“And the name of the star is Wormwood!”

The expression And the name of the star is Wormwood! is Shiloh’s climactic interpretation of a light falling from the sky. Its force comes from the convergence of his end-times preaching, a crowd primed to expect catastrophe, and the arrival of a real craft: prophecy and spectacle briefly seem to confirm one another, though the scene leaves the meaning of the event unsettled.

Prophecy and preparation

Shiloh’s proclamation belongs to a campaign built around the expected return of an apocalyptic dirigible. He has tied its coming to a precise day and recalls that it appeared to him twice in the early morning; the last sighting, more than four years earlier, showed it coming from the west beneath a dying moon. He treats its return not as an isolated marvel but as the sign that will disclose the truth of his extraordinary birth and the identity of his father.

That expectation shapes both his religious organization and its practical work. Shiloh’s followers distribute tracts while he clips counterfeit half-crowns, covering the coins with religious literature. He presents the enterprise as service to God and anticipates a near future in which such labor will no longer be needed. The tract later found by Willis Pule gives the prophecy a crude visual form: an elongated dirigible crosses the clouds while a flaming, phallic comet bends toward the flat earth, beneath the warning, “The time is at hand!” The image makes the language of imminent revelation portable, something a passerby can carry away even without understanding exactly what time is supposed to arrive.

The phrase in Shiloh’s public preaching

Shiloh’s message promises imminent judgment and salvation together. In his encounter with Willis Pule, a young adherent announces that the end is near, urges him to join the New Church, and declares that Shiloh raises and redeems the dead. His appeal turns on the promise that a being “born of no man” can lift Pule out of misery. The episode shows the proclamation’s ordinary recruiting context: end-time certainty is offered as an answer to personal distress, but Pule rejects the appeal and tears up the tracts.

Elsewhere, the scale of the preaching grows beyond individual encounters. A great crowd moves out of Kensington Gardens, shouting together as Shiloh leads it. At a later gathering, he stands above kneeling followers and raises a cube for them to see. The darkness and the scattered fires lend the scene a charged, mystical appearance, while the object remains difficult for observers to identify. When the light appears, Shiloh cries, “And the name of the star,” and then, “is Wormwood!” The wording converts an unexplained celestial sight into a named portent and gives the crowd a scriptural-sounding interpretation at the very instant it is searching for one.

Revelation and misrecognition

The proclamation lands amid competing explanations of the approaching airship. The Royal Academy fears the consequences of its descent and debates whether it will crash or reach London intact; Shiloh’s followers, by contrast, regard the craft and the box associated with it as sacred. Reports circulating through London merge the approaching blimp with the Pratlow Street corpses, while popular religious claims cast an alien presence aboard the craft as an agent of Armageddon. The Wormwood line thus belongs to a wider atmosphere in which news, religious expectation, and physical danger become difficult to separate.

The scene’s final reversal both supports and unsettles Shiloh’s certainty. As the crowd looks toward the falling light, an attacker knocks him forward and seizes the cube. The object breaks when the runner reaches the assembled scientists and throws it down; the gathering’s attention, however, shifts to the glowing, spheroid ship falling from the sky. Shiloh’s cry has correctly anticipated that a momentous object will appear overhead, but it does not establish that the light is the prophesied star or that the ship fulfills his theology. The phrase captures the novel’s collision between supernatural interpretation and observable marvel: a real event intensifies belief without resolving what it means.