In the essay 'The Mysticism of World History' (1903), Strindberg sketched out a philosophy of history based upon patterns of analogous, parallel events in widely different places and times. The opening event of this wide-ranging sketch of world history is the exodus from Egypt. Similarly, his collection of short stories, Historical Miniatures (1905), opened with the birth of Moses and finished with the French Revolution. Also in 1903, Strindberg began a series of 'world historical plays'; the first of these was to be devoted to the exodus from Egypt, and the series was to culminate with the French Revolution. 'The Mysticism of World History' treated the exodus from Egypt as one of a number of contemporaneous migrations. The Greek myths relate the voyages of the Argonauts; Semiramis, 'the legendary Assyrian queen', invades India, where the migration of the Hindus is already under way, giving rise to 'the tremendous conflicts depicted in the Mahabharata'. In China the emperor moves the capital 'just as Moses moves Israel's camp in the desert'. All of these 'migrations of peoples' accompany 'great upheavals in spiritual life', and Moses 'initiates his - conscious or unconscious - world historical epic by climbing Mount Sinai' and receiving 'the great secret of monotheism, the doctrine of unity, monism - one God, the father of all, in whose name every people will be united' (SE, p. 181).

Strindberg's fascination with the exodus is biblical, historical and personal. While his conversion experience in the Inferno period shapes the argument in 'The Mysticism of World History', the search for a single principle that would account for the chaotic turbulence of world history occupied him from the beginning of his career to its end.