Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light, you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
It is all too easy and too simple to disdain as "superstition" everything one cannot understand, but the ancients themselves knew very well what they meant when they used symbolic language...the Spirit can always come back to breathe fresh life into the symbols and rites and give them back their lost meaning and the fullness of their original virtue.