Sasha Sagan offers eclipse advice, history and a sense of awe to her hometown of Ithaca

With under a week left before New York skies darken during a total solar eclipse on April 8, Sasha Sagan is gearing up for a family trip back to her hometown of Ithaca and will try to catch a glimpse of the celestial event on her way back to her Massachusetts home.

Sagan is bringing along more than her family for the ride, including a sense of wonder and awe toward the unknown and the many rituals humans have ascribed to the Earth's natural cycles.

“I’m very interested in rituals and traditions that seem to have appeared independently of one another throughout the world, the sort of convergent evolution of societal norms and ideas,” Sagan said Tuesday in an interview with the Journal. “I’m especially interested in the ones that have real astronomical or biological phenomena at their core, so I write a lot about the Equinoxes, biological changes like birth and coming of age that have, all throughout the world, so many rituals attached to them.”

Times are changing

Be it birthdays, funerals, or major holidays, Sagan dissects the human aspect of the natural world in her book "For Small Creatures Such as We" which she'll be selling, signing, and speaking on when she comes to Ithaca's Hangar Theatre April 7.

Solar eclipse 2024: These events in the Finger Lakes region focus on the celestial event

“I think the reason we have traditions and rituals is because it’s hard to process change,” she said. “Life in this universe is constant change and it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it. Some of those changes are permanent like birth and death, and some are cyclical like the changing of the seasons.”

“Sometimes we have these artificial or at least unsubstantiated stories we often tell ourselves about our place in the universe, and we sort of gloss over parts of the human experience, earthling experience,” she said. “Sometimes we’re so used to these ideas that we forget how beautiful and profound they are. The sun, for example, is extremely easy to be blasé about, but it is extremely important to us.”

Sagan pointed to the countless sun gods worshipped throughout history as an early human explanation for the season, and eclipses, however, the later was often handled with more fear than a simple change of attire.

“The idea of the sun suddenly going away in the middle of the day is so unnerving, there’s something about that that must have been terrifying if you weren’t expecting it, didn’t know what caused it, or thought it was something we had done as humans that had displeased the heavenly powers that be,” she said. “It makes sense that you see so many stories explaining how a solar eclipse happens and so many rituals that have to do with chasing the shadow of the moon. Even once we understand it and know that it is not a threat, feeling a little unnerved by it is interesting.”

For a more recent example, this past Sunday was Easter Sunday for people who are practicing Christians, or just enjoy chocolate bunnies and spring revelry. Why does it fall when it does? Part of it is because the Council of Nicea felt it was very important that Easter never fall during an eclipse, Sasha said.

“There’s something about (an eclipse) that is a little bit upsetting to us, and that echo, we can still hear it in our lives today,” she said. “So much of the history of our relationships with eclipses is the idea that it was a bad omen, specifically for leaders. You have these amazing stories of leaders going into hiding, including Alexander the Great, because of the idea that an eclipse would create political change or unrest.”

This was shown throughout human history in China, Europe and what is now South America, according to Sagan.

“I think that we, as my parents wrote about at length, are pattern recognition junkies and we want to feel, so much of human history at its core, the traditions, the stories, and belief systems are a way that we come to terms with the immense stressful, inconvenience of our inability to predict the future,” Sagan said.

“We find patterns where sometimes there are none and I understand deeply why it feels like innately like something bad, but I think that there's something so profoundly beautiful about the idea that other planets have moons, sometimes many, and we just have the one, but the proportions of the size of our moon and the distance of our moon and the distance of the Sun from us, create this, this geometric possibility to have a total eclipse, which is not possible, as far as we know, (on) other planets to my knowledge,” she continued.

Sagan’s advice: Save the doom and gloom for the things that are evidence-based sources of doom and gloom and find the beauty in the natural world, because there's no shortage of that.

Family ties and catching a glimpse of totality

Sagan called herself lucky to be able to return to Ithaca a few times each year.

“There's just nowhere else like it,” Sagan said. “I grew up in Ithaca. I have all my same best friends that I had when I was a kid and were spread out around the country, but we are all proud Ithacans.”

Sagan even met her husband, Jonathan Noel when they attended Boynton Middle School in the city, although they didn’t get together until college with Noel graduating from Cornell University and Sagan from New York University.

“I think one of the many elements of what makes it such a wonderful place to grow up is, it's a very, scientifically literate place and that people really are very curious and people have a deep appreciation for nature and a deep curiosity," she said. "There's so many interesting people from all over the world and to have that in a small town like (Ithaca,) it’s unlike any other.”

The city proves this curiosity and appreciation for the natural world with its Carl Sagan Planet Walk, named after the acclaimed Astronomer, Sasha’s father.

The Ithaca School District’s Board of Education recently voted to close schools for the celestial event, a move which Sasha Sagan said, is inspiring.

“What an amazing thing to celebrate,” Sagan said. “We have so many holidays, we have lots of days off from school, over the year that for my mind are not as profound, powerful and meaningful as an eclipse.”

This article originally appeared on Ithaca Journal: Solar eclipse 2024: Ithaca native Sasha Sagan talks about the eclipse