It’s not so surprising that people are traveling from all over the world to be standing on the path of totality when the sun disappears. “We human beings have been looking up at the stars for as long as we’ve been here,” says James Croft, outreach director at the Ethical Society of Saint Louis. “And there are records of total eclipses of the sun that date all the way back to 2136 BCE—four thousand years ago.”
That one was recorded by historians in ancient China. They were mightily pissed off, too, because as legend has it, the two astronomers tasked with performing certain rites and rituals during the eclipse—the beating of gongs, the shooting of arrows—had gotten drunk instead. If they’d caused offense, the gods might punish the land.
On August 3, well before we beat our own gongs and don our special sunglasses, Croft will give a multimedia presentation titled “Eating the Sun: The Cultural Significance of Eclipses.” The science is fascinating, he says—“just the fact that we stand on this planet and it is spinning incredibly fast and we don’t feel it at all”—and that so many rotations and shifts have to coincide to create this rare event. “But I didn’t see anyone talking about how cultures have experienced the eclipse through the ages.”
Before science held sway, “it’s easy to see that people would be very confused,” Croft says. “Unlike the moon, which is changeable, the sun is the stable celestial element, the constant in the daytime sky.” Pluck away, without warning, what gives us heat and light and food, and you’re just asking for drama.
Eating the Sun
Granted, a few optimistic cultures have interpreted eclipses as cause for celebration. “But the preponderance have seen it as a sign of something going badly wrong,” Croft says. “In Shakespeare’s King Lear, eclipses represent the turmoil in Lear’s kingdom.” The ancient Greeks thought an eclipse was a sign of divine wrath. Others saw an eclipse as a fight to the death between sun and moon.
Croft drew his title from a series of mythologies in which the sun is literally being eaten. The ancient Mayans drew the sun in the mouth of a serpent; in China it was consumed by a celestial dragon; in Vietnam, by a giant frog. The Norse believed two sky wolves chased the sun across the sky and night came when they caught it; an eclipse was a special victory at battle.
The point is not to compare old ideas with cool modern science. These are cultural stories, Croft says, and they can exist alongside a scientific explanation, serving as symbols or allegory with a moral significance. They tell us about ourselves.
The upcoming eclipse, for example, has captured people’s imagination in a way that transcends the rising differences among us. It is, quite literally, universal. And in a time of niches and silos and fragmented attention spans, that alone makes it extraordinary. “We didn’t create it or have anything to do with it, and we can’t control it,” notes Croft. “We can only look at it and wonder.”
“Eating the Sun: The Cultural Significance of Eclipses” is free and open to the public, August 3 at 7 p.m. at the Ethical Society (9001 Clayton).
