The light of day begins to fade in the middle of the morning. Looking up, you catch a glimpse of what looks like a disk of pure blackness sliding across the face of the sun. Soon the blackness has almost completely covered the sun, and dusk is falling over the land. The air cools. The birds are silent and still. What do you feel as the light drops away? Is an eclipse frightening? Beautiful? Or both at once? Eclipses appear often in the stories of different cultures and different ages, most often as signs of fear, and the overthrow of the natural order of things. The word eclipse comes from a Greek word meaning "abandonment." Quite literally, an eclipse was seen as the sun abandoning the earth. A common symbol of the eclipse was a dragon, or a demon, who devours the sun. The ancient Chinese would produce great noise and commotion during an eclipse, banging on pots and drums to frighten away the dragon. The Incas, too, tried to scare off the creatures who were eating the sun. In India they took a different tack -- people would immerse themselves up to the neck in water, an act of worship they believed helped the sun fight off the dragon. As astrophysicist David Dearborn notes, "In many ways it makes sense that eclipses would be seen as bad omens. For most early cultures, the sun was seen as a life-giver, something that was there every day, so something that blots out the sun was a terribly bad event, filled with danger."   Go Back The Sun-Eating Dragon This resource is presented by The Exploratorium and NASA's Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum.