January 19: The Rajneesh movement

On January 19, 1990, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (AKA "Osho") died. He led the international "Rajneesh movement" from Oregon - and later India, after he was deported from the United States following a salmonella-based terror attack, as well as a plot among his followers to assassinate a United States District Attorney. Rajneesh's movement attracted tens of thousands of adherents worldwide, including notables such as Nena ("99 Luftballons"), the actor Terence Stamp, and Arianna Huffington. At his height of success in Oregon, Rajneesh operated numerous subsidiary corporations and reportedly owned 93 Rolls-Royces.

Osho/Rajneesh had predicted that a combination of natural and nuclear cataclysms in 1983 would result in the complete obliteration of Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Mumbai, as well as other major population centers. Since the failure of such predictions, and his death in 1990, splinter groups like the Osho International Foundation and Osho Friends International carry on Rajneesh's legacy in India, the United States, and Europe.

January 17: Messiah claimant "The Egyptian Prophet"

During the year 58 CE a claimant to Messiah simply named "The Egyptian Prophet" led 30,000 Jews into the wilderness, then back to the Mount of Olives in an attempt to enter Jerusalem. As with other figures of the Late Second Temple Period, the Egyptian was attempting to fulfill a prophecy that the Messiah would lead his people into the wilderness before returning in triumph. However, Josephus reports that the group was broken up by the Roman army outside Jerusalem, with hundreds killed.

January 14: Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell's Christian Zionism aimed to fulfill the preconditions of the apocalypse by promoting Jewish control over Jerusalem's holy sites. Falwell famously stated the Antichrist was probably a Jewish man already alive on Earth, though he later publicly apologized for this claim. On January 14, 1999, he declared at a conference in Kingsport, Tennessee that Christ would return to Earth within 10 years.

January 13: St. Hilary of Poitiers

January 13 is the feast day of St. Hilary of Poitiers, who claimed that the apocalypse would occur sometime during the year 365.

January 12: "Just as sloshed as Schlegel!"

In 1829, Karl Wilhelm Friederich Schlegel died. His Lectures on Universal History (1810) attributed the entire course of social and political conflict in Europe to the power of Antichrist, and forecast an end to secular world history for 1836.

January 11: Messiah claimant Theudas

During the year 46 CE, Theudas was killed by the Romans. One of many Jewish claimants to Messiah, he led some 400 followers to the Jordan, aiming to fulfill a prophecy that the Messiah would lead his people to the wilderness before returning to Jerusalem in triumph. At the river, however, the group was massacred by the Romans, and Theudas himself beheaded.

January 8: Formation of the Jehovah's Witnesses

In 1942, Joseph Franklin Rutherford died.

As a young man, Rutherford had been a disciple of Watch Tower Society founder Charles Taze Russell. In 1914, the last of three major predictions of the end of the world which Russell made in his career, failed. When Russell himself died in 1916, his Watch Tower Society fell into some disorder, but Rutherford succeeded in taking control over the board and ultimately reshaping the group’s remains into a new organization named the Jehovah's Witnesses. This new group successfully went on to issue its own prophecies of apocalypse for 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, and 1984. "Our generation will see the great battle of Armageddon" and "Millions now living will never die" were among Rutherford's rallying cries, widely circulated in periodicals and leaflets.

January 7: Herbert Armstrong and Bobby Fischer

On this date in 1972, Herbert W. Armstrong of the Worldwide Church of God predicted Jesus' Second Coming. Far from being his only forecast of the apocalypse, Armstrong's 1972 prophecy was merely the most widely-heralded of dozens of end dates proclaimed in a ministry spanning five decades.

Founded in 1934 as a radio evangelism outreach in Eugene, Oregon, Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God eventually attracted thousands of followers in Pasadena, California, notably including eccentric chess champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer, like Armstrong's son Garner Ted Armstrong, had public fallings-out with the minister; and particularly after Armstrong's death in 1986, the group (now named Grace Communion International) was accused of practicing abusive programming techniques on the children in its congregation.

January 6: Messiah claimant Judas the Galilean

Sometime in the year 6 C.E., Judas the Galilean was killed in a violent suppression of his Messianic uprising against the Romans. This rebellion for Jewish independence was reported by Josephus, and attested to in Acts of the Apostles.

January 3: Edgar Cayce, and a Christian group seeks to destroy al-Aqsa

Two dates to note:

In 1945, Edgar Cayce died. The famous "sleeping prophet" had predicted Jesus' second coming for 1998 with the Battle of Armageddon following in 1999. These events were to be triggered when documents detailing the history of Atlantis were first discovered in a secret chamber beneath the Great Sphinx.

Founded by Monte Kim Miller, the group Concerned Christians began as an anti-cult and deprogramming resource but over time evolved an apocalyptic focus. A group of members led by Miller was expelled en masse from Israel on this date in 1999 for a suspected conspiracy to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. This act would clear the way for the establishment of a Third Temple in Jerusalem, widely viewed by Christian apocalypticists as a precondition of Christ's return.

Shortly after his expulsion from Israel, Miller claimed he would be killed in December 1999 and rise from death three days later.

January 2: Johann Kasper Lavater

In 1801, Johann Kasper Lavater died. This Swiss poet and physiognomist declared that the Messiah would arrive sometime during 1794.

January 1: The 12th Imam, Y1K, Pentecostalism, Y2K, and the current extinction event

Five dates to note:

In 874, the 11th Shia Imam Hasan al-Askari died. The Imam's precocious five-year-old son, the Twelfth Imam al-Mahdi, led the funeral service for his father - and afterward vanished from Earth. The young Mahdi's anticipated return from his state of ‘Occultation’, joined by Jesus, will lead to the killing of the Jewish World-Deceiver (antichrist) al-Dajjal, and final removal of the Ka'aba from Mecca to its establishment in Jerusalem.

In 1000, the monk Rodulfus Glaber documented Y1K “millennial madness” in his "Historiarum" including famine, heresies, and natural disasters.

In 1901, Agnes Ozman was visited by the Holy Spirit in Kansas, receiving divine powers similar to those dispensed on the Biblical day of Pentecost. (Specifically, she was perhaps the first American evangelical Christian to receive the power of speaking in tongues.) Ozman's follower William Seymour took her end-times-focused ‘Pentecostalism’ to Los Angeles, where it grew as a movement.

In 2000, the Y2K bug proved largely to be a non-event. With computers expected to be unable to handle date information after the calendar rollover, fears were widespread that vital financial and communications software would crash, precipitating global catastrophe.

January 1 of the present year is also a fitting a time to note the current (holocene) extinction event, on a par of severity with half a dozen others in Earth's history such as the great Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous-Tertiary dyings. The present extinction rate is as much as 20% of all species per millennium, in contrast with a pre-human background rate of .1% per millennium.

December 31

Three dates to note:

In 1384, John Wycliffe died. The Scholastic philosopher and author of "De Papa" (1379) asserted - particularly in view of the Great Schism in which the Greek Orthodox church separated from Rome - that the Pope is the Antichrist.

Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, CA, authored the influential "End Times" in 1978. His apocalyptic scheme is similar to Hal Lindsey's, in that the end of the world is anticipated for one Biblical generation (40 years) following the establishment of the State of Israel - ie, 1988, with the Rapture falling seven years earlier in 1981. (Smith later reasoned the Israel clock may have begun in 1967 rather than 1948 [= EOW 2007].) The ozone hole and Halley's comet were interpreted by Smith as Tribulation events. On this date in 1981, Smith held a Costa Mesa New Year's Eve service in which all present expected to be raptured at midnight.

December 31, 3797, is the furthest extent to which Nostradamus' precognition allowed him to see, and is interpreted in the Nostradamus documentary "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" (Orson Welles, host) as the end of world history.

December 27

In 1908, Nyack, New York prophet Lee J. Spangler had forecast the end of the world. Spangler fled town during the night before his prediction was to come true, leaving his followers to be ridiculed by a crowd for much of the day following as they wandered through Nyack looking for the appearance of saints.

http://timestraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/disappointment-in-nyack-as-world-goes-on/

December 25

In 800, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. For attempting to reconstruct the Roman Empire, some have viewed him as an antichrist, while other legends view him as a defender of Christendom who will return from the dead during end times to fight the Antichrist. Charlemagne also figures prominently in the apocalyptic quatrains of Nostradamus.

December 24

In 1965, William Branham died days after being struck by a drunk driver on his way home to Jeffersonville, Indiana. Branham was a notable premillennialist and leader of the faith-healing-movement. Scores of his followers relocated from southern California after his prophecy that it would fall into the sea. Branham predicted on his deathbed his bodily resurrection by Easter 1966.

December 23

In 1652, John Cotton died. This American Puritan leader, who would become father-in-law to Increase Mather and grandfather to Cotton Mather, emigrated from England to escape Anglican religious persecution. From his new ministry in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Cotton forecast Jesus’ Second Coming for 1655.

December 22

Three dates to note:

In 1880, George Eliot died. Her historical novel "Romola" grew from her own engrossment with the end of the world. The novel is about Savonarola, a Dominican friar in 15th-century Florence whose apocalyptic preachings and "bonfires of the vanities" led ultimately to his execution on orders from the Pope.

In 1908, Cyrus Reed Teed died. Titling himself "Koresh", or Messiah, Teed created a millennarian community in Florida which dissolved after his death.

In 1999, Charles Spiegel died (though he has been frequently channeled since). Spiegel, a retired psychology professor and director of the Unarian Movement, claimed that as part of an end-times scenario Atlantis would rise from the Caribbean in 2001. Predicting numerous other UFO-driven apocalyptic and world-historical events, the Unarians reached a peak membership of 10,000 in the 1980s.

December 21 (part two)

On 12/21/1237, the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe commenced. This has been estimated to have been the most devastating war in European history, surpassing even the Second World War (30 million European deaths in the Mongol Invasion, versus 40 million worldwide deaths from WWII, including the Pacific theater).

The Mongol invasion was believed to have been predicted in the mystical and apocalyptic "Cedars of Lebanon" prophecy (a reference to Psalm 92), first circulated decades earlier at the start of the 13th century.

To give a sense of the war's casualties, by 1241 fully half of the entire population of the first nation attacked - Hungary - is said to have been killed. Fears that the Mongol invasion meant the end of the world were widespread.

December 21

On this date one year from today - 12/21/2012 - the world will come to an end with the conclusion of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar.