One idol, across the ages
The The Founder-Prophet
The one who hears a single God and remakes a people.
Why these are the same idol
In the Axial Age a new social type appears: not a king or a priest but a single person who receives, or realises, a transcendent truth and reorganises a whole community around it.
The shape repeats: a call or awakening (the burning bush, the Bo tree, the cave of Hira, Zoroaster’s vision), a revelation or insight, a body of law or teaching, and a people remade in its image.
Zoroaster, Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad differ on almost every doctrine, but each plays the same role in the same drama: the founder through whom a tradition enters history.