Alas, the end times appear to have been a bit of a disappointment again, with no reports that I can see of people rising into the sky en masse or that mass human sacrifice someone was predicting, or the serial earthquakes the northeast US was supposed to get according to some others… I suppose we’ve still got a few days before the red heifer thing works out. Needless to say, though, the idiots have still been out in force online; on Youtube they’ve mostly manifested as astrologers, who I’m sure are harmless, but there was a ton of religious cranks (Muslim ones, not just Christians) who I’m a lot less sure of. And then there was this guy:
No reason not to use a common astronomical event to whip up a bit of Islamophobia, eh? Always the way with these far-right American pastors…
…Oh, he’s Australian? Fuck. Well, be honest, you would’ve expected him to be American too with the amount of bullshit his channel has about American politics. Though by that logic, you’d probably think I was American too or something… Anyway, Steve was born into “a family of Buddhists, Catholics, Methodists, and Muslims” and came away from it with the worst aspects of all of them, by the look of it. I’m sure him and Danny Nalliah would be great mates.
Still, this struck me as egregious even by comparison:
Um… no? I watched a bit of the video itself which is a lot more vague about things than this thumbnail for it might indicate, but I’m fairly sure that the fact that Crowley claimed to have started channelling Liber AL on April 8th 1904 and the fact that there was a solar eclipse on the same date 120 years years are entirely unrelated. I mean, Crowley himself attached so little importance to the book that he actually lost the manuscript for a few years, so I don’t think he would’ve attached any importance to the date coincidence either…
Anyway, the eclipse happened and people were excited, weather seems to have been good for most places, and I’ve seen a bunch of great photos of it online:
Ganked from the Graun, that was the view from Toronto. The Sun itself put on a good show before the Moon moved on; someone in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group posted this photo they got:
…And then noted that the solar prominence you can see at the bottom is the size of the Earth.
FUCK.
See, I find that sufficiently head-spinning without having to a bunch of religious bullshit about the end of the world and all that. (And what about the other countries that got to see the eclipse? Does God have a separate judgement for Mexico and Canada? What about all the other countries on Earth that saw nothing, are we off the hook?) The spectacle was more than enough, especially for some of the people I saw on YT having a moment together in news videos of it getting darker and darker. Celestial mechanics can be damned pretty to look at. And however cheesy it may be, I think the message of this song is basically correct and I fucking love it:
Now I think about it, though, I can imagine some dickhead might look at that and think “Apoptygma Berzerk… wait, Apop sounds like Apep, and APEP is the name of that rocket thing NASA was doing during the eclipse, and don’t they have an album called Rocket Science too? Apop… Apep… Stephan Groth is the Antichrist?!” If people can believe some of the shit I’ve seen lately, someone can believe that, I’m sure…
Anyway, so much for the apocalypse, I suppose. We’re due to get a total solar eclipse in 2028 that’ll actually be visible here in Sydney, so I suppose that’ll be something to get excited about, cos according to Wiki the last one we got here was in 1857 and the next one won’t be visible until 2858. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be around for that. Somehow I also suspect the weather on that day in 2028 will also be shit and no one will see anything…
