What do to know about the fear of comets?

Comets are familiar cosmic phenomena to all civilization in all ages. Some of the comets are bigger than others; some comets are small, some are almost invisible, many are completely invisible, some are truly spectacular, and some of them terrific.

Almost always, a comet apparition has been interpreted as a bad omen; a signal that something of great importance, or a big change is going to occur. For many people, the Bible is not a source of blind faith, but mostly a source of narratives of historic events. Since at biblical times the comets were unknown phenomena that appeared without any prelude, it is hard to discern what is fact from what is metaphorical in the cometary scenario.

One of the ancient references that some claim that Bible mentions the appearance of comets is in 1 Chronicles 21, 16, where it is said;

David looked up and saw the angel of the Lord standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand extended over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell facedown.

Hence, while for the fundamentalist and faithful Christians this passage should be interpreted exactly as it is written, for others the sword in the sky is an allegoric mention of a comet.

A more tangible evidence about the origin of the fear of comets is a coin issued in roman times.

This coin is a tangible evidence that since ancient times comets were interpreted as bad augury of some negative event. The event was near to come, or it already possible happened. The coin reads: DIVVS IVVS (Divus Ivlivs, Divine Julius). The coin was issued when a comet appeared after Julius Cesar's death when he was killed on March 15 44 BC by some of his own collaborators in the Senate. When, after his death the comet appeared, this coin was used to proclaim him as a god.

However, not always have the comets being associated with bad events in history. Chaeremon the Stoic, in his book Treatise on comets, advocates in favor of the comets.

For Aristotle, the comets were gases that slowly rose into the upper atmosphere where they caught fire, then ignited by sparks generated by the motion of the heavens around the Earth. If the gases burned quickly, they produced the sudden flash of a shooting star --a meteorite.

Lucius Anneaus Seneca, a Roman of the first century AD argued against Aristotle’s view that comets were sudden fires, arguing that they were celestial bodies moving on orbits like planets and that they might reappear, given time. Prophetically he wrote:

Men will some day be able to demonstrate in what regions comets have their paths, why they move so far from the planets, what is their size and constitution.

Marvelous and surprisingly modern ideas! Contrast them with Martin Luther's (1483-1546) concept of the heavens when he referred to comets as harlot stars and works of the devils, adding to that that comets were formed by the sins of the people.

On 1577, Tycho Brahe noted that since comets lacked parallax, they cannot be a sublunar phenomenon, and that Aristotle was wrong in that the comets were formed in the atmosphere of the Earth.

Duane Griffin, in his essay What Curiosity in the Structure: The Hollow Earth in Science mentions that William Whiston (1667-1752), a mathematician and cleric who served as Newton’s assistant and then successor as Lucasian professor at Cambridge, believed the sun, other planets, and comets to be hollow and inhabited as well.

The invention of the telescope

The invention of the telescope was supposed to be a turning point in the understanding of the cometary phenomena. And in was in certain sense, however, at the same time this invention brought some tragic interpretations of this cosmic phenomena.

The Jesuit Johann Baptist Cysat (1587-1657), is credited with being the first person to observe a comet with a telescope. Shortly after the invention of the telescope, nearly 1600, he studied in detail the comet of 1618, and was the first to assert that the orbit of the comet was parabolic, not circular. Since then lots of comets has been discovered, tracked, photographed, and even mystified.

There is a special date with relevant importance in the study of the fear of comets: it is the one related to the comet Kohoutek. Comet Kohoutek was discovered on 7 March 1973, by Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek.

Comet Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the "comet of the century". However, Kohoutek's display was considered a let-down. However, although it failed to brighten to levels expected, it was still a naked eye object.

It is hard to believe that in modern times, in the early stages of space exploration, somebody could teach and spread an enormous fear for the comet Kohoutek as did the preacher and sect founder David Berg¹.

On September 1973, David Brandt Berg (1919-1994), the founder of the sect The Children of God, The Family, also known as The family Cult handled to his followers the writing The Christmas Monster (document No. 269 GP) warning them against the imminent arrival of the comet Kohoutek. Of the 42 paragraphs, worth mentioning are the following (and sometimes shortened) paragraphs:

• “THE MOST SPECTACULAR NATURAL PHENOMENON ANY OF US WILL SEE IN OUR LIFETIME” will be the appearance of a huge new comet called “Kohoutek” during December and January of this coming Winter!
• SEVEN TIMES AS BRIGHT AS THE FULL MOON, it will nearly double the enlightenment of the night sky and even be visible in the daytime! “For those religiously inclined, it will have even greater significance.
• ARE OUR SCIENTISTS AND RULERS TRYING TO MINIMIZE IT’S SIGNIFICANCE, lest the populace of the world be frightened by this amazing once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon?
• GOVERNMENTS ARE NOTORIOUS FOR PLAYING-DOWN THE POSSIBILITIES OF IMPENDING DISASTERS AND THREATS OF DOOM, such as augured natural cataclysms, economic crises, political dangers, disease epidemics, etc., lest the people become disturbed, upset or fearful enough to panic and disrupt the status quo or disturb the peace!
• IT SEEMS THE DUTY OF THE SYSTEM OF LATE TO KEEP THE PEOPLE IN A STATE OF IGNORANCE and semi-unconsciousness of what is really going on in the world and space, in a desperate attempt to preserve law and order through the establishment in the lives and minds of the people of a false sense of security.
• THEY SELDOM EVER FOREWARN THEM THAT THEIR ECONOMIC SYSTEM IS ABOUT TO COLLAPSE, or their corrupt government about to crumble, or their religious system about to be obliterated!
• EXACTLY WHAT THIS HUGE NEW COMET SIGNIFIES we cannot tell, but we’ve already told enough to get a pretty good idea of what it could signify in possibly portending the end of things as they now are, including present world powers, economic systems, etc.
• THE APPEARANCE OF EVERY MAJOR COMET HAS ALWAYS HERALDED SOME MAJOR CHANGE or coming event. The first recorded appearance of the giant Halley’s Comet in 1066 A.D. coincided with a major turning point in history, the conquest of England by William the Conqueror from the Continent, as well as immediately preceding the revival of the Islamic Empire under the Turks, which was soon to threaten the very existence of Europe.
• WHEN LAST SEEN, HALLEY’S COMET IMMEDIATELY PRECEDED WORLD WAR 1 and the toppling of most of the monarchies and ruling houses of Europe!- I wonder what it will celebrate when it reappears in the fateful year of 1986?
• ACCORDING TO OUR OWN CALCULATIONS 1986 SHOULD BE ABOUT THE TIME OF THE FINAL TAKEOVER OF ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT BY A WORLD DICTATOR known in the Bible as the “Antichrist,” and the beginning of his reign of terror!
• THE MOST BRILLIANT COMET OF THE PAST CENTURY WAS THE GREAT COMET OF 1882 which appeared and disappeared within about the same year of the deaths of two of the most influential men in all modern history, and upon whose teaching both the faith and fate of a Godless world now hangs: Charles Darwin and Karl Marx! Both sealed the doom of Churchianity and Capitalism and the end of an age, if not the world!
• EVEN THE WORD “COMET” COMES FROM A GREEK WORD MEANING “LONG-HAIRED,” apparently from their long fiery tails, all of them being thus long-haired “hippies” who are always “hip” to the signs of the times! They usually appear in regular cycles accompanied by earth-shaking events as witnessed by mythology, ancient history and current events.
• THEY HAVE NEARLY ALWAYS SIGNALED SOME MAJOR DISASTER or collapse of empires, and many confirmations of their importance as warning signs from the heavens above to the earth below are found throughout the accounts of various ancient historians.
• THIS NEW COLOSSAL COMET KOHOUTEK THAT IS TO LIGHT UP OUR SKIES THIS WINTER WITH THE BRILLIANCE OF SEVEN MOONS is said to be outstanding in that it is only a once-in-ten-thousand-years visitor!
• SURELY THIS MUST MEAN THAT IT IS GOING TO SIGNAL A COLOSSAL EVENT of equal importance and rarity! Of course, we may not know immediately what this actual crisis is, and we may not even
• THIS ONE MUST BE GOING TO BE SOMETHING REALLY BIG! Because in our recent trip into the spirit world in “The Green Door” we found the spirits all agog about something big that was about to happen! This would also be in accord with other revelations we’ve had recently.
• IT COULD BE THE TOTAL DOWNFALL OF AMERICA, the collapse of the currency and/or economic system, or the great worldwide confusion brought on by the energy shortage and the startling upheavals soon to transpire in Egypt, Libya and the Mid-East, or the atomic war which will eventually consummate the course of world history!

P.S.- It has been called to my attention that a small article on the coming gigantic Kohoutek Comet did appear last June on an obscure page of Time Magazine calling it the “comet of the Century!”

Enough is enough.  The sad story about this is that this was the "astronomy" that the kids of the cult were learning². Total brain-washing, indoctrination, and worst of all completely devoid of critical thinking, cross referencing, and experimentation; the three great pillars for the teaching and advancement of science.

Nowhere in the history of science --and astronomy in particular-- can we find behavior and aberration like this.

The great irony of this story is that this enormous display of ignorance occurred in the grounds of the United States, the country that just 4 years earlier had landed a man on the Moon; a lesson for us about how knowledge and ignorance can coexist side by side in space and time.

E. Pérez
Feb-10

Notes

1. The official website of The Family International is http://www.thefamily.org/en/, but the original documents of the teachings of David Berg are not there. However, the Website from where the above paragraphs were taken is: http://www.exfamily.org/index.htm. Why two different web portals? Former followers of David Berg and ex-family members explain it:

No white-washing:

Unlike the spin on the official homepage of The Family, our mission is to bring you honest, truthful, accurate, complete and contextual information about The Family cult—also known as The Children of God, The Family International, The Family of Love, The Family and various pseudonyms; which now operates internationally as a collection of charitable organizations under the umbrella of the FCF (Family Care Foundation).

2. See also the article What do you know about the pyramid inside the Moon? for another of Berg's illogical teachings about how the Heaven is in a pyramid inside the Moon.