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Clube and Napier write:
One chronicler at least reports of the most immediate cause of the plague in 1345 that,
'between Cathay and Persia there rained a vast rain of fire; falling in flakes like snow and burning up mountains and plains and other lands, with men and women; and then arose vast masses of smoke; and whosoever beheld this died within the space of half a day...'
There seems little doubt also that a worldwide cooling of the Earth played a fundamental part in the process. The Arctic polar cap extended, changing the cyclonic pattern and leading to a series of disastrous harvests. These in turn led to widespread famine, death and social disruption.
In England and Scotland, there is a pattern of abandoned villages and farms, soaring wheat prices and falling populations.
In Eastern Europe there was a series of winters of unparalleled severity and depth of snow. The chronicles of monasteries in Poland and Russia tell of cannibalism, common graves overfilled with corpses, and migrations to the west.
Even before the Black Death came, then, a human catastrophe of great proportions was under way in late medieval times. Indeed, the cold snap lasted well beyond the period of the... plague.
A number of such fluctuations are to be found in the historical record, and there is good evidence that these climatic stresses are connected not only with famine but also with times of great social unrest, wars, revolution and mass migrations.
(Clube, The Cosmic Winter.)
It sounds surprisingly like our own era, does it not?
There are differences in detail and in scale, but the dynamics of a world gone mad, incredible cruelty running rampant, and global climate fluctuations are the same as we see before us now.
Calvinism was one of the developments that came out of this period. As Clube notes, the Protestant reformation was partly due to the fact that the powers of the time, the Catholic Church, had built their control system based on the Aristotelian system of,
'God is in his heaven and all will be right with the world if you are a good Christian'.
Obviously, they didn't want to talk about a cosmos run amok over which their vaunted god had no control.
And the fact that things were running amok and the church couldn't do anything about it (not to mention the corruption of the church that was evident to the masses) gave ammunition to the Reformers who then were able to attract many followers just as Christianity attracted Constantine at a time when the pagan gods did not seem to be able to help in the face of cometary bombardment.
The Protestants thus were able to use the situation to their advantage, suggesting that it was 'The End of Times' and that this was all part of the plan and people would be saved if they would only come over to the Protestant side.
Of course, once the Protestants had 'won their place', so to say, they too had to establish authority and adopt the Aristotelian view!
'Now, God is in his heaven and all will be right and there won't be any more catastrophic disruptions as long as everybody goes to church, tithes, and obeys the appointed authorities.'
This brings us to the topic of witch persecutions.
Abstract
For much of history comets have been associated with death and disease. There is increasing evidence that life on Earth originated in comets and other stellar debris. If
passing comets have continued to deposit viruses and microorganisms on this planet, this may explain why ancient astronomers and civilizations attributed the periodic
outbreak of plague to these stellar objects. Moreover, the subsequent evolution and extinction of life may have been directly impacted by the continued arrival of bacteria,
archae, viruses, and their genes from space. On this picture the evolution of higher plants and animals, including humans, would be impacted by the insertion of genes from space, as well as recurrent episodes of pandemic disease. Near-culling pandemics and extinction episodes have in fact been preceded by or followed by inserts of viral genes into survivors who have transmitted these viral elements to their progeny, thereby impacting future evolution. Although ancient fears and reverence of comets may be coincidental with the outbreaks of pandemics, they may also have a factual basis.
Keywords: Panspermia, life, interplanetary transfer, disease, death, plague, pandemic, 1918 flu, comets
***
In the first century AD, the Greek physician Rufus of Ephesus, refers to an outbreak of a devastating pandemic in Libya, Egypt, and Syria (Karlen 1996; McNeill 1977). The
popularly accepted cause of the pandemic is bubonic plague caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, in which flea-infected rodents act as an intermediate vector. But what
was the source of the bacillus? At around the same time Marcus Manilius (10-20 AD) wrote thus:
"Death comes with those celestial torches, which threaten earth with the blaze of
pyres unceasing, since heaven and nature’s self are stricken and seem doomed to
share men’s tomb."
"In times of great upheaval rare ages have seen the sudden glow of flame through
the clear air and comets blaze into life and perish."
Half a millennium later The Plague of Justinian (541-542AD) scourged and afflicted the Byzantine Empire, including its capital Constantinople, causing mass death. The
popularly accepted cause of the pandemic is also bubonic plague (McNeill 1977). These plagues are all bacterial diseases which are spread by infected fleas, by contact
with the body fluids of infected people and animals, and by inhaling infectious droplets in the air. How did fleas come to be infected? Were they also contaminated by pathogens in the air?
Late in the autumn of 1680 the good people of Manhattan were overcome with terror at a sight in the heavens such as has seldom greeted human eyes. An enormous comet, perhaps the most magnificent one on record, suddenly made its appearance. At first it was tailless and dim, like a nebulous cloud, but at the end of a week the tail began to show itself and in a second week had attained a length of 30 degrees; in the third week it extended to 70 degrees, while the whole mass was growing brighter. After five weeks it seemed to be absorbed into the intense glare of the sun, but in four days more it reappeared like a blazing sun itself in the throes of some giant convulsion and threw out a tail in the opposite direction as far as the whole distance between the sun and the earth. Sir Isaac Newton, who was then at work upon the mighty problems soon to be published to the world in his "Principia," welcomed this strange visitor as affording him a beautiful instance for testing the truth of his new theory of gravitation. But most people throughout the civilized world, the learned as well as the multitude, feared that the end of all things was at hand. Every church in Europe, from the grandest cathedral to the humblest chapel, resounded with supplications, and in the province of New York a day of fasting and humiliation was appointed, in order that the wrath of God might be assuaged.