The Axial Age

“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’.