Eclipses throughout history: Bad omens, hungry dragons
Solar blackouts used to be terrifying things
“Dragon devours sun, spits it back out.”
That could have been a headline in an ancient Chinese newspaper the day after a total solar eclipse.
We’ve known for years that the Great American Eclipse will cross the USA from Oregon to South Carolina on Aug. 21. Imagine how freaked out you’d be if you didn’t know it was coming.
“Many years ago, people were surprised and terrified when an eclipse occurred,” former NASA astronomer Fred Espenak says in his booklet Get Eclipsed.
Myths in many cultures claimed animals such as dragons, frogs, snakes or jaguars devoured the sun during a solar eclipse, then regurgitated or excreted it back out, says astronomy historian Steve Ruskin, author of the book America’s First Great Eclipse. “Early words for eclipses in China were to eat or devour.”
Vikings thought eclipses were caused by two great wolves chasing the sun and moon across the sky, and Mayans imagined snakes were eating the celestial bodies.
The moment the sun was totally eclipsed, “people would do all kinds of things to make the sun return,” Espenak says. “In China, they would light fires or shoot arrows at the sun to try to make it catch fire again.”
People thought of solar and lunar eclipses as bad omens or as portents of doom, says Cameron Gibelyou of the University of Michigan. Deaths of famous people have occurred around eclipses, which have helped fueled the fear: Charlemagne’s son, Emperor Louis the Pious, may have died after the terror he felt during an eclipse May 5, 840, Gibelyou says. It wasn’t always bad news. A total eclipse on May 28, 585 B.C., occurred during a war in eastern Turkey between the Lydians and Medes. Greek historian Herodotus reported that the combatants were so disturbed by the sight of the sun being “devoured” that they stopped fighting and made peace.
And some cultures saw eclipses as a good thing, such as the Tahitians or the Warlpiri people of the Australian Aborigines, Gibelyou says. Those groups thought an eclipse “involves an amorous encounter between sun and moon.”