The Aurora Through History: When the Sky Started to Move

From the lands of the Bible to telegraph offices in 1859, the northern lights have surprised farmers, prophets, emperors, sailors, and scientists. This is the story of what people thought was happening when the sky began to glow.

Imagine standing on a hillside in the ancient world. There are no streetlights, no headlights, no glow from distant cities. Night is truly dark. The stars are so sharp that they almost feel close enough to touch.

Then, without warning, the sky itself begins to move. Pale bands of light rise silently from the horizon. They twist, ripple, and spread until the whole northern sky looks like a curtain of living fire. You do not know what solar wind is. You have never heard the phrase “magnetosphere.” All you know is that heaven looks like it has just opened.

For thousands of years, people have watched the aurora and tried to decide what it meant. Today we can model the electric currents that cause these lights, but the human reactions have always been the same: fear, awe, and the feeling that someone far greater than we are is speaking through the sky.

Lights Over the Lands of the Bible

The Bible never uses the scientific word aurora, but it was written in a world where strange lights in the sky were noticed and taken seriously. In the book of Job, we read, “Out of the north comes golden splendor; around God is awesome majesty” (Job 37:22, NKJV). The poet is not writing a lab report, but he is doing what people have always done when the northern sky glows: linking unusual light to the majesty of God.

Ezekiel, seeing his famous vision by the Kebar River in Babylon, describes “brightness all around” and something like glowing metal and flashing fire (Ezekiel 1:4, 27). Whether or not he was seeing an aurora, he reaches for the language of radiance, movement, and color in the heavens to describe the presence of the Lord.

Later prophets speak of “wonders in the heavens” (Joel 2:30) and Jesus Himself speaks of “signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars” (Luke 21:25). For people who lived under truly dark skies, a night when the heavens suddenly glowed red or green would naturally feel like one of those signs.

Babylonian Sky-Watchers and the First Written Auroras

Long before modern observatories, the kings of Babylon employed professional sky-watchers. Their job was simple: every night, look up and write down anything unusual. Over centuries, these observers filled clay tablets with systematic notes on eclipses, comets, and strange lights.

Modern researchers studying these tablets have found several entries that almost certainly describe auroras. One tablet from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (sixth century BC) records a mysterious red glow in the night sky that lasted for hours. Other tablets in the Astronomical Diaries from Babylonia mention “redness” or “flaring” in the sky that does not match ordinary weather or eclipses. To us, strong geomagnetic storms are the obvious explanation.

These Babylonian records are powerful because they are dated. When scientists match those dates with reconstructions of past solar activity, they see that some of those “red heavens” happened during periods of intense space weather. The same lights that thrill photographers in Norway today were startling astronomer-priests on the plains of Mesopotamia more than 2,500 years ago.

Five-Colored Lights in Ancient China

Far to the east, Chinese court astronomers were keeping their own careful watch. One ancient chronicle, known as the Bamboo Annals, describes a “five-colored light” seen in the northern sky during the reign of a Zhou dynasty king around the tenth century BC. Modern scholars see this as one of the earliest descriptions of an aurora: multiple colors, in the north, appearing high in the night sky.

Later Chinese histories, especially from the Song dynasty (tenth to thirteenth centuries AD), record many more events. They describe red vapors, bands, and curtains of light seen far to the south of what we usually think of as the auroral zone. These records have become a treasure trove for space-weather researchers trying to map how active the Sun was long before satellites began their work.

When we put the Babylonian and Chinese records side by side, a pattern emerges. During the most powerful solar storms, the aurora was not just a polar phenomenon. It pushed toward the equator, spilling its light over farmers, soldiers, merchants, and prophets who had no way to know that the Sun was to blame.

Greeks, Romans, and “Sky Flames”

Classical writers also noticed strange lights in the sky. A Greek explorer named Pytheas, sailing in the far north in the fourth century BC, mentioned a region where the sea, the air, and the heavens seemed to mix together in a luminous glow. Later, the Roman writer Seneca tried to classify different types of sky lights, using words that mean “torches,” “chasm,” and “bearded” forms as he described flickering shapes in the night.

Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, described terrifying celestial flames that split the sky and made people think the world was on fire. These events were rare enough in southern Europe that when they did appear, they were treated as omens. They might signal war, the death of a ruler, or divine anger. To the average Roman citizen, a blood-red aurora over the city of Rome would have felt like the sky itself had turned into a warning banner.

Centuries later, the name we use today, aurora borealis, came from the world of classical mythology. In the seventeenth century, astronomers borrowed the name of Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, and Boreas, the god of the north wind, to describe the “northern dawn” that sometimes lights up the night.

Medieval Chronicles and Northern Legends

In the Middle Ages, the aurora continued to appear as an uninvited guest in the night sky—and people kept writing about it. Monks in Europe filled the margins of their chronicles with notes about “fiery armies” battling overhead. In Scandinavia, a thirteenth century Norwegian text offers three guesses at what the northern lights might be: fires at the edge of the ocean, reflections of sunlight from beyond the horizon, or energy somehow stored in ice and released into the heavens.

Northern legends went even further. Some Norse traditions spoke of shields of the gods reflecting light across the sky. Indigenous peoples in Canada and the Arctic told stories of spirits dancing, ancestors playing ball with a walrus skull, or the souls of the departed traveling along radiant highways in the night. Even in regions where the aurora appears more often, it never quite became ordinary.

For Christians in medieval Europe, any blood-red aurora could be folded into biblical language about “signs in the heavens.” Wars, famines, and plagues often followed one another so closely that a glowing sky easily felt like part of a larger spiritual drama.

The Night the World Glowed: The Carrington Event of 1859

On September 1, 1859, an English astronomer named Richard Carrington was studying a cluster of sunspots when he saw something no one had ever drawn before: a sudden flash of brilliant white light right on the surface of the Sun. Seventeen hours later, the Earth discovered what that flash meant.

That night, the aurora did not just visit the usual arctic circle. It surged toward the equator, spilling over cities and countryside all around the world. Miners in the Rocky Mountains reportedly woke up in the middle of the night, thinking it was dawn, and began cooking breakfast. In the northeastern United States, people said they could read their newspapers outside at midnight by the light of the aurora alone.

The colors were incredible. Witnesses described curtains of green and white, but also intense crimson that made the whole sky look like it was on fire. Ships at sea recorded eerie glows on the horizon in directions where no city should have been. In places as far south as Hawaii, Cuba, and northern Mexico, people saw lights they had never seen before and sometimes never saw again for the rest of their lives.

Telegraph systems, the cutting-edge technology of the nineteenth century, began to misbehave. Some telegraph offices found that their equipment sparked violently. Others discovered something even stranger: they could disconnect their batteries entirely, and the wires still carried enough current—generated by the geomagnetic storm itself—to send messages powered only by the aurora.

The storm of 1859, now called the Carrington Event, is still the most powerful geomagnetic disturbance ever measured. If a storm of that magnitude hit today, it could disrupt power grids, satellites, and communications on a scale that would make our minor outages look trivial. Yet even then, in the middle of this silent cosmic disturbance, what most people remembered was not the technology. It was the sky.

From Mystery to Physics

For ancient observers, the aurora was almost always interpreted as a message: from gods, ancestors, angels, or fate. Today, we can trace that message back to its physical source. The Sun constantly sends out a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. When that wind becomes especially strong—during solar flares and coronal mass ejections—it slams into the magnetic field that surrounds our planet.

Earth's magnetic field funnels many of these particles toward the polar regions. There, high above our heads, they collide with atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen absorb that energy and then release it as light. The color depends on altitude and the type of gas: green from oxygen at one height, red from another, and blues and purples from nitrogen. The result is what we call the aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south.

Knowing the physics does not make the aurora less beautiful. If anything, it adds another layer of wonder. The silent curtains of light you see above your head are connected, in a very real way, to storms on the surface of the Sun 93 million miles away.

Why the Old Stories Still Matter

When you read the old accounts—the Babylonian tablets, the Chinese chronicles, the Roman histories, the medieval chronicles, and the notebooks of nineteenth-century telegraph operators—you start to notice something. The details change. The theories disagree. But the emotional reaction is almost identical across time and culture.

People stop what they are doing. They walk outside. They look up. Some are afraid. Some feel joy. Some pray. Some simply stare in silence, unable to find the right words. Whether they speak of gods or of charged particles, their hearts are responding to the same thing: a universe that is far more powerful, ordered, and surprising than they usually remember.

For readers of Scripture, the aurora can feel like a living footnote to verses such as, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). For others, it may stir questions about our place in a vast cosmos. In both cases, the effect is the same as it was on that ancient hillside: we are reminded that we are small, but not forgotten.

Here at Solar Ruler, our tools and maps are built to help you know when you might see these lights for yourself—to turn historical stories into tonight's plans. Somewhere above you, the Sun is still sending out its stream of particles, and Earth's magnetic field is still shaping them into ribbons of color. When the sky starts to move, you will be part of a story that stretches from Babylonian scribes and biblical poets all the way to the Carrington telegraph operators and beyond.

And if you ever find yourself under a sky that suddenly erupts in color, remember this: you are seeing the same lights that startled kings, comforted lonely shepherds, filled sailors with dread, and made miners think dawn had come hours too early. The aurora has always been more than just pretty lights. It is history, science, and—many would say—a quiet reminder from the Creator, written across the night.