Saint Elias and the noctilucent clouds of July
By Roberto de Mattei | 24 July 2024
In the last weeks of July, during the hours of twilight, there appeared in the sky a rare atmospheric phenomenon known as noctilucent clouds.
Noctilucent clouds are the highest on Earth, at an elevation of more than eighty kilometres. They occur when water vapour freezes into ice crystals embedded with tiny particles of meteorite dust, creating crystalline blue reflections. At the end of June 2024, an extraordinary display of noctilucent clouds was observed in Lithuania, and then, in July, to the amazement of astronomers, many of these clouds were seen in low-latitude countries like Northern Ireland, England, France, and even Italy.
Having to look for a symbolic meaning in everything that happens, it is thought-provoking that this unexpected phenomenon came about in the month of July, with the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the 16th and that of Saint Elias on the 20th. The cloud is in fact a symbol applied both to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and to Saint Elias and his disciples.
In the First Book of Kings, it is told that Saint Elias, after killing the false prophets of Baal, “went up to the top of Carmel, and casting himself down upon the earth, put his face between his knees, and he said to his servant: Go up, and look toward the sea. And he went up, and looked, and said: There is nothing. And again he said to him: Return seven times. And at the seventh time, behold, a little cloud arose out of the sea like a man’s foot.” (1 Kg 18:42–45) And in a short time, the sky darkened, the wind arose and a heavy rain fell.
In this cloud, Elias saw the mysterious symbol of the Lady who was to come, Mary, Queen of Carmel. The cloud symbolised Our Lady, and the rain Jesus Christ. But Elias too, taken up to Heaven by a chariot of fire and transported to an unknown place (2 Kg 2:11) is compared to a cloud. He will return when the Antichrist persecutes the Church of God. Saint Elias, like the Antichrist, will have precursors: the Apostles of the End Times, of whom Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Monfort speaks in the Treatise on True Devotion to the Virgin Mary:
“They shall be clouds thundering and flying through the air at the least breath of the Holy Ghost; who, without attaching themselves to anything, without being astonished at anything, without putting themselves in pain about anything, shall shower forth the rain of the Word of God and of life eternal. They shall thunder against sin; they shall storm against the world; they shall strike the devil and his crew; and they shall strike further and further, for life or for death, with their two-edged sword of the Word of God, all those to whom they shall be sent on the part of the Most High.” (True Devotion to Mary, no 57)
The cloud is also the symbol of Divine Wisdom, of which we read in the Book of Sirach:
“I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before all creatures. I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth. I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud. I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and have walked in the waves of the sea, and have stood in all the earth: and in every people, and in every nation I have had the chief rule” (24:3–10).
The Apostles of the End Times will be filled with Divine Wisdom, necessary, says Saint Louis-Marie again, to support our weakness in the difficult times that await us, to illuminate our minds, to inflame our hearts, to teach us to speak, to act, to work and be able to offer ourselves with Jesus Christ in the hours of confusion.
The book of Exodus tells how God led His people through the desert, from Egypt to the promised land, by a cloud: “And the Lord went before them to shew the way by day in a pillar of a cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire: that he might be the guide of their journey at both times. There never failed the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, before the people” (Ex 13:21–22).
Recalling this passage, Saint Paul writes:
“For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And all in Moses were baptised, in the cloud, and in the sea: and did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; (and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ). But with most of them God was not well pleased.” (1 Cor 10:1–5)
The cloud that accompanied the people of Israel for forty years without interruption guided them and protected them from their enemies at the same time. “The pillar of the cloud,” Sacred Scripture says, “leaving the forepart, stood behind, between the Egyptians’ camp and the camp of Israel: and it was a dark cloud, and enlightening the night, so that they could not come at one another all the night.” (Ex14:19-20) Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, in The Glories of Mary, sees in this mysterious phenomenon a figure of Mary and of the two offices that she continually exercises on our behalf: “as a cloud she protects us from the ardour of Divine justice; and as fire she protects us from the devils.”
The history of humanity has known dense and dark clouds, like that which in 536 AD obscured the sun for eighteen months, casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness. The mediaeval historian Michael McCormick of Harvard University recounts this in a study, “Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’” (Science, 15 November 2018), in which he states that the worst year in the history of humanity was not that of the Black Death of 1349 or the First World War of 1914, but precisely 536, when day could not be distinguished from night and the coldest decade of the last two thousand years began.
Yet, if there are clouds that darken the sky and the earth, like that of the terrible year 536, there are also clouds that seem to announce the Reign of Mary, like the noctilucent ones that sail, together with the Northern Lights, the stormy skies of the West. The month of Saint Elias reminds us of this.