“We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.”
-Annie Dillard
April is not a reliable month. Here in the Pacific Northwest, each week is a bipolar mixture of blessed sun and depressive rain. We’re just about out of the bleak midwinter. But the darkness isn't done with us yet. North America is about to get blasted by a total solar eclipse, which, from an archetypal perspective, is not exactly a recipe for sunshine and rainbows. In fact, no sunshine will be had at all. I’m already feeling it, hundreds of miles and nearly a week away.
To all my friends heading down to the Texas Eclipse Festival, hold on–you’re in for a bumpy ride. I fondly remember the emotional breakdown I went through during the infamous Oregon Eclipse Festival in 2017. It wasn’t the 21-hour traffic line to enter, or the punishing desert shrubs, or the many miles of walking through poorly-planned, sweltering campgrounds that got to me. It was the intense, purgative, and undeniably shadowy energy surrounding the event itself.
It left me wondering if the only sane thing to do during an eclipse is to take shelter and pray. A total solar eclipse is one of the most intense, apocalyptic, heavy metal things a human being can experience.
And this year, I’m good.
But I thought it would be an interesting moment to explore this cosmic phenomenon from an archetypal perspective, in hopes that it might shed some light on the subject. (See what I did there?)
Eclipses are doorways into darkness. From a Jungian lens, eclipses are all about shadow, which Jung defined as “that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious.” That’s a complex way of saying that your shadow contains all the aspects of your personality that fail to neatly conform to your idea of who you are.
There is perhaps no better natural symbol of deep, confrontational shadow work, then a total solar eclipse. And speaking from both past and present experience, they really seem to have a way of wringing our shit out like a dirty sponge. For me, at least, that almost always seems to show up in my intimate relationships–the arena where the shadow is most likely to rear its ugly head.
The moon–often symbolizing the feminine, intuition, natural cycles, and mysterious wonder–literally casts a shadow onto the earth by blocking out the sun–a symbol of masculine, egoic consciousness, life force, and the archetypal light of awareness. Instead of our usual, solar, egoic ways of thinking and behaving, we might find ourselves overly emotional, overcome with inexplicable or undesired feelings, or revisiting old material we thought was long resolved. You don’t need to be in the “path of totality” to experience this, or even witness the thing. It is happening to our physical planet, and to our collective psyches, whether we see it or not.
Eclipses shine light onto our darkness, and darkness on to our light.
This isn’t confined to our individual experiences either. Solar eclipses also amplify and reveal the collective shadows that might be easier to ignore in our day-to-day lives.
Today, you don’t have to look far to witness unspeakable instances of collective shadow playing out across the world. This is nowhere more apparent than in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As I write this, the Israeli military is being accused of deliberately targeting aid workers, destroying hospitals, and intentionally orchestrating a famine– war crimes all–committed by a nation founded by survivors of these very same crimes. Trauma, when left unhealed, becomes a monster when all it knows is the repressive darkness of the shadow.
The natural world knows this too, in its own way. Snakes slither out of their dens into the false light of day. Birds chaotically take flight, then cower down towards the earth, too frightened to spread their wings. Shadows bend and fade into scythe-like blades, glimmering eerily in the dust. There is no sound, only the silent black sun burning a hole in the sky.
This all might sound like the lyrics to a Slayer song, but all of these things actually occur during these terrifyingly ineffable moments where cosmos, psyche, and earth converge.
Eclipses are encounters with something called the numinous. Coined by Rudolf Otto, a German theologian and philosopher from the early 20th century, the numinous can be understood as an archetypal force recognized by the psyche as all-powerful, sacred, holy, and terrifying. To use Otto’s words, the numinous is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the overwhelming, fascinating mystery.
Jung also wrote about the numinous, saying, “Numinosity . . . is wholly outside conscious volition, for it transports the subject into a state of rapture, which is a state of will-less surrender.” In the face of the numinous, the ego surrenders (willingly or not) whatever scraps of power it so tightly clings to. A complete reorientation of the psyche occurs in presence of the numinous—a tectonic shift in priorities, understandings, values, and belief systems. We come away from these encounters changed.
When a total eclipse occurs, there is a phenomenon called the “wall of shadow,” which is a rapidly moving shadow cast by the moon and sun. Like the Eye of Sauron, you can see it sweep across the landscape, scouring and penetrating everything in its path with its terrifying power. When the shadow lands upon you, there’s no telling what primitive animal might leap out of your skin.
No amount of sage smoke can prepare you for this.
Anthropologist Victor Turner linked eclipses to the idea of liminality–of being betwixt and between two places or states of being. Liminality is a humbling thing. It’s why psychedelics can be good medicine, but can also cut us down to size. Liminality is also the central component to this old idea called initiation.
There’s a lot of talk about initiation these days, perhaps because most of us are starving for anything that might resemble these ancient rites of passage that Western culture threw to the wolves centuries ago. Traditionally, initiation took place within a tight-knit community or tribe, where the young person could leave their childhood self and come back to the village as a new, matured, respected adult. The pivotal moment in every initiatory rite is the time spent in proximity with liminality, with nature, in the belly of the unknown.
True initiation means death. Witnessing death, inflicting death, experiencing death. This is the inescapable medicine of initiatory experience. Even if it’s a death of one way of being for the sake of another, something must be let go in order to move through that liminal space and come out the other side.
When I think about what myths speak to the meaning of eclipses, I can think of none other than the Norse myth of Ragnarok, the “twilight of the gods,” the end of days.
Ragnarok is at once a creation myth, a chronicle of collapse, a battle saga, an apocalyptic prophecy, and a promise of rebirth. Through a series of betrayals, violence, and natural disasters, the world tree, Yggdrasil, is set aflame as the world is submerged beneath the churning sea. It is a frighteningly accurate myth for our times, which are fraught with greater polarization, public violence, and increasingly vivid encounters with ecological destruction.
In the story’s final cataclysm, “the moon blocks out the sun.” Odin is eaten by Fenrir, the wolf. All the gods are destroyed, and the earth is plunged into frigid, ashen darkness.
But two people survived. Life, and Life’s Yearning, they were called. And as the world burned, they took refuge inside the charred trunk of Yggdrasil. Holding each other tightly, they made it through the long night, and were kept alive, just barely, by each other’s warmth.
Ragnarok isn’t an uplifting tale. But it ends with one important lesson: we must be good to each other. Despite the horrors unfolding across the world, despite the darkness that blocks out the sun and casts us all into shadow from time to time, the story tells us clear as day: if we’re going to survive this, we must hold on to love.
Thanks for reading. A few quick things:
Next week I’ll get back to my series on Archetypes of Leadership and the Psychedelic Guide.
I was just interviewed on The Sanctuary Podcast. This was a truly lovely conversation, and I felt like we covering some good, old-growth terrain. We talked about myths and why they matter, mythopoetics, working with myth and symbolic imagery, the importance of imagination, the connection between stories and the land, and language and the secret knowledge encoded into stories.
Watch it on Youtube:
Or listen on Spotify:
Please let me know what resonated in a comment, and share my Substack with a friend, if you feel so inclined. It’s free. For now.
Stunning read, Simon. Woah.
This:, "No amount of sage smoke can prepare you for this." Haha! So good.
And, this: "Ragnarok isn’t an uplifting tale. But it ends with one important lesson: we must be good to each other. Despite the horrors unfolding across the world, despite the darkness that blocks out the sun and casts us all into shadow from time to time, the story tells us clear as day: if we’re going to survive this, we must hold on to love. "
Amen.
Potent reminders here. I have been reflecting too over the Easter story. Yes, Life rose again, in a transformed way, but not until a total acceptance and enactment of death first occurred.