The Solar Eclipse

Yesterday, I was fortunate to experience the full solar eclipse from the Pymatuning State Park Reservoir in western Pennsylvania. The light turned silvery as the sun neared total obfuscation, and green colors emerged and reds dimmed, the effect of our eyes’ cones coming offline and employing the rods more. Shadows close to the ground sharpened until the sun winked out completely. With totality, the skies darkened like nighttime. Watching the last edge of the sun vanish into darkness, I removed my protective eyewear and stared at the black orb ringed by our star’s corona. It was sublime, and dazzling, and eerie, and I had compassion for people of ages past, who had less access to science than we do now.

Medieval astronomers understood that solar eclipses happened when the moon was aligned between the Earth and the sun, and could even predict these events. In the Medieval imagination, solar eclipses could forecast events like flooding and earthquakes. They were especially important for magnifying the effects of other planetary conjunctions.

Of course, ordinary people could no more predict a solar eclipse than I. They frequently thought of these events as portents of horrible disaster. For instance, the French chronicler Rudolph Glabber wrote of a partial eclipse in 1033 that: “in that same year . . . there occurred a terrible event, an eclipse . . . Now the sun itself took in the colour of sapphire, and its upper part looked like the moon in its last quarter. Each saw his neighbour looking pale as through unto death . . . Then extreme fear and terror gripped the hearts of men, for they understood that this omen portended some dreadful affliction which would fall upon mankind.”