Millennial Madness : CENTURY’S END: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siecle From the 990s Through the 1990s <i> by Hillel Schwartz (Doubleday: $22.95; 397 pp.) </i>

Where will you be on that fateful midnight when the bells ring in the year 2000?

If you don’t want to be left out (with the other 6 billion nobodies who will by then be occupying the planet), you’d better make your plans now. If yours is an apocalyptic cast of mind, you may wish to book a seat on Richard Kieninger’s fleet of blimps, now being assembled at Adelphi, Tex. From your blimp window, you will have a comfortable view of the calamities erupting below--quakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and similar consequences of the “catastrophic shift in the Earth’s axis” that Kieninger expects in due course.

If, on the other hand, you think that Cosmic Consciousness is just around the corner, you may prefer to gather at one of several “planetary light-body grid nodes” (Mayan ruins are especially good for this) with like-minded “dancing suns,” all celebrating the Great Harmonic Convergence predicted by art historian Jose Arguelles.

Of course, as Hillel Schwartz points out in his new book, there are sundry alternatives. Of these, my favorite is the plan of the Millennium Society, a bunch of Republican Yalies (Class of ‘79) who have reserved the Great Pyramid of Cheops for a smasheroo New Year’s Eve party of 3,000 hand-picked optimists. These optimists, who will include a complement of the world’s “most inspiring” people (Deng Xiaoping, Bruce Springsteen, John Paul II, George Burns, Steven Spielberg and Cory Aquino have all been invited), are to set sail at the Winter Solstice 1999 from New York Harbor aboard (you guessed it) the Queen Elizabeth II. But . . . if the ship doesn’t sink like the Titanic (that earlier barque of cheery conservatives), those on board will surely drown in their own fatuousness.

What, exactly, will they be celebrating?

To answer this question, we must turn to the beginning of Schwartz’s book, where he gives us the following picture of the current millennium’s inception--the eve of the year 1000:

“Once upon a time,” he begins, “the people of Europe were stricken with panic. The end of the millennium, so it is thought, had long been anticipated by prophets, prelates, monks, mathematicians, soothsayers, and surveyors of stars. None of them had anything good to say about Anno Domini 1000, for the world that year was to be drawn to its catastrophic conclusion . . . Debts were forgiven, convicts released from prison, men and women absolved of their infidelities.”

“It is impossible at this late day,” Schwartz quotes a 19th-Century historian, “to imagine the terror that reigned throughout Christendom as the thousandth year from the birth of Christ approached.”

After pages of such detail, Schwartz gives us the real dope. “None of this is true,” he announces without warning (unless you heeded the warning of his first four words). Apocalyptic expectations for the year 1000 cannot be traced to contemporary records. Indeed, the turn of the millennium came and went pretty much without comment in a world that could neither read nor count. The legend of universal panic must be laid to the quills of some fanciful clergymen of the late 16th Century, anachronistically reading their own fears into an earlier age.

This rhetorical bouleversement of Schwartz’s--setting us up, then knocking us down--becomes his method throughout. And, if as a method it is fraught with peril, it also makes for a book full of entertainment. For “Century’s End” is replete with divertissements --the “fun facts” of the new genre of infotainment.

Dionysius Exiguus (whose name Schwartz translates snappily as “Denis the Diminutive”), a 6th-Century Roman canonist, was the first to calculate our era from the birth of Jesus, which calculation he superimposed on the existing 12-month, 365-day Roman calendar, reformed long before by Julius Caesar. (Unfortunately, the little canonist was almost certainly off by a few years.)

The term AD (Anno Domini, In the Year of the Lord) was first used in AD 664 in the documents of the watershed Synod of Whitby, at which the Celto-British church bowed to the greater apostolic authority of the Roman church. Long after Europe had accepted this dating of its calendar, regional custom continued to dictate when the New Year began--in Rome on Christmas Eve, in Florence on March 25th (the celebration of Jesus’ conception), in Byzantium as late as Sept. 24th. The Iberians, at length, won out with their celebration of Jesus’ first shedding of blood at his circumcision (Jan. 1).

By 1582, the calendar was so out of whack (because of the earlier--and flawed--Julian reform) that Pope Gregory XIII found it necessary to suppress 10 days, proclaiming that Oct. 4 would be succeeded immediately by Oct. 15 that year. Thus, there came into existence the designation N.S. (New Style) for Gregory’s correction. Protestant countries, however, refused to accept this papist innovation and trudged resolutely on in their O.S. (Old Style), England holding out until 1752. However admirable their resistance, the two systems of dating, occurring side by side, are a chronic grief to students of history.

In addition to its eleemosynary richness of fact, “Century’s End” provides its readers with a fascinating focus for their own meditations on endings and beginnings and on the variety of human responses to symbolic milestones. Because of their colorful mien, Schwartz cannot help but concentrate on the extremists, whether apocalyptic or millennarian.

In truth, there is little of either in evidence before the end of the 13th Century. But from then on, as literacy and leisure rise, each century’s end seems to swarm with designer prophecies. As one reads through the evidence, it becomes ever clearer that the prophets are awfully simple folk, men and women dazzled by the compelling autonomy of numbers. None is simpler than our beloved ex-President Ronald Reagan, whom Schwartz quotes as telling an official of the American-Israel PAC: “You know (all Reagan sentences begin with “you know” or “well”) I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if--if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophecies lately but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”

Uh, which ancient prophets do you have in mind, Mr. President? Could you name one? (Armageddon appears nowhere in the Old Testament and but once in the New--in the Book of Revelation, which, if Mr. Reagan were to attempt to read it through, would give him a terrible headache.)

To Reagan’s embrace of Armageddon and to all similar calculations, one may oppose the question of Paul Harvey, Renaissance physician: “But is it credible that the extreme dismal state of the world, or any utter casualty of so mighty consequence, should in very deed depend upon the fickle state of numbers and figures?”

The answer is obvious. Our calendrical numbers, whether Jewish or Roman or Islamic or Christian, are merely convenient designations, arbitrary as applied to the years of our history, no more meaningful than the number of drawers in a filing cabinet. They can speak to us neither of coming retribution nor coming rapture. They cannot speak at all.

But Schwartz answers Harvey thus: “The answer is yes, it is credible. Or rather, yes, it had become credible, thanks to astromusicians, almaniacs, pansophisticates, Christorians, mathemagicians, kabbalanthropists, a calendaring pope, and a hybrid host of other centuriators.” Thanks, in other words, to a great gaggle (except for that “calendaring pope,” who was only trying to put things in order) of mystifiers and obscurantists.

Here I part company with Schwartz, who has been such a genial guide. The problem with this book is that it is a tourist’s view of history, in which we check in and out quickly, and all centuries become, in the end, more or less the same--same terrific ambience, same great local characters.

Schwartz gets important things wrong. He never seems to notice the profound difference between oral and literate civilization, perhaps the central dividing line in human perceptions and measurement of time.