WASHINGTON (AP) – It’s not just the skies that get dark when there’s a total solar eclipse. So do we.
Modern science explains that the sun disappears because the moon is passing in front of it. But before that, people had to come up with reasons for what was happening in the sky. Some of them weren’t exactly bedtime stories.
The lore of early eclipses often told us more about the people spinning the yarns than it did about the sun or the moon, said Anthony Aveni, author of “In the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses.”
“It’s not myth. It’s not science. It’s culture,” said Aveni, a professor of physics and sociology at Colgate University.
They are often morality tales to warn against everything from incest to lying, Aveni said. They could be quite bloody and scary- and thus make a good lesson. After all, what’s more unnerving than the sun disappearing in the middle of the day?