Meteor Beliefs Project

About the Project

Meteor Beliefs Project Logo

Established during the second half of 2002, the Meteor Beliefs Project was announced in early 2003. Its purpose is quite simple in essence, but potentially far-reaching and open-ended in practice. What we would like is that anyone with information to share should contact us with their favourite literary, poetic, mythological or folkloric references to meteors. Items submitted are then either re-edited as elements of compilation articles, or presented in longer pieces in a suitable format under the authorship of the contributor or in collaboration with the Project coordinators, and under the general Meteor Beliefs Project banner. All contributors are fully acknowledged, whatever the case. Publication so far has been primarily in the IMO's journal WGN, but online versions of many of the articles are now available, and a CD-ROM with all the published articles through to the end of 2007 is now available. At the end of 2005, we introduced a new strand, "Meteoric Imagery in SF", to feature meteoric objects as portrayed in films and TV programmes. At the same time, we also began collecting notes on meteor-related contemporary song lyrics, and both aspects continue.

Notes for contributors

When you send us your material, we need to know exactly where the reference came from, giving as much detail as possible, and including things such as specific line numbers for poems and plays, or dates, places and people for oral tales you have collected, for example. The information should be sufficient to allow any future investigator to easily find and confirm your report for written items, or to give confidence in the accuracy of oral sources.

To help better communicate with an international audience, we will need an English translation of whatever you send, but in some cases, you may feel that an original-language version should also be presented (perhaps where poetic scansion cannot be properly represented in English). If there are particular problems with words or concepts that cannot be translated into English, please make this clear. If you are unsure, contact us to discuss such things first. If you need to send material using characters not in the standard American-English ASCII computer character set, please send a hard copy by ordinary mail and not by e-mail, as this will likely cause problems and delays.

We welcome constructive comments and ideas for anything connected with this Project, as well as individual items as already outlined. If you think we've missed something in an earlier article, or if you've found a variant translation you think is interesting, let us know. We are far from infallible!

If you are not sure about what you have found, send us the material anyway, and please do not be concerned that your item may duplicate someone else's. We would rather get some material we cannot use, or several repetitions of the same thing, than miss the chance to bring to light some long-forgotten or potentially important item. In all cases, we are relying on you to help us move the Project forwards!

Articles already published

Note that all articles in this list published before January 2006 are now freely available online as full-text PDFs from the Harvard ADS abstract service. A low-cost CD-ROM with PDF versions of all the articles to December 2007 is available for purchase, which also includes a short file of corrections and additional cross-references.

Forthcoming items

The Project's articles for 2008 have been designed around a general theme of meteorites and impacts, in a year-long commemoration of the Tunguska event over the Siberian taiga in June 1908. The catalyst for this concept came thanks to novelist Howard Hendrix, who contacted us in late 2006 to say he'd located some useful references for his latest book "Spears of God" (Del Rey, 2006) via the IMO website, the novel drawing on various real-world meteor beliefs, rewoven into a near-future fictional setting. Howard has contributed some notes for the Meteor Beliefs Project showing how he reused some of these elements in his book, which is intended to feature with some additional discussion in WGN for 2008 February. Anyone interested in finding out more about this novel and Howard's other work should see http://www.howardvhendrix.com . Amongst other items later this year, we hope to present examinations of beliefs concerning the Ensisheim meteorite fall of 1492 November, and regarding meteoritic iron weapons and tools.

Musical Meteors

One additional strand we would very much like to explore further concerns meteors as used in contemporary song lyrics. So far, we have collected only a relatively few items since starting to look into this in December 2005, including:

Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire!" song appears to be a more straightforward sexual metaphor, rather than meteoric, but music, song and poetry is all about interpretation after all, and meteors have been used as sexual metaphors in the past, as we discussed in WGN 33:1 in 2005 February.

Any additional suggestions would be most welcome - we need the artist's name, track and album titles (where relevant), the publication date, and sufficient of the actual lyrics to give the context the meteoric reference is used in. Remember, we're interested not just in a simple mention of a meteor or two; we want to know why the meteoric reference is there as well, and what the lyricist wanted us to understand by the use of such imagery, where possible.

We'd even consider instrumentals, if relevant. The nearest we've come to anything like this so far (admittedly not very) are a couple of Chopin piano Etudes, Opus 25, Numbers 11 (in A minor) and especially 12 (in C minor). Number 11 was written in 1834, and is sometimes called today "The Winter Wind". These have rather "glittering"- or "brittle"-sounding right-hand passages at times, aside from a rolling, stormy feel, partly suggestive of stars or meteors. The dating might infer a knowledge of the American Leonid storm of 1833, but unfortunately, Etude Number 1 (Opus 10, in C major), written in late 1830, is very similar to Opus 25, Number 12. If anyone knows what Chopin's influences may have been - did he revisit the theme of No. 1 as No. 12 after learning of the 1833 Leonids, say? - we'd be interested to learn of it. There seems to be little else from the Classical music canon that relates to meteors otherwise. Or rather, little that we've come across so far... Perhaps you know differently?

Future plans

While we have a number of topics sketched out for possible publication over the next few years, we are always open to fresh, positive input. The International Year of Astronomy in 2009, with its stated aims of celebrating astronomy in its widest sense, including its contributions to society and culture, provides another potentially year-long focus for highlighting aspects of meteor beliefs, for instance. We would also like the chance to examine more non-European material, which has so far proven more elusive than we had anticipated, though we do have some information on African and Maori meteor beliefs we would like to verify and expand upon.

Making contact

The Meteor Beliefs Project Coordinators are Alastair McBeath and Andrei Dorian Gheorghe, who wrote the above notes on the Project, and who have either singly or jointly authored all the published articles listed here, where nobody else was mentioned.

Our postal contact details are given in each issue of WGN that features one or more Project articles, but you may contact us by e-mail too, via meteor@popastro.com. Messages sent to that address MUST be less than 150 kB in size however. If you have a larger file you wish to send, please let us know before you try e-mailing it, or contact the IMO Webmaster.

We look forward to seeing your meteoric quotes!