As I was surfing the 'net, I stumbled upon a website dedicated to The End of the World as We Know It, based upon the Mayan calendar's ending on December 21, 2012.

Yawn.

Then I read a rebuttal by an archaeologist, who pointed out that for the Mayans (and for many other peoples), time was cyclical. That time, for them, wouldn't end in 2012, but that this era (I forget the name for it) would end this year on the solstice or thereabouts.

The part that caught my interest was the archaeologist's reference to a cycle of 394 years.

Hmmmm...said I to myself. If I subtract 394 from 2012, I get 1618. Was 1618 the end of the world?

The 30 Years' War started in 1618; originally, religious beliefs were at the core. Wars of religion turned into bloody contests for land and wealth, fought by mercenaries with no personal stake in the outcome.

It was devastating. All of Europe became embroiled. In some places the population was reduced 35-75%, caused by war and pestilence and disease (plague, typhus, dysentery), by war's end. Villages, particularly, were put to sword and flame.

One long-term consequence of the war was virtually the end of the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire as has been said) and the establishment of the concepts of the sovereign nation state and national armies, a plague still upon us today, preventing us from seeing the larger brotherhood of man and humanity as a whole.

Sounds like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, doesn't it? War, famine, plague, death. For those people, at that time, it must have seemed indeed like the End of the World.

Maybe those Mayan priests were not so far off, after all.