America's Old Tryst With Kinich Ahau

On Monday, the good people of America observed a ritual that goes back centuries. Invoking Kinich Ahau, the Mayan sun god – without actually invoking him, since most Americans are unaware of the deity’s existence – millions observed the Great American Eclipse, or GEA, in parts of Mexico, 15 US states and eastern Canada. Unlike what we, in Asia, consider to be GAE – the decline of the US as a global power – Monday’s phenomenon was the celestial spectacle of a total solar eclipse.

The path of totality, where the moon fully obscured the sun, was over 161 km wide beginning on Mexico’s Pacific coast, moving northeast through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, upwards towards New York, New Hampshire and Maine, before stepping off the gas in Canada. Six minutes after the stroke of the midnight hour here in India, when most of us slept, Texans made a tryst with destiny in the form of Ixchel, the Mayan moon goddess, blocked out Kinich Ahau, creating minutes of darkness, bar the latter’s glowing halo, or corona.

The religious fervour was evident as millions observed the ritual of taking out their mobile phones to click pictures of the Dark Ring in the Sky and muttering the holy words of ancient awe, ‘Awesome!’ The rest of us witnessed a custom of a continent that, for all its trysts with modernity, goes back in time, and space.