Second Axial Age as Mass Mutation

Pilgrimage, Exodus, Odyssey

What follows builds upon the previous article introducing the idea of the Axial Age as Mass Mutation.

Because the very idea of the Axial Age, however, cannot be adequately digested from a single point of view, I’ll now suggest three angles, three perspectives, from which the Axial turn can be viewed: Axial Age as pilgrimage; as exodus; as odyssey.

The final of these three angles with lead us into the Second Axial Age.

Angles on the Axial

I. As Pilgrimage

By pilgrimage I mean a particular view or story surrounding a movement from one place to another. It emphasizes the point of destination. The destination is seen as a goal to be reached. Reaching the goal is felt to be a cause for celebration. The goal is often considered to bring some sort of improvement in the condition of those who make the journey. If not this, then it is at least considered to bring some kind of gain, or to introduce something new that had not previously been the case.

The myth of progress reigns.

The Axial age can be construed as a mass pilgrimage toward emergent dimensions in consciousness and culture.

Toward conceptual reason. Toward the sense of a transcendent dimension of existence. Toward metacognition. Toward an emerging sense of intensified individuality.

II. As Exodus

By exodus I mean a particular view or story surrounding a movement from one place to another. It emphasizes the point of departure. The starting point is seen as a home that is lost. Whether due to forceful banishment or some other necessitating cause, this disconnection from home is cause for grief. The loss is felt to be a deprivation or disconnection from an original state in those who make the journey.

The myth of the fall reigns.

Here we may consider the Axial age in light of what Charles Taylor called “the great disembedding.”¹ There is an uprooting, a divorce from structures that once held and contained humanity.

This is a movement away from participation mystique.

Away from embeddedness in a mythic cosmos permeated by divinities. Away from consistent attunement to an archetypal and numinous dimension whereby symbolic reality shines through the whole of earthly existence. Away from immediately felt, unquestioned continuity and identity with body and with earth. Away from a cosmos experienced as continuous, unbroken, and whole, even amidst multiplicity and flux.

And, of key importance to my central philosophical project: Away from the vital bonds of the clan, away from lived experience of a collectively dispersed locus of consciousness.

According to Richard Tarnas, Robert Bellah once remarked that “the theoretic, disembedded, is suicidal.”² In other words, if the rational consciousness forged during the Axial Age remains cut off from its roots in mythos and soma, desensitized to Eros and archetype, divorced from self-evident communion with the earth community, then it is bound to end in self-termination.

III. As Odyssey

This final angle recognizes Tarnas’s insight that the myth of progress (pilgrimage) and the myth of the fall (exodus) stand as relative and partial truths that must not be held as totalizing lest we lose sight of the greater whole.³

Pilgrimage and exodus stand as complementary halves in a movement that is itself only half of the picture.

By odyssey I mean a particular view or story that emphasizes the pattern of departure and return. The starting point is seen as a home that, for some reason, is departed from for a time. The destination is that same home. The key point of the odyssey, however, is that there is a fundamental transformation effected by the journey that took place. One does not return home unchanged.

The view of Axial Age as odyssey, then, is a counterpart to the pattern of initiation. The clearest example of this is a rite of passage. The initiate is ritually separated from home and community. From there, an ordeal takes place—often with life or death hanging in the balance. If this ordeal is navigated successfully, then the initiate returns home transformed, prepared to reenter community from a place of greater maturity.

This angle—Axial Age as odyssey—also corresponds directly to the movement of polarity and intensification in consciousness I introduced previously: “the tendency at once to individuate [polarity] and to connect [intensification], to detach [polarity] but so as either to retain or to reproduce attachment [intensification]” (Coleridge).

This necessarily incorporates the notion of a Second Axial Age.

First Axial Age: polarity.
Second Axial Age: intensification.

We see this pattern articulated by Ewert Cousins who, drawing influence from Teilhard de Chardin, did much to popularize the notion of a Second Axial Age. As he put it:

“In this Second Axial Period we must rediscover the dimensions of consciousness of the spirituality of the primal peoples of the pre-Axial Period . . . this consciousness was collective and cosmic, rooted in the earth and the life cycles . . . Having developed self-reflective, analytic, critical consciousness in the First Axial Period, we must now, while retaining these values, reappropriate and integrate into that consciousness the collective and cosmic dimensions of the pre-Axial consciousness.”⁴

“While retaining these values.” There is a preservation of what emerged amid the departure alongside a reintegration of what was left behind.

In this same vein, Richard Tarnas considers the central task of a Second Axial Age to be the “recovery of the unconscious”⁵—a conscious reconnection with what has been habitually submerged or cast out to the cultural periphery as modernity took root.

Among the profoundest articulations, in my view, of what the Second Axial Age entails can be found in Jean Gebser’s description of the integral mutation of consciousness. In Gebser’s thought, we discover a finer differentiation in what Jung referred to as “the unconscious.”

We find a magic structure of consciousness—wherein human consciousness is distributed, permeating the group soul, each individual experientially entangled with the others. The entangled clan is further entangled, experientially, with the environmental surround. The present moment, as experienced, is ever-entangled with moments past and future in a nonlinear fullness of time. No distinction arises between material appearances and symbolic realities—symbol is concrete, phenomenal reality is inherently metaphorical. Synchronicity is experienced as a perpetual, ever-present reality.

We also find a mythic structure of consciousness—in which a deepening awareness of soul begins to bloom. A meaningful cosmos still prevails as the symbolic realm begins to move “inward,” taking on a more ethereal, dreamlike quality. The symbolic roots of existence increasingly show forth as divine personalities—as gods. The stories and narratives that interweave these divinities into great dramas become more differentiated, lucid, intense. The stuff of individuality pervades consciousness, even while remaining largely impersonal, not yet fully taking residence in the individual person. The sensitivity to cosmic polarity, to a sense of reality as a play of opposite yet complementary principles, begins to show forth and stabilize—as felt in cycles of time, whether through the oscillations of night and day or the recurring circulation of the seasons. Human beings begin a partial extrication from the earth.

While these magic and mythic structures of consciousness are in one sense distinct, they undeniably blend and bleed together, making it difficult to completely tease them apart.

The Axial Age corresponds to what Gebser deemed the mental mutation of consciousness, culminating in the mental-rational consciousness that today remains dominant. The sense time as history, as linear time, breaks free of mythic cyclical time. Everything articulated in the previous article rushes forward, as the mythic and magic orientations toward existence recede into the background. Those still attuned to these more primordial structures are relegated to the margins of the dominant culture, while for the rest they continue operating below the surface as “the unconscious.” The partial extrication initiated in the mythic structure culminates in the dualistic modern consciousness.

Mass Mutation

A Second Axial Age corresponds with the integral mutation of consciousness that Gebser devoted his life to articulating. There are many possible ways of attempting to describe this—although verbal description, alone, is inadequate. One accurate way of putting it would be to say that the realization of integral consciousness entails a revival and flourishing of participation mystique—albeit a transformed participation mystique that preserves the cosmogenic imperative toward intensified individuation that arose amid the Axial Age, recovering and integrating the more primordial structures of consciousness even while growing beyond them.

It must also be acknowledged that Gebser understood this as a fundamentally spiritual process.

The presently emerging integral structure is marked by a condition Gebser described as diaphaneity: consciousness becomes fully transparent to the interplay between the magic, mythic, and mental structures. “Transparency (diaphaneity),” he writes, “is the form of manifestation (epiphany) of the spiritual.”⁶ Speaking of the integral mutation, he asserts that “the decisive role in this event will be played by the spiritual,” and that “since the spiritual may well precipitate the mutations, it is therefore of signal importance whether or not the strength achieved by our consciousness will comprehend the originary presence of the spiritual.”⁷

What is perhaps most challenging of all to grasp in Gebser is the claim that the integral consciousness, and its awareness of the spiritual, also entails a radically transformed perception of, relationship with, time.

Origin: The Primordial Leap (Ursprung)

Seen as a corridor to the integral consciousness, a mutative interval, what does a Second Axial Age look like? What does it require of us?

As the mental-rational structure of consciousness moves further into its deficient phase (reflected in what many are calling the metacrisis), exhausted civilizational structures begin breaking down. Amid the cracks, new (and ancient) realities begin shining through.

The dispositions corresponding to the magic, mythic, and mental structures of consciousness increasingly begin to commingle. Their distinct space-time modalities and their unique configurations of self-other-and-world begin to oscillate and flow together.

Animism comes rushing back as long-ignored and more-than-human and more-than-egoic sources of agency—seen and unseen—make themselves felt and known.

Imaginal causality comes to the fore amid strengthening intuitions of the living symbols through which the world soul speaks its meanings, “those superior significances in which we have a share”⁸ and which we come to know only through constellations of moments whose meaningful connections are revealed through the unfolding of time.

Living reality consistently overflows and pours over the designated lines of our maps of reality, its insistent complexity transgressing the boundaries of even our most sophisticated conceptual frameworks, reminding us that more than conceptual reason is required to be in relationship with the real.

Things get weird, and much as we might wish to recoil, attempting to cling to the familiar structures of the modern civilizational pattern, we discover not only that those structures are already dissolving, but also that we are already thoroughly and co-creatively entangled with these strange “new” realities in our midst.

We can’t navigate this mutation alone. We must feel our way into “a further union, a deeper communion”⁹ with those many others in connection with whom we may live into greater creative potentials than we, alone, can realize.

We can’t navigate this mutation alone. We must realize that we all have our roots in that mysterious ((( O R I G I N ))) from which all these structures, all these mutations, have surged forth—the ever-present source in which this entire unfolding lay wholly latent “before” the springing forth of time itself.

We can’t navigate this mutation alone. We are tasked during our inescapably liminal time of crisis, and potential renewal, with leaping together into co-conscious participation with the creative influence of Origin, in primordial trust.

This happens in the uncanny space where volition and surrender are reconciled… where leaping and being leapt are revealed as two faces of the same whole…

We might describe this as causal leadership. We might call it soul’s calling. Or, falling in love with the future.

Crucially, this mutation calls upon us to leap beyond the flowering of indivduality that followed the first Axial mutation. Amid the Second Axial Age, we are called to become more-than-individual.

More to come on this…

With this, let us take the leap…

1. Charles Taylor, “What was the Axial Revolution?”, in The Axial Age and its Consequences, p. 42.

2. Tarnas expressed this during a 2016 lecture at the California Institute of Integral Studies, for a class entitled “Radical Mythospeculation.” The use of the term theoretic traces back to the work of Merlin Donald who, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, described a cumulative emergence of mimetic, narrative, and theoretic cultures, each with their own structures of consciousness.

3. Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, “Two Paradigms of History,” p. 11-15.

4. Ewert Cousins, The World Religions: Facing Modernity Together

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5464ade0e4b055bfb204446e/t/572119ca55598627640bea88/1461787082702/The+World+Religions+-+Facing+Modernity+Together.pdf

5. From the “Radical Mythospeculation” lectures.

6. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p. 6.

7. The Ever-Present Origin, p. 29.

8. The phrase comes from a translation of a 1925 letter written by Rilke.

9. “We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion”
—T.S. Eliot, East Coker

Gebser recognized Eliot as a harbinger of the emerging integral consciousness.