Dancing in the Lights 

By: Emily Eade 

The soft colors of blue, red, pink, green, and purple danced throughout the nighttime sky. My hands turned red and burned as the cold air hit my skin. Gazing into the brightly painted sky, all I could think about were the people who came before me and their thoughts on this magical phenomenon.

Many know the scientific meaning behind the northern lights and why they occur. The aurora is caused by the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and charged particles from the sun through solar flares, and other solar storms. But what most people don’t know is that many cultures take it as a sign from their culture’s folklore.

The Indigenous cultures believe that the northern lights are the spirits of their ancestors. Although the two known polar region native groups have different thoughts about the spirits of their ancestors. The Inuit people, from Alaska and Greenland, believe that the lights are the souls of their deceased relatives, some believing that the lights are the dancing spirits of children who died at birth. Whereas, The Cree tribes, from Canada, also believe that the lights are a way to communicate with their ancestors.

The Greeks and Romans believed that the northern lights represented their respective pantheons’ the Goddess of Dawn. For the Greeks, this would be their goddess Eos, and for the Romans, this would be their goddess, Aurora. The story is that she would race across the sky in her multi-colored chariot to wake her siblings, her brother, the sun, and her sister, the moon every morning.

In some cultures, there are known legends that are associated with the northern lights. In Chinese culture, legends associated the northern lights with dragons, the lights were celestial battles between good and evil dragons. In Irish folklore it suggests that a raw material would fall from the sky, this material was said to be a cure for burns. A Finnish legend says that the aurora is a firefox racing in the sky, whereas, in the Anishinaabe culture, legend has it that the aurora proves to us that more awaits on the other side.

The northern lights, also scientifically known as Aurora Borealis, come from the Greek words aurora, meaning sunrise, and boreas, meaning wind. It can be seen through many cultures that the northern lights have a significant impression on them. The spiritual meaning behind the northern lights has always been significant to me and the reason why I have always wanted to view them with my own two eyes.