Читать книгу Comet Lore - Edwin Emerson - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Bacon, the great English thinker, has said: “Comets have some action and effect on the universality of things.”

All Comets recorded in history, so Lubienitius has shown in his “Universal History of All Comets,” appeared in connection with some great event or catastrophe in the History of Man.

George F. Chambers, one of the most up-to-date writers on Astronomy and Comets, on the second page of his “Story of the Comets” (1909), declares:

“It is the general testimony of History during many hundreds of years, one might even say during fully 2,000 years, that Comets were always considered to be peculiarly ‘ominous of the wrath of Heaven and as harbingers of wars and famines, of the dethronement of Monarchs and the dissolution of Empires.’”

Reaching back into remotest history, the sacred books of India show that the births of Krishna and of Buddha were foretold by moving lights in the Heavens.

The ancient records of China tell of the appearance of a moving beacon in Heaven at the birth of Yu, the first ruler of the Celestial Empire, and again at the birth of the great Chinese prophet, Lao-Tse.

The ancient Greeks have recorded similar appearances of Comets. Aesculapius, the divine healer and first physician, was born under a Comet.

The oldest traditions of the Jews tell us that when Abraham was born a moving star was seen in the East.

Another moving star with long radiant gleams of light streaming behind it shone forth at the birth of Moses. This Comet was seen by the Magi of Egypt, who pointed it out to the King as an omen meant for him. Hence Pharaoh’s order, as recorded in the Old Testament, for the slaughter of all male Jewish infants then born in Egypt.