The Eclipse as Dark Omen
To experience transcendence during a solar eclipse is a privilege of modernity. I know a man who once sailed to a remote island in the South Pacific to see an eclipse, and having caught the bug on that trip, later flew to see another in Svalbard, where local law required him to keep a shotgun handy, lest he end up a warm meal for a polar bear. If I had to compress his field reports from these far-flung eclipse viewings into a single word, it would be wonder. In that, he’s no outlier. Wonder is the dominant theme of recent eclipse accounts, whose general spirit is captured by a 1925 article in The New York Times that described an eclipse as “the most magnificent free show nature presents to man.”
These breathless reports of “magnificence” represent a radical break with the historical literature on eclipses. For Shakespeare, an eclipse was a “stain on the sun that portended no good.” Milton compared the eerie light of the eclipsed sun to the tarnished glow of the fallen Lucifer. And these are relatively recent accounts. The eclipse myths of antiquity were more unsettling still.
It’s no surprise that eclipses
