On April 8, millions of people will observe a solar eclipse, mainly in North America. And although today we are an informed population with great technological advances, this astronomical event has caused some panic in part of the population.
Fear is not new. Since prehistoric times, eclipses have been considered bad omens. The world is not going to end on the 8th. Eclipse after eclipse, the world has never ended.
About the Sun and the Moon
Drlectin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Feared, but also celebrated by humanity throughout time, eclipses exalted the beliefs and worldviews of many cultures. Often accompanied with offerings, rituals or ceremonies, as a way of giving meaning to their myths, their oral traditions and a social order. These shocking phenomena have been recorded in rock art, in codices, in books and in oral traditions.
Various investigations have pointed out painted or engraved eclipses in the world’s rock heritage. An example of this is in the rock art of the Kur-ring-gai Chase National Park, in New South Wales (Australia).
Astronomer Duane Hamacher and astrophysicist Ray Norris reviewed 50 stories related to eclipses in their work on the astronomy of Australian aborigines. For example, in most Aboriginal cultures the Sun is feminine and the Moon is masculine. For the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, a solar eclipse was an act of copulation between the Sun (female) and the Moon (male).
Dice Duane:
“When an eclipse occurs, she reaches out and attacks the ‘moon man’, whom they call Bahloo.”
The stone engraving of two human figures and a crescent could be representing the contemplation of an eclipse. The image is very dynamic and could appear to be a ceremony during the so-called “third contact”, the beginning of the total eclipse, when the lunar surface completely enters the Earth’s umbra.
Hamacher and Norris detail that, in the oral traditions of the Australian aborigines, eclipses announced a terrifying change that interrupted the harmony of the cosmos. The Arrernte or Wardaman understood that something covered the Sun, but they explained it as a large black bird or the effects of evil magic.
The coincidence in dates
The prehistoric rock carvings of Aspeberget in Sweden have been studied for more than a century without a general consensus on their meaning. Among them is a solar representation supported by two female figures. This petroglyph, according to archaeoastronomy studies, corresponds to an eclipse that occurred on October 23, 1067.
There is a very similar figure in the Chaco Canyon, in the United States. This pictorial set has been proposed as the eclipse of July 11, 1097. The so-called corona or solar ring that is projected when the Moon covers the bright light of the Sun was even painted. According to astronomer McKim Malville, from the University of Colorado Boulder , an expert in archaeoastronomy, who discovered the petroglyph in 1992, “does not seem to symbolize a fearsome moment.”
University of Colorado, CC BY
Festivities to honor the Sun
In pre-Hispanic times and before the arrival of Europeans, cultures such as the Nahuas or the Mayans counted eclipses. In the Nahua language he was described as Tonatiuh qualo“the Sun is eaten”, and in Mayan, Pa’al K’in, “Broken Sun.” The Sun was devoured, eaten or died.
A large number of pre-Hispanic cultures developed tools, methods and calendrical counts that allowed them to make predictions of celestial phenomena. The Mayans were correct in predicting eclipses up to 55% of the time.
Alfonso Torres, archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH (Mexico), has carried out an in-depth study on astronomical observation in Hidalgo, Mexico. Torres details ceremonies such as those observed in cave paintings made by Otomi and Nahua peoples linked to eclipses, as well as the calendar inscription of the eclipse that occurred in the year 1508.
In this set we have also suggested a kind of ritual with lunar elements associated with women, in addition to other calendrical symbols such as sacred wars.
Although eclipses were synonymous with disastrous moments, in many cultures the union of the Sun and the Moon has symbolized the origin of humanity. Where the feminine and the masculine were intertwined and where eclipses, as the Aymara think to this day, had to happen for life to continue.
Nothing to fear and maybe celebrate
We cannot say one hundred percent whether these iconography of the past were evocations of eclipses, but we do have records of predictions of eclipses, calendrical counts, knowledge of the movements of the Sun and Moon, as well as knowledge of times of drought or ideal times of the year for hunting and gathering, keys to human survival and the balance of the planet.
On April 8 the Sun and the Moon will meet again. The world is not going to end, but it will be, for the lucky ones who can observe it, an astronomical event that will forever be recorded in the collective memory.
Aline Lara Galicia, Researcher at the ATLAS group. Territories and Landscapes of Recent Prehistory in Andalusia (HUM-694), Sevilla University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.