Our model produces a beautiful insight into the emergence of the great religions, so-called, but at the same time we must be clear that it takes a ‘hands off’ approach to their appearance since by the very nature of a discrete-continuous model they are beyond the range of our dynamical explanations, or explorations. The most we can claim is that something in our eonic sequence, here the Axial interval, produced seeds that flowed into a diffusion zone thence to be raw materials for mideonic constructs, and the mediation of new oikoumenes. Full stop. And that the evidence shows, most powerfully. And yet this ‘explanation’, even as it explains everything, explains nothing, and we must respect the historical integrity of these outcomes by opening a new file for their study. We must trace their historical chronicles without invoking the dynamics of the eonic sequence. Because of their occulted origins, that is extremely difficult to do.

The Axial interval of the Old Testament appears on schedule, while, for example, the initialization point of Christianity is given no explanation in our model. It defaults to mideonic micro-action. All we can conclude is that later men, in the realization of the powerful corpus of eonic emergents appearing in the eonic interval, saw fit to do certain things that later became major religions. And they struggled even more specifically with their inchoate perceptions of an ‘eonic effect’ in action by noting the special character of their source point, calling that, misleadingly, an age of revelation, thinking further that certain prophets predicted what they were doing. This issue of prophecy confused them since we must doubt that interpretation, as we see that what occurred was at most a selective realization among a host of potential outcomes, the contrast of Christianity and Islam giving a powerful indication of this different potential realized.

It might be that our eonic model is too basic, that a deeper dynamic is missing in our attempt to express the character of the eonic sequence. But we are bereft of the means to carry this further, although hints and intimations of such lurk in the data. For example the sudden appearance in concert of Mahayana and Christianity six centuries after the divide, both as schemata of redemption must leave us wondering what we have missed. And the curious Zoroastrian character of Islam near the source points of that other tradition hint at a more complex picture than we have drawn. And the appearance of Sufistic traditions embedded in Islam shows us an experiment in ‘religion-formation’ taken to a very high level indeed, a phenomenon well beyond the capacity of our model to explain.

Let us note what later secularists tend to (wish to) forget, the theocratic ambitions of the great religions of the Axial Age, visible powerfully in the transmutation of the Israelite theocratic state religion into an oikoumene action script pool, leading to the projects of ‘spiritualization of empire’, however confused or unsuccessful the outcome, leading to the powerful dialectical reversal in the modern transition. This was a response to the degenerations of empire so obvious in the encounter of Israel and the Assyrians, for example. We need to take everything in its time, ‘root for the team’ in its time, and then do backflips as we pass to the successive stages of the eonic sequence.