The Great Christ Comet (33 page)

The Hydrid Meteor Storm

In verses 3–4 John writes, “And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great fire-colored
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dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns.
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His tail swept/dragged
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a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.”

What is described in verses 3–4 is specifically placed on the eve of the birth of the child (“the dragon stood before the woman who
was about to
bring forth the child”;
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v. 4b). That is, the dragon's throwing of the stars to the earth and his aggressive standing in front of the woman must have been seen on the last predawn observing session before the coma-baby had descended to the point that it could be regarded as having been born.

The focus in verses 3–4 is not on Virgo but on a second constellation, one consisting of a great fire-colored dragon, with seven heads and ten horns. There can be little doubt that this constellation is the Greek Hydra,
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known in Bab­ylon as the Serpent, which was seen as a serpent-dragon “adorned with horns, wings and a pair of legs” and was identified with the Chaos Monster.
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The serpentine dragon in Revelation 12 is, evidently, closely associated with the seven-headed Chaos Monster Tiamat in Bab­ylo­nian tradition
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and with the seven-headed Leviathan
of Canaanite mythology.
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The Greek Hydra/Bab­ylo­nian Serpent is located in the area of the sky right beside the zodiacal constellation Virgo, just to its south. As a constellation, Hydra was “great” (v. 3) because it was the largest of all, aside from Argo Navis.

The manifestation of Hydra is astonishing and deeply disturbing. The fiery color, coupled with the self-assertion implied by the horns and crowns, suggests that the dragon is dangerous and angry, and enjoys great royal authority. When we get to chapter 13, we realize that this serpentine Chaos Monster is the power behind the first beast, who will rule over the whole world at the end of the age. But here, on the eve of the birth of the cometary baby, he is seething with rage because he realizes that this child is destined to destroy him. Consequently, in an act of fearful power, he casts a third of the stars to the earth.

Revelation 12:4 is very specific in saying that the means by which the stars are thrown toward the earth is Hydra's tail. Hydra's tail is a segment of the bottom of the constellation figure. Its lowest point (see
fig. 7.13
), the tip of the tail, is
π
(Pi) Hydrae. This was the opinion of Ptolemy in the second century AD, but it preceded him.
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Pseudo-Eratosthenes (
Catasterismi
41) and Hyginus (
Poetica Astronomica
3.39) offer quite vague matchups of Hydra's stars to the constellation figure.
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They speak of 9 dim stars in the section of Hydra from the tail to the fifth coil. These 9 stars may be identified as
π
,
γ
,
ψ
,
β
,
ο
,
ξ
, HIP56332, HIP56280, and HIP57613. Together those nine constitute the brightest stars in that long section of Hydra. Moreover, Hipparchus in the second century BC also regarded the tip of Hydra's tail as being
π
(Pi) Hydrae.
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That the Bab­ylo­nians in this general period thought of the constellation similarly is suggested by a drawing of the Serpent on a Bab­ylo­nian astrological cuneiform tablet from Uruk in the Seleucid period, in which the small constellation known to the Bab­ylo­nians as the Raven (and known to the Greeks as Corvus, or the Crow) is portrayed as a bird perched on the Serpent's tail (
fig. 7.15
). Accordingly,
π
(Pi) was almost certainly understood to be the tip of Hydra's tail at the time of the birth of Jesus.

The highest point of the tail segment of Hydra is not very clear, although Pseudo-Eratosthenes locates the Crow (Corvus) on the tail and reveals that what he calls the fifth coil of Hydra (evidently associated with
β
,
ο
, and
ξ
Hydrae) is not part of the tail.
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The Bab­ylo­nian representation of Hydra was very similar, except that the bird sitting on the tail is the Raven and is oriented toward the tip of the tail rather than, in the case of Corvus in Greco-Roman imagination, away from it.

From somewhere along this stretch of the tail, from
π
(Pi) Hydrae to where the feet of the Crow/Raven rested on Hydra, one-third of the stars of heaven seemed to streak toward the earth. Since the scene climaxes in verse 4b with Hydra standing, that is, with the tip of the tail level with the eastern horizon, the shooting stars must have seemed to stem from a higher point in the tail, probably between
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae (which is about 11 degrees basically straight above the tip) and a star like HIP59373 (about 25 degrees from
π
[Pi] Hydrae), under Corvus the Crow/the Raven. All or part of this section of Hydra's tail was above the eastern horizon when the stars seemed to be thrown toward the earth.

It seems clear that what is being described in Revelation 12:3–4 is a great meteor storm, when thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of meteors per hour streak through the sky. Meteor storms occur when Earth moves through a dense collection of meteoroids in a meteoroid stream. As many who witnessed the Leonid meteor storms of the nineteenth century noticed, the meteors in a meteor storm all appear to streak away from one particular point in the sky, called a radiant. It is not that
all
the meteor streaks in a given shower begin at the radiant—they do not—but rather that if one draws lines from the meteor streaks backwards, those extended lines will converge at the radiant. In the case of the meteor storm in view in verses 3–4, the radiant is manifestly the tail of the serpentine dragon. We shall give more detailed consideration to verses 3–4a and the meteor storm in appendix 2.

According to verse 4b, the serpent-dragon is intent on killing the newborn child as soon as he is fully delivered. Specifically, Hydra the dragon “stood before the woman who was about to bring forth the child, so that when she brought forth her child he might devour it.” The Greek verb for “stood” here is in the perfect tense, to make the Monster's “standing” more vivid.
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Of course, used of the serpent, the language is very forceful: snakes often “stand” before they strike out. The dragon's standing before Virgo is therefore aggressive—Hydra is intent on attacking the baby as soon as it emerges completely from Virgo's belly. He is desperate to kill and devour his ultimate opponent.

But what did Hydra's “standing” actually look like in astronomical terms?

Hydra only “stands” when the constellation is ascending over the eastern sky and
the tip of the tail seems to be resting on the ground, that is, at the point of just emerging over the horizon. For Hydra to stand,
π
(Pi) Hydrae would simply have to be level with the eastern horizon (see
fig. 7.13
).
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Viewed from Bab­ylon in the run-up to dawn in September/October, the lowest part of Virgo is almost level with
π
(Pi) Hydrae—
λ
(Lambda) Virginis, associated with Virgo's left foot by Hipparchus, Hyginus, Pseudo-Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy, is less than 4 degrees in altitude, and
μ
Virginis, regarded as her right foot by the Greco-Roman astronomers, is just over 2 degrees up. So someone in the Near East gazing at the eastern horizon as
π
(Pi) Hydrae was rising would have been looking at the whole of Hydra and the whole of Virgo. The image of Hydra standing beside Virgo as she is about to bring forth her baby is a powerful and deeply troubling one.
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The occurrence of a dramatic meteor storm radiating from Hydra's tail on the eve of the birth of Virgo's son, when little of the coma-baby remained inside her womb, would have been truly extraordinary.

The Birth

In verse 5 we return to the focus of verses 1–2—that is, Virgo's delivery of her child. According to verse 5a, she proceeded to give “birth to a son, a male child
,
who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”
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Evidently, the cometary baby had now, finally, descended to the point where the whole of it rose after the rising of Virgo's vaginal opening. Her baby could therefore be regarded as born. Of course, that seemed to imply that the baby on the earth whom the cometary baby represented was born at that very time. In a special sense, then, the terrestrial newborn was Virgo's son, born in conjunction with her celestial baby.

It seems most natural to infer that the coma-baby at the time of the birth was approximately the size of a full-term baby relative to its mother—hence about 9–12 degrees long.

Needless to say, the sight of Virgo giving birth to her baby would have been a celestial wonder to behold!

The Iron Scepter

Verse 5's reference to a “scepter,” the symbol of royal authority, at this point is striking. It recalls Psalm 2:9's prophecy that the Messiah will rule the nations with an iron scepter, and Numbers 24:17's oracle that the Messiah would be a “star” and “scepter.”
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That the scepter is “iron” suggests, as in Psalm 2:9, that it is a symbol not just of royal authority but also of overwhelming power.

The narrative of Revelation 12:1–5 has been about an astronomical nativity. Why, therefore, does John interrupt the flow of the celestial story to refer to the future reign of the Messiah? The answer is presumably that the remarkable play unfolding in the heavens above alluded to this future reign. Since the birth consisted of the cometary coma playing the part of a baby in Virgo's womb that grows and is born, the most obvious and natural explanation of this parenthetical note (“one
who is to rule all the nations with an iron scepter”; v. 5) is that the whole comet, including its long tail, at that very point took the form of an iron scepter. Scepters in the ancient world were typically straight, long sticks, often with some decoration or fancy design at the top. At the time that the baby Messiah was born, the cometary tail was apparently silvery-grey in color and was extremely long. Numbers 24:17 is very important here, because that prophecy by the Mesopotamian seer Balaam had suggested that, at the time of the Messiah's coming, a cometary scepter would “rise” or “stand.” As we have already seen, what Balaam prophesied suggested that the Messiah's comet-star would look like a scepter at the time when it rose. Revelation 12:5 appears to be claiming that the Messiah's cometary scepter was a prominent celestial feature at the point when Virgo's baby was fully delivered.
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The fact that Revelation specifies that the Messiah would rule “all the nations” with an iron scepter may well imply that the comet as a whole at that moment stretched all the way across the sky from low on the eastern horizon to the western horizon. Such a phenomenon would have made it seem that the scepter was resting on the ground in the west (namely, Israel). Balaam's scepter-star would literally have looked like it was rising up out of Israel to announce the coming of the Messiah, who would exercise dominion over the entire world (Num. 24:17).

Accordingly, it would appear from Revelation 12:5 that the newborn baby was not the only image being created by the comet at the point of birth. Even as the comet's coma played the part of Virgo's baby boy, the comet as a whole seems to have been forming an enormous iron scepter that symbolized his eschatological reign over the whole earth. Together, these two images powerfully revealed that the Messiah, future autocrat of the world, was being born at that time in Judea.
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In light of the fact that Hydra was presented in Revelation 12:3–4 in terms that highlighted his royal authority and indeed his determination to attack, kill, and devour the Messiah as soon as he was born, the mention of the iron scepter in verse 5 is very striking, for it makes the point that Hydra is destined to fail. Even Hydra's final worldwide kingdom at the end of the age would be overthrown and replaced by the Messiah's everlasting kingdom (Revelation 12–14). The Messiah's scepter would loom large over the whole world.