ABSTRACT
This chapter provides many examples of expressions of axiality that emerged between the two main waves of the mental or rational or theoretic stages of cognition or consciousness. It shows the need to distinguish the three main Axial Age breakthrough domains so as to avoid an exclusively cognitive focus. Historians and other scholars of the Axial Age have pointed to post-Axial Age 'secondary breakthroughs' or 'second waves' of axiality, including Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mahayana Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism. The full flowering of philosophical rationality in axial Greece in the fourth century bce coincided with the creation of the Macedonian Empire under Alexander the Great. The Hellenistic era involved both a dissemination and dilution of axial Greek culture. It was a period of social and political instability, intense migration and commercial exchange, cities built on a scale never seen before and an unprecedented cosmopolitanism and mix of disparate ideas and cultures.
