October 4: The Order of the Solar Temple

On this date in 1994 a disaster began to unfold in Quebec as an infant was ritually stabbed to death with a wooden stake by members of a group named the Order of the Solar Temple. They believed the boy was the Antichrist. This cult had been formed by a man named Luc Jouret in Geneva in the late 1970s as a supposed extension of the medieval Knights Templar, and of more modern occult groups like the OTO and Golden Dawn. Jouret claimed to be Jesus Christ, and eventually went on to commit suicide.

In fact, within two weeks of the infant murder, over 50 OTS members in Quebec and Switzerland staged a ritual mass suicide variously using poison and firearms. The statement left by the dead claimed they were departing Earth to be reborn in the Sirius system. Numerous other murders and suicides performed by OTS members would occur in Canada and Switzerland for years afterward.

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Today is also the 1926 birthdate of German theologian Klaus Koch. In his The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (1970) he identified eschatology, or a belief in the coming end times, as the key formative element in the development of Christianity.

October 3: The Second Coming Will Be Televised

As Gil-Scott Heron told the world, the Revolution will not be televised. However, that doesn't seem to apply to the Second Coming.

Daystar, TBN Ready for Messiah in Jerusalem

October 1: A Canticle for Leibowitz

October 1959 is the month Walter Miller, Jr.'s apocalyptically-themed classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz" was first published in book form, after parts had appeared as novellas in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction starting in 1955. The book, which follows the slow re-emergence of civilization after a nuclear war, won the 1961 Hugo award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

This dramaztization of the book (available free online) was created for Wisconsin Public Radio in 1981.

September 30: Saint Jerome and Edgar Cayce

Today is the feast day of Saint Jerome (d. 420), traditionally credited as the author of "The Fifteen Signs of Doomsday", a popular medieval manuscript which actually first appeared in the tenth century.

September 30, 1999 was to be the date of the end of the world according to one Kirk Nelson, who obtained the date through his combined research of the Bible and the writings of Edgar Cayce.

September 29: Left Behind

"Left Behind", the first novel in a series that went on to sell over 40 million copies, was first published on September 29, 1995. The dozen -plus novels, by evangelist Tim LaHaye with writer Jerry Jenkins, follow the adventures of a group of late-converting Christians who were not taken up to heaven in the Rapture, and left on Earth to fight the Antichrist.

The first two books of the series were made into motion pictures starring "Growing Pains" star Kirk Cameron. The entire series was also adapted into this highly-recommended dramatic radio serial.

September 28: Harold Camping's Prior Failures

Harold Camping of Family Radio in Oakland, California, is famous for his prediction(s) of the Rapture and Judgment Day in 2011. But these forecasts were the last in a series of prophecies he's made in his career - according to his first, the world was to have come to an end before the end of this past night, in 1994.

Also, on this date in 1840 the Hebrew year 5600 began. A number of prophecies had held that the Messiah would appear within the year.

September 27: The Earth is not Hollow; It's Full of Water!

The Reverand Thomas Burnet died today in 1715. Though admired by Newton and referenced in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth presents an idiosyncratic portrait of the world. For instance, Burnet claimed that since the oceans don't contain enough water to cover all land, the Biblical flood story implies the Earth is hollow and full of extra water.

Burnet believed the hexameron - the six-day creation - was a template of universal history. On this plan, an apocalypse in the 6000th year of the Earth will inaugurate a seventh millennial "day" of Christ's rule. (This cosmogony is at least as old as Irenaeus in the third century - see June 28).

Burnet's On the State of the Dead and of the Resurrection led the ever-skeptical Edward Gibbon to quip that far from making sense of either Revelation or the soul's immortality, Burnett had at least done a service by laying out their "inconveniences".

September 26: 1859

A Massachusetts minister named Thomas Parker predicted the milennium should begin around 1859. That same year, in France, Eugene Huzar published The End of the World by Science, a forerunning look at the environmental dangers of high technology.

September 25: Mother Shipton

Mother Shipton (1488-1561) was a renowned soothsayer and hag of 16th-century England. Her pronouncements were first printed 80 years after her death, and from the beginning they included a number of fabrications. In fact Mother Shipton's most famous prophecy of all wasn't even invented until an 1862 edition of her sayings, 300 years after her death:

"The world to and end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty one."

September 24: 1999

Prince's single "1999" was released on this date thirty years ago in 1982. The apocalypse-themed song garnered little attention at first, but was reissued for radio play after the full album "1999", put on sale in October, saw success with the single "Little Red Corvette".

On its second try, the song "1999" would peak at #12 on the United States Billboard charts in 1983.

September 23: Holy Toledo

Today is the anniversary, in 1186, of a planetary alignment in Libra, which had been successfully forecast by John of Toledo. In his "Letter of Toledo", John warned that the conjunction would be the herald of worldwide catastrophe, killing most of humankind.

September 22: The Ring and Ragnarok

Das Rheingold, the first opera of Wagner's Ring cycle, premiered today in 1869 in Bayreuth, Germany - making this an opportune day to take note of Ragnarok, the norse apocalyptic myth of the twilight of the gods.

September 20: Michael Paget Baxter Predicts Seven Armageddons

Michael Paget Baxter (1834-1910) was a traveling Anglican minister, strongly influenced as a young man by a visit to England by Dwight Moody (Moody himself had been a student of the apocalypticist John Nelson Darby).

With his wife Elizabeth, Baxter extensively toured Europe and Canada while producing a vast amount of evangelical writing in books and periodicals. In these works, he predicted specific dates for Armageddon on no fewer than seven separate occasions between 1867 and 1908.

Online books of Michael Paget Baxter

September 19: Megiddo and Mrs. Spofford

On this date in 1918, the week-long Battle of Megiddo began between the British and Ottomans, helping usher the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the close of the Great War. (This location was also the site of an Egyptian/Canaanite battle in the 15th century BCE, and will soon be where Armageddon is fought as well.)

The British commander in the fight was General Edmund Allenvy. Allenvy, while stationed in and around Jerusalem at the war's end, wrote in his memoirs about meeting an American woman named Mrs. Spofford. Mrs. Spofford related to him how she had brought a group of believers with her to the holy land from the United States in 1881 - 37 years before - to witness Jesus' return to Earth in a "flaming golden chariot". Though the trip appeared to have been unsuccessful vis a vis the Second Coming, Mrs. Spofford had remained in Jerusalem. Allenvy did not record what became of her followers.

September 18: Domitian dies; Revelation's Written

The Emperor Domitian was assassinated by members of his court on this day in 96 CE, setting an upper bound on the time when the Book of Revelation was written (scholars believe it was completed before the end of Domitian's reign).

The book's author, John of Patmos, is not to be confused with the Gospel writer John. The John of Revelation was likely an Aramaic-speaking Jew born in Roman-occupied Judea who ended up in forced exile on the island of Patmos off of Asia Minor after the 70 CE Roman defeat of a Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem.

Breaking with his Jewish roots to embrace the new Jesus movement, John wrote in a rusty, Hebraized Greek about a series of coded "visions" portending the collapse of the Roman Empire. Many later Christian eschatologists - even today - have chosen to read John's symbolism literally.

September 17: deaths of Hildegard von Bingen, Heinrich Bullinger, and Shabbati Zevi

We've got three big dates for September 17:

In 1179, Hildegard von Bingen died. The renowned German composer and prophetess wrote about the lurid visions she experienced - including the Whore of Babylon birthing a black-headed child within a cathedral nave. She took this to mean that the coming Antichrist would be brought forth from within the institutions of the Catholic Church. Despite this sort of thing, Hildegard was canonized a Saint by Pope Benedict XVI just this past May.

In 1575, Heinrich Bullinger died. In his "One Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalypse of Jesu Christ", he preached from Zurich that the fin du siecle, or end of the world, would occur in 1557.

And in 1676, Shabbati Zevi died. A Kabbalist from Montenegro, he claimed to be the Messiah, and led 300 families of followers as far east as Istanbul en route to reclaim the Holy Land for Israel. In Turkey, however, the Ottoman Sultan arrested Zevi, who converted to Islam under threat of death.

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.