The End of Time
Nearly a quarter of a century later, it is hard to recall all the excitement – and angst – that surrounded the impending millennium in 1999. Eventually, attention focussed on a rather unlikely problem, although it seemed very real at the time. This was that electronic calendars and timers all had not been designed to deal with year 00: many were operating on the basis that the only year identifier needed was the last two digits. But if we hit year zero, what would happen. This was seen as a computer flaw, described at the time as the ‘Millennium Bug’, all the result of the fact that when complex computer programs were first written in the 1960s, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the ‘19’. As the year 2000 approached, many began to believe that these automated systems would not interpret the ‘00’ correctly, and as a result there would be a major glitch in many systems.
It was considered possible that banks could face real challenges as interest rates might be affected: instead of using the rate of interest for one day, the computer might calculate interest for minus 100 years! Others worried about transportation which also depended on knowing the correct time and date. Airlines were considered at risk, especially as there were no airline flights in 1900! As a result of these and other concerns, companies worked to fix the ‘bug’ by developing ‘Y2K-compliant’ programs. The simplest solution was the best: the date was simply expanded to a four-digit number. In the end, there were very few problems. Given the lack of dramatic disasters, many dismissed the ‘Y2K-bug’ as a hoax.
Panic over a Millennium Bug was the modern world’s example of an apocalypse, a catastrophe that marks a significant moment in the history of mankind. In The End of Time, Damian Thompson gives a detailed analysis of millennial thinking and predictions of disaster. It is one situation where the modern world offers a poor version of something the ancients did with far more verve and drama. Before turning to his commentary, I should point out that we do have some fine contemporary apocalyptic movements, however, with a number of predictions over the past 25 years. At this point, I should add that I consider 2001 the last year of the second millennium. New post-millennial predictions commence from 2002!).
In terms of forthcoming disasters, I might mention that we can look forward to 2026, when the Messiah Foundation International predicts the world will end when an asteroid collides with Earth in accordance with predictions in The Religion of God. If that seems rather close we can go back to Newton writing at the end of the Seventeenth Century who predicted that the world would definitely not end before 2060. One Sunni Muslim theologian Said Nursi, has offered 2129 as the date for the world’s demise. That leaves one more key source, the Talmud, which indicates the Messiah will come within 6000 years since the creation of Adam, with the world destroyed 1000 years later, so that the period of ‘desolation’ will begin in 2239, and end in 3239.
Actually, we’ve survived some narrow squeaks already. Starting with the most recent, an American religious leader, F Kenton Beshore had worked out that Jesus would return in 1988, before realising the definition of a biblical generation was incorrect: on this revised basis the second coming of Jesus would take place between 2018 and 2028 and the final rapture by 2021 at the latest. Many predictions of the end face revisions of this kind, so that David Meade first chose 2017, but revised it to 23 April 2018; Ronald Weinland told everyone the end would come in 2011, and then changed to 2012; and Jeanne Dixon initially explained the world would come to an end on 4 February 1962, and then revised her prediction to 2020 (better vision, I guess). Out of many others, I must acknowledge 2011 as a bumper years, with Harold Camping joining with Ronald Weinland in going for 2001, accompanied by a whole group that became convinced that Comet Elenin, travelling between the Earth and the Sun would cause massive earthquakes and tidal waves, or even collide with Earth (on October 16).
It is clearly time for me to get back to Damian Thompson’s book. Part One deals with history, and especially event around 1000 AD. Perhaps one of the early and clearly exciting forerunners was the Secular Games in Rome in AD 248, which were held to celebrate the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome. Rome was already in decline, and the emperor, Philip, saw the need for an exercise in restoring self-esteem and traditional Roman religion. All the more interesting in that Philip was an Arab!
“Along the Tiber he burned lambs and black she-goats to the Fates, who caused men to proposer or fail. He sacrificed white bulls to Jupiter the Best and the Greatest, king of gods and patron of Rome; a pregnant sow to Mother Earth, who gave the empire food in abundance or held it back and made men starve. He offered cakes and burned incense to Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, without whose assistance the empire’s population dropped. Matrons knelt to Juno, in supplication for blessings. Twenty seven aristocratic youth and twenty seven highborn young virgins, their lives unpolluted by the death of either parent, chanted ancient hymns to Apollo and his chaste sister Diana.” (from G C Brauer, The Age of Soldier Emperors, 1975)
In his chapter The Mystery of the Year 1000, Damian Thompson pulls ff a great trick. We read the “population of Christendom lived through the year 999 in a state of mortal fear, convinced that, with the completion of a thousand years since the birth of Christ, history had run its course.” People fled cities and countries, building were abandoned, debts were revoked, prisoners freed, and terror was rampant. If you think this sounds rather like the predictions of Donald Trump assuming the US Presidency in January 2025, you’d be right. Just as we have no idea what will happen, with the result imaginations take over, so the same is true for AD 1000. Current historical research has discovered there were no ‘Terrors of the yar 1000’. As Thompson observes: “It is a romantic invention, dating back no further than the sixteenth century”. How did this happen.
Historians have identified some small number of decisions and plans that centred around the end of the first millennium, but one reality is uncontested and critical: in 1000 AD the vast majority of people didn’t know what year it was. For almost everyone, 1000 was ‘a year like any other’. Not everyone, however. Recent work by historians of the tenth and early eleventh centuries do offer accounts and evidence suggesting gloomy presentiments about various misfortunes about to affect the population. It seems that Princes and preachers used the date as the basis for offering warnings, while at the same time planning celebrations to shake off fears and a sense of danger.
As in so many things, we are using the past, in this case, the turn of the millennium, as a canvas on to which to focus our current fears and uncertainties. It seems that telling a story what ‘happened’ is also a way to offer a warning about what might happen now. We often give space to accounts of unsuccessful peasant uprisings in medieval times, to reassure ourselves that contrary views do emerge, and, at the same time, to recognise they almost always fail. If there are stories about the year 1000, they both illustrate the power of religious belief, miserable existences and that ‘audacity of hope’ that can motivate us. At the same time, they are reminders that nothing really changes.
The second part of A Brief History of End-Time takes us to the end of the 20th Century. Prior to 2000 were a series of events at the end of the 19th Century, associated with image of fin-de-siècle. That term was a modern invention, first appearing in France in 1885. There were many odd but memorable episodes at the completion of eighteenth century. There’s the story of Miss Agnes Ozman, (unrelated to the Wizard of Oz), a student at Bethel College, a Texas bible school. On January 1, 1901, she was heard speaking in tongues. She explained:
“During the first day of 1901, the presence of the Lord was with us in a marked way, stilling our hearts to wait upon Him for greater things. It was nearly eleven o’clock on this first day of January that it came into my heart to ask that hands be laid upon me. …. As hands were laid upon my head the Holy Spirit fell upon me, and I began to speak in tongues, glorifying God. I talked several languages. It was though rivers of living water were proceeding from my innermost being.” (Recorded in a 1964 book on the Pentecostal movement)
Little has been written about Agnes Ozman and consequences of this episode. but it has been attributed with starting the modern Pentecostal-Holiness movement in the early 20th century.
However, Agnes speaking in tongues was unlike most stories about events associated with the end of the twentieth century, if not so different from so many other curious episodes recorded at the turn of previous centuries. Today, we seem to have become rather more interested in technology that spiritual ad religious happenings. If the general public still believed in ‘miracles’ back then, our capacity for such beliefs has declined – unless, of course, you consider Donald Trump winning a second term as US President as similarly miraculous, together with the extraordinary ability of certain foods and cures to make you instantly attractive. Have we have decided to ignore warnings about the ‘end of time’ and the like?
Perhaps in an increasingly secular world, we are likely to be concerned about rather more prosaic problems. Attention on many peoples’ minds is given to threats of having our computers or mobiles phone ‘infected’ by a virus, by which means our personal life is known, manipulated, our cash savings stolen, and our thoughts replaced by scurrilous texts sent to people in our address book. That isn’t all. We also worry about banks failing, the cost of living continuing to increase, Covid returning in some new and horrible form, about what the government is going to do next, and how conflicts in Europe Asia and the USA will spill over into disastrous confrontations here. This isn’t apocalyptic thinking, nor is it millennial fervour, it is stubbornly pedantic and ‘here and now’. It isn’t about ‘the end of time’, it’s about personal financial obliteration: in the 21st Century it is our financial presence that takes precedence, rather than religious or spiritual concerns.
However, apocalyptic thinking has remained. In Thompson’s book we are reminded of all the crazy cults and concerns about a ‘New Age’ that emerged in the latter part of the Twentieth Century. Some were interesting, some were odd, and some were – well, bizarre. How about the 11:11 Doorway Movement. They claimed, “mankind had entered a twenty year period of opportunity to end the earth’s period of conflict between light and dark”. The ‘doorway’ would open on 12 January 1992, and end on 31 December 2011. The groups leader, Solara, explained the 11:11 symbol of the group was precoded in our memory banks ‘long, long ago’. Ah, but here’s a further key point “this numerical revelation came to Salara, incidentally, while he was staring at a digital clock”. I always new that digital technology was a problem!
It is easy to make fun of many of these movements, but some had very serious consequences. There was the amazing case of Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. This was a sect led by Asahara, where, after a great deal of confusion, the police discovered the group was manufacturing the deadly sarin gas. Rumours swirled for some time, following sarin gas outbreaks in Kamikuishiki and Matsumoto. Eventually, the investigators found, under a Buddha sculpture in Kamikuishiki laboratory packed with vats of foul smelling chemicals. Eventually, they revealed that Aum was planning a war on society (!), using whatever weapons it could acquire or make. The more the investigators dug into the details, they found Aum was “developing biological weapons, trying to secure uranium, assembling guns and rifles, , manufacturing LSD and using truth serum on its followers. The initial gas attacks in Tokyo were intended as the precursor to a terrorist war.
If the sarin gas attacks had been alarming, it was almost chance that led to two vinyl bags being found in Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku station. The two bags were close to being broken open by a fire, and if that had happened the result would have been the production of enough hydrocyanic gas to kill an estimated 10,000 people. Quite what Aum was seeking to achieve, and how far the cult was responsible for all the apparently related attacks and other events remains unclear. What was clear was the Aum Shinrikyo was a violent millennial cult, seeking to deal with (and perhaps promote) a coming apocalypse.
Another series of equally disturbing events took place in America, a place famous for ‘fights for the soul of the country’. One of the more famous was back in 1993, when a group of fundamentalists built a compound, Mount Carmel, just outside Waco, Texas. In February of that year, US federal agents raided the compound, in the belief if held a cache of illegal arms. Four occupants were killed, but that was the precursor to a fifty-one day siege. The siege came to an end with impatient government agents decided to send in tanks and CS gas. A fire swept through the building, and eighty of the apocalyptic believers died. The group of believers had been led by David Koresh, who had managed to persuade them the ‘end of time’ was imminent, drawing on a variety of complex – and bizarre – views centred around the breaking of the seven seals in the Book of Revelation. Bizarre or not, his views had led his followers converting rifles into machine guns, the development that had precipitated the raid; it remains unclear how the fire started that killed the sect members.
In many ways, Waco can be seen as just one example of the many so-called ‘culture wars’ that were rampant as the second Millenium was approaching, wars that pitted right-wing extremists, seeking to save the American state from totalitarian plots devised the government and its various secretive and repressive hidden institutions. Another of these events to receive worldwide attention was the Oklahoma bombing by Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh wanted revenge against the government for the Waco siege, and the 1992 death of several people at Ruby Ridge. In a way that was to become increasingly familiar, he was concerned about ‘the rights of US private citizens, and agencies like the FBI. He wanted to inspire a revolution, and in 1995 he masterminded and carried out a bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children, injured 684, as well as partially destroying the building.
Especially in a country where incidents of these kinds abound, the Second Millennium is characterised by many instances where it is the role of government, not religion, that attracts fears about the end of time, global catastrophes and the need for violent uprising to save the nation. Just as had been true a thousand years before, there are disaffected people who are easily motivated to ‘restore’ their country or their group to the way it had been before government intervened. The dates of the millennia may seem arbitrary, but they offer a focus for those who fear their world is being overrun. The only change over 1000 years is that todays’ apocalypses are more likely to be focussed on earthly politicians, not cosmic beings!
