Why the Ancients Viewed Eclipses as Ominous Signs

Imagine you lived in a time before electricity, when your daily work had to be done during daylight hours. You rose with the sun, you worked outside when the sun was out. When the light faded, it was your signal to pack up and head in, your work complete.

Consider a farmer out in the field, harvesting his crop, when suddenly the sky turns dark. There’s no warning, no apparent explanation.

Eclipses as Ominous Signs

This type of sudden change would be unnerving and unsettling if you didn’t expect it or know what was happening.

For this reason, the ancients believed eclipses to be ominous signs.

Over the span of centuries, eclipses have become associated with sudden beginnings and endings, fallen political figures and heads of state, and reversals of fortune.

These significations mirror what is happening in the sky:

During a solar eclipse, the Sun, the main luminary in the sky, goes dark as the moon passes between it and Earth. The Sun is “taken out” while in its prime.

When the sky goes dark during a total solar eclipse, we can see the stars. Of course, the stars were always there — they are fixed to their locations in the sky. But we cannot see them when the sun is shining.

In the same way, the things in our life that suddenly become clear or more prominent during an eclipse were always there; we just couldn’t see them before.

Beginnings and Endings

The sudden beginnings and endings that are linked to an eclipse seem to come out of nowhere, but they are not really a surprise.

Nothing in nature is ever instantaneous.

The seeds for what is “suddenly” ending were likely planted some time ago — perhaps even during an earlier phase of this eclipse story.

And what is beginning may not be apparent immediately. Sometimes it takes time to see the seeds sprout, but when we look back, we can see that they were planted at the eclipse.