[i] One might protest with the question, doesn’t all of this cyclical thinking show some previous inkling of the eonic effect? Yes, but our thesis has no connection with the myths of the Great Year. Our frequency hypothesis suggests an average period of 2400 years relative to a V-cone of emergence, with a relative beginning in relation to ‘deep time’. This ‘cycle’ is not a view of time at all, and has a fixed geographical field effect. We are in a completely different business. The answer to our question is that anyone who comes home from the beach always describes waves, but he may never have seen a long tidal wave. Our approach requires a good five thousand years of history, ideas of geographical eonic jump diffusion, some distinction of eonic determination and free action, past and future, and a separation of the sequence of civilization or evolutionary culture and eonic sequencing, etc,… But this raises the intriguing question, did someone notice the obvious relation of one unit of the Great Year to a known record or memory of over five thousand years? Very doubtful indeed. But they could see fragments. The obvious reason confusion can arise, is that the eonic effect is real, and therefore must be noticed, but occurs with too long a period to fix the cycle. But this may not be quite true. Someone must have noticed the correlation of one unit of the great year with no more than the sense of the great New Age changes occurring in classical times, and guessed that 2150 years was the length, based on calculations of the Great Year, and loss of memory of the very existence of Sumer, before the rise of the middle Mesopotamian period. This is possible, but if so they destroyed the chance to grasp what was happening. Clearly variants of millennial thinking arose attempting to posit the beginning of a cycle, and then guess its period, using astrology. If this in fact happened, it is clear why the hopeless confusion of the Piscean age got underway. Whatever the case, this alternate periodization has been responsible for driving awareness away from what has really been going on. For this cosmic period length can never be made to work, for the deficit of 250 years, from 2400, immediately throws all correlation out of sync. What more can be said, there is absolutely no astrological correlation with historical phenomena or the tempo of eonic progression. But cyclical thinking is directly related to TP1, 2, 3, much of it descending in degeneracy from the original Sumerian vision which deserves historical respect of another kind. Therefore,…

� Chaldea, Cycles and the Great Year. We must be on our way, and can spare only a paragraph to raise the lid of the Pandora’s Box of cyclical myths a bare crack. It is interesting that while the Greeks, at the edge zone, produce the first beginnings of science, are creative in the best sense, the areas of  the Old Mesopotamian oikoumene show the (?) eonic regeneration of old ideas into new forms, as the old Sumerian and Mesopotamian ‘astronomy’ crystallizes, first with the Assyrians, and then the Chaldeans, into astrology, and passes outward into the new oikoumene, there to create confusion, already evident in the thought of Plato. This effect, no doubt, was already evident in Hesiod, but this is probably an earlier form. This work is not a history of cyclical ideas, of which there have been many. We have avoided this here, although at some point it would be appropriate to write the history, and indeed, the eonic history, of cyclical theories! For the most obvious fact is that the first form of astrology, a misnomer, was an early Sumerian eonic emergent. But it is regenerated during ‘ET5’. This tells us something about our eonic mechanism, it is not a truth machine, as such, more like an amplifier, perhaps. However, the Chaldeans and Assyrians are already out of the creative mainline, and are simply recycling old information. The original Sumerian vision would remain to be reconstructed. But cyclical theories show strong eonic correlation, as the cosmic star-religion of the first phase of civilization passes into the stream of diffusion, there to become embroidered pseudo-science, as the ship of human progress takes on bilge. It is here that Christianity performed a service to civilization, in the attempt to bring this confusion under bounds. This correlation is surely no accident. Men seek models for their cyclical perceptions. An example of this correlation is the idea of the Four Kingdoms, with its clear association with ‘ET5’, the progression of Assyrian (or Babylon), Persia, Greece, and Rome. Eonic correlation is very efficient, we know instantly, but only quite vaguely as a prelude to its history, what this is about: perceptions of ‘ET5’ become mixed with the idea of dynastic cycles, and the progression of empires seems to have a canonical status as the eonic outcome of universal empire. They were trying to give expression to the eonic emergence of these, if any. ‘ET6’ will spawn Fifth Monarchy men! But our first priority is not a history of these other ideas that will truly confuse the issue of our own periodization whose difficult abstraction can’t be allowed association with these other historical variants, whose history is the history of confusion and historical, historicist, misperception.

[ii] This is the strange quality of the transitional era: we see diffusion suddenly transformed by a creative energy that gives the appearance of an axial age, but is in reality a transformer amplifying ‘small signs and signals’, the intuitions of a Moses or Zarathustra, and much else from every category of culture, grow into monotheism, and the multitude of eonic emergents appearing after the divide. The effect is completely broad, and stupendous in its scale. The continuous flow back again from parallel interactive emergence during phase to sequential dependency as diffusion can be seen beautifully in the intermediate case of Rome which is virtually a transitional area (‘ET5, Rome?’), but in addition a delayed dependent of Greece. This might seem a contradiction but it is not. The reason is the cultural similarity of Latin and Hellenic cultural forms, which allows the Greek tradition to echo so easily in the Roman sequential executive. This example will show the way the continuous t-streams receive a shockwave of relative reperiodization during the period ‘ET5,…’. The onset of the new phase begins to become evident after -900, although the results require time to manifest, if they can manifest at all. It is easy to confuse this with the very clear division around 1200 or with the onset of the ‘Iron Age’. The former is simply a series of contingent disasters accelerating decline, the latter a strong influence, but not the generator of this new period. The Buddhists abandoned the technosequence for begging bowls and needed no iron to change Asia. In a world of the Tiglath-Pilsers, destined to disappear, these ‘religious’ tactics succeeded.

 

[iii] Charles Redman, The Rise of Civilization (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978), p. 280.

 

[iv]  Eonic Sequence, and the Emergence of Religion. Our distinction of eonic determination and free action allows us to resolve the confusions of the double aspect of religion that confounds all generalizations and makes debates between ‘science and religion’ generally unproductive. Instead of the ‘sacred’ as a foundation concept, we could reconstruct religion, in relation to science, with no more than our distinction of ‘consciousness and self-consciousness’. This distinction explains why what one man finds to be revelation, another finds only to be a discombobulation.  Why secularizing mechanical religion only makes it resurface stubbornly as the search for the elusive ‘self-consciousness’ to smite positivist man, suddenly seen as the ‘bad guy’ on the old Zoroastrian radar. As we can see from the transformations of statism, religion, in its ambiguous transition from Prophet to theocracy back to secular state, is not a ‘fundamental unit’ of social macrohistory, whatever its recurrent omnipresence or its sources in Paleolithic ‘religion’. These all become tired words in which the original meaning is lost from institutional ‘newton’s third law’ of religious mechanics. We see the poignant drama of the Enlightenment attempting to extricate culture from the self-sustaining flow of religious tradition. But then we see the challenge to ideology, the socialist ‘religion’, and the botched secularization trying to replace ethical man with mythological evolutionism, a la Darwinism. Secularists wonder where they went wrong! We see the modern period ‘banish the archetype’, and see why the Greek Enlightenment preceded the rise of the great religions, Gilbert Murray’s complaint about the classical falloff and deviation. The birth of the libertarian challenge to the state is almost an afterthought given Gautama’s challenge to civilization, or the Sufi Halloween mask of Islamic piety. Indeed, the ambiguity of religion is that of the State itself, a crypto-socialist endeavor from the beginning, as we see in the Sumerian temple structure. In the classical era we see the ‘challenge to the Assyrians’, so to speak, and the appearance of the ‘Islam’, the religious challenge to the State. From the Reformation onwards, this idea is passing away, in the era of so-called secularization. But its ancient sources are clearly in this era. But the first appearance of religion would seem to precede the rise of the State in Sumer. The liberal age, as it ‘banishes the archetype’, has inherited many of the implied functions of religion better by far, in some cases, than the original case. The man entering this liberal age from the Reformation is not the man entering the ‘liberal’ age of the Greeks.

In the study of history, the questions of religion are the most confusing. In part this is so because the term ‘religion’ is never defined, or given an operational meaning in sociological terms that makes assumptions about the content of religion that are often as far off the mark as the belief systems under the microscope. It is also true, as Toynbee’s work shows, that it is competing, or once was, so to speak, with ‘civilization’ to be the fundamental unit of historical analysis, the source of this being evident in the Prophetic challenge to the Assyrian Empire, followed by the Israelite braiding with the Persian Empire and its state religion. With respect to religion, the human domains of discourse, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, the quest for truth and the quest for order with its political component, overlap and become fused. Cosmology conditions politics and law as belief becomes a stage of ‘rationalization’ and detribalization, that in turn begins to look ‘primitive’ or mythological. As we attempt to define the term ‘religion’ we are defeated by a closer examination of the history of religions, particularly the western ‘islams’, that are really a series of historical transformations, under the spell of Zoroastrianism, whatever viewpoint we may adopt as to their origins, or the traditions they construct, or the sense of values they invoke, or the activities of their founders. For they each invoke the period/zone or transition of the Hebrews—they are sequentially dependent in that sense. If we compare Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we see the only common denominator is eonic architecture. If we look at Greek Tragedy we see an entity we should include in cross-correlation, but which the term ‘religion’ excludes. Thus,…

Religion and Eonic ‘Re-Formation’ Our eonic viewpoint is very simple. We have not fully explained religion, but we can see that ‘system return’ simply morphs whatever is in its path, religion included. But this creates an illusion of ‘involutionary force’ that leads to a hybrid social construct of ‘religion’ and eonic transformation. The first case is the Pharaonic myth. The factor of ‘eonic determination’ totally confuses everything. Note, then, that the correspondence is not one-to-one. For religions can start at any point, as ‘free action’. Religious developments are sui generis, but enter the eonic sequence in same way as ‘t-stream’ culture processes. If we compare Zoroastrianism with its later Christian versions we see that this resolves many issues.

It would require a second study to explore the implications here, and our approach gives us an indirect strategy to look at the history of religion, based on the idea of Gilbert Murray’s ‘Greek Reformation’. This entity warns of a danger of false comparison for an ‘essential reformation’ as an entity that doesn’t exist, a high-level abstraction that might mislead us. A ‘Greek Reformation’, of sorts, is probably there, but a ‘re-formation’ is more solid and obvious, and an aspect of Greek culture somewhat neglected in the emphasis on the Greek Enlightenment, in the midst of the waning Olympian melodies. And if we look at our three great turning points, we see their crucial significance for the ‘re-formation’ of what we call ‘religion’. All the great religions, by and large, spring from this classical phase. Why? We should become suspicious, and apply our ‘turning point analysis’ to the sequence of religions, with particular attention given to these ‘eonic turning points’ Our strategy should be to look, not at the general category of ‘religion’ whose many meanings confuse discussion, but the eonic determination of religion at the periods in question. The Old Testament, compared with the New, is transparent in this regard. The distinction of eonic sequence and the mideonic ‘free action’ constructing religions as traditions clarifies many of the confusions of religious history. Note, however, the danger of confusing eonic transformation and content. Zorastrianism already exists before the ‘eonic emergence’ of monotheism.

� Evolution versus Involution Although our emphasis is on evolution, we risk a trap of amputating the core of religion in the name of a theory, challenged by the much ridiculed Theosophists with their ‘involution’. It seems obvious this is wrong until we attempt to rationalize a theory of ethics. We have been hard on Darwin, but here we should better come to the aide of what he really meant. But we can challenge the instant new myth of ‘involutionism’ with the idea of ‘eonic evolution’. The latter plays a trick on ‘involution’ by creating a distinct mode, ‘free action’. (In some treatments, the distinction is of involution and evolution, in our approach we see one ‘evolution’, that looks to some like involution, with its ‘free action response’, or the evolution of free action, as Freedom.) Religions give themselves away as ‘downfield new-aging’ free action scripts, by their temporal relations with our turning points, and by their embracing of a theory, myth, or philosophy of involution, to use the nineteenth century idea that has caused great confusion. In our discussion of eonic evolution, we noted the views of T.H. Huxley who felt driven to find a process beyond a process, in the relation of evolution to the emergence of values. His viewpoint is not unique! Many rival theories of evolution have always existed, and in recent times taken the form, to repeat, of an ‘involution’ in relation to an evolution. We have not commented on this before, in part because it can simply create confusion, and also because it is simply more appropriate to look at one process of evolution. Evolution counseled by physics is all we have, we have no evidence of involution. The ‘known’ instances are instances of our ‘eonic evolution’. But if we look at the transitional process in the Greek example we can see how the illusion of involution comes into being, for it is one of perspective. But theories of involution attempt to isolate a series of spiritual characters into a separate law, just as Huxley was forced to do. Just here the world of the Greeks can help, for their magnificent blend of high and low, economic and artistic, shows one law of evolution. To one looking backward, in a generated sequence in which the efforts become constructive rather than spontaneous, the feeling of two laws at work is easily had. The classical emergence is a good instance to sort out this confusion, for any distinction of involution and evolution arises from a kind of ‘double shockwave’ effect. Euripides is done, and then Menander,… In fact there is no double at all. Values and reactions to them can come into existence in parallel, and in tandem with economic, or any other process. Much confusion arises in the sudden need (at among New Agers) to search for a second law of evolution, called involution. Again, we tend to associate involution with the appearance of religion. But here again the Greek case is instructive. We would think monotheism the achievement of an evolutionist ‘sequence of stages’ in the progression of civilization. But ‘ET5’ shows a phase period that simply morphs everything in its path. In particular, there is a late flowering of Greek polytheism (relative to its antique sources in the hyperborean, then, Mycenean world) that takes the form of the intangible braiding together of cultural, and civic existence in the context of the polis. Although not an evolution from Greek religion, Greek Tragedy shows the appearance of this ‘morphing all in its path’, for we see the same intuitions that produce the religious preoccupations of divinity and human will in the dramatic productions of the Greek tragedians.

Looking at the passage from Catholicism to Protestantism, or any of the other products of the classical period, it is tempting to see a form of historic transformation, as a ‘property’ of some process called ‘the eonic evolution of religion’. The modern Reformation and the Greek ‘re-formation’ might tempt one to posit a general ‘reformation’ concept as an eonic explanation for religion. We should resist the temptation, and yet consider that each of our transitional eras has a pronounced effect on the development of religion. This must stretch all the way back to the middle Neolithic, for we see the first ‘catholicizer’ in the temples of Eridu and the early stages of the Ubaid. We should map out the eonic grid to see how great a simplification this brings to the category of religion, for we cease to look for the philosophic common denominator of the term itself:

1. Neolithic onwards, two possible phases,

2. The relative change in Sumerian religion ca. –3300 to –3000+, unknown

The same for Egypt, and we see at once the clear fretting of Pharaonic divine kingship from this era,…

3. The obvious classical emergence religions, climaxing in the titanic Islam. We should note the ambiguous Persian Empire, the injector of Zorastrianism into the eonic sequence.

4. Modern Reformations, still underway, the category ‘religion’ to yield to new definitions, in relation to the secular era now claimed as modernism. This hardly encompasses the vast area of religion at the fringe, seen by the anthropologist. But our point is that this sluggish recycling of ‘big religions’ is directly associated with the eonic sequence, and needs a separate categorization.

In each case we see a transformation. But this is misleading, for just beyond the Protestant Reformation we see the rise of Biblical Criticism, a transformation also, for example, an obvious eonic emergent, and yet whose effect is simply a greater self-consciousness about historical religious data. The major ‘transformations’ in between show clear lineage relative to the era –600, Islam, Christianity, Mahayana, and, yes, Hinduism as we now know it, a clear construct related to Upanishadism, Buddhism, and earlier sources evident in Jainism. We must then account for the founders of religions, and state whether they are subject to this law of transformation if they appear later, explain the ad hoc character of the result, such as the imposition by take-over of a politician such as Constantine who creates the final form of the religion, and the confusion of the Judaic tugboat moving in parallel to it own outcome. We see Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer in the philosophic stream trying to rescue the Enlightenment from its difficulty, and complete the ‘Reformation’, neatly on schedule in our prime jump diffusion zone.

The point is that ‘religion’ is not defined, and crisscrosses between social ideology and extra-social liberation, and is struggling for air, i.e. plain understanding, the only significance of the distinction of consciousness, mechanical, and self-consciousness, the real coin of religion. For some Constantine represents the real beginning of a religion, as social functionality. For others it represents its demise as state controlled ideology. The final difficulty is the fact that one is not, as a scientific analytical specialist, truly a meta-observer of this evolution to which we contribute by our doubt created by the common street observation that these religions are packages of incorrect information with pretenses of the sacred. This is not because the religious impinges on the transcendental but that the student of the process cannot convincingly claim to be anything more than what came next in the sequence of eonic or other generations. Such (deliberately) harsh statements make us instant ‘converts’ as ‘protestants’ proceeding to create a new category altogether to replace that of religion, very much a hybrid creature of the middle passage of civilization. The final mystery here is Mohammed, a unicorn and enigma, whose position is none the less closely matched to the general Persian-Judaic sequence generation. But his achievement remains elusive and, for its time, one of the all-time mysteries of world history. Part of the reason is that the world of ‘self-consciousness’ is as potential in a desert prophet as an Indian yogi, and the appearance of this new religion conceals the overlap of several cones of diffusion. The effect is first unmistakably evident in the figure of Jesus, always especially revered by the Islamic Sufi, who arises in this overlap where meditation and prayer demand a hybrid form.

Whatever the case with all these issues, we are not therefore in a position to analyze in any ultimate terms the basis of religion, although in the case of western monotheism we feel increasingly sure that what we see is a myth about the ‘eonic determination’ of the Israelites rendered over to an ideology of the cultural integrator of its ‘Islamic’ phase, whose doctrines are to counsel ‘free action’. For the Roman Empire it gets the job done, although the dogmatic confusions are fundamental, grotesque. In any case, whether or not scientists, we are in the same position, creating a Protestant assembly for the debriefing of this earlier discrete cycle, with the Enlightenment philosophes as our patron saints. This is strange but it is better than pretentious analysis of the ‘phenomenon’ of ‘religion in tweezers’, and yet no-nonsense in the grim realization that Occidental monotheism bares a distinct resemblance to eonic ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

Whatever the outcome of such lengthy deliberations whose cautious conclusion would be the dubious status of the subject called the ‘evolution of religion’, we have one possible new approach that can simplify the perspective of the study of religion. It is here that our distinction of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ comes into its own, if we are clear, for we require no distinction of social action, state formation, religious emergence or evolution, and the initialization created by ‘prophets’. We must not let ambition to fast ‘science’, or the fear that the unknown be interpreted as transcendental, hurry our efforts to forge a significant understanding of the tremendous creative forces let loose, in splendid mutual contradiction and inconsistency, by the rhythmic transitions that we can increasingly document as fact. If we look, in terms of religion, beyond ‘what they say’, to ‘what they do’, we find particularly in the case of Christianity and Islam two of the historically most powerful engines of cultural integration, whose Medieval achievements constitute their real claim to a contribution to human progress. Our eonic approach is more satisfying than either the religious self-explanation, whose apparatus of revelation we can annex, or the purely reductionist explanation, whose commitment to ‘law of transformation’ must wander like a Bedouin through the desert of sociological causation, and cheat the sense of dramatic creativity that entered into both Christianity and Islam

Can historical transformations be religions? This really means that we should beware of the use of the term ‘sacred’. There is no general definition of religion, therefore, we could only answer that we see historical transformation, and men processing social information, and creating or uprooting traditions in a process of eonic evolution, as the Israelites, the Buddhists, or the Communists, make clear. The term ‘religion’ is itself a ‘religious’ novelty, and subject to new evolutions, a point implicit in the understanding of a man like Auguste Comte, a man on the spot as far as this development is concerned, whether we accept his formulation or not. In fact it might seem already out of date, for a new stage requires an order of magnitude of advance, analogous to the emergence of the great religions themselves in relation to the era that came before. Our judgments are confused by the fact that we are currently in the midst of the most recent of these historical transformations, straddling the old and the new. The issue is not religion, whose period of flourishing, by one definition, may well be passing, but the nature of the transformation itself. Is there an evolution of religion? Not unless we have a model that can explain why a politician such as Constantine is, in the end, the real founder of a religion! We do have such a model! And ordinary theories of religion do not. We have nearly answered this question by dismissing it. For what we are beginning to see is the creative response, called religious, of men during great turning point, in relation to the genuine evolution of cultural situations as a whole. There is a progression of periods, and what goes on in between them, as evidenced by the clear difference in the Israelite phase, the Upanishadic phase, and the crystallized religious resultants of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism.

[v] J. Cooke, The Persian Empire (London: J.M. Dent, 1983), Hermann Bengston, The Greeks and the Persians (NY: Delacorte, 1965).

 

[vi] N. P. Lemche, Ancient Israel, A New History of Israelite Society (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1988), John Hayes et al. (ed.), Israelite and Judean History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), J. Alberto Soggin’s A History of Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), M. S. Smith, The Early History of God, Yahweh and other Deities in Ancient Israel (NY: Harper & Row, 1987), Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (NY: Columbia, 1971), Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods (1967), Giovanni Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (London: SCM, 1988), Marc Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (1995), H. Saggs, The Encounter with the Divine in Mesopotamia and Israel (London: Athlone, 1978), Robert Coote, Early Israel, A New Horizon (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), John Van Seters, In Search of History (New Haven: Yale, 1983), Aberbach David, Imperialism and Biblical Prophecy 750-500 (NY: Routledge, 1993), Bernhard Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Sheffield, UK: Almond, 1983), Ahlstrom, Gosta, The History of Ancient Palestine (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), Albright, William, The Archaeology of Palestine, NY: Penguin, 1960, James Pritchard, The Ancient Near East (Princeton: Princeton, 1958)

 

[vii]This is an oral tradition put into writing after being transformed by a ‘Homer’, most probably a real individual, but not the sole creator. Just as a Westerner looks back to his Medieval roots, with a strange surge in the middle after 1500, the Greeks looked back to the age of Troy, a world that no longer existed, and one completely different from that of the polis as it springs into its intense phase in the eighth century. Cf. Denys Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1959), for an account of what can be inferred from this period from the Iliad, the world of the Linear B Tablets, a rigidly structured world clearly in cone of diffusion of the great civilizations of this era. Page notes, p. 222, 229 that while the Epic has a continuous history from Mycenean times, the Iliad is a late version retold in the language of ninth century Ionia. He notes that at the end of the Dark Ages, in the ninth, and not earlier than the early eighth, century, there was a new flowering of Epic poetry that reshaped the materials handed down, and still bearing the formulary traces of the oral tradition.

 

[viii]   Greek Tragedy G. Else, in The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, removes some of the confusions that have arisen around the idea of tragedy, among them Gilbert Murray’s theory that the form evolved from some from of religious cultism. Here is the crisis point for any theory of eonic, or any other, ‘evolution’. The term blends long and short scales, and requires care not to confuse dynamism with essentially free activity in the passage from long to short. He rejects the idea of the ‘development’ of tragedy by claiming that the form arises from the creative acts of two men, Thespis, and Aeschylus. It is an important reminder that, in our subject at least, as opposed to the notions of biological evolution, the large scale perception of ‘evolution’, even at the level of time in our sense of eonic, must resolve itself from the ‘overall’ with its pointillistic impression to the points of creative free action, whatever mysteries lurk behind that. This is certainly true again in the modern instance where the genre recreated by Shakespeare clearly doesn’t evolve, although it lies in the wake of Gorboduc, and Marlowe’s Faust, but simply appears. It is testimony to Spengler’s mixed instincts that he wished to emphasize the Faust myth as fundamental, and indeed Goethe’s Faust appears in concert with the German divide era, transformed into something else. This is a second tale, what of Goethe’s alteration of the tragic mood. This myth is a clear eonic emergent, appearing in Reformation Germany, moving to England for a first treatment, and then reappearing in its ‘commedia’ version in Goethe, just at the divide, the idea of tragedy yielding to the idea of progress. Coincidence? One should think not. It is simply a shirking of theoretical clues to throw away such data, albeit certain it is not at all easy to understand it. This should not be an endorsement of the Faust myth and its tendency to reinduce mythological thinking at the threshold of exacter understanding. But all of this can create mystification, especially of the ancient Greek tragedy, whose institutional foundation helps put it in context in an almost homespun fashion, almost needed after the fantastic notions surrounding the ‘idea of tragedy’. The point is that the Greek theatre was a social emergence of a kind of Greek Hollywood at a level that puts us to shame.

It is essential to see the instrument first. This ‘instrument’, the Greek poetic universe as language, meter, and myth, makes the entire business of Greek tragedy self-sustaining in a way that no future literature (of tragedy) can recover until modern times, and then never with the same self-sustaining momentum. The beautiful and supple ‘blank verse’ of the Elizabethans is still no match for the orchestra of Greek linguistic resources. In any case, we are confronted by a near rout of most forms of thinking in the area of cultural evolution. We see the clear flowering, in historical times, of linguistic and artistic resources, in phase, followed by the characteristic passage to the very ‘prose’ instruments with which to conduct propositional science. This prose reaches a larger universe of discourse, yet is conditioned by its eonic transformations, raising the question, how can a theory of evolution account for its own self-referential passage to prose instruments, and reckon the meaning, and possible, loss of meanings in the denaturing passage?

� Colin Renfrew’s The Emergence of Civilization, The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium B.C (London: Methuen, 1972) after constructing a fascinating model using system ideas hybridized with Rostovian take-off economics, proceeds to apply it in isolation to the ‘emergence of Aegean civilization’, without specifying the relation of this to the Sumerian or Egyptian ‘emergence’, i.e. relative re-emergence or amplification, during phase, ‘ET4’. Here our analysis is entirely different, for it is a clear-cut case of the Hellenic t-stream entering the Sumero-Egyptian cone of diffusion as sequential dependency. The long idling of this t-stream, passing into a Minoan blend, can certainly be called the ‘emergence of civilization’ as sequential ‘free action’, but this would be confusing. Greece is especially interesting because it begins building up a rich soil on the fringes of Mesopotamia, from as early as the third millennium, undergoes a sequential phase in relation to the Minoans, and then has its own transitional ‘take-off’ during ‘ET5’. The issue of the Minoans is somewhat complex, for although it first complexification shows an undoubted relation to the Egyptian emergence, as sequential dependency, its prior state may have shown earlier influence from a previous Neolithic phase in Anatolia, whence, quite possibly, the strong influence claimed for the persistence of ‘goddesses’ and ‘goddess religion’. This is a very strong candidate for the flowaround effect. This substrate of the earlier Neolithic is possibly evident also in the case of Hellenic culture, creating a confusing blend of factors, and the Bachofen controversy and its descendants, about which this model cannot convey much wisdom. And yet everything falls into place, if the crucial factor of phase is taken into account. In Egypt Before the Pharoahs, Michael Hoffman, most remarkably, attempts to apply the Rostovian ‘takeoff’ model to ‘ET4, Egypt’, in a context where it really seems to fit, quite at home. Indeed, the Rostovian takeoff is a creature of transition (the idea is absolutely tempting), but the cross application makes statements about economies of world history that cannot be said to match.

� Martin Bernal, in Black Athena I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (London: Free Association Books, 1987), explores the Afro-Asiatic roots of Classical Civilization, with a particular emphasis on the possible Egyptian sources of certain aspects of Greek culture. M Leftkowitz et al. (ed.), Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1996), systematically reviews the complex claims made by Bernal in a fashion more meticulous that what we can offer here, which is the key to the resolution of why Archaic Greece is both derivative and original. It is certainly true that there were Oriental influences on Greece, including direct ones from Egypt. But the direct eonic sequence highlights the source and t-stream distinction. The former emerges from Sumer, the latter can be disparate. The African influence on Egypt could be real, but it doesn’t follow that Egypt is an autonomous African source of civilization. In the case of Greece, it is clear from our argument that what sources of diffusion do arrive, from any source, are transformed during phase. Greek sculpture starts by looking Egyptian, yet within a century has developed into something greater. Cf. W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution (1996). The worry wart over this issue of African culture in relation to the whole is simply false, for its position until ‘ET6’ is like everyone else’s, basic Neolithic village culture. Instant contact with this phase starts turbocharging something whose outcome we haven’t seen yet, and is especially notable already in the sudden realizations of  ‘t-stream, e-sequence’ mixtures such as the appearance of Jazz. Eurocentric focus blinds us to the fact that one prime eonic correlate dead center on our divide was the liberation of Haiti, against the very Napoleon admired as the executive of the Revolution! A good example of the need to consider the phase and its field, rather than the ‘centric’ source areas, in any account of modernism.

� Coinage A very good example, as eonic correlation, not only of focalized eonic emergence, but of its relationship to the distinction and complexity of the technosequence, econosequence, and eonic sequence, lies in the Greek development, but not invention, of coinage. The case of coinage is especially significant because it straddles all three fences not only in time but in place. The slow emergence of ‘media of exchange’ as bulk precious metals (money but not coinage?), goes back nearly to the beginning of civilization, and in still more basic forms even before, while the emergence of actual systems of coinage and their financial institutions is a Greek phenomenon (China apart), but with the actual invention of coinage, as a technical innovation, occurring in Lydia. As so often a technical invention occurs as a function of ‘individual discovery’, while its elaboration into social advance requires a different medium, here the focal emergent zone of the Greet transition. Glyn Daniels p. 64, in A History of Money (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales, 1994), notes, “From its birthplace in Lydia and Ionia the knowledge and use of coins spread rapidly east into the Persian Empire and west through the rest of the Ionian and Aegean islands to mainland Greece, and then to its western colonies, especially Sicily. It also spread northward to Macedonia, Thrace and the Black Sea, but it was only partially, reluctantly and belatedly accepted Egypt. Mainland Italy also was at first rather slowing accepting the Greek financial innovations, in contrast to the speed with which they were adopted by Sicily…” This example shows the danger and resolution perhaps of the sense of ‘phantom eonic causes’, and that a great deal of our ‘eonic emergence’ is evidently a simple function of acceleration, i.e. booms don’t create innovations, people do, but at a faster rate. Unfortunately, as we zoom outward we realize that economic cause shows macrohistorical conditioning as eonic pattern, and the sense of ‘phantom eonic cause’ starts to recur.

� Open Systems, Open Societies, Open Spaces Our framework of periodization throws an ironic highlight on the critique and attempted refutation of ‘historicism’ mounted by the philosopher Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. His daring attack on a great cultural icon, Plato, gave intuitive expression to a ‘settling of accounts’ for a philosophic tradition that got off on an authoritarian wrong footing, eliminating its early spring. Popper’s definition of historicism centers around prediction, historical or evolutionary laws and trends, and the emergence of novelty in discrete periods. His critique almost defines our subject for us, and our pattern simply proves his thesis to be missing the very ‘historical forces’ evident from his critique. It is of great interest that his argument should open in the realm of the classical transitions. Popper’s critique of historicism is a gesture denying linear historical directionality, more in reference to modern ideology. Popper picks four points where historical process shows, by our argument, an especial ‘directionality’ at its most intense. The era of Heraclitus, ‘ET5, Greece’, Plato, ‘ET5+’, the Judaic period, ‘ET5, Israel’, and the period of Hegel and Marx, ‘ET6,…’. This is embarrassing. He has led us to the most curvaceous spots. This is not the way to defend the open society. Not surprising, however, that Popper is mad as a hornet. A whole tradition is made to seem as if it starts with Plato, who represents the onset of the transitional fall-off period, demonizing the now almost phantom sophists, better representatives of the real creative era. It is no rejection of the greatness of Plato to see the misfortune created by the secondary tradition of authoritarianism sweeping away the green twig of Freedom. Notwithstanding its flaws, Popper’s attack on Plato correctly catches the sense of loss of a great advance that was soon lost in the Hellenistic world, as if the course of change wrought by the transitional era had derailed. It is the falloff of cultural advance and the change in direction between the Archaic-Classical period and what follows that finds Plato negating the democracy of the Athenians and coming into the spell of the new ecumenizing world to come. These two changes of direction, between the onset of the transitional era in which we find Heraclitus and the later reversal in the fourth century of Plato and Aristotle, are especially treacherous for they are ‘invisible to the naked eye’. None of this necessarily invalidates the commitment to the Open Society, granted the all-important question of what the term is to mean?

Popper’s idea of the Open Society is of great value and deserves defense, but it is a modern idea and sinks at once as formulated, as still another ambiguous substitute for a fundamental unit. Is the Open Society a state, the State, an oikoumene, a libertarian free-for-all at the ‘boundaries from law’? Before applying the ‘open society’ to antiquity’s open spaces, it is worth wondering why people never took picnics in this age. Slaving pirates were quite omnipresent. These open spaces are a world better understood by the old-fashioned Hegel with his ‘freedom as the State’. Once achieved, the modern libertarian impulse attempts to counteract the failure of social integration to honor the real freedom of man. Popper finds the ‘opening’ of the Greek Transition to give birth to the Open Society, calling the arguments of Plato or others ‘tribalism’. But this reverses the reality. The Greeks were able to ‘open’ because they were a fresh tribalism at the fringes of the detribalized and mechanically integrated Universal Empires. The ‘open society’ shows eonic determination and falls off as the transitional era passes. The difficulty in Popper’s argument arises from pitting ‘historicism’ against ‘freedom’, the perception that historical directionality contradicts emergent freedom, which would be true if one claimed the historical inevitability of this freedom.

The clear implication that there is a relation between the emergence of a sense of history and its directionality and the onset of great periods of transition should make us smile, for Popper is indeed locating the very sources that show the basic pattern that we have outlined at work. It is does not follow, of course, that the emergence of ‘historicisms’, the wrong term, during our periods of transition grants them any ultimate claim on truth. But there arising invariably is significant. The so-called ‘historicist’ view of the Hebraic prophets was a challenge to the very forces of universal empire and authoritarian despotism, seen by them in the Assyrian world, that constituted such a threat to the ‘open society’. These difficulties with the idea of an ‘Open Society’ are easily repaired.

� P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1977), “The archaic period is perhaps the most important period in Greek history”, p. 49. For a comparison of transitional China and Greece, cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (NY: Zone, 1988), Chapter 4.

Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization, 1100-650 B.C. (NY: Norton, 1991), The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit (NY: Knopf, 1968), The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece (Oxford: Oxford, 1977), Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece, The Age of Experiment (Berkeley: Univ. Of Ca., 1980), The Dark Age of Greece (1971), R.J. Hooper, The Early Greeks (1976), Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (Cambridge: Harvard, 1993), M.I. Finley, Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Age (NY: Norton, 1981), The World of Odysseus (1962), W.G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966), Pavel Oliva, The Birth of Greek Civilization (London: Orbis, 1981), A.R. Burns, The Lyric Age of Greece (NY: St. Martin’s, 1960), William Biers, The Archaeology of Greece (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980). Donald Kagan, in Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (NY: The Free Press, 1991), Herman Frankel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (NY: Harcourt-Brace, 1962), Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge: Harvard, 1990), Jennifer Roberts, Athens on Trial (Princeton: Princeton, 1994), Walter Burckert, The Orientalizing Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard, 1992)

[ix] . � Samkhya To point to Samkhya, is to point to a cold trail, in a philosophy already late, given the world of Buddha and Mahavir centuries before. Buddha actually forbade all speculation. And it is doubtful if anyone in his category could make any better sense of the dualism of prakriti and purusha so obviously a later crystallizing dualism of philosophers. And it is often pressed into service in reversed involutionary mode as a counter to modern evolutionism (Consider a typical Theosophical treatment, Evolution Toward Divinity, Beatrice Bruteau, Wheaton: Ill, Theosophical Publishing House, 1974). Surely the original version was evolutionary, as the scheme of ‘emergent triads’, look at our modern transition partitioning into Romanticism, etc,…). But as the confusions of consciousness are claimed by ‘esoteric’ middlemen dosing out the obvious in sacred increments, the world of Samkhya points to the reality, everything known here is recorded in the ancient sutras, and anyone can be his own guru by dealing with the ‘public record’. The mystifications of these subjects (perhaps the Samkhya is already quite fallen into this mystification, and into philosophic speculation). The history of Indian philosophy seems determined to place a Kapila as the creator of Samkhya in the time-period 600 B.C. as though to assist our delineation of eonic architecture. We’ve seen this before. The evidence suggests that it was emerging from an Upanishadic phase that is registered even in the Mahabharata. The exact form that it took in the age of materialism is not clear, but the influence on Buddhism is so clear that we can feel confident that the main features of the system were more or less in place in the time of Buddha. In fact, a man like Buddha would probably have cautioned against Samkhya as too abstruse, speculative, or impractical. But it represents the ‘grand total’, as it were, as a gesture of pointing to the Indian contribution. Over and over again, the basic elements are repackaged in every generation as a new product with elements added to seal the authority of its proponents. A good recent example is the work of the mystic Ouspensky whose ‘system’ with many elaborations is plain  Samkhya this time repackaged as esoteric Christianity combined with a pseudo-physics.

The fate of this system was denunciation by the later Shankaran yogis who had quietly expropriated its terminology and concepts. And they were not the last. Great embarrassment rings through the history of mysticism and religion in the fact that the great breakthrough of the classical Indian transition produced a ‘materialist’ mysticism. The gem is flawed and the ‘materialism’ is a bit vexed, with a dualistic distinction of prakriti and purusha whose polarity is not amenable to metaphysical explanations. ‘Meditator Thinking’ and ‘Meditator No Longer Thinking’ is closer to what was originally meant. The beauty of the system of Samkhya, as ancient as the speculations of Thales and as deserving of a place in the Smithsonian of proto-science, is its consistency and simplicity: everything is material, that is, all is of a piece, matter, energy, mind, purpose, god, and yet beside this is a witness, perhaps misunderstood as ‘consciousness’, a term they did not use. This witness does nothing, and is neither god nor creator. Everything comes into existence from primordial matter as a cascade of evolutionary triads or gunas, doubling in number in some later formulations: 3, 6, 12, 24, 48,... The dualism of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ disappears and become a ‘dialectic’ or triad. (Purusha is not ‘spirit’.) This dialectic is biophysical, the fact of the body, the mind, and the triadic ‘connector’, ‘e-motion’, desire, etc,… Science might have grown better in this acidic soil, for Samkhya has no metaphysical difficulties when it encounters, e.g. ‘purpose’, which is not a transcendental subject, but another permutation of the basic triads. The ‘will’ can occur in nature at any level as a sattwic process. This is its strength, and also its limitation, at least in relation to western science. Science however didn’t grow in this soil, as if the west were so obsessed with its strange historical myth that it was forced at last to demand a new form of verifiable knowledge, as the modern Darwinists harried without end, bugged, by his Creationist nemesis. But if scientists end up arguing with theologians over the argument by design, the view of Samkhya deserves a hearing. The transcending element is only a purposeless witness. Theistic will, if real at all to such yogis, would only be an upsurge of basic ‘material’. Samkhya is often accused of being dualistic. Surely the reality is that the accuser is confused! We see the reason why the ‘fourth state’ was only reluctantly named, for the philosophic distinction shows the paralysis of meditation that overtakes yogic psychology. But the distinction of triad and the background ‘purusha’ creates a ‘dualistic’ tetrad. But the real dualism lies in the Cartesian thinking that the ‘material’ must exclude the elements of ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’, and then rederive them with a bootstrap atomism. Samkhya is triadic, and indeed one of the great sources for all the distorted ideas of the Dialectic. Samkhya is the great key to the labyrinth of Indian spirituality, tracing its origins and history and the cover-up of the black sheep is fascinating. One of the mysteries of world history is the resurfacing of a distant variant of this kind of ‘triadic logic’ in Hegel as an idealism, and the immediate and forceful effort to reverse it as a materialism in the very different dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. Classical Samkhya, An Interpretation of its History and Meaning (1979), Gerald Larson.

A.L. Basham, The Wonder that was India (NY: Hawthorn, 1967), E. J. Rapson (ed.), The Cambridge History of India (1922), Romila Thapar, A History of India (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India (1981), D.D. Kosambi, Ancient India, A History of its Culture and Civilization (NY: Random House, 1965), R.C. Mujumdar, History and Culture of the Indian People (1951), Paul Masson-Oursel, Ancient India and Indian Civilization (1967), Paul Deussen, The Philosophy of the Upanishads (1966) N.K. Sidhanta, The Heroic Age of India (NY: Oriental Books Reprint, 1975), contains an interesting cross history of the Indian and Greek epic traditions. Joseph Elder, Lectures on Indian Civilization (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1970), Phulgenda Sinha, The Gita As it Was, Rediscovering the Original Bhagavadgita (Lasalle: Open Court, 1987), and Prem Nath Bazaz, The Role of the Bhagavad Gita in Indian History (New Delhi: Sterling, 1975)

[x] The repeated instances of defeudalization reveal a difficulty in the Marxist evolutionist sequence. After -800 we see the phenomenon of defeudalization and cultural acceleration. For an interesting discussion of Max Weber’s views on China, with a comparison to those of Wittfogel in his theory of Oriental Despotism, cf. Otto Van Der Sprenkel, “Max Weber on China”, p. 198, in Studies in the Philosophy of History (1965), George Nadel (ed.) This essay, beside its clear demonstration of Weber tackling ‘ET5, China’, documents the refeudalization that occurred synchronously ca. 500-600 (A.D.) with that of the West: the same long term effect in the Occident from ‘ET5, Greece, Rome’ to the onset of the Middle Ages. Fo