While it may incorporate the best of the old, any new thing is the calling of the future. In Isaiah 43.18 the prophet reports God as saying, “Remember not the former things.” ‘New things’ are not simply continuations of the old, repackaged, as Jesus was to make very clear when he talked of the futility of attempting to put new wine into old wineskins or sew a patch made of new material onto a threadbare garment. The new cannot be contained within old parameters and expectations, nor does it come from the direction we have been expecting it. Instead, it suddenly bursts forth fully formed after gestating silently and hiddenly.

What was the new and radical divine initiative in the human journey of unfoldment being seeded over the Axial period and destined to be planted into the world in its fullness by Jesus five hundred years later on the Aries finale/Pisces inception? Isaiah was very clear that God’s ‘new thing’ had two major elements – it would provide a road through the wilderness, to make the way easier for journeyers and prevent them getting lost. And it would create major sources of new life in what had become a spiritual desert.

God might be doing a ‘new thing’, seeding a new initiative around 500 BCE. It could emerge in its truest form only with active human participation, and clues abound as to the radically new spiritual expectations on humanity at the second Aries threshold.

Self-consciousness, the individual and the capacity to reason were burgeoning, radical new notions in a world where family, tribal and mythic consciousness had been the norm. Zarathustra, the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers stressed both divine will and purpose and free human choice. Suddenly, as a result, there was an urgent need to understand responsibility in a completely new way. Whereas to this point responsibility had been held by the group for the group, now there was a ‘new thing’. From this point it would be the individual who would be responsible for himself. No longer would individuals be able to shelter behind the group. No longer would they shoulder or avenge wrongs perpetrated by ancestors or children. By 500 BCE the reality of individual responsibility had emerged, even though, 2,500 years later humans are still attempting at times to evade it.

The Age of Aries had been an Age of ‘lawgiving’, designed to provide a formal framework within which people could learn how to be in relationship. Although all of the ‘great words’ which had been given, whether in the Ten Commandments or in Patanjali’s Sutras, had within them the capacity to be interpreted at many levels, up to the Axial Age they had largely been taken very externally. Now this key time brought moves to understand the soul, and a realisation that true relation arises not merely out of physical obedience to external laws like ‘kill not’, but out of deep realignment and an opening of the heart in genuine love. Interiorisation had begun, though it would scarcely have made a ripple before Jesus’ lifetime and teaching.

How would that affect coming into relation with God? Right up to the Axial Age, there had been ambivalence about this, and reluctance, even among Jews and Zoroastrians, to really commit to the concept of one God. Most people would rather hedge their bets. The old sites, used for thousand of years, the old gods, and the old way of reaching God or the gods through animal or human sacrifice, still held sway. Over the period covered by the book of Isaiah the sweet stench of burning flesh from children being sacrificed to Moloch in the Valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem, was a normal fact of everyday life for the Israelites. Now, the prophets thundered, God expected something radically new, internalisation of sacrifice and a commitment on the part of each individual to personal relationship with God. No longer simply the placatory external and often superficial ritual, but the sacrifice of each person’s heart and their entire self on an ongoing basis.