Portends and Signs

Hope or dread in modern and ancient times.

The Northern Lights making shapes last night in the sky over Saskatchewan. Anyone else see a winged women moving towards the right, her face in profile with a Bear in her headdress? Just me?

Last night was a glorious Aurora night where I’m at. The kind where you stand outside at midnight with your naked eyes and marvel at the world. I took the above photo pointing straight up over me while I stood in my parent’s back yard in the middle of the city. I marvelled standing there how incomplete the photo was, how it couldn’t capture the dome of dancing light surrounding me. The dome of the Aurora teaches us that the world is indeed round, and that we are wrapped in a loving, protective cushion of atmosphere that she uses as a projection screen to make her art upon.

I stood there with my science and understanding and wondered what would have been made by nights like this in the Middle Ages? What would these angelic light shapes have portended to them? What do they mean to me?

It’s been feeling quite Medieval lately. The world balancing awaiting it’s fate with none of us really sure who is deciding. We’ve had eclipses and this week a comet that isn’t behaving as expected will visit the southeastern skies before dawn. Mother Earth has been prodded too long and has risen to remind us how fragile we are and just how we are also the ‘nature’ that we’ve tried to convince ourselves resides neatly in parks.

St Columba, Erna, the ancestors of Argyll and Ireland wouldn’t have felt the existential dread of knowing a 100 year hurricane was about to devastate a place 4000km away. But we know they had an understanding of these signs and portends in ways we will never understand again. Maybe they made up meanings that were convenient to them. Or maybe, like so many of the teachings that have been lost, their meanings were made from thousands of years of knowing and carrying memories. Maybe they didn’t know that Geneva was wiped out by a landslide or crops in Europe failed because of a large volcanic explosion in Indonesia, but maybe they recognized the signs that Mother Earth was awakened and shifting like now.

My Erna exists at a knife edge time too. The time when the people of the west of Scotland still knew some of the ways of their ancestors and when Christian doctrine had yet to decide to take it away. What must have that been like? I think it might have been like now—at least for those of us who aren’t committed to doctrine and prescriptive gods. Maybe Erna saw her angels in the aurora and felt the winds of hurricane remains crossing the Atlantic and it helped her decide in what actions hope lay for her.