The end may be near, but exactly how near is the sticky question. As millennium fever swept the globe, party planners and doomsdayers alike were fixated on
the year 2000. Meanwhile, Judgment Day sticklers have been obsessing over the fact that there never was a "year zero," and therefore A.D. 1 plus two
millennia equals 2001. But pinpointing Armageddon isn't quite that simple. When it comes to end times, there are as many proposed dates as there
are fates (Rapture or Tribulation? Fire or Flood? Demons or Pleiadeans?).
However, in the wake of past doomsday embarrassments (the world didn't end in the year 1000, and the hoopla over the 1987 Harmonic Convergence turned out
to be the spiritual equivalent of 8-track tape), few latter-day prophets are willing to stick their necks out and name a drop deadline. "What the prophets
try to do is make predictions and leave the fulfillment vague," explains Stephen D. O'Leary, a millennial scholar at the University of Southern
California. The most successful millennial prophets remain "strategically ambiguous," he says. He prophets who do get specific tend to be the more
marginal ones."
It's no surprise that the Internet, a haven for marginal oracles of all strips, is home to millenarians who are bold enough to set a date. In fact, the
Internet has assumed an important role on the end-times stage. "The Internet will be to the twenty-first century what the printing press was to the
sixteenth," says medieval historian Richard Landes of Boston University, who, with O'Leary, cofounded the Center for Millennial Studies. Just as the
printing press made apocalyptic tracts available to the public five hundred years ago, the Internet disgorges a vast literature of alternative doomsday
scenarios.
"The Internet has increased the amount and the kind of information people have at their disposal to construct millenial scenarios," says O'Leary.
"It also gives people a chance to try out different interpretations and prophecies in
electronic discussion groups." In effect, he says, "the Internet provides a kind of social reinforcement," a public-address system for
"people who might otherwise be relegated to the fringes as crackpots."
Well, in the lottery of multiple Armageddons, today's crackpot may turn out to be tomorrow's messianic seer. So how can the rest of us plan for the
ultimate end and/or final beginning? The handy guide to doomsday chronologies is a good place to start, and a good place to determine if any of these are in
fact true:
July 1999 (Nostradamus): This end date arrives in the summer of 1999 (just in time for that Prince song). Everybody's favorite sixteenth-century doomsayer was uncharacteristically specific when he prophesied that "in the year of 1999 and seven months will come a great king of terror from the skies…." Rather than interpreting that to mean Stephen King skydiving, latter-day pessimists are thinking nuclear missile strike. And the pessimists' tent is big enough for everyone: Everyone banking on the end of the world wants a piece of nuclear Nostradamus - New Agers, psychics, fundamentalist Christians, and Tom Clancy fans alike.
August 18, 1999 (Criswell): Ed Wood's favorite phony TV psychic was brazen enough to narrow down Armageddon to the precise day: "If you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 18, 1999, and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak, and no words will come out, for we have no future…. You and I will suddenly run out of time!" Of course, Criswell never explained exactly how the world would end, only that future generations will wonder "what on earth was meant by the words 'Henry Ford' or 'Hollywood.'" But how accurate was Criswell? Well, his record speaks for itself: "Meteor destroys London [in] 1988"; "I predict embalming by radar, where the body is turned to indestructable stone"; "I predict that by 1980 you will be able to lift your own face in your own home for only $5.00."
