Armstrong's basic mistake is to downplay the element of synchronous emergence, the remarkable effect of simultaneity in separate regions stretched across Eurasia. This is the result noone wants to see, but which is staring us in the face, for it implies something of global scale is at work, something stupendous, mysterious. 

The result of Armstrong's tactic is a bland flattening out of the depiction, and the motive behind this is no doubt a sense that her secular audience will not accept the provocative facts of the case. Readers of her earlier books might have thought Armstrong was religiously motivated, but apparently this is not the case. She appears to have shifted here views toward a kind of generalized Buddhistic perspective and this is a tempting way to approach the data, but unfortunately this does not do justice to the phenomenon in question. It is ironic that she enters the one-dimensional history that the universal history of the ancient Israelites attempted to propose as a challenge to mundane world views.

This, of course, throws down the gauntlet. I should say that I would also propose a secular account of history. And would demand that we embrace the new research findings of Biblical Criticism that have exposed the mythology of the Old Testament. We must withdraw the claim that we have any knowledge of 'god acting in history'. But once we have completed this confrontation with science, a strange thing happens. We discover that the bare historical facticity of the 'real' history behind the Old Testament is as remarkable, more so, than the mythical religious version! For this bare facticity of Axial phenomenology demands that we 'deconstruct' the 'flat histories' of causal mechanics with a renewed consideration of universal history, this time one that encompasses the whole effect of the Axial Age. We should note at once that this effect is almost more visible in the case of the Greek Axial Age than the Judaic. Put the history of the Greek Archaic/Classical era on a timeline against the backdrop of world history, and a remarkable mystery arises. 

This Buddhist trend, if that it was it is, of Armstrong's account thus loses a major thematic staring us in the face, one that confronted its first discoverers in the nineteenth century and which disconcerted Karl Jaspers, who nonetheless brought himself to see that what he was dealing with transcended his own religious  perspective. This perspective lingers in his work, with its confusion over the Axis of history (the Christ moment, but which is not in the Axial Age) and the actual era of the 'Axial' effects. 

It is appropriate to bring Buddhism into conjunction with monotheism, but we cannot reduce the one to the other. Nor can we easily explain how this process produces two religions, one theistic, the other non-theistic. Armstrong's tendency to assume that the Axial concordance implies an 'Axial ethos' gets her in trouble with her thesis. 

Armstrong's views are more transparent from another book she has written this year: a book on mythology, The History of Myth. Here she looks at the whole of world history since the Paleolithic and produces a periodization in which there is also a 'modern transformation'. But here Armstrong seems to wish to downplay the question of modernity with a critique based on her flawed mythos/logos distinction. There is a distinct bias against the supposed 'rationality' of the modern age. Thus in here account of the Axial Age there is a pronounced confusion over the place of Greece in the Axial period. A myth has appeared that the Axial Age represents some kind of primordial religious age. But this fails to deal with the fact that the first scientific revolution in Greece, along with Greek democracy, are prime Axial phenomena. And this can't be pressed into the sausage grinder generalizations Armstrong wishes to use on her data.

The Axial Age is a mystery until we see it in a larger context, that of the whole history of civilization. Then we notice what I call the 'eonic effect', which is a long-range pattern of which the so-called Axial Age is a subset. We discover that the key to the Axial Age is in many ways to be found by studying the modern world. Once we drop the assumption that the Axial Age is some kind of religious era, then the deeper meaning of the whole sequence of 'Axial Ages' stands out. 

Finally, Armstrong is on record trying to propose/promote various notions of a Second Axial Age. But this conflicts with her own statements about the modern transformation. What is the relationship of these things? We cannot eclectically invent new 'Axial Ages' and aspire to them in the future. Some kind of postmodern neo-spiritual age is simply not in the predictable future that is emerging from modernity. The many New Age movements predicting such events could be self-fulfilling prophecies, but they would not be a 'second Axial Age'. The only second Axial Age is the rise of modernity itself, a statement that requires careful study of the whole of world history in light of the eonic effect.