In ancient times, solar eclipses were omens more feared than understood. The scientific era offered rational, scientific explanations, Today we experience them as individuals and are deeply affected regardless of how we interpret them.
In his essay “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object,”1 Goethe describes how our first impulse on encountering some new object or experience in nature is to relate to it personally. Is a plant useful or attractive, is it poisonous, does it have medicinal value? But should we wish to understand natural objects in their own right, and in relationship to other objects, our task is far more difficult. To do so, we must renounce the standards of attraction and repulsion, usefulness or harm and “as quasi-divine beings seek and examine what is, and not what pleases.”
When we enquire how celestial phenomena, such as planetary conjunctions, comets or solar and lunar eclipses were regarded in the past, we will find that the immediate experience was almost always overshadowed by the effort to discover its meaning. Is it a portent? Does it bode good or evil?
In our own times, total solar eclipses are consciously sought out by thousands of people, and for the most part, experienced without the interference of anxious thoughts about what they might portend. To renounce our personal judgment and allow the phenomena to speak is possible in our times. It does indeed require that we become “quasi-divine beings”, achieving an inner stillness which allows our observation to take on a meditative quality.
In studying the history of eclipse observation, I am struck by the absence of any account before the nineteenth century that adequately describes the incomparable beauty of the solar corona: that flower-like, radiant apparition surrounding the darkened lunar disc which can only be seen during the brief minutes of totality. The earliest descriptions I have been able to discover that do the corona full justice relate to the eclipse of July 8, 1842. The first was written by a scientist, the second by an artist.
Francis Baily, an English astronomer best known for his discovery of the bead-like drops of light which appear along the edge of the solar disc moments before or after totality, observed the eclipse in Milan:
“The beads were distinctly visible. … I was astounded by a tremendous burst of applause from the streets below, and at the same moment was electrified at the sight of one of the most brilliant and splendid phenomena that can be imagined. For at that instant the dark body of the moon was suddenly surrounded with a corona, or a kind of bright glory. … It had the appearance of brilliant rays. … Splendid and astonishing, however, as this remarkable phenomenon really was, and although it could not fail to call forth the admiration and applause of every beholder, yet I must confess that there was at the same time something in its singular and wonderful appearance that was appalling.”2
Far better known is the description by the novelist and landscape painter Adalbert Stifter, who observed the eclipse in Vienna:
“The moon stood in the midst of the sun, no longer as a black disc, but as it were, half translucent, as though covered with a delicate shimmer of steel, and around it not the edge of the sun, but a wondrous, shimmering halo of great beauty, bluish, reddish, breaking apart in rays, as if the sun were pouring down its flood of light from above onto the lunar globe, whence it sprayed out in all directions – the most sublime effect of light I have ever beheld!”
And in regard to the experience as a whole, in its dynamic musical quality, he writes:
“I know that I have never been so deeply moved, so stirred, either by music or poetry, or any other phenomenon of nature … and I think that there can be no heart upon which this apparition does not leave an indelible impression.”3
Fifty years ago, I had the good fortune to stand in complete solitude at the edge of a forest in Sansibar as the darkness descended and the corona was revealed. The impression was unforgettable—the bird chorus falling silent but for the plaintive, dirge-like descending notes of an African cuckoo; this music will always be associated with the corona for me. Not the sky and the landscape alone, but all of ensouled nature takes part in this event!
For many observers of eclipses, the impression of the waning light is entirely unlike that of sunset and evening twilight. Rather, it is as though a visibly-moving blanket of darkness had fallen over the landscape, immersing it in a death-like pall while the soul rejoices when the first droplets of light reappear on the edge of the solar disc.
And between these two experiences lies the brief appearance of the corona—like a revelation from another plane of existence—of the star which gives us light and life. Does not the whole sequence of events resemble an initiatory experience? In pre-Christian times the neophyte underwent a near-death experience in order to be reborn in the unshakeable certainty of his immortality. But what has become possible through the experience of a total eclipse today is not reserved for those few deemed worthy. It is available to all who are willing to make the journey and open themselves to an experience from which they may not emerge unchanged.
Footnotes
- J.W. Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object,” 1792. In Johann Wolfgang von GOETHE, Scientific Studies, edited and translated by Douglas Miller, Suhrkamp Publishers New York, 1988.
- Quoted in: S.A. Mitchell, Eclipses of the Sun, Columbia University Press, 1951.
- Adalbert Stifter, “Die Sonnenfinsternis am 8. Juli 1842.”
