The end of the millennium was approaching and when a plague of invisible fire broke out, cutting off limbs from the body and consuming many in a single night, the sufferers thronged to the churches and invoked the help of the Saints. This fire permeated the wretched people with such cold that no means sufficed to warm them. The order of nature had been overturned. Hell seemed to have broken forth out of the depths of the earth, consuming men in an invisible fire whose nature resembled that of ice. And people did not notice that together with that deadly "holy fire" epidemics of psychosis also came.