Eclipses Were Regarded As Omens in the Ancient World - Space.com
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6 days ago - August 21, people living in the continental United States will be able ... In ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq), eclipses were in fact ... This is called a syzygy, from the Greek word "súzugos," meaning yoked or paired.
Why Total Solar Eclipses Frightened Ancient Cultures - Newsweek
www.newsweek.com/what-solar-eclipses-meant-ancient-cultures-651206
4 days ago - Many ancient cultures worshipped the sun and the moon, or at the very least saw them as supernatural beings. In the sky, their movement ...
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How 5 Ancient Cultures Explained Solar Eclipses
History · 2 days ago
How 5 Ancient Cultures Explained Solar Eclipses - History Lists
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2 days ago - Solar eclipses have been fascinating—and often terrifying—humans ... by the moon, will cross a wide swath of the United States on August 21, 2017. ... word for eclipse includes the character “shi,” which means “to eat.
How ancient cultures explained eclipses - The Conversation
theconversation.com/how-ancient-cultures-explained-eclipses-79887
4 days ago - On August 21, a total solar eclipse will be visible across parts of the United States
Solar Eclipses in History - Time and Date
https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar-eclipse-history.html
The English word eclipse comes from the Greek ἔκλειψις, ekleípō:
disappearance, abandonment. A solar eclipse is the moment in which the
sun disappears, abandoning the world. It’s like being forsaken by a god.
The ancient Greeks thought of a solar eclipse as an act
of abandonment, a terrible crisis and an existential threat. It meant
that the king would fall, that terrible misfortunes would rain down on
the world, or that demons had swallowed the sun.
Yet not everyone thought of the eclipse as a horrible
threat. For some cultures, the eclipse was an act of creation: The sun
and moon were coupling, and would create more stars. For others, it was a
random and chaotic act by a trickster or a mischievous boy, causing
trouble just for the sake of it.
On Monday, a solar eclipse is coming to America. In the 21st century, a solar eclipse means eclipse parties. It means buying specialty glasses and building pinhole boxes and preparing to see “the most beautiful sight you can see in nature,” as one cartographer put it.
But for much of human history, that’s not how people reacted to eclipses, even after they were able to predict them accurately (around 206 AD for the Chinese and 150 BC for the Greeks). Here’s a rundown of some of history’s most pervasive eclipse folklore.
The gods are angry with us
In many cultures, the darkening of the sun meant the gods
were very, very angry with humanity, and about to inflict some
punishment. Often, that meant that in order to appease them, you had to
kill someone.
In Transylvania, people believed an eclipse was caused by the sun turning its back on the sins of humanity, creating a poisonous dew. The Inca viewed eclipses as a sign that the sun god Inti was angry, and required appeasement with offerings. For the Native American Tewa tribe, an eclipse meant that the angry sun was leaving the sky to go visit his home in the underworld.
Aztec priests predicted
that if there was a solar eclipse accompanied by an earthquake on the
date 4 Ollin, the world would end, so every year on 4 Ollin they would
perform a ritual human sacrifice. (As the priests likely knew — they
were sophisticated astronomers — there would be no solar eclipse on 4
Ollin until the 21st century.) Solar eclipses on other dates were also
met with human sacrifices. According to some,
the Aztecs mostly sacrificed fair-skinned prisoners to appease the gods
on eclipse days, but that report comes from a 16th-century Spanish
missionary, so take it with a grain of salt.
The Greeks thought
an eclipse meant that the gods were about to rain punishment down on a
king, so in the days before an eclipse, they would choose prisoners or
peasants to stand in as the king in the hopes that they’d get the eclipse punishment and the real king would be saved. Once the eclipse was over, the substitute king was executed.
A demon is eating the sun
The idea that a solar eclipse meant a demon
was swallowing the sun shows up in eclipse folklore across the globe,
and if you look at pictures of a partial solar eclipse, you can see why:
It’s easy to imagine that some giant creature is slowly taking bite
after bite out of the sun. In ancient China, the earliest word for eclipse, shih, meant to eat, and eclipses were believed to be caused by a dragon eating the sun. In Vietnam, the sun eater was a frog. For the Native American Pomo, it was a bear. In Yugoslavia it was a werewolf, and in Siberia a vampire.
In ancient Egypt,
Apep, the serpent of chaos and death, opposed Ra, the sun god, and was
always trying to reach Ra’s skyboat to devour the sundisc — but in the
end, Ra was always able to fight him off, and the sun would come back.
In ancient India,
Rahu was an immortal demigod with a severed head. He had a grudge
against both sun and moon — they were the ones who convinced Lord Vishnu
to chop off Rahu’s head in the first place, after he drank the nectar
of immortality — so he chased them endlessly across the sky, and
sometimes caught them. But whenever he managed to swallow either sun or
moon, his victory was short-lived: They’d pass out of the stump of his
throat shortly thereafter.
In Norse mythology,
the sky wolves Hati and Skoll chase the sun and the moon endlessly,
waiting for Ragnarok, when they can finally swallow their prey and
plunge the earth into darkness, heralding the final destruction of the
Viking gods. It’s not entirely clear
whether the Vikings thought of eclipses as near misses at Ragnarok,
with Hati and Skoll nearly capturing their prey, but many scholars
believe there’s a pretty strong possibility that they did.
Generally, across the globe, when a demon is trying to eat the sun, there’s only one thing to do: make as much noise as possible until it gets scared and flees. Then you survive until the next eclipse.
The sun and the moon are working some things out
Eclipses weren’t always seen as a cosmic calamity.
Sometimes they just meant that the sun and the moon, who were usually
understood to be a married couple, were working out their issues.
Celestial marriage counseling.
For the Tlingit tribes of North America, as well as some Australian aboriginal cultures, an eclipse meant that the sun and moon were having more children: the stars and planets that became apparent in the darkness of an eclipse but weren’t otherwise visible.
For the Batammaliba people of Togo and Benin in Africa, an eclipse meant the sun and moon were fighting with each other. So to encourage them to come to peace, people would approach eclipses as an opportunity to resolve their feuds and put away old grudges.
For the Inuits,
the sun and moon weren’t a married couple but brother and sister. At
the beginning of the world they quarreled, and the sun goddess Malina
walked away from her brother, the moon god Anningan. Anningan continued
to chase after her, and whenever he caught up to her, there was an
eclipse.
The Kalina of Suriname also thought of the moon as brother and sister, but their version of the relationship between the two heavenly bodies was a little more violent. An eclipse meant one of them had knocked the other one out.
Someone’s just messing with us for no good reason because the world is full of chaos and capriciousness
Sometimes eclipses don’t happen because the gods are
angry or because terrible things are going to happen or because a demon
is hungry or because cosmic bodies are working through their feelings.
They happen because some random trickster figure feels like being a
dick.
For ancient Persia,
eclipses happened if the trickster pari decided to blot out the sun for
fun. In the legends of multiple Native American tribes — the Cree, the Choctaw, and the Menomini
— an eclipse happens because a little boy has trapped the sun in a net,
usually to get revenge on the sun for burning him. The boy refuses to
release the sun, and an animal has to chew the net open.
Of all the eclipse myths, the trickster stories perhaps
come the closest to the way we think about eclipses in modern America:
There is no particular moral judgment at work here, and no dark omen.
The eclipse simply comes, inevitable and unstoppable, without caring
what we think of it, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
“You get an overwhelming sense of humbleness and how
small and petty we really are compared to the mechanics of the solar
system, the clockwork of the universe,” says retired NASA astrophysicist and eclipse chaser Fred Espenak. “These events that are taking place, that in no way can we affect or stop.”
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