December 13: HRE Frederick II

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II died today in 1250. He was called an Antichrist by Pope Gregory IX, and excommunicated in 1227 for lagging in his promise to join into the Sixth Crusade. For Frederick's part, however, he considered himself the Last world Emperor (see July 9) - the fulfillment of a popular medieval concept of a human leader whose righteousness would pave the way for Jesus' return.

A myth that the deaceased Frederick would return from death to lead a campaign against Church corruption, was so popular, that his Holy Roman Imperial successor burned two pseudo-Fredericks at the stake to stamp out their movements.

December 12: Mark Hitchcock

One of the most prolific end-times-focused theologians in America today, Mark Hitchcock has written over 20 books on the subject. Some have been in collaboration with prominent names in the field like Thomas Ice, and his work has received endoresements from the authors of the Left Behind novels.

Hitchcock's most recent book came out as recently as this past June; and in recent works he's one of a few evangelicals to address the coming close of the Mayan calendar (which he approaches skeptically, but seems to feel that the 2012 phenomenon could dovetail with a Christian apocalyptic perspective).

Profile of Mark Hitchcock from RaptureReady.com

December 10: End of the World Sketch

This isn't the original version from "Beyond the Fringe", but it's the one I grew up on:

December 9: Bugarach - France's Space Mountain

We looked at this back on April 24 - but as December 21 now approaches, a mountain in southern France outside the small village of Bugarach has become an obsession of new-age seekers who believe people in this area will be spared by aliens from the destruction of the world. Village officials have been taking steps to close down the region and prevent being overrun.

Space Mountain (The Sun)

December 8: Von Dem Letzten Dingen

Michael Schmaus died on this date in 1993. This German Catholic theologian composed his massive, influential, six-volume "Dogma" between 1938 and 1941 while teaching in Prague. From 1946 until retiring in 1965 he taught at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, where he was a mentor to the current Pope, then Joseph Ratzinger. Schmaus also composed a book in 1948 on apocalyptic portents, "On the Last Things" (Von Dem Letzten Dingen), affirming the coming of the events of Revelation.

December 7: Shallow Hal

I wrote about Hal Lindsey back on March 23. Looks like nine months later, he's still at it.

December 6: Jabbering Hut

Hans Hut, a 16th-century traveling book salesman of southern Germany, became an ardent member of the peasant religious movement called Anabaptism. The Anabaptists had split from Martin Luther's Protestantism and become involved in a number of countryside battles and coups against city governments. Though not a violent or military man himself, Hut was a writer and vociferous preacher of end times, claiming Christ would return in 1528 to destroy all but 144,000 elect.

Arrested with dozens of other Anabaptists who had met in Augsburg in 1527, Hut was severely tortured between August and today - December 6 - when he was asphyxiated in an accidental fire at the prison. The next day, authorities sentenced him to death and burned his remains.

December 5: 'Mo Better Blues

"Moses" David Berg founded the Children of God (now "The Family International") in California in 1968. Berg was the object of multiple allegations of child molestation, including from two granddaughters and also an adoptive son who would go on to take his own life after murdering one of his childhood caretakers in the Family.

A reclusive leader, Berg communicated with his followers mainly through some 3000 "'Mo Letters" written over time, espousing his philosophies and apocalyptic predictions. Among these was that comet Kohoutek would strike Earth in 1974; and that Armageddon would begin in the late 80s with the USSR's conquest of Israel, precipitating Jesus' Second Coming in 1993. Berg died on October 1, 1994 at the age of 75.

("Mo" was meant to refer to "Moses".)

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"