Our brief survey of the phenomenon of the Axial Age is complete, and the purpose of this examination has been more an effort to tune an instrument of further study than an effort to produce anything resembling a comprehensive account. The study of world history is an unforgiving encounter with immense zones of cultural detail and the real significance lies in that detail. And yet we can begin to realize that there is a case for the high-level view, the view of world history as a dynamical unity, an evolutionary whole. And yet that whole is made of an immense diversity. There lies precisely the significance of the Axial Age, and finally of the eonic effect. Diversity is matched by a large-scale trend toward integration. Taken in isolation the Axial period shows us a highly significant moment in that trend toward integration by going into reverse gear, so to speak. We see the sudden synchronous emergence of multiple separate streams entering into a process of realization that creates at least five great traditions that will serve a new age, from China to Rome. This period predates the age of modern communications and was, so to speak, the last chance for such an experiment. Even so there is an element of collision in the diffusion from these multiple sources, along with a blending and re-synthesis, witness the eclectic strains that will go into the creation of Christianity. The word 'creation' seems the right one and it is important to consider that what we think of as the great religions in the context of the Axial Age are really productions of a much later period. Christianity, especially, is in many ways an attempt to grapple with the Axial Age, and the eonic effect, and clears shows its sense of the extraordinary character of the Axial interval. Much confusion arose over that point, and it might be helpful to 'debrief' its semi-mythological terms by looking not only at its dynamics in terms of its local history, but also by enlarging its perspective to see its greater context. 

The Axial Age, we can see, is about far more than religion, and its signature is also visible in the first realization of science among the Greeks, along with the first great experiment in democracy. We must come to a generalized perspective that can embrace such seeming contradictions. And with this we can come to see the innovations of modernity in their proper light, as the genuine continuation, at a higher level of abstraction, of those great early breakthroughs that we see in the Axial period. 

As noted we have created a a framework of study more than a set of interpretations. Each of the elements of the Axial synchronous period are zones of immense study, and we must zoom in at length, now armed with an instrument to clarify the high-level dynamics. It will always be naive to try and formulate some sausage version of the Axial Age as some doctrine or metaphysics of reality. It is too elusively complex. Armed with our 'tuned instrument' we can preempt the false metaphysical versions of its dynamic and then roll up our sleeves to conduct a real study of the incidents given to us by history. Thence we can enrich our modernist perspective with a better sense of the evolutionary character of that modernity itself, at once nimble with the elements inherited from tradition and yet also prepared to 'let go' of the past in order to realize potential of a new age of global modernism.