Something Happened...
What yesterday’s eclipse taught me about explanation, enchantment and our place in the world
Yesterday I was almost as interested in people’s reactions to the eclipse as I was in the eclipse itself.
Some people were disappointed with expectations of something more dramatic. The light didn’t change as much as they imagined it would, or cloud intervened at the wrong moment. They all knew what was happening, of course. The Moon was passing between us and the Sun. We knew exactly when it would begin, when it would reach its maximum and when it would be over. Until the next time in 2050. There were diagrams and photographs and percentages to tell us precisely what we had seen. Interesting, yes, but hardly life-changing.
Others people seemed overwhelmed by it. They spoke about awe, wonder, connection. Some reached for words such as soulful and spiritual. For them something had happened which wasn’t captured by describing the relative positions of the Earth, Moon and Sun. The world had felt different for a while, and they had felt different within it.
I wondered whether these apparently opposite reactions reveal something about how we meet the world more generally.
I have been working with a small group to explore Rudolf Steiner’s figures of Ahriman and Lucifer recently, not as supernatural beings we need to believe in, but as the names for two pulls that I recognise in myself and in the culture around me. Ahriman draws us towards a world that can be measured, explained, categorised and controlled. Lucifer draws us towards transcendence, imagination, meaning and spiritual experience.
The eclipse offered rich pickings for both orientations.
The Ahrimanic response is easily caricatured as the person shrugging and saying, “It’s only the Moon passing in front of the Sun.” But there are subtler versions. We can become preoccupied with the percentage of coverage, the precise timings, whether our photograph was any good, whether this eclipse was better than the last. Did we use our colander properly? None of these things is wrong, but when the description of an experience becomes a substitute for experiencing it perhaps there is something to learn? Knowing what something is can persuade us that we know ALL that it is.
Lucifer offers us the opposite temptation. The eclipse becomes a cosmic message, an awakening, a portal. The universe is trying to tell us something. I don’t want to dismiss the experience behind such language. Something genuinely profound may have happened to many. But I see how easily an encounter with something vastly beyond us can become a story about us. The Moon and Sun become characters in the drama of our spiritual development. A reminder of our insignificance in a cosmology over which we have no control.
Ahriman reduces the eclipse to mechanism. Lucifer inflates it into meaning. I wonder whether both responses place us, in rather different ways, at the centre of things. In one, I am the observer who understands what is happening. In the other, I am the soul for whom what is happening has significance. There is another possibility that interests me more.
Perhaps I don’t need to explain the eclipse away or decide what it means. Perhaps I can participate in it. Yesterday the Moon really did pass across the Sun. The quality of the light changed, the temperature shifted and birds and animals responded. Luna, the Patterdale, went out and stood still, alert, listening and sniffing. Millions of people stopped what they were doing and looked upwards. Bodies responded before minds had necessarily decided what to make of it. For a little while our ordinary preoccupations were interrupted by the movement of worlds.
And we were not outside that event looking in, we were part of it.
This is what enchantment means to me. Not pretending that celestial mechanics isn’t real, and not populating the heavens with meanings of our own invention. It is allowing something to be more than our explanation of it, without requiring it to be a message that is addressed to us. A story with us at its heart. A story that only we can know and tell.
A bee on a flower can be reduced to pollination behaviour, but I can turn it into a symbol of harmony, nature or the divine. Or I can hope it is one of my bees contributing to the honey crop. Or I can simply spend a little while with the bee and the flower. We can be in relationship, sharing this time, this place that we share. Perhaps the same is true of an eclipse.
Some people yesterday seemed to say, “Nothing much happened.” Others said, “Something extraordinary happened to me.” I am increasingly drawn towards a simpler response.
Something happened. And I was a part of it.