The Seba library treats Hourglass in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Campbell, Joseph, Winnicott, D W).
In the library
6 passages
Often he is represented together with death (as a skeleton), holding an hourglass. I have never met a similar motif in modern dreams. But in the stern moods and fits of depression from which many aging people suffer... one might assume that this archetype is at work.
Von Franz identifies the hourglass as the iconographic attribute of Father Time — an autonomous, split-off dark aspect of the God-image — whose psychological correlate is the depressive melancholy of aging, even if the explicit image no longer surfaces in modern dreams.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The upper right hand of the dancing god holds a little drum shaped like an hourglass, the rhythm of which is the world-creating beat of time, which draws a veil across the face of eternity, projecting temporality and thereby the temporal world.
Campbell reads the hourglass-shaped drum of Shiva Nataraja as the creative, world-projecting rhythm of time, transforming the hourglass from an emblem of exhaustion into a generative, cosmogonic pulse.
She described herself as being in gaol, locked up, completely out of control of things, identified with the sand in the hourglass.
Winnicott records a patient's spontaneous identification with the hourglass's sand as a clinical image of total passivity, entrapment, and loss of self-agency — the hourglass functioning as a projective container for psychic helplessness.
This is qualitative time as distinct from the quantitative hourglass of waking time.
Bosnak explicitly opposes the hourglass as a symbol of quantitative, linear, waking-state time to the qualitative, discontinuous temporality encountered in imaginative and dreamlike states.
Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
Others, conferring upon him the identity of Chronos, think that he is displaying an hourglass. Those who attribute the identity of Saturn to him...
Jodorowsky documents the interpretive tradition that identifies the Tarot Hermit with Chronos/Saturn and reads his lantern as an hourglass, linking the symbol to the archetypal complex of wisdom, time, and senescent knowing.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting
A rendering of the Visconti-Sforza Hermit, or Time trump... the image of the triumph represented the soul's journey from its beginning.
Place situates the Hermit-Time card within Renaissance triumph iconography, providing iconographic context in which the hourglass would have been recognized as an attribute of the soul's temporal journey.
Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005aside