The hypertrophy of the present, which is characteristic of divinatory semantics, is particularly evident when dealing with time. The attachment to the context also includes an adherence to the present and to a precisely limited space.
Under this condition, it is difficult to separate concepts of space from concepts of time. In a spatially oriented semantics, time is also primarily understood in a spatial terminology – or rather: spatial and temporal categories overlap in a two-dimensional semantics that applies the same distinctions to both dimensions. In very many cases, the same phrase denotes time and the sky at the same time.
One can also assume, as in the case of Mazdaism (a variant of Zoroastrianism, which we will come to later), that the original deity from which all further distinctions are derived was time, but this does not change the semantics, which remains bound to concrete distinctions and does not have sufficient capacity for abstraction to distinguish and separate the mutually independent dimensions of time and space.
When dealing with time, the availability of written forms of storage also marks a difference to a purely oral conceptualization, in which the observation structures correspond directly to the structures of the operations. It seems that for the Nuer, for example, time is defined by concrete activities, whereas the reverse is not the case. Summer, which recurs in the annual cycle, does not refer to the time when people work in the fields, but in fact begins when they start to move towards the fields. The units of time also vary depending on the time of year. The hours and days are more or less long depending on the season and form a system of "flexible time" with no historical memory other than that which is immediately needed for current activities. We have spoken of an "ecological time" that is divided by the rhythm and recurrence of natural phenomena, by the requirements of extraordinary events or by the duration of human life. Under these conditions, there can be no autonomous time, because there is also no space that is autonomous from concrete operations.