One of the most notable correlations of our eonic sequence is with the political evolution of social aggregates, and our first turning point shows especially the beginnings of statehood in the basic frameworks, Sumerian and Egyptian, that will enter world history as recurring themes. It is important to remind ourselves that this first visible transition is not in any sense an absolute beginning, and what we detect is the sudden consolidation from the long lead up period of the Neolithic producing the forms of integrated statehood for the first time. The sequential development from village, to town, to city, was long, and deserves an equal place in the history of political development. The only thing stopping us here is the absence of written documents allowing us to arrive at some solid facts. We note again the critical advance of the period of the Axial Age: the appearance of written documents recording eonic transitions in detail.

Indeed the term 'civilization' with its 'civil' integration of tribal and post-tribal groups can as well be ascribed to the first Neolithic villages, but the fact remains that it is the period just around -3000 that the take-off into complex civilization occurs for the first time. This period is really the first 'Axial Age' we know of, and its 'pivotal' transformations reach a peak of seminal gestation that will produce all the majors foundational institutions of later history, a statement once made for the Axial Age proper. This is, of course, the period of the invention of writing, taken by many as the beginning of history. We have, of course, defined 'history' in a different fashion, one that is however not incompatible with this one. The key transitional area here is the world of Sumer, beside Dynastic Egypt which settles immediately into a kind of theocratic state as a parallel world, and it should be noted at once that there is an obvious resemblance of this great early world of the Sumerians to the system of Greek city states. Indeed, there are even indications that, in the diversity of the Mesopotamian field, the first intimations of democracy are visible, however briefly, in the still relatively unfixed experiments in social organization that we find in the constellation of Sumerian cities. More directly the technological demands of agricultural organization in the challenging context of the great river system of the Tigris and Euphrates provoke the self-organization of the first state systems. 

 It is important to see this political evolution in association with, but by no means in direct equation with, the somewhat later onset of empire over the course of world history, keeping in mind the inherent contrast of periods entailed by our distinction of 'stream and sequence'.  What happens in the mainline of the eonic sequence is not necessarily the same as what happens in the mideonic periods. It is one thing to create a state, quite another to create one that is more than a patched together authoritarianism of over-grown primitive kingship. This point, easily intuited in our first Sumerian transition, becomes dramatically obvious in the next, namesake Axial Age, where the Greek city-states undergo a spectacular evolution into republicanism, thence into the world's first true democracy in Athens. Indeed, this example will provide us with the basis for defining what we will call the 'discrete freedom sequence', as a sub-sequence inside the eonic sequence. It is more than speculation to consider that something like this had occurred already in the Sumerian system. 

We are left therefore with the paradox of what is almost two kinds of evolution, braided together, the first being the evidence of what happens in the eonic sequence, and what happens in between, the latter not being quite evolution at all, in our sense. This issue becomes dramatically obvious in the Axial period when the evanescent breakthroughs of the transitional era suffer the harsh fate of recurring imperialism and state domination. We proceed from the world of Athens to that of the Hellenistic thence to imperial Rome in short order and without the discipline of the eonic periodization matrix, with its discrete-continuous interplay of two levels, we tend to become confused by what is suddenly visible as mideonic retrogression inside the eonic progression on its larger scale. Even as late as the modern Enlightenment this fixation on Rome remains with its prejudice against Athens, whose stock, with remarkable timing, rises once again just at the modern divide! Like clockwork. 

We see at once that this more documented nexus of historical 'evolutions' is the key to unraveling the developments of the earlier rise of civilization beginning in Egypt and Sumer. Indeed, by the time this newly recovered world of antiquity becomes visible to us it is already transposing into its mideonic period, and we will tend to confuse the seminal period of our first transition, which is barely documented, especially that of Sumer, with the rapid onset of empire systems, beginning with the Akkadians, that swamp the brief era of the early breakthrough. It is clear from the text of the Old Testament that there is a struggle going on with the forces of domination by empire and that the Mesopotamian world has long since lost the memory of its earlier 'Axial' transition. In fact, the very existence of Sumerian language is nearly lost as it becomes a vestigial linguistic memory embedded in the Cuneiform tradition, not unlike the legacy of Greek linguistic forms in the Roman and subsequent language groups of the Medieval period. 

The Axial Age shows us two great 'revolutions against the state', speaking generally, in a generalized use of the term 'revolution', that of the Israelites in the world of inherited empire, and that of the Greeks in the context of the same field of empires, as they exploit their frontier autonomy to produce a birth of new political forms. But it is important, before crystallizing our usage of the idea of freedom to pay our dues to the significance of first statehood, at once a great advance in human social organization, and at the same time the precipitation of a new dilemma, the loss of the individual in the authoritarian consolidations of larger and larger social systems. 

We have but to consider the controversial philosopher Hegel and the criticisms often leveled against his ambiguous statist 'redefinitions' of the idea of freedom to see the way the collectivist/libertarian spectrum accompanies both our eonic sequence and the worlds interleaved with its action. Hegel had a vivid sense of the 'sanctity of the State' that more radical men can't manage without any immediate frenzy of protest. All well and good, but Hegel had a point. The point is that there is a double sense to the idea of freedom, and we can conceive of 'freedom within the state' and 'freedom from the state' as polar opposites in a dynamic interplay. It is obvious from the history of the Mesopotamian or Egyptian systems that the forms of state integration created for the first time that 'freedom within the state', however inadequate to later definition, without which advance would have been impossible. It is at a pinch nothing more complex at first than the freedom to realize complex agriculture in a field of pirates sailing up and down the great river systems that nourished the massive irrigation systems of this transitional era. Statehood created a potential field of possibilities as a foundation for all that came later. That this evolution rapidly became arrested is equally obvious from the facts--or for that matter from the mood of the myths of the Exodus. That the outcome of this proceeded rapidly to ever more constricted empire systems never challenged until the Axial Age is the tale of these millennia, from the Akkadians to the Assyrians, the nemesis of that of spectacular development recorded in the Bible. 

And here we can and should bring in the question of religion, this in the context of the generation of oikoumenes associated with our sequence of transitions. These transitions, as we have seen, operate locally on a particular cultural stream, and yet at the same time create a field of potential that flows outward by diffusion into the greater environment in which they arose, creating generalized culture fields, or oikoumenes. Their function in the stages of globalization is veiled by this localization of their initial effect. The problem is that too frequently we see this oikoumene creation degenerate into empire systems that do, however, perform some of the tasks of cultural integration. The emergence of transcultural societies is one of the most obvious direct outcomes of the overall eonic sequence. This point could not be more obvious if we examine the altogether swift passage of the Occidental Axial Age, especially the Greek, with is Roman Republican variant, into the world of the Hellenistic and finally Roman empires. 

And here the place of the Axial Age religions is uniquely significant. Our eonic sequence deserves almost another book describing the complexities of religion, which are quite obviously an aspect of both early statehood, and the earlier Neolithic periods. The idea of the Axial generation of religion is both false and misleading. All the religions that we know of show strong hints of being descendants of early Neolithic formations. By the time of the Sumerians and Egyptians religion has already shown a long development, well before the emergence of the State, which ironically shows the fist, the barest, hints of 'secularization' in the way they resemble the modern reaction of the State against medieval Catholicism. The first state arose in a field of ancient religious cutlures whose temple complexes go back additional millennia. 

But it is in the Axial Age that we see the birth of the so-called 'great religions' almost as a unique experiment that will prove a dominant theme of the subsequent mideonic continuation of that remarkable, and mysterious, interval. But as soon as we say this we should retract at once such a statement. The Axial Age is significant almost because it doesn't create any religions! All of that comes later, well after the passage of the Axial impetus. It is highly significant that Christianity and Islam, for example, appear well after the Axial period, and yet that they are focused on their heritage received from the seminal Axial period. Please note the distinction of system action/free action we have already. This distinction throws considerable light on the question of the coming religions. And we must be careful here because this question immediately founders in the confusions of teleological historicism, to say nothing of fanatical religious imperialism. We have claimed nothing more than directionality in our discussion of the eonic sequence. But this directionality pertains only to the intermittent steps of the sequence, not necessarily to the mideonic periods in between. The point is that we can't safely claim that the Axial Age shows some teleological plan to create great religions. The point at first seems to defy conventional religious wisdom, but the point can be seen at once from the stark reality: the outcome of the Axial period is inconsistent in that it produces a host of religions, sometimes in conflict. 

The much simpler analysis is simply to see that our mysterious Axial transitions ready the potential to create new cultural forms that will induce transcultural communication and integration. If we look at the Axial account in the Old Testament it is important to grasp what it says, and doesn't say, and that it is a history of a particular Canaanite state, or two states, 'Israel/Judah' and the religious/theocratic incidents of that history. As it happens this history shows, not the absolute birth of monotheism, but the viable consolidation of monotheistic ideas into a potent new form, but still a state religion, one that will simply flow outward into the empire systems coming into existence, there to stage a process of transcultural gestation that will end by overtaking one such empire altogether. This issue is a stumbling for many religionists, but our eonic model picks it up as grist for its mill. 

It is suddenly obvious that this whole process is as effective as it is ad hoc. The anomalous contrast of the Old Testament with the uses to which it is put stands out as a partial contradiction to any simple teleological interpretation of its narrative. There are certainly anticipatory 'prophecies', of a sort, but the Israelites are still involved in state formation, not religion formation, as such. So much confusion has arisen over the issue of prophecy that we have lost the much more interesting, if less dramatic, fact that our transition indeed betoken some kind of anticipatory potential to create new religious forms, whose realization however stand on their own terms as localized cultural worlds. 

 That said, as we stand back, we see at a glance the remarkable way in which a whole series of religious formations show their direct lineage in the context of the eonic sequence. And the case of Buddhism is in all respects isomorphic to that of monotheism, in the strictly eonic sense beyond any questions of content. Furthermore the Old Testament gives a clue to the direct relationship of religion to state formation. These are not really separate categories, in logical terms, and the appearance of religion as we know it betrays its signature here even as it commences a long history of almost revolutionary challenges to the State. In the world of Constantine religion shows clearly its other face. One and the same collectivist/libertarian spectrum provokes the tension of opposites that we see in the statist/revolutionary traditions. The drama of the Israelites could not be clearer: confronted with the empires of such as the Assyrians a new means to create cultural integration is needed, and the remedy pops out of the eonic sequence is a remarkably swift and efficiency creation of a new form of literature, the Book that will travel between cultures, in a beguiling concoction of cultural pidgin. The Old Testament, so radical and conservative at the same time, provokes what the myths of the Exodus make plain, a revolution against the domination of empire that speaks directly to the ethical and religious needs of the individual bound up in ever more mechanically frozen states. 

It is here, then, in the wake of the Axial Age, that the modern dilemma of secularism is born. For, even as we see the loss of the great advances so fresh and innovative of the Greek transition, we also see the flow of religion into a sudden vacuum, where the harsh reality of empire returns to haunt the mideonic worlds. This ambiguity will persist through the millennia past the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, and medievalism, until, once again, we see a 'revolution at the frontier', the rise of the modern world triggered so remarkably by the rebirth of science, and the remorphing of a religious formation, the Protestant Reformation, and its explosive movement against what, ironically, is the new form of empire, the transnational theocratic empire. We see the clear common denominator at work in the Sumerian, Axial, and modern transitions, and it is especially clear in the modern case that 'religion' and the 'state' show a hybrid lineage of mutual association, as the Protestant Reformation rapidly yields to what we misleadingly call 'secularism', which we can see means simply the onset of a new age period, religion being one of its initial starting points. 

That leaves the question of the future of religion, a question demanding a prediction on our part, and we will reach the end of our eonic account without predicting anything, save a warning that swamping mideonic worlds with religion at the expense of the gains of a new transition is all to familiar to us now as a form of possible retrogression. Our system never repeats itself, and what we will see could not forever be a continuation of the Axial Age's creations. Beyond that a close look at the modern transition will show us the deeper key to the way in which secularism, so often crafted with a set of cliches for its definition, will prove an ample carrier of a new disposition toward religion, quite able, at least potentially, to juggle two balls and make of the religious legacy of mankind a more intelligent rendition of religion than the ages of religion were themselves able to provide. The way to that is seen, ironically, in the fertile field of the discourse of freedom spawned in the modern transition in a fashion that transcends the increasingly sterile distinction of 'sacred' and 'secular' inherited from antiquity. 

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