The Second Coming of the Axial Age?

For a mind insatiably curious, every domain of knowledge holds its own spell. Yet some fields possess a peculiar magnetism. For me, that field is History, in its broadest anthropological sense: from deep prehistory to the recent past. It is, perhaps, the most self-reflexive of all human inquiries – the study of how we have studied ourselves. Though much of it remains speculative, punctuated by vast white zones of unrecorded life, history is also the realm we know most about, precisely because human beings have always sought to remember. Since the Paleolithic, we have left traces – carved in stone, painted on walls, told around fires, sung in lineages... Some records endure in matter, others in memory, but together they form the great stratigraphy of human awareness.

And within this vast continuum of planetary and human history, there are epochs that exert a particular magnetism – periods where the currents of change, creativity, and consciousness seem to converge. Some ages feel like turning points in the world’s metabolism. Which are yours? Each person, I believe, carries an inner historical affinity – a resonance with certain centuries, civilizations, or transitions. I’d like to share mine, and to reflect on why I find them profoundly relevant to the threshold age we are living through now.

Now, could you imagine? 

Within just three centuries (a blink of an eye on the geological clock!) the world seemed to ignite with philosophical, ethical, and spiritual inquiry. Imagine this: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle walking the streets of Athens; Confucius and Laozi shaping the moral imagination of China; Gautama Buddha and Mahavira articulating paths of liberation across India; Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel refining the prophetic voice in ancient Israel; and Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides expanding metaphysical thought in the Greek world. These figures and their circles were alive, teaching, writing, and meditating on the essence of existence – often unaware of one another, still moved by a shared civilizational pulse. Isn't it mind-boggling?

Even though it first felt like a personal revelation, I later learned that a German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, had given it a name. In his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), he described this period as “the axis around which the world turned.” Jaspers called it the Axial Age – the epoch when humanity, almost simultaneously across distant civilizations, began to reflect upon itself and the meaning of existence.

Yet even before Jaspers, another polymath mind had sensed this great turning. John Stuart Stuart-Glennie (1841 – 1910) – a Scottish barrister, folklorist, philosopher, early sociologist, and socialist – articulated a remarkably similar idea nearly seventy years earlier. In 1873, he published his theory of what he called “the Moral Revolution,” describing profound transformations that unfolded across multiple civilizations roughly 2,500 years ago, centered around 600 – 500 BCE. For Stuart-Glennie, this moment marked the second stage of his “Ultimate Law of History”, a universal pattern in which human societies evolve from mythic participation toward moral self-consciousness.

So what, in fact, happened across the ancient world in the middle of the first millennium BCE? Let’s explore the beauty of it.

THE AXIAL AGE

In Greece, the first tremor came from Miletus. With Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the world ceased to be only a stage of capricious gods and began to reveal itself as phýsis–an order with reasons. Thales named water as the archê, not to reduce reality to a substance, but to assert that nature has an intelligible ground. Anaximander proposed the ápeiron, the boundless from which worlds arise and return, and with it the audacious idea that cosmos self-orders. Anaximenes breathed air into being as principle, hinting that process and transformation–condensation and rarefaction–compose the fabric of things. From there, the current widened: Heraclitus heard in flux the law of becoming, Parmenides in being the stillness beneath change, Empedocles and Anaxagoras braided plurality and mind, Pythagoras tuned number to harmony, and Socrates turned questioning inward so that ethics became an examined life. In this unfolding, Greece did not abandon myth so much as transpose it – from story to logos, from ritual to reasoned wonder, from fate narrated by poets to patterns sought by philosophers and geometers, and it illuminated a way of knowing that was analytical and contemplative and reverent.

In China, the transformation unfolded with equal brilliance. During the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Confucius and Lao-Tzu were living and teaching – two luminous poles of the same civilizational awakening. Confucius sought order not in divine decree but in ethical cultivation: harmony through relationship, virtue through example, the cosmos mirrored in the just conduct of the ruler and the self-discipline of the individual. Lao-Tzu, by contrast, turned toward the ineffable Tao, the Way that precedes and permeates all things – a cosmic principle beyond words, known only through attunement and simplicity. Around them, an astonishing efflorescence of thought took shape: the Hundred Schools of Philosophy, including Mo Ti (Mozi) who preached universal love and social rationalism; Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi), who laughed at rigid distinctions and celebrated the dreamlike relativity of existence; Lieh Tzu, who blended Taoist mysticism with insights on spontaneity and transformation; and a host of others who explored logic, governance, language, and nature. In this ferment, China moved from the mythic authority of ancestral rites to a reflective ethics of harmony and balance, seeking the Way not in ritual precision but in conscious alignment between the human and the cosmic. The world was no longer simply to be appeased – it was to be understood, harmonized, and lived with awareness.

India produced the Upanishads and the Buddha, and – like China – traversed the entire spectrum of philosophical possibility, from spiritual idealism to materialism, scepticism, and even proto-nihilism. Gautama Buddha and Mahavira (founder of Jainism and philosophy of ahimsa, non-violence) were articulating paths of liberation across India – emblematic of the great shift that defined the Axial transformation itself: the passage from a mythical to a reflective consciousness. The ancient Vedic world had been governed by cosmic ritual and inherited cosmology, in which humanity’s task was to sustain the rhythm of the gods. But with Buddha and Mahavira, that axis turned inward. The question was no longer how to please the heavens, but how to understand the mind. Both taught that liberation did not arise from ritual acts or divine mediation, but from direct insight into the workings of consciousness and conduct. The mythic cosmos was internalized; karma replaced caprice; awareness replaced appeasement. In this turn toward inner experience, such as meditation, self-restraint, non-violence, and ethical clarity, India’s spiritual imagination became self-reflexive, aligning with the same movement visible in Greece’s philosophical introspection and China’s ethical humanism: the dawning of a world in which the sacred would be sought within awareness itself.

In the Near East, the Axial transformation took the form of a moral and prophetic awakening. In the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Hebrew prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others – transformed religion from collective ritual into personal conscience. They spoke of justice and compassion, of mercy over sacrifice, they spoke of inner sincerity over outward display. The divine was no longer distant and transactional, but intimate and ethical – a presence to be encountered in the human heart. Around the same time, in Persia, under the Achaemenid Empire, older (Zoroastrian) cosmologies were reinterpreted through moral law and ethical governance, extending the idea of divine order (asha) into the political realm. Across this region, the sacred shifted from mythic obedience to moral responsibility: a new awareness that history itself could be an arena of justice, and that every human action participated in a universal ethical drama.

Beyond Jaspers’ formulation, others have read this epoch as a threshold in the evolution of consciousness itself. Or the emergence of metacognition (thinking about thinking) in various cultural settings. The transdisciplinary philosopher Eric Voegelin called it “The Great Leap of Being” – a civilizational moment when awareness turned upon itself, when the sacred shifted from the external order of society to the inner order of the soul. It marked a reconfiguration of perception: from collective ritual to individual conscience, from cosmological maintenance to spiritual awakening.

UNIVERSAL EMPIRES AND INTERCONNECTED TRADE NETWORKS

Historian David Christian adds a complementary layer, noting that the first “universal religions” emerged alongside the first universal empires and interconnected trade networks. As material and informational systems expanded, so too did the moral and imaginative horizon. Faiths and philosophies began to speak not just to tribes or kingdoms, but to humanity as a whole, making an early experiment in global consciousness, carried along the same routes that transmitted silk, spices, and stories.

Here is how: 

During and after the Axial centuries (c. 800–200 BCE), vast and administratively intricate empires began to crystallize across the ancient world. Political organisms were capable of holding together unprecedented cultural and linguistic diversity. They were called universal not because they spanned the globe, but because each conceived itself as the whole world within its own horizon – an ordered totality, “all under heaven.”

The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BCE), stretching from the Indus Valley to the Aegean, pioneered multilingual bureaucracy, codified law, and tolerance of local faiths. It envisioned kingship as a reflection of asha – cosmic order – and in doing so, provided an imperial mirror for ethical universality.

In India, the Maurya Empire (322–185 BCE), especially under Ashoka, translated Buddhist ethics into policy: non-violence, compassion, and moral governance became instruments of statecraft. Metaphysics turned administrative and the dharma was inscribed not only in scripture but on pillars of stone.

In China, the Han Empire (206 BCE–220 CE) realized the Confucian ideal of Tianxia – “All under Heaven.” Moral philosophy and bureaucratic rationality merged, producing a model of governance in which harmony was both a political and cosmic principle.

The Roman Republic and Empire extended law and citizenship beyond ethnicity, forging civis Romanus as a moral as well as political identity, making it to an early experiment in legal cosmopolitanism.

Collectively, these empires wove the mental geography of the age. Roads and caravan routes, libraries and law codes, edicts carved in stone and scrolls carried by traders, all becoming veins of consciousness, binding distant provinces into dialogue. In this circuitry of administration and exchange, the Axial imagination pulsed outward, circulating from monastery to market, from the ruler’s decree to the seeker’s meditation.

As anthropologist David Graeber observed, the Axial centuries did not unfold in isolation from material innovation. Remarkably, the very period that Karl Jaspers identified as the Axial Age coincides almost exactly with the invention of coinage – and not by accident. The first coins appeared in the same regions where the great sages lived and taught: the Mediterranean, India, and China. These became the epicentres of Axial creativity, where abstract thought, ethical reflection, and economic abstraction arose together. Graeber suggested that the new habit of thinking in quantified value may have subtly shaped the new habit of thinking in universal terms by turning exchange itself into a metaphor for ethics, justice, and the invisible equilibria of the soul. Graeber went further, arguing that to understand the religious and philosophical breakthroughs of the Axial Age, one must also understand the birth of markets. The invention of coinage did more than ease exchange; it reconfigured the moral landscape. As he writes, its ultimate effect was the creation of an enduring division of spheres – on one side, the market; on the other, religion. Value itself began to bifurcate: measured in silver in one realm, in virtue in another. The tension between these two logics – transactional and transcendent – became one of civilization’s most fertile contradictions, shaping the ethical imagination of the age.

In that sense, the Axial awakening was as much about the economy of meaning as the meaning of economy.

In parallel, trade routes emerged that wove distant civilizations into a single communicative field, the proto-global networks of the ancient world. For instance, The Persian Royal Road (connecting Susa to Sardis) and later the Silk Road (linking China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean) transmitted not only silk and spices, but ideas, art, and philosophies. The Indian Ocean maritime routes connected the Red Sea, Arabian Peninsula, Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia – enabling early cultural syncretism between Hellenic, Indic, and Semitic worlds. Mediterranean trading circuits under the Phoenicians and later the Greeks and Romans spread alphabets, myths, and philosophical schools. The Axial cities – Athens, Taxila, Chang’an, Babylon, Jerusalem – became nodal points in these networks: crossroads of goods, ideas, and moral experimentation. These routes turned philosophy and faith into mobile systems: Buddhism traveling to China, Stoicism absorbing Persian ethics, Jewish monotheism interfacing with Hellenic rationality. Trade, empire, and thought became interlaced feedback loops – the economic and metaphysical currents of a newly interconnected world.

Fascinatingly, these empires and trade routes wove the first long threads of continuity across the ancient world. Along grain and gold, these roads carried echoes of thought, laws, and stories that outlived their messengers. As distances shrank, minds expanded: rulers, monks, and merchants alike began to sense the pulse of a world larger than their own. Such growing complexity called forth reflection – new codes to bind strangers, new philosophies to explain order amid motion. The Axial Age was therefore not only a spiritual awakening, but a systemic dawn – the moment when humanity first felt itself moving within a single, interwoven field of meaning.

So, the next question you may want to ask me is – what happened after this? 

Were there any other periods in human history that could be compared to it? My answer is the good German “jein” – yes and no…

HAVE THERE BEEN OTHER AXIAL AGES?

Some researchers have compared the Axial Age to the Neolithic Revolution, suggesting that the two mark the deepest thresholds in human history. The Neolithic turned survival into settlement: humans learned to cultivate land, domesticate animals, and shape the environment – the outer world – into stability. The Axial Age, millennia later, performed a similar transformation within the inner world. It cultivated consciousness itself – ethics, reason, introspection – and domesticated the wild forces of myth and instinct into moral and philosophical order. 

If the Neolithic revolutionized how humans lived on the earth, the Axial revolutionized how they lived within it. One laid the foundations of agriculture and cities; the other, of conscience and civilization.

Were there ever other moments when consciousness, shaken by scale and novelty, redefined its own horizon? There are, perhaps, no perfect equivalents to the Neolitic Revolution and Axial Age, but there have been resonances – partial re-axialities, each replaying the theme of reflection in a new key.

The Islamic Golden Age (8th–13th centuries) was a luminous echo – a re-axial moment when reason, faith, and imagination met in a single intellectual breath. From Baghdad’s House of Wisdom to the observatories of Samarkand and Córdoba’s libraries, the known world became a network of translation and synthesis. Greek philosophy, Persian cosmology, and Indian mathematics merged with Qur’anic revelation into a new vision of the cosmos as intelligible and sacred. Figures like Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and the mystic Ibn Arabi carried forward the Axial impulse – seeking unity behind diversity, knowledge as worship, and reflection as a path to transcendence. It was a civilization that briefly remembered what the Axial Age had first taught: that truth, whether spoken in Athens or Mecca, Sanskrit or Arabic, is one. Its libraries and methods later irrigated Sicily, Toledo, and Paris, seeding the European Renaissance.

European Renaissance (14th–17th centuries). Europe stirred from scholastic rigidity into humanist wonder. Art and science reunited, hand and mind reconciled: Leonardo, Copernicus, Erasmus – each dissolving the walls between disciplines. The printing press became a cognitive revolution, a kind of analog internet that democratized knowledge and consciousness alike. The parallel is unmistakable: a rediscovery of universality through human potential, reason, and imagination, when the individual was seen as both subject and instrument of truth.

The Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries) made Reason ascend as a new sun. Philosophers began to speak of rights, equality, progress, and secular ethics – the belief that moral law could emerge from reason itself, not revelation. It was another Axial-like move: from divine universals to human universals, from obedience to inquiry. A cosmopolitan spirit was born. A spirit that replaced the hierarchy of heavens with the fraternity of minds.

The Mid-20th Century: after two world wars, humanity awoke once again – this time to its own fragility. The United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and movements of decolonization reframed ethics on a planetary scale. Systems theory, cybernetics, and ecology emerged, teaching that everything is connected – organisms, societies, climates, minds. Eastern philosophies entered the Western conversation; Buddhism met biology, Tao met thermodynamics. Something big, some kind of planetary awareness strated taking shape.

INDUSTRIAL MINDSET

Before we step into our own age, we need to pause. Let’s look back at the previous epoch, the Industrial Age, and see what it truly did to the world. Originally, its transformation belonged to Western civilization, yet its logic soon leapfrogged across continents, permeating every system it touched. Today, most of humanity actually lives under its spell, being shaped, measured, and often confined by the same mindset and machinery that once powered its rise.

That era, which built engines and empires, also shaped mental architectures that still ripple through our ways of perceiving and living. The great mechanization of being was its legacy. The Industrial worldview taught us to think and work like machines:

• Efficiency became the new virtue; routine, the rhythm of existence.

• The body synchronized with the clock, the mind with the assembly line.

• Work replaced wonder.

• To be valuable was to be productive; to rest became a kind of sin.

• Humanity, once attuned to the breathing cycles of nature, was recast in the cold precision of the gear.

• Even time was industrialized.

• Once a rhythm guided by seasons, it became a grid of minutes and wages.

• The clock (not the cosmos any more!) dictated when to rise, work, eat, and sleep.

• Time became something to be spent or saved, not lived.

• Acceleration replaced presence.

• Rest turned into guilt.

• History itself began to move in a straight line – progress without pause, growth without grace.

• The same logic extended outward and inward.

• Nature was reframed as resource; humans, as human capital.

• Forests became inventories, and identities became economic assets.

• Even emotion found its price: attention sold, desire marketed, influence monetized.

• We learned to extract meaning as we extract oil – fast, shallow, consumable.

• The world, once sacred, became a spreadsheet.

• The Enlightenment’s luminous reason hardened under industrial pressure into instrumental rationality – intelligence serving utility.

• Knowledge became useful rather than wise.

• The scientific method, stripped of its philosophical humility, turned into production logic: measurable, replicable, monetizable.

• What could not be quantified was dismissed as irrelevant – intuition, imagination, even beauty.

• The world was no longer mysterious; it was measurable.

• The ideal human became the compliant specialist – efficient, predictable, and interchangeable.

• The Industrial system rewarded obedience to process over curiosity about purpose.

• Control replaced trust; standardization replaced nuance.

• In the name of order, we learned to distrust multiplicity.

• At its heart, the Industrial Age believed in an infinite horizon – progress as destiny, expansion as virtue.

• More production, more consumption, more extraction.

• It mistook quantity for evolution. 

And, let's be honest – how different is it, even now, in the year 2025? Beneath the surface of our digital age, the Industrial Mindset is safe and sound, manifesting in straight lines, structured hierarchies, and build into the steady pulse of productivity. The machinery has evolved, yes, but the mental architecture remains much the same.

ARE WE ALREADY IN THE NEW AXIAL AGE?

But hear, hear!

If one listens closely, one can already hear new frequencies humming beneath the old order – the early signals of a planetary awareness that has been sprouting since the late 1960s, like restless hatchlings pressing against the shell of the system, eager to fly.

This awakening began as cracks in the industrial carapace.

The ecological movement reframed the Earth as a living organism, not a warehouse of resources.

Systems theory and cybernetics revealed that everything is connected through feedback and flow.

Complexity science emerged, teaching us to see patterns, networks, and nonlinearity instead of simple causality.

Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity broke through academic silos, while holistic medicine, psychology, and contemplative science reconnected mind and body.

Feminist, decolonial, and ecological philosophies began to challenge the masculine myth of control.

The digital revolution linked the planet into one nervous system, while space exploration and the image of the Blue Planet offered a vision for planetary identity.

Together, these currents signaled the slow birth of a new consciousness, the one that moves from extraction to integration, from domination to dialogue, from the isolated human to the interdependent whole. The Industrial Age taught us to build machines; this emerging age is teaching us to become intreconnected ecosystems (or becomings?) – to sense, relate, and co-create with the world rather than against it.

Are these not the converging indicators of a new civilizational mutation toward a meta-reflexive, planetary consciousness? Are we, perhaps, entering a New Axial Age – as radical in its reconfiguration of reality as the Neolithic or the ancient awakening that birthed philosophy, science, and the great spiritual lineages? And if so, can we truly perceive it while still standing inside its unfolding, or will only distant centuries recognize the full contour of this turning?

Indeed, there is that subtle and seductive possibility – the illusion of believing we inhabit the most extraordinary of times. Countless generations before us have felt the same tremor of exceptionality. Even the twentieth century alone, with its revolutions in science, technology, art, and consciousness unfolded with such velocity and depth that one could easily call it transformative enough. So how can we discern whether our sense of unprecedented change is revelation or repetition, awakening or the perennial mirage of modernity?

I dare to suggest that there are mounting signs that our current epoch, whatever name future historians may grant it, may indeed be as transformative as the first Axial Age. 

Why? 

Let me share one more perspective – the polymathic one. As someone researching and living polymathy, I can hardly resist saying what seems so obvious to me: the age we are living in is astonishingly polymathic. If we take the core formula of polymathy – breadth × depth = integration – then our time stands as its most fertile expression yet. Humanity has reached unprecedented depth in almost every domain of inquiry, especially over the last two centuries. The sciences, arts, and humanities have all tunneled into the micro and the cosmic alike – from quantum particles to planetary systems, from neural networks to ancient genomes. At the same time, the breadth of knowledge has exploded beyond measure: more fields, subfields, and hybrid disciplines exist now than in all of history combined. 

Of course, this is not something that can truly be measured – knowledge is not a static map but a living ecosystem, branching and mutating faster than any taxonomy can contain it. Still, even the roughest estimations give us a sense of scale. The OECD classification lists over 40 major scientific and scholarly fields, which unfold into hundreds of subfields. Library of Congress Classification (LCC) identifies 21 main classes and thousands of subclasses. Academic databases such as Scopus and Web of Science map roughly 300–400 subject areas, while more inclusive counts that span the arts, humanities, and hybrid disciplines reach over a thousand distinct domains of inquiry. If we include applied, emerging, and interdisciplinary zones – from astrobiology to digital anthropology, from bioinformatics to AI ethics – the number could easily exceed 2000 fields worldwide. 

In short: the human mind has never explored so many dimensions of reality at once.

And here lies the most extraordinary possibility: it is precisely today, on the foundation of this accumulated depth and vastness, that the long-awaited integration of knowledge can finally occur. The boundaries are softening. Disciplines are beginning to converse again. Artists collaborate with scientists, coders with philosophers, biologists with poets. It is happening steadily, and seamingly too slow. But taking a big picture view one can see the awakening of a polymathic civilization learning to think with many minds at once.

But there is more to it!

The very notion of the human is dissolving at its edges, the very architecture of thought is shifting. Minds no longer end at the skull; they extend into machines that store our memories, shape our attention, and anticipate our needs. Social media, recommendation systems, and data profiling shape who we become.  What once stood as tools have become cognitive limbs – silent partners in the choreography of perception and decision. Identities, too, have entered new terrains: they blend with algorithms, echo through data streams, and evolve through the invisible logic of recommendation engines. The self becomes a fluid co-creation – part human intention, part machine reflection.

And beyond the individual, cognition itself unfurls into something planetary. Powered by unprecedented and ever growing human input (there are estimates that globally roughly 3.81 petabytes of data are generated every second across all sources (≈ 13.75 exabytes per hour) in recent reporting) information networks, sensor ecologies, and LLMs weave together into a distributed web of knowing – an emerging noosphere that blurs the boundaries between human, machine, and biosphere. Thinking, once a private act, is becoming a planetary event. Consciousness circulates not only through synapses but through satellites, servers, and soil. (Yes – even if that thought feels unsettling.)

Some thinkers describe this condition as posthumanism – an invitation to loosen our grip on human exceptionalism and ask a more daring question: Are we the center or a part of the weave? 

At its heart, posthumanism (not to be confused with transhumanism!) does not seek to erase the human but to de-center, re-situate it, reminding that we were never alone. We belong to a network that is mycelial, digital, microbial, ecological and more. We were shaped by bacteria long before algorithms began echoing our voices. The soil beneath us is alive; the forest dreams in chemicals; the ocean computes in currents. Our bodies, minds, and choices are braided into living systems far too intricate for reduction – and it is within this entanglement, not outside it, that the next chapter of consciousness may unfold.

The arising posthumanism challenges the long-held hierarchy between human and nature, mind and matter, intelligence and instinct. As ecological limits confront technological excess, a new synthesis begins to emerge, a consciousness that is no longer anthropocentric but relational and multi-species.

If this is not a paradigm shift, then what is it?

So, if the first Axial Age redefined how humanity understood itself, shifting from mythic belonging to reflective selfhood, this emerging age may be redefining what it means to exist within complexity. 

But wait…

The Axial Age once voiced its immortal request – Know thyself. First carved into stone at Delphi, later deepened by Socrates into the very art of reflection, it became humanity’s most enduring assignment. And still, here we are, twenty-five centuries later, standing amid neural nets and quantum dreams, still unable to answer it with any coherence. Do we truly know ourselves? Strangely, we do not even share a clear definition of what “human” means – a rather urgent omission as algorithms learn to imitate our gestures, our words, our desires. So how can we claim to advance into a new stage of civilization while the foundational question of the previous one remains unsolved?

...That strange feeling again – like a student who forgot the homework, right?

Except this one’s been pending for about 2,500 years.

Overwhelming? Absolutely.

And here comes the good news. As the 20th century came to a close, and what some might call a new Axial Age was beginning, a method emerged that allows us to know ourselves in ways never before possible.

But that, as they say, is another essay.

Second 

Coming 

of the