In an age where light is only the flick of a switch away, it's easy to take for granted just how much life as we know it depends on the sun, ever rising and setting exactly on schedule, day after day, year after year. But for most of human history, syncing life to the rhythm of the Sun was not as optional as it is today. Consider perhaps how disruptive a sudden power outage is to your day. Then contemplate what would happen if it never came back on, you may start to get a sense of what it was like on those rare occasions when the midday sun seemed to vanish behind a black veil, abandoning the world to darkness, if only for a brief moment. Cultures throughout human history, seemingly unconnected by geography or time, looked to this brief overturning of the natural order with fear, portending all manner of ill fortunes, from the death of Kings, to the calamitous end of life on Earth. In some cases, the only way to forestall the Doom signified by the Sun, seemingly being devoured in the sky, was human sacrifice, an offering of blood to appease the dark forces being unleashed. While today, science offers us a sort of shield from what may seem like silly superstitions, they're still lives in us all a primordial nature shared by 10,000 generations of humanity that looks up at a solar eclipse and sees death.