Introducing The Paradigm Timeline of History

(April 5, 2025) Above is the new paradigm timeline of European history with the paradigm revolutions in red. The traditional timeline below. While the traditional timeline is descriptive it not very insightful in regards to historical causes. It is also overly biased towards the Roman and Hellenistic empires. The translation of runic texts has pushed history further back in time to about 1900 BCE, way before the empires, which makes clear that the traditional timeline is inadequate

At its simplest a paradigm is how we see things as demonstrated above. Shift attention and we see this same picture differently. Being able to choose the way we perceive this well known picture makes it analogous to a religious paradigm. If we could not change perception at will then it would be analogous to a cultural paradigm. Such changeability requires exposure to alternate views.

What is a Paradigm?

(April 1, 2025) Facts must be organized so they can be found when needed. This requires a mental framework, that is, a paradigm for working with acquired facts. If new facts cannot be fitted into a person's existing paradigm they will be ignored. Those facts are just not seen. Paradigms should not be confused with social or cultural classification schemes (which they often are). They exist at a much deeper level.

History has 2 great paradigm shifts between 3 phases of history. The phases of history are shown below with their main religious groupings in parenthesis:

Ancient Pagan Era - Literate areas have religions with literate priesthoods for the first time. Religions with non-personified (perceptheistic) deities were initially Neolithic farmer Druidry and later smaller local religions incorporating Indo-European elements. As deities were personified causing a division between gods and spirits we get Pythagorean, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hinduism as well as the first bardic tales involving personified deities (Homer's works).
Scriptural Era - Literate areas developed religions with sacred scriptures which support and are support by empires. Religions with personified deities are: Jewish, Christian, Islam with corresponding Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic empires. Religions without personified deities: Buddhist starting with Ashokan empire.
Modern Era - Literacy spreads taking religion away from specialist priests. Existing religions split into many and new religions arise: humanists, materialists, new agers, witches, modern Pagans.

The great paradigm shifts are:

Dualist Revolution (500 BCE - 300 CE)
Renaissance Revolution (1400 CE - 2000 CE) Includes Enlightenment & Romantic movements

One example of a paradigm change is a scientific revolution like the one in which plate tectonics replaced the idea of a static earth with rising and falling land bridges. Changes in paradigm tend to follow the circular pattern above. This cycle was first described by Thomas Kuhn in his book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962at http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/revoltingideas/week1d.html

Paradigms Can Be Changed But With Difficulty

(November 27, 2023, Updated April 1, 2025) Paradigms can be difficult to change because they are heavily influenced by humanity's psychology. Either the psychology of identity or the difficulty in unlearning something then relearning. The first learning of something is always the easiest. This combination of change difficulty and identity psychology can make such people having such a "brain-washed" paradigm appear completely irrational to others. Holding onto an identity paradigm will even make them willing to perform atrocities in defense of that paradigm. This was noticed by German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was jailed and eventually killed by the Nazis. He wrote this:

“The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison)

A culture is like an inverted 3-layered pyramid. Its paradigm level is at the bottom supporting a middle layer of religious elements and a top layer of behavioral traditions.

Culture, Paradigms, and Religion

(November 27, 2023, Updated April 3, 2025) Runic texts cannot be understood and hence translated without first understanding their Ancient Pagan paradigm and 3 main religious divisions. At present, no universities are teaching this. The closest they come are studies involving the classics and the more recent bardic tales from Celtic and Scandinavian lands. But even those are studied from within today's dominant Scriptural paradigm instead of from the earlier Ancient Pagan Paradigm.

The Renaissance as an historical paradigm change is still ongoing. Innovations in thought and perceptions, motivated by nature as an authority, continue to evolve.

The 3 main divisions of philosophy revolve around the 3 main questions of existence and thus correspond the the main classification dimensions of religions.

Where Does Philosophy Fit Into This?

(April 4, 2025) The classification of paradigms in philosophy mostly belongs to the field of Metaphysical Ontology involving our assumptions about reality. These involve questions like:

Where do you tend to assign causes? To spirits, to unseen forces, to chance, to planetary motion, to hidden conspiracy groups?
What are the ultimate things which make up the universe? Atoms, fields, light, forms, the 4 classical elements (earth, air, fire, water)?

(April 5, 2025) Imagine these dots represent emotional/spiritual experiences. Many ways exist to cluster them together into various powers classes or deities. The colored separation shown represents just one way to divide-up the data, that is, one way to perceive the data. The Neolithic farmer culture divided the spiritual powers into a set which worked best for agriculture. Their Druid pantheon is at the core of all later European pantheons (along with Indo-European contributions of the planetary deities and the elementary deities)

New Word for the Post-Dualist World - Perceptheism

(April 5, 2025) Because we are emerging from a dualist paradigm many of our words reflect that pattern of thinking. This includes dividing all concepts into binaries such as: good or bad, male or female, mono-theism or poly-theism. The possibility of a having middle state or an uncertain state is ignored.

Percept-theism or perceptheism is a word for the post dualist society in which the characteristics of the divine realm are not fully knowable by a community of people. Not being of the material realm, spiritual influences are felt and not seen. Spiritual influences are not yet observable by material instruments. A person cannot really experience the feelings of another person. Hence spiritual knowledge is personal and dependent upon each person's perceptual filters.