April 14: Silent Spring

The conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson died on this date in 1964. Less than a year and a half earlier, her book "Silent Spring" had appeared, warning of the human-caused chemical collapse of world ecosystems.

April 13: Financial Advice for the Mayan Apocalypse

Folks with regular cable TV have probably seen this so many times by now that they're queasy. But I spotted it for the first time earlier this evening, and find it interesting that the 12/21/12 date is now soaked deeply enough into the popular consciousness to be eligible for parody in ads by financial advisors.

April 12: Mad Max

On April 12, 1979, George Miller's post-apocalyptic action thriller "Mad Max" was released in Australia.

April 11: Edward Wightman

On May 11, 1612, Edward Wightman, an English Anabaptist, was executed for preaching apocalypse and claiming he was (1) Elijah, (2) Paraclete (ie, the Holy Spirit), and (3) Savior of the World.

April 10: Abu 'Isa

Abu 'Isa ("son of Jesus") led a late Jewish Messianic movement in eighth-century Persia. Combining elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abu 'Isa's movement provoked sharp repression from Persian Muslim authorities. The dates of Abu 'Isa's movement are uncertain, but his followers believed long after he was gone that he would return from a mountain to lead them to the promised land.

April 9: Nanomachines Turn the World to Grey Goo

This month in 2000, Wired Magazine published "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", an editorial by co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy. Joy warned that the advent of nanobots could lead to the incorporation of all carbon-containing matter on earth in a runaway scenario once described by Eric Drexler as "Grey Goo".

April 8: Aleister Crowley's "Book of the Law"

On April 8, 1904, Aleister Crowley received The Book of the Law from his wife Rose, who entered a trance state during their honeymoon to the Great Pyramid. In proclaiming this book to the world, with its core Rabelaisian principle of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", Crowley believed he was ushering in a new world-age of the child, following earlier matristic and patristic periods.

Though Crowley took much amusement in calling himself "The Beast 666", and in implying he was the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi (see May 31), he was not a Satanist as is often claimed. But his messianic pretensions ran deep. At the end of his life - destitute in an English boarding house in on-again, off-again heroin addiction - Crowley claimed he had transcended the bonds of humanity and become a god.

April 7: Montanus

Montanism was an early-Christian splinter movement originating in the middle of the second century. Montanus, traveling with two prophetesses, preached against marriage - since, he said, God was about to lower a city from the sky into the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia. This city would be known as New Jerusalem, and become the center of a Christian new world order.

Though defended in some of his teachings by key church father Tertullian, Montanus was condemned as heretical in the year 177 by a synod presided over by the Bishop of Hierapolis. Though small, his movement persisted perhaps until the 6th century.

April 6: Good Friday, Albrecht Durer

Three dates to note for April 6:

--Celebrated as Good Friday by Christians, today is the day Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth was executed by the Romans in Jerusalem, probably in 33 CE. Though Jesus himself was a Jew, after his death his movement spread principally among Gentiles, who have been anticipating his imminent return ever since.

--In 793 Beatus, Abbot of Liebana, had claimed the world would end on Easter Sunday. On this Easter Eve his parishioners fasted and held a day-long vigil in anticipation of Jesus' return.

--In 1528, Albrecht Durer died. The famous German artist created an iconic series of woodcuts depicting the events of the Book of Revelation.

April 5: The Kindly-Sounding Saint Vincent Ferrer

On April 5, 1419, the Dominican friar St. Vincent Ferrer died. Born and educated near Barcelona, Ferrer traveled widely through Europe, preaching doomsday, forcibly converting Jews to Christianity, and authoring a book called The End of Days.

April 4: Calculating the End of the World with Logarithms

On April 4, 1617, the mathematician John Napier died. Most famous for inventing the logarithm and for popularizing the decimal point, Napier also used his powers of calculation to determine that the world would end in either 1700 or 1788.

April 3: Moses of Crete (and Real-Life Lemmings)

Sometime in the year 448, one of the strangest incidents in the history of messianic claimants took place. After the disastrous end of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans in 136 and subsequent Jewish diaspora, messianic movements came to an end for centuries. But one Talmudic interpretation led to an expectation that the Messiah would appear in 440 or 471.

Against this backdrop, a man on the island of Crete began to claim he was Moses, returned from his death at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy. He proposed to lead Cretan Jews directly back to Jerusalem through a part that would appear for them in the Mediterranean Sea. A group of his followers was actually convinced to walk over a cliff face to their deaths, while "Moses of Crete" somehow escaped the scene and was never seen again.

March 31: Jesus is Alive in Vancouver and Looks Just Like Abraham Lincoln

On March 31, 1998, the Christian-Buddhist leader of God's Salvation Church, a man named Hoh-Ming Chen, called a press conference to celebrate the success of his prophecy that God would physically appear that day at his church in Garland, Texas. Despite any evidence of God at the church - and despite the failure of Chen's previous prediction that God was going to make a miraculous television appearance earlier in the week - Chen claimed his own presence before reporters was the divine incarnation he and his followers had been praying for.

Prior to this press conference, Chen had claimed he would happily submit to execution if his prophecy failed. So he challenged the reporters in his church to stone him to death if they were unsatisfied with his personal apparition. He stood his ground for several minutes with no stones thrown. (It is unclear whether the reporters were provided with stones.)

In the year before this event, Chen's approximately 150 followers had begun moving from southern California to Garland, where they expected to be met by flying saucers sent from God. Since all of this was happening in the aftermath of the Heaven's Gate catastrophe (see March 26), the group was compelled to calm neighbors by stating publicly that they had no plans to commit mass suicide.

In addition to the flying saucers, other expectations of God's Salvation Church include that Jesus lives in Vancouver, and looks just like Abraham Lincoln (it is not clear whether he also dresses like Abraham Lincoln).

Chen believes the world goes through a cycle of Tribulations, from which God saves a few elect souls in a spaceship and allows them to re-seed the earth after the fires die off. One of the bigger Tribulations was fought between dinosaurs on the plain of Armageddon ten million years ago (ie, 55 million years after the dinosaurs actually went extinct. But this is not the only case in which Chen's grasp of chronology may be questioned. For instance, Chen says the solar system was formed by a nuclear war 4.5 trillion years ago - a thousand times its actual age, not to mention three orders of magnitude greater than the accepted age of the universe.).

March 30: Joachim of Fiore, and the Kali Yuga

On March 30, 1202, Joachim of Fiore died. A roaming prophet and possibly the Middle Ages' most famous apocalypticist, Fiore's writings (Exposition of Revelation, The Book of Figures) saw the Apocalypse of John as literal prophecy, in opposition to Saint Augustine's long-predominant spiritual view. According to Fiore the Second Coming was to occur within his own lifetime, or by 1260 at the latest. Though condemned by the Church for his radicalism, Fiore's works were highly influential, inspiring the "Spiritual Franciscan" movement. The Spiritual Franciscans embraced extreme poverty and rebelled against Church authority, going even so far in many cases as to identify the Roman Church with the Beast of Revelation.


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On March 30, 1925, Rudolph Steiner died. He founded the school of "Anthroposophy", claiming that we live in the "Kali Yuga", or Hindu last age. The end of the world was expected to arrive in the early part of the twentieth century.

March 29: Emanuel Swedenborg

On March 29, 1772, Emanuel Swedenborg died. He had claimed that the New Jerusalem had descended to earth from heaven "spiritually" in 1757, and that the Advent of Christ was proceeding apace.

March 28: Jews for Jesus

On March 28, 1991, the group Jews for Jesus took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers, comparing Saddam Hussein to the Antichrist. The ad warned that Hussein might return from the dead (after first being killed, of course) in order to launch a world takeover. The telephone number 1-900-MESSIAH was offered for further information.

More information about the ad is in this reference:

The End of the World as We Know It (Daniel Wojcik)

March 26: Heaven's Gate

On March 26, 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego donned matching Nike shoes and committed suicide by consuming vodka and phenobarbitol-laden applesauce. They believed that in dying they would somehow be transported to a spaceship concealed by the passing Hale-Bopp comet, escaping Satan's impending destruction of the earth.

March 25: Failed 1708 resurrection show, and Novalis

On this date in 1708, an odd story came to a head. A very wealthy French glass merchant, inspired by an apocalyptic book called "Accomplishment of the Scriupture Prophecies" (Pierre Jurieu, 1686) took in several young children and began schooling them to become prophets. As reported by the writer Daniel Defoe, these young mystics had left the merchant's care after a few years and were seeking to support themselves by spreading end times prophecies in London. On March 25, 1708, they staged a public resurrection from the dead in order to prove their powers and make some cash. The resurrection failed, and the young prophets fell into obscurity.

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On March 25, 1801, Novalis died. The poet's posthumously-published book "Christianity or Europe" was eschatological in its themes, claiming a new world order was soon going to form around a universal religion.

March 23: Hal Lindsey, and the Moonies

Two dates to note for March 23:

In 1970, Hal Lindsey's bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth was published. Reasoning that the world would end within a 40-year generation of the foundation of Israel (1948), Lindsey claimed the Rapture would occur seven years before then, in 1981. These dates were pushed back at least twice by Lindsey in later books such as The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (1980) and Planet Earth 2000 A.D. (2004).

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In 2004, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - the Korean founder of a Christian cult called the Unification Church - had himself crowned Messiah in Washington, D.C. before an audience containing a dozen U.S. lawmakers of both parties. Moon is a heavy political contributor, as well as owner/publisher of The Washington Times and a highly active Republican.

March 22: Four failed prophets, including Pat Robertson

There are four dates to note for March 22:

In 1758, Jonathan Edwards died. An American Puritan leader of the First Great Awakening, and author of Notes on the Apocalypse, Edwards predicted the world would end by the close of of 1866.

In 1930, Pat Robertson was born. Sounding eschatological notes throughout his career, Robertson stated in 1976 (and reiterated in a May 1980 "700 Club" broadcast) that Judgment Day would occur before the end of November 1982.

In 1997, one Dr. Dale Sumbur Ëru predicted the Tribulation would begin on March 22, with Christ returning in the year 2000.

In 2011, J.R. Church died. Church projected the apocalypse for numerous dates in the course of his ministry ("Prophecy in the News"). Perhaps most emphatically he had claimed the Tribulation would begin in 1988.