The morning skies are spectacular again this week, with the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars still conferring in the vicinity of the heart star Regulus, an hour before dawn in the East. And though this is dazzling, we all know the daylight is waning, and our thoughts can’t help but turn toward things that stir in the dark.
While this conference of planets continues to brilliantly monopolize the morning stage, the evening sky is swallowing the Sun earlier and earlier. It’s no wonder, then, that in this season, it doesn’t take much to stir up sensational fears of the dark.
As long ago as the 8th century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod planted the seeds for this fear when he wrote that the goddess “…Night bore frightful Doom and the black Ker, and Death, and Sleep, and the whole tribe of Dreams…”
Closer to our own era, Washington Irving set his pen to immortalizing night time fears with his witty rendering of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", with its fantastic and frightening tale of the headless horseman. The horseman, he alleges “…is the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a canon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind…”
There are a lot of fairy tales about the hero that has to spend up to three full nights engaged in overcoming the monsters and demons that can only attack in the dark. So is it any wonder that despite centuries of invention that tries to overcome our worst imaginings, we are still beset with a natural fear of the dark?
From now until the end of the year we can depend on the morning planets to shine through the night fears that define this season, so that, whether real or imagined, the thrills and chills of the dark won’t succeed in overtaking us!
For the full text from Hesiod's "Theogony", follow this link: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm
Washington Irving's ":Legend of Sleepy Hollow" can be found here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41/41-h/41-h.htm