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.