“On the morning of April 14, 1561, at dawn, a dreadful apparition occurred in the sky. This was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country, by many men and women.”
So begins a broadsheet news article printed in April 1561. illustrated with a woodcut engraving and text by Hans Glaser, it describes a mass sighting of unusual celestial phenomena.
The celestial phenomenon over the German city of Nuremberg on April 14, 1561, as printed in an illustrated news notice in the same month. Source: Wikimedia
Wikipedia has the translation of the original copy as follows, lightly edited by me here:
On the morning of April 14, 1561, at dawn, a dreadful apparition occurred in the sky. This was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country, by many men and women.
At first, there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter.
In the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood. There stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise, there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, while some were standing alone. In between these globes, a few blood-red crosses were visible, between which there were blood-red strips. The latter became thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass. They were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were many more globes.
These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides. Thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.
When the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and wasted away on the earth with immense smoke.
After all this, something like a black spear appeared in the sky, very long and thick. Its shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.
While arcs surrounding the sun sound like a typical case of a sun dog, the rest of the account is harder to explain. Also, sun dog arks typically appear on the left and right of the sun:
Sun dogs in Fargo, North Dakota, with parts of the 22° halo (the arcs passing through each sun dog), a sun pillar (the vertical line) and the parhelic circle (the horizontal line). Source: Wikipedia
Psychologist C.G. Jung, whose archetypes in writing I explored in my previous post, explained the whole event as a case of mass hysteria that showed people archetypes from the collective unconscious (you can read about it in Wikipedia). Personally, I think that anything that has no simple explanation, such as the dancing plague of 1518, is hand-waved away as mass hysteria, but that’s just me.
As for alternative explanations, I’ll leave it to my readers to come up with suggestions. Whatever it was, I hope it has sparked your creative juices. Happy writing!
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