Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 returning in 2019 on 16 July, started officially on 9 December 1658.
Its energies manifest as extra factors that define situations beyond its nature and context.
In 1658, Oliver Cromwell had been ‘Lord Protector’ for five years and imposed on royal forces, establishing the Commonwealth of England.
He dissolved the Parliament and instituted something similar; as Protestant Christian he was against the Catholics and as military he marched to conquer, not without cruelty, Ireland and Scotland against those he considered heretics; he claimed to defend freedom of cult and conscience but tortured those he called blasphemous. Many of his laws described as draconian are part of his record and genocide too.
Impossible to describe such a personality in a few lines, less so as even today he is controversial. However, in December 1658, when he was 58 years old, neither those who supported him nor those who opposed him, not even what he did or did not defined a halt to his power.
He was afflicted by a fever thought to be malaria, then an episode on kidneys due to a stone, but it’s also considered he died rapidly because of sepsis. Whatever it was, all the power he accumulated and events unfolding were defined by extra factors that took him out the way.
It happened again during the third return of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 in 1694, during the reign of Mary II of England, who at thirty two years of age ruled together with her husband William III and her life was interrupted by smallpox.
Before that, on the second return of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 in 1676, Dutch Anton van Leeuwenhoek observed, drew and described bacteria. Although his work, due to several factors, was recognized and validated only centuries later.
He was a businessman, pioneer in experiments to observe the worlds of microbiology and even to develop technological tools to do it. Around three hundred letters he wrote to the Royal Society, members of which at the beginning showed scepticism for the work of a ‘self-taught scientist’, but also due to the distrust Leeuwenhoek had to show his experiments.
Besides, they did not have the tools required to repeat those experiments. He did not share all his knowledge and specially refrained from transferring how he built the microscopes he used, and in spite of donating more than twenty to the Royal Society, a century later they disappeared. No one was to know how he made the lenses to observe.
Only in the twentieth century, when scientists were able to reach the required technology to observe with microscopes with the resolution and clarity of Leeuwenhoek’s lenses, was his work validated. Today, he is recognized as precursor of experimental biology and cell biology, for contributing to the “establishment of microbiology as a scientific discipline” and as the Father of Microbiology.
Jumping to the last returns of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139, more exactly on June 1947, pilot Kenneth Albert Arnold, entered the records of the North American Air Force classified as ‘mirage’, when he reported about the sighting of nine unusual objects on the sky of Rainier, Washington. It was the same year of another famous sighting: Roswell.
Three decades later, Arnold would express that in spite of more than fifteen million witnesses who reported sightings, the matter was not yet taken seriously. That, for him, was more fantastic than flying objects themselves or people from Venus.
During the return of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 in 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States, received from his scientific advisers a report to restore the quality of the environment. The report stated that contaminants altered at a global scale the content of carbon dioxide and concentrations of lead on oceans and human populations. Almost a decade after, extra factors are added in thousands of reports, though the state of contamination prevails and/or is worst.
The following return of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 in 1983, an event that due to extra factors was not really taken into account when it was reported, such as the description that three scientists made on the use of plasmid Ti Agrobaterium Tumefacines to produce transgenic plants. Notwithstanding it was the official start of genes alteration in plants through the modification of hormones with such plasmid that expanded the industry of modified genes.
However patterns in history of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 during the return of year 1983 will sound more familiar about what has been classified as HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus or AIDS, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
That year a series of extra factors around the HIV/AIDS led the situation into contexts that were related to other things and many in discriminatory contexts.
Although the virus was isolated by French scientists, a North American scientist reports he had discovered it. The Nobel Prize was for the French given that the US scientists used samples from them in his experiments, but both share the patent. It was about the patent not the HIV virus.
Then, due to nine homosexuals in California diagnosed with the virus, a series of prejudices were unleashed, closer to beliefs than the syndrome. It was also said it was the Haitians the origin, a little after the Africans, ending up to blame the apes and other primates. Meanwhile, a movie suggested that it could come from a laboratory. In spite of extra factors, its origins remain blurred.
The last return of Lunar Eclipse Saros 139 in 2001, these patterns of extra factors are found in what is known as the anthrax attacks. Weeks after the attacks of New York towers, letters were sent to some media and two senators containing anthrax spores.
Extra factors have almost nothing to do with anthrax itself. Rather, they are related to events unfolding during investigations, creating other circumstances.
First, they tried to relate the anthrax attacks with those of the towers and those who hijacked planes on September 11, but later it was ruled out; also they were attributed to war with biological weapons, although it was proven that those spores used were not turned into weapons.
Then, Sadam Hussein was blamed by deduction, since it was assumed that amthrax contained bentonite and Iran was the only country producing biochemical weapons. Later on, the presence of bentonite was ruled out.
In 2010, the FBI came to the conclusion that the attacks were perpetrated by a scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who comitted suicide previously in 2008. And before that, they broke into his house, he lost his job and was forced into a psychiatric hospital. Several academics and authorities doubted that conclusion.
Nor was the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), that the FBI required to review the scientific evidence, able to arrive to such concrete results as they were presented. Rather, PNAS expressed that with evidence available it was not possible to have definitive conclusions.
But, investigations lasted a decade after the attacks, which happened between 18 September and 9 October of 2011. The most important extra factor happened on the two following days, 10 and 11 October, when the FBI and the Center for Disease Control authorized the Iowa University to destroy the anthrax archives. Gone with them was evidence and the collection of spores gathered for seven decades.
Events chosen to illustrate the energies and patters in the history of eclipses are those with greater impact globally, following those registered by official history. Sources used, unless specified, are those of public access and can be found/verified in Wikipedia.
If you would like to search for other patterns in history or in current events for this eclipse, or, evoke how these energies acted at the local and /or personal level, read Energies from Eclipses.
Information on the eclipse such as date, time, visibility, general data, Saros family and last returns can be found in Eclipses July 2019.
Find energies and patterns in history from the previous Total Solar Eclipse on 2 July 2019 here.