Part 1

# Comet Lore: Halley's Comet in History and Astronomy ### By Emerson, Edwin

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Transcriber’s Notes:

Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_ in the original text. Equal signs “=” before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold= in the original text. Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals. Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs. Antiquated words have been preserved. Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.

[Illustration: HALLEY’S COMET OF 1910, AS SEEN IN NEW YORK, LOOKING WESTWARD, DURING THE LATTER PART OF MAY.]

COMET LORE

Halley’s Comet in History and Astronomy

By EDWIN EMERSON _Author of “A History of the Nineteenth Century,” Etc._

PRINTED BY THE SCHILLING PRESS 137-139 EAST 25th STREET NEW YORK

Copyrighted, 1910, by EDWIN EMERSON Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London All rights reserved under Berne Convention

Printed in the United States of America by the Schilling Press in New York from the electrotyped plates

CONTENTS

PAGE Halley’s Comet 7 The Terror of the Comet 10 Famous Comets of Olden Times 30 The Star of Bethlehem 39 Great Events and Disasters Linked with Comets 42 Halley’s Comet the Bloodiest of All 60 The Story of Edmund Halley 90 What Are Comets? 101 Our Peril from Collision with the Comet 113 The End of the World 122

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE Cover Designs by William Stevens Halley’s Comet of 1910 Frontispiece The Terror of the Comet in Antiquity 13 The Terror of the Comet in Mediæval Times 20 The Terror of the Comet at the Present Day 25 The Latest Photograph of the Comet of 1910 28 Napoleon’s Comet of 1811 53 The Great Comet of 1843 56 Comet of Tel-el-Kebir, 1882 59 Halley’s Comet of 1835 62 Halley’s Comet of 1682 69 Halley’s Comet of 1066 in the Bayeux Tapestry 78 William the Conqueror, an English Dream 81 Portrait of Edmund Halley 92 The Orbit of Halley’s Comet 103 Relative Sizes of the Earth, the Moon and Halley’s Comet 103 Donati’s Comet of 1858 106 The Civil War Comet of 1863 109 Coggia’s Comet of 1874 112 Halley’s Conception of a Collision with the Comet 119

TO THE COMET

“Thereby Hangs a Tail.”—_Shakespeare._

Lone wanderer of the trackless sky! Companionless! Say, dost thou fly Along thy solitary path, A flaming messenger of wrath— Warning with thy portentous train Of earthquake, plague and battle-plain? Some say that thou dost never fail To bring some evil in thy tail. W. LATTEY.

THE COMING OF THE COMET

The Sun will surely rise and set to-morrow.

Just so surely must a Comet flare forth in our Heavens this Spring.

Star gazers, astronomers and learned men have been waiting for this Comet all over the earth—in America, in Europe, in far China.

They have known for certain that this Comet would come; and they knew just when and where in the Heavens the Comet would first show itself to the naked eye—down to the very night.

All this has been known so surely because this same Comet has been seen by the people of this earth before.

It came and went seventy-four years ago. Seventy-six years before that, it came and went. And seventy-six years before that, the Comet had come and gone.

As long as human beings have lived on this earth—for thousands and thousands of years—human eyes have beheld this same Comet every seventy-six years or so.

The longest time between the Comet’s coming has been seventy-nine years. The shortest interval of all—74½ years—was this time.

For thousands of years in the past, wise men have written down records of this Comet.

Long, long ago, when white men were still savages who dwelt in caves, patient star gazers in China and Chaldea studied the motions of this Comet.

Farther back than that, in the hoary days before the art of writing was known, ancient bards sang of this Star and its hairy tail. Some of their words are still remembered.

Artists have drawn pictures of this Comet. Their pictures are still shown.

Women have stitched images of this Comet into their handiwork. Some of this handiwork can still be seen.

Coiners have stamped designs of this comet on their coins and medals. Those coins are still shown in museums.

Priests, Popes and great Divines have preached about this Comet. Their sermons are still preserved in the records of the Church.

Learned men have written in their books what happened when the Comet came. Those books are read to-day.

The coming of this Comet in olden times has been fixed in lasting records, which he who runs may read.

Nothing in all History is more certain than the story of this Comet.

WHY HALLEY’S COMET?

Two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, when this Comet was seen shining over the City of London, the great astronomer, Edmund Halley, made a special study of it.

Halley was the first to say that this Comet had come before and would surely come again. He wrote down the time when the Comet would come again, long after he should be dead.

“If it should return,” he wrote, “according to our predictions, about the year 1758, impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman.”

The Comet returned, as he had foretold, seventeen years after Halley’s death, when it was first seen in 1758, on Christmas night, by a man in Saxony, named Palitsch, who was looking for the Comet.

From that day this Comet has been called after Halley.

Since then many famous astronomers, such as Clairaut, Pontécoulant and Laplace in France, have calculated the dates for the Comet’s return.

Last time, in 1835, Halley’s Comet returned within a few nights of their prediction.

This time, so the astronomers figured seventy-five years ago, the Comet should be plainly seen after dark late this May.

What they predicted has come true.

THE TERROR OF THE COMET

“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.

THE EFFECTS OF COMETS ON MAN

Some thinkers have pointed out that there has often been a direct connection between the feelings produced in the human soul by the appearance of a Comet and the human deeds of violence or the human epidemics and excessive mortality following the widespread terror produced by Comets.

Only this year (1910) the appearance of Inness’ Comet over Mexico caused a panic-stricken holy pilgrimage to the Shrine of Talpa. In China, too, it caused terror, resulting in Christian massacres.

Hence, also, several Jewish massacres inspired by Comets in the past and hence also so many terrifying plagues connected with Comets.

Thus Ambroise Paré, the “Father of French Surgery,” who flourished in the sixteenth century, has recorded the effect produced upon his contemporaries by the Comet of 1528.

“This Comet was so horrible,” wrote Dr. Paré, “so frightful, and it produced such great terror among the common people, that many died of fear and many others fell sick.”

Dr. Paré himself appears to have come under the influence of this fear, judging from his awestruck description of the appearance of this Comet:

“It appeared to be of excessive length; and was of the colour of blood. At the summit of it was seen the figure of a bent arm, holding in its hand a great sword as if about to strike.

“At the end of the point there were three stars. On both sides of the rays of this Comet were seen a great number of axes, knives, and blood-coloured swords, among which were a great number of hideous human faces with beards and bristling hair.”

Hannibal committed suicide on account of a Comet. So did Mithridates. So did one Toma, in Hungary, only this year.

King Louis “the Debonair” of France, died from fear of a Comet (Halley’s Comet) in 837 A. D.