In some faiths, solar eclipse comes with its own traditions
On Monday, Pradeep Reddy, a pediatrician in Carbondale, Ill., will eagerly await the sight of the solar eclipse, which he expects will be an awe-inspiring scientific spectacle.
Then he’ll go inside and jump in the shower with all his clothes on. (Or at least he’ll run them through the washing machine.)
That’s what his religion tells Hindus to do after an eclipse, to purify the clothing that they watched the supposedly inauspicious cosmic event in. Hindus for generations have taken all sorts of precautions to ward off the bad luck that they believe an eclipse foretells.
On Monday, when the first crosscountry eclipse in 99 years swoops across America, believers of all faiths will have their first chance in decades to put their particular religion’s eclipse traditions into practice.
For Muslims, it’s an opportunity to revisit a section of the Quran that describes an eclipse occurring on the same day that the prophet Muhammad’s young son died, Imam Asif Umar said. During that eclipse, Muhammad gathered the community to pray in response; ever since, Muslims around the world recite the same prayer whenever they find themselves in the path of an eclipse.
Umar, who leads the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, will take students at his mosque’s school to a Missouri park, where he’ll talk to them about the scientific phenomenon of the eclipse as well as its spiritual meaning. “The sun is so much larger than the moon. But the moon is so much closer to the Earth,” he will tell them, explaining how the eclipse can occur. “It kind of just shows how God created it that way — from the Islamic viewpoint, in addition to being one of nature’s most spectacular sights, it’s also a reminder of the power of God.”
Dozens of church groups across the country have organized eclipse-viewing parties and trips. Most have the goal of preaching about God’s creation, but for the most part, Christianity also doesn’t assign specific prayers for an eclipse; the Rev. James Martin, an author and expert on all manner of obscure saints, said he didn’t know a patron saint of eclipses.
Some interpret the eclipse as a sign of the coming end times, referring to biblical passages including Acts 2: “I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.” A popular theory in certain evangelical circles posits that the Rapture will occur on Sept. 23, which is 33 days after this eclipse.
Jewish tradition offers specific blessings that believers should say upon seeing many natural phenomena — lightning, a mountain, a flower, a rainbow — but no blessing for an eclipse.
The Hindu traditions are more specific. Reddy, who is a member of the board of the Hindu Temple and Cultural Society of Southern Illinois, said his community will go over the guidelines this weekend: Don’t eat any food cooked before the eclipse after it’s over. If you’ve stored any drinking water in your house before the eclipse, discard it. Try not to conceive a child around eclipse time, for fear of birth defects.
Hindu scripture teaches that an eclipse occurs when an angry spirit swallows the sun: “They have a score to settle with the sun and the moon. They basically swallow it. That’s what causes the light to go out,” Reddy said. “That is the old belief. Obviously the new belief is completely different.”