April 14

The Nuremberg Celestial Phenomenon

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At dawn on April 14, 1561, the people of Nuremberg woke up to a fire in the sky.

What they saw—or what the city's most prominent publisher chose to report they had seen—was one of the most extraordinary and enduringly mysterious celestial spectacles in the documented history of the Western world: around and above and below the sun, blood-red spheres arranged themselves into clusters of three, in squares of four, between which appeared blood-red crosses. Soon, cylindrical shapes like rods of reed-grass materialized, mingling around the spheres; from left-to-right, two enormous rods flanked the entire display. Then, they began to move.

The globes then flew “from” the sun toward the spheres standing on the sides, while spheres on the sides flew “into” the sun. According to witnesses, all the various mysterious objects then “collided” against each other violently—as if in battle—for over an hour; it came to an epic finale when the forms fell from the sky, crashing and instantly wasting away on the earth with an immense, black smoke.

“Whatever such signs mean,” artist and woodcutter Hans Glaser later wrote, “God alone knows.”

The Broadsheet Account

The document that preserves the full account soon became a legendary work of occult art in itself; local Nuremberg craftsman Hans Glaser's broadsheet—a single printed sheet measuring approximately ten inches by fifteen, combining a detailed woodcut illustration with dense German text—is one of the most remarkable objects in the history of early printing. (Today, it’s safely archived in the prints and drawings collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Switzerland.)

The woodcut itself shows the skyline of Nuremberg, identifiable by the spire of St. Lorenz church in the lower right corner (though historians have noted the puzzling detail that St. Lorenz had in fact burned down before the date of the sighting—suggesting that, perhaps, Glaser was working from a stock city image rather than drawing from the window). Above the city, the sky is another incredible composition: from out of the circular sun swarm dozens of objects—spheres in clusters and individually, cylindrical shapes like fat cigars or barrels, crosses with and without spheres at their ends, two large crescent shapes. In the lower right corner, the black spear drives its way across the image, horizontal and enormous. In effect, both as beautiful and terrifying as the event itself.

It fact, the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomenon woodcut is not quite like anything else in the visual tradition of the period; it’s not an allegory in the manner of religious painting; it’s not really a “battle” scene. Nor are there any human figures—no armies, no recognizable participants. Perhaps it is the combined effects of all these unusual elements that makes the work—across five centuries of speculation—timelessly unsettling.

Nuremberg in 1561

Nuremberg in 1561 was a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire—one of the great commercial and cultural centers of the German-speaking world. It was famous for its artisans, trade routes, goldsmiths, clockmakers and printers. The city had wealth, prestige, and deep sense of community and civic pride. Yet, there was also a mass sense of anxiety. By 1561 Nuremberg had been Protestant for decades—the Reformation had reshaped its religious life as thoroughly as it had reshaped the rest of Germany, which was to say violently, expensively, and with no settled outcome in sight.

The Schmalkaldic Wars between Protestant princes and the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor had ravaged the region throughout the 1540s and 50s. A Protestant prince had demanded tribute from Nuremberg and, when refused, besieged the city and severed its trade routes. The city had successfully defended itself but at enormous cost; the economy was shattered, leading to long depression—followed by the plague. Soon, rumors of “divine judgement” had begun to take hold.

In this climate (or, perhaps, “zeitgeist” being more appropriate), the tradition of Wunderzeichen—the viewing of celestial omens, or “wonder-signs”—was not marginal but central to how educated and uneducated Germans alike made sense of their world. Martin Luther himself had written extensively about celestial signs as divine warnings; likewise, the great humanist theologian of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon, had catalogued unusual sky phenomena as “messages from God.” Comets, eclipses, strange lights, and unusual cloud formations were all read as a divination vocabulary through which God communicated with humans—if they were attentive enough to decipher the messages.

Hans Glaser was not necessarily producing a UFO account in 1561—but he was producing a broadsheet, which could be considered the tabloid journalism of the sixteenth century, combining religious edification with the guilty pleasure of reading about the unknown. Above all else, Glaser’s Wunderzeichen broadsheet was framed as religious reading material in which unusual celestial events were seen as warnings of God's impatience with a sinful world.

Whether the event it described was precisely as depicted was a secondary concern to its original audience; to them, its message—repent, return to God, heed the signs—was what mattered.

The Occult Account

The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the Nuremberg phenomenon (and, surprisingly, in line with certain esoteric and occult traditions) is that it was a parhelion, commonly known as a “sun dog”: an atmospheric optical phenomenon caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Sun dogs produce halos, arcs, and sometimes multiple apparent images of the sun, and have been documented and depicted in Europe since antiquity. In occult and esoteric practice, Perihelion is a threshold, a celestial moment when the usual veil between sky and spirit thins just a little more than usual, making various forms of magic all the more potent.

A famous 1535 Swedish painting by Jacob Heinrich Elbfas, the Vädersolstavlan, depicts a sun dog over Stockholm with careful geometric accuracy—the same era, the same kind of optical phenomenon, rendered without the blood-red battles and crashing objects of Glaser's woodcut. However, the disparity between the careful realism of the Vädersolstavlan and the wild, fantastic imagery of Glaser's broadsheet is precisely the point: Glaser was not producing a meteorological record but, rather, a Wunderzeichen broadsheet, in which a real atmospheric phenomenon—probably a sun dog, possibly enhanced by unusual cloud formations or other optical effects—was transformed through the interpretive framework of Reformation-era apocalyptic thinking into a vision of cosmic warfare. The objects in his woodcut are not objective observations; they’re the shapes that a sixteenth-century German imagination, steeped in scripture and prophecy, and a time when communicating God (or a bunch of them) was seen as very real, and very dangerous.

The Jungian Approach

The Nuremberg broadsheet lay largely unknown outside Germany until 1958, when Carl Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies—his analysis of the psychological and archetypal significance of the UFO phenomenon. Jung had included the Glaser broadsheet as a historical precedent, and in doing so introduced it to the twentieth century's fascination with unidentified aerial phenomena.

Hi reading on the event reading was, quite predictably, layered. He expressed the view that the 1561 spectacle was most likely a natural phenomenon interpreted through the religious and military imagery familiar to sixteenth-century Europeans; true. But he was less interested in debunking it than in analyzing what it revealed about the structure of the human psyche under pressure. To him, the entire display became a projection of the collective unconscious onto the sky, the psyche's way of dramatizing its own inner conflicts in the most spectacular way.

Whether or not one accepts the Jungian framework, its core insight is worth holding: that what human beings see in the sky is always, at least in part, what they bring to the sky. The Nuremberg citizens of 1561 brought centuries of Reformation anxiety, scriptural prophecy, and the visual vocabulary of religious art to an unusual morning display of light and atmosphere. They saw battle, divine judgment, the signs of the end times. The UFO enthusiasts of the twentieth century, primed by Cold War anxieties and the new vocabulary of aerospace technology, looked at the same woodcut and saw spacecraft, alien warfare, ancient astronauts. Both interpretations are projections. Both projections are revealing.

For the readers of Modern Occultist, the 1561 celestial phenomenon is a perfect illustration of one of the deepest themes this magazine explores: the threshold between the natural and the supernatural, between what can be explained and what refuses explanation, between what the world actually does and what it means when it does it. Glaser was not wrong to call it a sign; the instinct that unusual events in the natural world carry meaning for the human beings who witness them is not a delusion. Rather, It’s one of the oldest and most persistent features of human consciousness, and it is worth taking seriously. Just ask Merlin.

Whatever such signs mean, gods only know.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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