The Axial Age

Conspiracy of silence on the Axial Age

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational’, and the relationship of the Greek Enlightenment to the Axial Age.

We have already discussed the confusion in Armstrong’s book over Axial peoples, a phantom category: Armstrong’s confusion over Axial Spirituality/Axial Peoples

This type of confusion shows why people have such a hard time with the data of the Axial Age: they can’t figure out what they are ’seeing’, or what the phenomenon is. Armstrong goes into the question of the Aryan migrations and the different mythologies that diverge from some unknown prior ‘Indo-European’ culture. And then starts to find a theme of non-violence in the Axial ‘ethos’, and castigates Zarathustra for not fitting in.

Does anyone fit in? The Old Testament is no Gandhian tract. The great beginning of Axial Greece is the Iliad, a poem about war. And perhaps a tragedy in embryo.
This is typical of Armstrong’s wrong approach and its dangers. We are forced to point to the exceptions to a theme of non-violence, making plain the falseness of her generalizations.
The subject needs a different approach: what we are seeing is a series of diversities in a set of snapshots, not a unity of thought.
We could just as well say the era of monotheism that comes into being gave birth to the ‘holy war’.

In any case, a look at the eonic effect, and its generalization of the Axial Age will correct the distortions that Armstrong brings to here subject, and also show that the idealism we aspire to in invoking a religious thematic is amply illustrated by the action of ‘eonic evolution’ as a whole, without projecting our current concerns on the past.
In any case, the Axial phenomenon is not directly related to the issues of its exemplars, in this case the tribes of the Aryan migrations and their mythologies.

Darwin propaganda machine and whee

Israel and Archaic Greece

the Axial interval in the Greek world can be seen in itself without the confusions of theology grafted onto it, and the basic dynamic stands out. We can then return to the Israelite case and see the way that the theology which the ‘output’ of the transformations is confusing us.

The question of the rise of modernity has an ironic meaning for students of the Axial Age: Blaut, modernism, and the ‘European Miracle’

“The first people to attempt and Axial Age spirituality were pastoralists living on the steppes of southern Russia, who called themselves the Aryans’,
Chapter 1, first paragraph, of Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation’.

Armstrong’s first sentence in her book is completely wrongheaded, and shows the first of a series of fallacies that completely wreck her whole treatment of the Axial Age.
It is simply nonsense to speak of some kind of ‘Axial Age spirituality’, let alone in relation to some putative ‘Axial peoples’, the Indo-Europeans. Quite apart from presumably unintentional racism the statement seems to suggest that this ’spirituality’ was present in Indo-Europeans prior to the Axial Age.
This type of confusion is at least a reminder that people are having a hard time with the Axial Age and the history behind it.

The first mistake is to confuse the Axial Age with religion. The next one is to think that some doctrine is assoicated with this religion, and then finally that this religion belonged to particular people later seen in the Axial Age spectrum.

The only safe way to approach the Axial Age is from a viewpoint far larger than that of religion. Look at it in terms of the cultural transformations in five separate regions across Eurasia, to note the way in which it is the general evolution of civilization that is going on here, not religion as such. In any case the Axial Age exploits diversity and produces different results in different areas.
It is a time-slice in particular regions, and acts on those who in a given time and place are in the direct path of what we call in the study of the eonic effect the ‘eonic sequence’.
It is important to see that this has nothing to do with the archaic Indo-Europeans in the steppes of southern Russia. There are no ‘Axial peoples’.

Evolution: A Gaian Matrix

Online selection on the Axial Age from World History And The Eonic Effect

The online selections from World History And The Eonic Effect have a lot of material on, and insight into, the question of the Axial Age. Start here: Mysterious Drumbeat