Places · The Atlas

The Atlas The Field The Lamp Instruments

The Atlas
Cosmos
Beliefs & concepts
Comet

search the atlas

celestial-body

Comet

Cosmos · Beliefs & concepts

A hairy star on a long path. Omens, fear, and later astronomy have read comets without agreeing what they prove.

Roman religion

Comet appears in Roman religion.
Pliny’s Natural History treats comets among portentous sky phenomena. A named comet in that encyclopedia, not meteor as the shooting-star already walked and not a modern astronomy dump alone.
from Pliny the Elder · Natural History, c. 77 CE
appears in · sourced · documented

Nahua tradition

Comet appears in Nahua tradition.
Sahagún’s Florentine Codex records smoking-star speech in Book 7 comet speech — named comets among sky signs. A colonial-era Nahua ethnographic attestation, not a pan-Mesoamerican essence and not an unfiltered pre-invasion voice.
from Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators · Florentine Codex, c. 1577
appears in · sourced · culturally specific

sources

Natural History · Pliny the Elder
Pliny, Naturalis Historia.
Florentine Codex · Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators
Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex).