Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Day and Night’ operates simultaneously as a cosmological given, a psychological archetype, and an alchemical cipher. Jung establishes the foundational claim: the daily alternation of light and darkness has impressed itself upon the psyche from primordial times, generating mythic images of the solar hero’s diurnal journey rather than mere meteorological facts. Campbell elaborates this by linking the nocturnal realm to dream-logic—a world where objects shine of themselves and transformation proceeds by non-mechanical means—positioning Night as the matrix of mythic saturation. Hillman, characteristically, rescues Night from devaluation, insisting that Nyx and her offspring demand discriminating engagement rather than pharmaceutical suppression, and reading the elder’s disrupted sleep as initiatory exposure to the underworld’s pedagogy. The alchemical tradition, represented by von Franz’s commentary on the Aurora Consurgens, locates dawn—the precise threshold between day and night—as the privileged moment of the opus, carrying both temporal and chromatic significance. Plato’s cosmological discussions in the Timaeus assign Earth the role of ‘guardian and maker of day and night,’ grounding the alternation in rational celestial mechanics. Neumann reads the polarity through the Great Mother, in whose matriarchal sphere the sun is born and dies within the arc of light that always ends in nocturnal darkness. Corbin’s Sufi material inverts the polarity altogether, proposing a ‘luminous Night’ and a ‘dark Midday’ that displace conventional categories. The term thus anchors discussions of consciousness and unconscious, solar mythology, alchemical process, and mystical epistemology.
the daily course of the sun and the regular alternation of day and night must have imprinted themselves on the psyche in the form of an image from primordial times.
Jung grounds the day-night polarity in a phylogenetic imprinting upon the psyche, treating it as the primary source of the solar-hero mythologem and of archetypal imagery generally.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
diurnal alternation of light and dark is another ineluctable factor of experience… at night the world sleeps, dangers lurk, and the mind plunges into a realm of dream experience, which differs in its logic from the world of light.
Campbell argues that the day-night alternation is the experiential foundation for the opposition between waking rational consciousness and the non-mechanical, self-luminous logic of the dream and mythic worlds.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
An hour or two with the children of Nyx, wide-eyed in a dark room, can be exhausting… she takes offense at our methods of avoiding knowledge of the night.
Hillman reframes nocturnal wakefulness as an initiatory encounter with the mythological children of Night, opposing the cultural suppression of darkness through pharmacology and light pollution.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
In the matriarchal sphere, the daytime sky is the realm where the sun is born and dies, not, as later, the realm over which it rules. It is the light span of life, beginning and ending in night.
Neumann demonstrates that in matriarchal mythological consciousness, day is not sovereign but subordinate—a brief arc of light contained within and returning to the primordial darkness of the Great Mother.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
the dawn is between day and night and has two colours, namely yellow and red, and thus our science, or alchemy, produces the yellow and the red colours, which are between black and white.
Von Franz explicates the alchemical Aurora as the liminal threshold between day and night, its chromatic duality (yellow-red) encoding the intermediate stages of the opus between nigredo and albedo.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
the dawn is midway between night and day, shining with twofold hues, namely, red and yellow; so likewise doth this science beget the colours yellow and red, which are midway between white and black.
The Aurora Consurgens text establishes dawn as the structural and symbolic midpoint of the day-night polarity, mapping it onto the alchemical colour sequence as an intermediary between the dark and light phases of transformation.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
luminous Night (shab-e roshan) which is dark Midday… It is indeed Night, since it is black light and the abscondity of pure Essence… and yet luminous night, since it is at the same time the theophany of the absconditum.
Corbin inverts the conventional day-night hierarchy in Iranian Sufism, presenting the mystic Night as simultaneously dark and luminous—a paradoxical theophany that transcends and dissolves the ordinary polarity.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
Thus and for these reasons day and night came into being, the period of the single and most intelligent revolution.
Plato’s Timaeus presents day and night as the product of the Sun’s rational revolution, establishing the diurnal cycle as the primary unit of cosmic and mathematical order from which humanity learns to count.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
if Plato is consistent, the Earth must stand still, relatively to the diurnal revolution of the stars… Earth would be anything but ‘the guardian and maker of day and night’.
Cornford’s analysis of the Timaeus positions Earth as the passive guardian that defines day and night through its stillness, making the alternation a function of stellar revolution rather than terrestrial motion.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
three-headed Time, whose wings are the months and who makes life revolve with the alternations of day and night.
Neumann’s iconographic reading of the Great Round identifies the day-night alternation as the operative mechanism of Time’s sovereignty over life, linking it to the wheel of fate presided over by the Great Mother.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
The night of spirit, the sinking of consciousness, the ‘dark night of the soul,’ is a necessary movement in the rhythm of light and darkness.
Moore, following Ficino’s solar psychology, integrates the dark phase of the day-night rhythm into a complete account of consciousness, arguing that descent into darkness is structurally required by any genuine solar sensibility.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
it is one of the characteristics of night demons and specters that they are linked with night and darkness and that they have to escape if either a light is kindled or if day breaks.
Hillman’s Pan volume documents the mythological and ethnographic basis for the strict ontological boundary between night-demons and daylight, establishing the dawn as the threshold that dissolves nocturnal visitations.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
His way of talking brings together the black and white, or what Freud called the contradictory meaning of root ideas.
Hillman invokes Heraclitean paradox and the black-white opposition to frame the underworld’s dream-logic as a realm that refuses the clean separation of day-consciousness and night-consciousness.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
a diffused glow on the horizon, i.e., on the threshold of consciousness… The anima is this ‘feminine’ light of the unconscious, bringing illumination, gnosis, or the realization of the self.
Von Franz maps the dawn-threshold between night and day onto the anima’s psychological function, reading the aurora as the liminal light of growing unconscious luminosity at the edge of awareness.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting
God created light, the ornament and glory of the whole visible creation. For take away light and all things remain in undistinguishable darkness, incapable of displaying their native beauty. And God called the light day.
John of Damascus articulates the patristic cosmological grounding of the day-night distinction, in which light is the first creative act and the naming of day marks the ontological separation from undifferentiated darkness.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
the Fixed Stars with night and day: ‘When Ouranos ceases not turning these bodies about for many nights and days… Day and Night—one and two—is the simplest lesson in number.’
The Epinomis commentary frames day and night as the primordial numerical lesson—one and two—through which the revolution of the fixed stars teaches humanity the rudiments of counting and mathematical thought.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Why do old people sleep less at night and slip into little naps in broad daylight, dozing off in the midst of company? Why this reversal of conventional sleeping habits?
Hillman introduces the elder’s reversal of the conventional day-night sleep cycle as a puzzle requiring psychological rather than geriatric explanation, framing it as a shift of orientation toward the nocturnal domain.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999aside
‘If it is night, it is dark. But it is night. Therefore it is dark,’ is deductive… but is not true, because the antecedent conjunctive proposition ‘It is night’ is false.
Stoic logicians employed day-and-night propositions as canonical examples in their truth-conditional logic, treating the diurnal alternation as the paradigmatic empirical fact against which argument validity is tested.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside