On the
dream forum somebody asked about eclipses. Since I know a bit about the topic and had been mulling over how to explain the mechanics of eclipses, I posted a description. A lot of folks liked it so I felt that I should post it here and hope that other folks find it useful.
I'm not a professional astrologer, but I've played one on TV. Well, not really, but long ago I started studying it as it seemed to be at the roots of a lot the western mystical traditions and it was also one of the most outrageous affronts to scientism, and even people who believed in ESP and ghosts and the afterlife would just go ga-ga over astrology for some reason, so I had to involve myself with it! It is a lot easier being an astrologer now since you can have computers doing the calculations, which are time-consuming and error prone when done by hand. Since I was born right after an eclipse I have always searched out anything I could about the meaning of eclipses to astrologers.
First, it is worth pointing out a few things about eclipses. They are not at all rare. We have something like 5-13 eclipses per year. It all has to do with the intersection of the plane of the Moon's orbit around the Earth with the plane of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Just think of the Sun in the center of a table and the Earth rolling around it in orbit, that is the plane of the Earth orbiting the Sun. Now, while the Earth is rolling around the table, orbiting the Sun, the Moon is also orbiting the Earth, but NOT on the table, the path it takes is slightly tilted and half of the Moon's orbit is above the table and half below. If you imagine the Moon orbiting the Earth 13 times while the Earth makes one circuit of the Sun then you have a good toy model of what is going on.
When the Moon is directly between the Earth and Sun that is a New Moon, when it is opposite the Sun to the Earth, that is a Full Moon. If during a New Moon the Moon is somewhere near the surface of the table, then it will block the light of the Sun from us and that is a Solar Eclipse. If during a Full Moon the Moon is somewhere near the surface of the table, then Earth will block the light of the Sun from striking the Moon, and that is a Lunar Eclipse. The trick here is that the Moon is only near the surface of our imaginary table twice during its orbit around the Earth, so most New and Full Moons are too high or too low to be in shadow or cause a shadow. Actually, if you can visualize this you will see that this time when shadowing can occur happens approximately twice a year. And, you can note that the pattern will be for Solar and Lunar eclipses to happen two weeks apart. Always. And they usually come in threes. Since there is a slight drift in these things and the Moon cycles are not exactly aligned with the year we sometimes only get 5 eclipses, and sometime we can have up to 13! Typically we get about 7 a year if I remember correctly.
To add to the complexity the Moon is not always the same distance from Earth and the how far into the penumbra the other sphere is will change the eclipse width and duration. Luna is indeed the Changeable One! By the way, the intersection points of the two planes are called the Moon's Nodes, sometimes the Head and Tail of the Dragon!
The other thing worth knowing about eclipses is the Saros Cycle. This is an effect of the orbit I tried to describe above, such that every 19 years a nearly identical positioning of the three planets will occur. But not exactly. If you track the return of a Saros over and over you will see it move slowly over the globe, starting at the South Pole and continuing until it passes beyond the North Pole. The complete cycle varies in length but is roughly 1400 years on average if I recall correctly. So, astrologers who study these things tend to see these things as part of very long term changes in life on the planet and associate certain behaviors with each Saros Cycle. It is worth noting that the most ancient societies were aware of these cycles, just imagine how long you would have to keep records to discover this! I can't even predict how high in the sky the Moon will be on any given night, so this is impressive to me.
Now, after all of the pedantic rambling we get to the point. First, there hasn't been a lot of study of this topic. Most astrologers are working in the personal realm and these are B I G cycles. Second, the meaning associated with eclipses is hard to correlate with the real world. I haven't been keeping up with the articles for the last number of years, but I don't recall a single instance of eclipse astrologers agreeing on the what a particular eclipse means. So I would find it hard to really answer your very good questions. Sometimes an eclipse seems to act like an explosive and sometimes it does nothing. I have yet to hear an astrologer give a good accounting of eclipses.
I'd be more inclined to look at this as a dream and see what we get. In the Dream of Eclipse we have the Sun and the Moon, the two primary planets in astrology. The Lights. They are the Father and Mother. Eclipses are special New or Full Moons. They occur only at the Nodes of the Moon, which many astrologers associate with karma and reincarnation. They occur in long term families, taking centuries to complete. They have to do with close alignment and light and shadow. They bring an unexpected darkening and shadow that surprise those who do not know of the pattern and cycle.
How would you read this dream?
After rereading this I felt that there was one more bit worth adding. My use of penumbra was possibly misleading. There are a number of terms that are used concerning the shadow cast by the Earth or Moon (or anything, actually). If you search for 'umbra' you can find illustrations that show this, but for eclipses, the shape of the shadow is worth knowing.
The shape of the shadow depends on the size of the planet and on the size of the light source. If you imagine shining a penlight on an apple in a dark room you can see that the shadow of the apple will be larger than the apple, and as you move the apple closer to the wall the shadow size will get closer to the size of the apple. If you used a large spotlight instead of a penlight on the apple, the shadow only appears if the apple is close to the wall and at some point it is not seen at all. In the case of the penlight, the shadow fills a conical volume that expands the farther you go. In the case of the spotlight, the cone will be smaller the farther away you go.
Since the Sun is so much larger than Earth or Moon, the shadow cast will be a cone that gets smaller. If you are inside the cone of perfect shadow you will see a Total Eclipse, and if you are on the fringes you will see a Partial Eclipse. Just imagine that during a New Moon that the path from Sun to Moon is the handle of an artist's paintbrush and that the shadow cast is the brush-tip. If the Moon is close the tip will strike the Earth, if it is farther away it will not.
One more thing. Everything in this solar system orbits around the Sun and is smaller than the Sun. The Sun emanates a huge amount of light, radiating out in all directions. Everything in the solar system in the light of the Sun is casting a conical shadow behind it. Everything. A really clever creature could use this fact and the observations of eclipses over time to build the kind of model of the solar system we now have. The things the ancient sky watchers did gave birth to Astrology and her very clever daughter Astronomy. I often wonder how they did it, what technique did they use to get it all started? They didn't have our modern tools and methods. My best thought is that they left their bodies and traveled into the solar system to understand how it worked, then came back and used the journeys to help make sense of their observations of the sky.
I have a good eclipse anecdote that I'd like to add. Back in the early 90s we were on the fringes of a big solar eclipse. It was to be a partial eclipse for a few hours for us. I was in school at the time and had to take a bus to campus when the eclipse was to start. The light took on a watery hue, slightly green and dimmer. Of course you cannot look at the sun directly but my wife and I were planning to make a camera obscura out of a cardboard box to view it. Being as busy as we were we didn't get to it before the eclipse. As I was riding the bus, noting how many people were a bit awed by the weirdness of the sunlight I eventually noticed that the handful of pinhole sized apertures in the bus window frames and the dimming of the light were somehow making camera obscura effects and projecting small images of the sun with a 'bite' taken out of on the floor of the bus! Even stranger, when I got to campus and walked under the trees, the thousands of pinholes made by the leaves of the many tree were making thousands of tiny eclipsed suns on the ground, and they would come and go as the spring breeze shook the leaves. As the hours went by I tracked the progress of the eclipse until the effect faded. It was strange and enchanting and I've never seen anything like it since.
