Everything is interrelated.' For the Navajo Nation, the April 8 solar eclipse is a spiritual experience

[Admin]

While many Americans are deciding where to go and how to experience the total solar eclipse on April 8, Navajo (Diné) astronomers explain the vast differences in how their culture views these celestial events.

Everything is interrelated.' For the Navajo Nation, the April 8 solar eclipse is a spiritual experience : Read more

 

[jmurtari]

Please, I come to the site for science. This is not what I would consider to be a significant topic. And no, everything is NOT interrelated. Nice for touch-feely, but do you plan on giving the same space to ever major/minor religious feeling about an eclipse?

 

[NativeEngine]

While many Americans are deciding where to go and how to experience the total solar eclipse on April 8, Navajo (Diné) astronomers explain the vast differences in how their culture views these celestial events.

Everything is interrelated.' For the Navajo Nation, the April 8 solar eclipse is a spiritual experience : Read more

Thank you for this wonderful entry. There are many rituals and protocols the world over and I'm thankful you let my culture show a bit of itself. I hope to see many other cultural aspects of celestial events.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Speaking as a white person of European decent, who viewed the previous total eclipse with a group of similar folks in Tennessee, I can tell you that we did not wait for totality and then whoop and cheer. So, I have not idea where that came from in this article, but it is a stereotype that should be squashed promptly.

The tone of those watching in my experience was more of aw and appreciation, not wild reverie. While we did not believe the Sun was being swallowed by an evil spirit or that the Earth was coming to an end, we did note the actual effects on low clouds, insects and birds. Most observers seemed to have an emotional experience, while still recognizing the astronomy involved in a factual manner.

As for all things being connected - I choose to believe in the science that detects and describes connections. There do seem to be a lot of connections that go unappreciated by too many modern Western culture individuals. And there seem to be some unrealistic connections imagined by earlier societies and current cults that I just don't believe.

 

[sciencecompliance]

I'm going to look for another source of space news if I see too many more articles like this one. If you're going to look into how people's religious beliefs grapple with an event like an eclipse, I want to see a much broader picture than that of one Native American tribe. The Navajo aren't even the only Native American tribe over whose historical territory the 2024 eclipse will be traversing.

This article also insinuates that some peoples' experiences of the eclipse are more meaningful than others. I don't need to have a mythology constructed around a natural phenomenon to have a deep, meaningful experience of it, and Space.com shouldn't be effectively promoting non-scientific world views on a website that is ostensibly about science-related topics. Their mythology is not equivalent to a rigorous scientific explanation of the event. I'm not sorry to say that and would also say that about western European mythology or any other for that matter.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Well, the editors here are not really "hard science" or "just the facts. Ma'am" reporters, as evidenced by their many articles about fictional depictions of space, such as the Star Trek, Star Wars and Dune movies and TV shows. They post what interests them, with some obvious political biases, as well.

For strictly news, try https://spacenews.com/ , https://phys.org/space-news/ , and https://www.sciencedaily.com/ .

But don't expect Space.com to change into any one of those.

And, remember that you don't need to read every story they post here.