That vast and vague encircler of the world

Speculations on the pagan gods and time

Have you ever wondered why the pagan gods still assert their claims on our markers of time? Thor claims Thursday, Woden, Wednesday. Every January, Janus, the two-faced god of doors, facilitates the transition of one year into another. And Mars lets us know that campaign season approaches as winter thaws. The celestial Roman court reveals itself in planets—whose relevance to time I’ll attempt to imply.

Matthieu Pageau, in his The Language of Creation—an intriguing distillation of what he describes as the archaic way of thinking and seeing—defines “time” as that circular, chaotic principle that tends toward death and dissolution while simultaneously allowing for renewal. It is symbolized and brought about through music, waters (both baptismal and flood), drink, intoxication, wheels, wilderness, decay, recreation (re-creation), rest, and sleep. Time is the chaos which allows for death and birth. It is the big uroboric snake which wraps the mythic world at the edge of the seas.[1]

It's a perspective not far off from what those 19^th century pioneers formulated as the second law of thermodynamics—that entropy[2], disorder, tends to increase toward a maximum. Or as one of Isaac Asimov’s characters puts it, “Everything runs down, you know…” Though the scientists’ law seems to emphasize just one side of archaic time: the inexorable running down; I’m not sure it ever had much room for rebirth.

Pageau argues that time’s the counterpoint to “space” (the squarelike, ordering principle which allows for production, collaboration, and predictability—which is brought about by work and reveals itself in tools, the king, the state, the act of counting and measuring, pillars, dry land, etc.).

The perennial tension between space and time creates a cyclical pattern of structure and release. Structure is built under the reign of space until it becomes overwrought and stultifying. Time floods in to break the structure back down. And as the waters recede, space returns, and structure is rebuilt on now-irrigated dry land. We find this pattern all around us: in the cycle of our days from sleep to wakefulness back to sleep; in the arc of human life from birth to life to death; in the course of civilizations from wilderness to vigor to decadence to collapse.

One of the pattern’s most foundational—though maybe not readily apparent—manifestations is our seven-day week. In the Genesis account, we open on archaic time: “…the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Creation then takes six days, and “on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” We see time (the deep) give way to space (creation) give way to time (rest). And we follow this pattern in the cycle of our weeks, in which we rest, then work, then rest again.

But why six? Why seven? Doubtlessly the mystery is too deep to be netted by words, but—at the risk of alienating readers with this rather esoteric-sounding intuition (which is not necessarily load-bearing in the construction of this argument)—I’ll let Pageau suggest one possible way to think about it:

In the narrative of creation, the meaning of the numbers six and seven comes from the parallels between working and counting. The number seven symbolizes the inability to correctly measure the cycle with its radius, which yields a measurement of six and a little bit more [as a circle’s circumference equals the length of six radiuses plus an irrational remainder]. This “rest” demonstrates that cyclical continuity can never be subsumed by the square patterns of reason and ‘space’ because there is always a remainder. In other words, the complete cycle is an unanswerable riddle.

The number seven represents the natural law of the cycle, and the seventh part of that cycle symbolizes the irrational period when the end transforms into a new beginning. It is the strange moment when the cycle finally “swallows itself” in the confusion of first and last. This type of inversion is forbidden by the hierarchical “law of space” during periods of work and productivity. However, during the critical seventh period, space loses its grip on reality as it returns to more primitive cyclical conditions. In the Bible, this “returning to irrationality” is often symbolized as flooding on the cosmic scale and carnivals, Sabbaths, and Jubilees on the human scale.

Forgive me for that, but if it resonates at all, I’m glad to have the company. To state it more simply: six is the countable but incomplete, and seven is the complete but uncountable.

In any case, with this pattern in mind it seems no accident that Saturn—god of time, dissolution, and periodic renewal—claims what was historically the seventh day of our week.[3] And as Pageau mentions, Saturday is also the Jewish Sabbath[4]—a day of rest and worship which points toward messianic hope and the eventual reunification of heaven and earth[5]. And the Israelite Jubilee[6]—during which slaves were freed, debts forgiven, and social relationships inverted—marked the end of every seventh seven-year cycle and the beginning of a new one.[7]

Throughout history societies have instantiated opportunities for periodic chaos and renewal, during which chthonic forces would be given air to breathe so that civic life could be refreshed. The ancient Athenians hosted an annual festival for the god of madness and wine (the City Dionysia). The Romans had Saturnalia during which masters became slaves and slaves became masters amid riotous drinking, gambling and songs. In the Latin Catholic world, we have Mardi Gras and Carnival.[8] Modern Israel has Purim. And in the secular west we celebrate death, disguise, trickery, and indulgence on Halloween as the branches shed their leaves.[9]

All such festivities allow space to periodically give way to time.

They’re a sort of safety valve to relieve the mounting pressure. Things on the outside must be allowed to break in. The carnival that exists in a gravel lot on the outskirts of town brings its spinning rides and its pointless games to Main Street once per cycle. These moments of transition are inherently fun and inherently dangerous. There’s a reason for the bivalent resonance of the clown or the carnie. Is he happy or sad? Is he the stuff of children’s dreams or their nightmares? Is he a lovable friend or a serial killer?

The pattern is rooted in reality outside of human culture. The natural liturgy of the seasons dances the same dance. The earth rests in death during winter, after which life springs from the earth and grows toward summer ripeness and eventual decay, which finally gives way to autumnal dying and the return of winter rest. The space-structured day alternates with time-flooded night. The river valley deluges and dries. The tides ebb and flow. In every breath, we inhale to incorporate and exhale to dispel.

From the archaic perspective, Pageau implies, the forward motion of chronology can be taken as given and yet somewhat secondary to this purportedly deeper notion of time. Serial time was long marked, if marked at all, by which king, consulate, or emperor was reigning and for how many years he had reigned. It wasn’t until the King of kings inaugurated his rule that we fixed a point for year zero and adopted our frame for indefinitely accumulating chronological time relative to the “years of our Lord” (Annis Domini, A. D.). By the recognition of his reign, we allowed the old time—watery, snakelike, cyclical—to be baptized and integrated into the big, foundational pattern, which the biblical story characterizes as Paradise to fall back to Paradise—Eden to history to the New Jerusalem: the reintegration of space and time and the reunification of heaven and earth[10].

From this perspective, time looks neither like a circle nor an arrow but something like a helix—ever-cycling, ever-rising. The Christian liturgical calendar across denominations captures something of this shape.

Archaic space rules during the ordinary-time that covers summer and fall, but as the days shorten and archaic time—winter and death—approaches, we anticipate during Advent the shining light which hides in the darkness (the manger-lain child in a cave, the glinting fish at the bottom of the sea). At Christmas, the light springs forth during one of the longest nights of the year and time again gives way to space as the days re-lengthen and we’re back in the ordinary.

We then celebrate an inverted, more concentrated cycle as we usher in 40 days of Lent (the reemergence of archaic time—Jesus in the desert, echoed by Noah in the flood and Israel in the wilderness) during spring and then the return of the King on Palm Sunday. Another—completely transformed, yet completely recognizable—cycle follows on Good Friday as time returns with death for three days (Jesus in the grave/Hades, echoed by Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale) and then gives way with Easter resurrection.

The cycles build tension toward the climax of Easter. And after Easter, the God-man spends his 40 days not in penance, nor in floods, nor in wilderness, but in the world, as the resurrected King of new creation, in which both time and space find their place.

And with Pentecost, archaic time is utterly transformed into liberation and new life without destruction. It’s a sort of anti-babel moment. Rather than the scattering of the languages and the destruction of the prideful tower, at Pentecost, archaic time is liberation through the gospel, which can be heard clearly in all the tongues of man.

Each time through, the shape of the pattern remains, but the manifestations of space and time change their character in a crescendo that suggests eschatological momentum toward a final Palm Sunday.[11]

So far we’ve touched on time in three senses: (1) Pageau’s conception of archaic time as the principle of chaos and regeneration, (2) the cyclical pattern that oscillates between periods of archaic space and periods of archaic time, and (3) the forward motion of serial, chronological time, of which we most readily think when we hear the word “time.”[12]

The ancient Greeks (and Paul of Tarsus throughout his letters) distinguished between chronos (measurable, prosaic time) and kairos (qualitative, meaningful time: “the time is ripe”).[13]

Though I struggle to grasp these slippery thoughts, kairos is not quite Pageau’s archaic time. It’s the eternal mythic present in which the whole cycle plays out and we experience—while simultaneously looking forward to—the culmination of the pattern, which is to find a state of rest (time) and glory in the new creation kingdom (space)[14] and the healing of all things.

In other words, the helix-shape of history is a spiraling fractal as it includes itself in its own recursive pattern, which is probably one of the reasons why, as Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

And our markers of time (in all its senses) are recurrently a battlefield. In September 1792 A. D., French revolutionaries declared it Year 1 of the French Republic. They also attempted to adopt a ten-hour day (with base-ten minutes and seconds) and a ten-day week[15] and to “rationalize” the counting of months by making them as even as they could within our 365.249-day year. Their aim, quite explicitly, was to usurp the reign of Christ. They thought they welcomed the rule of their goddess of reason[16], but all they got was the Reign of Terror.

Such events suggest the intimate relationship which I believe exists between the pagan gods and Pageau’s archaic time. Time is dissolution. The pagan gods are diverse and fractured deities. Time is pointless cyclicality. The pagan gods pursue their petty squabbles in unending immortality.[17] Time is often violent while simultaneously celebratory. The pagan gods are surely that. Time is the chaos on the outside that periodically breaks in. The pagan gods hover on the edges of our conscious lives—just below the words we use, up in the night sky at the limit of our gaze.

G. K. Chesterton distinguished between the pagan daydream and the nightmare. In a forgivable—and not wholly off-base—bit of Victorian ethnocentrism, he drew the line between peoples. His Greek and Roman heroes lived a daydream, while the peoples of the Near East and the Phoenician diaspora lived a nightmare.[18] But his daydream gods of Greece and Rome—and certainly those of the Germanic north—had their nightmarish sides too. As agents of time, like the clown they are bivalent.

As some forces in our society encourage the adoption of the “Common Era” (C. E.) notation at the expense of A. D., I wonder if we’re yielding ground as did the Enlightenment French. Because though hell may have been harrowed in kairos, it does not seem that its forces ever fully quit the field in chronos.

Regardless, it’s clear that Ragnarok rages in our demarcations of time. Still we live in a fortress under siege. And that great snake still circles the seas—watchful, ever waiting to flood back in.

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[1] Described as “the vast and vague Encircler of the World, Miðgarðsormr, the doom of the great gods and no matter for heroes” by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

[2] A word first coined by Rudolph Clausius in 1865 to capture his notion of “the transformational content of the body” or “disgregation.” The etymology of entropy (Greek: en “in” + trope “a turning” and Sanskrit: trapate “confused” or “ashamed”) is perfect for a word bound up so tightly with ideas of time, chaos, and transformation, which are symbolized and instantiated throughout the biblical story and the myths by turning wheels, drunkenness, confusion, and shame.

[3] Saturday = Saturn’s Day.

[4] Our word “Sabbath” was derived from the Hebrew shavat (“to rest”).

[5] Following N. T. Wright’s argument in Surprised by Hope and elsewhere.

[6] Our word “jubilee” was derived from the Hebrew yobhel, a ram’s horn trumpet (a curved musical instrument).

[7] Interestingly, Leviticus states that the year of Jubilee would take place during every fiftieth, rather than every forty-ninth, year, which echoes and points toward the Jewish Feast of Weeks (seven weeks after Passover) and the Christian Pentecost (“fiftieth day”), when other sorts of debts were forgiven and other sorts of slaves were freed.

[8] Mardi Gras and Carnival inaugurate the return of time with the season of Lent.

[9] Halloween inaugurates the return of time with winter and points towards Advent.

[10] The reunification of heaven and earth is a profound idea that will have to be contemplated elsewhere. Pageau, N. T. Wright, and many others have much to say about it.

[11] When I stand back and squint it looks like a helix to me. This entire paragraph (and this entire essay) is unlearned speculation so please forgive my lack of clarity and my inevitable errors.

[12] I also recognize that we’ve been muddling terms and equivocating throughout when using the word “time.” And I only make it worse from here. It’s been done either for the sake of brevity or due to sloppiness or because of my suspicion that these seemingly diverse concepts of “time” may all derive from the same original unified meaning in the sense described in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (see my discussion of the word “gold” in “Giants on the moors”).

[13] See Alan Jacobs’s fascinating essay on Thomas Pynchon (in which I was happy to discover much overlap with—and some points of departure from—my own preoccupations) in The Hedgehog Review for a few illuminating lines on how we can think about the difference between chronos and kairos in our present age.

In this light, Pynchon’s praise of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) as one of the great American novels makes a lot of sense. Pynchon stands at the intersection of Kerouac and Wiener, reclaiming the essentially human in defiance of dehumanizing social and political structures—and equally in defiance of our desire to transform ourselves from creatures into artifacts. Buffoonery is a way of resisting that dark morphosis—“morphosis” being a key word in Mason & Dixon, and associated with disenchantment—while awaiting the hoped-for message from the “far invisible.” The clown stalls for time, but not chronos or clock time—rather, he waits for kairos, a word used in the New Testament to identify the appointed moment, the decisive time: an event that can’t be anticipated by attending to the entropy-governed ticking of one’s watch. Entropy is the only measure of time in a disenchanted world, but that just raises, again, the question of whether the disenchanted world is the only world there is. We can only wait and watch and listen—if we have what one might call a “tolerance for mysterious intrusion” (MD, 493) and at least a provisional sense of what to attend to.

and

Hierophany happens, in other words, within ordinary space, but suggests something beyond ordinary time, something that belongs to or comes from a different temporal order. Therefore, Eliade asserts, “religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites.” As noted above: kairos rather than chronos.

[14] And to find life (space) in death (time).

[15] Advocates for the metric system and extreme decimalization never seem to realize that a base-ten system would be just as anthropocentric and “arbitrary” from their point of view (if held consistently) as any other. Why not use hexadecimal or binary?

[16] The Cult of the Goddess of Reason was officially inaugurated with the Fête de la Raison in November 1793.

[17] A fascinating potential caveat to this statement may be found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s aforementioned essay. “In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness… This may make the southern gods more godlike—more lofty, dread, and inscrutable. They are timeless and do not fear death… It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. 'As a working theory absolutely impregnable.' So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times. It can work… without gods: martial heroism as its own end. But we may remember that [sic?] the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.”

[18] Chesterton cites the prevalence of child-sacrifice among the cults of Baal—a strong case from my perspective.