The change from one millennium to another is often an occasion for various forms of hysteria, apocalyptic visions and pronouncements, a sense of great change, new possibilities, and so on. In truth, when our calendar changes from one millennium to another is arbitrary in that the west decided when the calendar began, changed that calendar a couple of times since, and has not linked the change to any cosmic event that would be unique. Still, people have a visceral reaction to the change and see the change as monumental and cosmically significant. This is true today, and it was true in the change form the first to the second millennium A.D. during a much more religious and much more superstitious time.
Damian Thompson notes the nature of these time changes when he writes that the "measurement of time is inextricably bound up with belief in the supernatural. We need look no further for proof of this than the currents of revival and anxiety which are flowing through the world's religious communities as the year 2000 approaches" (Thompson 3). Millenarianism, or millennialism, is the belief that the end of the world is at hand and that a New World will appear once the old is destroyed. This mode of thought associates such a change with the change from one millennium to another (Eliade 521).
The Book of Revelation in Christian theology is a millennial book, and the Book of Daniel is an earlier statement of millennial thought in the Jewish tradition (Weinstein 91). Religious thought thus centered on the shift from 999 to 1000 as a possible time when the Book of Revelation would come true. There were events at that time which were seen as portents and which were judged to be evidence of a great change. In the spring of the year 1000, the monks of Lotharingia were celebrating the passion and resurrection of the Lord when they felt an earthquake, and soon after a comet appeared in the sky. These sort of events were seen as ome...