The Axial Age

Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation is a disguised rip-off of World History And The Eonic Effect, transposed and reinterpreted to grease the wheeels. Note how Armstrong slips in the ‘great transformation of modernity’, but has changed the terms of discourse complexity.

In our current predicament, I believe that we can find inspiration in the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. I From about 900 to 200 BeE, * in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. This was the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Jeremiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. During this period of intense creativity, spiritual and philosophical geniuses pioneered an entirely new kind of human experience. Many of them worked anonymously, but others became lumi¬naries who can still fill us with emotion because they show us what a human being should be. The Axial Age was one of the most seminal peri¬ods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical, and religious change in recorded history; there would be nothing comparable until the Great Western Transformation, which created our own scientific and techno¬logical modernity.

Armstrong speaks of four Axial regions, but that misses the point. There may be dozens. Something is acting across Eurasia in a manner we can’t easily understand.
Armstrong restricts the case of Greece to rationalism, totally misunderstanding what is going on. The Greek Axial interval is chock full of massive innovations in all directions, and it is a total transformation of culture.