Often overlooked by modern scholars, the zodiacal cloud is a discus-shaped swathe of comet dust through which the planets constantly move and whose most concentrated region is visible in good climates close to the Sun after dusk and before dawn. At the present time it can be seen as a pillar of light no less bright than the Milky Way, the pillar appearing close to the vertical in equatorial latitudes. If the zodiacal light were at one time much brighter, and contained decaying comets within it, then it would be seen to contain structure, and the Earth in the course of its orbit would run through these structures, or “hoops of fire”, sometimes to spectacular effect. …
Indeed, if they understood meteors and fireballs correctly, as the products of dying comets in hoop-like orbits that were no longer visible, there would have been a quite natural awareness of “hidden stars” coming between us and the Moon. …
The disintegration of a major comet or its offshoots injects a large mass of dust into the zodiacal cloud, and since the latter is seen by reflected sunlight, the result is a temporary increase in its observed brightness. Rare giant comets, orbiting in the inner planetary system with periods of only a few years, are a likely major source of such debris although no such active comet is visible at the present time. These early accounts may nevertheless be understandable as attempts to describe the process by which an active comet of this kind periodically enhanced the zodiacal light at some past epoch, creating clouds of debris which slowly spread along the constellations. In fact, there are several indications that the earliest references to the Milky Way are descriptions of an intense zodiacal light and that it, too, was able to reach below the Moon. …
Jets issuing from rotating wheels of fire; bodies coming between Moon and Earth; temporary “worlds” forming in the plane of the zodiac: it seems reasonable to conclude that the earliest philosophers were describing, perhaps from the experience of their forebears, an essentially correct association between cometary disintegration products and the formation of a luminous dust cloud in the plane of the ecliptic, albeit one which was also supposed to come between us and the Moon. We are beginning to see, perhaps, hints of a night sky which was not the one we see now; and perhaps even clues to the nature of the … gods and their thunderbolts… (Clube & Napier (1990) pp. 79-82, excerpts. )
