The Great Christ Comet
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Greco-Roman
The Greco-Roman version of the Combat Myth featured Leto as the pregnant goddess. According to one tradition (related by Hyginus), Python, the dragon, discovered that Leto’s son, the child of Zeus, would slay him. Python pursued Leto and sought to kill her and her unborn infant. However, thanks to the north wind and Poseidon, Leto escaped to Delos, where she gave birth to Apollo and Diana. Sure enough, not long afterwards, four days in fact, Apollo slayed the dragon with arrows. For this reason he came to be called Pythian Apollo.69
Egyptian
In the Egyptian Combat Myth, which was Egypt’s major national myth for some three millennia70 and was well known internationally,71 the combat was all about sovereignty. The red Chaos Monster, the serpent-dragon Seth-Typhon, killed Osiris (god of the underworld), but the dead king nevertheless managed to impregnate Isis. The child in her womb was Horus. The pregnancy was exceptionally long and her labor excruciatingly painful and difficult.72 But she eventually bore the child. The dragon, discovering that Isis had delivered her child, determined to slay the boy, but Isis fled on a papyrus boat through the marshes to Chemnis in lower Egypt. Her son was destined to become king and to restore order to a world that had been dominated by Chaos since the dragon had slain Osiris. In due course Horus fought with Seth-Typhon and defeated him, imprisoning him and then ultimately destroying him with fire. Horus became king of the living and Osiris became king of the underworld.73
Revelation 12’s Version
In Revelation 12 the woman is Virgo qua Israel and she is pregnant with the Messiah, and the dragon is Hydra, the massive neighboring constellation figure to her south (fig. 7.13).
FIG. 7.13 A stick figure and artistic representation of the seven-headed constellation figure Hydra, along with the names of its major stars. Image credit: Sirscha Nicholl.
The sea-dragon is presented in terms that highlight his royal authority—he has ten horns and seven crowns. When Virgo was giving birth to the messianic baby, the dragon dragged, or swept from their places, one-third of the stars, throwing them to the earth. Then he stood up aggressively, ready to kill the newborn (v. 4), no doubt because he realized that this baby posed an enormous threat to his dominion—destined to destroy him and inaugurate the kingdom of God in the world. Thereafter Virgo’s son was quickly snatched away to God and his throne—the description of this in verse 5b strongly recalls Psalm 110:1, where the divine Messiah is invited by God to sit down at his right side until God has made his enemies a footstool for his feet. The dragon was thus thwarted in his bid to derail the divine plan and hence was doomed to see the evil world empire he sponsored decisively terminated. Consequently, the dragon mounted a vicious attack on the baby’s mother, the woman. However, she was given wings with which to escape into the wilderness for 3½ years and there was aided by the earth (vv. 6, 13–16). Frustrated once more, the dragon then turned his attention to all-out persecution of the other offspring of the woman (v. 17).
The Egyptian myth is closer to Revelation 1274—in both, the pregnant woman gives birth to her divine son before the dragon chases her, and what is at stake in the conflict is royal authority.75
Of course, the fact that Virgo was often regarded as Isis and that Revelation 12:1 is portraying Virgo in terms strongly reminiscent of Isis—enthroned and gloriously enrobed—strengthens the case for regarding the Isis-Horus myth as more important for Revelation 12 than the Greco-Roman myth concerning Apollo. Some have suggested that Seth-Typhon was identified with Hydra by Teukros of Babylon and others.76 Regardless, the case for regarding Revelation 12 as picking up on contemporary associations between Virgo and Isis is formidable.
Isis was frequently portrayed as having the Moon on her crown, and Horus as the Sun God (fig. 7.14).
FIG. 7.14 An 8th-century-BC statue of Isis, with a crown consisting of the Moon within horns, preparing to nurse her son Horus. Image credit: the Walters Museum, Baltimore.
When, therefore, Revelation 12:1 describes Virgo as enthroned, with the Sun clothing her and the Moon under her feet, it naturally brings images of Isis to mind, although it challenges Isis theology as it does so. First, the locations of the celestial lights with respect to Virgo’s body are important, making the point that Virgo did not give birth to the Sun, nor was she sovereign over the Moon, but the Sun could beautify her and the Moon could exalt her. Moreover, her son was not Horus, but rather the Messiah. Furthermore, it is very possible that the Sun was playing the part of the divine Father who begot the Messiah.
Of course, Teukros the Babylonian mentions that, in his day, Virgo was thought to be Isis enthroned and nursing Horus. If this indicates that the Greco-Egyptian identification of Virgo as Isis had taken root in Babylon, that would mean that the celestial narrative that is preserved for us in Revelation 12, and in which the comet plays the star role, would have spoken powerfully to Babylonian astronomers-astrologers at the time of Jesus’s birth. Indeed the fact that Revelation 12 is interacting with pagan mythology regarding Isis and Horus may well hint at the kind of paradigms through which some pagans (perhaps especially those in Babylon) had sought to interpret the celestial drama. More important, since the celestial drama was essentially an adaptation of the internationally known combat myth, it offered pagan observers a ready paradigm by which to understand the importance of the Messiah’s nativity in salvation history. It highlighted that Jesus was the fulfillment of the hope of all humans for deliverance from Chaos and Disorder.
The Dragon, the Meteor Storm, and the Birth
The Relationship of Revelation 12:3–5 to verses 1–2
Revelation 12:3ff. is set apart from verses 1–2 by the new introduction (“And another sign . . .”), but it is clear from verse 4b that the story of Virgo’s pregnancy and delivery of her child is still very much in view. While everything in verses 1–2 seems to relate to Virgo’s pregnancy, verses 3–5 are united by their focus on the grand conflict between the dragon and Virgo’s special son. However, although the spotlight in verses 3–4a is on a dragon rather than a woman, the dragon is introduced here because he is playing the role of antagonist in the nativity drama. It is important to appreciate the continuity between verses 1–2 and verses 3–5. For one thing, they are both astronomical in nature (“in heaven”; vv. 1, 3). For another, verses 3–5 continue the narrative that began in verses 1–2. The action of verses 3–5 clearly follows the events of verses 1–2 in time. The delivery of Virgo’s baby began in verses 1–2 and is completed in verse 5. The action of verses 3–4 manifestly belongs chronologically between the action of verses 1–2 and that of verses 5ff. Accordingly, what is described in verses 3–4 occurs while Virgo is in labor and indeed on the verge of fully delivering her baby. As the baby is about to be fully delivered, the dragon is ready to devour him (v. 4b). With this in mind, let us examine verses 3–5. As we do so, we must remember that verses 2–5 record moments drawn from predawn astronomical observing sessions stretching over a few weeks (long enough to make room below Virgo’s womb into which the comet could descend to be born). The cometary baby was slowly emerging from her belly, descending into the region of sky associated with her legs.
The Hydrid Meteor Storm
In verses 3–4 John writes, “And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great fire-colored77 dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns.78 His tail swept/dragged79 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”;80 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,81 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.82 The serpentine dragon in Revelation 12 is, evidently, closely associated with the seven-headed Chaos Monster Tiamat in Babylonian tradition83 and with the seven-headed Leviathan of Canaanite mythology.84 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.85 Pseudo-Eratosthenes (Catasterismi 41) and Hyginus (Poetica Astronomica 3.39) offer quite vague matchups of Hydra’s stars to the constellation figure.86 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.87 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.
FIG. 7.15 The Babylonian constellation figure Serpent (equivalent of Hydra) as imagined in Seleucid-era Uruk—reconstructed from two pieces of a cuneiform tablet, one of which is in the Louvre in Paris (AO 6448) and the other in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (VAT 7487) (photographs of which appeared in Ernst F. Weidner, “Eine Beschreibung des Sternenhimmels aus Assur,” Archiv für Orientforschung 4 [1927]: 73–85). The constellation Raven is perched on Hydra’s tail. Image credit: Sirscha Nicholl.
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.88 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.89
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).90
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.91
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.”92
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, a
nd Numbers 24:17’s oracle that the Messiah would be a “star” and “scepter.”93 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.94 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).