December 4: Current Apocalyptic Fears in Russia

My own impression is that Mayan-apocalypse fears are quite tepid as the 21st approaches. But things may not be the same in Russia, according to this Times article from the weekend.

December 3: Fundamentalists Anonymous

According to Eugen Weber's book "Apocalypses", "a Wall Street Broker and a Wall Street lawyer who was also a graduate of Yale Divinity School, set up Fundamentalists Anonymous, which also offered a hotline: 212-696-0240. Within two years of its foundation in 1985, the organization's membership was 30,000 and growing." (p. 209)

Despite the twelve-step connotation of its name, "Fundamentalists Anonymous" appears to have believed fundamentalism is a good thing (whereas another group by the same name works today to help members "overcome the baggage of a dysfunctional religious experience.")

December 2: Richard Eby, The Hopi, and Napoleon

In 2002, Dr. Richard Eby died. In a 1972 near-death experience, Jesus informed this physician (later minister) that Christ's second coming would occur within Eby's lifetime. Eby's followers now assume this means Jesus is a child born between 1972 and 2002.

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Frank Waters' book "The Hopi" was published today in 1963. According to Waters, 8/9ths of the preconditions of the apocalypse prophesied by this southwestern native American tribe, had been fulfilled by the time he wrote.

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In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor before Pope Pius VII in a ceremony at Notre Dame. Napoleon was widely charged as being the Antichrist, particularly after his 1799 campaign in Palestine and 1807 convening of a council of Rabbis - moves viewed by Christian apocalypticists as precipitations of the end times. Johann Friederich Jung-Stilling (a German mystic whose prognostication that the Beast would rise from the sea failed in 1796) declared in 1805 that "N'Apollione" was the name of the Antichrist. More significantly, in May 1812 the Russian Church explicitly declared that Napoleon was in fact the Antichrist.

December 1: The Spanish Flu Pandemic

Arising suddenly in January 1918, the Spanish Flu pandemic ground to a halt and disappeared by this month in 1920. While not caused by the First World War per se, the disease was unusually vicious in turning a healthy immune system against itself, such that a high spike of deaths occurred in the very fittest individuals in their 20s. The cramped wartime conditions of young men in battle proved to be an excellent medium for the virus.

With as many as 50 million dead in nearly all parts of the world - 3% of the human population at the time - the enormity of the influenza pandemic was masked by the Great War, despite being twice as deadly.

November 29 : The American Nazi Party

The Socialist National Aryan People's Party - one group of several claiming to the title of being the American Nazi Party - forecast Armageddon for 1985. Another group, Aryan Nations, claimed that the Rodney King riots of April/May 1992 were the beginning of an apocalyptic race war.

November 28: Unlike Every Other Century, the Events of the 20th Century Prove That The Antichrist Has Arrived

The Antichrist: Has He Launched His Final Campaign Against the Savior? appeared in 1981 from New York Jesuit priest Vincent Miceli (d. 1991). Predicting the rise of a depraved yet totalitarian "Moloch State", Miceli said contemporary signs of Satan's final attack included World War II, Darwinism, the state of Israel, feminism, Communism, the Vatican II reforms, and rock 'n' roll music. Miceli's other books included The Gods of Atheism and Women Priests and Other Fantasies.

November 27: Apocalyptic Fears are Absurd Unless They Sell Magazines

To clear any confusion on the subject, Wired magazine has run two feature stories on apocalyptic fears this year. In August was a list of reasons why these fears are baseless. Back in January, they ran a list of reasons why they could be justified.

1: January - Pro

2: August - Con

November 26: Cashless Transactions are the Mark of the Beast

In 1981 Mary Stewart Relfe published "The New Money System: The 666 System is Here". Like in Willard Cantelon's earlier "The Day the Dollar Dies", and in countless conspiracy theories since, Relfe identified cashless transactions and credit cards with the Mark of the Beast. In a more novel vein, she pointed out that if you add the (then-new) zip-plus-four codes to a person's nine-digit social security number, you get a unique identifier for all Americans in 18 digits - a triad of sixes, suggesting 666.

(Never mind that Social Security numbers are already unique among American citizens, making the addition of the zip code superfluous.)

November 25: Take This Job and Shove It

The True Light Church of Christ, a 450-member congregation in the Carolinas, had held for well over a decade that the world would end in 1970. When the year arrived, many of the congregants quit their jobs in anticipation of Jesus' return.

The Sumter Daily Item - January 16, 1975

November 24: "A Thief in the Night" (1972)

Filming on a shoestring budget in Iowa, Donald W. Thompson (writer/director) and Russell S. Doughton (writer/producer) released "A Thief in the Night" in 1972. The independent film, screened mainly at churches, was the first to explore the end-times scenario of the Rapture and Tribulation. The filmmakers estimate it has been viewed by 300 million people.

Three sequels were produced between 1978 and 1983, and Doughton went on to produce at least another dozen evangelical films. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins cited the "Thief" films as a direct inspiration for their "Left Behind" series, appearing 23 years later.





In fact, the title "Left Behind" draws on this 1969 song, which appeared in "Thief", and became an early Christian-music hit.

November 22: C.S. Lewis

November 22 saw the passing of C.S. Lewis in 1963. The "Narnia" author also wrote an essay called "The World's Last Night". In it he concedes Matthew 24:34 ("Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until these things [the apocalypse] take place") as "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible." Yet Lewis affirms Jesus' personal lack of knowledge of the end of the world as a sort of proof of his historical authenticity, and affirms the doctrine of a mysterious and unpredictable Second Coming as "the medicine our condition especially needs."

November 21: One Month Left

One month from today, the world will end as the terminal date is reached of the Mayan Long-Count Calendar.

Innumerable batty explanations have been forwarded as to why a cataclysm is supposed to occur on that date, but the main body of speculation seems to be that the sun is going to be “aligned with the galactic center”, which “only happens every 26,000 years”. The two parts of this claim are actually unrelated.

As Earth rotates annually around the sun, the sun always appears, from Earth, to be situated against a different part of the backdrop of the Milky Way. December 21 is when the sun will appear to line up with the black hole in the center of our galaxy, an arrangement with no astronomical or gravitational significance. In fact, the sun’s closest alignment with the galactic center actually falls a couple of days before 12/21 - though apparently that's still close enough for new-age metaphysicians to call it a match with the Mayan date.

Making things worse, the “26,000-year” reference is a little off in its dating as well. The Earth’s axis constantly precesses, or wobbles like a gyroscope, completing a circuit each 26,000 years. If you imagine a perpendicular line going outward from the center of the Earth’s axis, that line spends most of its time slowly tilting up or down, but sometime in 1998 it crossed through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. New-age theoreticians seem to feel that this date too, 14 years ago, was recent enough to play into the significance of the 12/21/12 “alignment”. But however neatly or poorly these parameters line up, what has yet to be offered is any mechanism by which a cataclysm or “spiritual event” would be triggered by any of it.


NASA - 2012 - "Shadow of the Dark Rift"

November 20: Time Enough at Last

Today in 1959, "Time Enough at Last" aired, the eighth episode in the first season of The Twilight Zone. Written by Rod Serling, the program starred Burgess Meredith in a memorable apocalyptic scenario.

November 18: Jonestown

Today in 1978, 913 followers of preacher Jim Jones committed enforced, compulsory suicide on his orders. He was paranoid that his movement - having departed the San Francisco Bay Area to seek safety from Armageddon in Guyana - was under threat from a visiting US congressman, whom his followers had just murdered.

November 17: The Franks, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Utopian Socialists

Gregory of Tours died on this date in 594. In his "History of the Franks", Gregory stated that a heretic with powers of prophecy who was executed in Bourges was an Antichrist. Furthermore, the world was set to end 208 years after his writing - meaning sometime between 799 and 806 CE.

On November 17, 1624, Jakob Boehme died. He was a theosophist who claimed both Emperor Rudolph II, and Rudolph's succeeding brother Matthias, were the Antichrist.

And on November 17, 1858, Robert Owen died, a utopian socialist and founder of the city of New Harmony, Indiana. Like Charles Fourier and other prominent utopians, Owen preached an earthly Millennium, and founded separatist communities to help cultivate it. Fourier, for instance, called himself the Messiah of Reason.

November 16: The Nutty MP, and the Nuttier Professor

The French-Canadian separatist and messiah Louis Riel was executed today in 1885. Serving briefly as a Canadian MP, Riel held that mankind was at the dawn of a Third Age, which would begin as soon as papal authority was transferred to him.

Louis Riel's life was dramatized in an exellent graphic novel of that same title by Canadian comics artist Chester Brown.

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Today is also the birthdate of American shaman, professor, and psychonaut Terence McKenna in 1946. In his writings and lectures McKenna managed to associate hallucinogenic drugs with nearly all aspects of experience, even identifying them as the primary driver of human evolution. McKenna’s “novelty theory” held that the universe is a “teleological attractor” which compounds Jungian-type synchronicities in an escalating cascade leading to a singularity. With this theory, McKenna was arguably the first modern popularizer of the 12/21/12 close of the Mayan long-count calendar, claiming that this date was an on-track prediction of his psychedelic eschaton.

(Later, the 2012 date was made even better-known in the final episode of The X Files as the scheduled coming of an alien civilization to Earth. –And while we’re at it, in a very different cult-television-show connection, McKenna himself was the inspiration for the Twin Peaks character Dr. Jacoby.)

McKenna died tragically of brain cancer in 2000.

November 15: Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Kali-Yuga, Hare Krishna

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded on this date in 1966. The Hare Krishnas officially hold that this is the “Kali-Yuga”, or final stage of earthly history according to Hinduism.

November 14: Justinian

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian – a towering figure of the sixth century, who briefly reestablished the collapsed Roman Empire in the west, and laid down the defining principles of European law – died on this date in 565. In Procopius’ notorious The Secret History, filled with details of gossip and intrigues in Justinian’s court, the Emperor was implied to be an Antichrist, born of a human woman impregnated by a demon.

November 13: Y1K, Death of the Red Death, and "2012"

Three quick dates for November 13:

In the year 1004, the Abbo of Fleury died. The monk had written of doomsday predictions he heard preached from the pulpit at Notre Dame de Paris. However, Fleury’s report is one of the very few known instances of apocalyptic fear as Y1K approached. (That is to say, a popular conception that end-of-the-world fears were rampant around the year 1000, appears to be unfounded.)

In 1900, around 100 members of a Russian cult called the Brothers and Sisters of the Red Death committed mass suicide in the belief that the world was about to end.

And, most disturbingly of all, Roland Emmerich’s film 2012 was released to theaters on this date in 2009.

November 12: Charles Manson, and the Jehovah's Witnesses Give up the Ghost

Charles Manson was born on this date in 1934. As the leader of a small cult of personality in southern California in the late 1960s, Manson became an American icon of psychopathy during a series of unapologetic courtroom antics while on trial with his followers for two shocking mass-murders. (Adding to his notoriety, Manson's acolyte Squeaky Fromme was later jailed for attempting, ineptly, to assassinate President Gerald Ford for no particular reason in 1975.)

Manson had taught his Family about a coming "Helter-Skelter" (misspelled, in blood, as "Healter-Skelter" by Tex Watkins on the refrigerator of victim Sharon Tate). This apocalyptic race war, named after a Beatles song, was supposed to be triggered by an album Manson would record with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, which would lure sexually-liberated white women away from the Haight-Ashbury and down to Death Valley where Manson held court. The exodus of white women would so infuriate the black men who had been having sex with them, that a worldwide race war would erupt whose only white survivors would be the Manson Family, hiding in an underground city beneath Death Valley whose existence Manson postulated. Presuming the inferiority of nonwhites, Manson claimed his Family could go on to rule the world after other white people had been destroyed.

When this album of Manson's began failing to work out (he had actually done a small amount of recording with Dennis Wilson), he ordered the Tate and LaBianca murders on August 8 and 9, 1969. Attempting crudely to make the murders look like the work of blacks, Manson believed these atrocities would ignite his hoped-for race war. Manson and his followers were arrested 14 weeks later, on December 1.

As a note, Manson generally denies he ever claimed any of the above, insisting his race-war theories were invented by Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi. However, Manson's rambling diatribes (for instance with talk-show host Tom Snyder) are so lacking in an alternate explanation of the Family's activities - not to mention the fact that Manson is cheekily evasive and pseudo-wise to a point of outright incoherency - that if anything, his antics lend Bugliosi's account more plausibility.

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After a series of failed predictions of the world's end - including forecasts going back to the 19th century, as well as for 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1984, and 1994 - the Jehovah's Witnesses announced on this date in 1995 their new lack of expectation that the apocalypse was particularly near.