The four seasons occupy a richly polysemous position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological schema, archetypal quaternary, and temporal structure of psychic life. The most sustained treatments arise from the I Ching commentarial tradition, where the seasons are neither decorative background nor mere agricultural fact but constitute what Ritsema and Karcher term ‘the four dynamic qualities of time that make up the year and the Time Cycle.’ In the Taoist I Ching commentaries of Liu I-ming and Thomas Cleary, the seasonal cycle encodes the very logic of inner transformation: creation, development, fruition, and consummation mirror spring, summer, autumn, and winter as a single integrated movement of yang and yin. Jung’s alignment of the seasonal quaternary with the four psychological functions—via Paracelsus’s Scaiolae and the four elements—represents the corpus’s most explicit depth-psychological assimilation of seasonal symbolism, grounding what might otherwise remain cosmological poetry in the structure of consciousness itself. Harrison’s philological contribution complicates any facile fourfold scheme by recovering the archaic Greek dyad of fruitful and fruitless seasons, prior to the imposition of four Horae. Bly, drawing on fairy-tale analysis, treats completeness through the fourfold as a psychological imperative: three seasons without spring constitute a wound to the psyche. The field thus spans cosmological necessity, archetypal totality, ritual calendar, and the structure of conscious orientation.
Four seasons, SSU SHIH: the four dynamic qualities of time that make up the year and the Time Cycle; the right time, in accord with the time; time as sacred; all-encompassing.
This passage establishes the four seasons as a formal concept within the I Ching’s Time Cycle, defining them not as chronological divisions but as sacred, all-encompassing qualities of temporal reality.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
Like the four seasons and the four quarters of heaven, the four elements are a quaternary system of orientation which always expresses a totality.
Jung explicitly situates the four seasons alongside elements and cardinal directions as instances of the quaternary archetype, linking seasonal structure directly to the four psychological functions of consciousness.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
Creation, development, fruition, consummation, the successive movements of the four seasons, all are carried out by one strength; the one is the body, the four are the function.
Liu I-ming articulates the four seasons as the fourfold functional expression of a single underlying force, establishing the seasonal cycle as the temporal body of the Tao’s unceasing creative strength.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Heaven[and]Earth Skinning and-also the four seasons accomplishing. Heaven, Earth: Articulating and-also the four seasons accomplishing.
The I Ching concordance repeatedly grounds cosmological processes—skinning, articulating—in the accomplishment of the four seasons, making them the medium through which Heaven and Earth complete their transformations.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
superior people divide the various seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with their twenty-four energies and seventy-two periods, and thus make a calendar to show that the operation of the energies of the five elements each has its own time
Cleary’s commentary on hexagram 49 presents mastery of the four seasons as the basis of wise governance and inner cultivation, linking seasonal articulation to the adaptation of yin and yang in practical life.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Four is complete in that it stands for the four-gated city, the four directions, the four rivers of Paradise, the four seasons, the four letters of the Holy Name.
Bly treats the fourfold seasonal structure as one instance of a universal symbolic completeness, and reads the absence of a fourth season as a psychological wound—something essential has been lost from the psyche.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
The Greeks themselves had at first two, not three, Horae. In early days it is not realized that the Seasons, and with them the food-supply, depend on the Sun. The Seasons, the Horae, are potencies, divinities in themselves.
Harrison’s historical analysis reveals that the four-season schema is a cultural achievement rather than a universal given, with archaic Greek religion recognizing only two Horae as autonomous potencies tied to the food-supply.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
At the summer solstice, Yang dominates; at the winter solstice, Yin; at the equinoxes, they are in a state of dynamic equilibrium. But in the Fall, Yin increases; while in the Spring, Yang increases.
Rudhyar maps the four seasons onto the oscillation of yang and yin, framing the seasonal cross as the cosmological engine of all vital process and the origin of astrological symbolism.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
As the second phase of the Time Cycle it refers to: summer, the South, midday… As the third phase of the Time Cycle it refers to: autumn, the West, sunset; the season’s yield of natural produce.
Ritsema and Karcher demonstrate how each phase of the I Ching’s Time Cycle corresponds to a specific season, direction, and time of day, integrating the four seasons into a unified cosmological orientation system.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
The four seasons cooperate in a single scene; regard light and heavy with a single eye.
Dōgen invokes the four seasons as a model for the magnanimous, unbiased mind that accepts all conditions with equanimity, using seasonal cooperation as an image of integrated consciousness.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234supporting
twelve waxing and waning hexagrams… were combined specifically with the twelve earthly branches… and through them with the twelve months and the four seasons.
Kohn documents how inner alchemical practice correlated the sixty-four hexagrams with the four seasons through a calendrical system that governed the timing of transformative practices.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000supporting
as evening follows day, midautumn follows under the trigram of the Joyous, Tui, which, as autumn, leads the year toward its fruition and joy. Then follows the stern season, when proof of deeds accomplished must be
Wilhelm’s Inner-World Arrangement assigns specific trigrams to each seasonal phase, reading the year’s progression through harvest and fruition as a movement of psychic and cosmic ripening.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Nature herself, deriving her origin from the Godhead, also lays claim to this number as to her fundamental principle.
Pauli’s citation of the quaternary as Nature’s fundamental principle implicitly supports the fourfold seasonal schema by grounding all natural quaternities in a theological and mathematical archetype.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside
Vitalistic astrology may have been born in ancient Chaldea, where it studied first of all the celestial phenomena associated with the changes of the seasons.
Rudhyar situates the seasonal cycle at the historical origin of astrology itself, suggesting that the observation of seasonal change was the primordial act from which all subsequent symbolism of transformation developed.