A 19th century Father Time with Baby New Year

Detail of Father Time in the Rotunda Clock (1896) by John Flanagan, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

Because of their similarity in name as pertaining to parental figures, he is sometimes paired with Mother Nature as a married couple.

In various New Year's Eve customs, Father Time's image is used as the personification of the previous year (or "the Old Year"), who "hands over" the duties of time to the Baby New Year (or "the New Year"). In this case, his old age is emphasized (in particular, he may be depicted walking with the aid of a stick).

In Popular Culture

Time is one of the Incarnations of Immortality, human beings who perform mythological offices, in Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series of fantasy novels. The book specifically dealing with Time, Bearing an Hourglass, details the cloak worn by the Incarnation, which will instantly age-to-oblivion anyone which tries to attack Time, and the Hourglass, a potent magical device and badge of office which allows Time to move backwards and forwards temporally as well as to affect the temporal (and physical, by analogy to space-time) motion of others. In this series, Time is a human being who ages backwards from the moment they assume the office until they reach the point in time where they were born, at which time they go on to the afterlife, the Hourglass appears unattached in the mortal world, and the first human to touch the Hourglass becomes the new Incarnation of Time. Thus from the point of view of the rest of the Universe Time gets older and older, but knows less and less about the future, and is periodically replaced by a younger but much more experienced and knowledgeable entity. Alone among the inhabitants of the Incarnations universe, Time has a partial immunity to paradox and is allowed to be in the same place at the same time more than once, although there are still limits to what can be changed with this power.

Time is an anthropomorphic personification, like Death, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, specifically Thief of Time. Originally a creature of spirit, Time eventually came to occupy a body appearing to be that of a female human who loved the first History Monk, and had a child with him who became the new personification of Time while his mother and father "retired."

The role-playing game universe created by White Wolf Games contains a very powerful spirit called Wrinkle, who tends to appear when magic-using entities create too much paradox in a way that is associated with time travel or altering time flows. Wrinkle, a Paradox Spirit, has no fixed form but usually appears as a very old human male in stained and weathered formalwear - obviously inspired by cultural references to Father Time. While like all Paradox Spirits his purpose seems to be to prevent excess accumulations of Paradox and deal with them if they occur, he can be very capricious and has even been known to "help" the mages who generated the Paradox that attracted him - although if they do it again, the consequences can be very severe.

References

External links

• Article on origin of Father Time

nl:Vadertje Tijd pl:Ojciec Czas

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