September 15: Christian-Socialist Revolutionary Apocalypticism

Early Socialist William Weitling broke with Marx and Engels, and from the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon, to write the Christian-Communist manifesto "Gospel of a Poor Sinner" in 1843. In it he advocated for a revolutionary-messianic Millenarianism, in which social justice was tied to the return of Christ. Tried and imprisoned for blasphemy in Zurich, Weitling emigrated to New York and died in 1871.

September 14: 100 Shopping Days Left Until the End of the World

100 days remain until the Mayan long-count calendar terminates on 12/21/12.

September 13: Peace in Israel = EOW

The Oslo I Accords, signed this day in 1993 by Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat in Washington, DC, is at the heart of the apocalyptic theories of leading Hamas figure Bassam Jirrar. Since 1992, using a mixture of news items and numerological analysis of the Koran, Jirrar has been promoting his prediction that Israel will be destroyed in the year 2022.

September 12: Ottoman Defeat at Vienna, and The First Rule of Prophecy Club Is...

In the Battle of Vienna today in 1683, the Austro-Hungarians lifted two months of Ottoman siege with the aid of the Poles, decisively checking what had long threatened to be a gradual Turkish conquest of Europe. The drastic severity of the stakes caused observers on both sides to interpret the conflict as a sign of coming apocalypse.

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Stan Johnson of "The Prophecy Club" (a ministry which appears to be widely criticized even among prophetic evangelicals) rated the odds at 90% that the Tribulation would begin on September 12, 1997.

September 11: Whisenant's Rosh Hashanah Prediction, and 9-11

Edgar Whisenant's book "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will be in 1988" argued that god would take the living faithful into heaven on Rosh Hashanah 1988, which began September 11. After issuing a handful of new rapture predictions throughout the 90s, Whisenant died in May 2001.

Less than four months afterward, on September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists would kill over 3000 people in New York and Washington, DC. Their motive seems to have been to spark an apocalyptic battle between Islam and Judaism/Christianity, opening the way through Islam's ultimate victory to a worldwide Caliphate.

September 10: Rev. Major Jealous Divine, and a CERN Black Hole

The Reverend Major Jealous Divine, a Georgia preacher who went on to minister from Long Island, died on this date in 1965. He claimed to be God. (Also see October 10)

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The Large Hadron Collider was first operated on September 10, 2008 at CERN in Switzerland. Some had feared it might generate a small black hole which would rapidly consume the entire Earth.

September 9: A Messiah in Crown Heights

Menachem Schneerson was a Hasidic rabbi of the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn. Born in 1902 in Russia, he studied science and engineering in Germany and France, and escaped the Nazis in 1941 to settle in America.

Accepting the title of Rebbe in 1951, Schneerson's energetic outreach programs and opening of schools and synagogues led to a movement known as Chabad-Lubavitch messianism, which held that Schneerson was himself the messiah. Schneerson seems not to have claimed this openly for himself, however, predicting that the messiah would appear on September 9, 1991 (one month, as it happened, after the three-day Crown Heights riots). Schneerson died in 1994.

September 8: Ann Lee and the Shakers

Ann Lee died on September 8, 1784. After emigrating to the United States in 1774, she formed the "United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing", or more simply (due to their ecstatic dancing and Quaker affiliation) the Shakers.

To remain prepared for the coming kingdom of god, Shakers practiced strict chastity, damping the group's size over time. In the meantime, however, "Mother Ann" was considered by her followers to be herself the female manifestation of Christ, complementary to the male Jesus.

September 7: RaptureReady.com

Todd Strandberg's news-analysis and apocalypse countdown website RaprureReady.com - begun as a newsgroup as long ago as 1987 - interestingly features this list of failed predictions of the end of the world. Most of them have been or will be covered here too.

The RaptureReady.com Date Setters' Diary

September 6: The Great London Fire

Today in 1666, the aftermath of the great London fire of September 2-5 revealed as many as 70,000 of the city's 80,000 homes destroyed. Though immediate loss of life had been minimal, famine and disease followed in the months afterward, amid fears that the fire was set by papists or foreigners now preparing to invade England. The aristocracy feared revolution, and many - like the founding Quaker George Fox - believed the disaster spelled the coming of Armageddon.

September 5: Frashokereti, the Zoroastrian Apocalypse

Frashokereti is the Zoroastrian term for the apocalypse, in which the virgin-born savior Saoshyant compels both the living and the dead to ford a river of molten metal. The river will burn the wicked, while swirling "like milk" around the righteous. As it flows into the netherworld, this river will annihilate the universe's malignant co-deity Angara Mainyu.

Without a specific date to which to attach Frashokereti, I chose this birthdate of singer Freddie Mercury (1946) who may well be the world's most famous modern Zoroastrian. (A Zoroastrian by birth and upbringing, at least.)

September 4: Nodrog

Calling himself Nodrog (his last name backward) a certain Oliver Gordon founded the Outer Dimensional Forces this day in 1966. Criticizing humans for their mismanagement of Earth, the Forces with which Nodrog is in contact will soon be returning to Earth to purge the world of the unfaithful.

September 3: The Messiah has Passed

Today's Date in Apocalypse History reports with sadness that the Messiah - the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - died earlier today in South Korea.

(Our earlier entry on the Reverend Sun Myung-Moon is here.)

September 2: Jack van Impe, and Hell = Black Holes

Jack van Impe was born September 2, 1931. In his paid-programming weekly television ministry, cohosted with his wife Rexella, he has made numerous end-times predictions over the years, setting dates ranging from 2000-2012.

Van Impe won the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics for asserting that black holes meet the criteria for being the possible location(s) of Hell.

September 1: French-Revolutionary Apocalypticism

On September 1, 1794, Catherine Théot died. During the French Revolution she had claimed to be the mother of god, and was narrowly spared from beheading, possibly by direct order of Robespierre.

William Blake and the chemist Joseph Priestley were just a couple of prominent figures from the period who shared Théot's belief that the Revolution in France portended the apocalypse.

August 31: Old Moore's Almanac, and English Fears of Apocalypse in the Late 1830s

Old Moore's Almanac, an Irish annual which has furnished meteorological data, tide tables, and agricultural information since 1764, still exists today, and prints a section of tongue-in-cheek doom-and-gloom predictions for each coming year. However, in its 1837 number (appearing in the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne) the Almanac issued a serious threat that the return of Christ appeared to be at hand.

According to Eugen Weber's Apocalypses, this period was clustered with other eschatological predictions, including a series of speeches on Antichrist by Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman (who had made a very public break with Anglicanism by converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845) - and also a standing Jewish belief that the Messiah might appear in 1839-40 (5600 in the Jewish calendar).

August 30: Nelson H. Barbour and the Early Origins of the Jehovah's Witnesses

Nelson H. Barbour died this day in 1905. The author of Evidences for the Coming of the Lord in 1873, Barbour fell out with a young follower named C.T. Russell over questions of doctrine. C.T. Russell would go on to be a founder of the Watchtower Society and Jehovah's Witnesses.

August 29: Historical Zionism

On this day in 1897, the World Zionist Conference began in Basel, Switzerland under the leadership of Theodore Herzl. Herzl's restorationism - or desire for the repatriation of Jews to Palestine - was supported by many Christian apocalypticists not from any love of Jews, but because they believed it would help set the preconditions for Armageddon.

August 28: Saint Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (in present-day Algeria) died on this date in 430 CE. Augustine's moderate views toward the interpretation of Revelation became the European standard for nearly 800 years, until Crusaders and end-times millennialists like Joachim of Fiore gathered popular followings in the high middle ages.

Augustine argued against what he called a "carnal", or literal, interpretation of Revelation - as well as against many predictions he cited that the world would end on or around 500 CE. Augustine was an "amillennialist", meaning he did not accept an apocalyptic scheme where, after a Tribulation, Christ would return to reign bodily over Earth for 1000 years. For Augustine, the Book of Revelation was to be read as an allegory of the struggle for salvation within the human soul.

August 27: 20 Literary Visions of the Apocalypse

What, no Earth Abides ?

20 Literary Visions of the Apocalypse