![]() ![]() Even today, pregnant women in Mexico wear safety pins on their underwear during an eclipse. In Mask of the Sun, acclaimed writer John Dvorak the importance of the number 177 and why the ancient Romans thought it was bad to have sexual intercourse during an eclipse (whereas other cultures thought it would be good luck). Sorcery was banished within the Catholic Church after astrologers used an eclipse to predict a pope’s death. Columbus used them to trick people, while Renaissance painter Taddeo Gaddi was blinded by one. They were recorded on ancient turtle shells discovered in the Wastes of Yin in China, on clay tablets from Mesopotamia and on the Mayan “Dresden Codex.” They are mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and at least eight times in the Bible. Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipses have allowed us to know when the first Olympic games were played and, long before the first space probe, that the Moon was covered by dust.Įclipses have stunned, frightened, emboldened and mesmerized people for thousands of years. What do Virginia Woolf, the rotation of hurricanes, Babylonian kings and Einstein’s General Theory Relativity all have in common? Eclipses. ![]()
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