The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1881-01-27
The Terrible Year at Hand.
The world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-o one.
- NOtEay. SLjDto,,'s Pyo1,Io,.

Z,
common consent, been concentrated
upon the coming year. The soothsay-
ers, OWNERS, oracle makers, astrologers
and wizards seem to have combined to
cast their spell upon it. Superstitious
people OF every sort, and some who are
not willing to admit that they are super
stitious, regard the year 1881 with more
or less anxious expectation and dread
AS the earth, on New Years Day, swings
out into another round about the sun,
1t will 60 to meet a host of evil omens
1t will go cursed by theomancy and
blbliomancy. Aeromancy and meteoro-
Nancy will glare at it from comets and
shooting stars. Oneiromancy will in
tercept its path with visions of evil, and
nomancy will shake the ominous, back
ward-reading numerals ''1SS1" before
it. 1t will be beset with scarcscrow
figures by arithmancy, and with me-
naclng phrases by stichomancy. Yet
there IS no reason why persons of good
digestion should not go to sleep on New
Years night confident that, after hav-
ing encountered the average quantity of
storm and sunshine, the one horse ball
that we call the world will bring them
safe through the perilS of its five
hundred-million-mile flight round to the
starting point again.
Timid persons first began to look for
ward with some alarm to the year that
Is about to open, when, several wears
ago, the key to the so-called prophetic
symbolism of the Great Pyramid of
Egypt was made public, backed by the
name and reputation of the British as
tronomer, Piazzi Smyth. Others, using
Mr.. Smyth's observations and measure
ments, have gone much further than he
did in drawing startling inferences; but
no one can read his book without perceiv-
ing how powerfully it must affect those
who have the slightest leaning toward
superstition or credulity. Besides, this
record of explorations and experiences
in the heart of Egypt's greatest marvel
has all the charm and interest of DR..
ochliemann desert iptons of his dis
coveries in Homer's Troy. Such
book could not we'll be neglected by the
world of readers; and by the nature of
the human mind, many of its readers
were sure to be imbued with its omin-
GUS dogmas. So the belief, or at least
the suspicion, spread that the secret
chambers of the Great Pyramid, under
Divine guidance by the most mystical
character in all history, Melchisedek,
King of Salem, foretell, among other
things, that the Christian era will end
in 1881.
Mother Shipton's so-called prophecy
fixes upon the same date for the end of
the world. The ominous jingle of her
rhymes has probably done at least as
much to disturb the equanimity of cred
ulous persons as the more elaborate
Vaccinations of the pyramid interpre-
ters. Moreover, Mother Shipton is
represented as foretelling that in the
latter days England will accept a.
jew" AS England has, with consid-
cradle emphasis and more than once,
accepted the remarkable son of old
Isaac Disraeli for her Prime Minister,
this has been taken as a ful6lment of
the prophecy. So Lord Beaconsfeld's
dramatic personality is made principal
figure in the murky cloud of evil proph-
ecy that hangs over 1881.
As if the evil eye of Mother Shipton
and the mystical menace of the Great
Pyramid were not enough for one poor
twelvemonth to bear, the ''horrors of
the perihelia'' have been denounced
upon the coming year. About two
years ago certain pamphlets were cir
culated about the country, purporting
to be written by men of science. and
predicting that awful consequences to
mankind would result from all the
great planets reaching their perihelia,
or nearest points to the sun, together
According to these prophets the sinister
effects of the perihelia were to begin
their appearance this fall, when
Jupiter passed his perihelion, and next
year the scythe of death was to be put
to the harvest in the far east, and to
sweep westward with swathe as broad
as the continents, until it reached the
Pacific Ocean. The narrow Atlantic
was to be no more than a brooklet in
the path of this terrible harvester.
famines, pestilences, fire,
floods and tornadoes were
to scourge the human race until only
few remained, like Noah and his fami-
ly, to repeople the earth with stur-
der and more God-fearing race.
So much alarm was caused by this
hocus-pocus of pretended science and
that some real men of science
Mr.. Proctor among others were at
the pains to show that so far as these
predictions professed to rest upon
scientific facts they were baseless. The
great planets will not all be in peri
hellon in 1881, and they will not all be
in perihelion together at any time. 1t !
is true that several of the chief planets
will reach their perihelia within few
years, and that it is rare for them to be |
grouped so close together as they will
be at one time next year. 1t is also
true that remarkable condolences have |
been observed between the existence of
great storms on the sun, that produce |
electrical disturbances and possibly
meteorological changes upon the earth,
and the presence of Jupiter near his
perihelion. Astronomers have also sus-
pected that the influence of some of the
other great planets upon the earth can
be perceived, but they have never dis
any reason to believe that the
combined forces of all the planets
could, under any circumstances nro. |