Time [antikvár]

Time as a deity and the stream of events 1 Cf. Fraser, The Voices of Time and The Study oi Time. Cf. also Fraser, 01 Time, Passion and Knowledge; Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy ol Time; Priestley; Le Lionnais. 2 Cf. Whorf, 80. 3 Cf.Piaget. Time is one of the great archetypal experiences of man, and has eluded all our attempts towards a completely rational explanation.'' No wonder that it was originally looked upon as a Deity, even as a form of manifestation of the Supreme Deity, from which it flows like a river of life. Only In modern western physics has time become part of a mathematical framework, which we use with our conscious mind to describe physical events. The mind of primitive man made less distinction than ours between outer and inner, material and psychic, events. Primitive man lived in a stream of inner and outer experience which brought along a different cluster of coexisting events at every moment, and thus constantly changed, quantitatively and qualitatively. Even our seemingly self-evident concepts of past, present and future do not seem to be universal. The Hopi Indians, for instance, do not possess them in their language. Their universe has two basic aspects: that which is manifest and thus more 'objective' and that which is beginning to manifest and is more 'subjective'. Concrete objects are manifest and in this way already belong to the past; inner images, representations, expectations and feelings are 'subjective', on their way to manifestation, and thus bend more towards the future. The present is that razor's-edge where something stops beginning to manifest (is already past) or is on the verge of beginning to manifest. There is no continuing flow of time for the Hopi, but a multiplicity of subtly distinguished events. The creator of all this is 'a'ne hlivu, a 'Powerful Something' which is a kind of cosmic breath.^ Children, too, do not at once live in our communal clock time. They have been shown to perceive rhythm, velocity and frequency long before they begin to adapt to our ordinary notion of time.^ In man's original point of view time was life itself and its divine mystery. This remains so in the ancient Greek notion of time. The Greeks actually identified time with the divine river Océanos, which surrounded the earth in a circle and which also encompassed the universe in the form of a circular stream or a tail-eating serpent with the Zodiac on its back. It was also called Chronos (Time) and later identified with Kronos, the father of Zeus, and also with the god Aion.