The Solar Eclipse Through Science, Ancient Wisdom and the Guanche Sky
12 August 2026 · Tenerife
Tomorrow evening, something ancient will happen above us.
Not ancient because astronomy cannot explain it. We know very precisely what will occur.
The Moon will pass between Earth and the Sun. Its shadow will travel across our planet, and here in Tenerife we will watch a significant part of the solar disc disappear shortly before sunset.
From the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the eclipse begins at around 18:58, reaches its maximum at approximately 19:53, and continues until sunset at around 20:45. The Canary Islands will experience a deep partial eclipse, around 70% rather than totality. Because the Sun will already be low in the western sky, mountains and local terrain will make the exact experience very dependent on where we stand.
Astronomically, nothing supernatural is required.
And yet human beings have rarely experienced an eclipse as only astronomy.
Across cultures and centuries, people have prayed, hidden, shouted, drummed, fasted, told stories, feared for kings, contemplated cosmic order and simply fallen silent beneath an altered Sun.
Perhaps that tells us something.
Not necessarily about a mysterious force arriving from the eclipse.
Perhaps it tells us something about ourselves.
Before entering the mystery: how do we hold truth?
When we approach ancient wisdom, spirituality and the natural world, it is easy to become enchanted by connections.
A symbol from Egypt seems to echo a modern spiritual idea.
Alchemy begins to sound strangely close to psychology.
A myth touches something we have personally experienced.
A scientific phenomenon feels so extraordinary that ordinary language no longer seems enough.
Perhaps this impulse to connect things is deeply human.
We are meaning-making beings.
We look at the stars and create stories. We feel something move through the body and call it energy. We stand beneath an altered sky and instinctively ask whether something larger is happening.
There is nothing wrong with wonder.
But wonder becomes more powerful when we allow it to remain honest.
Throughout this exploration, I want to hold several kinds of truth beside one another.
There is what we can observe and measure.
There is what historical sources tell us people genuinely believed, practised or recorded.
There is what historians, archaeologists and anthropologists can reasonably reconstruct from fragments left behind.
And there is another layer altogether: the personal and symbolic meaning that an experience may awaken in us today.
These layers do not have to compete.
A scientific explanation does not erase symbolism.
A myth does not need to be literally true in order to reveal something about the human psyche.
And a profound inner experience does not become meaningless simply because it cannot be measured by an instrument.
The difficulty begins only when we ask one language to prove another.
This is especially important with a word we use often in wellbeing and spiritual spaces:
energy.
Physics gives the word a very specific meaning. Energy can be measured, calculated and observed through its effects.
But in ordinary human language, we use energy differently.
We may speak of having no energy after a difficult week.
We enter a room and feel its energy change.
We feel energised by someone, depleted by another person, heavy after grief or expansive after time in nature.
Sometimes what we are describing may involve the nervous system, hormones, attention, memory, emotion, expectation or countless subtle signals moving through the body.
Sometimes “energy” is simply the closest word we have for an experience that is real to us but difficult to name.
We do not need to choose one language and abandon the other.
We only need to know which language we are speaking.
And perhaps that is a useful way to meet an eclipse too.
We can understand exactly what is happening in the sky and still allow ourselves to wonder what happens inside us while we witness it.
The eclipse does not have to become less mysterious because we understand its mechanics.
Knowing how the Moon moves across the face of the Sun does not explain awe.
When the light changes, Earth responds
At the astronomical level, a solar eclipse is beautifully straightforward.
The Moon moves between Earth and the Sun, temporarily reducing the sunlight reaching part of our planet.
But the consequences of that change in light ripple through the environment.
Solar radiation decreases.
The ground receives less heat.
Air temperature can fall.
Atmospheric movement can change.
The upper atmosphere responds to the sudden reduction in solar radiation.
During sufficiently deep eclipses, researchers observe changes in the ionosphere—the electrically charged region high above us whose behaviour is strongly influenced by sunlight. NASA has used eclipses precisely because they provide an unusual natural experiment: daylight is abruptly reduced without waiting for the normal transition into night.
During the 2024 total eclipse in North America, NOAA satellite observations recorded measurable drops in land-surface and air temperatures as the lunar shadow crossed the continent.
So when people say:
“Everything suddenly felt different.”
they may be describing something quite real.
Something is different.
The quality of light changes.
Colours and contrast become unfamiliar.
Shadows behave differently.
The warmth on the skin can diminish.
The atmosphere may feel quieter or cooler.
Our visual system is suddenly asked to interpret daylight that resembles neither ordinary afternoon nor ordinary evening.
And we are not the only ones who notice.
Animals have been observed changing their behaviour during eclipses. Research involving zoo animals found substantial behavioural responses among a number of species, while newer studies of birds show that sudden eclipse darkness can interrupt ordinary light-driven behaviour.
It is as though one of biology's oldest clocks has unexpectedly shifted.
That clock is light.
Long before watches, calendars or smartphones, life evolved in conversation with the rising and setting Sun.
Light tells bodies when to wake.
When to move.
When to feed.
When to rest.
When to migrate.
When to reproduce.
Even our own physiology remains deeply organised around cycles of daylight and darkness.
So when light behaves unexpectedly, living systems notice.
That alone is extraordinary.
We do not need to say that Earth's spiritual “vibration” suddenly falls in order to acknowledge that a real environmental transition occurs.
And there is currently no established scientific evidence that an eclipse creates a physical portal through which karma, trauma or other people's unresolved emotions are released into the atmosphere.
Those ideas belong to spiritual interpretation rather than established measurement.
But perhaps there is a more interesting possibility.
An eclipse can affect the world around us physically.
The altered world affects our senses.
Our senses affect our nervous system.
Our nervous system influences how we experience ourselves.
So when someone says:
“Everything felt different,”
perhaps we do not need to dismiss the experience.
And perhaps we do not need to immediately make it supernatural either.
We can simply listen.
Here in Tenerife tomorrow, the eclipse will be partial and will occur close to the natural transition toward evening, so we should be careful not to assume that every dramatic response documented during total eclipses elsewhere will happen here in exactly the same way.
Yet something fundamental will still occur.
The light reaching this island will temporarily change because another celestial body has moved between us and our star.
And every plant, animal and human standing beneath that sky will inhabit that altered light together.
Perhaps this is where science and mystery can meet without either losing its integrity.
Science can tell us what the light is doing.
And we can remain curious about what that changing light allows us to notice.
Because sometimes the most meaningful part of an eclipse is not something arriving from somewhere beyond us.
Sometimes it is what becomes visible when the familiar light changes.
Perhaps the real portal is awe
There is another measurable part of the eclipse experience that fascinates me.
Awe.
Researchers studying the 2017 total solar eclipse in the United States analysed language produced by almost three million social-media users.
People located within the eclipse's path expressed more awe and used language that was less self-focused and more collective, affiliative and prosocial than people outside it.
For a moment, something enormous interrupted ordinary life.
People looked upward.
The individual self became slightly smaller.
The world became slightly larger.
That may be one of the most fascinating things about awe.
So much of modern life contracts attention around:
my problems, my plans, my schedule, my body, my work, my phone, my identity.
Then the sky behaves in a way that feels impossible.
And something inside us says:
Look.
Maybe we have been searching for the wrong portal.
Perhaps an eclipse does not need to tear open an invisible membrane between dimensions.
Perhaps the portal is attention.
For a moment we remember that we are living on a moving planet, orbiting a star, accompanied by a Moon whose apparent size in our sky occasionally allows one world to pass in front of another.
That change in perspective alone can be transformative.
Did ancient people fear eclipses?
Often.
But not always.
And this is where the idea of one universal body of “ancient wisdom” begins to fall apart.
Human cultures did not receive a single instruction manual from the cosmos.
They experienced the same phenomenon and created radically different relationships with it.
In Diné/Navajo tradition, elders may instruct community members to go inside during an eclipse, avoid looking toward the Sun, remain quiet and contemplate the relationship between Sun and Moon and the wider cosmic order.
This is remarkably close to the idea of using an eclipse for withdrawal, silence and inward reflection.
But travel to another culture and the response becomes almost the opposite.
Traditional Cherokee accounts speak of a giant celestial frog swallowing the Sun or Moon. Community members gather, drum and shout to frighten it away.
Some traditional Maya eclipse accounts likewise describe the Sun as being eaten, with noise used as part of the response to the dangerous darkness.
In Hindu mythology, the story takes another form.
Rahu sought immortality and was exposed by the Sun and Moon. After being decapitated, his immortal head continued to pursue them through the heavens. During an eclipse Rahu catches and swallows the Sun—but because he has no body, the Sun eventually emerges again.
In Chinese eclipse traditions, the language of the Sun being “eaten” also appears, but the meaning depends upon context, including the political symbolism surrounding the emperor.
And then there is a story I find particularly beautiful.
In Euahlayi traditions of Australia, the Sun and Moon can be understood as lovers.
A solar eclipse becomes their secret embrace.
Think about that.
The same darkness.
One culture hears danger.
Another calls for silence.
Another begins drumming.
Another imagines a hungry celestial being.
Another sees lovers meeting in the sky.
The eclipse itself did not change.
The human relationship to it did.
Perhaps that is something worth remembering whenever someone tells us:
“Ancient people knew that an eclipse means this.”
Which ancient people?
Where?
When?
Through which cosmology?
There was never only one answer.
When an eclipse threatened a king
Ancient Mesopotamia gives us one of the most extraordinary examples.
Assyrian and Babylonian scholars developed sophisticated traditions of observing celestial events and interpreting them as omens.
A solar eclipse could be understood as an exceptionally dangerous sign for the king.
And because the ruler represented far more than one individual, danger to the king meant danger to the political order itself.
The solution was remarkable.
Under certain conditions, a substitute king could temporarily assume the royal identity while the real king withdrew from public life.
The substitute wore royal garments, underwent rituals and became, symbolically, the target toward which the dangerous destiny could be redirected.
After the period of danger had passed, substitute kings and their queens could be killed, while the true ruler returned. Historical records preserve examples of this extraordinary practice.
The important point here is not the horror of the ritual.
It is the worldview underneath it.
For ancient Mesopotamians, heaven and human society were not entirely separate systems.
The sky communicated.
Political order and cosmic order reflected one another.
An unusual event above could signal vulnerability below.
This idea—that cosmos and human life somehow mirror one another—would reappear in different forms throughout astrology, Hermetic philosophy, alchemy and later Western esoteric thought.
Egypt: darkness, order and the serpent
The text that originally inspired this exploration contained a dramatic quotation supposedly carved into ancient Egyptian temple walls:
“When the Sun hides before its time…”
followed by a warning that a person looking upon the mystery would lose vital energy to the darkness.
I have not been able to trace that quotation to an identifiable ancient Egyptian inscription, temple text or established Egyptological translation.
For that reason, I would not present it as ancient Egyptian wisdom.
But something genuinely ancient and much more interesting lies underneath it.
Egyptian cosmology was profoundly concerned with the maintenance of order against chaos.
The solar god Ra travelled through the heavens and, during his nightly journey, confronted forces threatening cosmic continuity.
Among the greatest of these forces was Apep or Apophis, the serpent of chaos.
An ancient Egyptian ostracon now in the British Museum depicts Ra aboard the solar barque attacking Apophis.
The symbolic pattern is powerful.
Sun.
Order.
Life.
Continuity.
Against:
Darkness.
Chaos.
Dissolution.
The Sun returns because cosmic order must continually be renewed.
But this does not mean we should transform that symbolism into a claim that Egyptians universally believed every solar eclipse was Apep physically swallowing the Sun—or that anyone watching an eclipse lost their life force.
Those are additional interpretations.
The genuine Egyptian idea may be more profound anyway.
Order is not something achieved once and permanently possessed.
It must continually be restored.
Light returns.
Morning returns.
Life emerges again from darkness.
And perhaps that is why solar myths remain so psychologically powerful thousands of years later.
The marriage of Sun and Moon
Another theme from modern eclipse spirituality does have genuine historical roots.
Western alchemy developed an elaborate symbolic relationship between Sol and Luna—Sun and Moon.
In alchemical imagery, their meeting could become the “chemical wedding”: the union of opposing principles.
Sun and Moon.
Gold and silver.
Hot and cool.
Dry and moist.
King and queen.
Different substances and different qualities brought into relationship so that something new might emerge. Princeton University's collection of alchemical imagery describes the wedding of Sun and Moon as representing both a chemical combination and a philosophical union of contrary principles.
This is important because it means the symbolism of celestial union is not simply a modern invention.
But again, precision matters.
The alchemical Sol and Luna tradition is historically real.
The claim that a solar eclipse scientifically activates a “Twin Flame portal” is something different.
One can use an eclipse symbolically to contemplate masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, light and shadow, active and receptive—or any other polarity that feels meaningful.
But symbolism does not need to disguise itself as physics.
Alchemy does not become more profound by calling itself quantum mechanics.
And spirituality does not become more credible because we attach scientific vocabulary to experiences science has not demonstrated.
Symbolism is allowed to be symbolism.
Mystery is allowed to remain mystery.
And then we come home: Tenerife
This is where this eclipse becomes especially meaningful to me.
Long before the telescopes of the Observatorio del Teide studied the heavens, people were already living beneath these skies.
The Indigenous populations of the Canary Islands came from North Africa. Modern ancient-DNA research strongly supports a North African origin for the pre-European inhabitants of the archipelago, with relationships to populations ancestral to or related to Amazigh groups.
They reached these islands, adapted to isolation and developed distinct communities across very different environments.
And on Tenerife, the people we now call the Guanches lived within a landscape that must have demanded attention to the natural world.
Seasons mattered.
Rain mattered.
Pasture mattered.
The movement of animals mattered.
The mountains mattered.
The Sun, Moon and stars mattered because, before mechanical clocks and printed calendars, the sky itself participated in timekeeping.
But there is a difficulty whenever we talk about Guanche spirituality.
The Guanches did not leave us theological books explaining their worldview in their own voices.
Much of what was recorded about them comes from European writers during and after the conquest.
Even one of the early important sources, Alonso de Espinosa's account from the late sixteenth century, records Guanche concepts through the intellectual and Christian vocabulary of the person writing them down. Espinosa does record the name Echeyde in relation to Teide and Guayota as a feared malignant being.
So we must approach this world differently from a culture that left thousands of written religious texts.
Archaeology speaks.
Language speaks.
Early chronicles speak.
Later oral traditions speak.
But none gives us the entire picture.
And perhaps that uncertainty deserves respect.
Did the Guanches watch the sky?
There are good reasons to believe astronomical observation played a role in Indigenous Canarian timekeeping and ritual life.
Archaeoastronomical research in the Canary Islands has examined structures and archaeological sites for relationships with solar and lunar rising and setting positions. Research traditions associated with César Esteban, Juan Antonio Belmonte and other scholars have investigated possible solar markers and astronomical orientations in pre-Hispanic Canarian sites.
José Barrios García has gone further in reconstructing elements of a Guanche lunar calendar from historical and ethnographic clues.
One of his most fascinating hypotheses involves the star Canopus.
His reconstruction proposes that the heliacal reappearance of Canopus around the middle of August may have helped establish the beginning of the Guanche lunar year, with other appearances and disappearances of the star corresponding to important points in the annual cycle. It remains a scholarly reconstruction rather than an unquestioned historical certainty, but it is a serious attempt to rebuild an Indigenous astronomical calendar from fragmentary evidence.
And suddenly the date becomes interesting.
Mid-August.
Harvest.
Sky.
Calendar.
Renewal.
Tomorrow is 12 August.
I do not mean that the Guanches predicted tomorrow's eclipse or that we have evidence they performed a particular ritual for it.
We do not.
But the eclipse is happening above a landscape where human beings were already observing the sky long before modern astronomy arrived.
And perhaps that is enough.
We do not need to invent secret ancestral knowledge.
We can begin with something simpler.
They looked.
They watched the horizon.
They watched the Moon.
They noticed when particular stars disappeared and returned.
They noticed when the Sun changed its position across the year.
The sky was not background decoration.
It participated in life.
Magec, Guayota and the story we should handle carefully
If you search online for Guanche mythology today, you will quickly encounter a spectacular story.
Guayota, the dark being associated with Teide, captures Magec, the Sun, and imprisons it inside the volcano.
The world falls into darkness.
The Guanches call upon Achamán.
Achamán defeats Guayota, restores Magec and seals Guayota inside Echeyde.
It is almost irresistible as an eclipse story.
But this is exactly where our promise about truth becomes important.
What can be traced securely in early post-conquest written sources is the association of Guayota with Echeyde/Teide and a feared malignant power.
The elaborate narrative linking Guayota, Magec, Achamán and the imprisonment and liberation of the Sun is enormously popular in modern retellings, but I would be cautious about presenting every detail of that narrative as securely documented pre-conquest Guanche belief.
That distinction matters.
It would be easy to write:
“The ancient Guanches believed an eclipse meant Guayota had captured Magec.”
It would also make a wonderful social-media caption.
But I have not found reliable evidence that allows us to make that specific eclipse claim.
So perhaps the more respectful sentence is:
We do not know how the Guanches interpreted a solar eclipse.
Maybe stories existed that were never written down.
Maybe rituals existed.
Maybe people feared for the Sun.
Maybe they experienced eclipses within an entirely different cosmological framework.
Maybe generations of oral knowledge disappeared during conquest and cultural transformation.
We cannot recover every lost voice.
And perhaps respecting that silence is itself a way of respecting ancestry.
We do not have to invent our ancestors in order to feel close to them.
Maybe that is one of the deeper lessons
Modern spirituality sometimes seems frightened of the words:
I don't know.
But I don't know is not an empty space.
Sometimes it is the beginning of genuine curiosity.
Science itself advances because someone admits:
We don't know yet.
Archaeology advances because fragments remain unresolved.
Philosophy survives because certain questions refuse to disappear.
And spirituality, perhaps, becomes more mature when mystery does not immediately need an explanation.
An eclipse is produced by geometry.
That does not make it meaningless.
A rainbow is produced through the interaction of light and water, and still we stop to look.
Music consists of vibrations travelling through air, yet knowing this does not explain why one song opens grief we had hidden for years.
Love involves neurochemistry, attachment, memory and physiology—and still none of those descriptions exhausts the experience of loving someone.
Knowing how something happens does not automatically tell us what experiencing it means.
Science may ask:
What is happening?
History asks:
How have people understood it?
Anthropology asks:
How does culture shape that understanding?
Philosophy asks:
What does this reveal about being human?
Embodied practice asks:
What happens inside me when I experience it?
Spirituality may ask:
What relationship do I choose to enter with this moment?
Those questions do not have to fight one another.
Perhaps Balaboa belongs precisely in the place where they meet.
Shadow does not have to mean evil
There is one piece of eclipse symbolism I would keep completely.
Shadow.
Not as contamination.
Not as a dangerous vibration entering the aura.
Not as something from which we must protect ourselves.
But as a profoundly human metaphor.
Every life contains things that are easy to illuminate and things we would prefer not to see.
Fear.
Grief.
Desire.
Pride.
Old wounds.
Contradictions.
Our need to control.
Our need to be loved.
Our resentment.
Our tenderness.
Our longing to belong.
We often imagine healing as becoming permanently luminous.
Perhaps integration asks something more difficult.
Can I remain present when part of my inner Sun disappears?
Can I stay with uncertainty instead of immediately escaping it?
Can I listen to discomfort before trying to silence it?
Can I meet what emerges without immediately calling it good or bad?
Can light and shadow belong to the same person?
Alchemy imagined transformation through the meeting of opposites.
Psychology may speak about integration.
A nervous-system perspective may speak about increasing our capacity to remain present with sensation, emotion and uncertainty.
Balaboa might simply call it:
listening.
A Balaboa eclipse practice
This is not an ancient Guanche ritual.
It is not an Egyptian ceremony.
And it does not claim to protect you from a cosmic portal.
It is simply a contemporary Balaboa practice inspired by attention, nature, embodiment and respect for the sky.
Before the eclipse, choose where you want to be.
You may feel drawn to open landscape and sky.
You may prefer quietness at home.
Neither choice is spiritually superior.
If you are going outside to observe the eclipse, first take care of your physical eyes.
Tenerife will experience a partial eclipse, which means there is no safe naked-eye phase. Whenever you look directly toward the Sun you need proper solar viewing glasses or another safe solar-viewing method. Ordinary sunglasses are not adequate.
Then perhaps put your phone away for a few minutes.
Feel your feet.
Notice the volcanic ground beneath you.
Notice your breath without trying to change it.
Notice the temperature of the air against your skin.
Before looking upward, look around.
What colour is the landscape?
How are the shadows falling?
What are the birds doing?
What does the air feel like?
Can you notice the difference between what you expected the eclipse to feel like and what is actually happening?
Using proper eclipse protection, look toward the changing Sun.
Then return your attention to the body.
Instead of asking:
What energy is the eclipse sending me?
perhaps ask:
What is this moment revealing in me?
As the eclipse deepens, allow some silence.
You might hold three questions:
What am I ready to see that I normally leave in shadow?
What part of myself have I treated as an enemy because I have not yet learned how to listen to it?
What no longer needs to travel with me when the light returns?
Do not force an answer.
The body does not always speak in sentences.
Perhaps there is an emotion.
A sensation.
A memory.
An image.
A desire to cry.
A desire to laugh.
A feeling of peace.
Or nothing at all.
Nothing is allowed too.
No cosmic performance is required.
When the eclipse moves toward sunset, notice what remains.
No dramatic declaration is necessary.
No promise to become a new person tomorrow.
No need to burn the old self.
Perhaps simply place a hand over the heart, the abdomen, or wherever feels natural.
Feel one complete breath enter.
Feel it leave.
And remember:
The Moon did not destroy the Sun.
The Sun did not defeat the Moon.
Nothing went wrong.
For a little while, from one particular place on a small planet, one celestial body moved across our view of another.
And because we were here to experience it, something in us may have moved too.
The sacred does not require fear
I do not think we honour an eclipse by frightening ourselves.
And I do not think we honour ancient cultures by placing modern beliefs into their mouths.
Ancient people did not speak with one voice.
Some withdrew.
Some prayed.
Some made enormous noise.
Some worried about kings.
Some imagined monsters.
Some imagined lovers.
Some watched the heavens closely enough to build calendars around celestial cycles.
And now we stand beneath the same sky with knowledge our ancestors did not possess.
We can calculate the alignment.
We can predict the minute.
We understand orbital mechanics.
We can study changes in the atmosphere.
We can watch the ionosphere respond.
And yet our ancestors may still have something to remind us of.
They knew how to stop when the sky changed.
Maybe tomorrow we can hold both.
Science without disenchantment.
Spirituality without fabrication.
Ancestry without invention.
Mystery without fear.
Observation without consumption.
Presence without needing to explain everything.
Because perhaps the deepest invitation of an eclipse is not to decide whether darkness is good or bad.
Perhaps it is to notice what happens when something we take completely for granted—the light—is temporarily interrupted.
To remember how dependent life is upon it.
To remember how small we are beneath the sky.
To remember that shadow does not destroy light.
And perhaps, for a few minutes, to discover whether we are capable of remaining fully present while
light and shadow belong to the same sky.
Balaboa — learning, unlearning, listening.
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