apeguia said:
I personally like your hypothesis, hkoehli. That would explain some bits of the Medieval descriptions of the Black Death that sounded a bit too far-fetched, even for comets. Such as: frogs and worms falling from the skies, dragons and stuff like that. It would also put the prophetic descriptions in the Apocalypse under a different light: multi-headed "monsters" and all sorts of weird apparitions could be taken a bit more literally. So yes, a cometary bombardment was chaotic and confusing enough, and people do have imaginations, but perhaps there were opportunistic 4D bleedthroughs making things even worse.
A couple things: We haven't really had any "close encounters" with comets like our ancient ancestors did, and after reading Baillie's "The Celtic Gods" I can see how a close comet can be described as a monstrous dragon (the book provides good, and plausible, explanations for all kinds of strange observations of comets: multiple 'heads', spears, battles, hair, fleece, birds, fish, etc). However, that doesn't necessarily explain the reptilian connections. Snakes I can understand. But "dragons" are mythological, so why make them (i.e. comets) reptilian? Perhaps there was an association between lizzies and comets?
In Imbrogno's book he describes some of the strange features of possible portal areas, including falling rocks. Not meteors, but rocks that materialize above a certain area and fall. They're usually warm to the touch, and seem to occur like poltergeist activity, around a youth with emotional disturbances (unilevel disintegration, Dabrowski would call it). So falling frogs may also be a portal side effect.
One thing I learned from Laura is that people from past ages were essentially the same, and so they should be taken as seriously (or not) as you would take people from our days. So if they mentioned monsters falling from the sky, maybe that's exactly what they meant. If they said that Serpent-Gods taught them science, then again maybe that's what they meant. I'm reading The Mothman Prophecies and you could say that people's stories in there are also quite 'Medieval'.
It's interesting because today I found a book in a local library about a Brit journalist who wanted to write about 'crazy' and eccentric ghost hunters, and ended up accepting that they were not crazy at all after being seriously spooked a couple of times. One ghost hunter observed that surveys about beliefs in the paranormal from the end of the XIXth century were the same as nowadays: a third believes, a third is agnostic and a third is strongly skeptic. So it's again that idea that people are always people.
And I think that is Clube's and Baillie's perspective. It's not that ancient peoples say comets and aspired "God status" to them. It's simply that at that time, "Gods" were those brilliant bringers of destruction that flew across the sky. However, it looks like those authors only take such thinking so far, and would not accept such an explanation for paranormal activity, like the British journalist before his own experiences.
