The most common story concerning eclipses it that which probably find its best form in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Here the time travelling hero, Hank Morgan, has been sentenced to burn at the stake, but manages to escape, stupefying the Arthurian court by causing the Sun to go black, because he knows that an eclipse is due.

This story has been attributed to Christopher Columbus saving himself from Carib Indians, Belgian explorers escaping cannibals and gaining their land for the Belgian Empire, even to that most famous Belgian of all, Tintin the boy reporter, in Prisoners of the Sun.

Such stories are, of course, simply the expression of the superiority of the scientifically advanced Westerner over everybody else, and essentially colonial in nature. But things are never as simple as this.

Many ancient cultures were perfectly capable of predicting eclipses , the Babylonians in particular, ever the great astronomers, developed a prediction mechanism called the saros, that enabled them to date eclipses in the past as well as the future.

The Babylonians, however, were great astronomers because they were great astrologers. The ability to predict a eclipse did not mitigate whatever omens or supernatural significance might be attached to it.

Traditionally eclipses are omens of bad luck, predicting disasters natural, martial or social. According to English tradition eclipses mean seven days' bad luck. It is usually seen as the sun being assaulted in some way, not surprising given the origins of most religions in sun worship - for the Chinese, for example, it was being eaten by a dragon, which the people had to frighten away.

This is not universal, however, Arctic American peoples, for example, see them as the sun and moon leaving heaven to check all is well on Earth. The people of Tahiti see them as the Sun and Moon making love, an example of that social attitude that made Tahiti so popular with eighteenth century Europeans.