Axial sages

Karen Armstrong
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

From John Wilson's New York Times review:

What we are left with, then, is a story of the Fall in which the serpent in the garden is none other than that old devil, Organized Religion. The "Axial sages," Armstrong contends, would have brushed aside the crude question of whether they believed in God: "The prophets, mystics, philosophers and poets of the Axial Age were so advanced and their vision was so radical, that later generations tended to dilute it. In the process, they often produced exactly the kind of religiosity that the Axial reformers wanted to get rid of. That, I believe, is what has happened in the modern world."