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1. Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597–1665), The Choir of the Church of Saint John, Bois-le-Duc, drawing, British Museum, London

2. Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597–1665), View of Bois-le-Duc with the Church of Saint John, 1632, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

History has been called a “seamless web,” although human beings insist on giving it arbitrary divisions. While segments of hours, months and years have little meaning, save for convenience, we assign great power to them, especially when they reach the dimensions of centuries and millennia. The French have a name “fin-de-siècle” for the malaise that seizes its citizens at the end of a century. A millennial change carries even more power, especially since Christ promised to return at the end of the first 1000 years after His death in order to pass judgment on the faithful and the faithless.

At the approach of the year 100 °CE, people believed that the Judgment predicted by Christ to occur at the Millennium was imminent. When it did not come in 1000, or near that time, the chronicler and Cluniac monk, Raul Glaber, wrote: “…there occurred, throughout the world, especially in Italy and Gaul, a rebuilding of church basilicas. Notwithstanding the greater number were already well established and not in the least in need, nevertheless each Christian people strove against the others to erect nobler ones. It was as if the whole earth, having cast off the old by shaking itself, were clothing itself everywhere in the white robe of the church”. (Holt, 48)

On April 6, 1997, according to the New York Times of a day earlier, the countdown to the third millennium began in the United States of America.

3. The Cathedral of Saint John, ‘s-Hertogenbosch

The fanfare that accompanied the announcement anticipated the celebration in New York City and around the world when the 1000-day countdown would be complete, on January 1, 2000. Restaurants were already accepting reservations for the celebrations of that evening. On every hand there were fortuitous as well as dire predictions for the end of one century and the beginning of the next.

President Bill Clinton, who ran on the Democratic Platform in 1996 as a “bridge to the 21st century,” was still making predictions for the great social and economic future of America and the world for which he would help prepare the way. Even so, troublesome glitches marred the utopian view. Computers were expected not to recognize 00 as 2000 but as 1900, resulting in shutdowns that could affect government functions from the payment of Medicare claims to control of the nation’s air traffic system. In fact, failure to address the problem universally was predicted by some to lead to catastrophic global consequences.

Religious and prophetic cults had already appeared with more regularity than in the usual “fin-de-siècle” periods. As early as 1980 saw the beginning of the many “survivalist” cults to come in the next two decades when an Arkansan, named Kurt Saxon, warned the audience of the National Broadcast Company’s “Tomorrow” show, that everyone should be prepared to live off the land and keep an arsenal for self-protection against the marauding bands that would follow the coming nuclear holocaust (Arkansas Gazette, 7/29/80). The solemn projections of the end of the world reached their most modernized climax in 1997, when 39 members of a computer-related cult followed their leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, in a suicide contract to beam themselves up to a spaceship presumably trailing in the wake of the Hale-Bopp Comet that was plunging through the Heavens that year.

4. Sculpture at the Cathedral of Saint John, ‘s-Hertogenbosch

5. Anonymous, Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch, c.1550, red and black chalk drawing in the Arras Codex, 41 × 28 cm, Municipal Library, Arras

An essayist in The New Yorker commented on their fantastically flawed mission: “Though science is stronger today than when Galileo knelt before the Inquisition, it remains a minority habit of mind, and its future is very much in doubt. Blind belief rules the millennial universe, dark and rangy as space itself (4/14/97, 32).

That many believed the fate of science and rational thought to be in jeopardy was reflected in an article in the NYT entitled “Scientists Deplore Flight From Reason” (6/6/95). Scientists, doctors, educators, and other intellectuals meeting on the subject at the New York Academy of Sciences proclaimed a “call to arms” against various threats to rational behavior. These included traditional hobgoblins such as astrology and religious fundamentalism; new to the times were the ‘post-modernist’ critics of science who contended that truth in science depended on one’s point of view, not on any absolute content. In such an environment, it was said irrational ideas had taken hold in popular commerce. “Paranormal nostrums” rampant among the public included belief in angels, “out of body” and “near-death” experiences, as well as abduction by aliens and multiple reincarnations. Seeming to reinforce the NYAS conference presumptions were references that abounded in the national media to increased interest in astrology, psychic phenomena, and magic as well as the related fields of Satanism and witchcraft.

An article on witchcraft (NYT, 10/31/98) centered around a group of “Wiccans” (the modern name of so-called witches, derived from a neo-pagan, pseudo religious group called “Wicca”) operating in Salem, Massachusetts. That city, site of the 17th-century witches’ trials, was said to have become a center of tolerance for “alternative spirituality,” including New Age beliefs and contemporary witchcraft groups such as the Temple of Nine Wells and the Witches League for Public Awareness: “Claiming that theirs is a peaceful, nature-oriented religion, quite unlike early devil-worshipping societies, the Wiccans have organized educationally, even politically, to correct misapprehensions about witches and their modern motivations.”

6. Death of a Miser (Detail), side panel, c. 1485–1490, oil on panel, 92.6 × 30.8 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington (said to have been hanging over Philip II’s bed in the Escorial at the time of his death; now said to have been part of an altarpiece)

A tabloid article quoted from a list of “the world’s top Bible scholars” who predicted the imminent end of the world and the coming Apocalypse, which it inferred, would be at the end of the Millennium (Weekly World News, 5/14/96). It cited ancient prophecies from Revelations and more recent ones from, among others, the sixteenth-century prophet Nostradamus about dire natural events to occur at the end of our Millennium that seemed to accord with El Nino’s deviant climatic disorders in 1998.

The fact that these events did not happen as so balefully set forth made the turning of the Millennium seem almost anticlimactic-until “9–11,” that is-which many saw as the USA’s Armageddon. Similar predictions and oddities had occurred in the decade leading up to the half-Millennium of 1500. As if their predecessors of the first 1000 years had been mistaken about when the Judgment would come, contemporary thinkers expected it to appear without fail in the year 1500.

Art historian Charles Cuttler summed up the emotional atmosphere of the time: “It was a time of pestilence and turbulence, of economic, social, and religious unrest; an age which believed in chiliasm, Antichrist, apocalyptic visions; in witchcraft, alchemy, and astrology… It was also a period of extreme pessimism, the natural outcome of a belief in demons fostered by the Church itself…” (“Lisbon,”109).

As always, artists were present to give voice and imagery to what otherwise would have seemed unimaginable. Northern poets, known (such as François Villon) and anonymous, as well as sculptors of Romanesque tympana and capitals had graphically displayed their versions of the terrors to come at the end of the world. Later, in the proto-Renaissance period, Gothic revivalist painters depicted these anomalies in their altarpieces. Possibly the most vivid and detailed were those of the Hollander Hieronymus Bosch which shall be the subject of this essay.