Is this the reason Ireland converted to christianity?
The Orionid meteors pass the night sky in a flash of light every year, peaking this year on October 21.
They pass through debris from Halley’s Comet, perhaps the most famous of them all.
Halley’s has passed the Earth for at least 2,000 years and is known to have been in existence for some 16,000 years.
It was first recorded in the Shih Chi and Wen Hsien Thung Khao chronicles, though others say this date can be pushed back further, to the Ancient Greeks in the year 466 BC.
The comet has been present for many major world events, and some researchers and archaeologists believe it may well have influenced some of these historical flashpoints, including a shift in religion on the British Isles.
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Ireland’s conversion from Druidism is thought to have taken place in the 5th century AD.
The story goes that a man by the name of Patrick travelled to the island from Roman Britain in order to convert the Pagan population.
Researchers have, however, long doubted the legitimacy of this, questioning whether it is only a fiction to outline Ireland’s Christian history, something that was explored during the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Sacred Sites: Ireland’.
Dr Patrick McCafferty, a Celtic Scholar, said: “The reality wasn’t like that, Saint Patrick did not travel all over Ireland, he was confined mainly to the northern part of Ireland.
“Also, we know that other people were teaching at the same time, and we also know that even by a century after his death, paganism still survived in Ireland.”
Since then, scientists have analysed the Earth’s ice stores in order to determine what was going on in Ireland at the time of its conversion, with some researchers coming across an “extraordinary” link between Halley’s Comet and the event.
Sometime around 540 AD, a huge dust cloud appeared in the Earth’s atmosphere, something that researchers have managed to identify in the vast stores of ancient ice.
Aligning the dates of the dust cloud with the conversion to Christianity, alongside analysing air bubbles trapped in one of the ice columns, they found that the two events did appear to be linked.
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Dr Dallas Abbott, a geophysicist, studies samples from the large ice sheet that covers Greenland and explained: “The Greenland ice core samples tell us there was extraterrestrial dust coming into the Earth’s atmosphere from 533 until 539, 540 AD.
“Back then, they described the stars as dancing, and that’s basically due to their being a lot of dust.”
The dust, she said, came from the trail of Halley’s Comet, which zoomed past the Earth in 530 AD.
Dr Abbot also discovered that Halley’s left an unusually long celestial trail full of debris in its wake.
She said: “Some places in the cometary dust trail were bigger than the comet. One of those hit the Earth near the equator and that produced most of the profound darkness between 536 and 537 AD.”
Records show that one medieval historian, writing in posterity, found in historical records “a comet so vast that the entire sky seemed to be on fire”.
The Romans observed wild changes in the landscape and a cooler sun, lost behind the cloud, leading to crop failures, something that ancient Irish annals detail as forcing food troubles, shortages, and potentially civil unrest, according to the researchers.
“We have a famine, we had the plague, and we also have references to the stars falling and comets in the sky from the 530s into 540s,” said Dr McCafferty.
“Now, together, I suspect that these were enough to convince people that the religion they used to believe in wasn’t working anymore and that they needed to leave for something new.
“And in a sense, Christianity would have brought this message that these are symbols of the world ending, and now was the time to switch religion: to change from Druidism to Christianity.”
Halley’s Comet makes a similar journey past Earth roughly every 75 years. For this reason, it has taken on a mythical aura, with many people attributing its presence to big change, as in Ireland.
It was, for example, said to have inspired Genghis Khan in his invasion of Europe. Years later, its return in 1456 overlapped with the Ottoman Empire’s invasion of the Balkans which brought Islam to Eastern Europe.
The comet also came back in 1066, coinciding with the Battle of Hastings which saw the Norman conquest of Britain.
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