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The fourth hexagram of the I Ching quoted in this volume by Hellmut Wilhelm is named “Meng” or “Youthful Folly”. Much to the chagrin of the aged and wise, the Judgement says, “Youthful folly has success”. The spontaneous unreflecting attitude of the “young fool” enables him to maintain himself in the heart of time more truly than theirs. “Meng” can offer hope to a non-specialist who might tremble to attempt a review of a volume containing the mature and erudite expositions of twelve leading authorities on Time in relation to their special studies given at recent Eranos Meetings. For the reflections of such a reviewer must of necessity be unreflection in such a context.
Six of the papers are concerned with Time in relation to great religious systems, i.e. Gnosis, Patristic Christianity, Islamic thought, Mazdaism and Ismailism, Indian thought, and Chinese thought in the I Ching. A seventh is by a modern Christian with specialist knowledge in ancient Egyptian religion. The rest are by a philosopher, a biologist, a professor of physics and electronics, and two analytical psychologists.
The contributions do not cover certain aspects of the problem of Time and to some extent the authors are brought together by a common interest in the collective unconscious. Nevertheless it is possible to distinguish certain nodal points of archetypal interest in the papers.
One centre of interest lies in those religious systems which are concerned with the “direction” of Time conceived of as a flow. Thus the “circular” time, attributed to the early Greeks and others, is contrasted with the “linear” time of Christianity and the “broken linear” time of Gnosticism, together with not dissimilar notions in classical Indian thought as well as those in Mazdaism and Ismailism. “Circular” time is connected with the kind of consciousness that is immersed in the round of the seasons—with death and rebirth endlessly repeated. Christianity's “linear time” sees time in an eschatological setting as having