ECLIPSES AND SUPERSTITION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26748, 17 April 1948, Page 9

ECLIPSES AND SUPERSTITION

Sir, —“ Civis ” discourses instructively on superstitions, including the Korean's fear of elections on May. 9, the date of an eclipse. Authoritative predictions give the Koreans an advantage over the ancient Medes and Lydians, reported by Herodotus to have abandoned their warfare on being overtaken in fierce battle by the terrifying frown of the gods in the form of a solar " black-out.” The Koreans are evidently willing to resume the conflict on the following day, and eclipses, unfortunately, can no longer be expected to promote pacific ends. They have the opposite reputation in Shakespeare. Gloster, in "King Lear," says: “ These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us; though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet Nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.” Edmund " debunks ” this, but the theme is of frequent recurrence. Again, Milton: “. . . that fatal and perfidious bark, built in the eclipse and rigg'd with curses dark.” The tradition ol' occult influence of the heavenly bodies is by no means defunct. We are apt to forget that anniversaries, sacred and secular, and therefore centennials also, imply tribute —almost worshipful—to astronomical rotas which, in the larger view, arc neither less nor more haphazard than eclipses. True Scottish Presbyterians have been inclined to withdraw religious significance from all but the weeWy cycle with its Sunday—a cycle which has only a remote, if any, astronomical bearing: but this restriction (as recent bitter reproofs have shown) has been largely to the scandal of the majority of Christendom. Extrarational beliefs are necessary to mankind and are widely distributed among all classes. Theologians may envisage archangels dancing on needle points, physicists talk learnedly about phlogiston, caloric, or other still useful, but discredited entities such as gravitational forces. Psychologists may conjure up ghostly super-egos and other demons, and who but a (perhaps equally baffled) posterity can say them nay? Wc must not be too scornful of the simple Koreans, and if we wish to demand pure reason for all beliefs we must revert to Pyrrho, the famous Greek sceptic, who doubted everything—eveji his own scepticism!—l am. etc., John C. Begg.