Angry Gods, Dragons, Tricksters, and Edmund Halley

    "Heavy cloud, but no rain." That's how the local weather prognosticators last weekend described the upcoming weather for this past Monday afternoon here in the greater Delaware Valley. Ordinarily nobody would care except for the poor couples who had planned an outdoor wedding for that day...and more importantly... golfers! It's also a great song by Sting, from his Ten Summoner's Tales CD, titled "Heavy Cloud, No Rain." But I digress. The aforementioned weather report was a little disappointing as this was the day for the long-awaited solar eclipse. People were excited and were even willing to travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to see it. I read that there was one airline offering solar eclipse packages, as well as other airlines that were willing to slightly divert their flight paths so as to get the best view for their passengers. While I appreciate the enthusiasm of the airlines it hasn't been a good six months for them, what with holes appearing out of nowhere in the sides of fuselages. As well as somebody forgetting to put the bolts in the proper holes, etc., etc. So I might have been a little tense with a sudden course correction of my San Jose to Boise flight to fly due East for a peek at a solar eclipse while listening to The Police sing, King of Pain with the line, "There's a little black spot on the sun today", from their Synchrocity CD. "Um, excuse me, miss? Do we have enough gas for this?" You're an idiot. Yes, I know. Again, I digress.

    As for your devoted correspondent, I found myself, again, walking at Tyler State Park, earbuds blaring the shuffled songs from my iTunes library and trying to get a good, long walk in. Coming around a corner I saw a couple up ahead of me staring up into the gray, overcast sky. "Really?" I said to myself. "So soon?" As I joined these two strangers straining our necks skyward in the search for this celestial event behind the somewhat gray but fast-moving clouds, there it was; almost moon-like in its celestial crescent. And while it wasn't the dark and ominous disc with the spires of fire surrounding it, there was still an awe-inspiring feel to it all. And because I'm a dork...my mind started wandering...and wondering.

    Sometimes it's easy to forget how connected our ancestors were to the sky and to the events (like solar and lunar eclipses) that occurred, and how important that connection has been throughout human history. And while that feeling of oneness has seemed to wane as technological advances have made the heavens seem less grand or ominous, even smaller, as it were, this modern disconnect was much less evident for our ancestors. I imagine that thousands of years ago, you almost felt that the stars could reach out and touch you and you could feel the embrace of the entire galaxy. 

    Our ancient myths are full of connections to the heavens because of their implied impact on earthly events. Whether it was the annual flooding of the Nile River in Egypt that gave the region life, which was heralded by the heliacal rising of the brightest star in their night sky, Sirius; or the people of ancient China who thought that a solar eclipse was a dragon eating the sun, so they gathered together in their villages and screamed and banged on their percussion-like instruments to scare the giant dragon away...which worked, by the way! Even today, the Mursi peoples of southwest Ethiopia connect the flooding of the Omo River with the heliacal setting of the stars in the Southern Cross, which of course, led to one of Crosby, Stills and Nash's greatest songs! Oops, digression...my bad. This connection between the earth and the sky was taken to its logical extreme, as it were, by the Misimay villagers in the Andes, who viewed the Milky Way as merely a celestial extension of the Vilcanota River (now the Urubamba River), whose waters they see as circulating from the heavens to the Earth. 

    Yes, ancient angry gods from Egypt to China; to trickster gods who had nothing better to do than to play with nature and frighten humans; even Ezekiel's "wheel within a wheel" (Ezekiel 1:4, and 10:5,20) that, depending on your point of view, was a promise or a curse of Yahweh's intervention in mankind's affairs, or if you want to get all Ancient Aliens on your bad self, was a UFO...all were a part of the intricate connection between earth and sky for the ancients. But as it is written, "When I became a man, I put away childish things." (1 Corinthians 13:11) As time went on, actually even as early as 600 BCE, priests in Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Babylon were recording dates of past eclipses in an effort to predict when the next one might happen. We were finally growing up.

    Modern predictions reached a zenith when the British polymath Edmund Halley (he of the comet that bears his name) successfully predicted an eclipse in 1715. And then, approximately 200 years later in 1919, a team of British scientists went to South America to observe the eclipse that year, and verified the predictions of a German-born scientist that space and time themselves are distorted by the presence of mass and energy. That scientist was some guy named Albert Einstein. 

    There is a striking pathos in the fact that scientists from two countries that only a year earlier had been locked in a horrifying world war, came together to unweave such a cosmic mystery. And while not all of these thoughts were going through my head at that particular moment this past Monday as I looked up and squinted through the cloud cover at this wondrous event, what did run through this increasingly older and sometimes forgetful and cynical brain, was the fact that along the Neshaminy Creek that runs through beautiful Tyler State Park, a few hundred people paused their noisy, hectic lives and tuned out the craziness of the world around them and joined millions of others doing the same as we all looked up at the sky and our myopic vision was briefly expanded as we marveled at this wonder of the cosmos. I hope it reminded people of how precious our brief moment in the sun really is.

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com