Eclipses in art and mythology

In Norse mythology, two giant wolves, Sköll and Hati, chase the Sun and the Moon relentlessly across the sky. An eclipse was read as the moment one of the wolves finally managed to catch and bite its prey; prophecy held that only at Ragnarök, the end of the world, would one of the wolves finally devour it whole. In China, the very word for 'eclipse', 日食 (rìshí), literally means 'eating the Sun': traditional belief blamed a celestial dragon, and the popular remedy was to make as much noise as possible — drums, gongs, pots and pans, even arrows shot into the sky — to scare it off and force it to release its prey. The Chinese chronicle Zuo Zhuan, more than 2,500 years old, already records this kind of ritual during an eclipse.

In Mesoamerica, the Maya — whose astronomers kept eclipse records with remarkable mathematical precision, recorded in tables such as those in the Dresden Codex — explained the phenomenon as a celestial jaguar devouring the Sun; the Aztecs, for their part, feared that during an eclipse the tzitzimime, fearsome star deities, would descend to devour humanity, which is why pregnant women and children took shelter indoors. Astronomical precision and mythical narrative coexisted without contradiction: being able to predict an eclipse didn't remove the fear of what it was believed to represent.

In Hindu mythology, the culprit is Rahu, a demon beheaded by the god Vishnu after trying to steal the nectar of immortality. His furious, immortal head periodically chases down and swallows the Sun or the Moon in revenge, and the body reappears when it slides out through Rahu's severed neck, which no longer has a body to hold it. What's remarkable about this myth is that Rahu and Ketu — the demon's head and body — are identified in traditional Hindu astronomy precisely with the two nodes of the Moon's orbit, the points where, as explained in 'What is an eclipse?', the Moon has to be for an eclipse to be possible: an ancient civilisation had personified, without knowing it in modern terms, the exact geometry that today explains why there isn't an eclipse every month.

One of the oldest surviving literary accounts is a poem by the Greek poet Archilochus, from the 7th century BC, which describes the sudden darkness of a solar eclipse as proof that nothing in the world can be surprising anymore, not even the Sun abandoning its place in broad daylight. Astronomers have used that poem to date, with fair confidence, the eclipse that inspired it: that of 6 April 648 BC, one of the oldest chronological reference points in Greek history that can be dated thanks to an astronomical calculation.

Centuries later, William Shakespeare used the eclipse as an omen of disorder in King Lear, when Gloucester warns that 'these late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us', foreshadowing the tragedy to come. For an Elizabethan audience, the link between eclipse and catastrophe was a shared language that needed no explanation.

Literature has also played with astronomical knowledge as a weapon: in Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the protagonist saves his life by threatening to 'blot out the Sun', relying on his foreknowledge of an approaching eclipse. Twain didn't invent the idea out of nothing: it drew, more or less directly, on a real episode from 1504, told in the next block.

By the 20th century, the American painter Howard Russell Butler took the depiction of the eclipse into unusual territory: he travelled to observe totality in 1918, 1923 and 1925, and painted from memory immediately after each eclipse, working with astronomers so that the shape of the solar corona on the canvas would be scientifically accurate. His large paintings, now held at scientific institutions in the United States, remain a reference for how art can document, with real rigour, something no camera of his time could capture well.

In ancient Babylon, when the court's astronomer-astrologers predicted an eclipse that could be read as a direct threat to the king, a ritual documented on cuneiform tablets was invoked: the 'substitute king' (šar pūhi). Another person — often a prisoner or a commoner — was temporarily enthroned to symbolically take on the bad omen in place of the legitimate monarch, who went into hiding for the duration. Once the danger had passed, usually around a hundred days later, the substitute was put to death and the real king resumed the throne. It's one of the best-documented examples of just how far an eclipse could mobilise an entire state apparatus.

In China, where the emperor was believed to rule by a 'Mandate of Heaven', an eclipse the court astronomers hadn't foreseen was read as a celestial reprimand of the ruler, and could force the emperor to perform public penance, review policy decisions, or dismiss advisers. Correctly predicting an eclipse was therefore never a purely academic exercise: it carried consequences of state.

Astronomical knowledge was also, on at least one occasion, used as a tool of persuasion against people who didn't understand its cause. In 1504, during his fourth voyage, Christopher Columbus was stranded in Jamaica with his crew and depended on the goodwill of the local Taíno population for food. Knowing, from European astronomical tables, that a total lunar eclipse was approaching, he warned the Taíno that his god would remove the Moon from the sky if they stopped supplying him. When the Moon darkened on the night of 29 February 1504, exactly as Columbus had announced, he got the supplies he needed.

Beyond any single episode, there's a pattern that repeats across almost every ancient culture: the near-universal response to an eclipse was to make noise — drums, shouting, banging metal, arrows shot into the sky — to frighten off whatever was devouring the Sun or the Moon. And because the light always came back, since an eclipse ends by pure geometry and not by any celestial battle, the ritual seemed to work every single time, reinforcing the belief generation after generation.