Palden Jenkins
This is from a now-changed chapter in the book Healing the Hurts of Nations.

Titanic considerations
The mythology of Millennialism: Anti-Christs, Riders of the Apocalypse, nuclear incineration, Second Comings, the coming of space-people, galactic Null-Zones, impacting comets and overwhelming disasters. Who wants to be there? Most people deal with it by ignoring it – perhaps it will all go away. After all, isn't the Millennium a good reason for a drunken Auld Lang Syne super-party and some extra construction contracts and media spectaculars? The majority of people are pitifully stuck between two forms of denial of the full implications of our situation: a majority subscribes to fundamental disbelief or joking half-belief in millennial ideas, and a minority tends toward a compensatory over-belief – and there is little careful consideration of realistic issues in-between.

It is easy to evade looking at whatever writing is on the wall – everyone is too busy making a living or a profit. If they threaten to stir disquiet in the ranks, even the utterances of highly-respected scientists are passed off by media commentators and spin-doctors as extremist opinion – scientists may opine and provide data, but politicians and media editors decide what is true and important – and have a big say in the allocation of research grants. It is equally easy make big and definite-sounding future predictions: prognosticators are rarely held accountable for their forecasts, and people forget about them anyway, adopting new forecasts to suit passing moods. The failure of earlier end-of-the-world predictions in a more gullible age has hardened people into rejection of all predictions.

However well-meant or carefully devised, many predictions do tend to be coloured by current beliefs, predispositions or paranoias – part of the problem is that we lack experience and data in global survival questions. Additional ingredients come in too: religious or ideological advocates of dramatic millennial scenarios often believe that tribulations will affect everyone else but them, or that redemption or rescue will bless them but not others. Needless to say, prognosticators of all angles are usually sincere if at times over-zealous, and their predictions often carry a symbolic value which does serve to make at least some people think. Which is better than blanking-out – though a full and serious consideration of what information we have, scientific or belief-based, still needs to take place.

Millennial notions do stretch our sense of possible future reality, making us aware of matters which indeed deserve consideration. It is well worth acquiring a grasp of the spectrum of future possibilities – including both the more extreme scenarios and the more moderate probable likelihoods. However, the more one investigates all this, the more one uncovers uncomfortable information and insights which make even moderate scenarios begin to look quite extreme! Most people deal with this by keeping their heads down and looking no further forward than three years. This is an escape from, not a solution to the enormity of the question that faces us. Whither the future?

The extremism of many predictions does not automatically prove that they should be ignored. Self-appointed rationalists beware! One who takes a Bly rationalist viewpoint often does so from an unacknowledged irrational basis, geared to the denial of mystery, emotion or responsibility for past errors. However, anticipation of disaster is not just idle paranoia. We do live in crucial times. If we examine our world situation honestly, looking beneath the surface, we find that many of the most fundamental issues of human history are up for examination and radical change, whether this is chosen by us or foisted upon us by force of circumstance. If we focus solely on a single issue such as growth in world population, vast and deep historical issues rear their ugly heads, drawing in matters of religion, social structure, politics, economics, tradition and hosts of other complicating factors. The stakes in the global poker-game are now high, and planet Earth is, regardless of official opinion, distinctly not a safe and secure place to live, whether in New York City or in an isolated valley in the High Pamir.

When armies of soldiers, police and security personnel are deemed necessary to guard society from its own members, something is dreadfully wrong. When intelligent beings of the same species threaten each other's existence to the extent of overkill, and when individuals allow their own personal interests to override everyone's collective interests, something is wrong. It isn't necessary to be a visionary or a futurologist to see what's going on! Basic commonsense tells any average human of any nationality that all is not well. Belief in the pronouncements of authorities of all kinds is dangerously weak, even though most people would like it to be otherwise. An old Bantu song goes "Listen more closely to things than to people...".

The world's problems seem to be ever-increasingly interwoven with each other. The solution of one issue rests on the solution of others, and these rest on yet more interdependent issues. Dedicated conservationists seek to protect endangered species and landscapes and to re-educate the public, yet nature conservation on its own is a symptom-oriented first-aid measure which cannot heal the root-causes of environmental degradation. It proceeds only a small distance before it comes up against blocking issues in other spheres – rhinos in East Africa are decimated by poachers supplying traditional medicinal ingredients for affluent consumers in East Asia, and bird stocks in Antarctica are affected by agrichemical practices in Denmark, India and Nigeria. Conservationists cleave into two camps: those moved toward political action (often direct action) and those pressurised by funding and authorities to attend to localised small-scale, single-issue conservation work to rescue certain species or environments – as long as it doesn't raise taxes or greatly affect anyone.

Yet times are now crucial. Ominous multiple global issues are by now well-known: over-population; over-consumption by some and undernourishment for others; ozone-layer depletion, atmospheric warming and climatic change; political instabilities and social stresses; toxic, nuclear or military risks; urban, industrial and agricultural pollution; habitat and species decline; immune-system degeneration; decline in male sperm-counts; creeping corruption, dishonesty, cynicism and profit-chasing; personal, family and community breakdown; and, most crucially, governmental and institutional incapacity to remedy all these. These factors insidiously eat away at the inherent robustness and potential in both nature and human nature. Even though there are B lobbies portraying our situation as normal and manageable, it is all approaching some sort of crescendo. While people might prefer business as usual, usuality and normality are in decline. It's safer to expect the unexpected.

In every single department and every cranny of human life, large-scale world issues are reflected in people's personal experiences and predicaments. The world is visibly more crowded, and the increase is itself increasing. Sold-out impotence, shoulder-shrugging resignation and individual helplessness pervade many people's lives. Bird-song and contemplative sunsets are forgotten – if they don't happen on-screen, they're unimportant. Foot-tapping restlessness, point-and-click short attention-spans and perpetual busyness lead successive generations into ever-subtler forms of avoidance of the bottom-line questions of existence. Global uncertainties affect you and me: we are now even endangered by over-exposure to natural sunshine. The risk of getting mugged, even in our own home, confronts so many of us. Is this the world we want to live in?

This acutely-loaded situation generates a new underlying worldwide awareness – an awareness which has never existed to its current extent. People largely conform to the presented norms modern society expects of us, bound securely into an enormous wage-debt-reward-tax system, acquiescing in a rather merciless reality which clashes horribly with human sensitivities. "You too could win a million dollars!" – yet most people are obliged to subsist on but the possibility of winning. People who do win gilded carrots find their success and fortune has mixed blessings – worries, responsibilities, ulcers and accountancy bills cancel out the advertised bliss. Underneath this pile of societal carcinogenia something else is being generated: a widespread, deep and latent disaffection, a questioning which emerges only when things get to be too much. Is this what life is really all about? Wasn't there something else we all came here to do?

Such estranged questioning and disillusionment has found expression mainly through the actions, utterances and silences of odd-balls, poets, vocal minorities, far-sighted visionaries or outraged radicals. However, widespread unconscious disaffection has arisen too: only a small proportion of the six-ish billion people alive today live free of reservations about the state of the world. Most people accept what they get, yet only few experience 100% satisfaction with the manner of civilisation by which we live. Many people work hard to justify how things are or to make things better, yet they also experience serious, secret, deep, largely unacknowledged reservations – even if these surface only during unusual moments of truth, loss or disadvantage.

It is well-nigh impossible to prove the truth of assertions I have just made – opinion polls rarely investigate people's truly fundamental feelings and might not be capable of doing so. Evangelists and futuristic preachers tap into these feelings, spin-doctors tame them and ad-men prey on them – but what happens afterwards? We are still faced with the same inescapable problems. "We've had enough" is a short, sharp conclusion which lurks furtively in the back recesses of people's awareness, waiting for something to stir it.

There it is, a spiritual enzyme gnawing at the foundations of our beliefs. It's a secret yearning for a better life and a happier world – a world where the efforts, aches and joys of life are proportioned to a more natural, human and authentic base-line of reality. We are given to understand that our modern world represents an apex of human achievement, yet there's a sensing that there is a further reality beyond this – a reality we glimpse during periodic 'funny feelings', moments of insightful peace or razor-sharp personal crisis, a reality which becomes a forgotten fantasy as soon as we return to 'normality'.

Disaffection levels reflect a hidden growing saturation with sales-talk, political spin, moral judgements, public untruths and social control-mechanisms of all kinds. People get to feel quietly hemmed in by the stated categories to which they are obliged to conform. We are told what to feel: if we use a certain flexicard, we shall feel happy, powerful and free, and if we default on our debts we must feel inadequate, failed and ready for exile. People go along with it, perhaps feeling there is no alternative, yet they also have doubts. Fundamentalism of all kinds, including mainstream conventionalism, covers enormous qualms – the quest for black-and-white certainties betrays a gaping insecurity.

A large proportion of humanity is loitering in this point of history, underlyingly dissatisfied with the present and discreetly concerned about the future. This covert dissatisfaction has achieved a crucial level of intensity – though where the critical threshold lies is anybody's guess. This intensity arises from daily-life influences culled from the very achievements modern civilisation has given us – world-shrinking satellite TVs, telephones and faxes, global migration and travel, multinational corporations and products, multicultural influences and obligatory education. We're surreptitiously becoming global citizens, without having been properly consulted or notified. We're discovering a newly-dawning set of possibilities. A new level has appeared at the top of everyone's personal pyramid of social relationships, called the human race – the endless unknowable crowds we push past at airports, stations and street corners. There they all are, on the TV screen: masses of milling faces. Who are these people? Do they have anything to do with me? Though we live in different worlds, do we occupy the same planet?

This new globalised awareness lurks under the surface of consciousness. It generates another kind of historic awareness which has not been present for all peoples of all times: the awareness that things do not intrinsically have to be as they present themselves to us now. This causes a mysterious restlessness and multiplication of wants and aspirations, expressed or hidden – and hidden, reserved hopes are dangerous, since they can surge out when the lid is even slightly lifted, like bubbles in a just-opened bottle of sparkling wine. They can cause sudden outbursts of irrational mass-behaviour.

This phenomenon was demonstrated in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s when the promise of change, justice, freedom and prosperity was dangled before unsuspecting Soviet citizens. As soon as the grinding post-Stalinist oppression had eased, newly-visible issues such as the 'nationalities question' bubbled up to the surface – an issue once buried under the prevailing ideology and controlling issues of Soviet political life. The nationalities question proved to be a Ber force in some parts of USSR than the urge for gizmos and well-stacked supermarket shelves – people in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Armenia and other states were prepared to sacrifice the promise of security and comforts to prioritise national self-determination. Soviet planners had not anticipated this: their plan was an ordered and integral transition to a more appropriate liberalised economy – but they had forgotten the human factor. Similarly, worldwide, the rush for economic growth and techno-propagation overlooks what's fermenting underneath in the hearts and guts of people in the street. High-growth places such as Singapore have a veneer of achievement, provision and finesse to them, yet as many new social problems arise with affluent, successful economic centres as with shanty-towns and high-rise residential stacks, though less obvious and visible. Growing buying-power purchases only limited expressions of freedom, accompanied by a creeping indigestion arising from the boxed-in feeling from living in individual properties and closing ourselves inside insulated roles, cars and offices.

Is the game nearly up?
Many inherent contradictions in modern daily life have become visible to increasing numbers of people – especially to younger people, with their penetrating capacity to see things as they are, not as they are made out to be. People of all social backgrounds are seeing things with more piercing eyes than before – they are not accepting traditional handed-down givens in the way they once did. Many people 'play the game' only in case it's true, not with certainty. Since the 1960s, 'the game' has grown emptier, acted out as an insurance policy and a multi-channel escape. Waistlines have grown and nerves have sharpened. Alternative possibilities have been suppressed and subdued by indistinct governmental and commercial forces, having the effect of preventing ordinary people from forming and acting on their own conclusions about the issues in front of them.

Nevertheless, conclusions are formed, underneath the level of attitudes, opinions and rationalisations – conclusions which many people are hardly aware of, yet they quickly take shape when it comes to the crunch. We are being obliged by modern circumstance to scrutinise incongruities which do not make sense. Fifty years ago, people were told that they would be rewarded in old age if they worked hard – yet the rewards have fallen on only some. The government was supposed to look after everyone's interests, yet this seems evidentially not to be the case. Even role-models such as bishops, royals and presidents present us with glaring inconsistencies – 'irregular' dealings unbecoming of their station. Occasionally a resignation or a public acknowledgement is made, to give the impression something is being done, though mistakes are crafted to appear to represent isolated cases. Scapegoat-creation diverts social awareness away from the major issues, for enough time until the heat dies down and it no longer matters.

Errors are repeated in the cynical presumption that we'll get used to them, eventually to stop complaining. Incongruities are explained away, yet this creates an ever-growing schizoid gulf between life-as-experienced and life-as-rationalised. It exacerbates an unconscious irritation deep down which slowly generates a shining pearl of knowing. Multiple falsehoods lead to eventual truths. Or, as William Blake once put it: "The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". Except that, today, we cannot afford to go too far too long – Blake was alive at a time when industrialisation was but new.

This mode of accentuated public awareness has arisen in earlier times in localised ways, particularly in pre-revolutionary or pre-collapse situations. Sometimes these situations can be long and drawn out, as was the case in the last decades of both the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty in China and the Ottomans in Turkey around the turn of the 20th century. Such buildups of acute charged perception have indeed led to outbreaks of change, yet often this has led to a raw deal – humanity has not yet fully engaged with the fundamental psycho-spiritual causes of the problems involved, and therefore cannot fix them. Mixed outcomes from revolutions and major reforms have compounded a historical trans-generational frustration. Things sometimes change for the better, yet in limited ways and with a bitter taste.

We unconsciously carry the frustrations and unfulfilments of our foreparents with us, passed down through unconscious programming inherited by successive generations of children. It can go back generations, well covered over with the generational amnesia of regret. The emancipatory behaviour of many modern women derives not only from frustration with their own life-experience but also from the suppressed feelings of generations of mothers and grandmothers reaching into the dim, distant past. The danger with rapid changes such as this, however, is that the necessary changes are not taken far enough – symptoms of emancipation are accepted instead of fundamental causes. The aggressive-destructive orientation of modern civilisation could actually receive an added boost from the promotion of highly-motivated career-women, who bring with them a new competitiveness and a new vested interest in preserving and expanding their hard-fought power. This could hamper the more wholesome transformative core-influence post-modern womankind brings to civilisation as a whole. However, women sitting in men's traditional seats are changing things, bit by bit – yet they are still constrained by having to play by someone else's rules.

Similarly, the rise to affluence of many formerly poor countries leads toward consumption and destruction levels far higher than the bad old days of white industrial imperialism. No one would set out to deny others a place in the sun, yet if truth be known, there's only a certain amount of room on the beach! Revolutionaries of old used to despise liberal reformists – sometimes more than they despised ancien regimes – because liberals can unwittingly dilute and hijack the sharp poignancy of the moment, turning a burning question into a committee of inquiry. The essence of the situation can be lost, and second best accepted in its stead. This might be a symptom of incomplete readiness for a fundamental change, or it might be a symptom of human attachment to known quantities.

So the cycle repeats. New governments are sworn in on the promise of making things better. New products emerge, with the prospect of making life easier and more exciting. Yet the problems of existence are not fundamentally changed. Reality has always been virtual, since the beginning of time – only our minds have made it unvirtual. The 'war to end all wars' landed up not being so. The 'book of the century' is superseded by a new one three years later. The never-ending story of secret dismay goes on – what is the world coming to? In parallel with growing issues such as pollution and overpopulation, historic disillusion is approaching critical mass – it adds to the potentially explosive poignancy of our contemporary worldwide condition. It silently awaits a set of circumstances which bring it to the surface to germinate fundamental change. Critical circumstances in our world (population, climate, etc) escalate in direct proportion to our disillusionment and disquiet, creating a highly-charged totality, a mass of sludgy collective feelings. We are perhaps beginning to notice the mysterious direct connection between the world out there and our world in here, between events and thoughts.

Life is made up of two major spheres of experience: what is happening out there (events and circumstances) and how we are experiencing it in here (subjective experiential value-assessments). The pain lies in the friction between the two. Vast incongruities lie in a conflict between what we are told is the case by conventional received wisdom, and what we ourselves perceive in our own personal experience. Sharpness of perception slowly becomes compromised as we mature into adulthood – 'growing up' – as we accept given realities and quieten our zeal and ardour. We do however have the option to maintain this acute youthful perceptiveness throughout life – it keeps us seeing, on our toes. The price to be paid for this can sometimes be our social disadvantaging and a grating feeling as our conscience rubs against the demands of acceptable social behaviour.

There come crunchy occasions when holding down our potentialities and 'playing the game' no longer work. The grating eats at our very being. Uncomfortable facts confront us everywhichway – at home, at work, in the neighbourhood, on the news. The irritation occasionally gives us nightmlares and illnesses. It can lose us spouses and friends. Inward collapse causes individuals to enter a personal, often secret inner growth process, yet this remains a minority development which society spurns, criticises and denigrates. The art of being spiritually awake in the modern world involves adopting false appearances or gathering into sheltered gaggles and networks of like-minded people with but limited outreach into society as a whole. Yet the individuals involved in this add together into a movement.

Society protects itself against a growing tide of spiritual dissidents through trivialising their beliefs and efforts, or by commercialising and containing their activities into the framework of contracts, markets and copyrights. This works for a while. Yet, spiritually, this grating dissent generates a pearl of wisdom which gives deeper sharpness to the contradictions and insanities we witness in our world. It builds up a tide of contained potential energy of historic proportions, which at some point must overflow its banks and dams, turning kinetic. If enough individuals turn kinetic, it starts accelerating into a collective form.

The process of becoming civilised, through the socialisation and education we undergo as we grow up, involves the adoption of descriptions and explanations given to be gospel truth. It is implied we must believe them if we wish to succeed and be accepted in society. It's an unspoken contract. Within these parameters we are permitted given individual freedoms. Play the game, and you get a living – play it well, and you get promotion and a raise. Size of income and extent of social influence tend to be directly proportional to the extent of self-suppression an individual has gone through to climb the social ladder. Yet there is an inherent flaw: if a person, thus taught to obey and reinforce the rules, suddenly has an experience where these rules are shown to be incongruous with sense or wisdom, or to be protective of certain vested interests, then a deep discrepancy is found. The itch grows.

We get stuck in compromises, finding our arms tied. We find ourselves being a party to the problem, compromised by the very game we play. Our children eyeball us thanklessly with increasing suspicion, indifference, pity or disdain. We're faced with the nagging threat that we'll end our lives feeling incomplete, unresolved, as if we haven't done what we came here to do – whatever that was! So much conditioning covers our sense of innate purpose that we cannot even remember that it is there waiting to be remembered. This is a norm for the human race. Yet this remembering lurks quietly within the psyche of everyone, itching to get out, awaiting its moment.

Discrepancies continue to take place because we retract ourselves from questioning the continued existence of major inconsistencies. We tend to get tangled up in confusion or impotence or just dealing with tomorrow. Insight into life, commitment to our path and awareness of the consequences of our acts run counter to everyday busy reality. We suppress contradictions in order to create some sort of peace and security. It is simpler to obey social norms, however much we rue complicity, than to resist or protest, even branded a criminal or traitor, even betrayed by neighbours and associates, even cast out by our own families. It is simpler to conform. That is, until we reach that critical point of despair. At this point, the bubble pops. The unfulfilment we have accumulated becomes a cancer of the psyche, demanding urgent treatment.

Something goes bananas. It's difficult to handle. We face a Hobsonian choice: to becoming a broken person, a be a hero against all odds, to live the life of a social reject or to try to thoroughly drop out. However, these options exist only while such breakdown-breakthroughs remain isolated and individual. If such contradictions are one day perceived by sufficient numbers of people simultaneously, and if circumstances pressure-cook that collective perception into something much greater, then there can arise an awkward psycho-social situation in which extraordinary value-shifts, people-surges, protest movements or potential revolutions arise. Then there's trouble.

We now live in a situation in which civilisation and its repercussions seem to be reaching a crucial crescendo. Billions of people are becoming woven into the modern global buy-sell system: this looks like an all-encompassingly successful market system with a great future. We're massaged with glossy brochures, bribed with debt-purchased cars, pacified with sugary edibles and diverted by sophisticated electronics. We're promised a perpetually-better future. However, when the chips are down and reality prevails, the truth is otherwise.

It is remarkable that modern civilisation still works. In the 1960s the chances of reaching the millennium looked slim. People have developed fundamental though largely untested reservations. Current history is like a loaded cannon, with the safety-catch only just in place. This fuels growing private and public anticipations for the future. It kindles a sense of future-shock, a dissemination of varying millennial warnings and a deep sense of clueless expectancy, coagulated around the coming of the year 2000. Few people dare think big beyond the year 2000 – only occasional authors and film-makers do it, with a few crackpot environmentalists thrown in. Futurology is taken as a form of fantasy or speculation. Yet the year 2000 is with us. In the few years prior to the millennium, people have wanted to be left alone to mosey somnambulantly along pre-laid tracks. Silently wishing the millennium would go away, we could make it up-beat, have a mega-party just like we did in the 80s – a super-new year's super-binge. Let's all get drunk and celebrate! Good business for fireworks and packaging manufacturers.

Celebrate what? What are we leaving behind and what are we entering into? The turn of the millennium gives cause to think, to measure up our lives and our children's prospects, to pause for contemplation of Big Questions. Big questions. Bigger questions than any we've contemplated before. So many interwoven questions that it seems too much to address. Where do we start? Perhaps it's better not to worry about it and just get on with our lives. Perhaps it will go away. Perhaps someone might deal with it – as long as they don't expect us to change.

The result of all this is the growth of a deep, festering and largely unaddressed global morass of underlying, semi-conscious concern. It goes round and round. Should the turn of a millennium not be a time of hope and emergence of new faith and purpose? Should it not entail a re-evaluation of why we are all here, doing all the things we are doing? Is there the courage amongst us to peer into the far future, to get a sense of where we're going? No, let's leave it to the master of the ship, whoever that is. Let's stay in the ballroom, dancing to the orchestra. It's up to the captain to avoid icebergs. Everything's taken care of. Isn't it?

Calendrical conundra
The Millennium was one thousand years ago – if we take 'the millennium' to mean literally 'one thousand years after the birth of Jesus'. There were indeed major disturbances across Europe in the few years before the year 1000. Preachers ran riot with people's fears and hopes. People expected The Last Days and The Judgement, knowing that they had omitted to live in pristine obedience to the Law of God and to spiritual purity, as their religion had taught them they should. Much blood had been spilt, and the lilies in the field had not been remembered. A lot of praying went on, hand in hand with duplicity. Absolution of sin fetched escalating prices. Fear of consignment to Hell was a major social force, and localised pockets of panic broke out: the End of the World was nigh, and the Last Judgement was on the threshold. In certain areas, things got quite hair-raising.

This panic was confined to Europe, owing to its unique calendrical system – other cultures established their dates differently, often in terms of cycles, dynasties or reigns. The Judaic, Islamic and Christian dating systems all started from a point in time and progressed therefrom, except that they each started at a different time. However, for Europeans the year 1000 Anno Domini indeed was something of a turning-point inasmuch as the young, once-barbarian European culture was then on the edge of lifting off, to become a distinct and creative civilisation of its own right. When the promised Last Days did not come, Europeans subconsciously felt they had been pardoned, and their way of life had been validated and legitimised, even favoured by the Almighty. Or at least they felt that they perhaps would be able to get away with what they were doing.

Within a century, great churches and universities were being founded, trade fairs were growing, kingdoms were being expanded and overseas Crusades were being mustered to reclaim the Holy Land from 'the infidel'. The Apocalypse had not happened. The Kingdom of God did not come – unless this kingdom was the new medieval order which nobles, clerics and other beneficiaries regarded as a breakthrough. Europeans felt divinely licensed to treat the Earth like a playground for adventuresome entrepreneurs and conquerors. For most, toil and never-ending gruel continued. But for some – such as the bold Normans, who invaded England and parts of Italy and infiltrated the courts of many lands – there was a growing sense of sanction to achieve wealth and power by any means.

Nowadays the date 1000 is given little attention in history books, apart from wry comments on the superstitions of uneducated early-medieval people and the ravings of eccentric monks, yet it did represent a psychological turning-point for the fledgling Europeans. Millennialism, as a complex belief-system, carried on well into the Middle Ages, to embed itself in the European psyche and to manifest in many religiously- and socially-dissident forms over the coming centuries. The Millennial cosmology has carried on, in ripples, to this day. Here it comes again, gaggled this time around the year 2000. A new book of Nostradamus' largely-incomprehensible predictions is published every two years.

However, the idea of Millennium is not necessarily to be taken literally. In ancient thinking, 'one thousand years' means 'a very long time'. Only in the last 500 years, with our clocks, statistics and machines, have we become so quantitatively precise in our numeracy as we now are. Additionally, the popular idea of Millennium is distorted: the sequence of events described in the Book of Revelations describes a specific set of conditions which would follow 'the Last Days'. The Last Days involved the dreadful coming and the eventual defeat of an Anti-Christ, followed by the parousia or Second Coming of the Christ. The Millennium was to start after the Second Coming. It was to be a period of bliss, peace and wonder, before the final dissolution of the world. And the world, in those days, was reckoned to have existed only a few thousand years.

In other words, there is no inherently sound linkage between the year 2000 and 'the Millennium' – the connection is a misconception probably dreamed up by evangelists and populists. The most rife period of millennial cult activity in Europe was from the 1100s to the 1500s, using no connection to calendrical dates at all. Millennial mythology, adopted by Christians, is derived from the ancient Persian mythology of Manichaeism [1], which was syncretically adopted by the ecclesiastical compilers of Christianity. They used various ancient Middle Eastern strands and traditions to give Christianity universality, in the centuries following Jesus' radiant yet blighted life.

If indeed the date of the birth of Jesus the Nazarene does have a bearing on current global affairs, and if indeed we're talking about millennia or, more accurately, two millennia, then the years 1994 or 1995 are likely to be far more eschatologically [2] important than the year 2000. This might sound odd, until one appreciates that Jesus, according to most of the best current thinking amongst scholars, was born around the years 5 or 6 BCE – not the year 1 CE (AD), as our calendrical system would have us believe. The initial setting of the Year One was probably a mistake – or a cover-up to lose a few years of Jesus' life-story. Our current dating system was initially checked by Sextus Julius Africanus in the 200s CE and later by a Scythian monk living in Rome in 533 CE, Dionysius Exiguus, who was commissioned to check back through history year-by-year, comparing Roman and Jewish records, to fix the beginning of the era [3].

Both had omitted to reckon in the four years Octavian had ruled Rome alone (31-27 BCE) before officially becoming Emperor Augustus. This skewed the chronology of the time of Jesus. As a result, the historical reckoning and dating system was some four or more years inaccurate. No one had checked or corrected it until the above-mentioned ecclesiastics came along. Since the dating system was already widely used and had been authoritatively validated as an article of faith by successive Vicars of Christ, and since it was found to be ecclesiastically impolitic to alter things at this stage, it was found by Exiguus and his employers to be easier to stay with an incorrect system than to change everything around. The public might fear the consequences of a perceived loss of time or of ecclesiastical authority.

In a time when the Church claimed moral authority and absolute knowledge of divine verities, admission of error in dating would be politically unthinkable. There could be a risk of setting further investigations in motion, which might unveil other uncomfortable historical issues – such as the twenty-six or so Gospels omitted from the Bible [4]. These had been edited out at the time when the Bible was being properly assembled, in order to construct a more consistent authoritarian religion. This was done mainly by the Council of Nicaea of 325 CE, called by the Roman emperor Constantine (Constantinus). Constantine recognised the psychologically-centralising value of a written doctrinal ideology, a state religion, for the next wave of civilisation – Byzantium, successor to Greece and Rome. He saw himself, not Jesus, as the Messiah and the Second Coming, and was intent upon constructing an all-embracing state religion synthesised out of a number of cults, including Mithraism, Sol Invictus, Manichaeism, Christianity and Judaism, with the help of the Christian bishops, whom he coopted to his cause with funds and favours [5].

Even today, the public believes that Jesus was born in the Year One. Few are bothered to research the matter, even though only a little logic is called for. As we know from Biblical lore, Herod vowed to find the new-born boy king when alerted by the Wise Men from the East (probably Babylonian astrologer-sages). Yet Herod died in 4 BCE. "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king...", stated the Gospel of Matthew. Cyrenius (Quirinius), governor of Syria during the census which caused Joseph and Mary to journey to Bethlehem, ruled Syria 10-7 BCE. Thus, a reasoned estimate fixes Jesus' birth around 8-4 BCE [6]. The Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus threefold conjunction in Pisces in 7 BCE qualifies as a front-runner to be the Star of Bethlehem [7] (Uranus was known to the ancients, contrary to orthodox knowledge [8]). Whatever the date of Jesus' birth – somewhere between 8 BCE and 4 BCE – it is certain-ly not 1 CE. Thus the true Millennium (or bi-Millennium) is likely to have been around 1993-95! We have already passed it!

However, this does not invalidate the enormous psychological impact on the world's population of the coming of the calendrical year 2000. Our dating system, now politely internationalised as the Common Era, leads us to a major calendrical turn of a millennium which has no inherent cosmic or natural chronological basis (despite efforts by many to find one), yet it does have a raw numerical basis into which enormous significance is naturally invested.

This is special. Thought-provoking! What adds to its charge is the old Christian notion that the coming of the Kingdom of God accompanies the Millennium – a legend of which the whole population is subconsciously aware, thanks to the influence of evangelical preachers, Nostradamus [9] and a steady stream of millennialists. However, this underlying investment of meaning in a collective western belief is but a loose and unfounded association of ideas, bolstering up the well drummed-in notion of 'Repent, for the End is Nigh'. It has been heard for centuries. This looming threat has stirred many into dread, awe and faith. It is fascinating how widespread this notion is, and how deeply-held it is in our post-Christian day and age. Only affluence staves it off.

Whether or not the Judgement Day is attached to this millennial shift, the very arrival of the year 2000 causes us to re-examine our personal lives and the very nature and meaning of human life, history and civilisation. It invokes a grand sweep of time, a quest for meaning in the course of history. The year 2000 gives rise to anxious anticipation. Not without foundation, since it coincides with an enormously vexatious and potent period of history in which change is racing ominously fast and intense. Issues for re-examination and alteration increasingly overwhelm appropriate and effective solutions, in all niches of the world stage, affecting all actors hereon.

Amidst these confusing, urgent times, nothing less than miracles are called for – breaking or overriding accustomed expectation – in order to render the world into a state which elicits confidence in the future. A smooth and rational world transition is unlikely because too much needs to change too quickly. Since miracles are a paranormal occurrence, the collective psyche selects imagery suggesting miracles – or showdowns such as the Apocalypse. The total situation draws in every individual, every species, every atom.

There are dilemmas in every area of life – evasion does not make them disappear. The coming of the calendrical millennium prompts every individual to think over all that has happened since the year 1000. The 20th century, the first known global century, is ending. For many, this could be a great relief.

Proceed now to part two of this article

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© Palden Jenkins, 1996. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: