Eclipse

For nearly all of human existence, whenever the sky suddenly went dark during the middle of the day, everyone immediately stopped whatever they were doing.

Our ancient ancestors followed the movement of the Sun and other celestial bodies as though their lives depended on it—often enough, they did. They knew that there was a close correlation between what happened above and what happened here on Earth, even if they didn’t fully understand why.

So, whenever the Sun disappeared unpredictably in the middle of a bright day, the event wasn’t a fascinating scientific spectacle so much as a sure sign of a coming cataclysm.

Even animals were (and are) freaked out by an eclipse. It seemed like nature itself was thrown out of whack.

Naturally, myths and legends sprung up to explain the underlying reason behind the phenomena. Our minds are eager to make sense of things, and we became great storytellers over the ensuing thousands of years.

In the same way that we can see bioluminescence in fireflies…