by Thomas Hockey

I admit being one of those who lie awake worrying at night. Lately, it's been regarding the millenium. No, not the Millenium Bug. I imagine that 01-01-00 will come and go, with people's wallets a little thicker with cash and their pantries a little fuller with canned goods, but nothing much else. Y2K is viewed as a technological "threat," not a spiritual one.

No, I'm concerned about the millenium sky. Computers don't raise passions like the stars do. It is an ironic cosmic coincidence, the conjunction of three bright planets in 2000, that I fear will bring out the worst in humankind's fears--and perhaps open Heaven's Gate once again.

It has happened before. Harvard's Owen Gingerich reminds us that Nicholas Copernicus watched Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars approach each other in 1503-04. Doing so, he may have wondered whether there might be a better way to model the Solar System than the Earth-centered view of the ancients. But others looked for a catastrophic reenactment of Noah's Flood.

None other than the founding father of modern planetary astronomy, Johannes Kepler, alerted Europe to the "Grand Conjunction" of 1604. (To make ends meet, Kepler cast horoscopes on the side.) Slow-moving Jupiter and Saturn, whose conjunctions were least frequent of all the known planets, would finally meet as they do every twenty years or so. Astrologers divide up their zodiac into four groups of three, earth, wind, water, and fire, following Aristotle (not the 70s funk group). This time, the two outer planets would conspire, joined for a time by menacingly red Mars, in the "fiery trigon." On the last occasion this had happened, Charlemagne was still establishing the Holy Roman Empire.

Was the end of the world at hand? At the very least, it might be the end--Northern Europeans hoped--for that part of the world known as the Turkish Empire. Neither event materialized; nevertheless conjunctions have inspired apocalyptic visions many times since.

Conjunction phobia predates Kepler. Astrologer Johannes Lichtenberger warned of them in a fifteenth-century tract, which had the celebrity endorsement of Martin Luther.

What Kepler did was to equate a Grand (a. k. a. Great) Conjunction with the Star of Bethlehem. If the three planets shown as one when Christ first appeared, might they not herald his long-awaited comeback? Apparently to underscore the point, the nativity Grand Conjunction took place in the constellation Pisces. Get it?

Except that it probably didn't. Not at the original Christmas, anyway. Many scholars agree that the Grand Conjunction of 7-6 (the most likely candidate) was too early to signal the imminent birth of Jesus. And to be fair to the Gospels, a routine reading of Saint Matthew implies a miraculous Star of Wonder, not as pedestrian a natural event as a planetary conjunction.

Furthermore, a conjunction does not mean that the planets need merge to create the effect of a single "star." Jupiter and Saturn can appear in the same direction, but one above the other. When the upcoming conjunction occurs in mid-April, 2000, Mars will form a triangle with this pair at dusk. (Other planets will happen to be in the same celestial neighborhood, too--especially in May's evening sky--but not all will be visible to the naked eye.)

More precisely, both Kepler's and Y2K's Grand Conjunctions should go by the more casual name of a massing, which is simply three or more planets in the same part of the sky. People remember massings: The longest-playing Chinese calendar began with a massing.

The end of the world (ours) was predicted for 1962, when the five naked-eye planets massed. The Moon was tossed in for good measure. All the worlds involved survived.

Earth managed to carry on until 1982, when the "Jupiter Effect"--not a true conjunction at all--was supposed to expend its wrath on (in particular) California. Sales of the book, The Jupiter Effect, fell off markedly when California failed to fall off into the ocean, once again. (The extra gravitational repercussion of all the planets lined up would be barely enough to display on a handheld calculator.)

Yet the linkage of a Grand Conjunction, the numerologically significant Year 2000, and the Second Coming has proven irresistible to the eschatologically impaired. Once more the destination is the "fiery trigon," and Web Pages announce that disaster (from the Greek word for "bad star") is at hand: "Governmental collapse." "Expect a geological, psychological, and evolutionary surge." "Wide-spreading melancholy, depression, and mass-suicides." And it is all still more than a year away!

The modern response to such craziness is to ask, "Who do we blame?" Regrettably, the finger seems to point to Belgian Jean Meeus, who pioneered the use of the personal computer for the calculation of astronomical events. He thought he was just doing a favor for amateur astronomers. However, Meeus also made it possible for any would-be doomsayer to find a portent of choice over lunch. One of these is apparently Richard Noone, whose 1997 conjunction-alluding book, 5/5/2000 Ice: the Ultimate Disaster, is as nonsensical as its title.

Grand Conjunctions have transpired for eons, not merely millennia. They come. They're pretty. They go away. They don't necessarily inspire the purchase of automatic weapons. My hope is that knowledge of conjunctions' historic al regularity, predictability, and seeming impotence will lessen the hold this specific event will have on those looking toward an astral sign for mischief.

After all, the first "face of Jesus" to appear on a pizza was wondrous. The second must have been interesting. The third was consumed and forgotten. This is the best advice I have on the 2000 Grand Conjunction. Having said so, it is time to turn the pillow, and turn my anxieties to the rare Transit of Venus in 2004 . . .