Axial Age as Mass Mutation

Archaeology of an Efflorescence

Much of my writings here so far, as well as writings to come, revolve around the idea that we are either approaching, or already in the midst of, a Second Axial Age.

This is the overriding context for a matter of central concern to me.

I’ve therefore been compelled to let this article on the Axial Age take form as a central node in the rhizomatic text that this Substack is growing into.

With this, let us leap…

Karl Jaspers introduced the idea of the Axial Age in his 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History:

“An axis of world history, if such a thing exists, would have to be discovered empirically, as a fact capable of being accepted as such by all . . . It would seem that this axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short we may style this the 'Axial Period'.

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 scepticism, 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 anyone of these regions knowing of the others.”¹

According to theologian Ewert Cousins, the Axial Age saw the release of an “enormous spiritual energy” expressed through these charismatic figures who articulated new intuitions about the ultimate nature of reality. These intuitions, by means of the religious and philosophical works that conveyed them, sent transformative reverberations rippling out far and wide. The very structure of personhood, culture, thought, and the overarching patterns of civilization, underwent a dramatic metamorphosis.

What were the essential features of the Axial Age? While I won’t be able to treat this question exhaustively in one relatively short essay, I’ll sketch out four crucial elements here. While the Axial Age brought with it consequences that have shaped the world, the broad patterns of unfoldment sketched here reflect a process that was gradual and nonlinear and does not apply universally.

I. The Budding Intuition of Transcendence

One of the central features associated with the Axial Age is the emergence of the idea of transcendence.

The Upanishads introduced the idea of the unity of Atman and Brahman (आत्मा ब्रह्म है), prophets of Israel initiated the “Yahweh (יהוה) alone” movement at the root of Abrahamic monotheism, Zarathustra asserted Ahura Mazda (𐬀𐬵𐬎𐬭𐬋 𐬨𐬀𐬰𐬛𐬃) as the Supreme Being, the conception of the Tao (道) arose in China in association with the figure of Lao Tzu, Plato in Greece introduced the realm of Ideas or Forms (εἶδος). Through each of these developments, intuitions regarding a spiritual Absolute were breaking in, entailing some conception of transcendence.

What “transcendence” is actually understood to mean, however, can exhibit non-negligible differences across contexts. To take one core example: whereas the Judaic, Zoroastrian, and Vedantic conceptions of the Absolute that emerged amid the Axial Age suggest a transcendent realm distinguished from and valued above the earthly sphere, this is not the case with the notion of the Tao.

The Tao is nevertheless transcendent, albeit in different sense. It is an ultimate ontological predicate—it is that by reason of which everything else has existence. It points to something understood in itself as infinite, evading all conceptual closure. Language, because inherently finitizing, fails. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”

Then, there is the complication posed by the inclusion of the Buddha as a major figure in the Axial shift. The transmission of his spiritual intuitions never introduced a new noun in reference to a transcendent Absolute. The closest parallel in the case of Buddhism is the notion of Śūnyatā (सुञ्ञता), often translated as “emptiness” or “voidness.” This is an adjective describing an absence of inherent existence behind all particular phenomena: all finite beings lack “thingness”—yes, including the very idea of emptiness! Behind all voidness, we might intuit a Void which, once spoken, is not the true Void.

II. The Flowering of Individuality

This idea of transcendence corresponds closely to the emergence of an intensified sense of individuality. The case of Judaic monotheism is particularly illustrative on this point.

Jean Gebser, for example, speaks of “the birth of monotheism, counterpart of the birth in man of the awakened ego.”

What are we to understand by this? Well, he goes right on to say that the birth of monotheism “is also the birth of dualism: man is here, God is there; they are no longer polar correspondences or complements, but stand opposite one another as a dualism.”²

The implication is that this emerging idea of a metaphysical dualism posited in the religious and cosmological registers is mirrored by a corresponding psychological and phenomenological dualism. Or, that the intensifying experience of dualism in each of these registers amount to different inflections of a coherent, underlying mutative process.

Just as the monotheistic God is unified and cosmologically extricated from the world, so the emerging Axial individual begins its unification and psychological extrication. The experience of “self” is reconfigured as a seemingly self-subsistent and unified entity, independent and separate from felt continuity with the surrounding world.

The Axial intuition of a divine Absolute to which the human individual stands in relation marks a major step toward the widespread use of the word “I” as a personal pronoun. And while this development took root with the Axial shift, it took centuries to ripen. This happened at different specific speeds, and in different ways, amid the various Axial cultural streams.

Hard to imagine as it might be, the word I was not in widespread use—it was quite rarely used at all—until the late middle ages. There are those, therefore—Rudolf Steiner and Jean Gebser among them—who assert that the experience of being an “I” did not emerge to its fullest extent in the west until that time.

Indeed, the peculiar characteristics of the word “I” can be easy to overlook. As Rudolf Steiner notes:

“Every other name can be applied by any one to the thing or being to which it belongs. The word ‘I,’ as the designation of a being, has a meaning only when given to that being by himself. Never can any outside voice call us by the name of ‘I.’ We can apply it only to ourselves. I am only an ‘I’ to myself; to every one else I am a ‘you,’ and every one else is a ‘you’ to me. This fact is the outward expression of a deeply significant truth.”³

This characteristic of the personal pronoun hints at the typically obscured connection between individuality transcendence. Linking the birth of the ego, as Gebser does, to the monotheistic development, Steiner goes on:

“The divinity dwelling in man speaks when the soul recognizes itself as an ego . . . But it by no means says that the ego is God, only that it is of the same nature and essence as God . . . Man is able to find a divine element within himself, because his original essence is derived directly from the Divine.”⁴

Just as polytheism was normative prior to the Axial mutation, so was a condition of psychological multiplicity absent of any unified sense of self. There had been no impression, psychologically, of being one.

Now, given our current cultural milieu, I’m obliged to immediately leap in and acknowledge that the idea of the inherent multiplicity of psychological life is making a big comeback, most notably with the widespread popularity of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and its “parts work” approach (though this, of course, has its very recent antecedents—gestalt therapy, Sidra and Hal Stone’s “Voice Dialogue,” and John and Helen Watkins’ family systems-informed approach to ego states therapy being just a few among them).

While the sudden surge of interest in IFS certainly marks a kind of watershed moment toward widespread cultural acceptance, many readers will know that the irruption of this perspective has other, also comparatively recent, antecedents in Western psychology and its philosophical predecessors. To can take a number of examples, walking backwards:

• James Hillman’s rallying cry that we take our psychology “back to Greece” and model our approach to the soul on a polytheistic basis.

• C.G. Jung’s theory of separable and autonomous psychological complexes which grow and crystallize around archetypal nuclei.

• Sigmund Freud’s topographical (unconscious, preconscious, conscious) and structural (id, ego, superego) models of the psyche.

• Pierre Janet’s early discovery of the dissociability of the psyche into multiple, independently functioning personae.

• F.W.J. Schelling, still earlier than these, understood the mind as a revolving door of independent centers, rising above and falling back beneath the threshold of the unconscious in succession.

These examples all signal a resurgence of features of consciousness that have generally been occluded or neglected from the standpoint of the modern mind, itself a downstream effect of the Axial mutation.

The essential point I wish to make here, though, is that the relationship with psychic multiplicity is arguably different from the standpoint of the modern mind. I’ll start by offering this account from Mark Vernon, speaking to what pre-Axial cultural artifacts from ancient Greece suggest about some of the ways they had experienced participation mystique:

“The locus of aliveness wasn’t set within a person’s frame and physique. It wasn’t inside that they felt their individuality. Instead, their identity came from the outside in, with different limbs and organs attuned to external divine influences. The inner life of the cosmos was their inner life. They had little or no notion of the isolated individual, like the early Israelites, and little sense of a unified self who was or could hope to be in charge. To be alive, to be functioning, was implicitly tied up with being porous to society, spirits, gods.”⁵

According to this view, while what we today call “parts” abounded for these ancient Greeks, the whole idea of “parts” would make no sense from within this style of consciousness. They weren’t “parts” yet—they couldn’t be: to speak of parts implies a whole to which the parts belong; a “self” in reference to whom parts are experienced as “mine.”

Yet, if we follow Vernon, there was no stable I here at all, standing in reference to any parts. What there was was a field in which the human collective remained porous to a panoply of divine influences. These gods, unlike parts, weren’t “interior” to me or you. Human animacy was thoroughly immersed in a state of continuity with the flowing activity of gods, expressed in and through the events of the world. Human actions were never separable from the divine sphere—and this divine sphere was never separable from the cosmos.

What does Vernon base this account of ancient Greek participation mystique upon? He draws on the work of Owen Barfield. Laying to one side his more esoteric sources, Barfield looked to both language and art as archaeological records of consciousness. His approach is, in this regard, closely akin to the method Jean Gebser employed toward his Kulturphilosophie, which regards cultural artifacts as windows into the forms of consciousness that produce them. Consciousness fossilizes itself in and through its artistic productions.

Barfield argues that ancient Greek cultural artifacts unveil a condition in which collectivity stands at the forefront. It is not quite accurate to say that this collective emphasis stands against individuality, because the kind of individuality we moderns take for granted still remained latent.

Vernon continues:

“. . . they did not experience themselves as individuals in the way we do. The art accurately depicts how they did experience themselves: as facets of a collective. That collectivity reached into their internal self-awareness because, the thesis adds, they did not know their bodies as integrated entities either, but rather as baggy gatherings of spirited factions. It’s what the art displays . . . The people appear to move as one, as if swaying in a field of consciousness like as many wheat ears blown by the wind.”⁶

This corroborates Gebser’s account of the magic structure of consciousness, which is more primordial than the mental structure that emerged amid the Axial mutation. Gebser, in the following passage, invites us to imagine a radically distributed locus of consciousness, a resonant field of dispersed sentience permeating through the whole clan:

“Communication between members of the group-ego, the ‘We,’ does not as yet require language, but occurs to a certain extent ‘subcutaneously’ or telepathically. The egolessness of the individual—who is not yet an individual—demands participation and communication on the basis of the collective and vital intentions; the inseparable bonds of the clan are the dominant principle.”⁷

This style of consciousness prevailed among hunter-gatherers with more nomadic and egalitarian forms of social organization. Here, the mode of perception that the modern mind has called animism prevails. Numinosity—the felt experience of sacredness—saturates everything. All individuals—human and beyond, animal and beyond—are equally irradiated by it. The world is experienced as a living field of porous entities entangled in interbeing, irradiated with sacredness. Gebser called this the vital nexus.

As the civilizational structures in which the Axial shift took place begin to take form, there is a pattern in the alteration of the expression of participation mystique. The locus of numinosity begins changing shape.⁸

Where these civilizations begin to coagulate, accompanied by an increasingly hierarchical social stratification, the locus of numinosity is increasingly concentrated in the ruler. The sovereign is either equated with the divine or set up as the mediator between the divine and the population (e.g., divine right of kings). The ruler becomes the cultural lightning rod for the sources of enchantment.

This sort of configuration, this way of binding the social body and divinity, seems to be a corridor leading into Axial cosmologies. It supports a new pattern in the concentration of energy and attention amid the group soul. The sovereign becomes a prime focal point for the shared attention of the collective, making a shared sense of identity possible among larger and larger collectivities, gathering once-disparate tribal groups together. However, this increasing stratification also tends toward oppression and despotism, and this is a significant part of what the Axial figures respond to.

Hans Joas therefore describes a “desacralization of political domination” that occurs amid the Axial Age.⁹ The Israeli prophetic tradition’s leap into monotheism was accompanied by the assertion God that is not identical with or in exclusive relationship to the king. The king is instead beholden to the God whose supreme existence the prophet directly intuits. And, like the prophet, each individual, in principle, has access to this divine Absolute to which the king ought to stand in service. This furnishes a new foundation for criticizing the social order, and was likewise reflected in other Axial figures.

Pyramidally elevating one individual above the rest, collectively concentrating the numinous into this distinguished person, the whole social structure of these sorts of civilizations might be imagined as a large scale ritual enactment of the very paradigm of individuation. What is collectively and unconsciously enacted in the social structure, ritually elevating a king at the center, is successfully introjected by the charismatic Axial figure who stands at the societal periphery.

Individuation is the expression of this significant leap. “Outer” ritual structure is transsubstantiated into “inner” psychological fact. The actual ruler is rendered transparent as a symbol for each person’s latent potential to realize their empowered individuality—a potential that has its source and roots in direct connection with the divine.

III. The Sprouting of Metacognition

This leads us to another emergent characteristic of consciousness that arose in correspondence with the idea of transcendence: metacognition. This is also called second-order thinking. It is the capacity to think about thinking, implying a mind that can take the contents of its own consciousness as objects of thought. What was subjective is made objective. What was felt as self is placed “out in front” of self.

I’ll return to IFS and “parts” as an easy beeline for making this point. In IFS parlance, doing good parts work relies on establishing and maintaining “Self energy.” Stated differently, working well with parts requires anchoring consciousness in a stable and abiding awareness from which the various parts and their relational dynamics can be witnessed with continuous, compassionate attention.

The very possibility for conscious participation in this “Self energy” arguably rests on the transformations forged through the Axial mutation. Richard Schwartz, who developed IFS therapy, explicitly links “Self energy” with notions related to the divine sphere that emerged through the Axial traditions (e.g. “Buddha Nature”).¹⁰ Notably, the IFS term “Self” is connected with Jung’s notion of “the Self” (der Selbst), the self-image of the psyche in its totality which corresponds to the monotheistic conception of God.

As consciousness extricates itself from a sense of identity with its own contents (its “parts”), the mind in some sense transcends itself.

The gradual strengthening of this capacity, historically, has been linked to the widespread increase of literacy and coinage surrounding the Axial age. Writing places one’s thoughts outside oneself, just as the exchange of moneys with discrete values invites engagement with numerical abstractions. This movement toward abstraction leads us to one final feature corresponding to the Axial mutation.

IV. The Blossoming of Logos (and Obscuration of Mythos)

I’ll lean here on Aaron Cheak’s very nice description of this feature of the Axial turn: “the fundamental mode of reality-perception mutated from mythos to logos.”¹¹ This describes, in part, a core feature in what Gebser described as the mutation from the mythic to the mental structure of consciousness.

A mind fundamentally grounded in mythopoetic cognition (mythos) gave way to one structured by conceptual reason (logos). In other words, a mind that primarily encounters the world through images and narratives now increasingly begin to favor ideas and abstract concepts.

Robert Bellah, in this connection, describes the “discovery of the concept” as it occurred amongst the ancient Greeks, a development that had its counterparts elsewhere.¹²

Imagine that: the discovery of the concept. For those of us today who are so thoroughly immersed in the mental structure of consciousness, this being the water we swim in, it’s a bit of leap to imagine a context where wholly abstract ideas are nowhere to be found. We are dealing here with the advent of a mind grasps and works with ideas unmoored from any reference to concrete context.

Jaspers’ phrasing regarding this dimension of the Axial shift is also suggestive: “Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth (logos against mythos).”

Increasingly, the ascendancy of logos supplanted mythos in the dominant culture. The existence of Gods was cast under doubt and suspicion. Logos was used to criticize mythos. This feature of the budding Axial mind anticipated the fortification of the modern mind, feeling itself to be dispensing with naivete by busting up and dispersing the dreamy clouds of myth.

Seen from a different angle, mythos was simply forced underground (where, despite the modern mind’s rational self-image, it would continue to operate). The attunement to archetypal presences that had, up to that point, been a feature of consciousness (a central feature of participation mystique) was now widely relegated to what we today call “the unconscious.”¹³ The starry expanse of the mythopoetic imagination now became a neglected backdrop, obscured by the solar brightness of a culture built by a mind wedded, with increasing exclusivity, to logos.

In Jung’s phraseology, a mind structured by fantasy thinking was replaced by a mind dominated by directed thinking.

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We’ve been gazing at the flower that blossomed in the Axial age… this has all been preamble.

It’s time to remember the stem, to feel again the teeming roots from which we’ve never truly been separated…

This rootward movement , even now, is stirring…

A Translucent and Transindividuating Participation Mystique is welling up, breaking in, surging forth…

1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, p. 1-2.

2. The Ever-Present Origin, p. 76.

3. Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science: An Outline, p. 67

4. Occult Science, p. 68-69

5. Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last inkling, and the Evolution of Consicousness, p. 48-49.

6. A Secret History of Christianity, p. 48-49.

7. The Ever-Present Origin, p. 58.

8. This position, positing mutually-implicating developments in the experience of the divine and the sociological structure of societies, is drawn not only from Vernon, but also Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, John Weir Perry’s The Heart of History: Individuality in Evolution, and lectures by Richard Tarnas (“Radical Mythospeculation”).

9. Hans Joas, “The Axial Debate as Religious Discourse,” in The Axial Age and its Consequences, p. 11

10. Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual, edited by Anderson, Sweezy, and Schwartz (digital copy, lacking specific page)

11. Aaron Cheak, From Poetry to Kulturphilosophie. http://www.aaroncheak.com/from-poetry-to-kulturphilosophie

12. Religion in Human Evolution, p. 39.

13. This historical perspective of a mutation from one structure of consciousness to another qualifies Gebser’s statement that “There is no so-called Unconscious. There are only various modalities (or intensities) of consciousness; a one-dimensional magic, a two-dimensional mythical, a three-dimensional mental consciousness.” He continues: “And there will be also an integral four-dimensional consciousness of the whole.” (The Ever-Present Origin, p. 204). I’ll soon be turning toward a greater focus upon this emerging integral consciousness.