History of Comets in Divination
How to Seek a Prediction
Wait for a comet to appear
Equipment
Naked eye
Personnel
Any human who attributes meaning to the appearance of a comet
Description
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the apparent perfection and regularity of the Heavens are disturbed by an unknown interloper: a comet.
For thousands of years, myriad civilizations around the globe saw comets as supernatural signs–sometimes as portents of good news, and other times as harbingers of doom
For cultures striving to understand the world around them, the capricious, seemingly random, unpredictability of comets is what imbued them with meaning: where else could comets be coming from, if not from the divine?
There are many famous comets in Western history:
44 BCE: An appearance of a comet soon after Julius Caesar’s death was taken as a sign that Caesar had become a god
12 BCE: The appearance of the “Star of Bethlehem” during the birth of Jesus is often interpreted as a comet (perhaps Halley’s comet)
1066 CE: An appearance of Halley’s Comet was supposedly a good omen for William the Conqueror and the Norman’s conquest of England at the Battle of Hastings (or, alternatively, a bad sign for the defeated King Harold and his Anglo-Saxons)
The change over time in humanity’s feelings about comets offers a great example of the same phenomenon taking on very different meaning within the predictive systems
Before Newton worked out his predictive theory of gravity, comets were almost universally thought to be signs from the gods, appearing to be random phenomena
Once Edmund Halley made the bold claim, using calculations based on Newton’s theory, that the “Great” Comet of 1682 (now called “Halley’s Comet) would return 75 years later, and that claim was posthumously verified, comets were effectively demoted in some people’s view to being great demonstrations of the near-fully deterministic nature of gravity, rather than supernatural messengers