Five dates to note:
In 874, the 11th Shia Imam Hasan al-Askari died. The Imam's precocious five-year-old son, the Twelfth Imam al-Mahdi, led the funeral service for his father - and afterward vanished from Earth. The young Mahdi's anticipated return from his state of ‘Occultation’, joined by Jesus, will lead to the killing of the Jewish World-Deceiver (antichrist) al-Dajjal, and final removal of the Ka'aba from Mecca to its establishment in Jerusalem.
In 1000, the monk Rodulfus Glaber documented Y1K “millennial madness” in his "Historiarum" including famine, heresies, and natural disasters.
In 1901, Agnes Ozman was visited by the Holy Spirit in Kansas, receiving divine powers similar to those dispensed on the Biblical day of Pentecost. (Specifically, she was perhaps the first American evangelical Christian to receive the power of speaking in tongues.) Ozman's follower William Seymour took her end-times-focused ‘Pentecostalism’ to Los Angeles, where it grew as a movement.
In 2000, the Y2K bug proved largely to be a non-event. With computers expected to be unable to handle date information after the calendar rollover, fears were widespread that vital financial and communications software would crash, precipitating global catastrophe.
January 1 of the present year is also a fitting a time to note the current (holocene) extinction event, on a par of severity with half a dozen others in Earth's history such as the great Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous-Tertiary dyings. The present extinction rate is as much as 20% of all species per millennium, in contrast with a pre-human background rate of .1% per millennium.
