“Canst thou fearless gaze
Even night by night on that prodigious Blaze,
That hairy Comet, that long streaming Star,
Which threatens Earth with Famine, Plague and War?”
—_Sylvester._
So long as the memory of man goes back, the appearance of a Comet has
always been taken as a just cause for dread.
In the train of Comets, it has ever been held, come wars, bloodshed,
fires, floods, plagues, famine and the fall of mighty rulers.
Our Holy Bible confirms this time-honoured belief.
The Saviour Himself said, according to the Gospel of St. Luke, Chap.
XXI., Verse 10-11:
“Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom
against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in
divers places, and famines and pestilences; and
fearful sights and great signs shall there be from
Heaven.”
In the Revelation of St. John the Divine (Chap. VIII., Verse 10) we
read:
“There fell from Heaven a great star burning as a
torch,” and again (Chap. XII., Verse 3):
“There was seen another sign in Heaven, and behold
a great red dragon ... and his tail draweth a third
part of the stars in Heaven. And behold the third woe
cometh quickly.” (Chap. XII., Verse 14.)
The “flaming sword” in the hands of the angel of the Lord, when Adam
and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, many sacred writers hold,
can only be interpreted as a Comet.
“For the Almighty set before the door
Of th’ holy park a seraphim that bore
A warning sword, whose body shined bright
A flaming Comet in the midst of night.”
—_Todd._
So, too, when Jerusalem was to be wasted by a plague, David beheld a
Comet in the shape of a flaming sword:
“And David lifted up his eyes and saw the angel of
the Lord stand between the earth and the Heaven,
having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over
Jerusalem.”
—_I. Chron. XXI. 16._
The fall of Satan, some sacred writers hold, was marked by the
appearance of a Comet. In Isaiah (XIV. 12) we find:
“How art thou fallen from Heaven, O flaming one, son
of the morning!”
John Milton, in his “Paradise Lost,” has fixed this image in immortal
verse:
“Satan stood
Unterrified, and as a Comet burned
That fired the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th’ arctic sky, and from its horrid hair,
Shakes pestilence and war.”
The Great Deluge, described in Holy Writ, came after the appearance
of a mighty Comet (Halley’s Comet), so Dr. William Whiston, Sir Isaac
Newton’s successor in the Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge,
set forth in a special treatise. The great French astronomer, Laplace,
also reached the same conclusion.
This same Comet (Halley’s Comet) likewise foretold the final fall of
the Holy City, Jerusalem, in the year 70 after Christ. This Comet was
seen by St. Peter. Josephus in his History of the Jewish Wars recorded
the nightly appearance of this Comet over the City of Jerusalem just
before the war which ended with the destruction of the Holy City.
“Amongst other warnings,” writes Josephus, who saw
this Comet with his own eyes, “a Comet of the kind
called sword-shaped, because their tails appear to
represent the blade of a sword, was seen above the
city for the space of a whole year.”
Josephus at the time rebuked his Jewish countrymen for listening to
false prophets while so clear a sign from Heaven was before their very
eyes.
This same Comet (Halley’s Comet) reappeared at a critical period of the
rule of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of Rome. He
first beheld his sign from Heaven in the midst of battle as it blazed
overhead in the sign of a Cross. With the help of his mother, the
sainted Helen, Constantine was moved thereby to turn Christian.
Constantinople, the great capital of the Orient, which owes its name
to this same Emperor Constantine, was lost to Christendom in the year
1453, when the Turks overran the great city with fire and sword. This
event, it is recorded, was heralded by another appearance of a Comet.
Three years later, when the Turks were about to descend upon Belgrade,
another Comet (Halley’s Comet) spread consternation throughout Europe.
At that time Pope Calixtus III., on the appearance of this Comet,
seeing that evils were impending for the human race, called for prayers
that the Almighty would turn these evils upon the Turks, the enemies of
the Christian faith.
[Illustration: “A SWORD-SHAPED COMET BLAZED OVER THE DOOMED HOLY CITY.”
—Josephus’ “_History of Judea_.”]
At the same time the Holy Father gave orders for all Church bells to be
tolled at noon to remind faithful Christians to pray for those battling
against the Turk.
Into the Ave Maria were put the words: “From the Devil, the Turk and
the Comet, Good Lord, deliver us!”
Since that time in most Catholic countries the Angelus is still
regularly rung at noon. In Italy, even to-day, the cakes sold before
the church doors at noon go by the name of _Comete_.
All the great Fathers of the Church have taught that Comets are to be
taken as signs from Heaven.
Baeda, the Venerable, declared in the seventh century in England, that
“Comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or
heat.”
John of Damascus, preaching in the same century in the Orient, laid
down the same belief.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Light of the Church in the thirteenth
century, accepted and handed down the same opinion.
The sainted Albert the Great, the most noted thinker of the Church in
the Middle Ages, received and taught the same doctrine.
The teachings of these Church Fathers as to Comets have been commended
in our own day by Pope Pius IX.
The great teachers of other religions, likewise, have laid down
identical beliefs as to the meaning of Comets.
The sacred books of India are full of awed references to the baleful
influence of Comets.
The ancient year books of China, written centuries before white men
kept any records, tell of the appearance of Comets and of the disasters
they foretold.
The Mohametans and their wise Arab star gazers, when they saw a Comet
in the Heavens, knew that it meant war.
The woe of one Comet (Halley’s Comet of 1456), which had the shape of
a Turkish scimitar, so the Arab soothsayers foretold, would be turned
against their enemies. This was the same Comet which brought such fear
to the hearts of Pope Calixtus III. and all his Christian followers.
Thus it can be seen that Comets have been held to foretell disaster on
one side, and victory on the other.
The Comets which conquerors hailed as their guiding stars, have meant
war and bloodshed and disaster to those whom they came to conquer.
The same Comets which shone upon the birth of mighty rulers, have
blazed in warning of their death.
Julius Caesar, who was born under a Comet, saw his bloody end foretold
by another Comet.
Therefore, Shakespeare in his play “Julius Caesar,” makes Calpurnia say
to Caesar:
“When beggars die, there are no Comets seen;
The Heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
On the night of Caesar’s assassination, when the Comet was seen blazing
at its brightest, the Romans said that it had come to bear away the
great soul of the murdered Caesar.
At the death of Nero, the Roman Emperor, who persecuted the Christians,
a Comet blazed forth again. The Roman historian Suetonius, who wrote
the Life of Emperor Nero, thus described this Comet:
“A blazing star, which was commonly held to portend
destruction to Kings and Princes, reappeared above
the horizon several nights in succession.”
Another great Comet (Halley’s again) reappeared when Attila, the King
of the Huns, the “Scourge of God,” was overthrown in the greatest
battle of Christendom on the Catalaunian fields.
Claudius, a Roman writer of that period, then stated that “a Comet was
never seen in the Heavens without implying some dreadful event.”
This has ever been the belief of all the great poets of olden time.
Homer, the greatest poet of Ancient Greece, a thousand years before the
birth of Christ, sang of:
“The red star, that from his flaming hair
Shakes down diseases, pestilence and war.”
Let it be explained here that the word Comet in Greek means
“long-haired,” from _kome_,—hair.
Virgil, the greatest Roman poet, sang of “the baleful glare of bloody
Comets,” and again, of “dreadful Comets blazing in the sky.”
Tasso, the greatest of Italian poets after Dante, sang thus of Comets
in his “Jerusalem Delivered”:
“Qual con le chiome sanguinose horrende
Splender Cometa suol per l’aria adusta,
Che i regni muta, e i feri morbi adduce,
Ai purpurei tiranni infausta luce.”
—_Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto VII., Stanza 52._
Rendered thus by Wiffen into English:
“As with its bloody locks let loose in air
Horribly bright, the Comet shows whose shine
Plagues the parched World, whose looks the Nations scare,
Before whose face States change, and Powers decline,
To purple Tyrants all, an inauspicious sign.”
The great English poets, on their part, have lifted up their voices to
sing of the dire effects of Comets.
Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, abounds in allusions to these
dread wandering stars.
Thus he makes Horatio in the first scene of “Hamlet” speak with awe of:
“Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood;
* * * * *
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on.”
More briefly Shakespeare in his “Henry VI.” refers to:
“A Comet of revenge
A prophet to the fall of all our foes”;
and again, in “The Taming of the Shrew” to:
“Some Comet or unusual prodigy.”
Spenser in his “Faerie Queene” sings of a woman’s hair loosely
dispersed in the wind:
“All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast
His heavy beames, and flaming lockes dispredd,
At sight whereof the people stand aghast;
But the sage Wizzard telles, as he has redd,
That it importunes death and doleful drearyhedd.”
John Milton, besides likening Satan to a Comet, as before quoted, also
showed that he shared in the belief that the flaming swords mentioned
in Holy Writ were Comets:
“High in front advanced
The brandish’d sword of God before them blazed
Fierce as a Comet.”
The poet Young, in his “Night Thoughts,” aptly writes of the Comet:
“Hast thou ne’er seen the Comet’s flaming light?
Th’ illustrious stranger passing, terror sheds
On gazing Nations, from his fiery train.”
The poets of other nations have written of Comets in like vein. There
is an old German rhyme, sung by German school children even to-day,
which has been put into English by Dr. Andrew D. White in his “History
of the Doctrine of Comets”:
“Eight things there be a Comet brings,
When it on high doth horrid range;
Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings,
War, Earthquake, Floods and Direful Change.”
This little rhyme was originally put forth for German school children
by two Protestant preachers of Basle, Switzerland, at the time of the
great Comet of 1618, which heralded the outbreak of the great “Thirty
Years’ War.”
These Protestant ministers got their belief in Comets and their evil
influence upon mankind not from the Church of Rome, but from the
Bible teachings of such great Protestant reformers as Martin Luther,
Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox of Scotland, Bishop Jeremy
Taylor and John Howe, the great Nonconformist divine.
Martin Luther preached in one of his Advent sermons:
“The heathen write that the Comet may arise from
natural causes; but God creates not one that does not
foretoken a sure calamity.”
Luther’s friend, Melanchthon, in a letter, declared Comets to be
“heralds of Heaven’s wrath.”
Zwingli, in 1531, declared that the great Comet of that year (Halley’s
Comet) was sent by God to betoken calamity.
John Knox, preaching in his Scottish kirk at Edinboro, declared that he
saw in Comets tokens of the wrath of Heaven.
The great divines of the Church of England,—from Cranmer, Bishop
Latimer, Archbishops Spottiswoode and Bramhall, Bishop Jeremy Taylor,
down to our own times, clearly preached the doctrine that Comets must
be taken as tokens from Heaven.
Thus the Comet of 1572 was pointed out from the pulpits of England
and Scotland as a token of Heaven’s wrath and warning at the St.
Bartholomew Massacre on the night of August 24, 1572, when thirty
thousand Huguenots were murdered in the streets of Paris and elsewhere
in France.
Across the sea, in the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the great
New England divine and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather,
on the apparition of the great Comet now known as Halley’s, in 1682,
preached on “Heaven’s Wrath Alarm to the World—wherein is shown that
fearful sights and signs in the Heavens are the presages of great
calamities at hand.”
Increase Mather preached on the text taken from the Book of Revelation:
“And the third Angel sounded, and there fell a great Star burning as a
Torch, ... and behold the Third Woe cometh quickly.”
In this sermon the great preacher told of the Roman Emperor Vespasian,
who, when warned of the omen of a Comet, made fun of it, and then died
miserably.
So Mather preached: “For the Lord hath fired his beacon in the Heavens
among the stars of God there. The fearful sign is not yet out of
sight.... Do we not see the sword blazing over us?... Doth God threaten
our very Heavens? O pray unto Him, that he would not take away stars
and send Comets to succeed them!”
[Illustration: THE TERROR OF THE COMET OF 1531. FROM AN OLD NUREMBERG
WOOD-CUT.]
The profound Russian thinker Tolstoy, in his great book “War and
Peace,” has written of the flaming Comet of 1811. This was the famous
“Comet of Napoleon,” which blazed over Western Europe when Napoleon was
gathering his grand army for its disastrous march into Russia and to
Moscow.
At Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia, this Comet was observed by
anxious thousands. One night there was this talk between a novice nun
and the Abbess of her Convent. On their way to vesper service one
evening in Moscow the nun suddenly beheld the Comet for the first time
and asked: “What is that star?”
The Abbess answered: “It is not a star. It is a Comet.”
“But what is a Comet?” asked the young nun. “I have never heard that
word.”
The Abbess then answered: “Comets are signs in Heaven, which God sends
before misfortunes.”
Shortly after this the bloody battle of Borodino was fought, and
Napoleon, with his army, appeared before the gates of Moscow. The
hundred-towered city was abandoned by the Russians and was given over
to the flames.
Years afterward this same nun thus told her story, as printed in the
“Revue des Deux Mondes”:
“Every night the Comet blazed in the Heavens, and we
all asked ourselves: What misfortune does it bring?
Then the enemy came, and our sacred city was put
to the torch. Our convent, together with all other
cloisters, monasteries and churches, was burned to
the ground.”
Many other writers of the time who saw the great Comets that blazoned
Napoleon’s destructive wars have recorded how they were universally
taken as omens of the great conqueror’s bloody trail.
Napoleon himself gloried in this dread omen and hailed the Comet as his
“guiding star.”
All this has been fully set forth by the famous French astronomer
Messier, a latter-day observer of Halley’s Comet, who wrote a special
book on “The Wonderful Comet which appeared at the Birth of Napoleon
the Great.”
As for the many Comets that have blazed down upon other great
conquerors and other bloody wars, before the comparatively recent
Comets of the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars, they are all
set down in a special History of Comets.
In this great work, entitled “A History of All Comets,” the Latin
scholar Lubienitius has pointed out all the calamities and dire events
which attended the appearance of each and every Comet recorded in
history.