Gazing into the Eclipse

regular gum. Okay, maybe available on nicotings later. I don't no. Eclipses our thing that they are both sort of mundane in physical terms, but also quite stunning and terrifying and significant throughout the history of humanity, significant to the observer. Yeah, because I just want to try to imagine. I know you can't really put yourself in this headspace, but just try to imagine what it would be like to sort

of live in a pre scientific time. Maybe you're you're part of a you know, a hunter gatherer tribe somewhere in the world, and for the first time in your life, something very strange happens. One day, the sky starts to go dark and you see a black disc pass in front of the sun until there's just a ring of white fire and the the it's dark in the middle of the daytime. You don't know what's going on or what's causing this. I have to imagine that it would

be absolutely terrifying and and completely bizarre. Yeah, I mean the cycle of night and day, you know, the one of the guiding uh, factors of your life. Even with the gay, the guiding factors for any organism, and some of the earliest organisms were still based on recognizing when it was dark and when it was daylight. And suddenly that seems to be thrown out the window by there's

a random chaotic event. Yeah. Well, i'd say upsetting the clear division between night and day is like one of the most perverse things you could do to a biological organism. I mean, the sun, it's it's the mother of all on Earth. When you think about it, all energy on Earth is solar energy. Pretty much all all the energy we consume, you know, all the food we eat is

a few steps down the chain, but it's solar energy. Uh. And so it's just kind of amazing to imagine not knowing what's going on, but seeing that that mother of all life suddenly blotted out. And of course maybe not equally astounding, but also very strange and and perhaps perverse

and upsetting is the lunar eclipse. Uh, seeing something happen to the moon which to you might have been some kind of god or have some other kind of magical significance, seeing it change colors, or seeing a shadow pass in front of it. Um. So, yeah, I think eclipses are going to be a really interesting thing to talk about. So you might have heard a couple of years ago that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world. You remember this, I remember hearing a little about it. Yeah,

way too much. Oh, I got so sick of hearing about that. But maybe it's just now been long enough that we can bring it up again without making people grown too much. But it was supposed to end in December twelve. Well, not only did the world not end, but the Mayan calendar, actually, this is funny, didn't predict the end of the world. Did you know this at the time? Um, I don't think I was that informed about it. But and it also it was just bombarded

with that idea of you know, Mayan apocalypse. Yeah, so around that time was basically the end of their long calendar cycle, which would reset afterwards, so it wasn't really a judgment day. It was more like their December thirty first. If they had a really, really really long year, it would be like somebody looking back at our calendar system and thinking of the end of the year, is the the end of the of an era, at the end

of an age and apocalypse? Right, And so they didn't predict the end of the world there, but the Mayan astronomical calendar actually did make some interesting astronomical predictions. For example, there's a book called Astronomy and the Maya Codessees by Harvey and Victoria Bricker. So they discussed the ancient Maya Mayan astronomical calendars and and they discuss some dating back

to the eleventh or twelfth centuries CE. And they say that these ancient calendars that the Maya had predict the date of a solar eclipse that would have been visible in July of ninete within about a day of accuracy. And it kind of makes you wonder why predicting an eclipse would be that important to them. I mean, it's not like it had any real like physical effects of much significance on Earth. You know, it didn't like it wasn't that an eclipse would like destroy all their crops

or something. So what did it mean? Well, it, I mean a lot of it really comes down to, of course, there's cosmology, your understanding of what you are as a people and what the what the world is, and then what the cosmos means. Uh, as well as just basic record keeping basic uh observation of the movement of the spheres and using this as a as a as a

way to divide out time. UH. The ancient Maya believed in in recurring cycles of creation and destruction, and they believe that life was composed of eras lasting around in modern years, it would be around a fifty two hundred year periods. They believe in a flat, four cornered earth that was has been described as being like that of the back of a crocodile that's resting in the water, you know where it's just the back is emerging. And you know. There was additional stuff about the four corners

and the corresponding gods and UH. And of course there are also a lot of rituals in life that are dictated by this two hundred and sixty day sacred round calendar. So within my culture, you have these priests, these are these are the guys that are that are tasked with with taking care of upkeep of the calendar as well as astronomy. So they're calculating time. Uh, They're they're figuring out when festivals should occur, when ceremonies are occurring, uh,

certain fateful days and seasons. They're divining the future. Uh, they're they're trying to figure out the cures for diseases. They're writing about it all, and they're keeping track of the various genealogies. So in a sense, they are they're the keepers of time. They're concerned with Mayan time and

uh and the Mayan people's place in the universe. Yeah, and obviously to the to the Maya, astronomical events had real significance, like that they might believe that an astronomical portent could give them real information about what would happen to them, you know, like it could it could bring something bad that would be dangerous, or it could bring a good omen So you actually really wanted to be

able to predict and understand astronomical events. And of course the Maya weren't weren't the only ones who had believes like this. This is very common all around the world, Like the ancient Chinese were very concerned with being able to predict eclipses, even the you know, the Anti Kithera mechanism. Yes, this is sometimes heard to as the world's first computer

or like the oldest astronomical calculator in existence. It's a mechanical computer that's you know, I think more than two thousand years old, that was discovered in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean off the coast I believe of the island Antikithera. And so they bring this thing up and people have

been studying it and putting together reconstructions of it. And what the people who have studied this mechanism, uh decided is that, oh, yeah, so this was an ancient astronomical calculator that if you wound the gears, it would tell you the placement of different celestial objects and it would predict eclipses. So the ancient Greeks or whoever invented this

amazingly advanced mechanism for the time. We're also very concerned with being able to know when was an eclipse going to happen, So we're gonna come back and discuss the human significance of eclipse more in a few minutes, But first we really need to break down the basic science of the eclipse, the basic celestial mechanics, uh, that are in play here. Okay, Robert, tell me a word that's

hard to pronounce. Oh, well, you know I can. I can probably stumble over any number of difficult words pronounced, but the one in question here is ziziggi, which is ziziggi, zizigi which is s y z y g y um, which is uh. It's like they were playing a joke on you. Yeah, I mean, and it only just makes me think of Ziggy the cartoon character. But but you know, it comes from Ziggy Stardust or Ziggy start us. That's why am I going to Ziggi the cartoon character instead

of Bowie. I don't know, um, but it's a It comes from from the Greek um ziogos, which means yoke together. Because ultimately we are talking about about convergence here, right, So every eclipse is a ziziggi, but not every ziziggi is an eclipse. When when a ziggi he occurs with celestial bodies, we're talking about a nearly straight line configuration of three celestial bodies. In this case, we're talking about uh configurations that involved the Sun, Moon, and the Earth

lining up within a gravitation gravitational system. It also refers to when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction, such as a new moon or in opposition, a full moon. So those are examples. Those those A full moon is a ziziggi. But obviously a full moon is not necessarily an eclipse. Okay, you need a full moon for a linear eclipse, but more on that later, right, Yeah, okay, so I get that. So ziziggi ziziggi, Yes, from the Greek.

Where does the word eclipse come from? Well, with eclips we have to go back to the Greek as well, back to eclipses from eclip in, which means to omit fail, suffer, etcetera. Uh man see but this kind of dire I mean, it kind of drives home the fact that throughout human history like this is how we view eclipse. It is

a thing of of dire omen totally. Well, okay, let's look at how lunar eclipses work first, and then we can turn the solar eclipses Okay, so pop quiz, which is which we you know that one you know that one is the Earth blocking light from reflecting off the Moon, and the other is the Moon blocking the direct light from the Sun that we receive on Earth. But which

is which? Oh? I mean? So you're basically for a solar eclipse, a solar eclipse to occur, the Moon has to be in the way, right, So for a solar eclipse, the easy way to remember is that you're naming the object that's being obscured. So for a solar eclipse that's blocking the light from the Sun, the lunar eclipse is blocking the reflected light from the Moon. So the lunar eclipse happens. It's actually, in the most basic terms, really simple.

It's when the Moon passes into the shadow of Earth. Uh. And when we describe these it will probably really help if you will try to do our best. But if you look at a picture, this is inherently kind of a geometrical or ual phenomenon. You can only say so

much with words. Um, But if you picture the Earth orbiting the Sun and then the Moon orbiting the Earth, every now and then the orbits line up so that the Moon is directly behind the Earth with respect to the Sun. And of course the light we see from the moon doesn't come from the Moon, it's reflected from the Sun. So if you block the light, you know with the Earth's shadow, you're gonna not see much light reflected from the moon, or you're gonna see maybe some

strange colors. So it's like standing in front of a movie projection camera facing the screen and you're suddenly asking yourself, where did the movie go? Well, the movie is on your back now because you're standing in front of the rejector. That's a good analogy. Yeah, okay, so the Earth, there there are two cone shaped shadows that come off of the Earth, and one is sort of the the outward spreading one, and one is sort of the inward focusing one.

The outward spreading one is known as the pin numbra.

That it's the more diffuse shadow. So that's kind of a faint shadow, and you've probably seen, you know yourself, in various scenarios that you're actually casting sort of more than one shadow, kind of a faint, bigger shadow, and then a smaller, more concentrated shadow, and then of course the the middle focused inner shadow is the umbra, and that's going to be the very dark area that the Earth is blocking out a big majority of the Sun's light.

The pannumbra in cases the umbra, so the pannumbra is wide, the umbra is small. In the middle of that is futtle bull's eye there in the umbre. Because a lunar eclipse can only happen when the Moon is behind the Earth, that means that a lunar eclipse also only happens during a full moon. A full moon is when the you know, the Moon is behind the Earth, reflecting its full face

to the Earth. It's it's not getting a partially out of view, but the Moon orbits the Earth all the time, like it makes a full circle roughly every month, right, So why don't we see a lunar eclipse every full moon? Why don't we see a lunar eclipse every time the Moon is on the opposite side of the Earth. So you can imagine the Earth and the Sun together on what's called an ecliptic plane. They're sort of like sitting

on a flat surface together. You imagine that's a flat surface, and the Moon actually does not orbit the Earth on exactly that same plane. It's not flat with the Sun and the Earth. It's at a five degree angle from that orbit. So if you can imagine this, and it probably again will help if you look at a picture, Uh, the Earth's orbiting the Sun on a flat plane, and

then the Moon is orbiting the Earth slightly diagonally. So every now and then it is just lined up on the sort of up and down y axis with where the Sun and the Earth are, and other times it's above or below. Okay, So the rotation of the Earth is like a brimmed hat that's just on perfectly, whereas the Moon's rotation is a cocked hat. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So those places where the Moon crosses the ecliptic plane of the of the Sun and the Earth, those are called nodes, and that's where it's lined up correctly to be caught right in the middle of of the possible eclipse shadow that's being cast by the Earth. When those orbits line up perfectly like that is when you're going to see a lunar eclipse. It's when the Moon is it just the right hy coordinate on this graph. So

remember those two different shadows I talked about. You have the the the umbra and the pin umbra and the pin numbre the big shadow. When the moon passes into that shadow, sometimes you will get like a pinnumber a lunar eclipse, and that can be difficult to see right because that shadow isn't so so dense, it's not going to block out as much light. And then you can also get a partial lunar eclipse where you know, only part of the moon is blocked out by the shadow.

That the really impressive one you want to see is the total lunar eclipse where it's just right to pass into the umbro, you know, that deep center shadow, and that's where the magic happens. And so a lunar eclipses are pretty rare. On average, they can happen about three times a year, though you can have a year where you don't have any eclipses, any lunar eclipses at all um And then about a third of these are the pin number ones that are harder to see cool, and

that brings us to solar eclipses. And again it comes down to three bodies, you know, again sort of the projector something in the way of the projector in the screen. But in this case, a solar eclipse is occurring when the Moon passes into direct line between the Earth and the Sun. So we're the screen as opposed to the individual standing in front of the screen in my projector analogy here, and solar eclipses are only possible during the

new moon phase. Uh. This is when the Moon essentially plays monkey in the middle Sun and Earth when you normally wouldn't see it. Right. So what happens here is the Moon's shadow travels over the Earth's surface and blocks out the Sun's light as seen from Earth. Again, it all comes down to the observer. Because the Moon's the moon orbits the Earth at an angle as we already discussed,

approximately five degrees tilted. The Moon crosses the Earth's over doll plane only twice a year, and these team times are called eclipse seasons because they are the only times when eclipses can occur. So for an eclipse to take place, the Moon must be in just the correct phase during an eclipse season. Uh, and then that's when the solar eclipse occurs. The condition makes this extremely rare. Now, the Moon's shadow, as we already mentioned, you have the central

umbra and then the outer pannumbra. Depending on which part of the shadow passes over you, you'll see one of three different types of solar eclipses. Because as you've as you've probably noted if you've done any kind of reading, you know, online, where you're like, when's the next eclipse occurring? How am I going to see a solar eclipse? Solar eclipse depends on where you are. Yeah, it depends greatly

on where you are. I mean, I'm already looking ahead to the next one, and I think, all right, how far do I have to drive? I think I have to drive to Kentucky to really get a good view of it. And I'm and I'm already thinking about my eclipse tourism, because yeah, you could get a total uh solar eclipse, and clearly this is the one you want to drive for the entire central portion of the Sun is blocked out. This is your big iconic Oh my god, the world is ending eclipse, right, But then there's the

partial eclipse where only part of the Sun's surfaces blocked out. Uh. And then there's an annuler and this is when only a small ring like sliver of light is seen from the Sun's disc. Yeah, you can you can actually observe the Sun's corona sort of like a plasma halo of the Sun around the outside of the black disc, which is also pretty Oh my god, the world is gonna end. Um And that's a solar eclipse. That's how that works. Yeah, we did our best with words. Again, look at a picture. Yeah.

And also I'm gonna make sure to link out to our how stuff works articles on the landing page for this episode. We have an article about solar eclipses and we have an article about lunar eclipses. Both of those have illustrations that will really help you at a better grash than what's happening here, as well as more in depth explanations. Right. Uh. And we're eventually going to get back to what eclipses mean to us in a kind

of like a dark and magical way. But eclipses also do have scientific significance, and I think we should examine those claims, both the real scientific significance and the ones

that have been maybe proposed but not quite validated. Yeah. Indeed, and something you might not even think about, like I had not really thought about the effect of a solar eclipse on terrestrial wind wind, Yeah, which of course makes perfect sense, right, because the Sun and its effect on the Earth is doing a lot of the work in UH in stirring our our atmosphere into the weather patterns that we perceive. Yeah, I mean a lot of what wind is is exchanging gas from one place to another

because of heat differentials. And when you block out the Sun, obviously you're you're creating as kind of disturbance in the normal solar radiation levels you're getting in a certain area. Indeed, and UH. In two thousand twelve, a study from the University of Reading looked into this UH and found that solar eclipses due in fact UH slow the wind down

and make it change directions. This is a team of scientists led by Dr Suzanne Gray, and they compared hourly measurements of wind speed and direction from a hundred and twenty one weather stations across southern England during the August total solar eclipse. Then they compared these to a high resolution weather forecast model UH that did not account for a solar eclipse. So every what they found is that

everything lined up on these two different accounts. The model that the computer model that does not have an eclipse, and then reality which has an eclipse, everything lines up right until you get to the eclipse point. Uh. So they got to see what the weather would have been like without the eclipse occurring at that diversion point, and

these were the results. They found that average wind speed across a cloud free region over southern England dropped by point seven meters per second, and that the winds direction turned counterclockwise by an average of seventeen degrees. So effectively, the eclipse was causing the winds to become more easternly,

and temperatures also fell by about one degree celsius. Oh so did they know that the reason why it was changing the mother Was it what I was saying earlier about changing the temperature and solar radiation or did it have more to do with gravity from the sun and the moon. Well, I mean, temperatures fall and there's no sunlight obviously, as we see in our regular play of

night and day. So so that was expected. Wind slow went atmosphere um close to the ground cool, So that was to be expected, But the changes in wind direction were a bit of a surprise. I wonder what could caused that? Well, I mean a lot of it just comes down to just the complexity of of of weather models, you know, and uh, and just how many different factors are playing into windspeed in direction right, butterflight's the sun in New York, you get rained instead of I mean exactly.

So that's when we get the butterfly effect. We get the the idea of chaos area, and that stems out of our attempts to forecast weather in this entirely complex system. Here's one I've heard. I remember reading somewhere that apparently animals go nuts during an eclipse. Now is this true or is this a bunch of bunk? I believe this is a bunch of buck based on the research that I was looking at. Um basically across the board. There's there's no there's no you know, um preternatural response by

animals to eclipse. Uh. They simply tend to react to the darkness as if it were occurring during a typical cycle. Uh. So, for instance, scientists have observed this in the vertical migration of zooplankton in the ocean due to lunar eclipses, as well as I mean countless higher animals when it comes to solar eclipses. Because of course, that's the more drastic change. Uh, that's weird. I mean, intuitively, I would think it would

make a big difference. Like if you know, animals have circadian rhythms, and you know, rhythms that are based on the cycle of night and day and that are tied to all kinds of biological processes, not just sleep and wake, but lots of things in your body. Um, I would think if if the darkness comes before you're expecting it,

that would throw you all out of whack. Well basically, I mean it comes down to you have daytime mode and nighttime mode, right, and if it seems like suddenly it's getting dark, well it's time to shift into nighttime mode. And that's that's pretty much what a lot of uh. The research out there has shown that that roughly speaking, diurnal animals react as though night we're approaching, UH, as

demonstrated in you know, expedited roosting and betting behavior. And in contrast, animals that are normally active at night, nocturnal you know, animals like bats and whatnot, they may show the reverse pattern. So they're emerging into the open as if the as the sky darkens during an eclipse. So yeah, there's not there's not animals going crazy in the streets. They're not you know, wolves, They're not howling out of madness.

It's just a gentle shift into sort of early nighttime, and then oaps, it's not nighttime after are all go back to your regularly scheduled program. Here's something I don't know if I've ever seen addressed in the werewolf literature. What happens during a lunar eclipse. So let's say you're a werewolf. Your transformation is triggered by the appearance of

the full moon. So full moon's out, but suddenly it passes into the umbra, and you've not got a full moon anymore, at least not got a normal full moon. You've got an eclipsed full moon. What happens to your body? I would think that wolf mode is canceled at that point, Yeah, I would think you just revert back to a naked human in the woods. Yeah, I would think so. I mean,

maybe even more naked than normal, like nobody hair. You would be whatever whatever is on the other side of human from the werewolf, like a almost like a ware human, a wear human plus that would be my guest. You turn into a into a one of those dog robots, you know, with the puppy bots. But you know you've hit, of course on an important question because we're talking about how out eclipses affect animals and of course the human animal like that's that's where we see most of the

more impressive effects. Now we don't turn into wear wolves obviously, because of course eclipse has a huge impact on the way we perceive the universe. Have we perceive life on Earth and what it means? Yeah, it's it's importents we were talking about earlier. I mean, we are the animals that go crazy when a solar eclipse happens, are a lunar eclipse sometimes indeed, we we we are the animals that go crazy. I don't know if you've ever seen like a video of a large crowd gathered to view

a solar eclipse. Sometimes there's just like sudden screaming and people. It's it's bizarre. I mean, I would be very impressed to see a lunar eclipse. I don't think I've ever actually watched one. Maybe when I was a little kid or something. I don't know, Um, but I wouldn't scream. I don't think. You don't think, but you know how can you be for certain? I mean, I've never seen I don't think i've I've never seen a solar lunar eclipse myself, not the full you know, lunar eclipse and

fort of them full solar eclipse. So you know, I think I would behave calmly, but maybe I would just really mark out for it. Now. We'll talk more about the religion and myth here and a bit after the after an upcoming break. But um, according to at least one historical account to greet According to a Greek historian, Herodotus, and only according to him, keep that in mind. Baileys of Melita's predicted an eclipse that occurred during the six year of war between the Medians and the Lydians, and

allegedly this eclipse resulted in a complete ceasefire. Um. So that the eclipse occurs, war has been raging for years and years and years, and then the eclipse occurs and everyone puts down their weapons and they get serious about talking peace. Um. Did it happen? I don't know. This is the only Herodotus gives us this account. Uh, And if it occurred, we're probably talking about an eclipse on

May five, eighty five as as. This is when a total solar eclipse was visible in the Aegean and Asian mind or region, but there were no There was no mention of where wolves in his account either. But in sometimes the the the effects and the ramifications of eclipse go beyond life here on Earth. They go into our our understanding of how the universe itself works. Yeah, this is great. There have actually been examples of people using eclipses as a way to devise an experiment that you

couldn't otherwise perform. So like on Earth, we don't have a lot of options for performing experiments that involve incredible amounts of mass or energy like now we you know, these days we can build like had drawn colliders and stuff to generate a huge amount of energy and a controlled area. But we didn't always have stuff like that, and we still can't generate, you know, enough mass to simulate like the mass of a star or the mass of a planet or something like that. We can only

harness so much. But there are very clever ways to use quantities like, for example, the mass of the Sun to experimentally verify predictions based on new theories. So I want to take us to nineteen nineteen when we had this wonderful new theory from my old friend Alfred Einstein Albert Einstein I believe he was called, but his his

theory was theory of general relativity. So the idea here is that gravity is actually the curvature of what Einstein called space time, that that space and time are sort of part of the same general four dimensional fabric of the universe, and that gravity was actually the effect of seeing that fabric warped or distorted or bent by a large piece of mass. But how could you test that? Yeah, because you're basically saying Einstein's basically saying a sufficiently massive

object he is going to bend light. Yeah, like you could observe it. You could observe the bend in space time by seeing how the trajectory of a eam of light changes as it goes around a really massive object. But you can't put the Sun in a lab. Yeah. It's like, if you need to get you need to say, okay, Einstein, go get a sun sized object to get a bowling ball about that sis, get a flash flight, and let's

watch the light curve. Right. But you know one thing you could do is try to watch what happens when a star passes behind the Sun. You could look out towards the Sun and see, hey, as the light passing the Sun comes towards us, does it get bent an amountain by the gravity of the Sun. That would be uh, there would be a number corresponding to Einstein's theory of relativity, and that would be great if you could check it out. But there's a problem. The Sun's too bright, like you

can't see the light from the stars behind it. At least you certainly couldn't at the time. I'm not sure if we could now, but there might be a way around that. You could look for how the Sun bends light coming from stars behind it during a solar eclipse, and that's the solution. So Sir Frank Watson Dyson and Astronomer Royal of Britain conceived this experiment and then it

was carried out by a Sir Arthur Eddington. But what they did was they they plotted out the course of an upcoming solar eclipse, and then they sent teams to

a couple of locations. One of them was an island off the west coast of Africa called Prince cheep A I believe and then the other team I think, was sent to Brazil and they were supposed to measure what happened when the solar eclipse happened, to look for that light coming from the star that was passing behind the Sun to see if it bent at just the right amount to experimentally verify Einstein's theory relativity. And it did,

which of course made einstein overnight sensation. So we see a case of the eclipse being the perfect scenario in which to test out a theory regarding uh nass and the bending of light. Right, and and at the time there was just like no other way we could have tested this. Yeah, you can't build a model in which to construct it. You have to depend on the model that is reality. Of course, the experimenters were very lucky

that they had like clear weather and stuff when that happens. Yeah, I mean that's why they sent out two experiments, like one to two teams to two different locations, because what if one was cloudy, right, you needed to fail safe. Yeah, what if they've both been cloudy? I want a mess. Imagine picking up the check for that experiment. None of us would know who Einstein was. Alright, we're gonna take a quick breaking When we come back, we're gonna talk

a little bit about eclipse mythology. We're not going to do an exhaustive mention of everything, because every culture has some sort of cool eclipse and my but we'll do some highlights and then talk a little more ce. Let's feel mechanics before we close it out. All right, we're back. So when you're talking about eclipse and mythology and folklore, you do see the re emerging trend of disorder and chaos. Right.

It's like we were talking about earlier, where the sort of rhythm of night and day is about as basic as it gets for a biological organism, Like Disturbing that cycle is a I think I called it perverse, and I'm going to stick with that. It is a perversion of what seems to be biologically necessary. Yeah, I mean, you can you can basically root most of the major themes in mythology and folklore down to the basic rhythms

of life. There's night and day, there's life and death, there's birth, there's disease, and the cycles of the seasons, maybe the cycles of the seasons. Uh, And so you end up personifying these movements and defining features of life. And then of course those all those gods end up having their own little personal dramas, their own their own offspring, their own parental issues, and you end up just filling up the entire pantheon and then uh and then driving

stories out of each one. So yeah, we know that the ancient Chinese astronomers were very concerned with being able to predict eclipses. Like were some ancient Chinese beliefs about the eclipse. Well, one that certainly rises through the surface is just the the the basic belief that the eclipse occurred when a legendary celestial dragon devoured the sun or the moon. Uh. And it was actually tradition in ancient China to bang drums and pots and make loud noises

during the eclipse to frighten away the dragon. And this the tradition of this actually carried out into the nineteenth century when the Chinese navy would fire cannons during a lunar eclipse. That's cool, Yeah, you know, it comes back to what you're talking about, like people you know, making a lot of noise, sort of freaking out and getting

excited during one of these uh, these these eclipse events. Uh, so you can sort of see see this tradition as an example of that where it's just it's a time to make a lot of noise and get excited about what's happening and into varying degrees. Apply this mythical context and uh you know, as far as records of eclipses go in China, uh, they date back at least to uh C. We see that by looking at oracle bones

from the Shang dynasty. Wow. Another really interesting one is the role eclipse has played in sort of the royal mythology of ancient Assyria. So if you look to Assyria in the first millennium b C. There was a type of lunar eclipse that was actually considered a bad omen for the reigning king at the time. So it's like, oh, you see this particular type of lunar eclipse, and you know the gods have it in for the king. The king's going to die. That's bad for your political standing,

that's bad for the certainly bad for the king. So so what do you do? I mean, well, so you could come up with some kind of like just standard magical rituals to board off the bad omens. But what if you're afraid that's not gonna work. Well, So basically, how do you get out of cosmic trouble here? How do you get us keep your fate? Yeah, as dictated by the you know, the celestial objects. They know more than we do. I mean, so the way they figured out to get around this was a ritual substitute king

or I believe it's pronounced sharp poi. And so what you what you do is you would basically create a scapegoat king to absorb the you know, the evil fate of the reigning king. And so you dethrone the real king, the reigning king, for like a hundred days, and you would substitute this fake king to eventually be killed in the king's place. And then once the the you know, the bad omen is fulfilled, then the king, the actual king can safely return to the throne without having to

worry about his fate. And I understand it like the when I first started looking into it, I thought they meant that it was more like a rituals like sacrifice of the substitute king, But it sounds more and more like the substitute king quote unquote dies. So you can imagine some form of royal crier appearing before the people and saying, oh, the substitute King has died in his sleep, thus fulfilling the prophecy and any death related obligations of

our returning king. Let's hear it for king what's his name? Asher banafol back in a come back? Yeah, the bad omen is behind us because the substitute king absorbed it all. Yeah, that substitute king was such a bad king anyway. It's it's I wonder what it would be like to be that substitute king. Would you? Would you feel the pressure to really get stuff done? Like maybe if I really proved myself in my hundred days in office, I can

that they'll actually keep me. Or is it just sort of like, well, heck, they're gonna kill me in a hundred days. I'm just gonna ride this out in the most hedonistic did that's impossible? Did the substitute king know, like, did he think he was having the best day ever? That's true? Yeah? Is it? Or is it just the priests and the king himself that are aware of this scenario? Yeah? I don't know it would I would? I wonder if

there's any fiction out there that explores this trope? If so, I would love to hear about it because it seems just perfect for exploitas. Send us that short story. Yeah. Um. Another example that came to our eyes was that of

Apopus in Egyptian religion, ancient Egyptian religion and mythology. And this is a moon serpent, the moon serpent that emerged from the Great Void at the dawn of time and now lives deep within the nile Um the Nile not only in the physical sense but also in sort of the cosmic sense of ancient Egyptian religion and embodies all the dark aspects of the universe. He's night and death,

he storms and chaos. He conspires was set the god of evil and sometimes the ensnare souls in their journey between this life and the next, engulfing them and not not only just like eating them and just crushing them into the non into non existence, reminding me a bit of the long Boy in Stephen King's Lissies story. I haven't read that. He's is basically a cosmic world serpent that lives outside of our reality and he eats you. It's like love crafty and levels of bad. This crushes

you into non existence. Stephen King likes those cosmic world eating serpent. He's he's great when it comes to the extra dimensional entities, no doubt. Um. So, of course this cosmic world serpent from Egyptian mythology. Of course, he wants to devour the great sun disk that lights our world, which is pulled across the sky by the god Raw in his sun boat. Rob's protected, however, by another serpent, a good one, and almost always escapes um the ravenous

of office. Sometimes he almost succeeds, and that's when we get into eclipse, but he's always made to vomit everything back up again. So in this we see the the traditional trope of eclipse as an example of the forces of chaos and darkness and evil almost winning but then being beaten away by the forces of order. You know, I feel like we still have not actually shucked this myth of like the monster that eats the sun, because we've got it within the past few decades with the Unicron,

you know, eating planets. Yes, Unicron, And we'll come back to Unicron in a minute, because he does line up rather nicely with with a particular eclipse, the entity from Hindu religion. Let's see, I'm going to see if I can find a good YouTube clip of Unicron eating a planet, but no Unicron Galactus. Those those guys are very much in keeping with these these ancient ideas of cosmic world eaters, cosmic moon and sun eaters. It is a truly captivating idea. I mean, like, um, it is the sun and entity

that can be consumed. I mean, if it could, you you could sort of see that. It's like it's like the ultimate empowering agent. It's you know, it's the pill that you take that gives you ultimate power. Yeah. But it's also it's almost kind of this idea too that like this like nothing can actually eat the Sun. So if you have an evil being or creature in your cosmology, of course it's going to try to eat the Sun, but it can't carry it out and then it just falls back to Earth, It falls back to Hell or

what have you. Now we're kind of jumping around in time a little bit, but just to just to make sure we hit at least one werewolf. Example, there is a werewolf from the folklore traditions of Russia and Belarussia Uh. And this is an individual named vessus Lav Uh. The Belarussian werewolf. So now, are we actually going to find out what happens to a warwolf during the eclipse? Uh? No, haply not. But we'll see how an eclipse factors into

the creation of a werewolf. The idea here is that his mother was violated by a serpent, and as a result, Vessuslav was born during a solar eclipse, and so he became a mighty warrior in life, kind of a warrior magician, a warrior, sorcerer, battle wizard if you will. Uh. But he also could turn into a wolf. He he was essentially a werewolf and could and could take on this

nocturnal lupine form. Now he's based on a real guy, based on the real live vasus Lav of Polot, also known as Vasaslav, the source for Vassaslav the Seer really lived from ten thirty nine to eleven oh one, and he's the most famous ruler of the Polots and briefly Grand Prince of Kiev from ten sixty eight to ten

sixty nine. UM. This more mythic uh likeanthropic version of him stems from the twelfth century Slavic epic the Tale of Egor's Campaign, and as far as I know, nothing in there tells us what happens to Vasuslav during a lunar ecliffs man, that would be really cool to be immortalized and like epic poetry and turned into a were wolf. Yeah. He we were talking about this earlier. Kind of he kind of reminds us of the Starks, right right, He's

like Rob Stark, you know, like they're a legend. He's actually just a sort of warrior king, but their legends surrounding him. All. He can turn into a wolf in the full moon, and then of course there's throat ripping. Yeah, the bloody time delicious viscera. And this brings us to one of my favorite and again, you know, we're continuingly to see this trope of the moon or sun consuming entity. This brings us to the Hindu god ra who or a Frau ra who is. He's known in Thailand and

he has just a fabulous stories. But he's easily my favorite of all these different eclipse entities because he was once a proud osherra Demi, god of immense power and hunger. But you know, he's a bit flight he's a little too ambitious. He wants immortality because you know, within this particular cosmology, demi gods are just another realm and the wheel of sam Sara. So demi gods may be super powerful, and they may live a long long time compared to

human lives, but they're ultimately going to die. So Ra who drinks the divine nectar that's going to give him immortality. But before the this gulpful of this magical liquid could pass his throat, all powerful Vishnu jumps in and decapitates him for the transgression. Okay, so he cuts his head off, severing the esophagus before it trickles down the esophagus, right before it can actually go all the way down, So

just cuts it off there. Oh man, that's such a bummer, Like how low would it have to get to have an effect? You have to fully digest it? Um. I think it's the idea. It's kind of like an Achilles kind of a situation. You know, Achilles is only as powerful as how far he's dipped in the water, and so you know he'll didn't make it end, so the heel is vulnerable, So cut him off before the liquid

could pass into the body. So the body's gone, but the head, the head has the power So the idea here is that the power of the nectar makes the disembodied head of ra who immortal man. And and so this pleased and fallen god continues to seek his revenge on the two planetary deities who ratted him out to Vishnu. And that's the sun in the moon. So as such ravenous rah who regularly ascends into the sky and attempts to swallow the sun or the moon. But since he's disembodied,

his meal falls back out again, so he succeeds. He eats that moon, he eats the sun, but he has nobody's just ahead with some neck flesh, so he swallows it and comes right back out the next step. That is a genius like that is an awesome myth. Now in Thailand, he's he's seen as more cut off at the stomach, however, as opposed to just ahead, so he's more of just a half god instead of astead of just ahead of a god in those motifs. Now, where

this gets interesting. Uh, an area of this myth that I really find fascinating is that you see this, uh, this exchange between science and myth regarding Rahu and and his status. So there's always been less conflict between science and Hinduism due to a variety of reasons. But you could you can hone in on distinct linguistic differences between teleological and causative wise, so just the language of talking about why something happens, there's the why is in like

what was the actual cause of this event? And then there's the why in the sense of what is its reason from a cosmological standp Oh, it sounds almost like a parallel between causality and synchronicity. Yeah, yeah, in a sense, because it's it's kind of like if I say why did I get sick? You could say, well, the reason you were sick is because you ate that food at

that restaurant last night that was a little off. Yeah, And then then there's the why that you would ask, like, why God am I allowed to get sick on this most important day of my life when I have this job interview and my marriage on the same afternoon to humble you, yeah exactly. So the idea here is that in in the in English especially, there's there's more room for confusion here between your wins, whereas in Hinduism they're

depending on linguistic models that have a clear distinction between those. Wise, I think that's really interesting. Yeah, um, anyway you shake it, though, we do see this interesting interplay between raho and astronomy of the time, because the Indian astronomy was pretty advanced UM and its scientist Rajesh Kosher discusses in his paper Rahu and Ketu in mythological and astromological context UM treatments of the disemb adi ra who actually evolved with the

scientific knowledge of the time. Uh. Yeah, So go back two thousand years and Indian astronomers divided the cosmos into seven geocentric planets or graha, and then they set aside, uh, you know, particularly disastrous phenomena like meteor's comments and eclipses, and they called those outpata. So on one hand, you had us a cyclical order, the graja the planets, and then you had uh news, chaos and die are omen in the forms of outpata. But of course, as we

know now, eclipses follow a pattern. We can predict them, we can prove it out. They're actually more in line with order than in chaos. But it's not necessarily easy to see that pattern, It's right, and that you might only notice after you've collected multiple generations worth of data. Yeah, yeah, it took it took a while before someone realized that. And in four the great Indian mathematician astronomer Ari Bahada introduced a mathematical theory of eclipses that that really pretty

much nailed it. Uh, just our two lunar nodes, earth shadows and moon shadows, so there's no demons required. But of course that means that there ra who needs a promotion along with his headless body that ends up being known as Kettu. So instead of them being chaotic pata, they're upgraded to order Draha. So while they're not actually considered planets, they don't get like full planetary status. Was of course they're not planets, it's just you know, the

way things are lining up. They took on the distinction of being shadow planets, so that they graduated from becoming sort of like intruders on the cosmic plane to uh more like shadowy residents. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they were really seen as more. They said, hey, we can't really classify the eclipse is just pure pure chaos, because clearly there's a pattern. Clearly it's part of the ordered system of our planets. And they realized that this. Even in four,

I'm sensing more parallels with the Unicron. I mean, indeed you get when you look at Unicron, especially Unicron and Ra, who are basically the same entity, right down to just being disembodied heads, right, Because what did Unicron do in the eighties six Transformers movie tried to eat the Earth right, Transformers stopped him and he's just reduced to a head. Wow. Yeah, so I've I've looked into it. I found no clear example where someone says, yeah, we based a Unicron on

Hindu God, indu entity. But it seems there's just too much coincidence there to ignore. But of course it's not just the ancient religious cosmology that assigns true like magical significance to eclipses. There are still religious movements today that are looking for the religious significance of eclipses. One example that I remember hearing about is the so called blood moon prophecy that's popular in some circles of evangelical Christianity

these days. Yeah. The idea here is that it revolves around a hatred series of lunar eclipse that's four lunar eclipses within within a cycle. Uh. You know, three is rare enough, but here you would have you would have four showing up in a in a row. And it only occurs a few times within a century. For example, Um, in this century, it occurred in two thousand three, two thousand four, two thousand fourteen, and uh a few more

times before the turn of the next century. So it's a rare enough account that you'll end up, you know, hitting the jackpot with four. Okay, But like, why is this popular right now? Well? Uh, it all comes down to a two thousand thirteen book, Four Blood Moons Something is about to chain, or let me say, four Blood Moons colon Something is about to change. That sounds like

a like a great like rock album title. Yeah, yeah, what It did not come from rock and roll, though, it came from the pastor of the Cornerstone Mega Church in San Antonio, Texas, John Hagey. Uh I know John Hagy you do, Okay, not personally, but yeah, you see his picture. You look at my people go oh that guy from I've seen him preaching on television. You don't know him personally, no, okay. Um. So Hagey suggests that there's a link between a new Total Lunar eclipse a tetrid,

and the biblical process of prophecy about the end times. Okay, so it's certainly a case, yes, that we're still looking

to the movements of the sun and moon. We're still looking at at the eclipse, and even with all of our modern scientific understanding of what's actually happening, if we're trying to understand like this wider sense of not only why is that our things occurring in the universe in that positive sense, but also in the grander magical sense and the meaningful sense, you know, we can't help but look to the movement of the sun and the moon

and look to these to these anomalies that occur. Yeah, I think there's something very interesting about this historical progression of us seeing eclipses originally as sort of like a strange, unpredictable events that that violated our our sense of patterns, and then finally coming to understand them as part of

larger and longer patterns. It's sort of a microcosm of the whole progression of science in a way, like taking events that seem to represent chaos and disorder and then fitting them into the system of order that you finally come to understand, and of course it's an analysis of eclips and obsession of the clips continues on into a

present day fiction and fiction of the modern era. Uh. For instance, Asimov's Nightfall, which exists, of course, is both a short story and there's a full novel version that he did with Robert Silverberg. Yeah, but it concerns the fictional planet. Uh. It's called lag Ash in the short story and Kyle Gash in the novel. And this a fictional planet very much like Earth for the most part,

you know, like a sci fi Earth. You can think of it just kind of almost like a star trek Earth, where it's basically Earth at things that there are a few factors at play that make it interesting. Right, You've got some wrinkles on your head or something. Yeah, so it's kind of like that. It's at the ring. Goals here are that the the planet has six sons, which keep the planet illuminated in varying levels of daylight all

the time. It sounds like too many suns. It does sound like too many suns, but the result is that there's no total darkness on the planet. And so on one hand, the idea of their being total darkness just seems like no one can buy For the most part, no one can buy that. They're like, how would that even work? Like the creatures depend on light. If there were periods of darkness that it would just be devastating, But it also means that no one has ever seen

the stars and so. But but then there when they start looking back through through historical accounts and uh, and some individuals are you know, trying to figure out how celestial mechanics work. There's a belief that every two thousand years or so, darkness comes to the planet of of Lagash or cow Gash, and with it falls whole civilizations. You know, I can almost see that kind of thing in that scenario being a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, yeah,

uh it does. It is it's almost kind of like the idea of the eclipse blown up or or and and also kind of reversed that the world has always uh bathed in in varying levels of light, and but then every two thousand years there is a night into a world that has never known night. Would it just be madness? Would it be the would it be the

banging in the streets times a thousand? Like, how would we deal with that and that's what what's what Asimov's novel explores, or in a much simpler level, you can look at Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which a time traveling Yankee saves his life in the Middle Ages by remembering the occurrence of an eclipse

and claiming to have caused it. Oh well, I mean you could tie that into events in in real history actually, where you know, people have obviously been able to use their knowledge of the ordered uh sequence of eclipse cycles to impress people. Right, if you know that an eclipse is coming and other people have no idea that a elipses are on a schedule, basically you can appear to

have tremendous magical power. Yeah, it's and even today, if you work in a you know, kind of uninformed workplace, like nobody's really reading Scientific American or anything or the newspaper, you might be able to pull this one off. Still, wait for the next cellar eclipse, go to work, and then claim to be a wizard. You'll surely get that promotion you've always wanted. Yeah, I mean that's a rule, and that's a business one on one always promoted was

that's your solid advice right there, all right. So there you have it, the science of eclipse, you know, a brief study of some of the mythology surrounding the eclipse and just what it what it means to humanity as a whole. You would like to explore more on this topic again, check out that landing page for this episode and you'll find it at stuff to blow your mind dot com, along with all the other episodes we've ever reported, along with videos, blog posts, links out the social media accounts.

You name it. And if you've got a story you'd like to share about an eclipse you've ever seen or fascinating eclipse mythology you've read about, please email it to us and blow the mind at how staff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it has stuff works dot com