These stones are 'intermittent' stages of the sequence that reaches the other shore. The actual pattern is slightly more complex since it may use several 'stones' in parallel at each stage. Look at the Axial period. In five places simultaneously, a cultural stream crosses a (very fuzzy) temporal boundary, intersects with the eonic sequence, and gets ‘hot’, producing a host of innovations.   

This is a little tricky at first, but with the Greek example we can see the process very clearly. A similar analysis is then visible in the Judaic and other cases. Actually the Judaic case has all the pieces too, but we are totally distracted by the religious wrapper that throws us off track. The stream includes the whole mythological history from Abraham to Moses, then David to Solomon. The transition is the core period after that, and enters the eonic sequence. Note how easily we can restate the gist of the Old Testament in eonic terms. 

We take for granted as the source of a tradition something that the data of the Axial Age shows to be remarkable, which is the sudden take-off of Greek culture in the period from –900 to about –600, followed by the brief flowering lasting until about –400. This periodization revises the standard Axial interval (-800 to –200) just slightly backwards toward the less visible but more seminal gestation period roughly in the eighth century as it generates what is to come. The reason for this is that it reflects the data, and also because we notice that the three centuries of our transitional interval creates a divide at its stopping point.

Transitions and divides Any intermittent process will create a divide as its bursting effect stops. This is visible in the way we take the Old Testament, although the point is confused by the Exile. But the two centuries after -600 show the era of the Prophets coming to a close and a new tradition coming into existence. This divide is especially clear in the modern case, around 1800. 

The Greek Archaic is not as spectacular as its post-divide period but altogether as creative in less visible ways. In the eighth century it just takes off. This sudden explosion out of nowhere, yet in concert with similar transitions throughout the Axial period, is the clue to a new perception of world history, and leaves us dumbfounded in so far as local antecedent causal explanations can't be the whole answer. Once we set up a periodization matrix its action is almost stupefying in its concentrated innovations. In our new language what we see is that the stream of culture, the Greek, intersects with the mysterious sequence seen in the overall eonic effect. This form of evolution is clever indeed, and evolves the whole via the part, proceeding from a hotspot to an oikoumene created by diffusion. We have the key.

This is a 'next' step after an earlier cycle: Sumer and early Egypt are like Israel and Greece. We have even found transitions there too. Note that  the diffusing influences of Sumer and Egypt proceed outwards in the middle period between the two steps in our sequence. These reach the Minoan World, etc, which in turn influences a first period of Greek civilization, the Mycenaean. This is a considerable culture, but one that never comes close to what we see later. This world is one that echoes its heritage of TP1 diffusion, by and large. Note that the Mycenaean world is part of the stream, while Axial Greece is part of the sequence. This collapses. 

Then there is a period of chaos, for whatever reason (it has nothing to do with the eonic sequence, it is not present in China). A great period of confusion arises in the Middle East around 1200. And Greece falls apart and goes into a Dark Age until around –900 or later. There is no reason it has to happen that way, and China shows relative continuity instead. But this makes Greece a test case because it almost restarts from scratch, and the extraordinary explosion of advance beginning after –900 and especially in the eighth to seventh century almost seems turn on a dime, and does so in concert with the Axial interval, suggesting that this is a function of the higher level system, and not, as with the Myceneans, the result of relatively contingent diffusion alone. 

There are thus two types of culture or civilization, stream and sequence cases. We see both cases with Greece, the relatively imitative diffusion version of the Myceneans, and what happens as the stream crosses the eonic mainline. But this time, we catch the eonic effect, because the great advance suddenly seen shows Axial synchrony. This evidence of sudden advance, and yet in concert with the whole, is the master clue that preempts simple causal analysis. We must consider the discontinuity factor. This gives us several types of ‘civilization’ in one culture stream:

An independent stream, e.g. Indo-European Greeks

A mideonic entry into a diffusion field, e.g. Myceneans

A transitional time-slice, e.g. the Archaic Greek period

A post-transitional oikoumene

In each Axial case we can sort the ‘stream’ into these categories. In the eighth century we see a system of city-states emerge from the feudal decay of monarchy into aristocracy. Then the great miracle happens, and by the time Homer appears the system is set to take-off. From the time of Solon  around –600 to the period of Alexander we witness the most extraordinary flowering of culture, one that defies any logic of diffusion, and which creates a new plateau of culture that will persist as a tradition until the rise of the modern world. It is not at all unreasonable, however, to focus attention just slightly backwards to the era round about Homer and before where the gestation of this occurs in the early Greek Archaic, long before Athens produces its fantastic contributions. So very basic and less exciting innovations (like the adoption of writing) are occurring, even an early figure like Solon being somewhat late by comparison.

Once again we notice the brevity of this creative interval that by –400 is almost over. The effect of diffusion outwards creates a new series of descendants, and once again the world of city states and their creativity yields to empire. Note the way we can see that a great literature is arising on schedule in a frequency pattern. This is remarkable enough. But we see analogous, but not identical, effects, all across Eurasia. They are essentially in the same family, and Rome especially is a sort of far flung ‘city state’ of the Greek environment, whose remarkably similar mythology from the same primordial Indo-European stream is able to echo the Greek advance so easily in a condition of sequential dependency. The Greek advances flow into the Roman zone as it moves to create a later oikoumene. This creates a kind of evolutionary directionality. Our eonic sequence intersects the streams of local cultures in a kind of time slice, producing a local advance, which then flows outward to create an oikoumene. It’s like a strobe light effect in a dance hall. The continuity of the dancers dancing is joined by a discontinuous intermittent strobe effect that illuminates the faces of the dancers.

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