Kairos: A Jungian View of Time

Kairos, a mythological diety forgotten in twentieth century traffic, has been resurrected by Kelman in his classic paper, “Kairos: The Auspicious Moment.”1 According to Kelman, Kairos, the youngest son of Zeus personifies the auspicious moment, a unique moment which may never occur again. It is a moment of divine determination to be taken most seriously, for it may bring boon or bane.

Kelman tells of the twin altars erected at the entrance to the stadium at the first Greek Olympiad. One was dedicated to Kairos, the other to Hermes, suggesting the importance these two deities held for the antique world. In other words, these two gods presided over “The Games,” and it is evident from Kelman's paper that they may be encountered in the game of life, even today.

As a god, Kairos symbolizes eternal time, archetypal time which cannot be measured by the quartz chronometer to which modern Western man is bound. So addicted are we to our clocks, which measure straight line, linear time that we doubt the psychological reality of eternal time where Kairos lives. He is not captured by the laws of natural science, nor can we clock him with our kind of stopwatch, but it is very important that we apprehend his presence in the background of our lives.

If we go back to the animal world and to the very ancient world of man, ego consciousness had not arisen; instead animal and man were enveloped in eternal or archetypal time, which carried a sufficiency of unconscious meaning with it. Instinctual and archetypal patterns enforced a wise determination of life and behavior, meaningful and functional, but unconscious. Then evolution went on a pace and consciousness gradually emerged from animal unconsciousness. A new kind of time evolved. It emerged in a Near-Eastern geographic area where monotheism began to grow out of polythesism. We in the West now measure clocktime from the birth of Christ, but I don't think it became truly straight-line time until the French Revolution,