As we all well know by now, A total solar eclipse took America by storm last Monday. For those of us who were lucky enough to be in the totality, it was a magical event. The simple act of the Moon aligning perfectly to block out the sun’s rays is a rather amazing event that we are very fortunate to be able to witness. For those of you who don’t know, the sun is exactly 400 times larger than the Moon, and luckily enough, the Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun. This means that logically, the Moon perfectly blocks out the sun’s rays with a total solar eclipse. But enough about the science of things, I want to talk about the history of the solar eclipse, and how ancient cultures perceived this heavenly alignment. Spoiler alert, they panicked. Regardless, flip a few pages to read more about the history of the amazing event.
To our ancestors, the eclipse certainly would have been seen as a sacred omen of some type. Just imagine being a farmer tilling your field, and all of a sudden the sky goes dark. In many ancient cultures, the Sun and the Moon are representations of the most important deities. Needless to say, the event certainly isn’t calming. For example, in Incan culture, they saw the eclipse as the Sun god expressing his displeasure in Incan society. This dark time often caused them to repent in hopes that the Sun would return.
In what is now known as New Mexico, ancient Americans were known to have mass exodus from their homes and resting grounds. Many scholars believe this to have been a result of a lack of natural resources like food or water. However, this event also coincided with a major eclipse, notated in cave carvings by native peoples. Picture this scene, you’re going about your regular day, gathering materials for the tribe, and all of a sudden, the sky goes dark, nature stops singing, and the temperature drops chillingly fast. After a few panic-driven moments of the Sun being lost to your people, light returns and fills the sky once more. If you didn’t know any better, wouldn’t you interpret that as an omen to leave this place?
On the other side of the world in ancient China, early civilization too treated the eclipse with paranoia. They believed that the Sun was being actively consumed by a dragon and as such, they would bang loud drums and instruments to scare it off so that the sun would return to their people.
If you’re like me, you’re wondering what the Greeks or Romans thought of this spectacle, surely they’d have some idea what was going on? While they may have later on, in the early days of Greek civilization we have written record of the poet Archilochus, stating that Zeus himself had turned the day to night, and who knows what may happen thereafter. It wasn’t until the fifth century when an astronomer named Anaxagoras, discovered something closer to our modern understanding of eclipses, and how different celestial bodies cast shadows.
Overall, it’s pretty interesting to see how ancient civilizations observed the wonderful space spectacle we all know and love. For those of you who were lucky enough to travel to the totality, I envy you, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t pretty cool from where we were standing here in Kansas. The next eclipse in the Continental US will take place on August 23, 2044. But if you don’t want to wait till then, you can always see the one in Europe in 2026. Regardless, keep those glasses around, you may want them in 20 years.
