1. The first is of the so-called Axial Age, the enigmatic synchronous emergence of cultural innovations and advances across Eurasia in the period of the Classical Greeks and early Romans, the Prophets of Israel, the era of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, and Confucius in China.

2. The second, related to the first, is of the mysterious drumbeat pattern of turning points or transitions proceeding down a mainline of the diversity of civilizations. Looking at this Axial phenomenon we are forced to consider that it is really a step in a sequence, and moving backwards and forwards we suddenly discover the full pattern.  

In one stroke we discover what was said not to exist, a complete Universal History, rich in interior significance and meaning. We call this pattern the 'eonic effect', a superset of the core Axial Age phenomenon. This pattern is vast, and yet we can in this unique case get a better sense of it from a high-level view beyond the details, a stroke of good fortune.

The ‘Axial Age’ began to be observed in the nineteenth century. The sudden synchronous appearance of cultural innovation in Rome, Greece, the Middle East, India and China in a period centered on -600 is inexplicable under conventional assumptions. Standard causal reasoning about the 'evolution of cultures' fails because of the simultaneity of relative advances in these separated areas. The phenomenon does not emerge by slow evolution from the prior state of these separate cultures. There is some kind of global factor operating independently of particular civilizations. This is not the evolution of cultures, but a series of time-slices of multiple cultures in parallel. Since this period produces a series of world religions a confusion has arisen over the idea of some kind of 'spiritual age', but a closer look shows that the full effect is multidimensional. For example, in the case of Greece we see the emergence of philosophy, science, democracy, and much else that doesn't fit into a religious framework. Behind Buddhism we see Upanishadic yogis, and these shade into a set of philosophers. Heraclitus is a philosopher, but he is a little bit like a sage-yogi. Pythagoras is an actual 'yoga philosopher', almost explicitly. Confucius is a philosopher, but his work produced a kind of semi-sacred, semi-secular 'culture philosophy' rather than a religion. Clearly our categories blend between themselves at this stage prior to differentiation into philosophy and science. We really have two patterns in one, the synchronous emergence of the Axial period, and the sequential series operating in a kind of drumbeat pattern. The connection between the two is at first not clear, until we grasp logic of the overall pattern. 

The idea of the Axial Age was codified by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in his The Origin and Goal of History. We have Jaspers’ observation:

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism , sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra  taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, Part I, Ch. 1.

  For the Axial Age period, we have at least five seminal areas suddenly showing characteristic 'pivotal' intervals in concert:

Archaic to Classical Greece The period from the Greek Dark Age to Alexander contains the great clue to world history. The period of Archaic Greece overflowing into the Classical period lays the foundation for a whole new order of civilization, and produces the beginnings of philosophy, science, and democracy.  

Histories of Israel The phenomenon of ‘Israel’ is in the Old Testament is a considerable enigma but its significance falls into place once we see that it simply reflects its place in the Axial phenomenon. This involves the period from about -900 to the Exile, and does not include the (mostly mythical) accounts of Abraham to Moses. No historical myth, theory of evolution, or universal history has ever produced a coherent account of this history. But the eonic effect will clarify its status at once, and in a very simple and elegant way, if we see that the key issue is the core period of the Prophets around which additional history is adjoined as epic prelude.  

China: The period of Confucius One of the strangest cases of the eonic effect is the sudden transformation in medias res of the Axial period in China. This comes right on schedule in the midst of an otherwise continuous history! The rise to organized states in Chinese civilization begins very early, and yet we see the synchronous effect right in the correct time frame, as an overlay on the prior development. China and Europe are both at the fringes of the ‘eonic sequence’, at this point (we notice nothing in Europe).  The Chinese case is inexplicable in isolation. This shows that the Axial/eonic effect occurs on schedule independently of the local dynamics of civilization.

India: Upanishads to Buddhism The case of India resembles that of our ‘Israel’ in producing a world religion from the temporal sequence, as if sifting from a tradition that is already clearly formulated (relative transform) and existing prior to the transition. We see that some dynamic is operating independently of the politics of cultures and empires in the reactions of religion to state integration. With the forest philosophers who renounce history, India creates a protected zone, a parallel world in the Axial spectrum.  

Early Rome We should include the case of Rome either by itself or as a cousin of the Greek case. Note that when we speak of the Greek period we are referring to a network of city-states stretching all the way to southern Italy. The appearance of Republican Rome in the wake of the Axial Age is prime data for the eonic effect. Note that the Roman Empire is a much later phenomenon, and in fact dramatizes its own deviation and decline from the sturdy Republican beginnings appearing in the Axial interval.