"Comets are coming!" In February I took my kids to see the Morehead Planetarium sky show that preceded the arrival of the Hale-Bopp Comet. The show reminded us that the ancients always associated comets with some major earth event like a war or other societal upheaval. With this theme in mind, I got up early a few weeks ago to see the real thing.
The sight was strangely familiar since I had seen the spectacular Hyakutake Comet last year from my back porch in approximately the same location in the sky. That first experience of watching a "fuzzy star" move slowly across the heavens over a period of days was an astronomical initiation I will always remember, but in cosmological terms, it pales in comparison to the impact of the Shoemaker-Levy Comet on the planetary psyche in July 1995.
Although not visible to the naked-eye, the real-time action of comet fragments slamming into Jupiter was displayed for all to see by the Hubble telescope. The only modern celestial event that compared to this one in terms of a shift in global consciousness was the transmission of the first pictures of the Earth alone in space from the Apollo mission in 1968. Those pictures gave us a visual concept of our common bond as fellow astronauts on a fragile Spaceship Earth. Shoemaker-Levy reminded us of just how vulnerable our existence is in this solar system.
In astrology, Jupiter symbolizes expansion of consciousness, and the comet-planet collision changed our world view significantly, as reflected in the media's millennial obsession with global disaster imagery ("dis-aster" being derived from "bad star" in Greek and Latin).
Coincidentally, the recent planetary survival epic, "Asteroid," was shown on television the day before the newspapers proclaimed that scientists had confirmed that the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago as the result of a massive meteor impact in the Yucatan. "As above, so below" is one of the basic tenets of hermetic wisdom, so it is important to reflect on the societal events that were taking place during the third week of July that year. The cover of Time had a picture of the massive genocide in Rwanda graphically reminding us of our own capacity to destroy ourselves. At the bottom was a quote from a survivor: "This is the beginning of the Apocalypse."
In recent months, there has been much apocalyptic hype on the Internet surrounding the Hale-Bopp Comet including references to the "Wormwood" star in the Book of Revelation and speculations about the arrival of space aliens.
The most intriguing correlation with the appearance of this comet, however, has to be the synchronous announcement of the success of recent cloning experiments that have changed forever our view of our own uniqueness.
The possibility that our genetically-determined physical forms can be duplicated has been disturbing to ethicists and theologians alike. A Time essayist even raised the heretical question of whether or not the soul itself can be cloned. In that regard, astrology may make a comeback, since the only thing that will distinguish one clone from another will be the timing of creation and the configurations of the celestial bodies at those particular moments.
Such thoughts bring us back to our heavenly visitors again. Will a large comet or meteor impact the Earth someday despite the statistical improbability of the event? Will humans be cloned despite the government's attempts to ban such experimentation? The real question is not "will" but "when?" Issues of timing seem so important in our limited frame of reference, and the negative consequences of such events tend to dominate our minds.
Perhaps it is appropriate to think about the possible positive effects of these consciousness-shifting happenings. Comets and cloning cause us to consider that our physical bodies are really just impermanent shells that can be destroyed by natural catastrophes or replicated by genetic engineering. As a result, we are forced to confront the ultimate timelessness of the soul, which surpasses rational understanding, but is not beyond the reach of transcendental experience.
So, when you gaze at the comet on Easter weekend and ponder what the ancients thought of its last visit 4,000 years ago, remember this prayer from "The Mass on the World" by priest/mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Shatter, my God, through the daring of your revelation the childishly timid outlook that can conceive of nothing greater or more vital in the world than the pitiable perfection of our human organism."
Larry Burk is an associate professor of radiology.
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