Part 7

“The earth is under a terrific strain from Comets and planetary revolutions. Human destiny is red. That means blood. Political events are black. Terrible changes are imminent.

“This winter, France will be swept by terrible floods. Paris will be under water. The influence of form changes in other planets and the coming of a Comet will affect us for the worse.

“The strain of the stars will be most severely felt in America. The people of America will have to pay dearly for all their riches and sudden prosperity. With the coming of another Comet disaster will descend upon America.

“A financial crash is impending, to be followed by a long string of suicides. Black ruling us, men will commit all manner of crimes and knaveries for money.

“The times are swaying toward degeneration. We are swinging within the evil influence of a strange orbit. Our souls are jarred from their proper bearings. I dare not say all that is revealed to me. It would be too terrible.”

Soon after this prophesy was uttered came the first of such suicides. Adam Toma, a wealthy landowner of Szozona, Hungary, cut his throat because of the Comet. He left a note saying that the Comet was the cause of his death.

Cardinal Gibbons later expressed his profound belief that the Paris floods of this year were sent by God as a punishment to the Parisians for their frivolities and sins, of which the Comet was a fiery warning.

Commenting on Madame de Thebes’ predictions and her connection of the Comet of 1910 with this year’s spring-floods in France, Italy and Germany, the French astronomer Henri Deslandres, late Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Meudon and member of the French Academy of Sciences, said:

“However distant Comets may be, it is not at all impossible that their enormous tails, measuring 75,000,000 to 125,000,000 miles in length, may come in contact with our atmosphere. The theory that a Comet may disturb the atmosphere of the earth, causing rains of great duration, and consequently inundations and the sudden overflow of rivers, is not at all absurd. It can be sustained by scientific reasoning.”

It should be remembered here that Laplace, one of the greatest of all astronomers, credited the deluge to a Comet.

Before Madame de Thebes’ ominous prophesy concerning Halley’s Comet and its effects upon America were cabled over to this country, another, no less dire prediction of financial disaster in the United States, coincident with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, was made by W. E. Corey, the President of the American Steel Trust.

Mr. Corey then warned his friends to “call in their money and get from under” because a calamitous financial crash and general business ruin would surely come during the Spring of 1910.

The most ominous of all prophesies connected with the coming of Halley’s Comet this year was made by the venerable General Ballington Booth, the head of the Salvation Army. Speaking in London, immediately after Halley’s Comet had been located, early this year, General Booth said:

“We are, this year, rapidly approaching the end of all things, with similar results, but far surpassing in horrors any disaster that has gone before.

“All things will be wound up. Besides a deluge of water sweeping parts of the world and its inhabitants there will be fierce destruction by fire.”

FAMOUS COMETS OF OLDEN TIMES

Bacon, the great English thinker, has said: “Comets have some action and effect on the universality of things.”

All Comets recorded in history, so Lubienitius has shown in his “Universal History of All Comets,” appeared in connection with some great event or catastrophe in the History of Man.

George F. Chambers, one of the most up-to-date writers on Astronomy and Comets, on the second page of his “Story of the Comets” (1909), declares:

“It is the general testimony of History during many hundreds of years, one might even say during fully 2,000 years, that Comets were always considered to be peculiarly ‘ominous of the wrath of Heaven and as harbingers of wars and famines, of the dethronement of Monarchs and the dissolution of Empires.’”

Reaching back into remotest history, the sacred books of India show that the births of Krishna and of Buddha were foretold by moving lights in the Heavens.

The ancient records of China tell of the appearance of a moving beacon in Heaven at the birth of Yu, the first ruler of the Celestial Empire, and again at the birth of the great Chinese prophet, Lao-Tse.

The ancient Greeks have recorded similar appearances of Comets. Aesculapius, the divine healer and first physician, was born under a Comet.

The oldest traditions of the Jews tell us that when Abraham was born a moving star was seen in the East.

Another moving star with long radiant gleams of light streaming behind it shone forth at the birth of Moses. This Comet was seen by the Magi of Egypt, who pointed it out to the King as an omen meant for him. Hence Pharaoh’s order, as recorded in the Old Testament, for the slaughter of all male Jewish infants then born in Egypt.

GREAT EVENTS CONNECTED WITH HISTORIC COMETS IN ANTIQUITY

The earliest Comet of which there is any historic record was a Comet mentioned in the oldest cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia several thousand years before our Christian era, recently found on the north bank of Nahr-al-Kalb, near Beyrut in Syria. This Comet is recorded to have been visible to the naked eye for 29 nights.

At the time Lubienitius wrote his big “History of all the Comets” the exact date of this Comet had not been fixed. Lubienitius, though, had a record of this same Comet, the date of which he fixes at the year 2312 before Christ, the date computed by him and other writers for the beginning of the deluge.