December 20: Coast to Coast AM - 12/21/12 Watch

If you've been wondering what Pat Boone, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and the actor who played Will Robinson in "Lost in Space" have to say about the close of the Mayan long-count calendar tomorrow, this article comes just in the nick of time. Ostensibly a profile of the paranoiac overnight radio show "Coast to Coast AM", this Huffington Post piece asks three semi-celebrity fans of the show to share what they expect to see happen on 12/21/12.

George Noory, Host Of 'Coast To Coast AM', Makes Doomsday Prediction: 'We're Gonna Be Here'

December 19: Doomsday-Countdown Detritus

This reality series profiling survivalists debuted in February on the National Geographic channel, and entered its second season in November. The show's youtube channel carries 16 show clips, like this one about eating worms.

Doomsday Preppers

***

And

It’s Not the End of the World as We Know It. But Admit It—You’re a Tiny Bit Worried.

(In all honesty, it's never occurred to me to be "a tiny bit worried". The whole picture of what's supposed to happen Friday is much too incoherent.)

December 18: 500 Apocalypse Hysteria Arrests in China

As 2012 winds down I'm very happy about the breadth of topics I've been able to touch on in these posts. This sort of story, though, reminds me that there's much more weirdness going on than I would ever be able to summarize in one year.

China Detains More Than 500 People For Spreading Doomsday Rumors

December 17: Lord Kelvin, "On the Beach", and 16 Million Spaceships

The mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin died today in 1907. He speculated that the world would come to a heat-death end within a million years as the sun cools - a date extended to perhaps 10 million years by Camille Flammarion in 1894. As nuclear fusion and cosmology have come to be better understood, this date now rests in the billions of years, but the eventual settling of the universe into a dispersed temperature near absolute zero seems to be its likely fate.

***

Today in 1959, "On the Beach" was released, a popular film based on Nevil Shute's novel about the slow death of humanity's few survivors after a global nuclear war.

***

For this day in 1996, psychic Sheldan Nidle of the Planetary Activation Organization stated that 16 million spaceships would arrive at Earth along with a host of angels. Afterward, Nidle claimed that the seeming nonappearance of these spaceships had only occurred because they'd made a last-minute decision to spare the world by placing it in a hologram.

December 16: The Nine Billion Names of God

Arthur C. Clarke was born today in 1917. His "The Nine Billion Names of God" was retroactively selected as best science fiction story of 1953 by the Hugo Awards (the awards were begun in 1955).

This apocalyptic story, about a Tibetan monastery provided computer support in its meditational practices, is really pretty brief, and can be read here.

December 15: Sitting Bull and Bailey's Theosophy

The Lakota resistance leader and sideshow performer Chief Sitting Bull was killed today in 1890 by Federal US Indian agents in Standing Rock, South Dakota - a prelude to the Wounded Knee massacre which would occur two weeks later. Sitting Bull's arrest had been ordered because of his support of the messianic Ghost Dance movement, which held that a returned Jesus Christ would drive the white men out of North America, restoring wild game and perished ancestors.

***

Alice A. Bailey died on this date in 1949. A theosophist who held that World War II had been a battle of armegeddon between the forces of good and evil, she claimed that with Hitler's defeat an Aquarian new age had begun. For Bailey this meant the imminent appearance of a Maitreya, or world-teacher, who has been vocally anticipated at least since 1982 by Bailey's follower Benjamin Creme (see June 1).

December 14: James Bruce and the Book of Enoch

The Scottish explorer James Bruce was born today in 1730. In 1773 he returned from a voyage to Ethiopia with the first copy Europe had seen of the apocalyptic Hebrew text "The Book of Enoch".

Supposedly written by Noah's grandfather, the book descibes visions and visits to heaven, as well as the fall of a group of angels named the Watchers, who fathered the Nephilim - a race of giants - by mating with humans.

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.

***

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.

***

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.