May 31: Eliphas Levi

Eliphas Levi, writing under his birth name of Alphonse-Louis Constant, published "The Bible of Liberty" in France in 1848. In it he appraised the Book of Revelation through a triumphal lens of utopian socialism, seeing its predictions of a Second Coming and New Jerusalem as having a political dimension, as well as spiritual. The book was considered radical, and resulted in a brief prison sentence.

Later, under the Hebraicized moniker "Eliphas Levi", Constant went on to focus more on Kabbalah, the occult, and Satanism. He died this day in 1875.

May 30: The Taborites, and Joan of Arc

The Taborites were a 15th-century militant faction which split away from the Czech reformists known as Hussites (named for their original leader Jan Hus). The Taborites, influenced by the medieval apocalypticist Joachim of Fiore and convinced of the imminent return of Jesus, believed it righteous to kill those who opposed their theology. They also believed the entire world would be immolated in 1420, leaving five mountain redoubts spared in all of the earth. One of these would be their own fortification in Bohemia, which they had named "Tabor" (as they had also named themselves) after the location of Jesus' transfiguration.

The year 1420, however, turned out not to be the date of a world conflagration, but just the beginning of the "Hussite wars" in Czechoslovakia.

On May 30, 1434, the Taborite army was broken (13,000 of 18,000 men killed) by a Catholic league led by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund at the Battle of Lipany outside Prague. Within three years, the Taborites signed a treaty with Sigismund and ceased hostilities (although the fortified town of Tabor was captured 20 years following). Separately but around the same time, the Catholic wars with the broader Hussite movement were also brought to an end with the defeat of the Hussites.


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One opponent of the Hussites and Taborites happened to be Joan of Arc, who wrote them a threatening letter in 1430 claiming she would lead a Crusade into Czechoslovakia unless they rejoined the Church. But this would not come to pass, as Joan was first burned at the stake by the English on this date in 1431. Her victories for Charles VII of France in the Hundred Years' War with England were intended to lay the mere groundwork for a great Crusade into the east - in which not only the Hussites would be defeated, but also the Turks. Her ultimate hope was to recapture Jerusalem for the West and install Charles as the "King of Last Times" in preparation for the return of Jesus.

May 29: Elohim City and Timothy McVeigh

A militant white separatist named Robert Millar founded Elohim City, Oklahoma in 1972, eventually attracting a population of over 100. Millar predicted a sequence of disasters beginning with the invasion of the United States by Asian powers in 2000, followed by natural catastrophes and the return of Christ.

Questions were raised in the 90s when it came to light that Timothy McVeigh was in contact with a number of residents of Elohim City in the lead-up to the Murrah Federal Building attack. However, none of his contacts were named as co-conspirators.

Robert Millar died this day in 2001.

May 28: The Greys and Planet X

Informed by her contacts with Zeta Reticulans ("Grey" aliens), Nancy Lieder predicted Planet X would nearly miss earth on this date in 2003, causing a 5.9-day cessation in its rotation and global catastrophe. After the failure of the prediction, the event was moved ahead to 2012 and linked with the close of the Mayan long-count calendar. Michael Drosnin, author of "The Bible Code", also predicts a comet hit for that time period.

May 27: Müntzer and the beginnings of Anabaptism

Thomas Müntzer was an early associate of Martin Luther who broke away in favor of a new, more radical reform movement called Anabaptism. His increasingly violent following of a few hundred peasants led a nervous Duke of Saxony to summon Müntzer for an interview. Müntzer declared himself to the Duke as a new Daniel, in possession of direct revelations from God, and urged profound but unspecified changes in German society. Müntzer narrowly escaped over the town walls that night.

By the following year, 1525, Müntzer found himself at the head of an 8,000-man irregular army of disaffected, apocalypticially-minded peasants. On May 15 they were met outside the city of Frankenhausen by 2000 cavalrymen with cannon support. Rousing his troops for battle, Müntzer declared not just that God would assure their victory, but also that he would personally be able to catch enemy cannonballs in his cloak.

The 2000 cavalrymen killed 5000 of the peasants while sustaining only six casualties of their own. Müntzer caught no cannonballs in his cloak, and was instead found after the rout hiding in an attic nearby. During nearly two weeks of torture, he recanted his entire ministry, begged forgiveness, and accepted Catholic communion before being beheaded on May 27.

The apocalyptic Anabaptist movement, however, would continue bloodily on into the 1530s without Müntzer (see Jan. 22).

May 27: A visit to the Cloisters...

Illuminated manuscript of the Apocalypse of John, from Normandy circa 1330. At The Cloisters Museum, New York.

May 26: The Venerable Bede

The Venerable Bede died this day in the year 735. The Northumbrian monk and "Father of English History" wrote several works on chronology and time-reckoning, first popularizing "Anno Domini" as a method of giving dates (rather than in reference to the reign of a given emperor or king).

Bede's calculation that the world was created in 3952 BC led others to forecast its end for exactly 6000 years following. Bede also reported in his histories on popular beliefs that the second coming would occur around the year 700.

May 25: A pleasant end-of-the-world afternoon at Coney Island

Fifty members of a church called the Assembly of Yahweh gathered at Coney Island on May 25, 1981, bringing white robes and bongo drums to await the Rapture sometime between 3pm and sundown.

May 24: Savonarola

In late 15th-century Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola preached the Book of Revelation and the coming of a new Flood - as well as of a new Cyrus (messiah) who would save the Church. By railing against the exploitation of the poor and against clerical corruption, Savonarola ran afoul of the two most powerful families in Italy: the Medici and the Borgias.

The Medici, whose vast banking operations made them de facto rulers of Florence, were ousted from the city ahead of the invading French King Charles VIII. Savonarola supported and celebrated the overthrow, declaring Florence a "New Jerusalem" and organizing a political party and popular reforms. Claiming to have been taken up into heaven where he received a mandate for all this from the Virgin Mary, Savonarola sent patrollers into the streets to enforce morality laws, and organized "bonfires of the vanities" in which items of vice and luxury were publicly destroyed.

Refusing to cooperate with the Borgia Pope Alexander VI's alliance to eject the French from Italy, Savonarola was excommunicated. But he continued writing savage attacks against the Church, and intimated that he could perform miracles. A fellow monk issued a challenge to Savonarola to prove himself in a public trial by fire. The event, after several nervous delays during the appointed day, was eventually botched by rain, and Savonarola's popular power was so diminished that the Pope saw an opportunity to strike. Arrested and tortured, Savonarola confessed that his spiritual visions had all been fraudulent. For this, he and two fellow friars were hanged for heresy and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence on May 23, 1498.

May 23: Political radicals of the early 14th century

Fra Dolcino was executed without trial by the Holy See in 1307 by a brutal, prolonged process of dismemberment. A part of the "Spiritual Franciscan" movement, Dolcino was an early political radical of sorts who had created a peasant commune on Mount Rubello in Italy in 1300.

In response to attacks by the Church, as well as by Crusader forces, Dolcino's peasant movement had become murderously violent in something of the way of a modern guerrilla army. 15 years after Dolcino himself was killed, 30 of the remaining Dulcinians were finally rounded up by the Church and burned at the stake in Padua (1322).

Influenced - as were all the spiritual Franciscans - by the medieval apocalypticist Joachim of Fiore, Dolcino predicted around the time of his capture that the world would be overtaken by the Antichrist within three and a half years.

May 22: Use all your vacation time before the end of 2033

The Texan Methodist minister John Denton died today in 1841. Deciding that both of God's covenants with man must be of equal duration - the covenant with Abraham, and the one established by Jesus - Denton calculated that the end of the world will come in 2034.

May 21: Campanella, Laszlo Toth, Agee's first Rapture, and Harold Camping

Today's a big day for the apocalypse - I have four dates of note:

In 1639, Tommaso Campanella died. A Dominican astrologer and political radical who spent 27 years imprisoned in Naples, Campanella had predicted that the sun would collide into the Earth in 1603.

In 1972, a Hungarian geologist named Laszlo Toth came to realize that he was Jesus. This meant, of course, that he should travel to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and attack Michelangelo's Pieta with a hammer. Many marble chips from the statue, including Mary's nose, were snatched up by Basilica visitors and never recovered. Years later, Toth's legacy was assured when his name was appropriated by the comic writer Don Novello ("Father Guido Sarducci") as a pseudonym in writing three volumes of crank letters.

In 1999, Marilyn Agee of "Bible Prophecy Corner" announced that this day of Pentecost would be the date of the Rapture. She has announced at least one dozen other dates for it since. Her website currently posts April 16, 2016 as the date of the Second Coming.

And finally, in 2011, Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, CA declared the Rapture would occur on this day. It was to be followed by five months of Tribulation, with Judgment Day due for October 21. The 5/11/2011 prediction became the subject of an extensive national advertising campaign. (Earlier in his career, Camping had predicted the Rapture for 1994.) When no visible signs of the Rapture took place on May 21, Camping, "flabbergasted", called a press conference two days later to announce his conclusion that the Rapture had indeed happened, only "spiritually". The Tribulation was in effect - meaning it was now too late for unbelievers to become saved - and Judgment Day was still on track for October 21.

The picture is one I took about a year ago now on a New York subway car, a week after the 5/21 deadline had passed.


Here's a great article following up a year later on the lives of the 5/21/2011 prophecy's most dedicated adherents (thanks to Jim).

May 20: Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus died on this date in 1506. He believed his ultimate mission, by winning gold from the New World for Spain, was to finance a Crusade into Palestine to capture Jerusalem and rebuild Solomon's Temple there.

Columbus' obsession with end-times and eschatology led him to transcribe by hand a book of apocalyptic quotations he carried with him on his voyages, which he called The Book of Prophecies. He believed the end of the world would occur in 1656.

May 19: Saint-Simon, the man who shot himself six times in the head

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon lived a life of unexpected turns. Born an aristocrat, he risked his status to come to America and fight in the Revolutionary War, then amassed a fortune in the French Revolution - which he lost during the dissolution of a year-long marriage.

Saint-Simon's growing utopian-socialist views led him to announce that he was the Messiah, and to ask Lady Hester Stanhope - an English mystic and orientalist (see coming entry of June 23) to join him as a female Messianic counterpoint. Lady Stanhope declined, moving instead to the Holy Land to await the return of Jesus.

Saint-Simon's admirers included Napoleon III, and he exerted a wide influence over utopian movements of the 19th century. In 1823 he made a failed suicide attempt by shooting himself six times in the head, and merely blinding himself in one eye. His final work, "Nouveau Christianisme", was completed shortly before he died on this date in 1825.

May 18: Under the Volcano

Mount St. Helens erupted on this day in 1980. The event, killing 57 people, may not have been apocalyptic in its own right. But a supervolcanic eruption is certain to occur someday in the Cascadian range, at the Yellowstone Caldera, or at some point along the Pacific Ring of Fire. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption, for instance, killed over 35,000 people. But a genuinely vast supervolcanic eruption could have global effects, sending enough ash into the air to reduce worldwide sun exposure for years and drive severe famine or waves of extinction.

May 17: Internet doomsday!

Only 53 days left...

May 16: "Do not try this at home."

Moses Maimonides wrote of a man known as the Yemenite Messiah, arrested in Fez (contemporary Morocco) in 1172 during a period when Arabs in the region had begun compelling Jewish conversions to Islam. The Yemenite Messiah preached division of wealth with the poor - and despite the name that became attached to him personally, he taught that this sort of piety would hasten the coming of the true Messiah.

When his Arab captors asked for proof of the divinity of his cause, the Yemenite Messiah suggested that they behead him so he could come back to life. So they beheaded him. He did not come back to life.

May 14: Formation of Israel - Monte Judah's Tribulation Timeline

On May 14, 1948, the Jewish People's Council declared the formation of the state of Israel. The original failure of New Testament prophecy - "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." (Matthew 16:28) - has been interpreted by many contemporary Christian evangelicals to mean the Second Coming will, for some reason, occur instead within a 40-year generation of Jerusalem's reclamation by the Jews.

In 1978, Colin Deal published Will Christ Return by 1988? 101 Reasons Why. Like Hal Lindsey and others, Deal principally argued that Jesus would return to earth in 1988 because Israel had been formed 40 years before.

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Monte Judah is a Baptist preacher who has embraced kabbalah, declared himself a Hebrew, and formed Lion and Lamb ministries in Oklahoma. He predicted that the world would end on May 14, 1997. Though this prophecy failed, Judah maintains a Tribulation Timeline on his website which is no longer attached to a specific date.

May 13: Pentecostalist predictions

In 1916, the Assemblies of God Council, embracing hundreds of Pentecostal ministries from across the United States, was just two years old. In its May 13 Weekly Evangel, the council claimed the advent of the Great War had marked the beginning of the End Times, with Armageddon to occur in 1935. The council would go on to make a number of similar failed predictions.

May 12: a late Messianic movement in Babylon - David Alroy

David Alroy was a Messianic Jew in Seljuk-ruled Babylon during the middle 1100s. He proposed an enormous one-two strategy of leading a Jewish uprising against Muslim rule in Mesopotamia, then joining forces with Christian Crusaders to liberate Jerusalem.

As trouble began to mount, David - who had reportedly performed a number of magical feats - proclaimed angels would fly him and his Baghdadi followers to Jerusalem, but the prediction failed. Instead by one account, David was killed by his own father-in law, who had been paid off to do so - sending on the decapitated head to the Seljuk Sultan in tribute. Jews throughout the region were forced to pay severe indemnities for the uprising.


Alroy's story was turned into a novel by Benjamin Disraeli in 1833. Sounds interesting! I'm going to try giving it a read.