Fear the Eclipse

Why “Ancient Superstition” Was Preferable to Whatever We're Doing Now

A terribly messy article by the New York Times’ dedicated “religion” correspondent wondered yesterday “why the eclipse leaves us awe-struck”. The piece is not quite sure what it wants to do, but its unwitting argument is that it’s damned hard to account for the religious sentiment that accompanies rare natural phenomena when we lack the conceptual frame and vocabulary of any religious tradition to put this sentiment into words. An admirable attempt is made by one of the interviewees, Priyamvada Natarajan, who is a Yale astronomer of Indian origin. “In ancient days,” the article informs us, with its conventionally vague periodization, “communities in India believed an eclipse was a demon swallowing the sun… But now an eclipse is an opportunity to pay homage to the explanatory power of science. And in modern secular society, it offers a sense of belonging, a collective moment like the religious expression of prayer and gratitude.” Next the article quotes Natarajan directly: “‘The question is about transcendence,’ she said.”

Not to be too pedantic, but how can the experience of an eclipse be about “transcendence”, if it is also an occasion for “homage to the explanatory power of [empirical] science”? Don’t we have to choose here? Isn’t the whole professional habitus of Natarajan and her colleagues one that was shaped over the past centuries precisely by drawing a firm boundary at the limits of the empirical? Of course, if we’re being charitable, rather than pedantic, we can perhaps appreciate that this is only another case, one of many, where the conceptual and terminological apparatus we have inherited proves inadequate to express the obscure jumble of our desires, and so we end up mixing registers with little regard for their compatibility.

This is certainly what was happening in another article we read a few days prior, in which a group of New York State inmates are reported to have successfully sued for an exemption from the scheduled lockdown during the eclipse’s “totality” (as everyone is suddenly saying with overstressed fluency, much like they started saying “discovery”, as if they always had, when Trump’s legal troubles began: “It’ll all come out in discovery”). It was a crucial part of their religion, they argued, to witness this event. What religion was that, now? It was atheism.

Use whatever rhetorical strategies will work, I suppose, to get around the inhuman rules of the carceral system. But still, let’s be honest: there’s nothing about being an atheist in particular that requires special observances at the time of an eclipse. Indeed it’s not hard to imagine some hyper-rationalist wise guy going one step further than Neil deGrasse Tyson is often known to do, and declaring: “There’s nothing to see here. We already know there will be an opaque body positioned between us and a light source. Why wouldn’t it cast a shadow?!”

These reflections put me in mind of François Bernier, a French materialist philosopher who was also, for some years, the official court physician to the Mogul Emperor at Delhi. Bernier witnessed two solar eclipses in his life, one in France in 1654, and another in India in 1666. Here is how he describes the latter, in a letter to Jean Chapelain, written from Shiraz in Persia, and dated 7 October, 1666: