From Paganism to World Transcendence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen K. Sanderson
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
World History ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Theories Of Religion ◽  
The Face ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Basic Argument ◽  
Social Attachments ◽  
Religious Attachment

This chapter draws on one of the new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories of religion, religious attachment theory, to explain the emergence of the Axial Age religions of the late first millennium bce. These religions—Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—introduced new kinds of gods into world history—gods that were transcendent and capable of providing release from suffering. Religious attachment theory views religion as providing “substitute attachment figures” under circumstances in which people’s social attachments have been severely disrupted. The basic argument of the chapter is that the new Axial Age gods were responses to heightened levels of anxiety and ontological insecurity that accompanied massive increases in warfare and urbanization in the period between approximately 600 bce and 1 ce. The anthropomorphic pagan gods of the ancient empires had become inadequate in the face of the new religious needs that people began to experience, and thus they came to be replaced.

The Axial Age, Axiality, and the Missionary Enterprise

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-72
Author(s):  
David Lindenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Memory Storage ◽  
External Memory ◽  
Broad Perspective ◽  
The Third ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Brain Culture

This article reviews recent literature on the Axial Age as a phase of world history and seeks to illuminate the role of Christian missionaries as part of this broad perspective. Introduced by Karl Jaspers in 1949, the concept has attracted attention from scholars interested in human development. The cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald views it as the third stage of “brain-culture co-evolution,” which draws on the external memory storage that literacy provides. I argue that missionaries have been central agents in conveying such stored knowledge to non-axial cultures.

scholarly journals A Systematic Assessment of “Axial Age” Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence

2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 596-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Austin Mullins ◽  
Daniel Hoyer ◽  
Christina Collins ◽  
Thomas Currie ◽  
Kevin Feeney ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Complex Societies ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Systematic Assessment ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Temporal Localization ◽  
Axial Transformation ◽  
Institutional Foundations

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept’s major global contentions. As a result, the Axial Age concept remains controversial. Seshat: Global History Databank provides new tools for examining this topic in social formations across Afro-Eurasia during the first two millennia BCE and first millennium CE, allowing scholars to empirically evaluate the varied and contrasting claims researchers have put forward. Results undercut the notion of a specific “age” of axiality limited to a specific geo-temporal localization. Critical traits offered as evidence of an axial transformation by proponents of the Axial Age concept appeared across Afro-Eurasia hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years prior to the proposed Axial Age. Our analysis raises important questions for future evaluations of this period and points the way toward empirically-led, historical-sociological investigations of the ideological and institutional foundations of complex societies.

Religious Autonomy and Religious Entrepreneurship: An Evolutionary-Institutionalist’s Take on the Axial Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Abrutyn
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Parallel Evolution ◽  
Human History ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
The World ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
First Time

AbstractThrough the first millenniumbce, religio-cultural revolutions occurred in China, Greece, Israel, and India. Commonly referred to as the Axial Age, this epoch has been identified by some scholars as period of parallel evolution in which many of the World Religions appeared for the first time and humanity was forever changed. Axial scholarship, however, remains in an early stage as many social scientists and historians question the centrality of this era in the human story, while other unsettled debates revolve around what was common across each case. The paper below considers the Axial Age from an evolutionary-institutionalist’s perspective: what was axial was (1) the first successful religio-cultural entrepreneurs in human history and, thereby, (2) the evolution of autonomous religious spheres distinct from kinship and polity. Like the Urban Revolutions that qualitatively transformed human societies 3,000 years prior, the Axial Age represents a reconfiguration of the physical, temporal, social, and symbolic space in irreversible ways.

The axial age: the emergence of transcendental visions and the rise of clerics

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Human History ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Irreversible Effects ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
The Revolution

Inthe first millennium before the Christian era a revolution took place in the realm of ideas and their institutional base which had irreversible effects on several major civilizations and on human history in general. The revolution or series of revolutions, which are related to Karl Jaspers' ‘Axial Age’, have to do with the emergence, conceptualization and institutionalization of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders. This revolutionary process took place in several major civilizations including Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, early Christianity, Zoroastrian Iran, early Imperial China and in the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations. Although beyond the axial age proper, it also took place in Islam.

Ancient Near Eastern Religions and the Writings

2018 ◽  
pp. 356-368
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Snell
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
First Millennium

A survey of the Writings shows surprisingly little contact with the religious environment of the Ancient Near East, in which Jews lived in the late first millennium bce. The reasons for this lack do not derive from lack of opportunity but from the self-confidence of the Jewish tradition in the face of polytheism. This finding seems to show that the sense of Judaism as all-sufficient and convincingly monotheistic had been established at least in the minds of the people who brought together the Writings. Although Jews in the late first century bce were exposed to a cacophony of other religious traditions, their interactions do not show up in the Writings, except as critiques or mocking of other traditions.

HUNTING REPUTATIONS: TALENT, INDIVIDUALS, AND COMMUNITY IN PRECOLONIAL SOUTH CENTRAL AFRICA

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHRYN M. DE LUNA
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Technological Basis ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Foregone Conclusion

ABSTRACTThe familiar mystique of African hunters was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners, dependents, and leaders who created it. Late in the first millennium, Botatwe farmers’ successful adoption of cereals and limited cattle sustained the transformation of hunting from a generalist's labor into a path to distinction. Throughout the second millennium, the basis of hunters’ renown diversified as trade intensified, new political traditions emerged, and, eventually, the caravan trade andmfecaneravaged established communities. The story of Botatwe hunters reveals alongue duréehistory of local notables and the durability of affective, social dimensions of recognition in the face of changes in the material, political, and technological basis sustaining such status.

The Face of the Earth: Environment and World History (review)

2002 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-471
Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett Peterson
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Earth Environment ◽  
The Face

Five Thousand Years of Foundations: A Typology from Mesopotamia to the usa

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Borgolte
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Near East ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
The Usa ◽  
First Millennium

According to the written record, foundations can be traced back to roughly 3000 bce and were found in Babylon and Egypt. They originally served the cult, or more precisely the nourishment, of the gods as well as the provision of ancestors in the post-mortal state. Beginning from the time of the so-called Axial Age, according to Karl Jaspers around the middle of the first millennium bce, endowments involved people, that is the founder himself or beneficiaries designated by him in the spirit of philanthropy. The monotheistic religions of the Near East, which in this respect were perhaps influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, developed an extremely successful type of foundation, namely the foundation for the salvation of the soul. This appeared alongside or replaced the older foundations for the soul, which were essentially meant to support one’s continuing survival in the afterlife and aimed at an enhanced and blissful form of existence through the mercy of or closeness to God. The second universal historical caesura for foundations was brought about by modernity, by removing the religiously-motivated motivation for the lasting purpose of the endowment. The “operative” or “provisional endowments” of the present, essentially an American innovation, have parted ways with a millennia-old interpretation, in order to meet the requirements of inexorable societal and cultural change.

scholarly journals Human responses to the Ilopango Tierra Blanca Joven eruption: excavations at San Andrés, El Salvador

Antiquity ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Akira Ichikawa
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Construction Material ◽  
Research Theme ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Radiocarbon Data ◽  
The Face ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Energetic Analysis ◽  
San Andres

Human responses to catastrophic natural events form an important research theme in archaeology. Using excavation and radiocarbon data, this article investigates the socio-cultural impact of the mid-first-millennium AD Tierra Blanca Joven eruption at San Andrés, El Salvador. The data, along with an architectural energetic analysis of the Campana structure at San Andrés, indicate that survivors and/or re-settlers made considerable efforts to construct monumental public buildings immediately following the eruption, using large quantities of volcanic tephra as construction material. Such re-building played important religious, social and political roles in human responses to the eruption. The study contributes to discussions about human creativity, adaptation and resilience in the face of abrupt environmental change.

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