The English word eclipse comes from the Greek ἔκλειψις, ekleípō: disappearance, abandonment. A solar eclipse is the moment in which the sun disappears, abandoning the world. It’s like being forsaken by a god.
The ancient Greeks thought of a solar eclipse as an act of abandonment, a terrible crisis and an existential threat. It meant that the king would fall, that terrible misfortunes would rain down on the world, or that demons had swallowed the sun.
Yet not everyone thought of the eclipse as a horrible threat. For some cultures, the eclipse was an act of creation: The sun and moon were coupling, and would create more stars. For others, it was a random and chaotic act by a trickster or a mischievous boy, causing trouble just for the sake of it.
On Monday, a solar eclipse is coming to America. In the 21st century, a solar eclipse means eclipse parties. It means buying specialty glasses and building pinhole boxes and preparing to see “the most beautiful sight you can see in nature,” as one cartographer put it.
But for much of human history, that’s not how people reacted to eclipses, even after they were able to predict them accurately (around 206 AD for the Chinese and 150 BC for the Greeks). Here’s a rundown of some of history’s most pervasive eclipse folklore.
The gods are angry with us
In many cultures, the darkening of the sun meant the gods were very, very angry with humanity, and about to inflict some punishment. Often, that meant that in order to appease them, you had to kill someone.
In Transylvania, people believed an eclipse was caused by the sun turning its back on the sins of humanity, creating a poisonous dew. The Inca viewed eclipses as a sign that the sun god Inti was angry, and required appeasement with offerings. For the Native American Tewa tribe, an eclipse meant that the angry sun was leaving the sky to go visit his home in the underworld.
Aztec priests predicted that if there was a solar eclipse accompanied by an earthquake on the date 4 Ollin, the world would end, so every year on 4 Ollin they would perform a ritual human sacrifice. (As the priests likely knew — they were sophisticated astronomers — there would be no solar eclipse on 4 Ollin until the 21st century.) Solar eclipses on other dates were also met with human sacrifices. According to some, the Aztecs mostly sacrificed fair-skinned prisoners to appease the gods on eclipse days, but that report comes from a 16th-century Spanish missionary, so take it with a grain of salt.
The Greeks thought an eclipse meant that the gods were about to rain punishment down on a king, so in the days before an eclipse, they would choose prisoners or peasants to stand in as the king in the hopes that they’d get the eclipse punishment and the real king would be saved. Once the eclipse was over, the substitute king was executed.
A demon is eating the sun
The idea that a solar eclipse meant a demon was swallowing the sun shows up in eclipse folklore across the globe, and if you look at pictures of a partial solar eclipse, you can see why: It’s easy to imagine that some giant creature is slowly taking bite after bite out of the sun. In ancient China, the earliest word for eclipse, shih, meant to eat, and eclipses were believed to be caused by a dragon eating the sun. In Vietnam, the sun eater was a frog. For the Native American Pomo, it was a bear. In Yugoslavia it was a werewolf, and in Siberia a vampire.
In ancient Egypt, Apep, the serpent of chaos and death, opposed Ra, the sun god, and was always trying to reach Ra’s skyboat to devour the sundisc — but in the end, Ra was always able to fight him off, and the sun would come back.
In ancient India, Rahu was an immortal demigod with a severed head. He had a grudge against both sun and moon — they were the ones who convinced Lord Vishnu to chop off Rahu’s head in the first place, after he drank the nectar of immortality — so he chased them endlessly across the sky, and sometimes caught them. But whenever he managed to swallow either sun or moon, his victory was short-lived: They’d pass out of the stump of his throat shortly thereafter.
In Norse mythology, the sky wolves Hati and Skoll chase the sun and the moon endlessly, waiting for Ragnarok, when they can finally swallow their prey and plunge the earth into darkness, heralding the final destruction of the Viking gods. It’s not entirely clear whether the Vikings thought of eclipses as near misses at Ragnarok, with Hati and Skoll nearly capturing their prey, but many scholars believe there’s a pretty strong possibility that they did.
Generally, across the globe, when a demon is trying to eat the sun, there’s only one thing to do: make as much noise as possible until it gets scared and flees. Then you survive until the next eclipse.
The sun and the moon are working some things out
Eclipses weren’t always seen as a cosmic calamity. Sometimes they just meant that the sun and the moon, who were usually understood to be a married couple, were working out their issues. Celestial marriage counseling.
For the Tlingit tribes of North America, as well as some Australian aboriginal cultures, an eclipse meant that the sun and moon were having more children: the stars and planets that became apparent in the darkness of an eclipse but weren’t otherwise visible.
For the Batammaliba people of Togo and Benin in Africa, an eclipse meant the sun and moon were fighting with each other. So to encourage them to come to peace, people would approach eclipses as an opportunity to resolve their feuds and put away old grudges.
For the Inuits, the sun and moon weren’t a married couple but brother and sister. At the beginning of the world they quarreled, and the sun goddess Malina walked away from her brother, the moon god Anningan. Anningan continued to chase after her, and whenever he caught up to her, there was an eclipse.
The Kalina of Suriname also thought of the moon as brother and sister, but their version of the relationship between the two heavenly bodies was a little more violent. An eclipse meant one of them had knocked the other one out.
Someone’s just messing with us for no good reason because the world is full of chaos and capriciousness
Sometimes eclipses don’t happen because the gods are angry or because terrible things are going to happen or because a demon is hungry or because cosmic bodies are working through their feelings. They happen because some random trickster figure feels like being a dick.
For ancient Persia, eclipses happened if the trickster pari decided to blot out the sun for fun. In the legends of multiple Native American tribes — the Cree, the Choctaw, and the Menomini — an eclipse happens because a little boy has trapped the sun in a net, usually to get revenge on the sun for burning him. The boy refuses to release the sun, and an animal has to chew the net open.
Of all the eclipse myths, the trickster stories perhaps come the closest to the way we think about eclipses in modern America: There is no particular moral judgment at work here, and no dark omen. The eclipse simply comes, inevitable and unstoppable, without caring what we think of it, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
“You get an overwhelming sense of humbleness and how small and petty we really are compared to the mechanics of the solar system, the clockwork of the universe,” says retired NASA astrophysicist and eclipse chaser Fred Espenak. “These events that are taking place, that in no way can we affect or stop.”