Changes often take place unnoticed. At the height of sum­mer you would not think that dark­ness is steal­ing the days away minute by minute, until sud­denly you notice that dark­ness seems to be win­ning over the light. It is as if time were ebbing away drop by drop, and light ebbing little by little – this seems a loss. At first glance, an unnoticed loss – only a minute, but slowly the ebbing takes hold.

The dark forces see it oth­er­wise, for to them the height of sum­mer is the turn­ing point, and from then on they hope for their own vic­tory. At last, in winter, they hold a feast of rejoicing: We have won! – they cry, when the days have shortened to the utmost and the Sun has sunk to its low­est point. Dark­ness steals in, and at first you do not even notice that the Sun lazily rises a minute later and goes to its rest a minute earli­er. Civil dusk gets the bet­ter of the sac­red light, and in half a year the light loses as much as five hours to the dark­ness.

Pic­ture the globe before you, one side in light, the rest in shad­ow. See the sine curve along which dark­ness and light take turns, as a dark mantle, a smooth black vel­vet blanket, hides one half of the globe and leaves the other free.

Empir­ic­al and myth­ic­al reck­on­ings of time do not coin­cide. One counts 365 days, with a leap day now and then, the other 360. From sec­u­lar time we expect exact­ness, although the things of nature are always mal­le­able, so it is no won­der that at times even atom­ic clocks have to be adjus­ted to the actu­al passing of time. So instead of the hoped-for pre­ci­sion, a rel­at­ive impre­ci­sion remains. In the myth­ic­al reck­on­ing of time, by con­trast, impre­ci­sion would be per­miss­ible, and yet there everything is pre­cisely in its place: the year has 360 days, and the day is 12 hours long, just like the night. And though the duel, the con­test between light and shad­ow, never ceases, the out­come of the com­bat is not in doubt.

Which is stronger, dark­ness or light? Dark­ness is incap­able of hid­ing bright­ness, but the absence of light calls up dark­ness… dark­ness is a func­tion of light, while light is never a func­tion of dark­ness. That is why the wise do not hope for the vic­tory of light, but know that light has already won this battle.

For all that, dark­ness seems to swal­low up the light. Its sym­bol­ic vic­tory is far more troub­ling than the ground dark­ness actu­ally gains. Man knows in his mind that the light will come, and the wise have told us that it has already won. Yet when shad­ow and dark­ness reign, it is hard to trust in the vic­tory of light. Man is without means: he can­not raise the disc of the Sun any high­er, he can­not lengthen the days, nor can he shorten the nights. All con­triv­ing is in vain, man is defence­less, and the dark­ness grows too great for him.

Now the light is on the wane… The Sun's south­ward course, when it sets out from the sum­mit of the sum­mer sol­stice, is the time of los­ing light. They call this course the path of the ancest­ors, and it leads into dark­ness, into smoke, into the time of the new moon and into the lower worlds. And though the decline is gradu­al and slow, it seems unstop­pable. It is not head­long, like a cart rolling down a slope, but a steady, minute loss, the way time passes for man. Less and less remains. This decline of time and light is so grave that the Sun, on reach­ing its low­est point, comes almost to rest, indeed to a dead stop, as if it were van­ish­ing into the dark­ness. Light is dead – that would be a state­ment at least as grave as Niet­z­sche's say­ing: God is dead… – which we still know, more or less, though its con­tinu­ation far less: …and we have killed him.

How sad it would be if we had to say: light is dead – and we have killed it… The one thing more fatal than this would be if the Sun were to set on the inner hori­zon of our con­scious­ness too, if the light were to die… That would be the final dark­en­ing.