some while ago we watched "Kamen Rider Wizard", a magic-themed Kamen Rider series in which the heroes struggle against "Phantoms", monstrous beings who are unleashed when magically sensitive persons, "Gates" as they're called in the show, are driven into extreme despair. if they're not saved by a Rider's intervention, and if they can't fight off despair by themselves, then it's like their soul fractures wide open and releases their inner demons, which take them over. this almost happens to the main Rider, Sōma Haruto, but he's able to subdue his Phantom and maintain a tense equilibrium with it, and that's what gives him the ability to wield his Wizard powers. by the way, Haruto's Phantom is a great dragon.
the crisis starts when a mad-scientist physics genius turns to studying magic after the death of his child, and he organizes a massive ritual to create Phantoms deliberately—timed to coincide with a total solar eclipse. he successfully drives a whole bunch of people into despair all at once, because of the disappearance of the Sun...it's such an evocative moment, and I ask myself why it feels so appropriate.
science tells us that solar eclipses are a routine thing. we can predict to a high degree of accuracy where and when they occur; we can calculate exactly how long one ought to last at a given spot on the Earth's surface. I went to see one myself, in 2018, in a spot where totality was very short...and yet the moment of totality is still burned into memory. it almost didn't matter how short the eclipse was; I saw the Sun disappear, and I saw the red rim of the chromosphere come into clear view just for that brief moment in time—there's no mistaking the moment.
if you're like me, and myth and poetry mean something to you...then maybe you too, in such a moment, might wonder if the Norse myths were right, and one day the wolf Sköll will catch up to the Sun for good. maybe it's impossible not to imagine—whatever Science™ teaches us about eclipses—that some day the eclipse will never end, and the Sun will never reëmerge.
an irrational fear, you may say. but it's not every day or even every decade that one sees, with their own eyes, the Sun disappear into a ring of red fire.
~Chara