Day

Homer identifies the ‘day’ with the fate experienced, speaks of the fate as the fjnocp. aiaipov fjuap… inap is the fate experienced by the individual, not the daylight universally shared, and it does not last just a day but is a phase of fortune of greater or less duration.

Onians argues that in Homeric Greek the word for ‘day’ (hēmar) denotes a qualitative, individuated destiny rather than a shared astronomical unit, making the day coextensive with lived fate.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Morning knowledge is knowledge of the creator, evening knowledge is the knowledge of created things… As more and more falls under the rational control of the ego, humanity’s morning knowledge is increasingly darkened.

Edinger, reading Jung on Augustine, presents morning and evening as opposed epistemological orientations — the first toward God and the Self, the second toward matter and ego-rationality — so that the arc of a day encodes the psyche’s spiritual history.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This, too, belongs to the rhythm of day and night… with Augustine, the first day of creation begins with self-knowledge, cognitio sui ipsius, by which is meant a knowledge not of the ego but of the self.

Jung identifies the first day of creation with the dawn of self-knowledge in the Augustinian sense, grounding alchemical light-symbolism in the psychic reality of the Self.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This ‘eternal day’ is God himself… He saw ‘a great man clothed with the day, the most radiant day he had ever seen, a day of many years, even of eternal duration.’

Von Franz marshals cross-cultural evidence — Christian theology, Amerindian vision, Chinese cosmology — to show that ‘day’ can symbolize the divine itself as radiant, creative temporality.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Without the sun, what day? What night?… night and day are one… By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change.

Heraclitus proposes that day and night are not opposites but aspects of a single logos-governed cycle, anticipating the coincidentia oppositorum so central to Jungian thought.

Ephesus, Heraclitus of, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The assumption that the different portions of time have different quality is so strong that the various days of the month… are boldly characterised as good or bad for this or that.

Onians shows that archaic Greek thought attributed intrinsic qualitative character to particular days, a cosmological-psychological doctrine systematic in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

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.

Von Franz’s commentary on the Aurora Consurgens locates dawn — the liminal moment between night and day — as the governing image of alchemical transformation, structurally analogous to the nigredo-to-albedo transition.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Thus and for these reasons day and night came into being, the period of the single and most intelligent revolution… that mankind shall learn to count and develop mathematics by the exercise of reckoning periods of time, days, months, and years.

Plato’s Timaeus presents day as the fundamental cosmic pedagogical unit — the Demiurge’s instrument by which souls are educated in number and intelligible order.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The life span of the Buddha with the moon visage is only one day and one night. The life span of the Buddha with the sun visage is one thousand eight hundred years. Both Buddhas, however, are only facets of the Great One.

Von Franz uses the Zen parable of Master Ma to illustrate how ‘day’ can encode both mortal brevity and cosmic duration, facets of a single archetypal reality.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Every year, month, day and even hour was identical with a number and was at the same time a god… time existed potentially from the beginning as a principle connected with the supreme Lord of Time.

Von Franz demonstrates that Mesoamerican cultures identified each day with a divine numeral, providing cross-cultural support for the archaic psychology of qualitative time.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For these are days which come from Zeus the all-wise, when men discern aright… the first, the fourth, and the seventh — on which Leta bare Apollo with the blade of gold — each is a holy day.

Hesiod’s catalogue of sacred and profane days grounds the archaic Greek belief that the quality of a day is divinely ordained and cosmologically significant.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

On that day a woman should set up her loom and get forward with her work. Avoid the thirteenth of the waxing month for beginning to sow: yet it is the best day for setting plants.

Hesiod prescribes specific human activities for specific days, embedding social and agricultural life in a cosmological rhythm of qualitatively differentiated time.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Day/sun, JIH: actual sun and the time of a sun-cycle, a day… A chün tzu completing the day: Force, Force… The seventh day coming: Returning.

The I Ching’s lexicon equates day with the solar cycle and encodes specific day-counts (seventh day, three days) as pivotal temporal thresholds for the unfolding of archetypal situations.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In the beginning, then, that is to say on the first day, God created light… And God called the light day, but t[he darkness night].

John of Damascus situates the naming of ‘day’ as an act of divine will separating light from darkness, establishing the theological foundation for the Christian symbolic valence of the term.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

On the ‘most polluted day’ of the Athenian year, ‘all Athenians are Oresteioi’… All sanctuaries in Athens were closed except this one. House doors were varnished with black pitch.

Padel describes the Anthesteria’s ‘most polluted day’ (Choes) as a ritual inversion — civic darkness, silence, and miasma — demonstrating that the Greek sacred calendar singled out particular days as loci of collective psychic danger.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day… I am able, on occasion, to begin a dream’s interpretation by looking at the event of the previous day which set it in motion.

Freud establishes the ‘day residue’ as the obligatory contact point between waking life and dreamwork, making the preceding day a threshold between conscious experience and unconscious elaboration.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The fourth of the mid-month is a day holy above all… the fourth day after the twentieth is best while it is morning: towards evening it is less good.

Hesiod’s fine discriminations within a single day — morning versus evening — extend his qualitative time-doctrine to the intraday level, foreshadowing the morning/evening symbolism later elaborated in alchemical and Jungian thought.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The moon wanes from the time of its origin, or renewal, till it is fourteen and three-quarter days’ old, and proceeds to wane till the twenty-ninth and a half day… a memorial of our resurrection.

John of Damascus treats the lunar month’s count of days as a theological sign of resurrection, linking temporal measure to eschatological meaning.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →