LONDON: A total eclipse of the moon is coming Saturday, but so early that dawn will not have arrived and most people will be tucked under the covers.
Any lack of worry would be a far cry from ancient days when lunar eclipses were feared as harbingers of evil, and many held that the moon was being swallowed up by gods or demons or other evil creatures.
The Maya of Central America are said to have believed that a jaguar ate the moon and could devour people, too, while in ancient China the culprit was a three-legged toad. To the Mongols it was a dragon named Alkha.
In Egypt in the time of the pharaohs, lunar eclipses were bad omens because the moon was supposed to be the “ruler of the stars,” yet ancient texts described the sky as swallowing the moon.
