In an opinion column published Tuesday, writer Javier Ors said people in A Coruña, Spain, would go out into the streets on August 12 wearing tinted eclipse glasses to watch the solar eclipse, greeting the midday darkness with a primitive but secular joy, free of the fears and shamanism that once surrounded such events, because science now explains what they see mathematically.
Ors wrote that the sky once belonged to the gods and the stone pantheons of the ancient world, a kind of Noah's Ark for Ishtar, Zeus and other Marduks, until the telescope and astronomers such as Galileo and Copernicus took it from the druids and gave it back to humanity cleansed of ancestral fears, leaving only the mythological outlines of the stars as a memory of the altars people once knelt before.
He said humankind had shed the yoke of distant Babylonian oracles and desert prophecy through knowledge and libraries such as the Library of Alexandria, which freed people from chains of credulity and naivety.
A return to superstition
Ors argued that in recent decades society has slid back into superstition, bowing before new golden calves such as conspiracy theories. He compared today's purveyors of misinformation to the old Wild West tooth-pullers and hair-tonic salesmen, saying they no longer travel by cart but instead deliver their tirades on social media, which he called the new public square for tricksters.
Citing the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of history as an eternal return, Ors said eras without answers become eras of magicians, and today's illusionists offer answers to calm widespread unease. He said doubt and fear tend to produce an abundant harvest of miracle-workers and necromancers.
Ors linked that climate to anti-vaccine rhetoric, which he described as a denial of the obvious, and to flat-earth believers. He said the flat-earthers, given the evidence the eclipse leaves behind, would at least for a few days be left in the dark.
