Kmflett's Blog

The eclipse: is it a  sign of bad things ahead for Farage?

The Clacton By-Election is on 13^th August but on the evening of the 12^th August there is a rare solar eclipse.

Norman Cohn’s book on millenarism, In Pursuit of the Millenium lists a number of events that might be regarded as omens, heralding the end of days. Signs included, droughts, famine, plague, civil discord, sudden deaths of significant people and so on

In 2026 there is detailed scientific understanding of what comets are, how they arise and where, what they consist of and what they do. Likewise for eclipses

Suffice to say this post is not about the science-quite the reverse.

In Medieval times the appearance of comets were not understood except in superstitious terms. Wiki has the following:

Fear of comets as acts of God and signs of impending doom was highest in Europe from AD 1200 to 1650.^[136] The year after the Great Comet of 1618, for example, Gotthard Arthusius published a pamphlet stating that it was a sign that the Day of Judgment was near.^[137] He listed ten pages of comet-related disasters, including “earthquakes, floods, changes in river courses, hail storms, hot and dry weather, poor harvests, epidemics, war and treason and high prices”

By the nineteenth century there was a much better understanding that bad things happened for many reasons, but comets was not one of them.

However the comet analogy had a brief political usage around the time of Peterloo and just after.

In 1819 Shorter published a radical paper the Theological Comet which anticipated the overthrow of priests and Kings. It was subtitled the Free Thinking Englishman

E P Thompson references it in the Making of the English Working Class noting that it was the kind of publication and ideas that London ultra radicals supported in the period after the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819.

In particular Thistlewood, who was a key organiser of the Cato St Conspiracy in February 1820 may have been influenced.

Cato St, a reaction to Peterloo, was a plot to behead the Cabinet while they were at a dinner in central London. The plotters were infiltrated by Government spies who in fact may well have been the real originators of the plot, and executed.