For centuries, astronomical phenomena have been taken as initiatory signals to divine the future or explain the evils of the present. Miguel Ángel Sabadell reviews the role that superstition and astrology have played in the history of humanity.
For the enlightened Montesquieu , astrology was a proud extravagance : “We believe that our actions are important enough to deserve to be written in the great book of heaven.” However, this belief has turned celestial phenomena such as eclipses, comets or planetary conjunctions into triggers of important historical events . For example, according to a widespread legend, during World War II Nazi leaders made their decisions based on astrological predictions. However, the rigorous work of the British historian Ellic Howe showed that, in reality, they did not take into account the relative positions of the planets. Of course, there was an exception: Rudolf Hess, number three in the Party after Hitler and Göring.
Hitler’s Russian invasion
It all started in full confrontation with England, when the Führer began planning the invasion of Russia. Hess thought that the UK would sign a secret peace agreement with Germany, so he decided to fly there. In early 1941, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, an amateur astrologer who was on the Nazi leader’s staff, told him that on May 10 there would be a planetary conjunction : the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus would occupy an arc of only 8th in Taurus. On the other hand, the Munich astrologer Maria Nagengast informed him that this would be a good day to travel abroad.
The rest is history: Hess’s peace conditions were a joke to Churchill, who stopped him. For Hitler, Hess had gone mad because of astrology. On June 9, the Gestapo launched Operation Aktion Hess, which resulted in the arrest of hundreds of occultists and astrologers. Most ended up in the infamous death camps. Planetary conjunctions also affected the greatest conqueror and genocide of all time, Genghis Khan. The Mongols frequently looked to the sky, where they saw omens and omens: the campaign against the Chinese province of Hunan stopped in May 1221 precisely because of an eclipse of the Sun. The celestial obsession of this people was such that, years later Marco Polo counted more than 5,000 astrologers and fortune-tellers in the Mongolian capital alone .
After defeating the Tangut Empire in 1226, the sovereign ordered the extermination of the population. On December 12, the five planets visible to the naked eye – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were concentrated in a 31º arc in Capricorn. Genghis Khan’s astrologer interpreted it as a sign from the heavens against such barbarism, so the emperor ordered the killing to stop. It is believed that the planets could thus avoid 100,000 deaths.
Bad omens
Of course, the position of the stars has also been taken as a harbinger of dire phenomena . On September 14, 1186, the 5 planets met in a space of 11 degrees, with the Moon and the Sun less than 3 degrees apart. A few decades later, the bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church Bar-Hebraeus wrote about it: “All astronomers (sic) predicted that a universal flood would take place and that all humanity would perish.” But no other conjunction has caused more panic than that of February 19, 1524, when the 5 planets and the Sun were concentrated in Pisces. The first to warn of the impending disaster was the German astrologer Johannes Stöffler, in 1499. His colleagues amplified his words, which became a publishing boom: thousands of pamphlets and more than 160 books on the subject were printed. Furthermore, the Berlin court astrologer Johann Carion set the day of judgment: July 15, 1524.
Something similar happened with the 1982 alignment, with the 9 planets placed on the other side of the Sun at a 90º angle. Such a catastrophe was feared that even two astrophysicists, John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, even claimed in The Jupiter Effect (1974) that the gravitational effect would cause an earthquake that would destroy California. The book became a best seller and the authors made huge profits.
The influence of the stars on human history is limited to how much we want to believe that they affect us. So it is with solar eclipses . During the war between Lydians and Medes, in 585 BC. C., darkness fell in the middle of the battle and both sides decided to seek peace. The founder of Islam also had his back and forth with eclipses. Although Muslim theology does not accept it, popular tradition says that the birth of the Prophet in 570 was announced by one. His son Ibrahim tragically died on January 22, 632, and curiously there was an eclipse that day. Some Meccans saw it as an omen, but Muhammad corrected them by saying: “The Sun and the Moon are signs from God and are not overshadowed by the death or birth of any man.”
The Sun, the star king
However, the phenomenon that may have had the most influence on our history is the activity that the Sun periodically unfolds. For example, it is possible that this explainsthe colonization of Greenland. The first record we have of this territory dates back to 982, when it was discovered by Eric the Red. The unusually good weather between 1000 and 1300 allowed the first colonies to flourish thanks to the trade in ivory, sealskins, wood … But the cold began to arrive in 1325 and caused poor harvests and famines. In 1350 the northern settlements were abandoned. Ten years later only one ship arrived every few years, and the last visit to the colony was in 1406. This dramatic turn in the weather is calledLittle Ice Age. At that time, the Thames froze every year and in the winter of 1422-1423 the Baltic Sea froze.
What is striking is that the preceding centuries, marked by warm weather, coincided with the so-calledMedieval Maximum of Solar Activity. For its part, the coldest time of that mini-ice age did so with two periods in which the Sun did not show a single spot: the Spörer minima -from 1400 to 1510- and the Maunder minima -from 1645 to 1715-. Records obtained over 3,000 years reveal that global temperature drops coincide with minima in solar activity. The most visible aspect of these blackouts are theSunspots, some dark areas that appear in the photosphere of the star. Although the Chinese knew of its existence since the Shang dynasty, in 1200 BC. C., provoked a bitter controversy between Galileo Galilei and the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner, who claimed to have been the first to observe them. Scheiner’s intrigues led to an open war against the Pisa astronomer that lasted for 20 years. In fact, Galileo always suspected that behind the persecution he was subjected to by the Church was the animosity of the Jesuits.
Sunspots are related to the appearance of ruptures on the surface of our star , which launch a shower of subatomic particles into space. These modify the properties of our ionosphere for days, which can cause satellites to fail and affect radio communications and microchips in different ways.
Playful particles are not the only thing that comes to us from the sky. Comets and meteorites of different sizes also add to the bombardment. If it hadn’t been for the impact of the 10-km-diameter asteroid that, 65 million years ago, caused the disappearance of 85% of animal species , including dinosaurs, mammals might not have taken off, evolutionarily speaking. The remains of this clash that are preserved in the Yucatan (Mexico) are the clearest example of the powerful influence of the heavens in the evolution of earthly life. Furthermore, possibly these boulders have also had something to do with the evolution of our technology. Indeed, around 1500 a. C. the Hittites discovered that iron could be cast to make better quality tools than bronze. However, to achieve this, it is necessary to follow a complex process and reach a temperature of 1,535 ºC. What gave the people of the Middle East the key to start using this metal?
The importance of iron
We have a clue in thatMany of the artifacts found in Bronze Age sites contain 90% iron.or. Among them, we have the dagger of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, who reigned in the 14th century BC. C. Chemical analysis has revealed that the impurities it contains are nickel, which indicates that the material used in its manufacture came from a metallic meteorite, whose composition is very similar. Is it possible that the cast iron in our atmosphere was the first material used by blacksmiths? Hittites and Sumerians recognized this connection by calling iron fire from heaven; even the Egyptian word for it means heavenly thunder. What’s more, the Assyrian term is metal from heaven. Another piece of data that supports this hypothesis: The first western explorers who went into the Arctic regions were surprised that the Inuit of northwest Greenland used knives, harpoon tips and engraving tools made of iron, since they did not have mines. Then? Its supplier was a meteorite that was 2,000 km away. In 1894, the American Robert E. Peary, guided by a local who led him to a certain place on Saviksoah Island, north of Cape York, found the legendary rock. This was divided into three parts: Ahnighito, 34 tons, the Woman, 3, and the Dog, 0.5. In the end, the Inuit iron mine was sold for $ 40,000 to the American Museum of Natural History. Today it is on display in the Arthur Ross Meteorite Room.
Ironically tooour civilization makes use of alien metals. 27% of the world’s nickel comes from the Sudbury astroblem in Ontario (Canada), the second largest crater on the planet. The gap was formed, approximately 1.85 billion years ago, by the impact of a large meteorite composed mainly of iron and nickel.
But themeteoriteshave not only served as a lubricant for thetechnological advance. Often they have also been given a divine character. That happened in 205 BC. C., when Aníbal threatened the stability of the Roman Republic. The sibyl prophesied that the Carthaginian chieftain would be defeated if the Mother of the Gods, Cybele Kaitabata, was brought from her temple at Pessinus, in Phrygia – today central Turkey. To this end, a ship was built, which set out on such a sacred mission with five senators commanded by the consul Marco Valerio Levino. All that display was made by what is believed to be a conical shaped piece of meteorite – the goddess Kaitabata, which means falling from the sky. After defeating Hannibal and conquering Carthage, the Romans built a temple dedicated to this deity on the Palatine Hill, where the meteorite was worshiped for 500 years, until it fell into oblivion. The rock came to light in excavations that were carried out in the area in 1730, but no one recognized it and it was lost forever. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (about 203-222) also had his relationship with meteorites. He had been high priest in the temple of Emesa – today the Syrian city of Homs – where the solar god Elagabalus was worshiped. Hence the name by which the sovereign is also known, Heliogabalus. His cult was centered on a large dark meteorite with markings that suggested the image of the Sun.
It is possible that this is also the origin of the Black Stone of the Kaaba, in Mecca, a pre-Islamic place of worship that contained 360 idols until in 630 Muhammad cleansed it of all of them. Islamic tradition states that the rock came from heaven and was the color of hyacinth, but turned black because of the sins of humanity. According to the testimonies of those who have seen it, it is reddish-black in color and a fringe and crystalline inclusions can be distinguished on its surface. In 1980, Elsebeth Thomsen, from the Institute of Paleontology and Historical Geology at the University of Copenhagen, indicated that it could be an impactite – rock formed by sand fused with meteorite material – obtained from the Wabar craters, in the Saudi desert of Rub al- Jali.
The Wabar impactites have the appearance of a hard glass with a porous structure – it can float, like the Black Stone, according to tradition – and have inclusions of white crystal and sandstone that could correspond to the peculiar strip of the sacred rock. And the examples continue. On December 2, 1880, a meteorite fell at the feet of two Brahmins near Andhra in India. They immediately proclaimed themselves ministers of the Miraculous God and managed to attract 10,000 pilgrims in one day. Even closer to our days, on August 14, 1992, dozens of rocks crashed down on Mbale in Uganda. The locals decided that, suitably pulverized, they would take them as medicine, since the gods had sent them to cure AIDS.
Comets and the future
The power to anticipate the future belongs, in turn, to other wandering bodies:the comets. The most famous is the Halley, whose first recorded appearance in the West dates from 1066. Its passage was for the chroniclers of the time the omen of the defeat of the last Saxon king, Harold II of England, which occurred a few months later in the battle of Hastings.
AKiteHe was also responsible for thedeification of Julius Caesar-the first of a Roman leader-, assassinated in the Ides of March of 44 a. After a series of political skirmishes, his nephew Octavio decided to organize in July of that year the games that Caesar promised as a result of his last victories. The first day a comet was seen to the north, and Octavio assured that it was the soul of the conqueror of Gaul taken to the skies, which unleashed an intense campaign that culminated a year and a half later, when the Senate declared Julius Caesar god. .
For the Romans, comets became symbols of the fall of the emperors. The year 54 was associated with the death of Claudio, who was actually poisoned. When in August 60 another appeared in the sky of Rome, the historian Tacitus wrote: “The general thought is that it means a change of emperor. People are already speculating about the next one, since they are sure that Nero – who had succeeded Claudius – is effectively dethroned. ” The monarch had it easy: he sent his possible successor into exile and had him assassinated there. Seneca wrote a treatise on comets, intended to appease his anger, in which he focused on physical hypotheses without any allusion to their divine implications. He even argued that his kite traveled the sky in the opposite direction to Julius Caesar, so he had nothing to fear. At the end of 64 another appeared. According to the biographer Suetonius (about 70-about 140), the astrologer Balbillus commented to the emperor that the sovereigns used to avoid the misfortunes that these stars carried by executing prominent figures of the society. Neither short nor lazy, Nero ordered the assassination of part of the high nobility and forced Seneca to commit suicide. On the other side of the Atlantic, things have not been very different. In the mid-15th century, the Aztec Empire, which dominated much of Central America, lived in a continuous state of war with its neighbors. This served its leaders to obtain resources and slaves, which they then sacrificed in bloody ceremonies. An estimated 20,000 people were killed in this way each year. The chronicles of 1517, 15 years after Moctezuma II ascended the throne, describe the appearance at midnight of a “flaming ear” that remained visible until sunrise.
The Emperor’s Vision
The emperor saw the comet before his diviners, so he had them tortured to death for their grievous inattention. By the way, he robbed their houses and enslaved their families. That did not prevent fear from invading him, since he suspected that the sign he had seen in the sky augured the fall of the empire. Thus, he increased the number of sacrifices and had altars built to appease the gods. And by those coincidences of life, in 1519 – the year in which the Aztec tradition announced that their god Quetzalcoatl would return to reclaim their land – Hernán Cortés appeared with 508 soldiers. The emperor, overwhelmed by the prophecies, believed that it was the deity. The gold and the rich presents that he sent to Cortés made the conquerors feverish, who eventually destroyed their empire.
The ominous prophecies that have historically been linked to comets have come to generate genuine outbursts of panic. Surely the most famous case took place in 1910, with the return of the always-fateful Halley. To add fuel to the fire, astronomers declared that the comet’s tail was going to cover our planet and that a terrible poisonous gas, cyanogen, had been found in it. All over the world, from France to Haiti, from the US to South Africa, gas-proof rooms were built, and newspaper headlines such as Women Close Doors and Windows to Protect themselves from cyanogen weren’t strange. Suicides and suicide attempts, madness and panic attacks, murders, even the false story of the sacrifice of a virgin by a sect in Oklahoma … it was all attributed to the comet.
Astrophysicist Bradley E. Schaefer, today at Louisiana State University, has made a catalog with 35 of these celestial bodies seen as omens by the ancient Romans: of them, only 2 were identified as omens of something good. Ethnographic studies confirm that these objects are often seen as carriers of bad news throughout the world. Human stupidity has even left us collective suicides, like the one carried out in 1997 by 39 members of the Californian Heaven’s Gate sect. They believed that this way they could board the spacecraft that was, of course, on the tail of a comet.
Miguel Angel Sabadell
