"The dark body of the Moon gradually steals its silent way across the brilliant Sun,"Mabel Loomis Todd wrote in her poetic nineteenth-century masterpiece on the surreal splendor of a total solar eclipse. Nearly a century earlier, in his taxonomy of the three layers of reality, John Keats listed among "things real" the "existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare." Indeed, the motions of the heavenly bodies precipitated the Scientific Revolution that strengthened humanity's grasp of reality by dethroning us from the center of the universe. But, paradoxically, the Sun and the Moon belong equally with the world of Shakespeare, with humanity's most enduring storytelling — they are central to our earliest sky myths in nearly every folkloric tradition, radiating timeless stories and parables that give shape to the human experience through imaginative allegory."
Andrea
