10.01.08
Enigma of the Axial Age
From World History And The Eonic Effect
Enigma Of The Axial Age
…the presentation of the eonic effect takes the overall pattern, the transition sequence, as a starting point. That’s the simplest approach in the long run, and the data generates this gestalt upon examination of world history. But that increases the level of complexity, invokes issues of historical dynamics, then of ideology and modernism. But it is an historical given that this data was perceived at first in its second step, the so-called Axial Age. Thus it is also possible to take the eonic pattern as an unassembled puzzle, with its major piece, or pieces, the data and perception of the so-called ‘Axial Age’, as a study in itself. The pattern in this aspect was described by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who summarized a series of perceptions by many scholars stretching backward into the nineteenth century.
The problem is that the phenomenon of the Axial Age finally makes no sense in isolation. Thus we have a sequential and synchronous pattern whose connection is not at first clear. Later the logic of globalization will suggest one solution to the overall pattern of selected hotspots showing eonic transformation, according to a minimum principle. The sudden synchronous appearance of cultural innovation in Rome, Greece, the Middle East, India and China in a period centered on –600 is inexplicable under conventional assumptions. Standard causal reasoning about the ‘evolution of cultures’ fails because of the simultaneity of relative advances in these separated areas. The phenomenon does not emerge by slow evolution from the prior state of these separate cultures. There is some kind of global factor operating independently of particular civilizations.
This is not the evolution of cultures, but a series of trans-cultural time-slices of multiple cultures in parallel. Since this period produces a series of world religions a confusion has arisen over the idea of some kind of ‘spiritual age’, but a closer look shows that the full effect is multidimensional. For example, in the case of Greece we see the emergence of philosophy, science, democracy, and much else that doesn’t fit into a religious framework. Behind Buddhism we see Upanishadic yogis, and these figures shade into a set of philosophers. Heraclitus is a philosopher, but he is a little bit like a sage-yogi. Pythagoras is an actual ‘yoga philosopher’, almost explicitly. Confucius is a philosopher, but his work produced a kind of semi-sacred, semi-secular ‘culture philosophy’ rather than a religion. Clearly our categories blend between themselves at this stage prior to differentiation into philosophy and science. We really have two patterns in one, the synchronous emergence of the Axial period, and the sequential series operating in a kind of drumbeat pattern. The connection between the two is at first not clear, until we grasp logic of the overall pattern.