On the evening of 12 August 2026, the moon will slide across the face of the sun, and a narrow band running through Reykjavík and northern Spain will briefly go dark: the first total solar eclipse over mainland Europe since 1999. Britain gets a partial version, weather permitting.
We know exactly when it will happen and for how long, which makes us unusual. For most of history a vanishing sun demanded explanation, and as Christopher Dell shows in Prophecies, working out what comes next is something every culture has found its own way to do.
1. The substitute king
Nobody watched the sky more anxiously than the scholars of Mesopotamia. Their great catalogue of celestial omens, the Enuma Anu Enlil, treated an eclipse as a direct threat to the king, although if Jupiter stayed visible while it happened, he was safe. The Assyrians developed a more thorough insurance policy. During a lunar eclipse a commoner would be dressed and enthroned as the šar pūhi, or ‘substitute king’, while the real one went into hiding; once the danger had passed, the stand-in was sacrificed to appease the gods. It was not a role with long-term prospects.
Nor was the fear a local one. For Hindus an eclipse meant the sun was being swallowed by the demon Rahu, and mantras were chanted to counter it. For the Greeks it announced the beginning of difficult times, for the Incas the death of a prince, and an Aztec manuscript took care to record the eclipse that darkened Mexico in 1496. In England the omen seemed amply confirmed when Henry I died in 1135, two years after the darkness of 1133.
Left: Figures from Cyprian Leowitz’s Eclipses luminarium, 1555, predicting eclipses up to 1600 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. Cod.icon. 181 Right: 'Watercolours from a ‘Comet Book’ of 1587, which drew on sources including Ptolemy and Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi. Universitätsbibliothek Kassel. 4° Ms. astron. 5
2. One day a month at Delphi
The Mediterranean's most celebrated oracles were women. Greece and Rome told stories of the sibyls, prophetesses so ancient that they were already semi-mythical in antiquity; the oracle of Delphi, though, was entirely real. The Pythia was Apollo's priestess, her title an echo of the serpent Python that the god was said to have killed there. She had to be over fifty and of respectable life, though she could come from perfectly ordinary origins, and she worked from an underground chamber in the temple, seated on a tripod above a fissure in the rock; it has long been speculated that vapours rising from it supplied her trances.
Consultations happened on a single auspicious day each month, one visitor at a time, on anything from plague and family trouble to war and matters of state, and her answers came back cryptic and occasionally in verse. The schedule was taken seriously: one Pythia, made to work on an inauspicious day, died afterwards.
A series of sibyls by Lucas van Leyden, c. 1530 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
3. The father of secrets
Delphi left its riddles for the visitor to untangle. In the Ifá tradition of the Yoruba culture of West Africa, interpretation is the whole profession. The babaláwo, literally the 'father of secrets', is a priest who reads destinies and steers decisions, acting as intermediary with Orunmila, the divine spirit of wisdom and prophecy, who speaks in turn with Olodumare, the high god.
A consultation involves casting palm nuts or an opele – a chain strung with shells, seeds or pieces of metal – onto a round wooden tray and reading the arrangement in which they fall. Each configuration, or odu, corresponds to a body of sacred verses to be applied to the matter in hand. There are 256 odu, each with multiple verses attached, so becoming a father of secrets means committing a genuinely forbidding quantity of poetry to memory.
Ifá divination vessel, mid- late 1800s The Cleveland Museum of Art. Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund 1994.200
4. The staff bearers
To the Norse mind, fate was not negotiable. It was spun into being by the Norns, the deities who sit at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, and neither humans nor gods could escape it. Seeing fate, however, was a gift, and it belonged overwhelmingly to women. Female seers were known as völvas, ‘staff bearers’, probably after the wands they carried, and graves of seeresses unearthed in Sweden have yielded exactly that: wands, buried alongside hallucinogenic seeds. In the great poem Völuspá, the ‘prophecy of the völva’, it is a seeress who tells Odin himself how the gods will be destroyed.
These women were not confined to myth. Veleda, in the 1st century CE, held real political sway over her tribe; the historian Cassius Dio records one of them, Ganna, meeting the emperor Domitian; and Ganna's likely student Waluburg turns up in the 2nd century CE on a pottery fragment by the First Cataract of the Nile, perhaps employed to read the swirling eddies of the river, a very long way from home.
Yggdrasill, 1859 Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at Boston Public Library, DL31 .M26 1859
5. Counting the days
Some cultures built prophecy into the calendar itself. Aztec diviners kept a sacred 260-day count, the Tonalpohualli or ‘counting of the days’, and consulted it to fix when crops should be sown and harvested, and what sort of luck a person could expect from the day of their birth. The instinct is far from extinct.
If you have ever hesitated over a Friday the 13th, you are taking part in it. In India, a bride or groom born under the malign influence of Mars may first be ‘married’ to a tree, so that the bad luck falls on the tree rather than the spouse; in China, dates with a four in them are shunned, since ‘four’ sounds like the word for ‘death’; in Thailand, Wednesday is held to be an unlucky day for a haircut, for reasons nobody can quite agree on; and in Japan a hospital patient may time their discharge to a lucky day. Auspicious days govern your fortunes while you are awake. The hours you spend asleep have a divinatory tradition of their own.
The Tonalpohualli or ‘day count’ calendar was used in Mesoamerica to determine lucky and unlucky days Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Jay I. Kislak Collection Washington, D.C. Kislak MS 1025
6. The dreaming pharaoh
The Egyptians treated dreams as dispatches from the gods, and produced manuals for decoding them: one, now in the British Museum, was written in around 1220 BCE and sorts dreams briskly into good and bad omens. A dream carried the will of the gods, which made it politically useful.
The prince Thutmose fell asleep in the shadow of the Great Sphinx, at that time half buried in sand, and dreamt that a god promised him the throne if he cleared it. He duly became pharaoh as Thutmose IV in around 1400 BCE, and set the whole story down on a stele erected between the Sphinx's front paws, where nobody could miss it. There may even have been chemical assistance: analysis of residue found in a mug shaped like the god Bes points to hallucinogens, taken to help the prophetic visions along.
Astrology: the Egyptian zodiac. Coloured engraving by J. Chapman after V. Denon. Wellcome Collection, London, 46433i
7. What did Mother Shipton actually predict?
Dreams made pharaohs in Egypt; in England, prophecy made money. The country’s most famous home-grown prophet was supposedly born in a cave at Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in around 1488. Ursula Sontheil studied botany, acquired a reputation as a witch and grew after her death in 1561 into the semi-legendary Mother Shipton, a near contemporary of Nostradamus who did most of her prophesying posthumously: the first mentions of her appear decades later, and a pamphlet of 1641 has her foreseeing the dissolution of the monasteries and the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. By 1666 her stock was high enough that Samuel Pepys notes the royal family discussing her prediction of the Great Fire of London, and the cave itself, open to visitors since 1630, is believed to be the oldest tourist attraction in England.
Her best-known prophecy, however – ‘The world to an end shall come; in eighteen hundred and eighty-one’ – first appeared in print in 1862, three hundred years after she died, and turned out to be a hoax inserted by the publishers to lift sales. Undeterred, later editions moved the date to 1981, and then to 1991, earning her a fresh round of press attention in the late 1970s. The apocalypse, it seems, can be rescheduled.
Mother Shiptons prophecies, 1651(?) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, BEIN Nkk94 Sh5 +651
8. The end of the world
It usually is. The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar held that an earlier world had run for 5,126 years before it ended, and the matching cycle of our own era ran out on 21 December 2012. Nothing in Mesoamerican mythology promised that anything would actually happen, but a suggestion made in 1966 by the scholar Michael D. Coe, that the ancient Maya themselves may have anticipated a cataclysm (a reading other scholars disputed, noting that Long Count cycles never actually end), was taken up by New Age thinkers and grew into a cottage industry of Maya apocalypse, complete with crowds gathering at Pic de Bugarach in France to await the spectacular. Nothing came. This was a disappointment to some, and presumably a relief to the eight per cent of humanity who had admitted to feeling anxious about the date.
On 12 August the sky will darken on schedule, and this time we know precisely why: no dragon, no demon, just the moon, punctual to the second. Knowing hasn’t quite cured us, though. Stand in that shadow as the light drains away and you will feel the pull of the oldest question there is – what happens next? – and understand exactly why our ancestors never stopped asking it.
John Martin, The deluge, 1831 Wellcome Collection, London. 38154i
Prophecies by Christopher Dell is available now.
