Our scientific view of the world, with all of its many wonderful inventions and discoveries, is only about 400 years old. This is relatively recent, considering that people with mental and physical capacities much like our own have looked in wonderment at the Sun and Moon for tens, perhaps hundreds, of millennia.

Our ancient ancestors interpreted the cycles of day and night, winter and summer, and the phases of the Moon in ways quite different from ours. Theirs was a more personal connection to the universe, where every event and especially grand ones like tornadoes and eclipses, meant something: perhaps a sign of a god's wrath, or retribution for human wrongdoing. In such an intimate view of the universe, things don't just happen randomly (as math and science would suggest), they happen for a reason: they are intentional acts of supernatural beings. For our ancestors the world and everything in it was not only alive but personally meaningful – a world where human acts draw superhuman consequences. This view of the world is not restricted to the distant past. It is alive today and shared by indigenous populations on every continent on Earth. While science has brought us many obvious advances, giving us the power to predict and describe nature in great detail, it seems that we have lost that sense of intimacy and personal connection, the cosmic embrace that our ancestors experienced so strongly.

Here are a few examples of such an interpretation of the world.

The first is a video clip in which a Native American, John Murray, an elder of the Blackfoot tribe of Montana, tells part of the story of Scarface and his adventure with the Sun, Moon and their son, the Morning Star.

Other interpretations of the eclipse are found at the Exploratorium's "Sun-eating Dragon" http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/dragon.html webpage.

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