1998/05/09 (Saturday 9 May 1998)
2245-2330 (10.45pm)
The first in a new series of experiments in creative radio specially commissioned for BBC Radio 3.
Tonight the 900th anniversary celebrations of the birth of Hildegard of Bingen open with men of science and of God battling for her soul.
The Devil - fabricated by writer Richard Gaskell and impersonated by Bob Peck - fires off seven deadly letters to distract the visionary Abbess from her mission of harmony and heavenly revelation.
Meanwhile, another anniversary celebration heads calmly toward an iceberg of unfathomable proportions, as the Executive Director of Taskforce 2000, Robin Guenier and David Atkinson, MP explain.
"The firmament has a revolving orbit in imitation of the power of God which has neither beginning nor end - just as no one can see where the encircling wheel begins or ends. For the throne of God is his eternity in which he alone sits, and all the living sparks are rays of his splendour, just as the rays of the sun proceed from the sun itself." Hildegard of Bingen.
"When the infrastructure starts failing towards the end of 1999, and when the infrastructure fails catastrophically in January 2000 there will be nowhere else to go. I feel confident that, you know, if the food supply fails, that I can walk as far as the market garden areas. If you live in London, will you be able to walk as far as Kent? I don’t think so." Mark Roberts speaking from Auckland after the recent power failures in that city.
This year marks the 900th anniversary of the birth of one of the most extraordinary personalities of the Middle Ages: Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was born in 1098 - the tenth of ten children - and from the age of seven was consecrated to God and sent to live in the cell of an anchoress at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg in the Rhineland. But even before this she had begun to see visions - encounters with a non-material realm that would continue throughout her long life - and when these prophetic experiences were written down she soon attracted the attention of the rich and powerful in twelfth-century Christendom.
At the end of the Twentieth Century Hildegard's visions have been re-interpreted by feminists and New Agers on the one hand and explained away by psychoanalysists on the other; yet her writings and her music have the power to strike us undimmed by the intervening centuries.
We are now faced with another, more significant anniversary than that of her birth: the turning of our century into the new Millennium, and with it the consequences of a simple human error - committed by computer programmers at the birthing of the information age and perpetuated by short-term vision - that will cause software and hardware across the world to misinterpret the year "2000". The Y2K prophets of realism are beginning to attract global attention in the face of corporate denial and the "microwave mentality" of the individual while the manmade clock ticks inexorably towards its unmissable deadline of 12 midnight on January the 1st, 2000.
With Hazel Hoerder, Ronald Chrisley, Alan Walker and Millennium Bug-catchers Doug Morrison, Dave Walton, Chris Anderson and Mike Kusmirak.
Researched by Penelope Howell and Neil Varley.
Composed and produced by Antony Pitts.