"Belief in the End of the World is awoken by the approach of the fated date... a fear without name grips humanity, the times foretold by the Apostle have arrived. But the year passes, the world is not destroyed, humanity draws breath, relieved, and starts to explore new paths."

So writes the French Art Historian, Henri Focillon, in his book "L'an Mil" - 'The Year 1000'. We need, of course, be in no doubt about who was responsible for this miraculous deliverance from the imminent manifestation of 'eschatology'. The monk Raoul Glauber tells us: "for three years around the year 1000 the Earth was covered with a white cloak of churches".

The lack of any significant change of circumstances in the year 1000 led to some doubt about which date was the really important one. The populus became wound up again to expect dire calamity and wrath of the Almighty in 1033, the supposed millenial anniversary of a solar eclipse punctuated by an execution in mysterious circumstances in Palestine. That year also passed as normal. Nation rose up against nation; there were earthquakes (somewhere or other); strange lights were seen in the sky (by anyone far enough North or South); pestilence stalked the land. Just like any other typical year on mediaeval Earth, apart from the throngs of thousands who were moved to "converge from every corner of the world on the sepulchre of Jesus in Jerusalem".

The upturn in devotion to Mother Church, though, was remarkable. Pieces of the True Cross sold in such profusion that it became obvious to the ecclesiastical authorities that a miracle was taking place before their eyes, and that the substance of the venerated relic was renewing itself while they slept. Could there be any surer confirmation that the Earth was indeed being favoured with an extended lease of existence by Divine providence?

Just to make certain that no-one forgot what lucky escapes they had had, a fresh outburst of Millenarian fervour was stage-managed in 1186, then another in 1229, and in 1260, in 1290, 1300, 1310, 1325, 1335, 1346, 1347, 1348, (the doom laden prognostications were particularly emotive during the Black Death), then 1360, 1365, 1375, 1387, 1395, 1396, 1400, 1417, 1429, and pretty well continuously through 1492/93/94. By that time people had finally woken up to the fact that the sale of indulgences to release the souls of relatives from purgatory was fraudulent, and that the loot collected was mostly going to keep the Borgias and other impoverished incumbents of the papacy in wine, women, impressive altar plate, and all the other accoutrements which might even have raised a glance of envy from Hasan i-Sabah, the late patron of the Assassins' Garden of Earthly Delights.

This millenarian campaign, which ran almost continuously for 500 years, must rate as one of the most effective, if not one of the first, advertising ventures in history. As so often is the case, the product did not live up to the presentation; but to take a dissenting view was to invite a marked deterioration in an already precarious quality of life, and those who shouted too loud often wound up as the main event at the next Church bonfire party. Times were rough!

During and after the Reformation, the millenarian banner was taken up with great vigour by the schismatic biblical literalist and puritan sects who still exist on the fringes of mainstream Protestantism. Today they are in full cry. The run up to the year 2000 looks, if anything, as if it is going to be even more hysterical than were the years leading up to 1000; no doubt amplified by the involvement of the protagonists in media hype of the variety exemplified by the evangelical TV channels in the United States.

The prospects of an Armageddon-like confrontation seem to have receded a little, but, nontheless, the anticipated imminence of cataclysmic change is precipitating out in an expectation of some "divine" or quasi-divine intervention in human affairs.

In what I would regard as the dabbling periphery of the occult scene, these anticipated events have become manifest in the upsurge of so-called "New Age" thought, or Aquarianism.

"THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS"

The notion of an Age of Aquarius was first popularised in 1967 through Rado and Ragni's lyrics for the stage musical 'Hair', but the idea did not originate with them. Graham Bond, the Thelemite blues musician, took the view that what was being referred to was Crowley's 'Age of Horus', since the figure representing Aquarius in the much discussed terrestrial zodiac surrounding the Somerset town of Glastonbury resembled some bird of prey, and so exhibited an affinity to the Egyptian Hawklord; all this was made more exciting by the co-incidence of the zodiac bird's head with the mystical Tor itself. The whole concept was further fuelled in the lyrics of rock bands like 'Quintessence' who drew extensively on Eastern imagery, and 'Hawkwind', who, on their first, album welcomed their listeners to a "New Golden Age".

The 'Age of Aquarius' has probably become the most enduring element in the 'Hippy' Mythos, surviving in popular consciousness much longer, for example, than Tim Leary's injunction to "Turn on. Tune in. Drop out." Although in the late 1960's the 'New Age' itself was seen as an inevitable consequence of enough people following that injunction.

So where did it all stem from? Carl Gustav Jung may be partly responsible. In the introduction to his 1959 book 'Flying Saucers' he makes reference to a concept of 'Platonic Months' and points to the upsurge in UFO sightings as the imminent harbingers of "changes as the Spring Point enters Aquarius".

In this Jung seems to have been picking up on some ancient traditions which were encapsulated in a booklet entitled 'Zodiacs Old and New', published in 1951 by one Cyril Fagan. That booklet seeks to explain differences between ancient systems of astronomy/astrology in terms of an observational phenomenon whereby it is apparent that the seasonal maxima and minima of day lengths on Earth do not synchronise exactly with the planets completion of an orbital revolution of the Sun.

The difference is fairly small (of the order of 50 arc-seconds per year), and in terms of the Sun's position relative to the fixed stars, it is pretty well impossible to make direct measurements, because, of course, the light from the Sun completely masks the light from those stars in the same part of the sky, except at the moment of a total eclipse. In consequence, the position of the Sun relative to the fixed stars at any time can only be inferred by calculation from indirect observations, such as those made of the star Spica by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians.

The conventional thesis which has developed is that ordinarily referred to as 'Precession of the Equinoxes'. This is typified by the migration of the 'Spring Point' - the apparent position of the Sun relative to the fixed stars on the day of the Spring Equinox - backwards through the constellation of Pisces throughout most of the Christian Era since the time of Claudius Ptolemy, a mathematician/astronomer of the 2nd Century.

Using data from Ptolemy's work and evidence extrapolated from more ancient Babylonian and Egyptian sources, Fagan plots a graph showing the migration of the autumnal equinoctial point over 1000 years, from 800 BC until 200 AD. The points on his graph, although in some cases suffering from imprecision with regard to the exact dates of the observation, do give an approximate appearance of falling on a straight line, and Fagan has connected them up much in the way that many of us may recall doing with some all important graph in the write-up after school physics practical sessions.

Fagan's straight line accords with the conventional perception that the equinoctial points are precessing (perhaps more precisely recessing) through the signs of the zodiac at a rate of 1 degree per 70 years. On this basis the spring point might be expected to traverse an entire zodiac sign, one twelfth part of circle of the ecliptic, in 2100 years, and this is the source of the 'Platonic Month' concept referred to by Jung.

The process seems quite cut and dried. In a period of some 25000 years the spring point recesses all the way round the zodiac. People who thought about such matters were quite happy with this idea; apart from anything else there was a reassuring resonance with Hindu concepts of long term cycles in the development of civilisations, the Earth in general, and the wider cosmos.

All sorts of mythological juxtapositions were pointed out; it was surmised that an Age of Taurus, exemplified by the bull cults of Minoan Crete, had been terminated in 2000 BC with the slaying of the Minotaur by Theseus. Moreover, an Age of Aries, having to do with lambs and rams, was symbolically ushered in at the point in time where Abraham sacrificed a stochastically manifesting "ram caught in a thicket" rather than his son Isaac. This age is similarly said to have come to its conclusion with the execution of Jesus as 'Lamb of God', and the Age of Pisces to have been symbolically initiated with the adoption by the early Christians of the Fish symbol.

That the datings of these fanciful correspondences do not co-incide with~ the dates when the relevant spring point transits were occurring seems to be of little concern, indeed the spring point did not enter Pisces until 200 CE, by which time the Fish symbol faction of the original tradition had already started to be extinguished by the more Roman oriented Pauline faction. Once the so-called Age of Pisces was actually underway, the important Roman Christian symbol was the sigil made up of the Greek letters Chi-Rho, and the original tradition which had resisted any compromise with the Empire during Diocletian's persecution, the Fish tradition, had become marginalised in North Africa. They were castigated as heretics (the Donatists), and eventually exterminated by the Catholic Christian Legions under a moral legitimacy worked out by Saints Augustine and Ambrose. In that sense, if the original Christian tradition represented the Age of Pisces, it was a short lived affair, lasting not much beyond the Synod of Carthage in 411. Not of course that the Early Christians knew or cared much about Astrology - it was more or less an exclusively Pagan art/science.

In any event, here we are now in 1991, with the Spring Point close to 6 degrees of Pisces, receding at a little over 50 arc seconds per year (50.288 seconds to be precise), at which rate the transition to Aquarius might be expected in the year 2400. Quite how this four century interval allows New Age adherents to claim (as some do) that we are already in the Age of Aquarius is a little baffling. Doubtless in the run up to the year 4000 their descendants will point to ancient records saying something like "Lo, in a day and a night the metal birds of the Great Satan poured fire and demolition upon the peoples of the two great rivers and Babylon was become a nation of Water Carriers". As a fanciful reference to the recent Gulf War, such a chronicle might have some notional accuracy, but as a signal of a new age it could be little other than fatuous.

IS P/RECESSION OF THE SPRING POINT LINEAR?

In 'De Revolutionibus' the heretical treatise which was published when he was on his deathbed in 1543, Copernicus writes at some length on the subject of movement of the Spring Point. Although Copernicus' thoughts on the matter are not referenced specifically by Cyril Fagan, it is clear, with regard to archaic astronomical data, not only that many of the sources were used by both writers, and moreover that Copernicus had access to data collated by Arab scholars throughout the Christian era. Copernicus' conclusions differ somewhat from Fagan's straight line (or linear) approximation.

Using additional data credited to one 'Al-Battani the Harranite' (Harran is now in South East Turkey near the border with Syria) who was working in the 9th Century CE, Copernicus concludes in Book III of 'Dc Revolutionibus' that "it is clear that the precession of the equinoxes was slower during the 400 years before Ptolemy (222 BC - 178 CE) than during the time between Ptolemy and Al-Battani (178 - 879 CE), and that the precession in this middle period was speedier than in the time from Al-Battani to us (879 - 1540 CE)". In other words Copernicus had realised that the precession phenomenon is NON-linear, which should hardly be a surprise today to those of us who have come to terms with the underlying chaotic character of the multi-body gravitational interactions which determine movement patterns in the Solar System.

It would seem that the decelleration of the rate of precession has continued slowly into our own time, and it has recently been suggested that what we may be looking at, rather than a circular precession, is an oscillatory movement. In that model, after some further elapse of time, the Spring Point would appear to remain stationary for some years, and then start moving back in the opposite direction, in a motion superficially akin to the apparent stasis and retrograde behaviour of planets as seen from the Earth. It is difficult to make projections with any great certainty, as one cannot be absolutely certain of the observational accuracy of the ancients, but Copernicus at least exhibits considerable confidence in his sources, and his conclusions have been proved right in the past, heretical though they may have been at the time.

The accompanying graph indicates a possible projection for the position of the Spring Equinox in future centuries on the premise that what we have been examining for the past millennia is merely a single hemi-cycle of a sinusoidal motion, which for a significant part of its course, and indeed from one individual year to another, may give the appearance of a linear motion.

As can be interpolated on this model, the movement of the Spring Point will continue to decellerate during the next 800 years, becoming almost stationary at approximately 3 degrees of Pisces, and then, slowly at first, begin to track back through Pisces returning to its present position in around 2000 years time, finally reaching the First Point of Aries, where it was in Ptolemy's time in about 5000 CE (or the Year 3100 of the Aeon of Horus, as the Thelemites might prefer). It should be clear from this projection that the Spring Point never actually gets into Aquarius, and it is on that basis that this paper has been titled "The Age of Aquarius is Cancelled". By the same reasoning, it must be said that it looks fairly unlikely that there was ever an Age of Taurus, and indeed there is no observational evidence that the Spring Point was ever within that sign.

All this may be a little upsetting to the burgeoning 'New Age' industry, and to those Christian harbingers of the Apocalypse who have latched onto the idea, because, in the absence of observational evidence, the only basis or authority on which the dawning of some New Age may be predicated is that of a praeter-natural "revelation" vouchsafed to Aleister Crowley. This, of course, would be dated to 9th April 1904 when Crowley received the automatic writing known as 'Liber AL' or 'The Book of the Law', which proclaims "Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat at the Equinox of the Gods ... Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating." It may of course be pure co-incidence that Wilbur and Orville Wright made humankind's first powered flight some four months earlier in a craft named 'Kitty Hawk' and at a location known as 'Kill Devil Hills', but it could certainly be said that a New Age of some sort was upon us from that point forward.

Crowley would probably derive some amusement from the recent (perhaps ongoing) series of New Age meetings being organised in St James Church in Piccadilly, a mere stone's throw from his one-time lodgings in Jermyn Street; one would be interested to know whether any debt of acknowledgement is ever paid to him in the course of those proceedings.

So, with the basis of an Age of Aquarius in disarray, with Crowley's 'Aeon of Horus' concept largely ignored, and with King Arthur's mineworkers contemplating amalgamation with the 'Transport & General', what sort of New Age are these dewy-eyed mystics actually left with?

"APOCALYPSE NOW"

There is no substantial tradition of 'Eschatology' (doctrine of Last Days) in Judaism dating back any further than the Book of Daniel, which was produced around 170 BC, contemporaneous with a period of persecution by the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Apocalyptic content therein, which provided some of the basic ideas for the Christian 'Book of Revelation', appears to have had its origin in eschatological teachings of the Zoroastrians with whom the Jews had come into contact during the Babylonian captivity.

The notion of a physical resurrection occurs in the passage: "many of those who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt". It is suggested that this idea was particularly directed towards the Israelite rebels, who were fighting a pre-Roman occupying force, to encourage martyrdom in battle. Since the more desirable of the two outcomes was exclusively reserved for those who remained true to the Law of Moses, this gave rise to a cadre of Zealots (those Zealous for the Law) whose motivations were similar to those of Islamic devotees seeking martyrdom, for example, in the armies of Ayatollah Khomeini.

It is suggested by Baigent and Leigh in their recent book 'The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception' that the early Christians were very much from within this militant tradition, and that their expectations of an apocalypse were imminent. This certainly is suggested by the reported final speech of Eleazar, the leader of the garrison at Masada, prior to the mass suicide of most of those Zealots defending that fortress in 74 CE. On evidence of Dead Sea Scroll material, the point is strongly made that, being "Zealous for the Law", these people would have regarded it as the utmost blasphemy for any human to have been accorded divine status, and many of them were quite prepared to die rather than offer sacrifice to the deified Roman Emperor.

Significant numbers of early Christian martyrs died for the same reason. What later became mainstream Christianity was more compliant though. The Dead Sea texts (particularly the 'Damascus Document' and the 'Habakkuk Commentary') refer to an adversary from within the early church community who is termed 'The Liar', and circumstantial evidence seems to point to this being Saint Paul, who upset the Jerusalem community by teaching that the Laws of Moses and the Covenant were things of the past, and in particular by proclaiming that Jesus was God. The original apocalyptic resurrection, of course, was only valid, as part of the Judaic Covenant, for those who strictly observed Mosaic Law; so the Pauline faction, in order to retain the emotional cosh of the Apocalypse, were obliged to redefine the eschatology. This was largely accomplished in the hotch-potch of writings known as the 'Revelation of Saint John', which are felt today to be an amalgam of the work of several authors at different times.

The traditions of the original Christians, those 'Zealous for the Law', were of course subsumed completely by the teachings of 'The Liar', whose heirarchical successors did everything they could to suppress any documentation recording the way in which the religion had been hi-jacked to serve the social control purposes of the declining Roman Empire. In 1947 some of the original stuff they missed was discovered in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea, and by all sorts of deviousness, according to Baigent and Leigh, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (aka the Holy Inquisition), have been doing everything they can to prevent this incriminating material from entering the public domain.

So it rather looks as if the conventional Christian apocalypse, with all its millenarian overtones and dire prognostications, was simply something concocted late in the 1st Century CE to frighten the kids, and quite unconnected with the original Christian tradition, which adhered rather more to the paradigm of Mad-Dog McGlinchey than that of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

All the same, should anyone happen to see four dark-clad spectral figures riding spooky horses and carrying scythes, it might be as well to communicate such a sighting to the Editor of 'Chaos International'. Who knows? They might be encouraged to put in six months work on 'Liber MMM', forget the 'New Age' crap, and fulfil a more constructive destiny as Chaos Magicians.