The Axial Age

From myth to reason: the philosophical revolution that transformed the very idea of God even as the temples kept smoking with sacrifice. Socrates tried for impiety, Xenophanes' one non-anthropomorphic god and Heraclitus' Logos, Pythagoras' immortal soul and sacred number, Plato's Forms and Demiurge and Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, the Stoic divine reason and Epicurus' uninvolved gods — with the Pythagorean tetractys, Greek isopsephy, and the Orphic gold tablets' encoded passwords for the dead.

The many Judaisms: how the Babylonian exile forged monotheism and a portable, text-centered faith, the ferment of sects (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes) revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the explosion of scripture and apocalyptic literature, the developing Satan, angels, and resurrection — and the fiercely debated question of what all this owes to Zoroastrian Persia.

The religion of no-self: the historical Buddha and the renunciant ferment that rejected Vedic sacrifice, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the radical doctrine of anatta that denies the very Self the Upanishads sought, karma and rebirth without a soul, a path to liberation with no creator god — and the emperor Ashoka, who made it a world religion.

Two answers to the same broken world of the Warring States: Confucius and the cultivation of virtue through ren, li, and ritual, completed by Mencius and Xunzi; and the Daoism of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi — wu-wei, ziran, and the uncarved block — with the archaeology (Guodian, Mawangdui) that rewrote their dating, the crucial split between philosophical and religious Daoism, and the Yijing's cosmos of yin and yang.

The republic of ritual: a religion not of belief but of the flawless public performance of the gods' due — the pax deorum and pietas, the Capitoline Triad and the open pantheon of interpretatio romana, the priestly colleges and Vestals, augury and Etruscan liver-reading and the Sibylline Books, the household gods of every home, the state's control of foreign cults from the Bacchanalia to Magna Mater, and the imperial cult that made men into gods.

The religions without a book: the Iron Age Celts and Germani, reconstructed from three treacherous witnesses — hostile classical writers, much-later Christian-era vernacular texts, and mute archaeology. Druids and sacred groves, the gods Lugh, Cernunnos, Wodan and Nerthus, votive swords in the water and bodies in the bog, the Coligny calendar, runes and ogham — and an unusually honest reckoning with how much about religions that kept no book we simply cannot know.

The religion of harmlessness — an axial-age faith that took a single idea, do no harm to any living thing, further than any other. Mahavira and the 24 Tirthankara ‘ford-makers’ within the shramana movement beside the Buddha; a universe with no creator and countless souls (jiva) weighed down by karma imagined as physical matter; the five vows and a radical ahimsa (the monk’s broom and mouth-cloth) that shaped Gandhi; the many-sidedness of truth (anekantavada, syadvada, the blind men and the elephant); the Digambara/Svetambara split; sallekhana, the serene fast to death; the Gommateshwara colossus and Dilwara temples; and a symbology of the raised hand of ahimsa, the swastika of the four rebirths, and the three jewels.

From fire altar to temple: the Upanishads and their debates at Janaka’s court, the self (ātman) and the absolute (Brahman) and ‘that you are’; the first teachings of karma, rebirth and liberation; the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhagavad Gītā; the Laws of Manu, varṇa and the stages and aims of life; the six philosophical ‘viewpoints’; and the Greek ambassador’s Garuḍa pillar, the Purāṇas and the first Gupta temples. A symbology of Om and the four states, the great sayings and the temple as cosmos, with epic chronologies, Rāma’s bridge and ‘Vedic science’ sorted from the evidence.

The mounted nomads of the Iron Age steppe, from the Danube to the Altai: the tattooed ‘Ice Maiden’ frozen in her tomb with six horses; Herodotus’s Scythians, with their hearth-goddess Tabiti, the sword of Ares on a mountain of brushwood, willow-rod diviners and the Enarees; the royal funerals of the Dnieper kurgans, which archaeology has largely confirmed; hemp burned in felt tents, now proven by chemistry; gold stags and griffins of the animal style; horses masked as antlered beasts; and the warrior women behind the Amazon myth. With Herodotus checked against the ground, and modern ancestral claims against the evidence.

Why nearly every people who kept records remembers the world ending in water — the Mesopotamian lineage from Ziusudra to Utnapishtim, its relationship to Genesis, and what the archaeology will and won't support.

How the world began, told side by side: the watery chaos of Tiamat, Nun, and tehom; the combat myth (chaoskampf) in which Marduk, Baal, and Zeus win order by battle — and Genesis's pointed refusal of the fight; the world built from a slain primordial body (Ymir, Purusha) and the contested Indo-European 'cosmic giant'; creation by word from Ptah to 'let there be'; the later doctrine of creation from nothing and the Genesis 1:1 translation debate; and the astonishing Nasadiya Sukta, the ancient hymn that looks at the beginning and admits it cannot be sure. With a symbology of the cosmic egg, sacred number, the dividing line, and the creative word.

The descent to the land of the dead — one of the oldest and most widespread of all sacred stories — and what a civilization reveals when it weighs its dead. Inanna stripped at the seven gates; the Greek katabasis (Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, Persephone); Egypt’s Duat and the Weighing of the Heart against the feather of Maat; the judged afterlives (Zoroastrian Chinvat bridge, the Tibetan bardo, Chinese Diyu) set against the un-judged pits of Sheol and Norse Hel; the god who goes down (Izanagi, Baldr, the Harrowing of Hell); and a symbology of the gate, the ferryman, the scale, and the guidebook written for the dead.

The divine feminine — and the modern myth built on top of it. The goddesses we can actually document (Inanna/Ishtar, Isis, Asherah and the ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’ inscriptions, Cybele, Demeter, the living Mahādevī of India, Guanyin, Amaterasu); the ancient temptation to unify them into one; and Marija Gimbutas’s Great Goddess of a peaceful Neolithic matriarchy, reported honestly as largely rejected by mainstream archaeology. The sublimation of the goddess into Wisdom/Sophia and the Virgin Mary; the 20th-century Goddess movement and thealogy; and a symbology of the figurine, the triple moon, and the Black Madonna — a study in keeping what is revered separate from what is proven.

The ruler as a holy figure between heaven and earth — god, god’s son, god’s chosen, or god’s hostage. Frazer’s priest of Nemi and the dying-king thesis; the king as god (the Egyptian pharaoh, the Sapa Inca son of the Sun, the Japanese emperor, the deified Roman emperor); the king answerable to Heaven (the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, the prophet-checked king of Israel); the documented dying-king rites (the Shilluk reth, the Mesopotamian substitute king); and anointed kingship in Christendom (divine right, the royal touch, messiah/Christ). A symbology of regalia, anointing oil, and the king’s two bodies — with Frazer’s grand unifying thesis flagged honestly as rejected even where the specific cases hold.

How the world ends — and the deep divide between the line and the wheel. The Qumran War Scroll and the apocalyptic mind; the Persian blueprint (Zoroastrian dualism, the Saoshyant, resurrection, and Frashokereti, the ‘making wonderful’); the apocalyptic turn in Second Temple Judaism (Daniel, Enoch) and the contested question of Zoroastrian influence; the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist, and the millennium; the Islamic Day of Resurrection, the Mahdi, and the Dajjal; and the cyclical counter-vision — Norse Ragnarök, the Hindu Kali Yuga and Kalki, Buddhist Maitreya, the Aztec Fifth Sun — where destruction is one turn of an eternal wheel. A symbology of 666, Armageddon, and the world made new.

The gift of blood — one of the most universal and most troubling of religious acts. What sacrifice was (korban, ‘drawing near’; yajna into fire; thysia, ‘making smoke’; do ut des) and the gift/communion/feeding theories; blood on the altar; the substitution of animal for human (the Aqedah, the Passover lamb); human sacrifice reported honestly (Aztec, the contested Carthaginian tophet, Shang retainers); the scapegoat of Leviticus and the Greek pharmakos; Girard’s mimetic scapegoat mechanism and Burkert’s Homo Necans (flagged as contested); and the sacrifice that ends sacrifice — the Lamb of God and the Eucharist, the bloodless turns of Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. A symbology of altar, smoke, substitute, and shared meal.