comet appeared and had died three months later, on the very
day it disappeared. Elizabeth I of England gained great pres-
tige by manifesting her indifference to the comet of 1557.
When her courtiers tried to deter her from looking at the
dreaded object she advanced boldly to the window, declar-
ing, “the die is thrown.” Seventeenth-century Christian
preachers declared that comets were sent by God to draw
human beings to repentance, and as late as 1843 the Miller-
ites thought a comet confirmed their belief in the immediate
destruction of the world.
Among the Aztec similar notions prevailed. They called
comets “stars that smoke” and thought they usually signified
the impending death of members of nobility; the death of
the ruler of Tenochtitlán followed the appearance of a comet,
and another was said to have predicted the fall of Moctezuma
II. The Plains Indians also connected appearances of comets
with disaster and misfortune.
In the Society Islands, comets (along with meteors) were
believed to be the tails of gods, and when they were seen, the
people threw off their upper garments (the mark of respect
shown to gods and sacred head chiefs) and exclaimed, “A
god! A god!” But in Samoa comets were believed to predict
the death of a chief, or some other calamity such as war or
bloodshed. The Indian astronomer and astrologer Varahami-
hira (sixth century CE), while generally concurring with such
theories, developed an elaborate system of analysis to predict
the three types of events comets can bring: auspicious, inaus-
picious, and having mixed effects.
Shooting and falling stars, meteors, and meteorites have
in common the sacred quality of having come from the heav-
ens, whether for good or ill. Like comets they are preemi-
nently seen as signs and portents. Ptolemy says they indicate
the coming of winds and storms, while Seneca links them to
violent political events. By contrast, some believed them to
be connected with healing. Pliny preserved the notion that
a corn may be successfully extracted at the time of a shooting
star; the physician Marcellus (fourth century CE) says the
same of warts, adding that if you start counting while a star
is falling, the number will equal the number of years you will
be free of sore eyes. In India falling stars are thought of not
only as reincarnating souls traveling back to earth, but also
as demons who love the night and who are connected in a
negative way with the souls of the dead. Such beings are espe-
cially dangerous to pregnant women.
Among the most famous meteorites in religious history
is the KaEbah of Mecca, which tradition says was brought to
earth by the archangel Gabriel. Also important is the meteor-
ite of the goddess Cybele of the Phrygians. It arrived in Rome
in 204 BCE, when Rome was being threatened by Hannibal.
The Sibylline Books, which had been consulted after a mete-
orite shower, foretold that a foreign army could be driven
from Italy if Cybele’s symbol, a meteorite, was brought to
Rome. It was, and Hannibal was defeated. The Romans ex-
pressed their gratitude to the goddess by erecting a temple
to her on the summit of the Palatine and held an annual cele-
bration to commemorate her arrival.
The alignments of temples, the long history of astrologi-
cal beliefs, and the abundance of myths and folktales about
the stars provide ample evidence for the existence in many
cultures of the notion “as above, so below.” This view of the
universe, in which the terrestrial and celestial realms are rec-
ognized as interrelated, has been a source of great richness
to the cultural and religious experience of the human race.SEE ALSO Astrology; Ethnoastronomy; Sky.BIBLIOGRAPHY
The best collection of myths surrounding the stars, constellations,
and zodiac is Richard Hinckley Allen’s Star Names: Their
Lore and Meaning (1899; reprint, New York, 1963). Allen
makes no attempt to synthesize his material, which is ar-
ranged in alphabetical order. For the various astral systems
of the ancient world, see Robert Brown’s Researches into the
Origin of the Primitive Constellations of the Greeks, Phoeni-
cians and Babylonians, 2 vols. (London, 1899–1900); for
their scientific background, see Otto Neugebauer’s The Exact
Sciences in Antiquity (1951; New York, 1969); while Ptole-
my’s Tetrabiblos, translated by F. E. Robbins (Cambridge,
Mass., 1940), remains the starting place for Western views.
For the Naks:atras and general Indian views, see The
Brihajja ̄takam of Vara ̄ha Mihira, 2d ed., translated by Swami
Vijnanananda (New Delhi, 1979), and Robert De Luce’s
Constellational Astrology according to the Hindu System (Los
Angeles, 1963). The decans are covered by Wilhelm Gundel
in Dekane und Dekansternbilder (Hamburg, 1936). Lynn
Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8
vols. (New York, 1923–1958), remains a valuable resource
on the West up to the medieval period.
On the issue of alignments, Joseph Norman Lockyer’s The Dawn
of Astronomy: A Study of Temple Worship and Mythology of the
Ancient Egyptians (1894; Cambridge, Mass., 1964), while
challenged today, helped to create the field of astroar-
chaeology. This work is continued in In Search of Ancient As-
tronomies, edited by Edwin C. Krupp (Garden City, N.Y.,
1978), which also contains excellent essays on ancient astron-
omy, and in Native American Astronomy, edited by Anthony
F. Aveni (Austin, 1977), which treats archaeological sites in
North and South America.
Finally, in part 4 of The Raw and the Cooked (1969; Chicago,
1983), Claude Lévi-Strauss provides an interesting compari-
son of similar myths of particular constellations, such as the
Pleiades, in South America and ancient Greece.
New Sources
Aveni, Anthony F. Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three
Great Ancient Cultures. New York, 1997.
Condos, Theony. Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans: A Source-
book Containing the Constellations of Pseudo-Eratosthenes and
the Poetic Astronomy of Hyginus. Grand Rapids, Mich, 1997.
Evans, James. The History & Practice of Ancient Astronomy. New
York, 1998.
Krupp, Edwin C. Skywatchers, Shamans, & Kings: Astronomy and
the Archaeology of Power. New York, 1997.8736 STARS