Beyond the Clock: Rediscovering Time’s Hidden Three Dimensions

How Sacred Myth, Eternal Cycles, and Timeless Truths Challenge Modernity’s Illusion of Progress

Time is a fundamental aspect of human experience that is complex and often misunderstood. Different cultures and spiritual traditions perceive time in diverse ways, shaping how existence is organized and how reality is encountered. At the surface lies Profane Time, the linear and measurable dimension that governs modern life. It encompasses intervals, progress, and historical timelines, reducing existence to mechanistic processes that alienate us from our spiritual nature. In contrast, Sacred Time is cyclical and qualitative, encompassing ritual and myth that actively reactualize primordial events. It highlights an eternal return, where the past remains present, allowing for connection with the divine and cosmic order. This perspective reflects traditional worldviews that align existence with natural rhythms and the ongoing cycle of regeneration and decay. Yet still more profound and transcendent is the dimension of Noetic Time, the timeless, eternal realm that lies beyond all change and becoming. Noetic time is the domain of archetypes, metaphysical truths, and the unchanging forms described in Platonic philosophy. It represents the source and ground of all temporal modalities, the immutable order from which both sacred and profane time derive their being. This is the realm accessible only through spiritual intuition, metaphysical insight, or intellectual contemplation, where time itself is transcended and unity with the divine intelligible order is realized. Noetic time is neither measured nor cyclical, repeating; it is eternal, changeless, and foundational.

These three levels of time, profane, sacred, and noetic, are not mere intellectual categories or abstractions but express profound ontological realities that shape human existence and consciousness. Their interplay illuminates the crisis of modernity: the eclipse of sacred and noetic time has left humanity stranded in the flattening continuum of profane time, a condition that traditionalist thinkers diagnose as spiritual amnesia and existential fragmentation. Without connection to sacred cycles or metaphysical origins, modern man is disoriented, alienated from both nature and the divine, trapped in a temporal dimension that offers only futility, acceleration, and meaninglessness. The traditionalist Indo-European perspective insists that recovering a correct understanding of time, one that embraces multiplicity, hierarchy, and transcendence, is essential for the restoration of spiritual wholeness. By reintegrating the cyclic and eternal dimensions alongside the profane, it becomes possible to reclaim a living cosmology in which human life is embedded within sacred rhythms and oriented toward higher realities. This recovery is not a mere intellectual exercise but a necessary step toward healing the modern soul and reawakening the perennial wisdom embedded in Indo-European traditions. By doing so, it hopes to contribute not only to the intellectual clarification of time’s nature but also to the spiritual renewal of a civilization confronting the disorienting acceleration and fragmentation of its age. Time, in its fullness, is a sacred mystery that demands reverence, insight, and participation; it is the stage upon which the cosmic drama unfolds and the medium through which human beings may rediscover their place in the eternal order.

Profane Time: Linear History and the Modern Illusion

Profane time names the shallowest, most impoverished register of temporal experience: the measurable, homogeneous flow counted by clocks and chronologies, the one-dimensional succession of instants in which moments are fungible and meaning is deferred to ends and projects. In the traditional register, time carries qualitative density of hierarchies, rites, and orienting centers; profane time strips those away. It is the calculus of schedules, growth rates, GDP, deadlines, and the “forward push” of historical narrative, such as progress as a neutral metric and the future as a repository of promised solutions. This secular, linear temporality is historically contingent, not eternal. It emerges as a particular reconfiguration of religious and social imaginaries rather than as an inevitable fact of human existence. Pre-modern peoples more commonly situated themselves in cyclical, liturgical calendars and mythic returns that matched the flow of the season, cyclicals of history, the eternal return of Sacred Time, creating a year as a concentric map toward beginnings, rites that re-found the cosmos in the present, and heroic histories that repeated archetypal gestures. The rise of a dominant linear temporality, one that narrates history as steady progress or as a pilgrimage toward a culminating consummation, signifies a profound desacralization, the removal of time from ritual participation and its translation into a resource for human instrumental projects.

A central cause of this grand transvaluation of time was Christian eschatology, and its obsessive historicism was built upon a rickety scaffold of pseudo-chronology. The Christian mind, from its earliest days, became fixated on a single, brittle line of cosmic narrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Last Judgment, and then the Kingdom. Cosmic history, personal salvation, even the motions of the heavens, shoehorned into this narrow eschatological pipeline. It is perhaps the most reductive reimagining of time in the history of human thought, replacing the vast, breathing cycles of traditional cosmologies with a one-way conveyor belt moving from a mythic past to a final day of cosmic reckoning, and because the drama was linear, Christians felt compelled almost pathologically to date-stamp every act of the divine theatre. Early bishops pored over genealogies in the Hebrew Bible as if they were accountants balancing God’s ledgers, trying to deduce the exact year, month, and sometimes even day the universe sprang into existence. This is why, to this day, one can find wildly divergent “official” dates for the Creation. Bishop Ussher’s famous calculation of 4004 BC, the Byzantine calendar’s 5509 BC, the Alexandrian computation of 5493 BC, and the Hebrew reckoning of 3761 BC, all derived from the same Scriptures, all claimed as the inspired Word of God, and all mutually contradictory. So much for “one truth, one God.”

James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656)

The farce only deepened when they attempted to date the birth of their messiah. The Gospels themselves offer no precise year, and what few chronological clues they contain contradict each other. Luke’s dating via Quirinius’s census does not align with Matthew’s reference to Herod the Great (who inconveniently died several years earlier). The Church’s solution? A happy fudge by the 6th-century monk Dionysius Exiguus, whose calculation of the “Year of Our Lord” was so riddled with errors that Jesus was likely born somewhere between 6 and 4 BC, meaning Christ was already several years old when he was allegedly born by church doctrine. Nor did the comedy end there. Different branches of Christendom couldn’t even agree on which day to celebrate Christ’s birth. The Western Church fixed it on December 25 which coincidentally aligning with the Roman pagan festivals of Sol Invictus and Mithras’ birthday festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Did you think no one would notice?), while many Eastern churches opted for January 6 or January 7, and some early sects didn’t celebrate it at all, considering birthday observances a pagan vanity. This fragmentation persists into the present day, with Catholics, Orthodox, Copts, Ethiopians, and Armenians all following their own sacred calendars, often placing Christmas and Easter on different days. The very faith that claims to possess the one universal and eternal truth can’t synchronize its own liturgical stopwatch.

And yet, when it comes to the other end of their linear fantasy or the end of history itself, Christianity offers nothing but an ever-shifting horizon line. In the first generation after Christ’s death, many believers expected him back within their lifetime; the apostle Paul even warned his followers not to bother marrying, as time was short. When that failed, the calendar was reset. The year 1000 AD saw waves of apocalyptic panic; 1666’s numerological resonance (666! Oh no! not the Jewish numerological spelling of Nero, how terrifying) sparked further hysteria; and in modern times, televangelists and paperback prophecy-mongers have confidently declared the apocalypse for 1844, 1914, 1975, 2000, 2012, and countless other “guaranteed” dates. Perhaps Jesus will come this Tuesday, if you believe the homeless prophet screaming on the street corner, or was he screaming about next Tuesday, or will it be Tuesday this September? Which Tuesday in September, you may ask? I suppose we will never know until only the American evangelicals are raptured. Regardless, Christian’s vision of time is filled with failed prophecy; each is brushed aside and replaced with a new one, as if God’s divine plan were a perpetually rescheduled dental appointment. But even more absurd is how this fragile theological timeline crumbles under the light of archaeology, geology, astrophysics, and biology. If the universe began in 4004 or 5509 BC, then how, exactly, do we explain Göbekli Tepe, a vast megalithic ritual complex in Anatolia from the Neolithic era, carbon-dated to around 9600 BC, millennia before Adam and Eve were supposedly wandering around Eden? Oh, that was a trick of the devil, right to create an entire neolithic civilization to test our faith, sure…..How do we fit the cataclysm of the Younger Dryas approximately 12,900 years ago, when a sudden return to Ice Age conditions radically altered global climate? Or the multiple episodes of catastrophic flooding preserved in geological records and in countless global flood myths that predate Noah, such as the Sumerian myth of Utnapishtim? And that’s just archaeology. Astrophysics shatters biblical chronology into dust. We know that the light from distant galaxies has taken millions, even billions, of years to reach us, meaning that the cosmos was already unimaginably ancient before any Christian calculation of “creation” even begins. The cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of an event nearly 13.8 billion years ago, not a long weekend in 4004 BC. In geology, radiometric dating of rocks puts the Earth’s age at about 4.54 billion years, something even the Vatican quietly concedes today, though this would have been branded heresy for most of Christian history. In biology, the entire evolutionary tree, from trilobites to tyrannosaurs to the first primates, unfolds across vast aeons that make the Christian historicist imagination look like a short children’s bedtime story that a realistic understanding of the cosmos and time. Such notions reveal the depth of Christianity’s fundamental failure: an obsessive fixation on history as if it were a sacred script penned in real time, despite the fact that these believers could have no genuine knowledge of Earth’s true age, approximately 4.5 billion years, a figure established through rigorous scientific inquiry across multiple disciplines in the modern era. And yet, in the Christian narrative, God allegedly does know all of history in detail because He transcends time, right? Convenient. And apparently, according to Young Earth Creationists, dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve. When was that in the linear expression of history? When did the Council of Nicaea approve that book of the Bible, the Gospel of Saint Stegosaurus of Judea? Perhaps it is one of the hidden Gnostic Gospels. Setting aside humor, the notion of divine omniscience actually underscores the hubris in adhering to a narrow, human-centric historical timeline, constrained by literal interpretations. The vastness of the cosmos, encompassing the full expanse of human and Earth history, eclipses any simplistic linear “biblical history” by unimaginable degrees. It’s akin to humanity grasping a children’s fable to validate a sequential past, while the universe unfolds an epic narrative over eons. This disconnect between recognizing authentic history and Time, an inability to harmonize faith with empirical reality, has left Christianity ensnared in a facade, masquerading as universal truth.

Somewhere out there, Someone Takes this image Seriously.

This linear disease did not die with the Reformation; it metastasized. By the 18th century, the Enlightenment had simply stripped the Christian narrative of its saints and sacraments, dressing it up in rationalist garb while preserving the same infantile faith in a single, irreversible arc of history. Instead of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Kingdom, the script was now Primitive Ignorance, Scientific Awakening, Rational Progress, and the Utopian Future. The metaphysics were gone, but the structure remained identical: history as a one-way ladder, ever climbing toward a final perfection. It was the same eschatology with a new paint job, like replacing church frescoes with neoclassical wallpaper and congratulating oneself on having “moved on.” By the 19th century, this secularized eschatology found its most pompous and absurd expression in the grand system-building of G.W.F. Hegel. For Hegel, history was not the stage for divine judgment but the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, steadily evolving toward perfect self-consciousness. He essentially rewrote the Book of Revelation as a philosophy seminar: instead of the heavenly trumpets and angelic hosts, the climax of all cosmic striving was… the Prussian state. What? Sorta, Hegel said, “The state is the march of God in the world.”[1], So the total state of Prussia, the country of his residence, was the end-point of history itself, a bureaucratic Prussian state that couldn’t survive the century. Utopia for Hegel is like watching a 12-hour opera where gods and heroes wrestle over the fate of the cosmos, and the final curtain rises to reveal… a government office issuing permits. It is difficult to decide which is more ridiculous: the theological arrogance of identifying God’s plan with one’s own government, or the number of educated men who nodded gravely at this pronouncement as if they were hearing profound truth rather than state-sponsored flattery. Predictably, Hegel’s linear mysticism spawned heresies of its own. Chief among them was Karl Marx, who simply replaced the Absolute Spirit with “historical materialism” and gave the faithful a new heaven-on-earth: the classless society. Ah, yes, Marxism, the grand utopia where the ‘Kingdom of God on Earth’ turned into a dystopian buffet of starvation, repression, and bureaucratic nightmares. But hey, don’t worry, my sweet summer child, I know true communism has never been tried because apparently, it’s hiding behind every failed regime and the dreams of every neurotic freshman in American universities. Honestly, it’s a toss-up who’s more deluded: the Marxist dreaming of revolution or the Hegelian daydreaming about the Prussian state as history’s final form? Both make great cautionary tales. Marxist progress theory was essentially the same Christian drama in workers’ overalls, Eden became primitive communism, the Fall was private property, the redemption was proletarian revolution, and the Kingdom was the stateless utopia. Marxists may have scorned religion, but they were kneeling before the same altar, History as the supreme god, the end-of-days written not in prophecy but in dialectics.

The cycle continues. In our time, the doomsday narrative has been taken up by new secular prophets. After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama claimed that the American Empire and liberalism represented the "end of history," overlooking the fact that events like the Ukraine war and COVID have shattered that notion. We also see environmental activists forecasting the imminent collapse of civilization with urgent warnings,“twelve years to save the planet!”that resurface every decade, without exception. Meanwhile, transhumanists eagerly await the Singularity, much like medieval monks awaited the Second Coming. Each of these groups believes that history is hastening toward a climactic transformation that will render everything that came before irrelevant. Each holds conferences, publishes manifestos, and seeks converts, and each postpones the end every time it stubbornly refuses to arrive without ever questioning the linear teleology that makes such predictions inevitable. In the end, all of these movements, Christian millenarianism, Enlightenment rationalism, Hegelian historicism, Marxist utopianism, Liberal Idealism, green doomsaying, and Silicon Valley immortality cults, are simply different pews in the same cathedral. They have not escaped the Church; they have merely changed the vestments. One imagines them, after centuries of intellectual wandering, finding themselves back in the same cloistered courtyard, where an ancient monk leans on his staff, smiles knowingly, and says: “First time?”

Indo-European Sense of Time

By contrast to the infantile illusions of Christian linear chronology, many Indo-European mythic traditions present a profound and deeply pious vision of history as a tragic cycle of decline and renewal, a pattern far removed from any naïve teleology of endless progress. The Vedic conception of the yugas, Hesiod’s account of the Ages of Man, the Norse sagas of Ragnarök, and ancient Persian cosmologies collectively attest to a shared intuition: history is a sacred drama in which the divine center gradually recedes, disorder and decay increase, and cataclysmic collapses punctuate the unfolding narrative, only to be followed by renewal through sacrifice, re-initiation, or apocalyptic transformation. This cyclical vision acknowledges the harsh realities of existence without succumbing to despair or false hope. It is a sober, tragic realism that recognizes history as a real and costly sequence marked by rupture and discontinuity. The sacred order is not guaranteed to persist indefinitely; it must be upheld, renewed, and sometimes violently restored. Renewal does not come as a divine gift bestowed effortlessly from above, but as the fruit of human courage, ritual discipline, and spiritual ascent. The gods themselves, though mighty, bow to the inexorable law of fate (μοῖρα), as Homer reminds us that even Zeus cannot overturn what is fated.[2] This acknowledgment of fate tempers human pride and imparts humility, teaching that all beings, gods and men alike, participate in a cosmos governed by immutable cosmic laws beyond arbitrary will.

The Vedic Mahābhārata elaborates this cosmology with exquisite detail, describing the four yugas as epochs of descending virtue and spiritual potency. The Satya Yuga (Golden Age) is a time when dharma reigns supreme, truth is manifest, and the gods walk openly among men. Gradually, through hubris and moral decline, the world deteriorates into the Treta, Dvāpara, and finally the Kali Yuga, the Age of darkness, fragmentation, and spiritual alienation. In this darkest age, the gods withdraw, chaos proliferates, and society collapses into materialism and strife.[3] Yet this descent is not eternal. It is destined to be purged by a fiery reset, heralding the return of a new Golden Age. History, from this perspective, is neither beginning nor end; it is an eternal recurrence, a cosmic wheel turning without cessation until humanity learns the purpose of its sojourn in the mortal realm.

Hesiod’s Works and Days echoes this view, narrating the Five Ages of Man. The Golden Age is a time of divine favor and harmony, followed by a progressive moral and social degradation through the Silver, Bronze, and Heroic ages, ending in the Iron Age, a world marked by toil, injustice, and the waning memory of the gods.[4] Far from promising a final salvation, Hesiod’s vision is one of inevitability: decline is the natural consequence of human failings, and only through ritual, virtue, and reverence can the sacred order be preserved.[5] The Norse tradition deepens this tragic cycle with the myth of Ragnarök, the cataclysmic end of the gods and the world itself, followed by a rebirth where the earth rises anew, fertile and pure, ready to begin the cycle once again. This narrative, recounted in the Poetic Edda, underscores the transient nature of all things, even the divine, and the necessity of heroic sacrifice and renewal.

These myths find resonance in the empirical record of history’s tumultuous ruptures. The late-glacial Younger Dryas event, the sudden climatic reversal some 12,000~ years ago, shattered ecosystems and human settlements, mirroring the primordial cataclysms of mythic memory. The collapse of Bronze Age civilizations around the 12th century BCE, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Sassanid Persia, and numerous other civilizational upheavals are historical attestations to the reality of cyclical decline and renewal. Yet these breaks are not metaphysical endings but passages, transitions between successive cycles of order, ruin, and restoration. The ethical implications of embracing this worldview are profound. To hold blindly to Christianized linear optimism, expecting history to be fixed by a final, earthly consummation, is to adopt a childish temporality rife with impatience, entitlement, and a dangerous outsourcing of hope to external saviors or secular messianisms. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return powerfully reframes this cyclical recurrence as a test of greatness. The challenge is not metaphysical resignation but the courageous affirmation of one’s life as it is, eternally repeated. This is no mere abstract concept; it is a call to spiritual initiation and heroic transformation. Evola, through sacred cosmology and solar symbolism, the regal, sacrificial, and aesthetically ordered traditions of Indo-European recurrence become a scene of apotheosis rather than sterile repetition.[6] The soul, through ritual and discipline, learns to meet the eternal cycle with courage, dignity, and creative resolve. Moreover, this cyclical vision offers a hopeful path distinct from Christian salvation’s false promises. In Hinduism, the cycle of samsara—the endless birth, death, and rebirth—can be transcended through moksha, liberation attained by wisdom, devotion, and self-realization. In Platonism, the soul’s journey through reincarnation can be overcome through eudaimonia, a flourishing life of virtue and philosophical insight that reunites it with the eternal Forms. Nietzsche’s Übermensch embodies the highest possibility of human transcendence: one who embraces amor fati, transforming fate into freedom and recurrence into eternal creation. Salvation is not universal or automatic; it is reserved for those who seek to overcome and affirm, who accept the burdens of existence with heroic resolve.[7]

Finally, this worldview imparts a necessary humility to our political and cultural aspirations. The collapse of a civilization or order is not the metaphysical end of humanity; it is the end of a particular cycle an opportunity for renewal. The challenge is to cultivate inner arts and social forms capable of withstanding collapse, sanctifying the dark times, and rekindling sacred time anew. This is the burdensome and courageous task facing any culture that aspires to survive its own trials and reemerge reborn. In sum, profane time—the flattened, quantitative temporality of modernity—is spiritually barren and ideologically dangerous, producing acceleration, despair, and infantilized hope. The Indo-European and traditional cosmologies offer a tragic yet dignified alternative: history as a sacred cycle of rise, decay, collapse, and renewal, governed by fate and illuminated by ritual and heroic affirmation. Confronting this cycle requires neither escapism nor nihilism but a disciplined amor fati a solar, regal, and sacrificial stance that transforms recurrence from a source of fear into a field of spiritual ascent and creative re-founding. Only through such a pious and heroic orientation can humanity endure the eternal return and participate in the sacred drama of cosmic renewal.

Sacred Time: the Return that makes Reality

Sacred time is not a variant of clock time; it is a different ontological register. Where profane time is quantitative, linear, and anonymous, an endless succession of measurable instants, sacred time is qualitative, hierarchical, and mythic: a terrain in which the primordial act and its archetypal meaning are perpetually present. For traditional man, reality itself is pierced by moments that come from a different order or hierophanies so that “to live in the sacred is to live in the real.”[8] This other temporality is best grasped by two intertwined phenomena: (1) the re-actualization of the cosmogony (the ritual repetition of the original creative episode), and (2) the calendrical structuring of lived time so that the human year becomes a map of participation rather than a mere sequence. In archaic societies, the founding deeds of gods and heroes are not merely remembered; they are ritually re-enacted. Every properly performed rite is, in Eliade’s phrase, a repetition of the cosmogony, the “creative act par excellence”, so that the community not only commemorates the origin but re-founds the world in the present.[9] Because rituals re-enter the age of origins, sacred time is in some sense reversible or at least re-qualifying of history: the past is not irretrievable, it is accessible. Through liturgy, initiation, sacrifice, or festival, the participant is lifted into what Eliade calls “Great Time” (the mythic instant of beginnings), where the archetypal event is again and again renewed and made efficacious. This is not nostalgic repetition; it is a metaphysical technique that neutralizes the terror of unmeaningful historicity by inserting human action into an order that transcends mere succession.[10]

The calendar in traditional cultures is thus not a neutral ledger but a sacred instrument. Solstices, New Year rites, and the cyclical festivals of planting and harvest each mark a locus where the profane stream is braided to an eternal pattern. The year becomes a concentric itinerary toward the center: the cosmogonic moment, the city-temple, the high priest’s or sovereign’s ritual action that renews cosmic harmony. Time, in this schema, is not the elimination of the past but continual participation in the archetype that produced the past.[11] That participation has existential consequences. In sacred time, human life acquires orientation, meaning, and moral gravity. The ritualized re-entry into the mythical beginning transforms otherwise profane acts such as eating, weaving, and governing into sacramental gestures that sustain the cosmos.[12]The cultic community is not merely a social group surviving history; it is a liturgical microcosm that mirrors the macrocosm and, by so doing, preserves continuity between the human and the divine orders. In this way, sacred time repairs the fragmentation and disorientation that secular, clock-bound existence produces.[13] Two clarifications are important. First, sacred time is not identical to mindless repetition: repetition is chosen, patterned, and meaningful. The ritual repetition is an intentional technique for “abolishing” history insofar as it frees a people from being only the passive objects of historical contingency; it places them within a metahistorical framework that preserves identity and provides a telos. Second, sacred time is not a uniform cosmology across cultures; Eliade’s comparative work shows forms and emphases vary (New Year rites, solstitial mysteries, seasonal sacrificial dramas, annual initiations), but the structural function is constant: to re-establish the connection between human acts and transcendent archetypes.[14]

Finally, the philosophical stakes of reclaiming the notion of sacred time are high. If modernity reduces existence to the profane temporality of production, measurable progress, and historicism, then the recovery of sacred time offers an alternative model in which human action can be cosmically significant again. The sacred does not obliterate human freedom; it relocates it: ethical choice, courage, beauty, and initiation become avenues by which persons re-enter the Great Time and participate in the perennial regeneration of meaning. In Eliade’s terms, the ritual return to the beginning is not mere fantasy but a practical ontology: a way of making the timeless present and thereby restoring a human life consonant with the deeper order of things.[15]

Plato’s Noetic Realm: Still Unity Beyond Time

Beyond the registers of profane and sacred time, there opens a stiller, more rarified dimension: the noetic realm or the world of Forms (eidos) in which things exist in their perfect, unchanging intelligibility. For Plato, this is not merely an ontological claim about a higher class of entities but a reorientation of how being and time themselves are understood. In the Timaeus, he famously calls time “a moving image of eternity”[16]. Time is therefore derivative, a copy instituted by the Demiurge to reflect, insofar as it can, the eternal order of the intelligible. The ontological priority of the noetic means that both linear, historical temporality and ritualized sacred time are manifestations or echoes of a timeliness that is itself beyond time. Plato repeatedly insists that genuine knowledge (epistēmē) belongs only to what is eternal and self-same, whereas opinion (doxa) concerns the world of becoming and flux.[17] The philosopher’s task is thus a turning away from sense-perception toward dialectic and contemplation: a vertical ascent in which the soul recollects or anamnesis its original sight of the Forms. The ladder of eros in the Symposium stages this ascent as an education in beauty: beginning with particular attraction and culminating in the vision of the Form of Beauty itself.[18] This pedagogical-erotic movement is both epistemic and soteriological; the soul’s remembering is simultaneously its homecoming. In the metaphysical register developed by later Platonists, the highest principle becomes the One of Plotinus, utterly beyond being, thought, and temporal sequence. From the One proceeds a graded emanation, the Intellect (nous) containing the Forms, then the Soul, and finally the material world. The One is not merely a summit on a ladder; it is the ineffable source that radiates intelligibility without itself being subject to change. Plotinus stresses the apophatic nature of this principle: the One must be reached by a withdrawal from discursivity, by a contemplative silence in which the intellect is emptied so that union or henosis may occur. Henosis is, in this account, less a movement in time than a transposition out of time, an identity of soul with the noetic mode of being in which change and succession no longer obtain.

This noetic dimension is best described by paradoxes: it is presence without succession, fullness without accumulation, and an unmoved plenitude that nevertheless generates the manifold. Thus, Noetic time is not an alternative chronos nor a higher chronos; it is the absence of temporal becoming or perfect stasis insofar as stasis names the plenitude of being rather than inert deadness. The experience of the noetic is, therefore, often framed in terms of ecstatic vision, apophatic silence, or the eros that burns the soul into seeing. Plotinus speaks of this summit as a condition of pure love, an intimate overflowing in which the soul participates in the source from which love and intelligibility emanate. Far from being an escapist otherworldliness, the noetic is the ontological root of order, meaning, and value. Sacred time mediates between earthly flux and timeless being: rites, myths, and contemplative practices are ways in which the soul re-aligns its temporal experience so that it can receive the noetic. The Platonic myths of the chariot teach that the soul’s pre-incarnate vision leaves an imprint, anamnesis that philosophy strives to awaken. Thus ascent to the noetic is simultaneously an ethical and existential transformation: the philosopher does not flee the world to deny it but dispels its ignorance by recollecting the higher pattern that orders it. This vertical metaphysic finds interesting resonances across Indo-European traditions. Vedantic accounts describe Brahman as the timeless ground behind māyā; Norse myth plants a World Tree whose roots and branches link temporal change to a deeper, axial center; Zoroastrian thought stages the soul’s return to Ahura Mazda as an ultimate re-orientation toward the principial good. In each, the highest life is an upward movement of anamnetic, purificatory, and participatory toward a timeless source whose presence confers dignity, legitimacy, and meaning.

To live toward the noetic is to enact a particular telos: not a denial of life but its fullest realization. The noetic home is the aim of nostos, the destination of philosophical and spiritual labor. It is an apophatic plenitude beyond naming, yet the wellspring of all names, where the soul’s longing is consummated in a love that is both rest and endless origin. In this way, Plato’s noetic realm remains the supreme corrective to both the flattening of profane chronos and the sacred repetition of sacred cycle: it is the timeless ground from which true order, beauty, and eudaimonia radiate.

Mithras as Ochema: the memetic vehicle that overcomes time

The culmination of a traditionalist theory of time is not a dry cosmography but a performative vehicle: an image, rite, and myth that transmits a mode of being through which the soul is re-encoded into a different temporality. In this register, Mithras must be read not merely as a cosmogonic actor but as Iamblichus’ memetic ochema, the “vehicle” (ochema) of the soul in which Porphyry glimpses Plato’s ladder out of profane temporality into a heroic, sacred, and finally noetic temporality.[19] As Porphyry’s account of the Cave of the Nymphs and Iamblichus’s use of the ochema suggest, Mithras functions as an ascending gate (Capricorn) and descending gate (Cancer): a hinge through which a soul turns, re-orienting its allegiance from historical flux to participatory eternity.[20] Read this way, the tauroctony is not only a cosmological tableau but a memetic ritual narrative that encodes an existential programme. The perpetual slaying of the bull is performed in sacred time, an act that is eternally replayed, the archetype rather than annihilating the world. In the act of slaughter repeated, reenacted, and internalized by the initiate, the cosmos is continually re-created: the material cycle (the bull) is opened to a higher ordering (the zodiac, the gates), and the soul is taught to register time not as a line to be fled nor a wheel to be merely endured, but as a field in which heroic transfiguration is possible.

Seen through a Nietzschean view, Mithras is the cultural technology of overcoming. Nietzsche’s will to power and amor fati give philosophical teeth to the Mithraic programme: the initiate does not renounce the world in Gnostic detachment or await an external salvation; rather, he affirms and reenacts his fate so that every recurrence becomes an occasion for growth and heroic creation. Mithras’ eternal bull-slaying sanctifies recurrence: it makes cyclical reappearance itself into an ethic of affirmation. This is not the passive repetition condemned by modern nihilism, but a liturgy of heroic assent that transforms profane, linear-Christian time and the paralyzing horror of blind cyclical rebirth into a disciplined participation in destiny. Neoplatonism supplies the metaphysical vocabulary for how this transformation works. The ochema is, in Iamblichus’ usage, the soul’s vehicle for ascent; through ritual, beauty, and theurgy of love, it becomes able to climb the Platonic ladder or the Diotimaan ascent toward the vision of forms and the One. In Plotinian terms, this is henosis, a turning of the soul out of the temporal multiplicity toward the noetic unity. Nietzschean affirmation and Neoplatonic union converge rather than conflict: the will-to-power transforms into the soul’s disciplined ascent, while amor fati becomes the grateful acceptance enabling deeper participation in the eternal noetic order. The aim is not to escape the world but to achieve heroic apotheosis, a perfected engagement with divine life or eudaimonia, realized through struggle, love, and a profound aesthetic reorientation of time. Mithras serves as a symbolic ladder of love between the dimension of time, like Plato’s ladder, he guides the lover-soul from the appreciation of sensible beauty to the contemplation of intelligible Beauty; and, akin to Shiva in the Indic tradition, he embodies both destruction and liberation. Mithras, this paradoxical god, frees the soul from the confines of profane temporality, leading it toward a state resembling moksha. not through renunciation or dissolution, but through courageous affirmation and transformation. Once we distinguish profane, sacred, and noetic time, as a cosmological hierarchy like the Henads, Mithras emerges as a memetic vehicle that trains the soul to convert profane historical time into sacred, participatory time, and ultimately into union with the noetic realm. The bull’s slaughter is not a denial of life but its consecration. Mithras’ passage through the gates at Capricorn and Cancer is far more than an astronomical event; it symbolizes the axis of a spiritual journey. Through heroic overcoming in a Nietzschean sense, erotic ascent, Platonic, and contemplative union, humanity is elevated not by fleeing time but by transforming its relationship to the world, thus attaining a heroic, beautiful, and lasting form of eudaimonia.

Toward a Restored Doctrine of Time

The traditional understanding of time, as revealed through the works of Plato, Nietzsche, Eliade, and the spiritual legacies of Indo-European civilizations, offers a profound corrective to the prevailing modern view of temporal existence. The contemporary world is dominated by profane linear, quantitative progression time defined by secularization, historicism, and technological acceleration. This time flattens reality, severing human consciousness from its metaphysical roots and reducing existence to mere chronological duration or material productivity. In contrast, the tripartite structure of traditional time, profane, sacred, and noetic, reveals a hierarchy of temporal modes that mirror the hierarchy of being itself. To recover this doctrine of time is not to regress into superstition or nostalgia, but to reawaken a metaphysical consciousness that affirms the sacred structure of reality. It is to remember that time is not simply what passes, but what reveals the medium through which the eternal makes itself known in the world of becoming. It is to restore the vertical axis within the soul and society: to live profanely yet ritually, to act mythically, and to contemplate eternally. Such a vision of time could form the basis of a renewed Indo-European spiritual identity, one not defined by race or politics alone, but by metaphysical orientation. It would reintegrate the fragmented modern self into the greater order of cosmos and being, recovering the wisdom of the ancients in light of eternal truth. In a world increasingly disenchanted and disoriented, the restoration of sacred and noetic time offers a path not just of critique, but of renewal.

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[1] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of Right. Courier Corporation, 2012.

[2] Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Simon and Schuster, 2011.

[3] Mahåabhåarata: An Abridged Translation. Translated by John D. Smith, Penguin, 2009.

[4] Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

[5] Ibid

[6] Evola, Julius. Revolt against the Modern World. Translated by Guido Stucco, Simon and Schuster, 2018.

[7] Ibid

[8] Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard Ropes Trask, San Diego Calif., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

[9] Eliade, Mircea . The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard Ropes Trask, Princeton University Press, 2018.

[10] Eliade, Sacred and Profane, Myth of the Eternal Return

[11] Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return.

[12] Eliade, Sacred and Profane

[13] Ibid

[14] Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return.

[15] Ibid

[16] Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letter, Timaeus. Edited by Edith Hamilton, Princeton, Nj, Princeton University Press, 1989.

[17] Plato, Republic.

[18] Plato, Symposium

[19] Finamore, John F. Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul. Oxford University Press, 1985.

[20] Porphyry of Tyre. Select Works of Porphyry. Translated by Thomas Taylor, Forgotten Books, 4 June 2017.