Millennium

This myth remained unassailably vital for a millennium — until the first signs of a further transformation of consciousness began appearing in the eleventh century. From then on, the symptoms of unrest and doubt increased, until at the end of the second millennium the outlines of a universal catastrophe became apparent

Jung argues that the Christian God-image sustained collective consciousness for exactly one millennium before its internal instability began generating symptoms of dissolution that crescendo at the close of the second millennium.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis

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a millennium is an exceedingly short period of time for so fundamental a change as from bicamerality to consciousness. We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality.

Jaynes reframes the millennium as a unit of psychic-evolutionary time, insisting that the bicameral-to-conscious transition remains unfinished even at the close of the second millennium.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis

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We, we fragile human species at the end of the second millennium A.D., we must become our own authorization. And here at the end of the second millennium and about to enter the third, we are surrounded with this problem. It is one that the new millennium will be working out

Jaynes identifies the millennial transition as the existential crisis of self-authorization: stripped of divine voices, humanity at the millennium’s turn must generate its own grounding.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis

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You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces.

Jung uses the Revelation motif of Satan’s thousand-year binding to argue that the psyche’s repressed shadow returns with catastrophic force once the millennial suppression lapses.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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every thousand years the Christians think the world is going to end again. In the year 1000 there were people in France who gave their property to the church… Now, of course, we’re coming to the year 2000… this is a regular cycle in our culture — every thousand years, we have disillusion meditations.

Campbell identifies the millennium as a recurrent mythic cycle of apocalyptic expectation embedded in Western religious psychology, not a singular historical event.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990thesis

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Both documents fall within the critical epoch that opened with the second millennium of the Christian era, about which I shall have more to say in due course.

In Aion Jung marks the opening of the second Christian millennium as an astrologically and psychologically ‘critical epoch’ whose significance he links to the Piscean archetype and the problem of the shadow.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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The final catastrophe will put an end to history, hence will restore man to eternity and beatitude… fire renews the world; through it will come the restoration of ‘a new world, free from old age, death, decomposition and corruption, living eternally’

Eliade contextualises millennial eschatology within the archaic myth of periodic world-conflagration and renewal, showing its Iranian roots and consolatory psychological function.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting

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As ACA moves into the new millennium and we attempt to integrate into our program the vast amount of personal experiences, clinical research and written material about Adult Children and dysfunctional families

The ACA text invokes the new millennium as a temporal marker for programmatic integration and conceptual consolidation, deploying the term rhetorically rather than analytically.

INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside

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