Signal from Heaven

Go ahead. Scream “Superstition!” at the top of your lungs.

I think that spectacular celestial events such as the total solar eclipse tomorrow (Asians will be in the night side of the planet when it happens, and therefore will not be seeing it) are reminders to us. “Calls for attention”, if you will. “Signals”, “beeps”, “alarms”...”warnings”? Celestial semioticists (astrologers for you who prefer it straight) don’t call them “signs” for nothing.

Before anything else, here are the facts. The exact moment of the eclipse will be at 6:31 pm, Universal Planetary Time (Greenwich, UK), and Americans (the US) will see or feel the darkening of the sun as early as 10 am. The geographic details have been worked out and is being discussed all over the Net. I’ll try to download and post here the graphs and the GIF (copyrighted Sinclair 2000) of the path of the eclicpse by Strickling (posted at Wikipedia).

Back to the “signs” now. On a purely observational level, they are noticed most obviously in the path of the eclispse, which, as you can see on Strickling’s graph is on the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina! The moment of totality as mentioned (11:31 am daylight) will be located either in the southeastern Midwest (Illinois) or northeastern Southeast (Kentucky) [that’s regionalism for you!], but this Sun-Moon conjunction races from west to east so fast that the entire string of states Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, and even the seas west of Oregon and east of South Carolina will be treated to this darkening of the sun rather spectacularly.

Now to the interpretation. Communication experts and also cyberneticists call these “shoulder taps” “interrupts” or interjects to describe a stimulus, or a series of environmental changes that catch/es our attention away from what we were formerly doing. In my own postmodernist daring, these interrupts pull our attention from worldly bickerings to the heavenly affairs. They tell us that we are essentially part of a Greater System, and should occasionally remind ourselves that significance is not limited to our tiny affairs on this tired planet. Or if you’re religious, that we are still part of a Greater Plan and should regularly turn our attention, and align our hopes and schemes to this Greater Scheme.

But who is signaling us? As a radical empiricist, I can retort, is a “who” necessary? But as an astrologer, er, a celestial semioticist, rather, I can say, the Creator is calling our attention. He is asking for some greater perspective rather than our materialist mania for wealth and power. For as a celestial whatsamacallit, I can say that the greater hope is not to be found in our material world but within our soul.