IF falling stars are considered to be lucky, the opposite must be said of those vagabonds of the solar system that occasionally, as at present, blaze a spectacular trail across our skies. From time immemorial, comets have been regarded as portents of natural disaster or great civil disturbance in the realm.
Pliny the Elder summed it up for his generation back in Roman times: "A fearful star is the comet, and not easily appeased, as was apparent in the late civil troubles when Octavius was Consul; a second time by the war of Pompey and Caesar; and in our own time when, Claudius Caesar having been poisoned, the Empire was left to Domitian, in whose reign there also appeared a blazing comet."
By the 17th century, Daniel Defoe was sophisticated enough to be a little sceptical. Yet he, too, found these superstitions worthy of reporting. He refers to them in his graphic account of the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London one year later:
"In the first place a blazing star, or comet, appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after a little before the great fire; the old women, and the weak-minded portion of the other sex, remarked that those two comets passed directly over the houses, and that it was plain that they imported something peculiar to this city alone.
"The comet before the pestilence was seen to be of a faint, dull, languid colour and its motion was very solemn, heavy and slow; but the comet before the fire was bright and sparkling, or as others said, flaming, and its motion was swift and furious; and that accordingly one foretold a heavy judgement, slow but severe, terrible and frightful, as was the plague; but that other foretold a stroke that was sudden, swift and fiery, like the conflagration."
Others, it must be said, came to rather different conclusions about the origins and meaning of these mysterious cosmic apparitions. Andreas Celichius, the influential Lutheran bishop of Altmark, for example, wrote in 1578 that "the thick smoke of human sins rising every day, every hour, full of stench and horror before the face of God, becomes gradually so thick as to form what we call a comet with curled and plaited stresses which at last are kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge.
But the good bishop's theory was somewhat discredited by the wise remark of a contemporary sceptic: "If comets be caused by the sins of mortals they would never be absent from the sky."