Tide

I became quite suddenly and swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my life

James presents ‘tide’ as the primary phenomenological descriptor for an involuntary influx of healing psychic energy during a spiritual-therapeutic encounter, marking it as sudden, somatic, and structurally analogous to religious conversion.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis

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once again, the tide turned. For as Persia had been stopped at Marathon (490 b.c.), so at Poitiers (732 a.d.) was Islam; and thereafter the stirring desert cry of the muezzin to communal prayer was year by year forced back

Campbell deploys ‘tide’ as a macro-historical metaphor for the rhythmic alternation of dominant religious-cultural forces, implying that civilizational energies, like psychic energies, follow cyclical patterns of advance and withdrawal.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964thesis

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Mount Lu in misty rain; the River Che at high tide. When I had not been there, no rest from the pain of longing! I went there and returned … It was nothing special

Watts cites the high tide as a classical Zen image illustrating how awakening restores ordinary phenomena — including the rhythmic fullness of water — to their self-evident reality, dissolving the longing that previously surrounded them.

Watts, Alan, The Way of Zen, 1957supporting

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At that time the winds are steady, and the sea is harmless. Then trust in the winds without care, and haul your swift ship down to the sea and put all the freight on board

Hesiod encodes an archaic wisdom of tidal and seasonal attunement, linking the condition of the sea to the readiness for bold undertaking, a pattern depth psychology later re-reads as outer cosmos mirroring inner psychic readiness.

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

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You yourself wait until the season for sailing is come, and then haul your swift ship down to the sea and stow a convenient cargo in it, so that you may bring home profit

Hesiod’s navigational counsel encodes a temporally rhythmic ethic — waiting for the sea’s receptive moment — that anticipates depth-psychological readings of kairos as psychic timing aligned with natural rhythm.

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

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Others, however, remained to cull sustenance not only from the forest but also from the sea and shores.

Campbell’s account of post-glacial human adaptation to coastal tidal environments subtly frames humanity’s relationship to the sea’s rhythms as a formative condition of mythological imagination.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964aside

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