Meteor
Chalybilsk, Siberia, February 2, 2013
Siberian winter has become hard to bear,
Sunlight feels weaker and sparser every year.
Bare electric bulbs spread a sickening light.
When clouds are few, the moon, mirrored brightly
On the shrouding snow, is cold and cruel
Like knives and guns and digging tools.
Oh, how I hate these long nights and brief days!
I stand here at my window and gaze
At grayness as I wait for the kettle to hiss.
The older I grow the more I miss
Summer breezes carrying children’s laughter;
I loathe the schoolmaster meanness of winter.
A light! Brilliant white, races across the sky like
An avalanche of angels above the forest, beyond the lake!
Glorious! I press my face to the cold window glass.
An unearthly glowing globe, nearing, speeding past.
I am amazed. A heavenly omen? An alien invasion?
I am frightened. An asteroid? An apocryphal weapon?
The end of time as prophets and shamans foretell?
Has fallen Lucifer escaped his blazing hell?
A blinding flash, a booming blow of sound
Throws me down. On the floor I am surrounded
By shards of glass, my window burst in,
around and upon me. Blood blinds my eyes.
Will someone rescue me? “Help, I’m hurt!” I cry.
Such foolishness, this old babushka’s summery dream.
I hear shouts and sirens. The boiling kettle screams.
Chalybilsk, Siberia, February 2, 2013
Siberian winter has become hard to bear,
Sunlight feels weaker and sparser every year.
Bare electric bulbs spread a sickening light.
When clouds are few, the moon, mirrored brightly
On the shrouding snow, is cold and cruel
Like knives and guns and digging tools.
Oh, how I hate these long nights and brief days!
I stand here at my window and gaze
At grayness as I wait for the kettle to hiss.
The older I grow the more I miss
Summer breezes carrying children’s laughter;
I loathe the schoolmaster meanness of winter.
A light! Brilliant white, races across the sky like
An avalanche of angels above the forest, beyond the lake!
Glorious! I press my face to the cold window glass.
An unearthly glowing globe, nearing, speeding past.
I am amazed. A heavenly omen? An alien invasion?
I am frightened. An asteroid? An apocryphal weapon?
The end of time as prophets and shamans foretell?
Has fallen Lucifer escaped his blazing hell?
A blinding flash, a booming blow of sound
Throws me down. On the floor I am surrounded
By shards of glass, my window burst in,
around and upon me. Blood blinds my eyes.
Will someone rescue me? “Help, I’m hurt!” I cry.
Such foolishness, this old babushka’s summery dream.
I hear shouts and sirens. The boiling kettle screams.
A bolide (from the Greek "bolis": "missile" or "to flash") is any large crater-forming impacting body(a rocky or metallic asteroid, an icy comet, or an extremely bright meteor, especially one that explodes in the atmosphere.) A standard definition is a fireball with an apparent magnitude of −14 or brighter, which is more than twice as bright as the full moon. A superbolide has an apparent magnitude of −17 or brighter. The Chelyabinsk superbolide entered Earth's atmosphere at 60,000–69,000 kmh (40,000–42,900 mph). Even 100 km away it was brighter than the sun. It exploded 29.7 km (18.4 mileso) above Chelyabinsk Oblast, generating a hot cloud of dust and gas that penetrated to 26.2 km and a large shock wave.
ReplyDeleteSome 1,500 people were injured seriously enough to seek medical treatment, mainly from broken glass when the shock wave blew in windows, and about 7,200 buildings in six cities were damaged. Though undetected before its atmospheric entry, it was about 20 meters in diameter and weighed 12,000–13,000 metric tons, more than the Eiffel Tower. The total kinetic energy before atmospheric impact was equal to some 500 kilotons of TNT, 20–30 times stronger than the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, but fortunately most of its energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, especially in light of the area's nuclear history. A serious fatal accident occurred in 1957 at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, 150 km NW of the city, and Slawomir Grunberg documented the unsafe dumping of radioactive waste in the Techa rivr and Lake Karachay in his film,"Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet."
As large as the Chelyabinsk superbolide was, it was dwarfed by the 1908 Tunguska event near the Stony Tunguska River in Krasnoyarsk Krai. The explosion, 5-10 km (3-6 miles) over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga, flattened 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, knocking down 80 million trees but caused no known casualties. The shock wave from the blast would have probably measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale. It was between 60-190 meters (200-620 feet), depending on whether it was a comet or a denser asteroid. Estimates of the energy of its air burst range from 10-30 megatons of TNT, depending on the height of burst; a 15-megaton estimate would be about 1,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, but only about 1/3 the size of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba.
ReplyDelete"On the day the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and turmoil and from the harsh labour forced on you, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: How the oppressor has come to an end! How his fury has ended!... How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.' But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. Those who see you stare at you, they ponder your fate: 'Is this the man who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble, the man who made the world a wilderness, who overthrew its cities and would not let his captives go home?'"
ReplyDelete"Lucifer" in the King James Version is taken from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible for the Hebrew word "hêlêl" in Isaiah 14:12. The Greek Septuagint version renders it as "heōsphoros," "bringer of dawn." Modern English translations have abandoned "Lucifer" in this passage in favor of "morning star,""daystar," "Day Star," "shining one," or "shining star." The prophet Isaiah uses the term as an epithet for an unnamed deceased king of Babylon (perhaps Nebuchadnezzar II, the conqueror of Jerusalem; Nabonidus; Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser, Sargon II, or Sennacherib; or perhaps a generic representation of the whole line of rulers). It means "shining one, light bearer," "the morning star, the planet Venus," "son of the dawn," or "light-bringing." Though the Vulgate uses the word "lucifer" in other contexts where it clearly has no reference to a fallen angel: 2 Peter 1:19 (for "morning star"), Job 11:17 ("the light of the morning"), Job 38:32 ("the signs of the zodiac"), and Psalms 110:3 ("the dawn"), and the Latin word was applied in poetry to "day" and to various figures (including Jesus, John the Baptist, the moon, Venus as the divine personification of the son of Aurora and Cephalus, or the Greek myth of Eos the goddess of dawn giving birth to the morning star Phosphorus), and two bishops (Saint Lucifer of Cagliari and Lucifer of Siena) bore the name, for English Christians "lucifer" eventually became a proper name for the angel/devil before his fall and continues to be used that way, especially in popular culture, even though the identification was explicitly debunked by John Calvin and Martin Luther. (Rabbinical Judaism rejected any belief in rebel or fallen angels. Origen, in the 2nd century, interpreted the passage in Isaiah and others as manifestations of the Devil; but since he wrote in Greek he did not identify the devil with the name "Lucifer;" his contemporary Tertullian attributed the quote ["I will ascend to the heavens..."] to the devil but never used "lucifer" to describe him. But eventually Isaiah was linked allegorically to Luke 10:18 ["I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven"]).
The identification may be related to the Canaanite portrayal of Venus, the morning star, as the god Attar, who failed to occupy the throne of Ba'al and ruled the underworld instead; the original myth may have been about Helel, a lesser god, who failed to dethrone the Canaanite high god El. Similar tales were told about the descent into the underworld by Ishtar and Inanna, both of whom were associated with the planet Venus, and the Babylonian Etana suffered a similar fate. The Greek myth of Phaethon, whose name is the "Shining One", is also similar. These accounts may have been a description of the process by which the bright morning star fails to reach the highest point in the sky before being faded out by the rising sun. The noted 20th century catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky conflated the various accounts of Venus, several divine figures, comets, and superbolides into a single, planetary object that threatened Earth at various times.
ReplyDeleteLuciferianism, influenced by Gnosticism, actually reveres Lucifer as a liberator, guardian, guiding spirit, or even the true god. Rudolf Steiner, whose writings formed the basis for Anthroposophy, characterised Lucifer as a spiritual opposite to Ahriman, with Christ between the two forces, mediating a balanced path for humanity; Lucifer was an intellectual, imaginative, delusional, otherworldly force associated with visions, subjectivity, psychosis, and fantasy. In Anton LaVey's "The Satanic Bible," Lucifer is one of the crown prince of Hell, the bringer of light, the morning star, intellectualism, and enlightenment; his epithet "lord of the air" is based on Ephesians 2:2, which used the phrase "prince of the power of the air" to refer to Zeus but was later conflated with Satan.