#phantom time hypothesis

Well, no. 

The most immediate problem with Illig’s phantom era is a focus on western Europe to the point of overlooking the rest of the world.  What we tend to think of as “the dark ages” in western Europe were the height of the Byzantine Empire and the golden age of Islam.  Illig’s boldest claim is that Charlemagne was as  apocryphal as King Arthur, but good luck trying to make that stick with Muhammad or the entire Tang Dynasty.  The world was a big place even then, and it’d be hard to get every major power to conceal a 297-year discontinuity.

Illig’s smoking gun is the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582.  The Julian calendar, in use since 45 BCE, had fallen out of sync with the equinoxes, so the Gregorian calendar starts ten days ahead to adjust for the drift.  This ten-day shift only corrects up to 1,280 years of error, but since the equinoxes were back in sync, Illig figures there are around three centuries unaccounted for. 

The flaw in this logic, though, is the assumption that the Gregorian calendar was intended to adjust the dates of the equinox in line with 45 BCE or even 1 CE.  The actual goal was to keep the vernal equinox on March 21, in compliance with the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.  So only 1,257 years of error needed to be addressed, which rounded up to a ten-day correction.

[Above: 1066 appearance of Halley’s Comet recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry.  Sightings of this comet date back to at least 240 BCE, but no one knew it was the same object returning on a predictable cycle until 1705.]

Illig does have the right idea about astronomical observations being a point of reference for human chronological systems, but it turns out they don’t support a “phantom era.”  Medieval records of eclipses and comets are consistent in Europe, China, and America, and follow a cosmic schedule that wouldn’t cooperate with a human conspiracy.

The biggest problem, though, is the supposed motive for orchestrating this Big Lie.  Illig thinks Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII collaborated to rewrite history so the year 1000 CE would occur during their reigns.  First of all, Constantine died in 959, when Sylvester was 13 years old and Otto’s father was four.  Second, even if Otto or Sylvester had the means to add 297 to the current year, they weren’t in power long enough to push the old dating out of living memory.  Third, a rebellion drove Otto and Sylvester out of Rome in 1001, and they died shortly thereafter.  Those rebels would know what year it really was, so why would they go along with a revisionist history created to flatter their dead enemies with an event that would have already come and gone?

It might seem like being the reigning emperor (or pope) during the year 1000 would be a trivial vanity, because it’s just a big number with lots of zeroes in it.  But there’s more to it than that.  Early medieval Christians believed that the birth of Jesus marked the Sixth Age of the world, that each “world age” was a thousand years long, and that the next age would begin with the Second Coming.  So Illig thinks the great leaders of Christendom wanted to pad history with phantom time in order to hasten the End Times.  This is where I decided the articles I found that debunked Illig were going easy on the guy. 

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Illig is right.  The pope had the power and influence to implement the phantom era, and it was done so skillfully that the discontinuity with non-Christian timekeeping and astronomical events is imperceptible.  Even granting all that, it’s absurd to think the pope believed he could accelerate God’s timetable essentially by crossing out “703″ on his day planner and writing “1000.”  It’s like putting up an advent calendar in September and hoping Santa Claus is dumb enough to bring presents three months early.  And why all the secrecy?  If you expect this stunt to work, who are you hiding it from?