Cultures through history have heralded eclipses as portentous, ominous events. Sites aligned to solstices and equinoxes—England’s Stonehenge, Ohio’s Serpent Mound—indicate universal interest in the passage of the sun among ancient peoples. But the rarity of a solar eclipse always stands out.
More than 3,000 years ago, scribes in the Fertile Crescent chronicled the earliest recorded total solar eclipse. Dating to 1223 BCE in Syria, it was accompanied by the appearance of Mars in the sky and occasioned great anxiety. Clay tablets cryptically declared, “Two livers were examined: danger.”
Then, as now, eclipses offer perspective through their enormity. They command respect. The response of Cooper’s New York to the eclipse was no less visceral.
In his memoir, Cooper described a train of “twenty waggons bearing travellers, or teams from among the hills. All had stopped on their course, impelled, apparently, by unconscious reverence … every face was turned toward heaven, and every eye drank in the majesty of the sight. Women stood in the open street, near me, with streaming eyes and clasped hands, and sobs were audible in different directions.”
Cooper grasped the power of the moment, experiencing with new eyes “the instant when I could first distinguish the blades of grass at my feet—and later again watching the shadows of the leaves on the gravel walk.”
In part for the awe and emotion it inspired, the eclipse of 1806 found fertile reception in America’s religious landscape during the Second Great Awakening (1797-c.1840).
While Cooper himself avoided the enthusiasm of the era’s religiosity, his native region became known as “the Burned-Over District,” a place where revivals crossed paths, merging like wildfire. Upstate New York produced such utopians as Shaker matriarch Ann Lee, Mormon founder Joseph Smith, and William Miller, self-styled prophets enthused by the supernatural.
Nor was this Burned-Over District a mere backwater, but it reflected the booming nation—a “psychic highway” connecting to the frontier via the Erie Canal and other navigable thoroughfares.
Interestingly, religious leaders influenced by the American Enlightenment treated the eclipse more ambivalently, warning against popular zeal while emphasizing the hand of divine providence. Joseph Lathrop’s Sermon Containing Reflections on the Solar Eclipse reflected this balance.
Insisting the eclipse was “not an omen of any particular calamity,” the New Englander nevertheless depicted it “as an emblem of national judgments,” foretelling “political darkness” on a sinful people. “Thus saith the Lord, I will darken the earth in the clear day. I will turn their feasts into mourning, and their songs into lamentation.”