a serpent eats up the sun and moon when they arc eclipsed, or a
demon devours them. To this day the Hindoos consider that a giant
lays hold of the luminaries and tries to swallow them. The Chinese
call the solar eclipse zhishi (solis devoratio), the lunar yueshi (lunae
devoratio), and ascribe them both to the machinations of a dragon.
Nearly all the populations of Northern Asia hold the same opinion.
The Finns of Europe, the Lithuanians, and the Moors in Africa, have
a similar belief." [286] Flammarion says: "Among the ancient
nations people used to come to the assistance of the moon, by
making a confused noise with all kinds of instruments, when it was
eclipsed. It is even done now in Persia and some parts of China,
where they fancy that the moon is fighting with a great dragon, and
they think the noise will make him loose his hold and take to flight.
Among the East Indians they have the same belief that when the sun
and the moon are eclipsed, a dragon is seizing them, and
astronomers who go there to observe eclipses are troubled by the
fears of their native attendants, and by their endeavours to get into
the water as the best place under the circumstances. In America the
idea is that the sun and moon are tired when they are eclipsed. But
the more refined Greeks believed for a long time that the moon was
bewitched, and that the magicians made it descend from heaven to
put into the herbs a certain maleficent froth. Perhaps the idea of the
dragon arose from the ancient custom of calling the places in the
heavens at which the eclipses of the moon took place the head and
tail of the dragon." [287] Sir Edward Sherburne, in his "Annotations
upon the _Medea_," quaintly says: "Of the beating of kettles,
basons, and other brazen vessels used by the ancients when the
moone was eclipsed (which they did to drown the charms of
witches, that the moon might not hear them, and so be drawne from
her spheare as they suppos'd), I shall not need to speake, being a
thing so generally knowne, a custom continued among the Turks to
this day; yet I cannot but adde, and wonder at, what Joseph Scaliger,
in his 'Annotations upon Manilius,' reports out of Bonincontrius, an
ancient commentator upon the same poet, who affirms that in a
town of Italy where he lived (within these two centuries of yeares),
he saw the same piece of paganisme acted upon the like occasion."
[288] Another, and more recent writer, also says of these eclipses:
"The Chinese