Readers who watch the skies may be interested in the following account by Sirkar van Stolk of the reaction of Hazrat Inayat Khan during a lunar eclipse nearly a hundred years ago. Sirkar was travelling with Hazrat Inayat as a secretary at the time, and he records this event in his book,”Memories of a Sufi Sage.’ At the conclusion of the Summer School in 1924, they had journeyed to Rome, and then on to Naples, where the following occurred. According to the records, there was a partial lunar eclipse on February 8th, 1925, which would have been visible across Europe.

One evening I went along to Murshid’s room after dinner, expecting him to greet me with the serenity I had come to associate with him. But I was to receive a shock. For the first time since I had known him, he was not calm. He was, indeed, extremely restless and disturbed — a state totally uncharacteristic of him. I did not then realise what a unique insight I was about to receive into the inner life of Hazrat Inayat Khan.

Although I had long been fascinated by the subject of the moon’s influence, I had never realised, until that evening in Naples, the extent to which it could react upon such a highly evolved being as Hazrat Inayat Khan. I had no idea at all of what was affecting him as he moved, restless and rather distrait, about the room; and I was surprised when he asked me to draw back the curtains and look to see if there was anything wrong with the moon. I did as he requested. The moon was at the full; but even as I watched, a great black shadow started moving across its surface.

“An eclipse!” I said. ‘The start of an eclipse.”

“I thought so,” was his answer.

He then said that he was going for a walk — and asked me to accompany him. We started along the boulevard bordering the Bay; but instead of proceeding at his usual calm, dignified pace, Murshid walked so fast that even I, with my long legs, could hardly keep up with him. His hair flew out behind him, and he was clearly very much out of his true rhythm. There was, for me, an atmosphere of unreality about the whole evening: the sudden plunging of the moonlit world into darkness; the inexplicable agitation of Murshid’s behaviour.

After about twenty minutes of walking, Murshid returned to the hotel and asked me to join him in his room an hour later. I did so, still filled with disquiet; and again I was to receive a surprise. All signs of his strange behaviour had vanished; he was as peaceful and relaxed as ever. He asked me to sit down and began to speak about lunar influences. I pondered the subject a great deal in the days following; and I came to the conclusion that behind this curious interlude there lay a deep significance.

Those who live an inspired life and have to remain constantly open to the inflow of higher cosmic forces are often intimately linked up with the different phases of the moon. If artists, musicians, and other creative workers are affected by these, how much more so are beings such as Hazrat Inayat Khan, who live at a still higher state of realisation. The fine, inspirational radiations of moonlight are, to such a being, a sort of life blood.

When the sudden darkness blotted out the moon that night in Naples, it was as if Murshid had been cut off abruptly from the source of his strength, from those vital cosmic forces which normally nourished his being. It seemed as if the eclipse had served — as he himself said later — to bring him to him in a most direct way the fact that power and inspiration do not originate in ourselves, but from an outside and far greater source.

“I felt all the inspiration had gone from me,” he said. “I was limited in a way which I have never been before.”