The Discovery of the Unus Mundus
Once man beheld light and wholeness, everything had to change.
The Axial Age was an entire world to its own. It was a chapter of human history with its very own empires, wars, legends, religions, and cultures. Some of them perished with the passage of time, and some accompany us today. It is in the Axial Age where we first observe large territorial empires spanning across continents and uniting a vast range of peoples and kingdoms.
Not only did territorial expansion characterised this transitional period of history, but also it also marked the emergence of monotheistic state religions, as well as what we can call spiritual philosophy, the separation of mind and matter. I will demonstrate how this relates to the emergence of coinage and the written phonetic alphabet. But first, let us delineate the exact period we are speaking about.
Historians tend to differ in their assessment of where to pinpoint the beginning and end of the Axial Age. For the purpose of this outline, I will focus on the first and last emergence of large territorial empires with a novel abstract, or monotheistic, state religion. This means, we begin with Ancient Persia, around 500BC, and end with the first Islamic Caliphate at around 700AD. After that, nothing comparable to Islam has emerged as a new religion of similar magnitude.
For Europe, the first half of the Axial Age manifested itself in the form of Classical Antiquity, including the Hellenic and Roman World. The second half saw the emergence of Christianity as a state religion, eventually leading to the political and doctrinal schism between Western Catholicism and Eastern Othodoxy.
In Asia, the Indian Subcontinent started with Buddhism dominating the Maurya empire, whilst the early Qin and Han Dynasties of China established Confucianism as official doctrine. Towards the end of the Axial Age Buddhism became more dominant in China while India was adopting a kind of Vishnu-centered monotheism.
What all of the various ancient empires had in common is a new kind of strategy that had been missing in the previous realms characteristic of the Bronze Age. In preceding ages, empires rarely succeeded in unifying territories beyond the limit of a dozen city states. With Egypt being a notable exception, we find that even the kingdom of the Nile had never created something of the scope achieved by the Macedonian or Roman empires.
To understand the origins of the Axial Age, we need to focus on what emerged from the rubble of the collapsed Bronze Age. This is a particularly dark age, as the lack of sources from any of the larger empires leaves us oblivious to much of what was happening back then. The most notable exception is the Old Testament. The Torah, Tanach, and many of the texts, which would later compose the biblical corpus, provide detailed descriptions of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, their wars with their neighbors and their ultimate conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians.
Assyria and Judah can be seen as the first pro-Axial empires. Not because they were particularly large, but because they exhibited elements that, in combination, would allow for large imperial structures. The kingdom of Judah was the first to (attempt to) maintain a state-enforced monotheistic form of worship, as the book of Kings tells us:
And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest... to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them outside Jerusalem... And he broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah.
2 Kings 23:4–7
Moreover, the Assyrians combined the militarily deployed technology of iron metallurgy with the brutal practice of eugenics among the elite circles, where the noble families of conquered cities were forcibly displaced or eradicated, and ultimately replaced by an Assyrian group.
Another missing piece of the puzzle is the emergence of the phonetic alphabet on written paper, a transportable medium of the written word. The Phoenicians and Arameans were among the first to make use of this highly versatile innovation. After the necessary clean break brought about through the Bronze Age Collapse, this ecology of preexisting strategies suddenly met the propitious conditions that allowed their ruling systems to expand and grow to prominence.
The Persians were the first known to us to rule over a (though largely empty) gigantic territory. We can observe with the Persians a profound synthesis and a culmination of all the aforementioned strategies. The Aramaic script, in combination with the proto-monotheistic Zoroastrianism, allowed a more sophisticated way of expansion than the cruel methods employed by the Assyrians. The mass adoption of the official religion of the Aechemid Persians was a simple way to homogenise the elites of various realms.
With uplifted hands I pray to you, Mazda, first of all, through Asha, and Vohu Manah, that you may grant me the strength whereby I may bring joy to soul and life.
Yasna 28.1, Ghata Avesta
Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity was seen as the ultimate reality behind the myriads of gods and goddesses that were being worshipped throughout the region. He could be prayed to via many deities and thus was easily adopted as a refinement of each realm’s already existing religious cult.
A similar development could be seen in the Greek world with the rise of philosophy. Unlike in Persia, the state religions fostered by their respective polity continued continued supporting the traditional pagan worship of local deities, however, the emergence of Pythagorean and Platonic thought initiated a long and far reaching intellectual tradition, giving rise to Stoicism, a philosophy followed by slaves and emperors alike.
It would take centuries of Jewish and Hellenic cross-fertilisation of thought until Christianity would eventually emerge as a unified religion for most of the Mediterranean and Levantine world. Until the spread of Christianity, we can still regard the Persians, Greeks, Phonecians, and Romans as polytheists. But in the same way as Buddhism, a similarly abstract spiritual teaching, was triumphing among nominally polytheistic populations, the seeds had already been sown for the world to come.
The abstraction that is represented in a monotheistic deity cannot stand on its own. It is only in combination with all of the other mentioned innovations of the Axial Age that its true power unfolds. The phonetic alphabet on a portable medium allows us to spread the message in its exact original wording, thus stopping a monotheistic deity from defaulting to the regional sun god or other highest pagan deity. The means with which the mundane was split from the otherworldly, the physical from the spiritual, is also represented in the most transformative, economic revolution in history: the rise of money.
As mentioned in previous articles, silver and gold had been used as means of keeping accounting records and trade promises. However, the Axial Age provided us with another innovation: the decoupling of monetary value from its underlying metallic substrate. In other words, the separation of mind and matter. Imagine the ancient style of city state expansion politics, only that using a particular mint of coinage would grant you privileges within these city states. The Greeks understood how to exploit this innovation to its fullest.
As Alexander the Great conquered Persia, slaves were captured and forced to work in silver mines. This silver would mint coins to keep soldiers on the payroll, fueling further expansion … The author calls this the military‑coinage‑slavery‑complex.
The Mediterranean became the center of commerce and quickly rose to become the basis upon which the next large conquest by Alexander the Great was undertaken, thereby establishing the Macedonian Empire. Even its fragmented successor states, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, remained enormous for their times. Quickly, none of the old realms of the Levante or Egypt could rival the innovative trade networks of the naval city states in the Hellenic, Phonecian, and Roman spheres.
Yet, the Middle East would soon get its revenge. Already in the 3rd century, Eastern influences were beginning to dominate in Rome. The Syrian Dynasty of Roman emperors adopted a solar cult under Aurelian as the priests of Kybele, Attis, and Mithras expanded their mystery cults into the Roman sphere. Nothing, however, would compare to the culmination of Axial Age mystery in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
All of the Axial Age strategies came together: The detailed written accounts by the four apostles allowed rapid expansion of the message. Salvation through belief in the resurrection was open to all the peoples of earth. And finally, the reign of coinage was toppled by a thorough separation of money and value.
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
Matthew 22:21
David Graeber observes a similar separation from the material attachment to the world in the Buddhist doctrine, leading to an analogous development of retreat and incubation of ascetic communities that would dominate the late Axial Age and early Medieval period.
The resulting tension between the two—market and moral worlds—came to a head in the Axial Age, which, as Karl Jaspers emphasized, was also the time when the major world religions that still endure today came into being. [...] These movements all took shape in opposition to military and political violence, and their rejection of existing institutions was often framed above all as a rejection of debt. They all began with a call to return to some primordial state of innocence.
David Graeber. Debt - The First 5000 Years
What the figure of Christ was missing, however, was the political unification required for territorial expansion on an imperial level. Whilst it took only a few centuries for Christianity to be adopted in 380AD by emperor Theodosius of Rome, the imperial throne required multiple councils to settle on a doctrinal consensus, whilst also progressively incorporating pagan elements of the imperial system. The accounts of Christ were distributed across various sources and required clerical authority to interpret and assemble into what we now know as the New Testament.
The spiritual mysticism of Christ allowed a vagueness and ambiguity when it came to imperial politics. With phonetically written religious texts, coinage, and spiritual monotheism being widespread and established, it was missing the crucial culmination of a singular written standard for what it meant to worship God, explicit legal code, and control over trade and markets. Enter Islam.
The revelation of the Qu’ran to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ until 632AD enabled the culmination of Axial Age strategies and at the same time ushered in the end of the Axial Age and of what in Europe would later be seen as the Middle Ages. Since then, no other text of such impact has been produced in terms of determining the course of political and imperial history. The medium of the written phonetic text was ultimately exhausted in the Qu’ran. In this way, the Islamic holy text was the first mover in this sphere and that particular technological medium would afterwards produce less impactful writings or writings derivative of the Bible or Qu’ran.
Whilst the Bible remains the most widespread text, it arguably consists of a collection of multiple writings and it has since its inception proliferated into a wider range of interpretations and diversions than the (relatively) consistent singularity of the Qu’ran. This does not mean that the Islamic world has remained politically united - quite the contrary.
After the conquest and establishment of the largest empire the world had ever seen, the Islamic caliphates notoriously fragmented and descended into infighting onwards from its earliest stages. The Sunni-Shia split already had its early origins in the murder of Ali in 662AD. Furthermore, the civil wars, or Fitnas disrupted the entire Ummayad Caliphate, leading to its eventual disintegration. Later, the more Persia-centered Abbasids and Egypt-centered Fatimids would arise.
Yet, the radical culmination of Axial Age thought in Islam managed to thoroughly maintain the separation of the worldly from the spiritual, as well as coinage from its value. Despite the rise and fall of the caliphates, Islam continued to spread and the interconnected markets that arose from the Islamic empires remained relatively active irrespective of political disintegration.
Islamic civilization was able to preserve a far more humane market order, largely because—despite repeated attempts by ruling dynasties to the contrary—neither the state nor the religious authorities were able to assert full control over either the commercial sphere or one another.
David Graeber. Debt - The First 5000 Years
The Muslims, due to their relative tolerance of other Abrahamic religions, facilitated a more robust establishment of a broadly interconnected Jewish diaspora. This way, the secluded and esoteric communities of Talmudic Jews could bring with them other forms of knowledge and practices from the East and spread them across the rapidly Christianising world of Germanic kingdoms throughout Europe.
The separation of the esoteric and exoteric through the unique abstractions of the Axial Age enabled Jewish sects to prevail and adapt to various political systems. The most successful Jewish sect, Christianity, formalised its esoteric ritual doctrine in a series of councils, leading to the gradual establishment of the church. Similar to the Islamic world, though not as consistent, the Church would prevail despite the rise and fall of Christian kingdoms.
This perseverance of the Abrahamic sects throughout history has enabled them to acquire many mysterious attributes and establish sectarian offshoots, working in the shadows. The persistent esotericism that survives the destruction of many worldly political systems has contributed to the opaqueness and conspiratorial nature of the successor to the Axial Age: The Middle Ages. Similar to the time after the Bronze Age collapse, the Western World entered a kind of disintegration period that took centuries until the West would reemerge into a bearer of a new kind of paradigm.