April 5, 2024

As everyone around here already knows, Cleveland, Ohio lies within the 124-mile-wide band that on April 8, three days after this newsletter appears, will experience the area’s first total solar eclipse since 1806.  I am quite amazed at the excitement this has caused.  All the schools will be closed, and the entire area is likely to be one enormous traffic jam.  This being Cleveland, the first thing to be skeptical about is the weather:  the prediction so far is “mostly cloudy," which could mean anything.  Yet already, a week away, there is a combination of party atmosphere and suspense, like that on Times Square waiting for the ball to drop on New Years’s Eve. 

The public interest has surprised me, if only because I am not used to finding my enthusiasms shared by normal people.  I have been fascinated by all things astronomical since boyhood, and since 1992 have belonged to The Planetary Society, co-founded by Carl Sagan, which is devoted to furthering the cause of space exploration.  The latest issue of their quarterly Planetary Report is a special “Eclipse Issue,” and from it I learned that the kind of eclipse we are going to witness is unique in the solar system.  It is, as the title of an article by Kate Howells puts it, “An Exquisite Cosmic Coincidence.”  Many places in the solar system experience syzygy, the alignment of celestial bodies, but unique to earth is “a wonderful coincidence of size and distance.  The Sun is 400 times larger in diameter than the Moon, and the Sun also happens to be 400 times farther away from the Earth than the Moon….This makes it so that both objects appear to be the same size from the perspective of Earth….When syzygy occurs, the Moon can perfectly cover the Sun’s face” (4). 

Okay, very cool.  But still, what is going on here?  When I was quite young, I thought I had been born at the perfect time.  Given any amount of luck, I was going to witness the turn of a century, the turn of a millennium, and Halley’s Comet—to which it turned out I could add the first manned moon landing, and, for that matter, 1984, since I had read the book and been disturbed by it when I was 13.   One by one, I have ticked those boxes, and now I have an unexpected extra item to add to the list, the last of its kind for me, since Ohio will not witness another until 2099, when I will be more than twice my present age and probably not up to attending.  But none of the other events except the moon landing captured any amount of non-nerd attention.  I have even read of a couple who plan to get married during the eclipse. 

Yet surely at least some people know that an eclipse has exactly the opposite significance for us in a scientific age as it did in older times.  For us, it is a dramatization of physical laws, an epiphany of a mathematically precise and predictable natural order.  For previous ages, it was precisely the opposite: a frightening and mysterious violation of the order of the cosmos.  This has generated a certain amount of ethnocentric smugness, as when Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee uses his ability to predict an eclipse to impress the members of King Arthur’s court.  But the prestige of modern astronomy as it has developed since the 17^th century has not been entirely earned.  Copernicus and Galileo replaced the old geocentric model of the cosmos, the so-called Ptolemaic cosmos, with a new heliocentric model, and in the 18^th century Newton’s laws explained how that model worked.  But the idea of the heavens as the manifestation of a higher, mathematically-governed order is far older—5000 or so years older, as a matter of fact.

At the end of his life, Joseph Campbell was working on a massive Historical Atlas of World Mythology.  It was organized according to what he called mythology’s paideumatic or pedagogical models.  The first volume, The Way of the Animal Powers, was about the earliest model, the animal world and the hunt.  The second, The Way of the Seeded Earth, was about the plant world and planting cultures.  The third volume, which Campbell did not live to complete, was to be called The Way of the Celestial Lights.  It would have chronicled the shift from the earthbound perspective of the first two models to the order of the heavens, a shift that first occurred in Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE, coincident with the appearance of a new form of society: the organization of mass populations into city-states that eventually burgeoned into empires.  Governing the city-states were the new institutions of kingship and priesthood, which used the new inventions of writing and higher mathematics both as practical instruments for governing mass populations and as vehicles of a new kind of ideology.  Campbell says:

This was a completely new idea in the world.  There had been plenty of interest, before, in the sun, the moon, and certain stars.  Personified, they had figured in many myths, and there had been rituals celebrated, as well as observatories instituted, to mark the summer and winter solstices, spring and fall equinoxes. [Stonehenge may have been one of these, though the disputes over Stonehenge are endless].  Never before, however, had anything like this mathematical concept of cycles within cycles of time, marking harmoniously a supernatural program for the organization of all things, been known.  It immediately became in those Mesopotamian city-states the key to a supernaturally authorized organization, not only of the calendar of festivals by which the common life was regulated, but also much more especially, of the now highly symbolic decorum of the court.  (76-78)  

 The ideology can be summed up in the phrase “as above, so below.”  There is a divine power above, which created the heavens and the earth by imposing order upon chaos.  That order is still evident in the cosmos, a word that means something like “beautiful design.”  In the first canto of the Paradiso, Beatrice lectures Dante:

“Among all things, however disparate,
there reigns an order, and this gives the form
that makes the universe resemble God.”  
(Canto 1, lines 103-05, Mark Musa translation)

But the divine power did not just create the natural order: it also created the social order as, indeed, an extension of the natural order.  The order was hierarchical, a vertical ladder or scale (both words were used) of power and authority.  The version of it that governed European society until the 18^th century was called the great Chain of Being.  Shakespeare’s Richard II speechifies endlessly about how he is “God’s anointed,” put on the throne by God himself.  To revolt against him is to revolt against God’s will.  Some people decided to test that theory and deposed Richard anyway.  The social chaos that followed, enough to fill a double tetralogy of history plays, was said to be God’s punishment for displacing his order principle.  This is a late form of the ideology that spread from ancient Mesopotamia westward to Egypt, where the Pharaoh was not just a divine representative but a god incarnate, and beyond Egypt, across the ocean to the city-states of Central America. Eastward it spread as far as China, where the Emperor had the “mandate of heaven.”

Later developments of Biblical mythology decided that the nature that God had created and found good fell along with humanity, though that is not explicit in the Bible.  Fallen nature, however, was “sublunary”:  that is, it stopped at the orbit of the moon.  Beyond that, the heavenly bodies and the stars remained unfallen, their regular order displaying their perfection.  Indeed, that is heaven, the spiritual world that the redeemed inhabit after death.  In the Paradiso, Dante the pilgrim ascends through 9 celestial spheres to the presence of God himself.  Although heaven is timeless, throughout the canticle Dante tracks his journey by references to the interplay of four circles:  the equinoctial colure, the celestial horizon, the celestial equator, and the ecliptic.  Clearly, although it was wrong in its geocentricity, the Ptolemaic model was anything but crude and unsophisticated. 

Eclipses, and other seemingly anomalous phenomena, such as comets, were taken as portents, particularly of the fall of an order figure.  Horatio recounts to Hamlet the astronomical omens associated with the assassination of Julius Caesar, including a lunar eclipse:

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets…
                    …and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.  
                    (1.1.117-24, Bevington edition)

In Antony and Cleopatra, after they have lost the battle of Actium, Mark Antony speaks of Cleopatra as his moon:  “Alack, our terrene moon is now eclipsed, / And it portends alone the fall of Antony” (3.13.156-57).  Likewise, in Othello, after Othello has killed Desdemona, he says of her death, “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe / Should yawn at alteration” (5.2.102-04), imagery that fits into a larger pattern of light and darkness throughout the play.  In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan, the rebel against divine order, is described in terms of an eclipse:

                    …his form had yet not lost
All her Original brightness, nor appear’d
Less than Arch-Angel ruin’d, and th’excess
Of Glory obscur’d: As when the Sun new ris’n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.        (1.591-600)

Satan, however, rebels against a heavenly order that does exist.  Shakespeare’s King Lear, although earlier than Paradise Lost, is actually more prophetic of a modern skeptical attitude.  In it, the character Gloucester speaks of recent eclipses as foreshadowing not just the fall of a ruler but perhaps the passing of a whole cycle of civilization:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.  Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.  Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son and father….We have seen the best of our time.  Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. 

                                                  (1.2. 106-17)

King Lear dates from 1605, which in fact saw a total solar eclipse. Gloucester’s evil son Edmund sneers at what he views as his father’s silly superstition.  We are uneasy to find ourselves aligned with Edmund, yet it is not only our modern rationalism that makes us skeptical but the play itself.  Lear is constantly calling for the heavens and their gods to avenge the wrongs done to him; in Act 3, he tries to command the storm to destroy the world that has treated its ruling figure so badly.  The only response he gets is the howling of the wind.  Lear’s loyal servant Kent may claim “It is the stars, / The stars above us, govern our conditions” (4.5. 33-34), but, so far as evidence from the play goes, the heavens are empty—and, without an order to subdue it and keep it in its place, the demonic rises up from below.  The character Albany says,

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey upon itself,
Like monsters of the deep.  
                    (4.2.47-50)

And that is exactly what happens.  No spirits come down, and in that sense life seems as “absurd” and meaningless as existentialism would later claim that it is.  The best we can say is that there are some truly good human beings, and that at least some of them prevail while the evil ones devour themselves.  Beyond that, instead of a descending order, what comes from outside the ordinary framework of life are mysterious oracular pronouncements ascending from “below,” from mental depths below the rational, in the speeches of the Fool and of Lear in his madness.  The cryptic utterances of fools and madmen, however, look forward to the Romantic sense of some mystery downward, inward, or on the other side of ordinary experience, a mystery that may still manifest itself in all its sublime strangeness, despite our supposed scientific detachment. These days, no one believes in a moral and providential order on high.  The realm above is law-governed, but the laws are mechanical and materialistic.  Yet actual experiences of eclipses, especially full solar eclipses, in our time are not so much of something happening up in the heavens but of our world transformed into something utterly alien and strange through a change in the quality of the light.  This world suddenly becomes another world—becomes the Otherworld that recurrently in mythology is said to be beneath or on the other side of this one.  Sometimes it is the world of the dead, and we ourselves become the dead, so that the eclipse becomes a kind of near-death experience.  Annie Dillard tries to capture the intensity of this estrangement in her essay “Total Eclipse”: 

“Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember. |  I turned back to the sun.  It was going.  The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum.  Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print.  This color has never been seen on earth.  The hues were metallic; their finish was matte.  The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded.  All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead.  The sky was navy blue.  My hands were silver.  (91)  

Later, she says,

There was no world.  We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down.  Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.  Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time.  We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them.   (93)

We may hope that Dillard is perhaps amplifying the kind of disoriented, weirded-out sensations that lurk on the edges of consciousness during times when a change of light alters our sense of reality, as during a concert’s light show.  But during a concert, we know the psychedelic metamorphosis of the real is mechanically contrived.  Whereas the eclipse is natural—or rather, unnatural.   Dillard repeats the anecdote that the Emperor Louis of Bavaria died of fright when the moon covered the sun.  I suspect the story is apocryphal, as most of the standard Internet references do not mention it (Wikipedia, Brittanica, Encyclopedia.com).  In fact, I hope so, or it does not bode well for people’s eclipse parties.  But accounts consistently stress the strange, awesome darkening and the transformation of the quality of the light:  it is something capable of shaking us out of our scientific complacency. 

The darkening of the sun during Christ’s Crucifixion is sometimes assumed to describe an eclipse.  Lisa Yaszek, a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech University and former president of the Science Fiction Research Association, in an interview with Abbey White recounts the story that during there was an eclipse in Italy during the shooting of the film Barabbas in 1961, so the director deliberately shot the Crucifixion scene during the actual eclipse.  Yaszek’s interview is very useful, providing links to some of the famous eclipse references in literature.  It may tide us over while we are waiting for the arrival of a book that aims to be a definitive study, Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts, edited by Henrike Christiane Lange and Tom McLeish, due from Oxford this very month of April, 2024.  A surprising number of famous writers have left descriptions of eclipses, both solar and lunar.  Virginia Woolf described an eclipse that occurred in 1927; Thomas Hardy has a poem on a lunar eclipse.

 The Yaszek interview links to a poem by Wordsworth titled “The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820,” but dismisses it as “super racist,” claiming that it describes “the interest of white people and the fear of brown people in the face of an eclipse.”  At first I was so confused by this that I wondered whether I was missing something in the poem.  It seems to me a misstep in an otherwise interesting discussion, one in which contemporary sensitivities have produced a slight misreading of the text.  The offending lines are “Which Superstition strove to chase, / Erewhile, with rites impure.”  There is no reference to any skin color or country, and in fact Wordsworth is correct that many cultures and races all over the world have conducted rituals to counteract the supposedly dire consequences of an eclipse.  He can be accused of rationalistic complacency, perhaps, but not of racism.  The accusation is unfortunate because it distracts from what the poem actually says, which is curious and interesting.  Wordsworth is on a tour in Italy, and describes the uncanny alteration of the light that so many observers agree about.  Then he imagines the sculpted angels on a spire in Milan:  even they are “All steeped in this portentous light! / All suffering dim eclipse!”  In another mental leap, he connects this with the angels who, in Paradise Lost, watch the Fall of humanity, and, despite their blessed status, are saddened by it:  “Throngs of celestial visages, / Darkening like water in the breeze, / A holy sadness shared.”  In a final leap, he thinks of England and those he loves, which are in a kind of figurative eclipse because they are far away, out of his sight.  All he can do is have faith in the “all-controlling Power” above that nothing bad has happened to them.  Wordsworth in his later years felt the need to cling to some kind of traditional faith in a providential order, and this is one example of that.  It is not a great poem, but it has a certain poignance. 

Eclipses are omens signifying disruption in this sublunary realm, but sun and moon are only 2 of the 7 celestial bodies visible to the naked eye, along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond these bodies lie the stars, which, from earliest times in cultures all over the world have formed various constellations, a tribute to the pattern-seeking tendency of the imagination.  The sun’s path through 12 constellations, called the zodiac, conjoined with the position of the planetary bodies within those houses, produces the system of heavenly influences called astrology.   One has to caution students that in medieval and Renaissance times, astrology was actually incorporated into Christian theology.  As Kent’s remark, quoted above, shows, belief in the influence of the stars upon human temperament and human life was not superstition but part of the structure of divine order.  What was rejected was only the idea that the stars predestine us, overriding our free will.  It in fact marks Edmund as an atheist and therefore, of course, a villain, that he scoffs at his father Gloucester’s reading ominous signs in the night sky:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.  An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!       (1.4.121-31)

We are not only inclined to agree with Edmund but to feel a grudging admiration for anyone who can use language with such energy.   “We” of course means those of us who feel that science has debunked astrology.  More accurately, it refers not to our whole feeling about the stars but to a certain satiric mood in which we are inclined to be amused at the habit of projecting patterns onto reality and then believing that they are really “there.”  This is a form of paranoia, as Thomas Pynchon shows in his satire The Crying of Lot 49, in which a character thinks of himself as a kind of planetarium, saying “Shall I project a world?”   He ends up committing suicide, however, implying that such megalomania, what Jung called “inflation,” is not sustainable. 

Because people read patterns into absolutely everything, there is a lot of leftover mythological junk up there, a situation satirized by the brilliant cartoonist Richard Thompson in one of his two comic strips, Richard’s Poor Almanac, in a recurrent “Skywatch” feature mimicking the astronomy news articles telling people what to look for during a particular month.  A fairly easy search of the Go Comics website will pull these up these catalogues of absurd constellations and other astral phenomena.  One “March Skywatch” features the constellation “Footsore the Inconvenienced Metro Rider” plodding up the perpetually broken escalator, also the binary stars Fistula and Scrofula and the Big Staticky Sweater Nebula.  Another “March Skywatch” opines, “Well, this month the night sky is a mess, an incoherent mishmash of second-rate constellations.  Frankly, I’ve done dot-to-dots on Bennigan’s kids menus that were more compelling.”  Constellations for this month include Gary the CVS Assistant Manager and Lacto the Milk Carton.  A banner across the top of the strip shows the phases of the moon:  New - Used – Gibbous – Bilious – Sullen – Boorish.  The last panel announces the annual “Insipid” meteor shower, “fitful glimpses of random flaming space lint.”   A “June Skywatch” adds to the list of constellations Dental Floss, Havarti the Artisanal Cheese, and Big Mickey the Copyright Violation; another adds Grocery Store Conveyer Belt Purchase Divider, Impetigo, and I-95 to Baltimore; to which a “November Skywatch” adds The Walker (geriatric variety) and Reflux.  Last and possibly not least, a “Spring Skywatch” points out the constellations of the Pinking Shears and Inerto the Commuter, the latter circling the night sky for hours waiting for a parking space.  Enthusiasts are urged also to note the Cussing Nebula, which takes the form of what cartoonists call a “grawlix,” a string of symbols used instead of a swear word.  That term may sound like a scientific name out of medieval Latin, but it was in fact coined by Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey.  

These parodies are an implied commentary on the arbitrary randomness of some of the actual constellations.  If you do any stargazing, you may well find yourself asking who the hell decided that that big W up there was the queen Cassiopeia sitting on her throne?   The constellation Lynx was invented in the 17^th century by someone who gave it that name because you have to be as sharp-eyed as a lynx to see it (I am not making this up).  And how many people (even in the southern hemisphere where it appears) know Dorado the Goldfish, which sounds like a Pixar character, possibly a Finding Nemo spin-off?   Part of the problem here is that there were only 48 traditional constellations, identified in the 2^nd century CE by Ptolemy—he of the “Ptolemaic cosmos”—in his Almagest.  These were rendered as two gorgeous woodcuts by Albrech Dürer in 1515, one for each hemisphere (Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere).  The rest of the official 88 constellations were drummed up by various observers over the years in order to utilize the leftover stars, until an authoritative list was ratified by the International Astronomical Union in 1928.   You can have a jolly time on the Internet searching for both proposed constellations that didn’t make the final cut and utterly weird ones that did, the latter including Caelum the Engraver’s Chisel; Camelopardalis the Giraffe; and Vulpecula, the Little Fox with the Goose, all of which sound as if they are out of a Richard Thompson “Skywatch.” 

You may also spend hours wandering in a literally marvelous book, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, which I cannot call a forgotten classic because it has not, to my delight, been forgotten.  The reason it is still in print despite being originally published in 1899 is that there is widespread agreement that, odd as it seems, it remains the only book of its kind in English. According to a brief Wikipedia article, its author, Richard Hinckley Allen, wanted to become an astronomer but,  prevented by poor vision, compensated by becoming one of those Victorian polymaths like Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough.  Allen’s friends called him “the walking encyclopedia.  Star Names is a compendium of the lore about both the 48 traditional constellations and the stars that belong to them, gathered from all the ages and from all of world culture.   Like The Golden Bough, it represents a staggering amount of work, done with file cards instead of a computer.  Its greatest value is as a sourcebook of literary references to the stars and constellations, both in Classical authors and in canonical writers like Milton and Spenser.  It is more unreliable the farther it strays from that European and American focus, but that does not matter, because it transcends the category of reference book and has itself become a member of the literary genre that Northrop Frye called the anatomy, a type of creative nonfiction taking the form of an encyclopedic meditation.  Medieval examples, such as the Saturnalia of Macrobius and the Cosmographia of Bernardus Sylvestris, were in fact themselves works of cosmological lore, the latter influencing C.S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet.  The brief intellectual conundrums of Borges are short examples of the form.  Indeed, when I read in Star Names that the Polynesian islanders referred to the Milky Way as “the Long, Blue, Cloud-eating Shark” (482), I am charmed by the witty enchantment I often feel when reading Borges.  The scientific veracity of the datum is not the point.  I bought Star Names when I was young, so long ago that I cannot remember buying it, and I have spent hours over a lifetime lost in reverie amidst its wonders. 

An eclipse is what Arthur Koestler, in the title of a famous 20^th-century novel, called “darkness at noon,” a reference to Job 5:14, a passage which says that God shall confound the wise:  “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.”  Our ordinary self, our ego, clings to the day and the light, so much so that the loss of them seems like a living death.  In Milton’s tragic drama, Samson Agonistes, Samson speaks of his blindness as such, in words that clearly suggest the anguish of his blind author:

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse
Without all hope of day!  (80-83)

He goes on to speak of himself as “exiled from light” in “a living death…Myself my Sepulcher, a moving Grave”  (98-102).  Yet the ego has intimations that this is not the whole story.  For every single night, not just the sun but the entire daylight world is eclipsed, only to reveal that it is a real and precious yet also limited perspective, a reality that is nonetheless part of a much larger reality, magnificent and sublime.  Even for sighted people, the ego undergoes eclipse in sleep every night, and is eventually eclipsed permanently in death.  Yet there is a suggestion in many mythologies, and in the visions of some poets, of a larger Self, a paradoxical identity that is at once God, the cosmos, and the total form of humanity.  In a crucial poem by Dylan Thomas, this greater identity speaks:  “I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, / And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.”   In another poem, “And death shall have no dominion,” Thomas says of the dead, “They shall have stars at elbow and foot.” 

Such a vision is “apocalyptic,” a word meaning “revelation,” an eye opening, the opposite of an eclipse, the imagination dilated to the limits of the conceivable. 

But even those of us who are not visionaries sometimes have intuitions we cannot express, and we may understand when Walt Whitman says that after he had heard the “learned astronomer,” he slipped out, “into the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” 

References

Allen, Richard Hinckley.  Star Names:  Their Lore and Meaning.  1899.  Dover Edition 1963. 

Campbell, Joseph.  “The Historical Forms.”  In Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Volume 2:  The Way of the Seeded Earth, “Part 1:  The Sacrifice.” Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 74-114. 

Dillard, Annie.  “Total Eclipse.”  In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters.  Harper & Row, 1982.  84-103. 

Howells, Kate.  “An Exquisite Cosmic Coincidence.”  In The Planetary Report.  Volume 44, Number 1.  March 2024.  4-5.