The Mysteries of Time

The ancient Greeks had three distinct concepts of time Chronos, Kairos and Aion (Eon.) Each was personified as a god. Aion represented the everlasting eternity of the cosmos, whereas Chronos symbolized clock time, and Kairos  the right time. Together, they explained humanity’s place in a temporal world  as it moved forward through eternity.

Chronos (Saturn), the god of fate, rules chronological, sequential time. We measure it with clocks which are divided into seconds, minutes, and hours. It’s the constantly ticking movement that governs our daily lives and it only moves  in one direction – forward. There is no going back. We can’t slow or stop it, and once it’s lost you can’t get it back. We describe it as the past, present and future or the beginning, middle or end. It can be looked at as the quantitative,  digital measurement of time and its geometry is linear.

Kairos, the god of luck and opportunity, rules moments – not the strictly measured seconds of Chronos. It is about qualitative time – “nature time,” not mechanistic, human time. It rules the appropriate moment to take action. It is when a window of opportunity opens and one feels something is about to happen; that there is an opportunity to be seized. Kairos symbolizes the right time while Chronos symbolizes clock time.

Numerology and astrology play a big roll here in helping people to determine that right moment to take action. Kairos is magical analog time and its geometry is the spiral.

This passage from Ecclesiastes is a great description of Kairos. “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be  born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot…”

Aion, the god of perpetual time, eternity, and zodiac, is associated with everlasting time. He differs from Chronos, who is also called a god of time, in  that his movements are cyclic and Chronos is connected to linear movement.  Aion, like the other two gods is considered a great living organism, not a  machine. He is the eternal everlasting god who rules the ages – the iron age,  bronze age etc. in cosmic order. Aionic time is a sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.

Since the time of Galileo and Newton, humanity has progressively devolved into mechanistic, chronological digital time. It almost global now. As a result,  most of us today would say that time passes, at a consistent and measurable rate, in a specific direction – from past to future. So now, during this curious  “out of time” pandemic pause, it may be the perfect moment to widen our view of time and become more attuned to the rhythms of nature and the cosmos.  As Hippocrates said:

“Every Kairos is a Chronos, but not every Chronos is a Kairos.”