The superstition on eclipses

This is the first time I have decided to write an article in English like the Wiccan student that I am today.

I've been living in London for the past few months, English is not my first language and I'm more of a phonetical speaker than a writer when it comes to English so don't be surprised if this article is less than grammatically acceptable, but I'm not going to apologize for the boldness and need of expressing myself. If you are picky or a grammar snob you can skip this article altogether.

That being said, I also want to remark that I appreciate being corrected when I'm wrong and I believe that is a great way of learning and improving, so as long as it's done in a loving and respectful way, feel free to step in if you want to.

I'm writing these lines today because I feel compelled to, I've been part of the witch community for a while now and there are some thoughts that I need to pour and share because I love the philosophical reading that can be done on many witchy subjects and also because it's my nature to overshare my perceptions (sorry, not sorry).

Just like Giordano Bruno, I'm talking about perceptions and information that I channel, observe, sense and reflect. If you want a strictly rational and scientific thought process then first, you should ask yourself why is it so important for you that the world be perceived only through that prism?; and second, why are you even reading a note on magick?

Anyway, after setting my defensive disclosure, I want to get into the subject of the meaning we give to experiences, more specifically about the meaning we give to magickal experiences; even more specifically, and time appropriate, the meaning we give to eclipses.

Even if you are not an astrologer, and you are just a simple witch who wants to do the best out of a Moon ritual (like me); we've heard before that eclipses are a phenomenon to be... if not scared, at least very cautious with. We've been told to keep ourselves away from any magickal activity and to use that time to rest and reflect, and the question that has been marauding my mind is "Why?".

About 3 years ago I did a very potent spell during an eclipse. I asked the eclipse to take away my insecurities, and little that I knew at the time the results were intense and traumatizing. For this reason, I was scared of doing rituals during eclipses for a very long time. But lately, I had to revisit that memory and I realized that the spell had worked perfectly because it forced me to face something I had avoided confronting for a very long time and that I was deeply neglecting inside myself.

The eclipse showed me how much the perspective of people that I have primal ties with, affected my ability to value and protect the aspect within me that I hold dear and make me who I am. It doesn't come as a surprise that witches relate too much to the metaphor of a gay person coming out of the closet. We live in an unfair and fearful society that tends to demonize anything that breaks out of the norm, and for a Latin-American family that has a deep tradition and culture of creating strong and involved ties (which I think is a beautiful thing), that demonizing mechanism becomes particularly excruciating, heartbreaking and lonely; but I needed to go through that in order to understand how important it was to stand for myself no matter the cost and I don't think I would've chosen that confrontation willingly if I had known what laid ahead.

I didn't know it at the time but the eclipse really helped me.

There are many ways of understanding the world but I like to group all the range of perspectives into two groups: love and fear. Love allows us to see how we are all connected and fear sets us apart. We are driven by a need to connect but we are also told that there are some things that don't deserve being connected to and any person who has done shadow work will tell you that it is impossible to love in others what we don't know how to love within ourselves.

Taking that last paragraph as the underlining of the upcoming reflection, I want also to remark on the importance of understanding the value of exercising our mind in a philosophical way.

One semiology professor told me once that language is like the rings inside a tree. By reading the ring on the trunk of a tree we can see its history, how old it is, how it changed over the years, and if it was pruned. And that studying the morphosis of language shows the same about their culture, about their geography and values.

I feel the same about philosophy, I believe that every immortalized philosopher becomes so because they dared to make conscious a paradigm that so far humanity was only subjected to and not the owner of. Just like in therapy, we are unable to take ownership of what we can't name in our lives (and this is also a very magickal notion); philosophy allows us to see and be aware of how humanity thinks, perceives and interacts with a particular era and puts a human context into it. It is in many ways those rings of a tree.

So, getting back to eclipses and our traditional magickal perception of them, I want to ask you a few questions:

Can we say that we have the same relationship and perception of nature that our ancestors had?

Can we say we are as alienated and at the mercy of nature as we were in medieval times?

Can we say we have the same relationship with the occult or with curiosity as in the Renaissance times?

Leonardo DaVinci was accused of necrophilia just for doing something that today is a common practice in medical studies. Do we really think that our need to connect and understand nature was accepted in the same way as today?

For humanity, curiosity for nature was as demonized as the LGBTQ+ is today (and it was then) and so we've been carrying for centuries a primal imprint of fear with any natural phenomena that broke the norm or were the exception, and if you have such an isolated event as eclipses are and we are immersed on a state of collective fear, what do you think is going to happen? How do you think we are going to interpret the reality after that? What do you think is the belief that it's going to be reinforced by repeating that fear pattern over and over again? Can something feel terrible but actually be a major leap in our growth? Would we be able to recognize it as such if we are immersed in a state of fear?

My spell worked, but it took me a while to understand it from a loving perspective. Maybe it's time we learn to do that with eclipses too.