Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
The Axial Revolution introduced a dramatic shift in the mythology of humanity, the story by which we understand the patterns of the world. The predominant mythology of the pre-Axial Age is that of the Continuous Cosmos, in which the world consists of cycles and gradations of power, and wisdom generally meant integrating into existing power structures.
This shifted during the Great Disembedding, when we began to tell a mythology of Two Worlds: the everyday world with its existing flaws, and a Real world that is naturally flawless and free from illusions. Individuals are seen as pilgrims seeking the Real world, and wisdom as the path to getting there, by self-transcending and cutting through illusions.
Stories (a psychotechnology) were developed in the Axial Age that presented the world as a cosmic narrative, a moral drama where righteous actions (faith) led to a better future, and wrongful actions (sin) led to disasters. Most importantly, people could participate in changing the future, i.e. making Progress. The concept of knowledge and being in this world (Da’ath) is fundamentally participatory, in the sense that the actor is immersed in their world, and actions simultaneously change the world and themselves (via key turning points called Kairos). God became a metaphor for the Open Future.
Nowadays, we have a challenge because our cognitive grammar is still informed by Axial Age traditions (most notably the Judeo-Christian tradition), while science is increasingly unraveling the universe and dispelling the mythology of Two Worlds.
Ancient Greece was a hotspot for the Axial Revolution. According to cognitive fluency, information that is easier to process is perceived as more credible. By adding vowels and standardized left-to-right reading, the Greeks increased cognitive fluency and thus the power of their cognition, facilitating their development of mathematics and rational argumentation. Pythagoras brought about the idea that there was underlying beauty and order in the world (Cosmos) that could be revealed by math. He and Socrates influenced Plato who went on to lay much of the foundations of the modern worldview.