The Axial Age

In an earlier post we suggested that religion is a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon. Religion changes all the time, and at the present time it appears to be at a transition point where (like many other aspects of human culture) it could change dramatically in the coming years, decades, and centuries.
But before we begin to look at what those changes might look like as a 21st century spirituality evolves, it might be helpful to look at a model of the long-term evolution of human religion which both helps us to clearly see how religion has evolved in the past and provides a framework for speculation on where religion is headed in the future.
 
The model that we are referring to is the Axial Age, a concept proposed by Karl Jaspers in 1949. Jaspers’ model is not universally accepted today by historians of religion, and clearly it has its share of deficiencies and controversies. But despite those shortcomings, it provides the most useful framework for thinking about the “big picture” of the evolution of human religion.
 
Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age” to describe a period of human history, running from approximately the 8th century BCE to close to the beginning of the Christian era, during which there was a radical shift in religious consciousness in civilizations across the globe. Religion prior to this period tended to be fairly uniform in the various cultures covering the Earth; but during this period, in many civilizations we see the slow emergence of a dramatically modified sense of Spirit, almost as if human consciousness turned on an "axis" and, spiritually speaking,  made a shift to something radically different from what preceded it.
 
 Using Jaspers’ model, we can distinguish between pre-Axial religion, Axial Age religion (represented by the various world religions that are still with us today), and what we will refer to as post-Axial religion, or the newly emerging sense of Spirit that could form the basis of what religion will look like in the future.
 
Pre-Axial Religion
 
We can refer to the period from the earliest evidence of human awareness of a spiritual dimension as early as 40,000 BCE to the 8th or 9th c. BCE as pre-Axial religion. During this extended period, religion throughout the world tended to contain some combination of the following elements:

• Awareness of a spiritual dimension, or what we might describe using contemporary language as a sense of a real dimension of existence that differed from (though was often seen as also present in) the tangible world of matter. In other words, there existed a religious sensibility of some type

• Belief that this spiritual dimension was found in multiple entities, some being presences in nature (referred to by historians of religion as animism), others being personified deities in a “heavenly” realm (i.e., polytheism)
• An essential quality of the spiritual dimension was power. Whether spirits in nature or deities in a heavenly realm, the spiritual entities of pre-Axial religion were understood primarily in terms of their power, and in particular their power over the tangible aspects of human existence that were necessary for survival (crops, game, weather, births, health, protection from enemies, etc.). Moral qualities and an afterlife typically were not significant aspects of the spiritual dimension in pre-Axial religion
• Sacrifice was the primary behavior that established a relationship between the spirits and the human realm. Animals, plants, and even humans were sacrificed to the spiritual powers in the belief that in return for such sacrifice, the spirits/gods would bestow benefits on the sacrificing parties. Morality, while certainly not absent, was not a prominent element in how humans related to the sacred
• Divine beings often acted in a very capricious manner, displaying qualities such as anger, jealousy, favoritism, etc. Gods, in other words, were seen as fearful beings more so than morally exemplary beings
• Acting in a manner that was understood to be “religious” was largely a matter of following rules about giving to the gods what they wanted in order to avoid divine wrath and hopefully (though not in any guaranteed sense) secure divine protection. The human-divine relationship was largely a transactional one, in which parties on both sides could nevertheless be somewhat capricious and unpredictable at times

 
To summarize, in the pre-Axial era humans recognized the presence of invisible, powerful spiritual presences in this world and in a heavenly realm, but they understood these spiritual realities as something that was primarily a source of power, and something that was related to through the performance of sacrifices. Moral qualities (kindness, generosity, compassion, justness, etc.) were neither seen as part of the nature of spiritual reality nor an important aspect of religious behavior.
 
Axial Age Religion
 
And then things changed dramatically, over the span of about five centuries (a remarkably short time in the larger context of the history of the human species) – in China, in India, in the Mediterranean civilizations – in a remarkable manner which would result in a radically different type of spirituality. This change would produce the great World Religions that are still with us today: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism all emerged during this period, in what Jaspers coined “Axial Age” religion, based on the notion that it seemed as if humanity was collectively pivoting on an axis and turning to a very different understanding of the spiritual dimension of reality.
 
More specifically, it was during this period that we see a shift away from understanding the sacred as a capricious and threatening power which is often intertwined in some way with Earthly existence, and toward a perception of Spirit as the unitive and transcendent embodiment of all perfections and the source of universal meaning to existence.

We see this movement from belief in multiple sacred spirits or deities toward a sense of the unitary nature of Spirit in the monotheisms of the Abrahamic traditions, in the non-dualism of the Hindu Brahman and the Buddhist Shunyata/Tathata/Dharmakaya, and in the Chinese Dao. In all of these Axial developments we see an evolution away from a sense that the Sacred is a scattered reality to an awareness of some sort of unity or oneness. This is the period of the rise of monotheisms in the West and the rise of non-dualisms in the East. In the Mediterranean world, the old gods clearly are in the process of receding by the time you get to the Temple period in Judaism, while in Asia the multiform sense of deity never completely disappears but rather becomes incorporated in the larger picture as part of a larger Oneness, as seen, for instance, in the Hindu Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhist tradition.
 
But along with this movement toward an awareness of the unitary nature of spiritual reality, we also find a dramatic shift in the understanding of the qualities of that sacred reality. Spirit becomes the source of transcendent meaning, in the sense that it is no longer solely concerned with the specific circumstances of a given tribe or people, but rather imbues the world with a broader, transcendent purpose and meaning, and the human relationship with the spiritual dimension is seen less as a means of acquiring power and protection for one group against another group, and more as the means by which we participate in universal meaning, a meaning that is salvific in nature and includes recognition of the perpetuation of consciousness after death of the physical body.
 
In addition, Spirit becomes moral during the Axial Age. Sacred reality is no longer characterized by capricious, petty, insolent, vindictive behavior, but rather is understood as the repository of moral perfection. Rather than gods acting like immoral humans, the Axial Age sees a morally perfect spiritual reality which is the source of all moral goodness. Spirit is now associated with love, compassion, kindness, justness, and other moral virtues.
And given this new awareness of the sacred, humanity’s understanding of how it should relate to the sacred also changes. Sacrifice is gradually replaced by virtuous behavior as the fundamental spiritual practice. Whereas in pre-Axial religion, morality was at best secondary to the performance of ritual sacrifices, in Axial religion the role of sacrifice gradually diminishes and is replaced by the importance of leading a life based on moral virtues.
If we look at religions across the globe in, say 3000 BCE, we find people offering sacrifices to a collection of rather unpredictable spiritual beings in return for protection from harm. If we look at religions across the globe in the first century CE, we often (although certainly not exclusively) find people endeavoring to lead virtuous lives in accordance with the will of a benevolent and all-powerful deity or force.
 
Of course, this short account of the shift from pre-Axial to Axial religion is an oversimplification of the complexities of religious life during that period, but the point that we’re trying to make, even in this simplified account, is that religion changed, and changed radically during this period. And, to finally return to the point that led us to a consideration of the Axial Age religion, if we have definitive evidence that human awareness of the Sacred changed radically in the past, why should we assume (as many apparently do) that the human understanding of Spirit stopped evolving around 2000 years ago? Human awareness of the sacred dimension of reality clearly changed radically from the birth of human self-awareness to the beginning of the Christian era… and if so, why should we think that that evolving awareness would have stopped at that point?
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That much of the world’s population subscribes to this scenario of a religious awareness that is stuck somewhere around the first century or so is clearly demonstrated by the manner in which people from all of the major faiths look to texts that were written during the Axial Age for knowledge about God/Spirit. When a Christian looks to the Bible for an understanding of the nature of God, she or he implicitly affirms that the portrayal of God in that 2000-year-old book is more valuable, meaningful, valid, etc., than what a person living in today’s world can know, sense, intuit, experience about God. The Buddhist who looks to the teaching of the Buddha from the 6th century BCE commits the same error, knowingly or not, of acting as if human insight into the nature of the Sacred can only be found in books that record teachings from 2500 years ago.
 
Post-Axial Religion
 
We are suggesting that just as the human spiritual sensibility reached a point in the past that led to the radical shift in the nature of religion from the pre-Axial to the Axial expression, similarly we have now entered into a period where the religious sensibility that has been developing over the past several centuries has reached a critical point where the religion of Axial Age spirituality, like the pre-Axial spirituality that it replaced, will in turn be transformed into something new, something that is more true to contemporary consciousness and its awareness of Spirit. Some of the old beliefs, the old texts, the old practices that have provided humanity with a meaningful way of relating to Spirit for over 2000 years are nearing the end of their useful existence. The human species and its slowly evolving consciousness have reached a tipping point, from which we will enter into the next phase of human awareness of the Sacred. We are entering a second Axial Age during which there will evolve a post-Axial religion.