Chatting with a couple friends at my back office HQ, Hopscotch, this AM about the eclipse due April 8th. Both are lettered academics; one’s a researcher in a hard science field and the other a professor in a history/culture/social discipline. I learned that Indiana University is shutting down for the day of the eclipse.
Some 300,000 visitors are expected to flood into Bloomington that day to see the big sky show so getting around town will likely be nigh impossible. And, I suppose, it’s nice that the U’s students, teachers, and janitors will be able to stand outside that mid-afternoon and see something they might never have seen before and probably never will again. Hell, eclipses have changed history, for pity’s sake.
Herodotus wrote in 430 BCE of a lengthy war between the Lydians and the Medes in modern-day Turkey that only concluded after a total solar eclipse scared the bejesus out of both sides. In 1504 Christopher Columbus convinced the people of modern-day Jamaica not to brain his savage, marauding crews by accurately predicting a lunar eclipse. The islanders thought him in cahoots with some divine power and so they spared his hoodlums.
There’ve been, of course, countless critter myths explaining eclipses, both solar and lunar. The ancient Vietnamese in the wake of one solar eclipse believed a giant frog had devoured the Sun and only the intervention of its master, the lord of Hahn, persuaded the amphibian to spit it back out. The ancient Chinese opted for either a dragon or a dog, depending on the era, as the greedy critter snacking on our star. The Norse blamed that old trickster Loki for unleashing starving wolves on the Sun. Then there’s the old German myth that the Sun is a bride and the Moon a husband and the two normally keep to their respective days and nights except occasionally, the husband gets a little hot to trot and attempts to do his thing with the wife in broad daylight — until, that is, she throws him out of her boudoir.
The Navajos had a more practical view of solar eclipses. They insisted people stay inside their hogans during totality, mainly because looking up at the Sun in an attempt to figure out what in the hell was going on was harmful. They were right, of course.
Even in our so-called enlightened age, many myths persist about eclipses. The NASA website lays out a few of them. They include:
- Pregnant women risk harming their fetuses by viewing an eclipse
- Any food prepared during an eclipse will be toxic
- Eclipses are omens of bad luck
- If an eclipse occurs on your birthday, bad health will ensue
And so on.
That professor I mentioned earlier told me she dreads the coming eclipse because it’ll cause her to have a migraine. I tilted my head like a puzzled dog upon hearing this. What, I wondered, could be the connection between a celestial event and a vascular headache? The exchange got me googling and eventually led to writing this.
I was all ready to believe my prof friend was batty, or at least credulous. Turns out she’s on to something. The first thing I found, speaking of googling, is during the lead-up to any total solar eclipse, Google itself is flooded with inquiries about headaches. “According to Google Trends,” a Mashable reporter wrote in 2017, “right now most of America is worried they have eclipse headaches.” Dig this Google Trends graph tracking searches for “seeing spots”:
Seeing spots is one of the top symptomatic auras preceding migraines. The graph covers the two days before and the day of the last American total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.
An article published about the same time in Bustle reported “…you might experience everything from headaches and fatigue to vivid dreams, sleepwalking, flu-like symptoms, and sensitivity to electronic devices” in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 eclipse.
After allowing for the usual psychogenic statistical noise, these post-eclipse maladies are largely real. People’s normal behavior changes during an eclipse. We rarely look directly at the Sun or even anywhere near it as it’s too uncomfortable to do so. But it’s almost irresistible to pull a Trump and gaze at the Sun as the Moon’s disc passes before it.
Trump Looking At The 2017 Eclipse.
By the way, approximately half the American voting populace still wants this man to be Leader of the Free World. Go figure.
Anyway, even the flitting, fleeting glances we turn toward the Sun during an eclipse can, honestly and truly, trigger real physical symptoms. The Sun, after all, is a thermonuclear fireball more than 860,000 miles in diameter, the emanations of which are bound to be a tad disagreeable at times.
I feel bad for doubting, if ever so briefly, my professor friend. Then again, this is the YouTube age and misinformation, myth, nonsense, regressive fables, and all other sorts of blather are ascendant. It’s almost a fallback position for me to cast shade on people’s self-diagnoses and/or descriptions of their pathologies.
What cannot be argued is the 2024 total solar eclipse is already an omen of bad luck. This town that under normal circumstances strains to meet the needs of 80,000 people during the school year will be experiencing the food, water, waste, personal space, and traffic demands of a place four times its size on April 8. It’ll be as if Bloomington suddenly is transformed into Tampa or New Orleans while its police and fire forces, its garbage trucks, its sewers, its tap water delivery, and its grocery stores all remain relatively small-townish. Yikes.
Still, I wouldn’t wish the eclipse away. It’s a once in a lifetime thing, even though it’ll be my second such total solar eclipse in the last seven years. It’s my most passionate hope that this second rarity in my experience is not a harbinger of another improbable repeat as embodied by the guy staring into the Sun, above.