Signs and portents

[mmcirvin]

Lest you think I have gone all Popstrological, I should say that I found this little anecdote of Phil Plait's poignant and slightly unsettling. Plait has just seen a particularly pretty sun halo and points it out to an acquaintance:

I showed her the halo too. Her reaction was not what I expected.

She gasped, looked at it for a moment, and then asked me, “What does it mean?”

I gawked at her for a second. “What do you mean, ‘what does it mean’?” I asked.

She looked right back at me. Her tone was more plaintive. “What does it mean?” she repeated.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I replied. “It just is.”

She watched me for a moment, then turned back to the sky. I waited for her to say something more, but when she didn’t, I began walking back home again, leaving her to try to extract some sort of purpose from a random event.

I'd be tempted to say "It means it's going to rain soon," as this is what sundogs and haloes traditionally portend to sailors and the like, and as portents go they are moderately accurate. But this perhaps wouldn't be a sufficiently satisfying meaning.

Comments

[jwgh]

I'm not sure it's entirely fair to assign a particular meaning to the woman's question, but on the other hand I wasn't there.

(She might have meant something along the lines of 'what causes that to happen?' In which case the answer would have been something like 'It means that there are ice crystals in the air; this causes the light from the sun to refract the sunlight, resulting in the halo.' Or not.)

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

What in the heck is a sun halo?

[iayork.livejournal.com]

It means the sun has been very, very good -- even better than the sun Happy Face, which is more common, but harder to see because you shouldn't look directly at Mr. Sun with Mr. and Mrs. Watery Eyes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing. (http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/phenom.htm) They're far more common than is usually realized.

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Tibetans ascribe great meaning to this phenomenon - is it more common at high altitudes? - and it's commonly claimed that sun haloes appear at the death or rebirth of great sages. One of the main symbols of dzogchen, a high form of meditation, is a Tibetan letter 'A' shown in a sun halo (http://dzogchen.galeon.com/ahh.jpg).