July 20: Seventh-Day Adventism

Ellen White and her husband James were followers of the prophet William Miller. Miller's series of predictions of the end of the world in 1843-4 were embraced by tens of thousands of Americans, and their failure came to be known as the "Great Disappointment".

White, however, remained convinced that Miller's predictions had actually been correct, albeit misinterpreted. The Temple of God - she explained in her ministry and in more than 100 books' worth of writings - had been spiritually opened on October 22, 1844, and the end of the world was yet approaching. Her influential views led to the creation of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in 1861.

The anniversary of White's death in 1915 was earlier this week, on July 16.

July 19: EOW fears of the 5th Century

A solar eclipse occurred in Europe on this date in 418 CE. Combined with a number of troubling events in the early fifth century, the event fueled general end-times speculation.

• Eight years prior, Rome had finally fallen to the Visigoths - and the city's next conqueror, the Vandal Genseric, would be identified as the Beast 666 by Victorinus of Pettau.
• In Spain and the near east, mystics claimed to be reincarnations of Elijah and John the Baptist (the "two witnesses" of Revelation [see July 14]).
• An earthquake in Palestine around the time was also interpreted as the shaking of the Earth after the breaking of the sixth seal in Revelation.
• No less an authority than Saint Augustine reported on apocalyptic predictions that were circulating for the year 500.
• Atilla the Hun's raids through Europe occurred in this period as well, drawing comparison to the armies of "Gog and Magog".

The once-widespread notion has been debunked that Europe was gripped by apocalyptic terror as the year 1000 approached. However, the year 500 does seem to have inspired a fair amount of hysteria.

July 18: Comets! Comets! Comets!

Between July 16 and 22, 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up in the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravitational field, making a series of spectacular splashdowns into the planet's viscous atmosphere. (The comet didn't break up entirely, however, and its main body continues to orbit Jupiter today.)

F.M. Riley, the Missouri pastor of a group named the Last Call - also author of 1994: The Year of Destiny - claimed the Shoemaker-Levy 9 incident proved his prophecy that Earth too was about to be struck by a comet. In the time since, as such an event has continued not to occur, Riley has shifted his claims away from Shoemaker-Levy 9 and attached them to the concept of a "Planet X", or Nemesis, or "Niburu". This is a hypothesized dark body circulating in the outer solar system which will soon enter a tighter orbit and wreak catastrophe on Earth.

These fringe ideas about Planet X have antecedents in theories circulated in the 1950s by the psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision attempted to explain several episodes from the Bible using astronomical hypotheses. For instance, a comet which Velikovsky claimed spontaneously sprang from Jupiter (later becoming the planet Venus) was considered the cause of the plagues of Exodus. Other comets and passing bodies caused the flood of Genesis, the fall of the tower of Babel, and the one-hour cessation of the Earth's rotation described in the book of Joshua.

Needless to say, these claims are absurd.

July 17: Salem Kirban

Salem Kirban died in 2010. A Washington-State evangelist, he was publisher of the "Rapture Alert Newsletter" and author of over 50 books, including the novel "666" (1970). He also wrote on the subject of bowel-cleansing as a means to health. In North Hollywood, Kirban also founded Second Coming, Inc.

(A review/summary of Kirban's book 666 in SF Weekly.)

July 16: Trinity

On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated in the "Trinity" test at White Sands, New Mexico. Speaking of the event later, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "I am now become death, destroyer of worlds."

July 15: the sack of Jerusalem

On this date in 1099, Crusaders from throughout Europe breached the walls of Jerusalem after a week-long siege and commenced a general slaughter of everyone in town. As many as 70,000 may have been killed, though modern scholars think the extent of the massacre was probably exaggerated by both Christians and Muslims in the centuries afterward.

The Crusade had begun more than four years before at the urging of pope Urban II (see November 27, forthcoming). Preparations to capture Jerusalem from the "Saracens" began with a wave of violent pogroms throughout France and Germany, and continued with the plundering of lands around Christian Constantinople by Crusaders hungry for supplies on their way to the Holy Land. (In the Fourth Crusade, a little over 100 years later, Constantinople would be sacked outright.)

Spiritual leaders of the pilgrims like Peter the Hermit and Peter Bartholomew believed their mission was intimately linked to the apocalypse. The conversion of Jews to Christianity, and the emplacement of a Christian Last World Emperor on the throne in Jerusalem were seen as preconditions of the rise of Antichrist and his defeat by Jesus.

July 14: The Two Witnesses of Revelation 11

Two 17th-century London men, John Bull and Richard Farnham, claimed to be the "witnesses" of the book of Revelation. After creating a public furor and spending time in Newgate Prison for heresy, Farnham died of plague in early 1642. His wife - a woman also bigamously attached to a sailor - claimed she had seen Farnham rise from the dead a few days afterward. (Presumably, Farnham quickly went back to being dead.) Bull would die ten days after that himself from unrelated causes.

Now, the "two witnesses" Bull and Farnham referred to are from Revelation 11. In that chapter, three and a half years of the Tribulation are described, in which the Beast 666 will be in power over the nations of Earth. Virtually the only opposition to the Beast will be a pair of "witnesses" - often identified by later writers as Elijah and Enoch returned to Earth - who will testify against the Beast, then be killed by him, then rise from death into heaven. (That all of this is supposed to happen in Jerusalem did not seem to trouble Bull and Farnham, or the many others in history who have claimed to be the two witnesses.)

July 13: Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th, though an unlucky day, seems to have little link with the end of the world in the popular imagination. But an Australian astrologer wants to dispel those fears anyway, saying that today's ominous date - combined with a conjunction tonight between Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter - do not spell out the apocalypse. Actually, these signs just add up to a promising day for asking somebody out on a date.

Astrologer rubbishes fears of apocalypse on friday the 13th

July 11: "The Bear" predicts an end before 1683

Nicholas Raimarus, or Reimers, or Reymers - or, as people seemed to prefer calling him, "the bear" - was a self-taught scholar and a rival of Tycho Brahe who served as royal astronomer to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. He died in October 1600, with a book he had written only appearing six years later in Nuremberg: "Chronological, Certain, and Irrefutable Proof, from the Holy Scripture and Fathers, that the World Will Perish and the Last Day Will Come Within 77 Years".

July 9: Geronimo Mendieta, and the concept of the "Last World Emperor"

Geronimo de Mendieta died on July 9, 1604. He was a Franciscan missionary, working in Mexico and South America, who believed that native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel and that King Philip II of Spain was the "Last World Emperor".

The concept of a Last World Emperor may be unfamiliar today, but it was a popular notion dating to the early Middle Ages (its first use has been traced to the 7th-century "Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius"). Although a normal human, the Last World Emperor was expected to reunite the Roman Empire and oppose the rising forces of Satan on Earth. These events would prepare for the appearance of the Antichrist and his defeat by the returned Jesus.

July 8: SciAm debunks

From Friday's Scientific American Online:

Scientific American: Neither the Maya nor world calnder ends December 21, 2012

I think the biggest takeaway - if we can already accept that the world was unlikely to end on 12/21 - is that the image usually bandied about as "the Mayan Calendar" is of an Aztec artifact made 400 years after the decline and disappearance of the Maya:

(From the article on the Aztec Stone of the Sun)

July 7: An Elizabethan Archbishop predicts a 16th century end

Edwin Sandys, an Anglican Prelate and the Archbishop of York under Queen Elizabeth, died this day in 1588. He had written: "The signs mentioned by Christ in the Gospel which should be the foreshewers of this terrible day, are almost all fulfilled."

July 6: Jan Hus and the Hussites

The Czech priest and early church reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415. Influenced by the radical views of John Wycliffe, Hus had openly suspected the papacy represented the power of Antichrist.

After Hus' execution, his growing number of followers in Bohemia were strengthened in their views. The Hussite Nicholas of Dresden, to take one example, specifically linked the papacy with Antichrist in his popular book "The Old Color and the New".

Between 1420 and 1431 the Church would launch a series of largely failed crusades against the Hussites. (Actually, the Hussites were defeated in the field - but the counterrevolutionary reaction against them "failed" in the sense that most Czechs remained divorced from the Church up until the larger Protestant reform movement swept Europe a century later. For more on the Hussite Wars, and the Hussite splinter group known as the Taborites, see May 30).

July 5: The Rupture of the Church of the SubGenius

The Church of the SubGenius claimed that on July 5, 1998, the rupture would occur. Aliens from Planet X, after concluding a deal with Bob Dobbs, would raise all ordained SubGenii into spaceships and then destroy the Earth *very* slowly. Meaning, perhaps, billions of years.

However, the Church of the SubGenius allowed that it may have read the date upside-down, and that these things will happen in 8661 C.E.

July 4: The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Julia Ward Howe's revised lyrics to the song "John Brown's Body", published in early 1862 as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", are a tissue of apocalyptic biblical references, drawing on multiple books from both the Hebrew and Christian testaments.

(List of Biblical References in The Battle Hymn of the Republic)

And it's always good to hear what Orson Welles has to say on any subject:

July 3: Muslim fundamentalists destroying Sufi sites in Mali

Just happened across this report from NPR. Muslim extremists in Mali, deliberately desecrating sites in Timbuktu sacred to the Sufi, have torn the door off of a sealed 15th century mosque. It was believed by the Sufi that this door would only be opened on the last day on Earth.

July 2: Jesus must stop Ireland from joining Britain

On July 2, 1800, a resolution of union between England and Ireland was passed in Parliament. M.P. Francis Dobbs, registering his extreme opposition to the measure, declared that Jesus Christ would return to Earth within the year to prevent it from being completed.

June 30: Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Caturday

Harriet Beecher Stowe died on this date in 1896. The "Uncle Tom's Cabin" author had been convinced she lived in the end times, with the apocalypse possibly due in 1858.


This has been Kitten Week at Today's Date in Apocalypse History, and though I've already shared seven days of kitten pictures or videos, today is Caturday and it seems fitting to include one more. This is on a more personal note too - a favorite old picture of Ava and Ivan, the sibling cats of "TDAH" friend Lauryl.

June 29: The Population Bomb

"The Population Bomb", by Stanford conservation biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, was published on this date in 1968. In it he claimed that with an exploding world population set to outpace any possible growth in agricultural output, Malthusian famines would sweep the world in the 70s and beyond.

The book began on a sharply unequivocal note. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."


And as Kitten Week draws toward a close here at Today's Date in Apocalypse History, here is a picture of a particularly excited-looking little kitten:

June 28: Irenaeus, and the Jehovah's Witnesses

Today there are two dates worth noting:

--In 202, Irenaeus died. His enormous, five-volume "Against Heresies" was a milestone in consolidating the doctrines of early Christianity. In it, Irenaeus expanded on the concept of the Antichrist: a figure mentioned just five times in the New Testament. All five references occur in the first two of the so-called letters of John ("so-called" because it is generally believed today that these two epistles were falsely attributed to the Gospel writer, and composed by later Christians). Building on the undetailed concept of the Antichrist in the Johannine letters as a mere "false teacher", Iranaeus described a much more robust Antichrist who would reign over Earth for three and a half years (a duration echoing the book of Daniel) to close the sixth millennial "day" of creation. After the fall of the Antichrist would begin the seventh "day" of Christ's return to Earth for 1000 years of rule.

--The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated today in Sarajevo in 1914, sparking the First World War. As the deadliest war of human history to that date, it was apocalyptic in its own right. But an independent fundamentalist prophet from Pittsburgh named Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916) had predicted that the apocalypse would unfold during 1914, and for at least the second half of 1914 his prophecy probably appeared to have some traction. Russell had formed a group called the Bible Students, and would form another named the the Watchtower Society (renamed, after Russell's death, as "The Jehovah's Witnesses"). By 1914, The Watchtower Society boasted around 30,000 members, despite the fact that Russell had already failed in predicting apocalypses for 1910 and 1874.

In addition to the three failed dates Russell predicted in his life, the Jehovah's Witnesses went on to add many others. Among these was 1994, which the group claimed would be the end of the world on the reasoning that Russell's final, failed prediction of 1914 had actually been correct - but only correct in marking the beginning of an 80-year generation whose culmination would produce the true end. When this date, too, fell on its face, the Jehovah's Witnesses declared publicly that they would no longer make specific announcements about the end of the world.


As Kitten Week continues here at Today's Date in Apocalypse History, here is a video of the kitten Maru (who appears not to be the Japanese viral-video star Maru, the kitten I was searching for).