Insight Editions · No. 140
Man and Time
Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks
Joseph Campbell (ed.) · Translated by Ralph Manheim, except C. G. Jung’s paper, translated by R. F. C. Hull
The Eranos essays examine human experience of time through myth, religion, philosophy, psychology, art, physics, and biology, contrasting cyclical, sacred, and modern scientific conceptions.
A study guide to Man and Time by Joseph Campbell (ed.), translated by Ralph Manheim, except C. G. Jung’s paper, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Man and Time (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbell; first published 1958 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London) gathers twelve lectures given at the Eranos meetings in Ascona: eleven from the 1951 meeting on Man and Time and one, van der Leeuw's, from the 1949 meeting on Man and the Mythical World. The papers were translated by Ralph Manheim, except Jung's, which R. F. C. Hull translated; Knoll and Wilhelm revised theirs in English.
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
The argument
| Step | Papers | Question answered |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What is Eranos? | Foreword, Corbin's preface | Why a meeting of specialists is itself a kind of time, not an episode in the history of ideas |
| 2. The great divide | Puech, Quispel, van der Leeuw | How the Greek circle, the Christian line, and the Gnostic break differ, and why the line made history possible |
| 3. Time as decree and as drama | Massignon, Corbin | How Islam thinks time as instants of God's command, and how Iran thinks it as the stage of a cosmic combat and a return |
| 4. Time to be escaped | Eliade | How India multiplies cosmic ages to show the vanity of history, and how yoga and Buddhism break out of time |
| 5. Time that is filled | Wilhelm, Neumann | How the I Ching treats each moment as pregnant with possibilities, and how art expresses the creative time of a culture |
| 6. Time without causes | Jung, Knoll | Whether meaningful coincidence and complementary descriptions require a new picture of nature |
| 7. Time in the living body | Portmann, Plessner | How organisms configure time, and how man's knowledge of death sets him apart from his own finiteness |
| 8. The choice | van der Leeuw | Cycle or line, and the "fourth dimension" of time apprehended in faith |
Chapter map
| Part | Paper (printed pages) | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Campbell, Foreword; Corbin, "The Time of Eranos" (xi to xxi) | Eranos as a festival of emergent visions, and its own time |
| 2 | Neumann, "Art and Time" (3 to 37) | Art compensates or expresses its epoch; modern art and the collapse of the canon |
| 3 | Puech, "Gnosis and Time" (38 to 84) | Circle, line, and the Gnostic broken line |
| 4 | Quispel, "Time and History in Patristic Christianity" (86 to 107) | The early Christian sense of time survived in the Fathers; Augustine as demythologizer |
| 5 | Massignon, "Time in Islamic Thought" (108 to 114) | A galaxy of instants and the silent intervals between them |
| 6 | Corbin, "Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism" (115 to 172) | Time as an archetypal person, a time of return, and the combat for the Angel |
| 7 | Eliade, "Time and Eternity in Indian Thought" (173 to 200) | The terror of time and the techniques of escaping it |
| 8 | Jung, "On Synchronicity" (201 to 211) | A parallelism of time and meaning beyond causality |
| 9 | Wilhelm, "The Concept of Time in the Book of Changes" (212 to 232) | Time as filled, seasonal, and to be met at the right moment |
| 10 | Plessner, "On the Relation of Time to Death" (233 to 263) | From mythical cycle to empty time; death known only by man |
| 11 | Knoll, "Transformations of Science in Our Age" (264 to 307) | Pairs of aspects, and the sun's rhythms in life |
| 12 | Portmann, "Time in the Life of the Organism" (308 to 323) | Living things as configured time |
| 13 | van der Leeuw, "Primordial Time and Final Time" (324 to 350) | Myth, creation, history, and the sacrament that binds time |
Chapter maps
1. Eranos. Campbell explains the volume's base (the 1951 papers) and its envoi (van der Leeuw's 1949 lecture). Corbin imagines a future historian who explains Eranos by causes and influences and so misses it; against merely belonging to one's time he sets being one's own time, with the individual as the first fact and events as ways of being.
2. Neumann. Every group has a cultural canon above and a collective unconscious below. Neumann sets out four relations of art to its epoch (the canon as fortress, the compensating earth archetype of the Renaissance, the artist who suffers his culture's poverty, and transcendent art), then reads modern art as the collapse of the canon and the first signs of something new.
3. Puech. Three figures sum up the paper: the Greek circle, the Christian straight line with its center in Christ, and the Gnostic broken line. Gnosis, "an absolute knowledge which in itself saves," is anticosmic against the Greeks and antihistorical against the Christians; it feels time as a prison and a lie and offers an atemporal salvation.
4. Quispel. Read from printed p 86 (the opening is missing from the scan), Quispel argues that the early Christian sense of time, with its kairos, center, and end, did not vanish in the age of the Fathers, and reads Augustine's analysis of time as a weapon against the Neoplatonists rather than a forerunner of Kant or Einstein.
5. Massignon. Islam knows no continuous duration but a galaxy of instants willed by God, the new moon seen by witnesses, and the silent interval between announcement and sanction in which man must act.
6. Corbin. In Mazdaism, limited time is cut from eternal Time as the instrument of Ohrmazd's combat against Ahriman, and time is an archetypal Person; Zervanism makes Time itself the god. In Ismailism, the stupor and repentance of the third Angel open the cycles of mythohistory, and the adept's life is the time of the combat for the Angel, ending in resurrection.
7. Eliade. Myth breaks profane time; the doctrine of the yugas makes history a cosmic decline; Buddhism and yoga teach escape through the instant; and India also knows a third way, living in history while open to the Great Time.
8. Jung. From chance groupings and Rhine's experiments to the scarab case, the I Ching, and an astrological test on marriage horoscopes, Jung argues for synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle.
9. Wilhelm. The I Ching needs a system (Shao Yung, Leibniz, Wang Fu-chih) but thinks of time concretely: each situation has its time, and the art is harmony with it.
10. Plessner. The rise of linear time goes with ego-consciousness and death as a problem; its secular decline leaves empty, fragmented time.
11. Knoll. Science moves from a homogeneous causal picture to complementary pairs of aspects. Biological and psychological time complement physical time, and solar rhythms leave traces in health, birth, and old cosmologies.
12. Portmann. From the eighteen-beat human moment and von Frisch's bees to the palolo, metamorphosis, and the arctic tern, life is configured time; science must also feed the imagination.
13. van der Leeuw. Myth fills time and renews the world; eschatology breaks the circle; Israel's creation makes history; the sacrament holds time together; and the modern reader faces a choice.
How the parts of this guide are built
Each paper opens with a lede giving the printed pages, then sections that follow the author's order.
Notes on sources and conventions
The book's own order is kept. The papers were given in French or German and are read here in the English translation. Two papers carry later revisions: Knoll's was augmented with material from 1957, and Wilhelm's was revised in English. Printed pages 84 to 85, the end of Puech's paper and the opening of Quispel's, are missing from the scan; this is a gap in the copy used, not a fault of the book.
Part 1. The Foreword and "The Time of Eranos"
Campbell's foreword
Joseph Campbell opens with an image. Eranos has met every summer since 1933 at the home of Olga Froebe-Kapteyn on Lake Maggiore, near Ascona, and, like the gods and demons who churned the Milky Ocean with the World Mountain and the World Serpent, its speakers have brought up "remarkable gifts" [p xi]. The meetings, he writes, "are festivals of emergent visions" [p xi]. The 1951 meeting, on Man and Time, was "a subject nicely calculated to make difficult the maintenance of any footing whatsoever" [p xi], and he sets Augustine's question at its head: "What is time? When you do not ask me, I know; but when you ask me, I no longer know." [p xi]
- Base: the bulk of the papers of the 1951 meeting.
- One addition: Gerardus van der Leeuw's "Primordial Time and Final Time", the opening paper of the 1949 meeting on Man and the Mythical World, his last contribution, placed as "a fitting envoi" [p xii].
- Selection and organisation: Olga Froebe-Kapteyn. Preface: Henry Corbin.
Corbin's preface: the historian who will miss Eranos
Corbin, writing in French (translated by Willard R. Trask), imagines a future historian who writes a monograph on Eranos and explains it by causes, currents and influences. Such a historian, he fears, "will completely miss the phenomenon of Eranos" [p xiii]. The real problem is to discover "not what explains Eranos, but what Eranos ex-plains by virtue of what it im-plies" [p xiii], for instance a true community of speakers and listeners that shows none of the features of interest to statistics and sociology.
| The formula he rejects | His counter-thesis |
|---|---|
| Eranos was "very much of its time" | Eranos succeeded in being "its own time" [p xiv] |
| Explain persons by facts and currents | Persons are "the first and last fact" [p xiv] |
| Historical dialectic, causal laws | Hermeneutics of the individual, reading signs |
| Abstract, quantitative time, "everybody's" time | Concrete time, "the time of persons" [p xix] |
The individual as the first fact
The argument turns on a reversal. Gnostic currents do not produce gnostic minds; the minds "decree the existence of a particular current and bring about their own meeting" [p xiv]. So "we must reverse the perspectives of the usual optics, substitute the hermeneutics of the human individual for the pseudodialectic of facts" [p xiv]. To explain is not yet to understand; to understand, he says, is rather to imply. The individual cannot be deduced (individuum est ineffabile), but explains everything that would not exist without him [p xv].
Corbin admits an affinity with Stoic thought, which he calls hermeneutic, and regrets its eclipse in the West by a dialectic derived from Peripateticism. In a footnote he points to Victor Goldschmidt's book on the Stoic system and the idea of time (Paris, 1953) [p xv].
Eranos as a sign
"Hermeneutics as science of the individual stands in opposition to historical dialectics as alienation of the person." [p xvii] The past must be "put in the present" to be read as a sign, and the whole work of Eranos is such a putting in the present. Hence, says Corbin, it was fitting that Jung's study of synchronicity should stand at the centre of the volume, "since that study is itself the center of a new problematics of time" [p xvii].
Three calendars in one signature
The reading: the preface is a manifesto for the method of the book: time is not a container in which persons sit, but something each person, and each community like Eranos, makes present.
Part 2. Erich Neumann, "Art and Time"
Neumann speaks as a psychologist of culture. His subject is not time inside the work of art but the relation of art to its epoch, and then the relation of modern art to "our own time" [p 3].
The starting point: the creative unconscious
Neumann begins from "the creative function of the unconscious, which produces its forms spontaneously, in a manner analogous to nature" [p 3]. As an unknown in nature brings forth outer forms, so "the collective unconscious, which is the source of all psychic creation" gives rise to religion, rite, social order, consciousness, and art. "The archetypes of the collective unconscious are intrinsically formless psychic structures which become visible in art." [p 3] The mother archetype keeps its identity but changes style in Egypt, Mexico or Spain, in ancient or modern times: "its archetypal eternity enters into a unique synthesis with a specific historical situation" [p 4].
Four relations of art to its epoch
| Stage | What art does | The artist | Book's examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Self-representation of the unconscious | Expresses the numinosum symbolically, integrated with group life | Everyone is artist, dancer, singer; "Great Individuals" credit ancestors or totem | Ice Age animal paintings: the bison as "father of the bison" [p 6] |
| 2. Representation of the cultural canon | Represents archetypes already brought near consciousness; therapeutic for the group | Grows into a tradition rather than receiving a direct mandate | Temple, statue, mask, sacral music; wells "walled in" [p 10] |
| 3. Compensation for the cultural canon | Opposes the epoch's values from the depths of the unconscious | An isolated individual, "a hero who must destroy the old" [p 11] | Renaissance realism, Dutch genre painting, Bosch |
| 4. Transcendence of art | Reaches "the level of timelessness" [p 15] | The Great Individual, transcending his bond with the collective | Late Rembrandt, Faust Part II, The Art of Fugue, late Beethoven |
The canon as fortress
The canon is a bond with the archetypal depths, but also a means "of limiting and fixating the intervention of the numinosum and excluding unpredictable creative forces" [p 10]. Hence "the cultural canon is always a fortress of security", with "the danger of onesidedness and congealment" [p 10]. The creative process need not break the canon outwardly: compare a Gothic, a Renaissance and a modern Madonna, or a Byzantine Pantocrator and Grünewald's Christ, and the transformation is plain [p 11].
The earth archetype
Neumann follows the earth archetype down to the French Revolution, materialism and "the Madonna's rather belated dogmatic assumption into heaven" [p 13], and sees it now turning inward, with Rilke's Ninth Elegy as witness: "Earth, isn't this what you want: an invisible re-arising in us?" [p 13]
Transcendent art
Is timeless art an illusion, since every Christ or Shiva needs its culture to be understood? Neumann answers with the works of the great artists' old age. Each passes through the earlier stages and ends alone, "whether he is worshiped as an Olympian, whether he is an organist respected in a small circle, or whether he ends in deafness, poverty, or madness" [p 17]. In their last works "the polarity of outward and inward" between nature and art seems resolved; "In the creative solitude of the Great Old Men the limitations of the epoch are passed over" [p 17]. Such works have no datable style; their "solitary monologue" is "spoken, as it were, into the void" [p 18]. The faith of Bach and "the atheistic infinity" of Chinese painting are kindred forms of this transcendence [p 18].
Part II: modern art and the collapse of the canon
Neumann illustrates with two diagrams (Figures 1 and 2): a "balanced" culture, where an arch of supreme values sits over a matching arch of archetypes, and our own, where the archetypes fade and "the arch collapses, because the underlying order has broken down" [p 21].
Isolation and the night
The first sign of collapse is "a sense of isolation, of forlornness, of homelessness and alienation" [p 23]. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau, Munch, Klee, Matisse, Chagall, Picasso: "Each of them is a world in himself" [p 23]. Day-before-yesterday's art, which lights life with the light of long-set stars, is in his view no less disquieting [p 23 to 24]. "Thus in our age, as never before, truth implies the courage to face chaos." [p 24]
He separates great artists from small ones. For "little" artists, "the absence of canon imposed by the situation has itself become canon", whence the "isms" [p 26]; the great use the situation consciously. Surrealism was "merely a late caricature" of what the great suffered "under the sign of Orpheus" [p 26].
"If this art is degenerate, we too are degenerate"
Neumann's ethical turn is sharp. Those who called modern art "degenerate" "were themselves degenerates", but the question stands. "The disintegration and dissonance of this art are our own; to understand them is to understand ourselves." [p 29] Anyone unmoved by the camps, the crematoriums and the atomic explosions, he says, may crawl back into the shelter of the old methods and rot [p 29 to 30]. "Paradoxical as it may sound when formulated in theological terms, it seems today that we must redeem a bit of Satan." [p 30] He closes on Frau Schweigestill's words in Doctor Faustus about the "understanding heart", and on Kwanyin who went down into hell.
What is new in the chaos
- The centre of the "modern mandala" is seldom human: rather "a flower, a star, a spring, a light, an eye, or the void itself" [p 32].
- Modern art leans toward "a radical spiritualism", compensating for the materialism born of the earth archetype [p 33].
- It is a misunderstanding to call it intellectual: "only its hangers-on are intellectual" [p 33].
- World art merges: the shaman and the medicine man "assume for us the same human dignity as Moses and the Buddha" [p 34].
Two integrations run side by side: outwardly, with world culture, toward "a universal humanism"; inwardly, individuation [p 35]. Man is beginning to be seen not only horizontally, in his epoch, but vertically, in his relation to the absolute [p 35]. The lives of modern artists are therefore "all, in greater or lesser degree, Calvaries" [p 36], and the neuroses of the time are "a kind of sacred disease" [p 36].
Neumann ends with hope: like the Zen masters who struck their pupils, our time strikes us "in order to fling us into the void of the center" [p 37], and the man of our time, like his art, is for Neumann a great fulfilment and a still greater hope [p 37].
Part 3. Henri-Charles Puech, "Gnosis and Time"
Puech's paper is the longest in the volume and the most carefully built. He admits at the outset that almost no Gnostic ever wrote about time as such. His method is therefore indirect: first describe the two conceptions of time the Gnostics found around them, the Greek and the Christian, then define Gnosis as a type of religious attitude, and only then read off the Gnostic experience of time from the Gnostic vision of the whole world.
Three difficulties and a method
Puech names three obstacles. First, "we possess no document in which a Gnostic has explicitly set forth his conception of time" [p 38]. For the Gnostics time was not a separate problem, yet it was not unimportant either; it was part of their general attitude to the human state and to the world. So the inquiry has to be directed "toward Gnosis as a whole, considered in its essence, its structure, and its mechanisms" [p 38], and only that will show that "the problem of time lies at the very heart of Gnosis" [p 38].
Second, the Gnostic position seems at first to be stated only negatively. It borrowed from contemporary world views and reacted against them, "often violently" [p 39]. We must begin with what it negates in order to reach what it affirms. Third, the word "Gnosis" itself is vague and has to be fixed before use. Puech warns that his slow approach is deliberate: the problem "proves baffling and elusive when we seek to confront it directly" [p 39].
The Greek circle
For the Greeks, dominated by "an ideal of intelligibility" [p 40] that found full being only in what stays identical with itself, movement and change were lower degrees of reality. The circular movement that brings things back is the nearest image of the divine immobility at the summit. Puech cites Plato's definition of time as "the mobile image of immobile eternity which it imitates by moving in a circle" [p 40]. Some late thinkers, Pythagoreans, Stoics, Platonists, went further and held that within each cycle the very same events recur. Puech's example is the condemnation of Socrates. "Cosmic time is repetition and anakuklosis, eternal return." [p 41]
He draws three consequences. There can be no absolute beginning or end of the world, so Creation and Consummation are inconceivable. Time has rhythm but no defined direction: Aristotle remarks that we are "after" the Trojan War, yet the turning circle will bring the war back, so that we may equally say we precede it [p 42]. And nothing radically new can arise. The note gives the passage from the Problemata in full, ending with Alcmaeon's saying that men die "because they cannot connect the beginning with the end" [p 42].
From this follows the Greek inability to build a philosophy of history. The farthest step, made late by Polybius and Diodorus, was to credit convergences in history to Tyche or to look for rhythms in political regimes. Plato's schemata gave, in Bréhier's phrase as Puech quotes it, "laws of decadence rather than of development" [p 43]. Puech's verdict: "the notion of a continuous progress in time was unheard of" [p 43]. The singular does not interest the Greek philosopher, and a circle in which every point is beginning, middle, and end gives no fixed reference from which to orient past and future.
The Christian line
Christianity brings "a wholly different conception of time" [p 46]. Time runs in a straight line, finite at both ends, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Creation, Last Judgment, and the interval between them are unique. Its direction is irreversible and it "has not only a definite orientation but also an intrinsic meaning" [p 46].
The perspectives that Hellenism interposed between God and creature are swept away: the divinity of the firmament, astral fatality, the rule of the heavenly bodies. Puech enjoys Lactantius's reply to the Greek argument from regularity: precisely because the planets cannot leave their orbits, "it is evident that they are not gods" [p 46]. Man is created free and stands directly before his creator. Each act of God marks a kairos, "a solemn and decisive moment of history" [p 47].
Interpretation itself changes axis. The vertical reading of appearances through atemporal archetypes "gives way" to a horizontal reading of segments of time through one another [p 47]. Earlier events are "types" or "prefigurations" of later ones. So, Puech writes, "here the image anticipates" [p 47] the model, whereas for the Greeks the model is eternally prior: "Greek exemplarism is diametrically reversed." [p 48]
Origen in the third century and Siger of Brabant in the thirteenth were not wholly free of cyclical ideas. But to believe in the repetition of Golgotha "is regarded by the Church as the error par excellence" [p 50], and where it appeared it came from Hellenism. Augustine's City of God, Book 12, chapters 10 to 14, sets the via recta, which is Christ, against the "false circles" of the philosophers; thanks to the Lord, "the circle is shattered" [p 50].
Three practical forces behind the line
| Factor | What it did | Effect on time |
|---|---|---|
| Need for a past | A "superstitio nova" attached itself to Judaism, adopting Israel's history back to Genesis [p 50 to 51] | Organic bond between present and past; prophecy foreshadows Christ |
| Eschatology | Born "of an apocalyptic ferment" [p 51]; even as the End receded, a tension toward it remained | Bond between present and future; time flows one way |
| Salvation history | History as Heilsgeschichte and, from Paul, a paidagogia that educates mankind [p 52] | Time has meaning for salvation; the whole person, body and soul, is saved |
Puech sums up: the early Christians conceived time as "rectilinear, continuous, irreversible, and progressive" [p 52], a manifestation of God's will, an oikonomia. He adds that this view was later pushed into the background by Greek influence, above all with Origen and the Alexandrians, when biblical typology turned into allegorism in the strict sense [p 53]. A note records that Daniélou and de Lubac disagree on how far Origen was affected.
What is Gnosis?
Historically the term named a heresy of the second century: Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, perhaps Bardesanes, heirs of Simon Magus and Saturnilus, with sects surviving to the seventh century. They divided mankind into three classes: the gnostikoi or pneumatikoi ("knowers", "spiritual men"), the "psychics" (ordinary believers with soul but no Spirit), and below them the "hylics", "enslaved to the body and to matter" [p 54].
Students of religion then widened the term. Manichaeism, born in the third century, was clearly a Gnosis far exceeding a Christian heresy. Hermeticism, the Chaldaean oracles, and Mandaeism, a baptist religion "still surviving in Iraq and Iran" [p 54], were added; mandaya is the Aramaic equivalent of gnostikos. The comparative school concluded that some "Christian" systems were Christian only on the surface, and that all used a common body of images whose origins lie far back in the Orient.
Gnosis against both conceptions
Modern scholarship offered two explanations. With Harnack, Burkitt, Schaeder, and Casey, Gnosis was an extreme Hellenization of Christianity; with Bousset, Reitzenstein, Steffes, and Lietzmann, it was a "reorientalization" [p 57]. The first predicts a Greek attitude to time, the second a mythical one. Puech reserves judgment on origins but states his thesis: whatever environment it entered, "Gnosticism never wholly adopted the Greek or the Christian view of time" [p 57]; it opposed both.
The root is the opposition between God and the world. "The entire sensuous universe is experienced and judged as evil." [p 57] God transcends the world utterly; he did not make it and does not rule it. He is the "alien God", the "Other", the Unknown, "naturally unknown (naturaliter ignotus)" [p 58], knowable only by revelation and therefore "new" when he appears. Below or against him stands a Demiurge, feeble or ignorant, or the Devil himself. "Two gods, then, whose activities are antagonistic" [p 59]: one of salvation and grace, one of creation and matter.
Against the Greeks: anticosmic
Gnosis keeps the frame of a hierarchical universe ruled by the stars, but distorts it. "But where the Greek exalts, accepts, agrees, the Gnostic condemns, rejects, rebels." [p 60] Regularity becomes crushing repetition, law a yoke, the planets evil Archons. "The Greek says: 'God and the world,' linking the two terms indissolubly; the Gnostic says: 'God or the world,'" [p 60]. Some Christian Gnostics held that Jesus broke the Heimarmene; the Pistis Sophia, in a note, says the course of the stars was "deflected for the salvation of souls" [p 61]. Hence time is not the image of eternity: it is "at best a caricature of eternity" and "in the last analysis, a lie" [p 61].
Against the Christians: antihistorical
Transplanted onto Christian ground, as in Marcion, the Creator becomes the God of the Old Testament and the good God becomes the Father of Jesus. Christianity is then cut off from Judaism and from all history: "It is novelty pure and simple, unrelated to the past" [p 62]. Some sects even exalted the rebels of the Old Testament: the Serpent, Cain, Korah, the Sodomites. Irenaeus summed it up as a contrarietas et dissolutio praeteritorum, against his own view of the present as fulfilment and extension of the past [p 62 to 63]. "To speak in more general terms, history is useless" [p 63]. The Gnostic is "antihistorical or ahistorical" [p 63], as he is anticosmic against the Greeks.
| Greek | Christian | Gnostic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Figure | Circle | Straight line | Broken line |
| World | Divine order | Created, finite, good | Evil, work of a lower god |
| Time and eternity | Moving image of eternity | Medium of God's acts | Caricature, "lie" |
| History | Cyclic, decline | Heilsgeschichte with a center | Useless, broken by irruptions |
| What is saved | Nous | Whole person, body and soul | The spirit alone |
| Puech's label | Cosmological | Historical | Anticosmic, antihistorical |
The Gnostic feeling of time
Gnosticism is a religion of salvation, and the need for salvation grows from lived experience. The Gnostic is "haunted by an obsessive sense of evil" [p 63] and keeps asking: "Whence comes evil? Why evil?" [p 64] The feeling of servitude could only be explained by a fall: man must originally have been something other than he now is, a "stranger" in an exile. Time is then perceived "as strangeness, servitude, and evil" [p 64], "the abode of servitude, of exile, of oblivion, ignorance, and sleep" [p 64].
Time is also a taint. Through the body the luminous self is chained to matter, and "our temporal state is a monstrous amalgam of spirit and matter, of light and darkness" [p 65]. Generation multiplies the captives; the Manichaeans saw the divine particles imprisoned "from body to body, from generation to generation" [p 65]. Reincarnation, which some Manichaean texts compare to the Buddhist samsara, makes existence a "growth of death" [p 65].
Time is also the consequence of a fall: in Valentinian Gnosis the fall of Sophia from the pleroma, in Manichaeism the defeat of the Primordial Man. It was born of the hysterema, a deficiency, in the kenoma, the void. For the Bogomils the Father abandons the present cycle of seven thousand years to Satan [p 66]. The planetary spheres become "customs stations or jails" [p 67], and the firmament that moved the Greek to veneration becomes "a drama full of horror" [p 67].
"And time is anguish." [p 67] Puech cites Hans Jonas on the "panic terror" time inspires and quotes a Mandaean lament: "In this world [of Darkness] I lived for a thousand myriad years and no one knew that I was there." [p 67] Marcion describes human birth and the body in brutal terms; the Valentinians project their torments onto Sophia, "all in ignorance" [p 68]. Puech prints three Manichaean hymns. A line from a Psalm of Jesus gives their tone: "I was life to them, but they were death to me." [p 69]
From the dark abyss which is a wasting away,
Which is all torment, wounds until death,
And in which there is neither helper nor friend! [p 69]
Revolt, and time as a lie
Time's constraint "engenders a need of Salvation" and a "nostalgia for a lost freedom" [p 70]. The Gnostic rebels against every law, physical, moral, or social, "at the risk of falling into nihilism, anarchism, amoralism, or even licentious immoralism" [p 70]. The Marcionite wages a theomakhia against the Creator. Valentinus tells his initiates: "You have been immortal from the beginning," and "you have wished to share death in order to expend it and exhaust it, in order that death may die in you and through you." [p 71]
Did this feeling become a theory? The evidence is thin, but two texts speak. In the Apokryphon of John, Ialdabaoth, chief of the Archons, takes counsel with his Powers; "they engendered Destiny (Heimarmene)" and bound gods, angels, demons, and men "in measure, duration, and time" [p 71]. Time is thus a product of ignorance and of a wicked imitation.
The second is Irenaeus's account of the Marcosians, disciples of Valentinus. Puech sets it beside Plato's Timaeus. In both, a Demiurge imitates a higher model and cosmic time results. But Plato's Demiurge knows the model exactly, while the Gnostic Demiurge, "the fruit of a fall" [p 72], knows it only dimly through his mother Sophia. So the eternity of the Ogdoad above is spread out into "times, and seasons, and vast numbers of years" [p 72].
The difference is decisive: "there is no longer a continuity between the atemporal and the temporal as in Plato, but a chasm" [p 72], and time becomes "a pseudos, a 'lie'" [p 72]. Puech notes traces of the idea in Hermeticism and Mazdaism; the Asclepius says that where things are discerned at intervals of time, "there are falsehoods" [p 72].
Gnosis as the answer
The emotional need is transposed into an intellectual problem and is answered by an act of knowledge: gnosis, which is also epignosis, "recognition" [p 73]. Puech reports the triple question that, by the sectarians' own account, Gnosis answers: who am I and where am I, whence have I come and why, and whither am I going [p 73 to 74]. A note gives the classical formula of the Valentinian Theodotus: "The knowledge of who we were, what we have become; whither we are hastening, whence we were redeemed; what is birth, what is re-birth." [p 74]
An atemporal salvation
"To be sure, Salvation takes place in time, but the act on which it is founded is intrinsically atemporal." [p 76] It is an inner illumination, sudden and gratuitous, given to a predestined person and requiring no preparation in time. The knowledge of self is, in Puech's account, a reminiscence of self, a return to a permanent state; his phrase is that the spiritual man "merely recovers an indestructible acquisition" [p 76]. There is no resurrection of the body. The soul's reflection is united in a "spiritual marriage" with "our real self, our 'angel,' who is our transcendent personality" [p 76].
Salvation "consists not in fulfilling oneself in time but in finding oneself fulfilled beyond time and before time" [p 77]. It is a gathering together (syllexis) of one's luminous substance. A note quotes the Gospel of Eve: "I am thou and thou art I, and wherever thou art, there am I, and I am scattered through all things." [p 77]
Where time enters, and is cancelled
Puech grants that Gnostic salvation is not wholly free of temporal conditions, but "its role is reduced to a minimum and the tendency is to annul it" [p 79]. Three points show this.
| Possible temporal element | How Gnosis treats it |
|---|---|
| Tradition | Valentinus and Basilides claim a secret paradosis; Mani a line of prophets since Adam (Shem, Seth, Enoch, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus). But each earlier message was "engulfed in a diabolical catastrophe" [p 80]. "Precursors there are, but no continuous or progressive tradition." [p 80] |
| The Savior | A "Saved Savior", personification of the transcendent Nous; a Revealer and "awakener", not a sacrifice. For Marcion, Jesus appeared "suddenly (subito) in the form of a man of thirty" [p 80]. Docetism: his body and Passion were only apparent; in Basilides another man is substituted on the Cross [p 81]. |
| Eschatology | No resurrection of the flesh; the illuminated man is already risen. The rite anticipates the end: the Manichaean Bema "is an anticipated rehearsal of the Last Judgment" [p 82]. The "perfect" man "is already 'consummated'" [p 82]. |
The conclusion generalizes: "Gnostic thinking is fundamentally mythical." [p 82] It is ruled by nostalgia for an initial situation. Concepts become "aeons", half abstract, half personal, "fragments of time or spatialized and hypostatized periods of time" [p 82]. Even the course of time is placed in a myth: for the Manichaeans, a three-moment drama of Light and Darkness, separate, then mixed, then separated again [p 82 to 83].
The mythical drama of the Aeons, Sophia's fall and return or the Primordial Man's captivity, chops concrete time into "an incoherent succession of dramatic episodes" [p 83]. Puech closes the point with Tertullian's Latin line on Marcion, which the note translates: "Christ suddenly, and just as suddenly, John! After this fashion occur all things in Marcion's system." [p 83] And, Puech adds, so is everything connected with Gnostic time.
The verdict
Puech admits the picture "may appear confused, unbalanced, even contradictory, and so indeed it is" [p 83]. Time is captive to an evil Destiny on one side, and broken by revelation and by the Gnostic's will "to break it in order to break with it" [p 83] on the other. It shares with Christian time a beginning, an end, and a kind of special Providence, but it lacks full reality, and its Providence works only for an elite. It is "an episodic copy of an atemporal tragedy" [p 83].
Part 4. Gilles Quispel, "Time and History in Patristic Christianity"
Quispel answers a scholarly claim: that the early Christian sense of time faded in the age of the Church Fathers. He argues the opposite, and then reads Augustine's famous analysis of time not as a forerunner of Kant or Einstein but as a weapon in a fight with the Neoplatonists of his day.
Kairos, center, and end
In the surviving text Quispel explains two New Testament terms. The oikonomia is the divine plan of salvation, and placed within it man experiences his kairos: "a tension and a meaning enter into his inherently profane and aimless life 'time,'" [p 86]. His classic example is John 7:6, where Jesus tells his brothers: "My kairos [to go up to Jerusalem] is not yet come, but your kairos is alway ready" [p 86]. For them any moment will do; for Christ the moments are fixed by God.
Eschatology shaped this sense of time. Quispel credits Weiss and Albert Schweitzer with the "great discovery" [p 86] that expectation of the end mattered to Jesus' teaching: mankind and the cosmos have an end "which draws events toward it like a magnet" [p 86]. Against this he sets van Groningen's account of Greeks fascinated by the repetition of the past, "so much so that for them the future had no dimension of its own" [p 87].
Yet the decisive factor, he insists, "was, rather, the center, the life and death of Jesus" [p 87]. From that unique fact, the ephapax or "once and for all", time takes its direction. And the kingdom was already present in Jesus. "Eschatological time breaks into present time." [p 87] Quispel calls this proleptic eschatology: the end anticipated now.
He grants that patristic Christianity is not simply early Christianity continued; the fight against Gnosticism "led to an overemphasis on free will" [p 88]. But to say that disappointment over the delayed Parousia caused a degeneration is a "hasty simplification" [p 88]; the texts show no breach. He quotes Jung, who traced the dogma of the Trinity to the Christian "message", which "caused a psychic revolution in Western man" [p 88].
How eschatology shaped the Church's life
| Area | Quispel's reading |
|---|---|
| Eucharist | Not only remembrance and sacrifice but "a Messianic banquet of rejoicing" [p 89]; Barth and Cullmann are quoted on the meal as anticipation of the end |
| Cult and the mysteries | The presence of the Lord in worship parallels Isis's presence in her mysteries [p 90]; the difference is the sense of time |
| Mission and apologetics | "Thus eschatology created the mission and the mission produced its apologetics." [p 93] |
| Asceticism and mysticism | Their eschatological origins, he says, have been shown by Peterson and von Unnik [p 93] |
On apologetics he is witty. The apologists wrote in the style of the rhetorical schools because otherwise they would not have been understood; there were things you had to say, "just as in fox hunting you have to say 'Tallyho'" [p 92]. The difference shows at the end: in Minucius Felix's Octavius the pagan converts, while in Cicero's dialogues the speakers "go home just as they came" [p 92].
Augustine as demythologizer
Quispel turns to Augustine with a startling admission: "I have never been able to find a single important doctrine in Augustine which is not based on an error in Bible translation." [p 94] He extends this to the analysis of time as distentio and intentio. Still, Augustine's work is theology, and "theology is a demythologization" [p 94]. Quispel uses the point to tease Bultmann, wondering why "the modern consciousness" should have been "elected Pope" [p 94]. Augustine, who calls God "interior intimo meo et superior summo meo" [p 94], shows a better way: evil located in the will, not in the cosmos; history as a conflict of loves; time as subjective.
Not Kant, not Einstein
It has become usual to say Augustine anticipated Kant. Emil Brunner went further and linked him with Einstein and Planck; Quispel says he "writes glibly" [p 95] and quotes him at length. His own judgment: "experience teaches that such parallels with modern science are dangerous" [p 96]. Better to ask whom Augustine was attacking.
The question "What did God do before he created heaven and earth?" [p 96] was an old rhetorical stand-by. Augustine's real targets were the Neoplatonists of Rome, heirs of the reaction once led by Symmachus, who blamed the Christians for the sack of Rome in 410. Their slogan was a lament for the good old days. "The battle was not about the academic problem of tempus but about Christiana tempora." [p 96] Their doctrine of eternal recurrence meant that Plato would teach again in Athens, innumerable times; "man, so to speak, is a squirrel in a cage" [p 97].
Augustine's counter in the City of God was the argument from novelty: even a Platonist must admit something new in the soul's career, and once a novum enters life it enters history. "Where are our revolutions, that admit nothing new, but keep all in one course?" [p 97] Herodotus began Greek history with the cycle; "the last great historian of ancient times" [p 98] led from the false circle to the straight road. On that ground Augustine built his two cities, rooted in amor Dei and amor sui, with pride as the beginning of all sin. Quispel's summary: "demythologized eschatology" [p 98].
Time in the soul
Then Book XI of the Confessions. For Aristotle time is the number of motion. Augustine makes it a riddle: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know." [p 99] The past is no more, the future not yet, and the present has no extent. Past and future exist only in the soul, as memory and expectation. Measuring a long and a short syllable, I measure not the sounds but their images: "In thee, my soul, I measure my times." [p 100]
Time is a distentio animi, and the stretching is also a tearing: "My whole life is distentio!" [p 100] Augustine admits: "I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts are torn with every kind of tumult." [p 100] He has moved time into the soul "in order to recover the soul from its externalization and dispersion in the world" [p 100]. Against distentio stands intentio, the soul stretching toward the eternal, echoing Paul's words about forgetting what is behind and reaching to what is before. Time without relation to God is, for Augustine, "lost time" [p 101].
Ostia
Quispel prints the full scene from Confessions IX, 10: Augustine and his mother Monica at a window in Ostia, speaking of eternal life, rising through the levels of creation, and "for one instant" [p 104] touching eternal Wisdom. He declines to call it only mystical or only philosophical. Using De Genesi ad Litteram XII, he shows that Augustine counted it a visio mentis, a term going back to Porphyry, given by grace, in which man becomes aware of "his createdness, his limitation, and absolute dependence" [p 105].
The "it" they touched, Quispel suggests, is the heavenly Jerusalem, his "dear mother" [p 106] in a later passage of the Confessions. So behind distentio and intentio stand the old Judeo-Christian themes of diaspora and return to Jerusalem, now made inward: "The theme of the dispersio is transferred into the soul." [p 106] Paul's "I count not myself to have apprehended" [p 106] stands beside the vision. Quispel ends with a question: is this soul, which knows God's eternity with certainty yet hovers between "already fulfilled" and "not yet fulfilled", not itself an instance of proleptic eschatology [p 107]?
Part 5. Louis Massignon, "Time in Islamic Thought"
The shortest paper in the volume, and one of the densest. Massignon argues that classical Islam does not think of time as a flowing duration at all. It thinks of instants, each one a decree of God, and of the silent intervals between them.
A galaxy of instants
Modern mathematics treats time as a form of intuition and a fourth dimension. A thought "wholly oriented toward a transcendent monotheism, such as Islam" [p 108] sees it otherwise: time reveals the order (amr) of God, the fiat (kun). So for the Muslim theologian, time "is not a continuous" duration but "a constellation, a 'galaxy' of instants" [p 108], and likewise there is no space, only points. The heresiographers condemned as materialists the Dahriyun, who divinized Duration (dahr). Islam is occasionalist: "there exists only the instant" [p 108], the "twinkling of an eye" [p 108].
The only perfect instant is the Hour, the Last Judgment, whose witness is God. Other "days" are incomplete, because the decree they announce is fulfilled only after a delay. Here, obliquely, duration enters Islamic thought: it is "the silent interval between two divine instants, the announcement and the sanction" [p 110], the "sounding board" [p 110] between two sounding instants, which the responsible person must use for expiation. The second instant is the marked term, ajal musamma.
Grammar, theology, philosophy
Arabic grammar, Massignon notes, originally knew not tenses but "verbal aspects" [p 110], the finished and the unfinished. The grammarians called the subjective instant hal. Theologians differed in analysing a sentence like "I come at dawn": Qushayri stressed divine omnipotence fulfilling hope, while "the very Hellenized Fakhr Razi" [p 111] appealed to the regular recurrences of nature. Abu'l-barakat held that God's innovations in each instant are the only real proofs of his existence and wrote that "time is the dimension of Existence" [p 111]. Later mystics, tempted by Neoplatonism, returned to a divine Duration; Jurjani said "Duration is the expansion of the Divine Presence" [p 112]. Hallaj replied in advance that pre-eternity and post-eternity are mere embryos beside the instant of divine certainty felt in the heart [p 112].
The testimony of practitioners
Massignon prefers "the experimental testimony of the 'practitioners'" [p 112]:
| Practitioner | What they show about the instant |
|---|---|
| Grammarians | The hal, the "now", has no duration; the historical present cannot revive it [p 112] |
| Jurists (from Shafi'i) | A momentary description of a case may be tacitly prolonged and applied to like cases: a "virtual, immaterial duration" [p 113] |
| Physician (Razi) | Pleasure has no duration; it is "simply the threshold of convalescence" [p 113], so the religions err in speaking of eternal bliss |
| Psychologists of ecstasy | Wajd is a sudden shock of grace felt as anguish; Muhasibi and Ibn 'Ata allow the state a kind of persistence [p 113] |
| Musicians | Rhythm arises from irregular alternation of dull and sonorous strokes and from systems of silences [p 114] |
So the instant of anguish survives only "like a germ of hidden immortality" [p 113]. Its doubleness is "not symmetrical, but oriented toward the future" [p 114], toward the marked term, and the empty stretches of waiting make a spiritual rhythm that gives each creature "its personal melodic mark in the symphony of the Beyond" [p 114].
Part 6. Henry Corbin, "Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism"
The longest paper in the volume, and the one closest to the concerns of this series. Corbin reads two Iranian visions of time, the Zoroastrian (Mazdean) and the Ismaili, side by side. His claim is that in both, time is not an empty line but a person, a "time of return" whose cycle carries each being of Light back to an origin that keeps ahead of it. The paper runs from printed p 115 to p 172 and is in two parts: Mazdaism (pp 115 to 144) and Ismailism (pp 144 to 172).
Part 1. Cyclical time in Mazdaism
Who am I, and whence have I come?
Corbin opens with a small Pahlavi manual of the fourth century, the Pand Namak i Zartusht, whose questions every Mazdean over fifteen was supposed to be able to answer. The first questions are: "Who am I and to whom do I belong? Whence have I come and whither am I returning?" [p 115]. The answers place the believer in the celestial world (menok) before the terrestrial one (getik): "I belong to the angels, not to the demons" [p 116], and the believer's true self belongs "to Ohrmazd and the Archangels" [p 116].
These formulas, Corbin says, place the moments of birth and death on a horizon of pre-existence and superexistence. Time as a line of indeterminate length, lost in the mists of past and future, then "has literally no sense, but is simply the absurd" [p 116].
The Mazdean cosmogony gives time two aspects: Time without shore or origin (Zervan-i akanarak), eternal Time, and limited time, "the time of long domination" (Zervan-i deranj xvatai), which is the aeon in the strict sense [p 117]. Eternal Time is the model of limited time, which was made in its image.
Menok and getik
Corbin warns against reading the pair menok and getik as a Platonic contrast of idea and matter. Menok is "a celestial, invisible, spiritual, but perfectly concrete state" [p 118]. Getik is the earthly visible state, but of a matter itself luminous. In the peculiarly Mazdean conception, passing into the getik state "means in itself not a fall but rather fulfillment and plenitude" [p 118]. What darkens the material world is not matter but the invasion of the demonic Contrary Powers. "Here the stranger to this creation is not the God of Light but the Principle of Darkness" [p 118]. Redemption brings the "body to come" (tan i pasen), which does not destroy the getik world but restores it to its luminous state.
Every being of the earthly world is thus the counterpart of a celestial reality with which it forms a pair: its spiritual entity, its archetype, its "angel" [p 118]. Time itself, in either aspect, will be apprehended "as a person with definite traits" [p 119]. Corbin insists that the worst response to such figures "would be to degrade these figures into simple allegories" [p 119]. He coins the word "transparitions" for the way one figure shines through another.
Four schemas
Corbin sketches an ideal sequence of possible conceptions [pp 119 to 120]. The table sets them out as he names them.
| Schema | Where the drama starts | Status of Darkness |
|---|---|---|
| Pure Zoroastrian Mazdaism | Attack of a Contrary Power exterior and alien to Ohrmazd | Ahriman rises from a bottomless abyss of undisclosed origin |
| Zervanized Mazdaism | Ohrmazd becomes sovereign through Creation as an act of thought (a Zervanite interpolation in Bundahishn ch. 1) [p 127] | External |
| Mazdeanized Zervanism | Zervan preponderant; Ohrmazd born of Fire and Water [p 128] | Still relegated to an outer abyss |
| Integral Zervanism | Within Zervan, eternal Time, the supreme godhead | Ahriman born of Zervan's doubt; he is the firstborn |
| Altered Zervanism (Shahrastani), then Ismaili gnosis | Within an angel of the pleroma, no longer the supreme godhead | Expelled; no legitimacy |
Twelve millennia in three acts
In pure Mazdaism cyclical time has three acts over twelve millennia [pp 120 to 121]. First the Creation (Bundahishn): three millennia in the menok state, then a transfer to the getik state in the fourth to sixth. Second the catastrophe: the Negator enters and ravages material creation, opening the period of "mixture" (gumecishn), "which we are still experiencing" [p 121]. Third the final "separation" (vicarishn), brought by the Saoshyant, the Saviors born of Zarathustra's race in the last three millennia, and the "transfiguration" of the world (frashokart).
Figure 46. The twelve millennia of pure Mazdaism as Corbin summarizes them [pp 120 to 121]. The book places the attack in the period of mixture "which we are still experiencing"; the 3+3+3+3 layout is the editor's reading of the text's three acts, not a printed figure.
The Bundahishn says that in the unlimited Time Ohrmazd was in the heights, adorned with omniscience and goodness and surrounded by light, and that this omniscience and goodness are his garment, which some call the Religion (Den) [p 121]. Here unlimited Time is neither above Ohrmazd nor his creation: "it is an aspect of his illimitableness" [p 121]. From it Ohrmazd made limited time to frustrate Ahriman, and made it "in the form of a youth of fifteen, luminous, clear-eyed, of tall stature" [p 121]. Corbin notes that fifteen is also the age the texts give to the resuscitated, so the "Person of Time" exemplifies the ideal dimension of a being of Light.
Den, the Voice and the Sophia
A chain of equivalences follows [p 122]. "What has always been is the voice of Ohrmazd in the Light"; this eternal Voice is the celestial archetype of the Ahuvar prayer; that archetype is also Den, the eternal Religion; and a late Persian text gives Ahuvar the name of Zervan. So there is "a reciprocal transparition, between eternal Time, the celestial archetype of creative prayer, and the eternal Religion" [p 122]. Den in turn is no institutional abstraction: Daena is "the principle of a whole strictly Mazdean sophiology" [p 122].
Daena is both an angelic hypostasis and, in the earthly being, the visionary soul. She is the garment and eternal Time of Ohrmazd, and she is "the feminine Angel who appears after death to the Mazdean soul that has battled faithfully" [p 123], presenting herself as its celestial Self.
Time as weapon and as liturgy
Ahriman rises from his depths, sees a splendor beyond his own, and falls back to produce his Counter-Creation. Ohrmazd, "omniscient but not all-powerful" [p 123], offers peace. Ahriman's answer is a challenge: "I will rise up, I will urge thy creation to fall off from thee and become enamored of me" [p 123]. Ohrmazd knows he will need limited time and proposes nine millennia; the Adversary accepts, since his knowledge is the kind that can only "retard."
From this Corbin draws the "essentially liturgical character of this time" [p 124]. Creation and Redemption are a cosmic liturgy: by the celestial liturgy Ohrmazd and the Archangels awaken the Fravartis, and by the five liturgies of the day the last Saoshyant will accomplish the Resurrection. Hence the millennia cannot be measured "in the uniform time of our calendars" [p 125]; the six Gahambar festivals repeat the six creations, and each month, day and canonical hour bears an angel's name. "the event of this day is this Person" [p 126]. When the angel says to the soul "I am thy Daena," it is as though it said: "I am thine Eternity, thine eternal Time" [p 126].
The absolute Time of Zervanism
Zoroastrian Mazdaism could not compromise on the preponderance of Ohrmazd and his heterogeneity from Ahriman [p 127]. Detaching Zervan from Ohrmazd and placing it above him had two effects: Ohrmazd himself takes on the restless dimension of his creatures, and the two antagonists sink to one level under Zervan. Mazdaism could not accept the second.
In the Book of Celestial Wisdom Zervan is a sovereign exempt from old age, pain and death, and Destiny (bakhsh) shines through him [p 128]. A Persian polemic, the 'Olama-ye Islam, goes further: "it is revealed that with the exception of Time all the rest is creature, while Time itself is the Creator" [p 128]. Time first produces Fire and Water, and from their union Ohrmazd comes to be; Corbin notes that in Hermeticism these two elements symbolize the alchemical work.
The consequence is intolerable to pure Mazdaism: the primogeniture of Ahriman. He becomes the legitimate prince of this world, and Ohrmazd "is sovereign, to be sure, but he does not reign" [p 130]. The cycle is Zervan's compromise: "limited time, our aeon, the time of our world, is the repentance of Zervan the Eternal" [p 131]. Corbin compares the dialectic of Yes and No in the godhead to Schelling's Ages of the World, in which "Eternity resolves into time" [p 131].
The Fravartis and the Angel of Ohrmazd
The Fravartis are the celestial archetypes of the creatures of Light and their tutelary angels; Ohrmazd told his prophet he could not defend his Creation without them [p 131]. Before the millennia of Mixture, Ohrmazd offered them a choice: stay safe in heaven, or descend into bodies to fight Ahriman on earth. "The Fravartis elect to join battle on earth" [p 132]. The incarnate Fravarti is then only the earthly part of a syzygy whose other half, its Destiny, comes to meet it after death on the road to the Cinvat Bridge and calls itself Daena.
More striking still, every archangel and angel has its Fravarti, and "Ohrmazd himself has his Fravarti" [p 133]. This angel is not like the Angel of Yahweh who manifests God to creatures; it goes ahead of Ohrmazd and reveals to him the horizon of unlimited Zervan. Such an intuition makes sense only if there is "a distance and a distention within eternity itself" [p 133]. Corbin's image for this endless ascent is a "Gothic style" of cosmology [p 133].
Dramaturgical alterations
Integral Zervanism keeps an ambiguity: if Darkness is an aspect of the godhead, serving this world may seem to serve the godhead too; Corbin reads in this the nocturnal cult that, according to Plutarch, some Magi offered to Ahriman [p 134]. The way out is to keep the idea of a unity mediating between Light and Darkness while moving it down to "an ontologically subsequent rank" [p 134].
Three witnesses mark the change [pp 134 to 136]. Dion of Prusa's myth of the chariot of the Magi, with four horses for the elements and a winged one that is the soul of the invisible guide. Plutarch's tetrad of Zervan, Ohrmazd, Ahriman and Mithras the mediator. And Shahrastani (twelfth century), for whom Zervan is "one of the beings of Light, the greatest among the angels" [p 135]. His doubt is now metaphysical: "Perhaps this universe is nothing" [p 135]. The angels decree seven millennia for Ahriman, after which he must return the world to the Light [p 136]. Corbin does not think the figure seven is a copyist's error, since it accords with the Ismaili schema [p 136, n. 56]. In Mazdean terms an angel can never be evil; what parallels the Archangel Michael's combat is "a voluntary descent" [p 136], the Fravartis' choice.
Time as a personal archetype
Gathering his results, Corbin lists the figures through which eternal Time appears: Zervan is a sovereign, Wisdom-Daena, Destiny, Light and Glory [p 137]. In Greek equivalents the transparitions converge on the Agathos Daimon, the tutelary angel or celestial paredros. Until the soul meets its Angel on the road to the Bridge, "the earthly soul is lacking, it lags behind itself" [p 138]. His conclusion is a phrase he credits to Nedoncelle: limited earthly time "is retarded eternity" [p 138].
Figure 53. The personal figures of eternal Time in Corbin's account, and their convergence on the tutelary angel or paredros.
The figure called xvarr, the Light of Glory, appeared as the nimbus round the heads of consecrated princes, a halo which passes from the Saoshyant to Western images of Christ and Eastern Buddhas [p 140]. But more than royal charisma, it is the power that knits together a being of Light; in this sense it "signifies the soul itself insofar as it exists before the body" [p 140]. Its Greek equivalents were Doxa and Tyche, and Tyche was identified with the Agathos Daimon. Corbin then states the matching anthropology: in Mazdaism fravarti and daena are both celestial entities and human faculties, and in Hermeticism the Nous is a god, man's faculty of intuition, and his tutelary angel. So "the man without Nous" is "the man without an angel," in short "something which is no longer a human being" [p 141].
Since the soul is "retarded eternity," it can see its eternal Time only by anticipation [p 142]. Corbin gives three forms. The kosti, the sacred cord of lamb's wool passed three times round the waist and knotted four times, which tradition reads as a tetrad that the believer completes as a fifth member [p 142]. The robe of the mystes, like the heavenly robe of the Mithraic mysteries. And the Hermetic injunction of Nous to Hermes: "raise yourself above all time, become aeon (become eternity); then will you understand God" [p 143]. Finally, a mental iconography of the supreme encounter: Daena at the Cinvat Bridge as a heavenly Maiden of unimaginable beauty, a vision met again in Manichaeism, in Sufism, and in Pure Land Buddhism [p 143]. Ismaili gnosis will call this the passage from the angel in potentia to the angel in actu [p 143].
Part 2. Cyclical time in Ismailism
Absolute and limited time: Rhazes, Iranshahri, Nasir-e Khosraw
The Ismaili theosophy took form in the tenth and eleventh centuries under several Iranian thinkers [p 144]. One, Abu Hatim Razi, a Fatimid da'i in Dailam, recorded a controversy with his contemporary Mohammad ibn Zakariya Razi, the Rhazes of the Latin Middle Ages, a physician and alchemist "suspected of crypto-Manichaeism" [p 144]. Rhazes posited five eternal principles: Demiurge, Soul, Matter, Space, and Time.
Rhazes' thesis is plain: "Time implies an absolute Time (Zaman mutlaq) and a limited time (Zaman mahsur)" [p 145]. Absolute Time is eternal Duration, ever moving; limited time exists through the movements of the spheres. Corbin declines to argue historical influence, but notes that the distinction "presents a direct and lateral correspondence with the two fundamental aspects of time in the Mazdean cosmogony" [p 145].
| Thinker (as the book gives him) | Distinction |
|---|---|
| Mazdean cosmogony | Zervan i akanarak (unlimited) and the time of long domination (limited) [p 117] |
| Rhazes, after Biruni's report | Time of number (Aristotle); Duration (mudda), the distention of the soul's life; aeon (dahr), the time of the intelligible world [p 146] |
| Iranshahri, Rhazes' master (ninth century) | "time," "duration," and "eternity" as one thing under two aspects, unmeasured and measured [p 146] |
| Proclus (as Corbin aligns him) | separated and unseparated time [p 146] |
| Nasir-e Khosraw (eleventh century) | "Time is eternity measured by the movements of the heavens" [p 147]; eternity is time not measured |
Rhazes was attacked as "the 'Sabaean philosopher,' the negator of Prophecy" [p 147], because Ismaili spiritual exegesis (ta'wil) presupposes the text that the Prophets transmit. Yet once polemic cooled, the twofold aspect of Time returned in Nasir-e Khosraw, for whom eternity lies in the horizon of the first Intelligence or Archangel, and time is in the horizon of the Soul as its instrument [p 147].
Azal, azaliyat, azali
In declaring "The Intelligence is one with eternal Time," Nasir also states the secret of Ismaili cosmology: "there are Events in Heaven, archetypal Events preceding the Creation of things" [p 148]. He uses three words modeled on Arabic grammar: azal, the eternally-being (agent); azaliyat, the eternal actuation of being (verbal noun); azali, the eternally made-to-be (patient). Corbin admits the text is "marvelously abstruse" [p 148]. The supreme godhead is unknowable; what it eternally is in revealing itself is the first Archangel, its "eternal Personification, its very Ipseity" [p 148].
Because the Angel has already repented, the time born of his fault "has the form of a cycle" [p 149], leading back to the origin. To lead back to the origin is the exact meaning of ta'wil. "Thus cyclical Time leading back to the origin becomes itself an exegesis, the total exegesis of mankind, the archetype of all exegesis" [p 150].
Corbin names his sources: for Fatimid Ismailism, Nasir-e Khosraw; for the post-Fatimid Yemenite tradition, Sayyid-na Idris 'Imadaddin; for the Persian tradition of Alamut, the Rawdatu't-Taslim attributed to Nasiraddin Tusi [p 150, n. 26]. In a first, peaceful schema (Nasir), the Soul of the World is born from the first Archangel's eternal adoration and moves the Cosmos to make good an imperfection "that comes to it solely from Time" [p 151]. A second schema, with ten archangelical hypostases, has a crisis in the third. That is the one Corbin follows.
The drama in heaven
The prime Intelligence, contemplating itself, recognizes that it is made to be; this recognition is its adoration (tawhid), from which the Soul of the World issues. It is at once the veil (hijab) and the supreme Name of the eternally-Being [p 152]. The second Archangel is the first to hear its appeal (da'wat), "the very word which denotes the esoteric mission of the Ismaili Church on earth" [p 153]. From the dyad of Intelligence and Soul issues a third Archangel, Adam Ruhani, the spiritual Adam, Angel of mankind and demiurge of our world, whose role "corresponds to that of the Angel Zervan" [p 153].
Here the Zervanite drama is altered. The Angel's imagination manifests his Darkness, his Iblis, but this Iblis gets no legitimacy: the Angel "tears Iblis out of himself, like an Archangel Michael achieving his own victory over himself" [p 154]. Iblis is hurled to earth. The Angel's own universe of angels, formed in his image, was retarded with him. Some hear the appeal he transmits; they resemble the Fravartis and are the posterity of the spiritual Adam. Others refuse; they are the posterity of Iblis, "demons with human faces" [p 155]. Far from being a wicked Archon, the Angel creates for his fellows a cosmos which is "the instrument of their purification and the scene of the combat which is at once theirs and his" [p 155].
Periods and cycles
Figure 58. Alternating cycles of Unveiling and Occultation within the Grand Cycle [pp 157 to 158]. Each cycle has seven periods; the book gives no fixed count of cycles before ours ("only the vastness of the perspective"), so the three arcs are schematic.
The drama on earth
The mythohistory records not the number of earlier cycles "but only the vastness of the perspective" [p 158]. It contradicts the modern notion of "primitive man": present mankind descends from a superior mankind through a catastrophe, and the oldest monuments witness "not to a babbling, nor even to a dawn, but rather to a twilight" [p 158]. Nasiraddin Tusi tells the exoteric theologians that "there never was a time when this world did not exist" [p 158], meaning 18,000 worlds, each a cycle. Adam was not the first man on earth but "one of the last survivors of the cycle of Epiphany preceding our cycle of Occultation" [p 158].
Nasir Tusi adds that Eve, wife of the earthly Adam, is the secret meaning of the positive religion (its batin), for she knew the hidden meanings [p 160]. Adam and Eve are two beings in one: the text of the Law and its exegesis, the Proclaimer and the Silent One (Samit). Corbin notes that Ismaili esotericism here takes as its supreme symbol the conjunction of masculine and feminine, "which was also the great symbol of Hermeticism" [p 161].
Resurrection and the combat for the Angel
The Imam as lord of Resurrection is "far above the political ideology" of a final Alid successor [p 161]; it is the Gnostic idea of the Imam as Anthropos or "Perfect Child" (al-walad al-tamm). Between the spiritual Adam, the earthly Adam and the Resurrector (Qa'im) runs the same relation as between Gayomart, Zarathustra and the Saoshyant to come [p 162]. Each adept must "resuscitate" an adept like himself, raising another to the rank he leaves; together they form the Temple of Light (Haykal al-nur), and each reflects it "just as the pupil of the eye can contain the highest mountain" [p 162].
Archetypal persons
Nasir Tusi substitutes, as it were, the question "Who is it?" for "What is it?" [p 165]. Corbin juxtaposes his propositions: "Paradise is a person (or a human being)." "Every thought, every word, every action is a person." "Every true thought, every true word, every good action has an Angel" [p 165]. To be in Paradise or to come into this world are modes of being and understanding; measured time "is only a metaphor for absolute Time" [p 165]. Because personification here corresponds to an archetype, "it is here the exact opposite of allegory" [p 166].
The homology of the cycles of Resurrection
In a stirring vision, Corbin says, Nasir Tusi describes all series of being as contiguous, each touching with its highest degree the lowest of the series above. The higher degree is always Paradise for the one below [p 168]. The infant who cannot yet open his eyes in sunlight is in a Hell relative to the child who can; that is Hell again relative to walking and talking; and Hell is the adult's condition while he cannot know the spiritual world through his own spirit, the meaning of the adage "He who knows himself ... knows his Lord" [p 168].
| Level | Its "resurrection" in the next level [pp 168 to 169] |
|---|---|
| Mineral | its highest potency joins the first degree of vegetal potency |
| Vegetal, animal | resurrected likewise in the next higher order |
| Living soul | like a body to the imaginative soul |
| Imaginative soul | like a body to the thinking human soul |
| Thinking human soul | like a body to the angel ('aql); "the corporal resurrection" when each is existentiated in the form above it |
| Esoteric ranks | each adept is a Qa'im for the rank below; at the seventh degree he stands at the threshold of the angelicity of the tenth Intelligence [p 169] |
Conclusion: let the living arise
In neither vision is Resurrection "an event that simply occurs one fine day" [p 170]. It is the work of each adept, as in Mazdaism the incarnate Fravartis begin the final Transfiguration in their own action, with the prayer: "May we be those who bring about the Transfiguration of the world" [p 170]. Both share a chivalrous ethic: suffering is in the divine being because it is in his creatures, and his followers "make a rampart of their souls for him" [p 170]. Corbin glosses the Persian javanmard as "spiritual knight" [p 170, n. 100]. Both end in the face-to-face meeting of the human I and the celestial I: Daena in Mazdaism, and in Nasir Tusi the angel of beautiful form who becomes the soul's companion for all eternities [p 171].
Nasir-e Khosraw's image closes the argument: in winter a living and a dead tree look alike, but in one the sap flows secretly; when spring comes, that is the Imam of Resurrection, only the first will flower [p 172]. Corbin ends with Balzac's Louis Lambert: "The Angel carried by the wind does not say: Arise ye dead! He says: Let the living arise!" [p 172].
| Mazdaism | Ismailism | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin of limited time | Ohrmazd's instrument against Ahriman (or Zervan's repentance) | The third Angel's stupor and retard |
| Darkness | Ahriman, external (legitimate only in integral Zervanism) | Iblis, torn out of the Angel, never legitimate |
| The soul's archetype | Fravarti, Daena | Angel in potentia becoming angel in actu |
| Saviour sequence | Gayomart, Zarathustra, Saoshyant | spiritual Adam, earthly Adam, Qa'im |
| End | Frashokart, Transfiguration | Qiyamat al-Qiyamat, Grand Resurrection |
Part 7. Mircea Eliade, "Time and Eternity in Indian Thought"
Eliade's paper (printed pp 173 to 200) moves from the function of myth, through the Indian doctrine of the ages of the world, to the Buddhist and Yogic techniques for escaping time. Its closing claim is moderate: India knows not only the sage who flees time but a third way, living in history while staying open to the Great Time.
Myth as a breach in time
Myth, Eliade begins, relates events that took place "at the beginnings, in a primordial, atemporal moment, a sacred time" [p 173]. That sacred time differs in quality from "the continuous and irreversible time of our everyday, desacralized existence" [p 173]. To narrate a myth is to reactualize that time, which is why in traditional societies myths may be told only in holy seasons or around the ritual fire. "By the simple fact of a myth's narration, profane time is" abolished, symbolically at least [p 173].
So myth "implies a breach in time and the surrounding world; it opens up a passage to the sacred Great Time" [p 174]. Eliade insists that the Australian who lives on insects and roots is as much in a "historical situation" as anyone, because the phrase implies "only the human condition as such" [p 174]. Ignorance, for him, is the false identification of the real with one's own situation: the politician believes only in power, the millionaire in wealth, the scholar in his laboratory [p 175].
The story reveals Great Time beside which Indra's heroic history seems "false," events without transcendent significance [p 177]. "To transcend profane time, to recover the mythical Great Time, is equivalent to a revelation of ultimate reality" [p 177].
The doctrine of the yugas
A complete cycle, the mahayuga, has four ages of unequal length, longest first; each is preceded by a "dawn" and followed by a "dusk." Their names come from the throws of the dice [p 177].
| Yuga | Die | Dharma remaining | Years (one reckoning, plus dawn and dusk) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Krta (Satya), "perfect age" | four, the winning throw | whole; observed spontaneously | 4,000 |
| Treta | three | three quarters; labor, suffering, death appear | 3,000 |
| Dvapara | two | one half | 2,000 |
| Kali, "evil age" | one, the losing throw | one quarter | 1,000 |
The four ages as the paper gives them [pp 177 to 178]. A mahayuga thus comprises 12,000 years; counted as "divine years" of 360 human years, 4,320,000 [p 179].
According to the Visnu Purana, in the Kali Yuga "property alone confers social rank" and "wealth becomes the sole criterion of virtue" [p 178]. "For several thousand years, it goes without saying, we have been living in the Kali Yuga" [p 178]. The name is associated, by a play on words, with the goddess Kali, the "Black," and her name has been related to kala, "time." Whatever the etymology, the association is structurally justified: "Time is black because it is irrational, hard, pitiless" [p 179].
Later speculation inflated the rhythm. A thousand mahayugas make a kalpa; one kalpa is a day of Brahma and another a night; a hundred such years, "or 311,000 billion human years, constitute the life of the god" [p 179]. Even that does not exhaust Time, for the gods are not eternal. At the end of each kalpa comes the mahapralaya, the Great Dissolution, when nothing subsists but the primordial Ocean on which Visnu sleeps [p 180].
Buddhism and Jainism keep the doctrine and liken it to a wheel with twelve spokes. Buddhism counts by kalpas (kappa) and "incalculables." Man's life shrinks with each Buddha: 80,000 years under the first, Vipassi, 91 kappas ago; 100 years, "the absolute minimum," under the seventh, Gautama [p 180]. The very contemplation of these eons "terrorizes man" and sharpens his will to escape [p 181].
Cosmic time and history
In the perspective of Great Time, empires and revolutions are ephemeral and even the universe is unreal, its worlds bursting "as rapidly as air bubbles" [p 181]. "Existence in Time is ontologically nonexistence, unreality" [p 181]. Eliade's example: "This table is unreal not because it does not exist in the strict sense of the term" but because it "will no longer exist in ten thousand or one hundred thousand years" [p 181].
But renunciation is not the only conclusion. The Bhagavad-Gita teaches renunciation "of the fruits of one's actions," not of action itself [p 182]. The myth of Indra has a sequel. Humiliated, Indra retires to the mountains as an ascetic; his wife Saci, forsaken, appeals to their guide Brhaspati, who praises to Indra the active life as well as the contemplative. Indra resumes his identity and his adventures, "but without pride and self-conceit" [p 182]. The essential is "to keep constantly in mind the perspectives of the Great Time, while continuing to fulfill one's duty in historical time" [p 182].
The "terror of time"
Cyclical time is not an Indian innovation. Traditional societies see the world as born, wearying, perishing and reborn "in a precipitate rhythm" [p 184]. Eliade holds that this is in all likelihood a lunar conception older than agriculture: the moon's rhythm marks a "creation" (new moon), a "growth" (full moon) and a "death" (the three moonless nights) [p 185]. The Indians multiplied cycles for a soteriological aim: terrified by endless births under karma, they sought an exit from the wheel. For post-Vedic India the eternal return equals transmigration, and deliverance from the world equals "a deliverance from cosmic Time" [p 186].
Time and Without-Time
The oldest texts stress the temporal character of all things: "Time has engendered everything that has been and will be" [p 186]. Krsna declares: "I am the Time which, in progressing, destroys the world" [p 186]. The Maitri Upanisad distinguishes two forms of Brahman, "Time and Without-Time" [p 186]; in Brahman, Eliade says, the nunc fluens and the nunc stans coincide. "What precedes the Sun is Without-Time" [p 186].
For the illumined sage of the Chandogya Upanisad the sun stands still at the zenith: "It neither rises nor sets" [p 187]. The zenith is the "center," the point through which the cosmic axis passes, where the planes can be crossed; illumination comes "like a lightning flash" [p 187].
Buddhist philosophy of time
For Mahayana Buddhism time is a continuous flux (samtana) that makes every form unreal. Stcherbatsky: "existence and non-existence are not different appurtenances of a thing, they are the thing itself" [p 190]. Vasubandhu: "Because of immediate destruction, there is no (real) motion" [p 191]. Eliade sides with Coomaraswamy against reading motion as "a series of immobilities": samtana etymologically means "continuum" [p 191]. The Buddha, identical with the Dharma, is "atemporal, timeless" and "is not a man of the eons" [p 191].
The present moment is ksana, which also means "favorable moment, opportunity" [p 192]. The Buddha urges his monks "not to lose the moment," for "those who lose the moment will lament" [p 192]. After the long road through cosmic Time, illumination is instantaneous. That eternal present "is no longer part of time" [p 193].
| Class of image | Examples (as the paper lists them) [p 193] |
|---|---|
| Cutting across the planes | the "broken egg," the lightning flash, the seven steps |
| An inconceivable situation | the sun immobile at the zenith, the cessation of the states of consciousness, total cessation of respiration in Yoga |
| The contradictory image | the "favorable moment," a fragment of time transfigured into an instant of illumination |
All symbolism of transcendence is paradoxical: the razor edge of the Katha Upanisad, the "strait gate" of Matthew 7 : 14, the door in a wall that shows none, the clashing rocks [pp 193 to 194]. Coomaraswamy: whoever would pass to the Otherworld must do so through the timeless "interval" between contrary forces, "if one is to pass at all, it must be 'instantly'" [p 194]. A holy stone, for all its holiness, "still remains a stone along with other stones" [p 195], which is why the favorable moment expresses the coincidence of opposites more forcefully than the other images.
Techniques of escape from time
Yoga starts not from chaos but from a perfected man. Pranayama, the rhythmization of breathing, "cosmifies" the yogi, and by slowing the breath "the yogi experiences a time different from ours" [p 196]. The Kalacakra Tantra relates inspiration and expiration to day and night, then to months, years and the cosmic cycles [p 196].
The two mystical veins, ida and pingala, are assimilated to moon and sun; inspiration is the day, expiration the night [p 197]. That brings the yogi into cosmic Time but does not abolish time. The exit comes when he unifies the two currents in the central vein, susumna: "Susumna devours Time" [p 197]. He breaks the shell of his microcosm, like the Buddha breaking the egg. The state that follows is samadhi, which Eliade prefers to call "enstasis" [p 198].
Yoga also aims to burn the vasanas, the subconscious residues, which Eliade likens to "Professor Jung's collective unconscious" [p 198]. In destroying them the yogi seeks to abolish the work of time. Meister Eckhart likewise says "there is no greater obstacle to union with God than time" [p 198]. For Eliade there is "no breach in continuity" between archaic man and the mystic of the great religions: both fight "against memory and time" [p 199].
The third situation
Maya is manifested through time, but Maya is the creative force of the absolute Being, so "the Great Cosmic Illusion is ultimately a hierophany" [p 199]. Living in time is not itself a bad action: "the bad action consists in believing that there exists nothing else, nothing outside of time" [p 199]. "One is devoured by time, not because one lives in time, but because one believes in the reality of time and hence forgets or despises eternity" [p 199].
Part 8. C. G. Jung, "On Synchronicity"
The shortest lecture after Massignon's (printed pp 201 to 211), and the only one built on experiments and case stories. Jung argues that some coincidences are too improbable to be chance and have no causal link, and he names the connecting factor synchronicity: a parallel of time and meaning.
From chance groupings to meaningful coincidence
Jung starts from facts, not definitions. The term has to do with "a kind of simultaneity" [p 201], or "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events when something other than the probability of chance is involved" [p 201]. Ordinary clusters, such as the same number turning up on a streetcar ticket, a phone call, and a theater ticket, stay within probability. He then gives his own series of six fish events around April 1, 1949, ending months later with a fish a foot long lying on the sea wall by his house. Even so, he assumes "that this was a chance grouping" [p 202], though a more improbable one than a mere duplication.
What changes the picture is foreknowledge. A student friend dreamed of a Spanish city, a Gothic cathedral, a turn to the right, and a carriage drawn by two cream-colored horses; in Spain he found all of it. When the coincidence is known in advance, chance loses its character "not only psychologically and subjectively, but objectively too" [p 203]. Words like clairvoyance and telepathy, Jung says, "are mere names" [p 203]: no one has built a causal bridge between the elements.
The Rhine experiments
Jung draws three conclusions: the psyche "can, to some extent, eliminate the space factor" [p 204]; time "can become psychically relative" [p 204]; and moving bodies can be influenced psychically. Since a future event cannot cause a present one, "the law of causality does not hold" [p 204]. One more finding matters to him: first attempts score better than later ones, and faith and optimism help while skepticism hurts. Affect is a condition that makes the phenomenon possible, "though it need not" [p 204]. The hit cannot be predicted; if it could, "we would be dealing with a law, and this would contradict the entire nature of the phenomenon" [p 205].
The scarab
Jung offers the case as a paradigm only, alongside Swedenborg's vision of the Stockholm fire and Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard's report of an officer's dream that foretold an accident to Goddard's plane [p 206].
| Category | What coincides | Example in the text |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Psychic state and a simultaneous external event in the observer's field | The scarab |
| 2 | Psychic state and a roughly simultaneous event at a distance, verified later | The Stockholm fire |
| 3 | Psychic state and a future event, verified later | Precognition |
Events of types 2 and 3 he calls "synchronistic, which is not to be confused with synchronous" [p 207].
Mantic methods and the marriage experiment
The I Ching presupposes "a synchronistic correspondence between the psychic state of the questioner and the answering hexagram" [p 207], but the psychic state is too indefinite for statistics. Astrology looks more promising, and Jung, citing Knoll's paper at the same meeting, suggests that planetary aspects affect solar proton radiation and magnetic storms, so that astrology may be largely causal and "in the process of becoming a science" [p 208].
He tested the old belief that marriage partners show sun-moon conjunctions. With Liliane Frey-Rohn he took horoscopes "at random" [p 208] in three batches as they arrived: 180 marriages, then 220, then 83. Each batch peaked on a different classical moon conjunction (sun-moon, moon-moon, moon-ascendant), each with a probability of roughly 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 3,000. Separately they mean little; together, Jung calculates, the concurrence is so improbable that one must assume "the existence of an impelling factor that produced this result" [p 209]. Dividing the marriages into more batches makes the maxima cancel.
So the result fits Rhine's: expectation, hope, and faith seem to shape outcomes. Jung calls it "a minor miracle" [p 210].
The principle
The term "explains nothing" [p 210]; it names coincidences so improbable that some principle must lie behind them. The only demonstrable link is a common meaning. Jung places synchronicity in the line of the old doctrine of correspondence, which ended with Leibniz's pre-established harmony, but says it rests "not on philosophical assumptions but on empirical experience and experimentation" [p 211]. It follows "either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche" [p 211], and the same for time. He points listeners to the longer study to be published with a work by W. Pauli.
Part 9. Hellmut Wilhelm, "The Concept of Time in the Book of Changes"
Wilhelm (printed pp 212 to 232) asks two questions of the I Ching. First, what kind of system must lie behind a book that claims an answer for every question? Second, how do its texts think about time? His answer to the second is that time in the book is concrete, filled, and seasonal, and that the whole art is to be in harmony with it.
Change and the unchangeable
The book's sixty-four situations claim completeness, and none of them is static, which is why we translate the title word I as "change." But the concept also connotes what is firm and irrevocable; an early apocryphon puts it as "Change: that is the unchangeable" [p 212]. Wilhelm notes in a footnote that the old derivation of the character from a lizard is uncertain, and that newer material suggests a root in "the fixed and straight, hence also of the directional" [p 212].
Still, the book needs a system. Its premise is that questions "at the dark gate" are answered not by a priest's intuition but by written texts, and that works "only if every questioner may find a correspondent answer for every question" [p 213]. It has served well outside its own era because its situations are raised above their period until they "bear an archetypal character" [p 214], with historical memories used only as illustration.
Shao Yung, Leibniz, and the binary order
Shao Yung built a new "natural" order of the hexagrams by adding a yang line and a yin line, step by step, to each figure: two, four, eight, and finally sixty-four. He set them out as a line, a square of eight rows, and a circle.
Father Bouvet, a Jesuit at the Peking court, sent Leibniz a chart of Shao Yung's square and circle. Leibniz had already devised a binary system, which for him meant more than arithmetic: 1 stood for the creative unity, "whose highest expression is God" [p 217], and 0 for unformed chaos. Taking the broken line as 0 and the unbroken as 1, he found "a perfect correspondence between the two series" [p 217].
The episode shows that the hexagrams "are not chance lots drawn from a grab bag but dispositions in a meaningful complex" [p 218]. Shao Yung's a priori "Order of Earlier Heaven" lays out abstract, mathematical time; the book's received "Order of Later Heaven" corresponds to experienced time. The oracle seeker attends to the experienced situation, but the institution of the oracle needs a firmer foundation, and here Wilhelm cites Jung's term synchronicity.
How the oracle works: Wang Fu-chih
Wang Fu-chih (1619-92) assumed an ordered, lawful continuum that "lacks appearance" [p 219]. From it images are differentiated, the sixty-four situations, which can be both experienced and treated by number. The oracle matches a question born of direct experience to "the theoretically correct" answer [p 219]. So "the synchronicity disclosed by the oracle is merely the apprehension of two different modes of experiencing the same state of affairs" [p 219].
That this theory came some two thousand years after the book need not trouble us: Confucius, asked to explain the Grand Sacrifice, said he could not. Institutions can work before anyone knows their meaning. The harder objection is mechanical: how can coins or yarrow stalks reveal a person's fate? Wang Fu-chih's answer is an attitude. "Only a man of the highest integrity," he says, "can understand this law" [p 220].
The methods themselves encode probabilities, which Wilhelm tabulates.
| Line value | Coins (of 8) | Yarrow stalks (of 64) |
|---|---|---|
| Six, changing yin | 1 | 4 |
| Seven, resting yang | 3 | 20 |
| Eight, resting yin | 3 | 28 |
| Nine, changing yang | 1 | 12 |
Both give yin and yang one to one, and rest to change three to one. Only the yarrow method adds that yang inclines to change (3 : 5) more than yin (1 : 7) [p 222].
Time in the texts: filled and seasonal
Two passages set the tone. In hexagram 4, Youthful Folly, the Judgment says "Youthful folly has success" [p 222], and the commentary explains it by his "hitting time (in the bull's-eye)" [p 222]. In hexagram 63, the eastern neighbor who slaughters an ox gets less happiness than the western neighbor with a small offering, because he "is not as much in harmony with the time" [p 223]. The outcome depends on timing, not on the sacrificer's attitude.
The word shih, "time," meant first "sowing time," then season, then time in general. Its early form joined the sign for the sole of the foot to a unit of measure. Hence the seasons "do not err" and the great man models himself on them. The Great Treatise: "There is nothing that has more movement or greater cohesion than the four seasons" [p 224]. In the earliest strata the word occurs only once, in hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden, where the maiden who waits is praised: "A late marriage comes in due course" [p 225].
A grammar of timeliness
| Relation to time | Example hexagrams cited | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| The time is "great" | 27, 28, 40, 49 | Time dominates the whole constellation |
| The meaning of the time is great | 17, 33, 44, 56 | Time binds like a law |
| The use of the time is great | 29, 38, 39 | Practical effect, often in hardship |
| Harmony is easy | 2, 41, 42 | "Go with the time" |
| Harmony needs exertion | 1 (third and fourth lines) | Outer action, then work on oneself |
| Waiting for the moment | 40, top line | "He bides his time and then acts" |
| Time rejects | 48, 1 (second line) | Fate, not fault |
| Missing the time | 60, second line | Personal failure, so the commentary claims |
Some cases ask effort. Of the creative man in hexagram 1 the commentary says he is active all day "in order to act in harmony with the time" [p 229]; at the next stage he "fosters his character and labors at his task, in order to keep pace with the time" [p 229]. The prince who shoots the hawk must wait for the exact moment: the superior man "bides his time and then acts" [p 229].
Other cases are tragic. Of the old well no animal visits, the commentary says "Time has rejected it" [p 230], and the same is said of the young creative man who cannot rise. Wilhelm notes that his father's rendering of the latter, "The reason is that he is not needed as yet," is "euphemistic" [p 230]. In hexagram 60 the commentary blames a man who stays inside the gate for "missing of the (right) time" [p 231], but Wilhelm disagrees: the hexagram shows that going through the gate leads to the abyss, so the commentary "takes the time in too personal a sense" [p 231].
Part 10. Helmuth Plessner, "On the Relation of Time to Death"
Plessner (printed pp 233 to 263) speaks as a philosopher and, he says, "a guest" on Jung's ground. His lecture has two parts. The first traces how the cyclical time of myth became the linear time of eschatology and then the empty, fragmented time of the modern world. The second asks how time and death are related in living things as such, and argues against Heidegger that death cannot be understood apart from life and nature.
Starting from van der Leeuw
Plessner opens by quoting the late Gerardus van der Leeuw's lecture of two years before, on "the great cleavage in the self-consciousness of mankind" [p 233]: on one side cyclical time, on the other a time with a beginning and an end, where someone proclaims "a definitive event" [p 233]. He accepts van der Leeuw's description of primitive man as living close to the maternal in an unsplit world, but pushes back on one phrase. "But without any objectivization whatever man is not merely primitive" [p 234], Plessner objects; he "is no man at all" [p 234]. Evolutionary thinking in terms of "not yet" treats early man as a precursor, and Plessner warns that what survives of old modes in our depths may have changed its function. Neither history nor psychology suffices; what is needed is "a philosophical inquiry concerning the limits within which we may speak of the specifically human" [p 235].
Part one: from cycle to empty time
Many ancient cultures had the potential for this step; Israel took it "with the idea of a creatio ex nihilo" [p 237]. Joined to Greek causal thinking, it produced the historical consciousness. The paradox: "Here alone has a myth, a mythical revelation, developed powers which led to demythicization" [p 237]. The end of the road is "a time totally bereft of meaning" [p 237], split into physical, biological, psychological, historical, economic, religious, artistic, and political times, a "total neutralization of our temporal consciousness" [p 238].
What, then, was mythical time? Plessner quotes Thomas Mann on "time's abrogation and dissolution in the alternation of tradition and prophecy" [p 238] and Cassirer: "For myth," there is no time as such, only "configurations of particular content" [p 238]. Plessner adds his own reversal: "without ritual, time does not pass" [p 238]. In Babylonia and Assyria myth became spiritualized: the regular astronomical process grounded a cosmic order, and myth split into a great year and a little year. The little year, the span of a human life in the city, straightened into an additive series. The great year kept its curve, computed from the precession of the equinoxes, which shows that a highly objective reason can exist inside mythical thought. Through Leopold Ziegler he gives the Babylonian figure of 25,920 solar years for a cosmic period [p 240].
The doctrine of creation from nothing "puts an end to the image of the cosmic cycle" [p 240]. Christianity fused the aeonic and the historical into the story of salvation, and met death with the Resurrection, "sharply opposed to the idea of immortality" [p 241]. Mythical man lived out of the past as "an" Abraham or "a" Isaac; Mann's Isaac tells his tales in the first person because "his ego faded out and back into the archetype" [p 241].
The negative, created along with time out of nothing, cannot be overcome by natural means. Without this nihilism at the base of Judeo-Christian faith, Plessner says, we cannot understand salvation history or resurrection, nor how this revelation could later secularize itself. Greek ontology and Christian faith stand "in a relation of irremediable tension" [p 242], and that tension "constitutes the creative unrest of the Western spirit" [p 243] and the source of free inquiry, but also exposes all radical questioning to nihilism. Nietzsche saw this and drew the consequence in eternal return.
| Substitute for lost eschatology | Plessner's judgment |
|---|---|
| Hegel and Marx | Salvation by reason and practical decision; loses cogency as critique advances |
| Belief in progress | "that last pale memory of an eschatological concept of time" [p 244] |
| Darwinism's infinite perfectibility | "unmasked" as "an unwarranted construction" [p 244] |
| Political myth (National Socialism; class struggle) | Dogma that must inhibit criticism; banished fear of death by making the nation everything |
| Existential philosophy | Free acceptance of death, near to Stoicism; peace with meaninglessness, "striking roots in the moment" [p 244] |
The result is decisionism, which can "neither summon them to responsibility nor stifle them" [p 245]. Today death menaces us "as the barrenness of a time that has lost its meaning" [p 245], and "'Low-grade' infinity kills him" [p 245]. Is absolute meaning a need of human nature? Plessner turns to the gap between world and environment. Science and technology destroyed the ordered cosmos; "Utopia has become reality" [p 246]. Yet man never had a closed animal environment; he has always had to make "a second nature" [p 246]. What is new is only the scale of the threat. "With the total transformation of the cosmos into fields of possible action the world has lost its face" [p 247].
Part two: time and death in living things
The modern tendency is to give time and death "an exclusively existential meaning" [p 248], which Plessner thinks distorts the question from the start. Only what lives can die. "Plants fade, animals expire, only man dies, because he knows his finite nature" [p 248]. Yet death's "must" is factual, not essential: if it were an inner necessity, rebellion and resignation would be meaningless. Man's knowledge of it "raises him above mere finiteness" [p 249]. In a phrase he makes his own, death is "transgredient" [p 250]: both inherent in life and coming to man's humanity from outside.
| Level | Relation to time | Relation to death |
|---|---|---|
| Plant | Develops, ages, has and loses potencies | Fades without abrupt transition |
| Animal | Adds instinctive anticipation and memory | Expires; a sharper breach |
| Human | Planning and memory make past and future actual | "Man, finally, dies and suffers death" [p 255] |
From his 1928 book he quotes: "Living being is grounded in the future, not related to the future" [p 251]. Reproduction answers aging, but "Rejuvenation compensates for old age but does not negate or transcend it" [p 251]. The summit, not death, is the telos: "The summit is the telos, not death" [p 254], and he suspects that Christian thinking first distorted this ancient view.
We know that we will die, not when or how: man's death lies "in a twilight between knowledge and nonknowledge" [p 255]. Plessner then compares three phenomenologists.
| Thinker | How the certainty of death is given (as Plessner reports it) |
|---|---|
| Scheler | Through aging: rising pressure of the past, shrinking possibilities, a gradual suffocation [p 256] |
| Landsberg | Through the death of the other, who "represents in reality all the others" [p 257]; death as "an absent presence" [p 256] |
| Heidegger | Through anticipatory resolve, making one's own end one's task; a "heroism of finiteness" [p 258] |
Heidegger's philosophy, Plessner says, "reveals the signature of Protestantism secularized and formalized; in Landsberg we hear the voice of Catholic piety" [p 258]. Heidegger answers the fragmentation of time by keeping only temporality, but in doing so he "divests both time and death of meaning" [p 259]. Death threatens only where it is set against continuity of life or rebirth: "only on a foundation of aeternitas can there be sempiternitas" [p 260].
Two passages from The Magic Mountain illustrate the point: the imagined creatures with a miniature time-economy, and the narrator's contrast between music's single time and narrative's double time, down to opium dreams of sixty years in a brief sleep [pp 261 to 262]. Plessner ends on the eternal "that neither endures nor passes, the nunc stans" [p 263]. "He whose life receives the seal of this moment has conquered not only time but also death" [p 263].
Part 11. Max Knoll, "Transformations of Science in Our Age"
The physicist's paper (printed pp 264 to 307, with four plates) has two halves. The first argues that modern science is reorganizing itself around "pairs of aspects," two descriptions of one object that cannot be merged into a single logical system, as in quantum physics and in Jung's psychology. The second applies this to time: beside the physical time of clocks stand a biological and a psychological time, some of it set by the sun.
The end of the homogeneous world picture
Behind this lies a process of becoming aware of forgotten psychological contents. Nineteenth-century science, built on the ratio as the dominant function, limited cognition to what can be causally predicted in space and time. By the twentieth century that picture proved one-sided: logicians found gaps in rational cognition, and physicists found that conjugate quantities of a particle cannot both be fixed at once. Quoting von Weizsacker on Bohr, Knoll says quantum physics contains "fragments of aspects and causal chains that can no longer be fitted together to create a model of a nature that exists independently of the observer" [p 266]. Paradoxically, giving up exact determination "appreciably increased the scientific value" [p 266] of microphysics.
Perception and the four functions
"Since physics is made by men, its general structure cannot be 'objective'" [p 267]. Knoll borrows Jung's four functions (thinking, sensation, intuition, feeling) and notes that opposite pairs compensate each other: the more one is conscious, the more its opposite sinks into the unconscious. This is the same general concept of complementarity that physicists later developed for the atom.
| Function | Its role in physics, as Knoll describes it [pp 270 to 272] |
|---|---|
| Intuition | Non-sensory perception of ideas or models; sudden, often after relaxation and a "period of meditation" |
| Sensation (observation) | Experiment and measurement |
| Thinking | Develops and checks ideas and observations; the sole source of quantitative accuracy |
| Feeling | Usually unconscious; decides which problems are accepted or rejected |
Feeling shapes physics through selection: many physicists show "a distinct unwillingness" [p 271] to touch findings that contradict the known, and Goethe's attack on Newton's theory of light is Knoll's example of an affective disparagement of the opposite type's view. He quotes Pauli on understanding as "a 'matching' of" inner images with external objects [p 270].
Simple and complementary pairs
Knoll calls two theories "complementary" only when a relation of uncertainty holds between them, as in quantum physics. Pairs without it are "simple pairs of aspects."
In mechanics, a body is described kinematically by position over time and dynamically by forces and mass. For bodies made of many atoms both can be measured together, so the pair is simple. For a single atom, impulse and position cannot both be fixed exactly; Knoll quotes Heisenberg and Bohr on the uncertainty relation [p 276]. Measurement disturbs the particle because it needs other particles or light quanta.
Psychology, he argues, has the same structure. Psychic activity (libido) is the analog of energy, and the activity pattern and the space-time pattern of a function are "equally necessary for a complete description of it" [p 277]. In a single emotional reaction, an observer cannot fix both at once, and observing alters the reaction. Knoll proposes the term "quantum psychology" for sudden autonomous psychic reactions [p 278]. To drop libido from psychology would be like describing particles only by position, without forces: "one-sided and therefore unscientific" [p 280].
Nicholas of Cusa: "It is a great thing to hold fast to the conjunction of opposites" [p 284]. Knoll observes that the same pairs that some philosophies treat as symbols of harmony strike many existentialists, and many physicists faced with quantum theory, as intolerably disharmonious, probably from different archetypal attitudes, like Kepler's trinity against Fludd's quaternity.
Physical, psychological, and astrobiological time
| Kind of time | Its scale marks | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Physical | Pointers passing marks on a scale | Very short, one-directional, continuous; carries no meaning |
| Psychological | A chain of meaningful experiences, each an excitation of a nervous network | Each mark a duration holding past and possible future; nondirectional; proceeds "in quanta" [p 286] |
| Astrobiological | Events in the environment set by the sun | An "inner clock" that need not depend on a nervous system |
Knoll pairs psychological and physical time as a complementary pair of aspects. His literary witnesses: D. H. Lawrence's "Time went on as the clock does, half-past eight instead of half-past seven" [p 286], and the ancient Egyptians, who divided every night into twelve hours that lengthened and shortened with the seasons, treating "night" as a constant unit [p 286].
What the sun does
The effects reach life: tree growth speeds up at sunspot maxima, so tree rings record the eleven-year cycle reliably enough for archaeologists to date settlements. Magnetic storms show 27-day and 30-day periods tied to the sun's rotation, and roughly double frequency at the equinoxes [pp 291 to 292].
Effects on the body and on types
The Duells found a 27-day period, matching the sun's rotation, in magnetic storms, northern lights, death rates, and some diseases in Zurich and Copenhagen; the Copenhagen curves rest on 35,244 deaths [p 295]. Knoll's caution: the amplitudes are small, so "there is a distinct effect (in view of the large number of cases), but (in cities, at least) the probability of its occurrence is low" [p 296]. Reaction times may be up to 10 per cent shorter in autumn. Possible mechanisms are atmospheric ions or ozone, the magnetic field itself (judged improbable), or electromagnetic "atmospherics."
Petersen proposed that meteorological shifts in active oxygen imprint certain groups in early pregnancy, producing a weather-sensitive type, gifted in health and disordered in illness. Knoll tests the timing with conception and birth data:
| Sample | Finding reported |
|---|---|
| 5,261 names from Wer ist's | Conception maxima mid-April to mid-July and mid-October to end of January [p 300] |
| American presidents rated "outstanding" | Six of ten conceived May to July [p 301] |
| Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry | Sixty-seven per cent born within three-month periods around the equinoxes [p 301] |
Because magnetic storms peak at the equinoxes while talented Europeans show a conception minimum then, Knoll concludes that birth, not conception, is the more likely moment of any imprint. He is careful: the Nobel sample is small and gives "only a modest probability that the frequency distribution in this case is not accidental" [p 302]. In a footnote, Kiepenheuer found no noteworthy correlation of these birth dates with sunspot numbers.
Old systems reread
Early solar cosmologies should be read "neither as mere superstition nor purely as psychological projection" [p 304], but partly as attempts to derive the whole world from small solar effects. Some are more empirical than the later astrology, and Chinese birth-hour astrology seems to be a late Western import.
Part 12. Adolf Portmann, "Time in the Life of the Organism"
The biologist's paper (printed pp 308 to 323) moves from the age of the earth, through the length of a "moment" in different animals, to the idea that living things are "configured time." Its closing turn is a plea: science must help revive the imagination that its own success has starved.
Earth time and lived time
It took "stormy spiritual struggles" [p 308] for Western thought to give up the Old Testament reckoning. Portmann notes that the first glimpses of Eastern cosmology helped, and that Buffon proposed 75,000 years for the earth's history in place of the Biblical 6,000.
| Who | Estimate given in the paper [pp 308 to 309] |
|---|---|
| Biblical reckoning | 6,000 years |
| Buffon (mid-18th century) | 75,000 years |
| Lyell (by 1830) | 230 million years for the strata |
| Helmholtz, Kelvin | No more than 10 to 20 million years |
| Radioactive dating | 1,100 million years since clear traces of life; oldest minerals 1,900 million |
The irony he enjoys is that physicists first rejected the geologists' figures as too large, and later supplied far larger ones. Beyond these figures lies controversy, where "even the sober-minded student of nature" [p 309] builds a picture from the human drive toward completion. Hence modern cosmology has come to resemble creation myths, and science conveys to us what Vishnu conveyed to Indra: our life is a brief dream. "In this sense the situation of the modern scientist remains as archaic as ever" [p 309]. A new balance between lived time and reasoned earth time is, he says, a psychotherapeutic labor for science.
The length of a moment
Other animals differ. The dog's moment resembles ours; the snail's is much longer and the fighting fish's much shorter, so a unit of time holds fewer impressions for the snail and more for the fish. Portmann warns that "the scientist will do well not to say too much about the inner world of the snail" [p 311]. A hummingbird, in a fraction of a second, turns on two axes while beating its wings four times.
Life as configured time
"Living things, like melodies, might be said to be configured time" [p 312]. Portmann's first example links back to earlier lectures on lunar animals: the palolo worm of the coral reefs, which governs the sacral year of many South Sea Islanders. On Atchin it swarms on the twentieth day of the lunar month in October and November, with smaller swarms a lunar month before and after, and the islanders read the flowering of a red-blossomed tree as its herald. Development, he insists, is "more than a mere undergoing of the temporal process; it is a resistance to time" [p 313].
Bird migration
The most puzzling case is migration. Young birds of many species leave before their parents and still follow the ancient routes, which shows an unconscious orientation. Light acting through the eye on the pituitary prepares the bird; to call the result a migratory instinct is a "deceptive simplicity" that "merely obscures the problem" [p 315]. Many birds arrive and leave about the same number of weeks before and after the summer solstice.
He also distinguishes two historical types: species driven south by the ice who return each summer to old breeding grounds, and species like swifts whose home is warm and who pushed north only after the last ice age to use the long days.
The arctic tern hatches after 20 to 23 days, its wings, nerve centers, and hormone apparatus built in the egg by inherited processes. After about a month the fledglings set off ahead of the adults, follow the coasts of Africa, sometimes meet American birds of their species, and have been seen as far south as the sixty-sixth parallel. Terns live at least twelve years, so an old bird has made at least twenty-four flights "each measuring almost the entire length of a meridian" [p 319]. The migrant is "an extreme example of configured time" [p 319], a "supreme unfolding of potentialities" [p 319] that the sedentary bird realizes only in part.
The plea for imagination
Migration exceeds practical need: "All necessity is transcended in these great formative processes" [p 320], and "The passage of clock time, meaningless in itself, is employed for the enrichment of life" [p 320]. Knowledge, rightly held, "only deepens the great mystery of formation" [p 320].
His last words name the driving force of the meetings "wise love," the effort "to transform as much knowledge as possible into creative life" [p 323], a rite whose meaning, like Confucius's sacrifice in Wilhelm's paper, need not be fully known.
Part 13. G. van der Leeuw, "Primordial Time and Final Time"
The volume closes with the historian of religion (printed pp 324 to 350), whose lecture Plessner quotes at the opening of his own. Van der Leeuw builds on Gunkel's insight that primordial time and final time are "the two poles of one and the same history" [p 324]. He moves from the riddle of time, through myth, primordial time, eschatology, creation, and history, to the sacrament that "binds the time," and ends by naming the choice between cyclical and linear time.
The riddle of the beginning
Hesse supplies the motto: "A magic dwells in each beginning" [p 325]. For van der Leeuw, "The riddle of time is the riddle of the beginning" [p 325]. There is no true beginning, since something has always gone before, yet we keep beginning anew, and "we call the long list of such beginnings, time" [p 325]. He quotes Augustine's famous puzzle ("If no one asks me, I know") and Bergson's distinction: clock time is a "hybrid concept, resulting from the incursion of the idea of space into the domain of pure consciousness" [p 325], while real time "is a river, a melody" [p 326].
Experienced space is not a continuum but "a number of islands between which there is nothing" [p 327]: a meadow, a river, a village. Time likewise is a series of favored points, the feast days that form the calendar. "La fete est le chaos retrouve," says Caillois. Originally the year was the season; "time is the time of life" [p 327].
Myth
We can live with clocks and square feet, "Except that we cannot actually live by them" [p 329]. Time is favored time, and "its content is the myths" [p 329]. Van der Leeuw takes Pettazzoni's formula: myth "is not fable, but history, 'true history'" [p 330], true because it is sacred and sets sacral forces in motion. Malinowski adds that myth is "not merely a story told, but a reality lived" [p 331].
The world "is not permanently established or given. It must always be begun anew through recourse to myth" [p 331]. An Old Norse poet whose inspiration runs dry recites how Odin won the mead of poetry. Primordial time is "not as a time very remote in the past, but rather as a prototypical time" [p 332]; "Primordial time is creative; it creates what happens today" [p 332].
"Myth is life and life is myth" [p 333]. Calendars still carry their founding myth ("An III de la Republique," "A.D. 1949"). Pharaoh was man and god at once; Isis is a goddess and a throne. On the Dutch island of Ameland every grown man becomes a masked St. Nicholas on December 6 and terrorizes the young: "The men are St. Nicholases, demons, gods for a day. The time is marked off; life can continue" [p 334]. Dante, lost in the dark wood in the middle of life, needed a new myth to begin again. Van der Leeuw's sharpest line: "The poet and the neurotic" are "the only men who experience lived time 'normally'" [p 335]; everyone else has grown used to the clock.
Primordial time and the Golden Age
Rites repeat primordial events and so make them real time. With Eliade: "Man constructs according to an archetype" [p 336]; Jerusalem was built on chaos, Babylon on the waters of chaos; "Reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation" [p 336]. Every Nile flood is a new creation. "There are no new times" [p 336]. Only the Golden Age points elsewhere: a happy past whose return is hoped for, not assumed.
Eschatology and the great cleavage
Primitive man "knows no eschatology in the strict sense" [p 337]: he creates his world anew each day by correct rites, so there is no end matching the beginning. Final time arises only after a painful awakening, when "the suffering of human existence has set itself a term" [p 338]. "The stupendous idea of an end of time is an attempt to negate the eternal stasis, to break the circle" [p 338]. Norse ragnarok, in which the gods die with men, is perhaps its most radical form. As late as the second century a Syrian bishop led his community into the desert to meet the Lord.
| Cyclical side | Eschatological side |
|---|---|
| Every sunrise a victory over chaos | Same images, but a definitive event is proclaimed |
| Every festival a cosmic beginning | The day of Yahweh, the last judgment, the final conflict as in Iran |
| Law as the rule of the sun's course | "a hiatus has been made, a tempus in the strict sense, which changes everything" [p 339] |
The idea lives in folk "adunata," sayings for an impossible moment ("when the calves dance on the ice"; "forty days after never") [p 339], until the impossible happens, as when Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane. "In these adunata there lives eschatology, the myth of the impossible" [p 340].
Creation and history in Israel
Israel too has a primordial time, olam, but here "the idea of the caesura and of the noncyclical beginning is much more sharply delimited than elsewhere" [p 343]. The Ninetieth Psalm ("even from everlasting," me-olam ad-olam, "thou art God") expresses "the true aloneness of God" [p 343]: man never exists without a world, but God exists "even without a world, a se" [p 343].
| Egypt | Israel |
|---|---|
| The primordial hill arises; "After that nothing happened" [p 344] | Flood and Exodus repeat creation and open new worlds |
| The world static, an eternal equilibrium | Creatio continua: God holds back the waters again and again |
| Pharaoh slays the world's enemies | Yahweh slays Rahab and Leviathan in the Egyptian enemy |
| Gods of the earth | "the lonely desert god" against the baalim [p 345] |
Buber: "Even the work of Creation has a historical tone" [p 345]. The world hangs over chaos, in Milton's image, "like a drop on a golden chain" [p 345]. Creation from nothing is supported by only one Biblical passage but deeply anchored in Jewish consciousness, and van der Leeuw finds it already in the contrast between bara, to create by the word, and asa, to make.
In Babylon, Buber writes, the cult calendar circled "above and immune to the vicissitudes of history"; in Israel history "transcribed the calendar into the stupendous signs of the unique" [p 347]. Minucius Felix mocked the annual Osiris mysteries: "They cease not to lose what they find, or to find what they lose" [p 347]. The Christian calendar cuts through nature's cycle from a seemingly arbitrary historical point, the kairos, and the creed names Pontius Pilate. Greek feeling, by contrast, "is fundamentally ahistorical" [p 348].
Final time and the sacrament
The epistle of Barnabas speaks of "the beginning of an eighth day, that is the beginning of another world" [p 348]: the day of Resurrection, "a final time that is a beginning" [p 348]. The Biblical idea of eternity is "no abstract timelessness" but "a me-olam ad-olam" [p 348]. Van der Leeuw holds that Jesus lived by the ancient schema in which decline heralds the end, and when nothing happened, sought a sacrificial death; with the resurrection the kingdom began. Since then, with Cullmann, our time begins at the center; the Anno Domini count "seems to have become definitive only in the eighteenth century" [p 349].
Hamann reminded us, van der Leeuw says, that separate moments do not make time: the beads must be strung on a thread [pp 349 to 350]. Primordial time strings them, and so does final time: "It performs the miracle of simultaneity, of experienced time" [p 350]. In the New Testament this happens in the sacrament: at the supper of the new covenant, "He binds the time" [p 350].
Part 14. Slips in the Printed Book
Small errors visible in the printed text itself: references that disagree, figures that do not add up by the book's own numbers, and dates that conflict between the papers and the appendices. Nothing here depends on outside sources; anything that would need outside checking is left alone, and queries are marked as such.
Page numbers are the printed ones. Printed pages 84 and 85 are missing from the scan, and several pages of Knoll's tables, figures, and plates are images without text, so slips there cannot be checked.
| # | Page | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | pp 41, 45 | Puech cites Marcus Aurelius's work as the Meditations in note 4 and, for the same work, as the "Confessions" in note 12. The second title is wrong by the book's own earlier reference. |
| 2 | p 179 | Eliade says the life of Brahma "comprises 2,560,000 of these mahayugas." On the same page he gives a mahayuga as 4,320,000 years and the life of Brahma as 311,000 billion human years. Dividing the second figure by the first gives about 72,000,000 mahayugas, not 2,560,000. The figures cannot all be right as printed. |
| 3 | pp vii, 207, 354 | The contents date Knoll's paper [1951], and Jung, lecturing in 1951, says Knoll demonstrated his findings "at this meeting." But the biographical notes say Knoll "Lectured at the 1952, 1953, and 1955 Eranos meetings," omitting 1951. Query: one of the two cannot be right as printed; the editor's note that Knoll later augmented the paper (1957) does not resolve it. |
| 4 | pp 213, 223, 224 | Wilhelm thanks his colleague Erwin Reifler in note 2 and, for similar help, "Erwin Reiner" in note 13. Query: the spelling differs within one paper; this may be a scanning artifact. |
| 5 | pp 228, 232 | Wilhelm twice quotes the same commentary on the Receptive: first "acts in its own time," then "acts in accord with its own time." Query: two renderings of one line, without comment. |
Part 15. Synthesis
Twenty-two takeaways
- Time has a shape, and the shape decides the meaning. Puech's three figures (circle, line, broken line) are the ruler for the whole volume: the Greek cosmos returns, the Christian line runs from creation through a center to an end, and Gnosis breaks out of both.
- The line made history possible. For Puech, Quispel, Plessner, and van der Leeuw alike, a unique, datable center turned time from repetition into a story in which events matter once.
- Myth is not old news but a renewal. Eliade and van der Leeuw agree that telling the myth of origins reactualizes sacred time; the world "must always be begun anew through recourse to myth."
- Calendars are made, not found. Van der Leeuw's Aztec "bundle of the year," Massignon's new moon attested by witnesses, and Knoll's Egyptian night hours all show time being marked by acts that a community performs.
- Some traditions think in instants, not durations. Massignon's Islam knows a galaxy of instants decreed by God, with duration only as the interval between announcement and sanction.
- Time can be a person. Corbin's Mazdean and Ismaili time is an archetypal Person, a "time of return," and the adept's life is the time of the combat for the Angel.
- Large numbers can serve a spiritual purpose. Eliade's cosmic ages exist to show the vanity of history; Portmann notes that modern geological figures leave us where Vishnu left Indra: our life is a brief dream.
- Escape from time and life in time are both live options. Eliade's yogi breaks out through the instant, but India also knows a third way: living in history while open to the Great Time.
- Time can be filled. Wilhelm's I Ching treats each moment as "pregnant with possibilities," and success depends on timing more than on effort or virtue.
- Harmony with time has a grammar. Go with it, labor to keep pace, bide your time, or accept that time has rejected you; Wilhelm's commentary cases are a field guide.
- Systems and oracles need a theory of order. Shao Yung's doubling, Leibniz's binary match, and Wang Fu-chih's continuum all answer one question: how can a finite text answer every question?
- Integrity is a method. Wang Fu-chih's condition for reading events is not learning or priesthood but the attitude of one who does not fool himself or others.
- Meaning can link events without a cause. Jung's synchronicity names coincidences linked by a common meaning, and he warns that the term "explains nothing."
- Expectation shapes results. Rhine's first trials score best, and Jung's marriage batches each confirm a different classical conjunction; both cases warn the investigator to look at his own hopes.
- Two true descriptions may refuse to merge. Knoll's pairs of aspects (wave and particle, activity and space-time, meaning and image) belong together precisely because one cannot be reduced to the other.
- Clock time is not the only time. Psychological time proceeds in quanta of meaningful experience; biological time runs on an inner clock; Knoll calls them complements to physical time.
- Living things are configured time. Portmann's bees, palolo worm, butterfly, and arctic tern show development as "a resistance to time," built into the organism before it is used.
- Only man dies. Plessner: plants fade, animals expire, and only man dies, because he knows his finiteness; that knowledge sets him at a distance from it.
- Death needs nature to have weight. Against Heidegger, Plessner holds that death gains ontological weight from its involvement with aliveness, which plants and animals share.
- Empty time breeds substitutes. Progress, Darwinist perfectibility, and political myth fill the vacuum left by eschatology, and the last of them must suppress criticism to survive.
- Art reads the time of a culture. Neumann's artist compensates his epoch or suffers its poverty, and modern art's chaos may carry the first signs of a new canon.
- Eranos claimed a time of its own. Corbin's preface argues that a meeting can be its own time rather than merely of its time, and Portmann closes by asking science to feed the imagination it has starved.
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Source | Use it to |
|---|---|---|
| Circle, line, broken line | Puech (Part 3) | Classify any view of time by what returns, what happens once, and what is to be escaped |
| Four relations of art to its epoch | Neumann (Part 2) | Ask whether a creative work defends, compensates, suffers, or transcends its culture |
| Instant and interval | Massignon (Part 5) | Treat duration as the space between a decision and its consequence |
| Limited time cut from eternal Time | Corbin (Part 6) | See a finite project as a time set apart for a purpose, ending in return |
| Yugas and the terror of time | Eliade (Part 7) | Notice when scale is used to relativize history |
| Three categories of synchronicity | Jung (Part 8) | Sort coincidences by whether the matching event is present, distant, or future |
| Grammar of timeliness | Wilhelm (Part 9) | Decide whether to act, labor, wait, or let go |
| Substitutes for eschatology | Plessner (Part 10) | Test a grand narrative by whether it can survive criticism |
| Simple and complementary pairs of aspects | Knoll (Part 11) | Decide whether two models can be reconciled or must be kept side by side |
| Configured time | Portmann (Part 12) | Look for the internal readiness behind an external trigger |
| Primordial and final time as thread | van der Leeuw (Part 13) | Ask what holds separate moments together into lived time |
A closer look
- The volume puts historians of religion, a psychologist, a sinologist, a philosopher, a physicist, and a biologist on one question and lets them answer each other: Plessner quotes van der Leeuw, Jung cites Wilhelm and Knoll, Portmann cites Plessner and Neumann.
- Several authors flag their own limits: Jung admits small batches and the possibility of fraud; Knoll calls his Nobel sample a "modest probability"; Portmann warns against premature generalization.
- The best papers (Puech, Corbin, Wilhelm, Plessner) give a reader tools that work beyond their subject.
- Revised claims. Jung cites Knoll as showing that planetary aspects drive solar radiation and magnetic storms, while Knoll's paper as printed, revised in 1957, calls the planetary influence small and the radio link uncertain. Jung's own marriage figures were "considerably reduced" later, by the editor's note. The volume does not reconcile these.
- Unkept promises. Quispel says "we shall see" that Augustine's distentio and intentio rest on a mistranslation, and the surviving text never shows it.
- Untestable schemes. Neumann's reading of modern art treats the same evidence as both collapse and rebirth. Van der Leeuw's sentence that God "is not good" and Corbin's refusal of historical derivation rest on commitments, not arguments the reader can check.
- The weight of "primitive man." Plessner already objects that a human without any objectivization "is no man at all." Van der Leeuw's and Eliade's use of the category deserves the same caution.
- Statistics and selection. Knoll's presidents, Nobel laureates, and Petersen's samples are small or selected; Knoll himself says the Nobel result is weak. Treat this part as hypothesis.
- Gaps in this copy. Two pages and several image pages are missing from the scan used, so some figures could only be reconstructed from the text.
Who's Who
Only dates printed in the book are given; where the book prints none, none is given.
| Person | Book's dates | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Joseph Campbell | Editor; writes the foreword | |
| Olga Froebe-Kapteyn | Host of Eranos since 1933; selected and organized the papers | |
| Henry Corbin | born 1903 | Preface "The Time of Eranos"; paper on Mazdaism and Ismailism |
| Mircea Eliade | born 1907 | Paper on time and eternity in Indian thought |
| C. G. Jung | born 1875 | Paper on synchronicity |
| Max Knoll | born 1897 | Physicist; paper on transformations of science |
| Gerardus van der Leeuw | born 1890, died 1950 | Paper on primordial and final time (1949), the volume's envoi |
| Louis Massignon | born 1883 | Paper on time in Islamic thought |
| Erich Neumann | born 1905 | Paper on art and time |
| Helmuth Plessner | born 1892 | Paper on time and death |
| Adolf Portmann | born 1897 | Zoologist; paper on time in the organism |
| Henri-Charles Puech | born 1902 | Paper on Gnosis and time |
| Gilles Quispel | born 1916 | Paper on time and history in patristic Christianity |
| Hellmut Wilhelm | born 1905 | Paper on the Book of Changes |
| Ralph Manheim; R. F. C. Hull | Translators (Hull for Jung's paper) | |
| St. Augustine | (City of God, 413 to 426) | His analysis of time is quoted by Campbell, Quispel, and van der Leeuw |
| J. B. Rhine | ESP and PK experiments cited by Jung | |
| Markus Fierz | Computed the probabilities of Jung's results; later reduced them | |
| Shao Yung; Chou Tun-i | Sung philosophers who systematized the I Ching | |
| Wang Fu-chih | 1619-92 | Theory of the oracle and of integrity, in Wilhelm |
| G. W. Leibniz | Found his binary system in Shao Yung's order; pre-established harmony | |
| Paul Ludwig Landsberg | On the experience of death, quoted by Plessner | |
| Martin Heidegger | Being-toward-death; Plessner's main opponent | |
| Karl von Frisch | Bee time-memory experiments, in Portmann | |
| Hermann Gunkel | (work of 1895) | Primordial time and final time as poles of one history |
| Raffaele Pettazzoni | Myth as "true history," in van der Leeuw | |
| Martin Buber | Israel's history-stamped view of nature, in van der Leeuw |
Part 16. Glossary
Terms as the book uses or glosses them, with the paper where each matters most. Foreign words follow the book's spelling without diacritics.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Adunata | Sayings for an impossible moment ("when the calves dance on the ice"); for van der Leeuw, "the myth of the impossible" in which eschatology lives (Part 13) |
| Aeternitas, sempiternitas | Eternity beyond time, and endless succession; for Plessner only on a foundation of the first can there be the second (Part 10) |
| Ahuvar | The Mazdean prayer whose celestial archetype is the eternal Voice of Ohrmazd; sung, it casts Ahriman down (Part 6) |
| Ajal musamma | The marked term: the second divine instant, the sanction, that ends the interval of duration (Part 5) |
| Amr, kun | The order and the fiat of God that each instant reveals (Part 5) |
| Aseitas | God's being of himself, rendered by van der Leeuw as "God's aloneness": God exists even without a world (Part 13) |
| Azal, azaliyat, azali | The eternally-being, the eternal actuation of being, and the eternally made-to-be, in the Ismaili cosmology (Part 6) |
| Canon (cultural) | A group's collective consciousness, its supreme values, above the collective unconscious (Part 2) |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Complementary pair | Two aspects of one object between which a relation of uncertainty holds, so that fixing one blurs the other; opposed to a simple pair (Part 11) |
| Configured time | Portmann's term for life: organisms, like melodies, as time given form (Part 12) |
| Creatio ex nihilo, creatio continua | Creation from nothing, which gives an absolute beginning, and creation renewed again and again (Parts 10, 13) |
| Decans | Egyptian time gods, each presiding over a ten-day section of the sky, read by Knoll as marks of astrobiological time (Part 11) |
| Den | The eternal Religion in Mazdaism, identified with the archetype of the Ahuvar (Part 6) |
| Distentio, intentio | Augustine's terms: the soul stretched and scattered in time, and its inner relation to eternity (Part 4) |
| Ephapax, hapax, semel | "Once and for all": the unique death of Christ that gives Christian time its direction (Parts 3, 4) |
| Eschatology | Utterances about the margin of the world before it was and after it ends; for van der Leeuw, absent in the strict sense from primitive myth (Part 13) |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Fravarti | In Mazdaism a celestial entity that is also a human faculty (Part 6) |
| Getik, menok | The earthly and the celestial state in Mazdaism; menok is invisible yet perfectly concrete, not a Platonic idea (Part 6) |
| Heimarmene | Destiny written in the stars, felt by late Greeks as servitude and by Gnostics as something to be broken (Part 3) |
| Kairos | The decisive, fulfilled moment of the Christian plan of salvation (Parts 4, 13) |
| Kalpa, mahayuga, yuga | Indian measures of cosmic time; a thousand mahayugas make a kalpa, one day of Brahma (Part 7) |
| Lo pan | The Chinese geomantic compass, with a magnetic needle and concentric circles (Part 11, Plate IV) |
| Maya | The cosmic illusion of Visnu, shown in the story of Narada and the water (Part 7) |
| Nunc stans | The standing now: the eternal that neither endures nor passes (Part 10) |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Oikonomia | The divine plan of salvation within which man meets his kairos (Parts 3, 4) |
| Olam | Hebrew primordial time, which gathers the whole content of time; me-olam ad-olam, "from everlasting" (Part 13) |
| Pairs of aspects | Knoll's term for two descriptions of one object, both needed and not reducible to each other (Part 11) |
| Pleroma | The Gnostic fullness from which Sophia fell, giving rise to time (Part 3) |
| Primordial time | Not a remote past but a prototypical time, repeated in rite, that creates what happens today (Part 13) |
| Shih | Chinese "time," first "sowing time," then season, then time in general (Part 9) |
| Synchronicity | Jung's term for "the parallelism of time and meaning" between psychic and psychophysical events without a causal link (Part 8) |
| Temps-cadran, temps-duree | Clock time, made spatial and countable, and lived duration, which cannot be counted (Parts 10, 13) |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Transgredient | Plessner's word for death in man: inherent in life yet coming to his humanity from outside (Part 10) |
| Zervan | Absolute Time made a god in Zervanism, from whom Ohrmazd and Ahriman are born (Part 6) |
About this book
Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks by Joseph Campbell (ed.), 1958. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions