In the last few weeks, another comet was making an appearance in the sky. Unfortunately, it wasn’t visible to the naked eye until it was nearing its closest approach to the Sun. This meant that, like the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury, it was only visible at all right on sunset or sunrise, making it extremely difficult, not to mention bothersome, to see.
But the very fact that anyone would be disappointed to not see a comet is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. Even as late as the early 20th century, people were terrified of comets.
“Almost always in classical times comets were regarded as portents, generally as warnings of dire events,” writes historian Duane Koenig. (They were also sometimes “harbingers of happy things,” like the birth of heroes, prophets, or kings.)
Ancient records show that thousands of years ago, “Persians and Koreans viewed comets as of evil nature and often [announced] war with the country in whose direction the tail pointed,” writes Koenig. Over in Rome, comets were an object of fear and worship. Historian Geraldine Herbert-Brown finds that Pliny the Elder paid “particular attention to comets, and the terror they had caused humans in the course of history.” According to Pliny, a comet would appear at “crucial intervals” starting in 49 BCE, “glaring terribly when Nero succeeded Claudius, and then continuously throughout Nero’s principate.”
Still, some emperors were able to laugh off fear of what were then called “bearded stars”. In 70 AD, Vespasian was warned about a comet. He responded that the bearded star did not concern him because he was bald. But, he said, it was trouble for Rome’s fractious neighbour, the Parthians, whose king was hairy.
Perhaps the most famous cometary omen in recorded history was Halley’s Comet in 1066. As the Bayeux Tapestry records, the comet was seen as a fatal omen for Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold II.
The fifteenth century witnessed the beginnings of modern astronomy and a more scientific approach to comets. But even into the sixteenth century, writes art historian Roberta J M Olson, “the attitudes towards celestial events remained unresolved.” Scientists like Copernicus and Tycho Brahe attempted to fight the superstitions. (Martin Luther called comets “harlot stars.”) Yet during the turbulence of the Reformation, belief in comets as portents actually spread, writes Olson. In 1528, a comet “the color of blood” was reported, supposedly “caus[ing] some people to fall sick because it was so horrible,” adds Koenig. “Some died of fear.”
With the invention of the telescope in 1608, the mystery of comets started to lessen. The work of Galileo, followed by Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, “would, once and for all, establish that comets were physical objects in rational, elliptical orbits around the sun,” writes Olson.
Jstor Daily
By 1906, H G Wells wrote a novel anticipating the approaching reappearance of Halley’s Comet in typically optimistic fashion. In the Days of the Comet relates a comet disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere and spreading a global blanket of happy gas. Eden results. “The great Change has come for evermore, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men.”
But over the next few years, a drearily familiar pseudo-scientific-media panic spread in apprehension of the real comet’s arrival. Those of us who lived through the millennium bug panic, not to mention the last decade, will feel a sense of deja vu.
“Will Coming Comet Collide With Earth?” asked a 1907 Kentucky newspaper.
Surely that was just uninformed media scaremongering? Oh, don’t worry, ‘experts’ were all-too-ready to outdo any nonsense the yellow media could come up with.
What effect would the comet have? A letter to the Royal Observatory worried whether the comet could “cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and the primeval forests of North and South America to be swept by the briny avalanche over the sandy plains of the great Sahara, tumbling over and over with houses, ships, sharks, whales, and all sorts of living things in one heterogeneous mass of chaotic confusion” […]
The French scientist Camille Flammarion warned that Earth would pass through the comet’s tail. According to Flammarion, there was a chance that “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”
“Cyanogen is a very deadly poison,” the New York Times helpfully pointed out. “A grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue [is] sufficient to cause instant death.”
And when there’s a media-science panic, there’s someone ready to profit from it.
Suddenly, anti-comet pills flooded the market. One promised to serve as “an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens.”
Gas masks became best-sellers and some even bought up “comet-protecting umbrellas.”
All That’s Interesting
Does any of this remind anyone of recent events?
