October 19: A Little Book of Arithmetic on the Antichrist

A German mathematician and monk named Michael Stifel - a friend and associate of Martin Luther's - wrote in "A Little Book of Arithmetic on the Antichrist: A Relevation of Revelation" (1532) that on October 19, at 8am, in the year 1533, the apocalypse would strike. When the prediction failed, he was forcibly taken to nearby Wittenburg by angry peasants and sued. 20 years later Stifel would retract the calculation in another pamphlet.

Martin Luther himself is reported to have believed the apocalypse would fall later than Stifel predicted, but still before the year 1600.

As a parting note, in Stifel's mathematical life he coined the term "exponent"; created the algebraic convention of representing multiplication without a symbol (IE, 2x = "two times x"); and furthered the study of negative numbers, which he still referred to at the time as "numeri absurdi".

October 18: Destruction of the Holy Sepulchre

Today in the year 1009, the Fatimid Caliph Al Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction in Jerusalem of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which stood at Golgotha, the site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial. Mysteriously, many clerics in Europe chose to blame Jews for this desecration, inciting pogroms and driving Jewish communities out of some cities in France.

Simmering rage over the destruction of the church stimulated the movement to conquer and secure the Holy Land, which would develop into the First Crusade later that century. (See "Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse", Jay Rubenstein, 2011)

October 16: Million Man March

On October 16, 1995, Tynetta Muhammad addressed the Million Man March in Washington, DC. The mother of four children with Elijah Muhammad, and author of the column "Unveiling the Number 19" in the Nation of Islam's newspaper "The Final Call", Tynetta has asserted from numerological analysis of the Koran that the world was to end in 2001.

October 15: Elizabeth Clare Prophet

Three years ago today, Elizabeth Clare Prophet died in Bozeman, Montana at age 70. Founder of the Church Universal and Triumphant in 1975 - which eventually boasted as many as 50,000 adherents - Prophet used Theosophical and spiritualist ideas to blend Christianity with Buddhism and Hinduism.

Claiming that a nuclear armageddon would occur in 1989, a couple thousand of Prophet's followers took to fallout shelters they had stocked with food and weapons at the edge of Yellowstone Park. A tense situation with area residents and the Federal government eventually subsided as no nuclear war appeared to be forthcoming, and disappointed believers started returning home.

Before succumbing to Alzheimer's disease in the late 90s, Prophet had claimed she had been Nefertiti, Marie Antoinette, Saint Theresa of Avila, and (the fictional) Queen Guinevere of Camelot in her previous lives. Along with other date-setting apocalypticists, Prophet was awarded a posthumous Ig Nobel Prize in 2011 for her predictions.

October 12: Antisemitic Apocalypticists of La Belle Époque

Edouard Drumont, a founder of The Antisemitic League of France, operated a newspaper in Paris in the 1890s called La Libre Parole (The Free Word). The periodical took a prominent role in the notorious Dreyfus Affair by attacking the innocent, imprisoned, and Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus for acts of treason which he had never committed.

In Drumont's spare time, he was also a occult-obsessed apocalypticist, authoring a book called La fin d'un monde (The End of the World) and promoting in his newspaper a faddish seeress named Henriette Couedon, who claimed to channel the Archangel Gabriel. Drumont's editor Gaston Mery published Couedon's journals of end-times visions, and went so far as to fight a duel on the woman's behalf.


Incidentally, the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus included the journalist Theodor Herzl, who was inspired in part by the Antisemitism he saw in the Dreyfus Affair to found the World Zionist Organization: the movement which eventually led to an independent state of Israel (see Aug. 29).

October 11: Two Terrible Disasters

Today in 1138, the worst in a series of earthquakes struck the contested lands of the Crusader State near Aleppo (Syria). Beginning with an August 9 temblor, and extending into the following year, the quakes killed some 230,000 people. And though the worst known damage was at Aleppo, whose citadel collapsed, losses were harder to estimate at the Crusader stronghold at Harim and the Moslem fort of Al-Atarib, whose destructions were nearly total.

The Aleppo earthquake is the third deadliest in history, following earthquake strikes in China of 1556 (830,000 dead) and 1976 (probably 655,000 dead, though the official figure of the Chinese government was 255,000).


Overnight last night, the anniversary also passed of the peak destructiveness of the Great Hurricane of 1780 - the deadliest Atlantic cyclone of all time, killing more than 23,000 as it passed through the Caribbean. This included the loss of 4000 Frenchmen and 40 of their ships off Martinique, stationed there to assist the Americans in the ongoing Revolutionary War.

October 10: Some African-American Messiahs

In 1888, in Rochester, Kentucky, a preacher named Miles Moss proclaimed he was Moses, charged by the Archangel Gabriel to lead black Americans back to Africa. Around the same time, in Savannah, Georgia, a certain Dupont Bell claimed he was Jesus, preaching that in the coming apocalypse of 1890 black people would be made white and white people black.

Both men, along with other African-American messianic claimants like William Saunders Crowdy (founder of the Church of God and Saints of Christ), James Bedward (a Christ-pretender in Jamaica), and the Reverend Major Jealous Divine (see Sep. 10) are mentioned in this interesting 1947 feature in the Baltimore "Afro American".

October 9: Michael Ruppert and "Collapse"

Former LAPD officer Michael C. Ruppert founded the conspiracy and investigative journal "From the Wilderness" (FTW) in 1998. He argues that many factors, chief among them the passing of peak oil production, are imminently bringing about a general collapse of industrial civilization. In 2006 Ruppert fled to Venezuela from a perceived threat from the United States government, but returned to make his case about the structural threat to civilization with the 2008 film Collapse.

Ruppert gave up his business interests earlier this year and relocated to a spiritual retreat in Colorado, where he still advocates that intelligent individuals should prepare themselves for the coming apocalypse with sustainable agriculture. He appeared early this morning on the overnight radio program Coast to Coast AM.

October 8: Antichrist Superstar

On this date in 1996, Marilyn Manson's album "Antichrist Superstar" was released, debuting at number 3 in the Billboard 200.

The allegorical storyline of this concept album is largely of Manson's invention, chronicling the growth into Antichrist of a worm (conceivably an echo of Nietzsche? "You have grown from worm to man, but much in you is still worm.", Thus Spoke Zarathustra.).

Along the way, a few songs like "Little Horn" - arguably the album's most aggressive - make clear Biblical references. In this case the allusion is to the dream of the four beasts in Daniel 7:





In the Bible, Daniel dreams of four conquering beasts representing the empires that had overcome the Israelites in the course of history. The last of these beasts - standing for Alexander the Great's Macedonian Empire - has nine horns, symbolizing nine Hellenic kings who ruled over Israel after Alexander. As Daniel watches, the beast grows a tenth "little horn", representing the blasphemous oppressor Antiochus IV Epiphanes (whose overthrow in the Maccabean Revolt is still celebrated as Hanukkah).

These correspondences - of beasts to empires, horns to Hellenic kings, and so on - form the contemporary consensus interpretation of the passage. But Christian theologians have interpreted Daniel's dream in wild and numerous ways over time, leaving open "little horn" to Manson as a general reference to any blasphemous usurper.

October 6: Sports Illustrated

For over 20 years now, Sports Illustrated has been running a weekly feature called "Signs of the Apocalypse", which highlights a disagreeable turn of events in the sporting world.

In the most recent SI available online, the "sign" was that a new video game named Fart Cat features a sound effect cribbed from an annoying horn blown by the fans of a sports team called the Blues.

Sign of the Apocalypse for September 24

October 5: The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event

The Permian-Triassic extinction event, occurring 252 million years ago, saw the death of 70% of all land vertebrates, and 96% of all marine species of any kind. This mass extinction - the largest the world has ever seen - took place in three great pulses spanning a million or more years. An early report describing the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" was first published in the journal "Science" on this date in 1979.

It is estimated that by the year 2100, the current Holocene Extinction Event may lead to the loss of as many as 50% of all species alive at the beginning of the industrual era - a smaller loss, by that point, than took place in the Permian-Triassic dying, but occurring almost instantly by comparison.

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."