1000 for 2000: Startling Predictions for the New Millennium from Prophets Ancient and Modern - Softcover

0ne thousand years ago, millennium fever was an isolated phenomenon seen only in Europe. Visions of the world coming to an end in flames didn't disturb the civilizations of South and East Asia. When India entered the last month of the old millennium, the only trace of wide-ranging fires came from farmers burning off leaf refuse from the summer monsoon season. The Islamic year overlapping the Christian calendar years of 999-1000 was a doomsday dud. Judgment Day came and went without much fanfare sometime around the year 390 after the Hegira. On the other hand, Muslims living in Palestine at that time did record a marked increase in tourism profits from a larger than normal influx of Christian pilgrims coming to Jerusalem to pray and pay their final respects to the Holy Land.

The year launching the second Christian millennium wasn't even a blip in the 400,000-year Kali Yuga (epoch) of the Hindu calendar, and Polynesians sailing the South Pacific in great catamaran canoes were clueless that the world was coming to an end.

They discovered New Zealand, and thus the year that should have ended the world completed the final stage of the greatest migration and nautical exodus in history. A thousand-plus native American nations took no note of anything doom-laden for that year. They didn't expect the harbinger of their apocalypse to appear anytime soon. indeed the foretold "lost white brother," carrying the ill omen of the cross over the Eastern ocean, didn't sail over the Atlantic for another half a millennium. Some daring Vikings did sail westward in the year 1000, but they found neither the edge nor the end of the world. They discovered the New World instead and for a time established colonies in Labrador and Newfoundland.

The only place where millennium fever burned brightly at the approach of the year 1000 was in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe. Many believed apocryphal stories that said the first day of the thousandth year after the birth of Christ was the day the world would end. Throughout the year 999 a medieval version of a Y2K panic seized the bankers and record keepers facing Y1K. If number "oo" in a computer can erase someone's bank account in our near future, then a year ending in "ooo" saw people a thousand years ago wiping out their bank accounts in extreme acts of charity. The indebted believed they gained brownie points in heaven by rubbing out the records of moneys owed to them by debtors. Many burghers went as far as throwing away their ledger books and closing their businesses. Some of the rich gave their wealth away so they could face God in a blessed and dirt-poor state. Farmers abandoned their crops. "What need will there be of food next year when there will be no next year?" they reasoned. Toward the end of the year commerce and agriculture in Europe generally shut down, with the result that many regions suffered doomsday-style bouts of famine and social chaos. The classes mingled in great pilgrimages to Rome and other holy places in Europe, and ultimately one saw mixed multitudes of nobles, merchants, and peasants surging all the way to Jerusalem.

By autumn of 999, millions of the backsliding faithful raised the gain of their prayers and intensified their acts of Christian virtue-some to the point of whipping themselves into a frenzy of penance, One saw armies of flagellants roaming the frosty countryside of Europe toward the end of December. One could follow their trails of blood through fields and fetid medieval city streets. Mobs cornered and killed the misfits and purported witches, they hanged tax collectors and a few unlucky rich merchants, and of course they burned a lot of Jews in a rush to gain one last bit of good merit before the angel Gabriel blew his horn.

in the final hour of New Year's Eve, Pope Sylvester 11 led thousands of cowering and kneeling believers in a Mass in Rome's pre-Vatican and ancient St. Peter's Basilica. Eyewitnesses report that as midnight struck the revelers of revelation didn't exactly mark the new millennium with party horns and bawdy, inebriated shouts of "Happy New Year!" The crowd screamed in terror and several people in the basilica dropped dead from fright. Yet January I, 1000, came and went like any other day, and this astounded everyone in Europe from the pope to the lowest peasant. Why hadn't the world ended? Theologians eventually reasoned that God must have postponed the end of the world until the year 2000.

The first day of the new one-thousand-year reprieve from doom found many stunned burghers; rummaging through refuse heaps to find their discarded ledgers. The new millennium's gray dawn light illuminated the way for farmers wandering over the countryside searching for the livestock they released a few weeks earlier. On New Year's Day, people came down to earth again, the class system was back in force, and local merchants were a tad...