chapters, I know that as this century progresses, the spirituality on our planet is going to grow to unprecedented strength and power, as we humans, at long last, start paying attention to the spirit voices inside us, reminding us that, yes, it actually is time to get our affairs in order. That spiritual growth is already under way, causing more and more of my clients to think beyond their day-today lives and search for answers to the bigger questions of their own spirits’ futures and the futures of every spirit currently residing on a planet that, according to countless rumors, isn’t going to last forever.
Several of these clients were experiencing the same understandable fear: they couldn’t get past the feeling that the end of days must be approaching or it wouldn’t be on their minds to begin with. For them, and for all of you who share that fear, I’m here to offer concrete proof that we citizens of the world in the year 2008 aren’t the first to feel sure that the end is so obviously imminent. Some historically verifiable examples:
In approximately 2800 BC an Assyrian tablet was etched with the words, “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.”
The Bible quotes Jesus as saying to his apostles, in Matthew 16:28, “There be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” And in Matthew 24:34, “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” Both statements were taken by some to mean that Jesus would return before the apostles died.
In around AD 90 the fourth pope, St. Clement I, predicted that the end of the world was imminent.
In the second century a Christian sect called the Montanists believed that Christ would return during their lifetime and that the New Jerusalem would “come down out of heaven from God.” And one Roman leader was so certain that the end of the world was only two days away that he and his followers disposed of their houses and all other belongings in preparation.
In AD 365 a bishop named Hilary of Poitiers made the public declaration that the world would be ending during that year.
Sometime between AD 375 and 400, a student of Hilary of Poitiers, St. Martin of Tours, braced his followers for a definite end of the world no later than AD 400. He also stated, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born.”
The middle of the first millennium saw a number of doomsday predictions, including that of Hippolytus of Rome, the “antipope,” who temporarily defected from the Catholic Church to protest its reformation, whose math convinced him that the Second Coming would occur six thousand years after Creation, or AD 500.
Sextus Julius Africanus, a Roman theologian, was sure that the end of days was destined to occur in AD 800.
Christians annually celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25, the day on which the Virgin Mary was visited by an angel and told she would give birth to the Christ child. In 992, Good Friday, the acknowledgment of Christ’s Crucifixion, coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation, an occasion that for centuries had been anticipated as the arrival of the Antichrist, closely followed by the end of the world according to the book of Revelation.
The year 1000 provided an opportunity for the first official millennium hysteria. It was further fueled by the disinterment of Charlemagne’s body, since, according to legend, an emperor would someday rise from the grave to do battle with the Antichrist.
Many authorities who had loudly proclaimed that the world would definitely end in the year 1000 explained their obvious miscalculation by “realizing” they should have added Jesus’s life span to their prediction. As a result, the world would now reliably end in 1033.
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