seasons
The term ‘season’ in the depth-psychology corpus operates along two distinct but convergent axes: the cosmological-temporal and the psycho-ethical. In the Chinese divinatory tradition represented by both Wilhelm’s and Ritsema’s I Ching translations, season (SHIH) carries a weight far beyond meteorological description—it signifies the quality of time itself, the sacred alignment of action with cosmic rhythm, expressed in the ideogram of sun and temple. Here the four seasons articulate the full yin-yang cycle of transformation, and the superior person’s task is to act in accord with the season rather than against it. This yields the resonant formula that appears across multiple hexagram commentaries: ‘associating with the season.’ In Harrison’s classical scholarship, the Horae—originally two, later three—emerge as substantive potencies rather than abstractions, representing the actual content of time as food-bearing reality. Campbell extends this into ritual theory, arguing that seasonal festivals do not merely attempt to control nature but enact the community’s conscious submission to cosmic order. Hesiod preserves the archaic identification of season with practical wisdom—reading stellar signs, wind patterns, and plant behavior as indices of right timing. Kerényi, treating the Dionysian opora, reveals the season as a profoundly ambivalent power, simultaneously dangerous and fecund. The unifying thread is seasonal time as normative: to act rightly is to act seasonally.
Season, SHIH: quality of the time; the right time, opportune, in harmony; planning in accord with the time; seasons of the year. The ideogram: sun and temple, time as sacred.
This passage provides the foundational definition of season within the I Ching system, establishing it as sacred temporal quality rather than mere chronological division.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
The season stopping, by-consequence stopping. The season moving, by-consequence moving. Stirring-up, stilling, not letting-go one’s season.
This passage articulates the I Ching’s core doctrine that right action is determined entirely by alignment with the season’s own movement or stillness.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
The Seasons, the Horae, are potencies, divinities in themselves, and there are but two Seasons, the fruitful and the fruitless. The year and the seasons derive then their value, as was natural, from the food they bring. They are not abstractions, divisions of time; they are the substance, the content of time.
Harrison argues that in archaic Greek thought seasons were not temporal abstractions but living powers defined by their substantive yield, making them the very content rather than containers of time.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
Rites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the essential oneness of the individual and the group; seasonal festivals open a larger horizon. As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city—so is humanity entire—only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos.
Campbell positions seasonal festivals as the ritual mechanism by which humanity recognizes itself as participant in cosmic rather than merely social order.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
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 concordance entry establishes the four seasons as the complete articulation of sacred time within the I Ching’s cosmological system.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
Actually Provision’s season righteously great in-fact. Actually Following the season’s righteous great in-fact. Actually Retiring’s season righteously great in-fact.
These repeated formulas across multiple hexagrams demonstrate that the season’s righteousness—its quality of moral and temporal correctness—is a governing principle throughout the I Ching.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
This was also the time of the most dangerous heat: a highly ambivalent season! The same was true in Crete and Greece… the heat was obviously evil… But in a mysterious way the season was also good.
Kerényi identifies the Dionysian opora as a paradigmatically ambivalent season, embodying simultaneously destructive heat and beneficial fruition, revealing the archetypal complexity of seasonal power.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
Harvest, Harvesting, LI, as a divinatory term, indicates what is advantageous… As the third phase of the Time Cycle it refers to: autumn, the West, sunset; the season’s yield of natural produce.
This passage demonstrates how each season in the I Ching system corresponds to a specific divinatory quality and phase of the temporal cycle, integrating cosmological and practical meaning.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
Actually Provision’s season righteously great in-fact. Actually Following the season’s righteous great in-fact. Actually Retiring’s season righteously great in-fact.
The concordance linking season to righteousness across hexagrams confirms that temporal alignment carries moral weight in the I Ching’s ethical cosmology.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
It is the season of harvesting, of joint labor. Next, 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 maps the trigrams of the Inner-World Arrangement onto successive seasons, establishing a cosmological progression from harvest through stern reckoning.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
It is the season of harvesting, of joint labor. Next, 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
This parallel Wilhelm passage confirms the trigram-season correspondence and emphasizes the seasonal movement toward fruition and judgment.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
The reference here is to the movement of the Receptive, which corresponds with the seasons of summer and autumn (south and west). At these times the Receptive is with ‘friends,’ that is, obedient to the laws of heaven: it is giving life to all varieties of beings.
Wilhelm links the Receptive principle to specific seasons, showing how alignment with seasonal movement is identical with obedience to cosmic law and the generation of life.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
the season when Boreas blows is the time when ‘the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth’; … ‘when the House-carrier, fleeing the Pleiades, climbs up the plants from the earth,’ is the season for harvesting.
Hesiod’s method of naming seasons through emblematic natural events demonstrates the archaic identification of right timing with observed natural signs rather than abstract calendar divisions.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting
the will of Zeus who holds the aegis is different at different times; and it is hard for mortal men to tell it; for if you should plough late, you may find this remedy—when the cuckoo first calls in the leaves of the oak.
Hesiod presents the reading of seasonal signs as the human response to divine temporality, acknowledging that Zeus’s will shifts with the season and must be discerned through natural observation.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting
Not only was the Kouros bidden to come for the Year, but… the Kouretes of Dikte, when they deceived Kronos, hid Zeus in the cave and reared him for the Year.
Harrison demonstrates how the seasonal cycle is mythologically encoded in the Kouros cult, with the divine figure’s return structured around the Year as the fundamental unit of seasonal renewal.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
‘It is changes that are chiefly responsible for disease, especially the greatest changes,’ the changing seasons. Change happens first in the environment. The prior cause of disease is outside.
Padel shows that in Greek medical thought the seasons’ changes constitute the primary environmental cause of psychological and physical disorder, making seasonal transition a site of vulnerability.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
The mountain is immovable, accepting all the different conditions of the four seasons, including roaring thunder in summer and snow in winter… ‘The four seasons cooperate in a single scene; regard light and heavy with a single eye.’
Dōgen uses the mountain’s impartial reception of all four seasons as a model for magnanimous mind, transforming the seasonal cycle into a paradigm of non-discriminating awareness.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234supporting
When the year is fixed by the solar period, we get festivals of the type of the Roman Saturnalia… and the single combat appears as the driving out of winter or of the dying year by the vigorous young spirit of the New Year.
Harrison identifies the ritual combat of seasonal festivals as the dramatic enactment of the dying year’s displacement by the new season’s power, linking the eniautos-daimon to seasonal succession.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
This version of the Christian mother-son drama plays itself like a routine repertoire, season after season, in the psyche of those mimetic to this particular pattern of the puer.
Hillman employs ‘season after season’ as a marker of compulsive psychological repetition, using seasonal recurrence as a metaphor for the puer’s inability to move beyond its characteristic pattern.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
This kind of thinking was joined to the Time Cycle by identifying each kind of line with a season. The yin and yang hemicycles were then elaborated around a central axis or Pivot of Equalization.
Ritsema explains the structural logic by which the I Ching’s line-types were mapped onto seasons, showing season as the cosmological template for the hexagram system’s organization.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside