Doomsday: 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions

 10 Failed Doomsday Predictions

By Rachel Cole

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Religious leaders, scientists, and even a hen (or so it seemed) have been making predictions for the end of the world almost as long as the world has been around. They’ve predicted the destruction of the world through floods, fires, and comets—luckily for us, none of it has come to pass.

2012 Maya Apocalypse

December 21, 2012, marked the end of the first “Great Cycle” of the Maya Long Count calendar. Many misinterpreted this to mean an absolute end to the calendar, which tracked time continuously from a date 5,125 years earlier, and doomsday predictions emerged. End-of-the-world scenarios included the Earth colliding with an imaginary planet called Nibiru, giant solar flares, a planetary alignment that would cause massive tidal catastrophes, and a realignment of Earth’s axis. Preparations for the end of the world as we know it included a modern-day Noah’s ark built by a man in China and extensive sales of survival kits.

Harold Camping

Among the most prolific modern predictors of end times, Harold Camping has publicly predicted the end of the world as many as 12 times based his interpretations of biblical numerology. In 1992, he published a book, ominously titled 1994?, which predicted the end of the world sometime around that year. Perhaps his most high-profile predication was for May 21, 2011, a date that he calculated to be exactly 7,000 years after the Biblical flood. When that date passed without incident, he declared his math to be off and pushed back the end of the world to October 21, 2011.

True Way

Taiwanese religious leader Hon-Ming Chen established Chen Tao, or True Way, a religious movement that blended elements of Christianity, Buddhism, UFO conspiracy theories, and Taiwanese folk religion. Chen preached that God would appear on U.S. television channel 18 on March 25, 1988, to announce that he would descend to Earth the following week in a physical form identical to Chen. The following year, he prophesized, millions of devil spirits, together with massive flooding, would result in a mass extinction of the human population. Followers could be spared by buying their way aboard spaceships, disguised as clouds, sent to rescue them.

Halley’s Comet Panic

Halley’s comet passes by the Earth approximately every 76 years, but the nearness of its approach in 1910 created fear that it would destroy the planet, either by a celestial collision or through the poisonous gasses it was rumoured to contain. A worldwide panic ensued, stoked by the media and such newspaper headlines as “Comet May Kill All Earth Life, Says Scientist.” A group in Oklahoma tried to sacrifice a virgin to ward off impending doom, and bottled air became a hot commodity. The Earth probably did pass through part of the comet’s tail, but with no apparent effect.

Millerism

Religious leader William Miller began preaching in 1831 that the end of the world as we know it would occur with the second coming of Jesus Christ in 1843. He attracted as many as 100,000 followers who believed that they would be carried off to heaven when the date arrived. When the 1843 prediction failed to materialize, Miller recalculated and determined that the world would actually end in 1844. Follower Henry Emmons wrote, “I waited all Tuesday, and dear Jesus did not come … I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain—sick with disappointment.”

Joanna Southcott

Beginning when she was 42 years old, Joanna Southcott reported hearing voices that predicted future events, including the crop failures and famines of 1799 and 1800. She began publishing her own books and eventually developed a following of as many as 100,000 believers. In 1813, she announced that in the following year she would give birth to the second messiah, whose arrival would signal the last days of the Earth—despite being 64 years old and, as she told her doctors, a virgin. She died before a baby could be born.

The Prophet Hen of Leeds

In 1806, a domesticated hen in Leeds, England, appeared to lay eggs inscribed with the message “Christ is coming.” Great numbers of people reportedly visited the hen and began to despair of the coming Judgment Day. It was soon discovered, however, that the eggs were not in fact prophetic messages but the work of their owner, who had been writing on the eggs in corrosive ink and reinserting them into the poor hen’s body.

Great Fire of London

Because the Bible calls 666 the number of the Beast, many Christians in 17th-century Europe feared the end of the world in the year 1666. The Great London Fire, which lasted from September 2 to September 5 of that year, destroyed much of the city, including 87 parish churches and about 13,000 houses. Many saw it as a fulfillment of the end of the world prophecy. Given such a large amount of property damage, though, the death toll of the fire was remarkably low, reportedly only 10 people--not quite the end of the world.

The Great Flood

Johannes Stöffler, a respected German mathematician and astrologer, predicted that a great flood would cover the world on February 25, 1524, when all of the known planets would be in alignment under Pisces, a water sign. Hundreds of pamphlets announcing the coming flood were issued and set in motion a general panic; Count von Iggleheim, a German nobleman, went so far as to build a three-story ark. Though there was light rain on the day of the predicted flood, no actual flooding materialized.

Montanism

Montanism, a 2nd century schismatic movement of Christianity, began in Phrygia (modern Turkey). Based on the visions of Montanus, who claimed to speak under the influence of the Spirit, Montanists believed the second coming of Christ to be imminent. Many Christian communities were almost abandoned when believers left their homes and migrated to a plain between the two villages of Pepuza and Tymion in Phrygia, where Montanus claimed the heavenly Jerusalem would descend to Earth.

The Switch to the Gregorian Calendar: Ten Days That Vanished

 Ten Days That Vanished: The Switch to the Gregorian Calendar

By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

© Jakez/Shutterstock.com

When it comes to calendars, small errors can add up over time. The Julian calendar—the prevalent calendar in the Christian world for the first millennium CE and part of the second millennium—was an improvement over the Roman republican calendar that it replaced, but it was 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the tropical year (the time it takes the Sun to return to the same position, as seen from Earth). The result was that the calendar drifted about one day for every 314 years.

One of the most pressing problems caused by the error was the increasing difficulty of calculating the date of Easter, which the Council of Nicaea in 325 had decreed should fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which at the time fell on March 21. The growing discrepancy between the date set by the council and the actual vernal equinox was noted in the 8th century CE, if not earlier, and a number of proposals for reform were brought before popes in the Middle Ages. But no action was taken, and the Julian calendar, flawed as it was, remained the official calendar of the Christian church.

In its session of 1562–63, the Council of Trent passed a decree calling for the pope to fix the problem by implementing a reformed calendar. But it took another two decades to find a suitable fix and put it into place. After years of consultation and research, Pope Gregory XIII signed a papal bull in February 1582 promulgating the reformed calendar that came to be known as the Gregorian calendar. The reforms were based on the suggestions of the Italian scientist Luigi Lilio, with some modifications by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius.

The most surreal part of implementing the new calendar came in October 1582, when 10 days were dropped from the calendar to bring the vernal equinox from March 11 back to March 21. The church had chosen October to avoid skipping any major Christian festivals. So, in countries that adopted the new calendar, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi on October 4, 1582, was directly followed by October 15. France made the transition separately in December.

Something as complex as implementing a new calendar couldn’t go off without some complications, though. The Protestant and Orthodox countries didn’t want to take direction from the pope, so they refused to adopt the new calendar. The result was that Catholic Europe—Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and the Catholic states of Germany—suddenly jumped ahead of the rest of the continent by 10 days, and traveling across a border often meant traveling forward or backward on the calendar.

Eventually, non-Catholic countries did begin to adopt the Gregorian calendar. The Protestant regions of Germany and the Netherlands switched in the 17th century. Great Britain and the territories of the British Empire followed suit in 1752, spreading the Gregorian calendar around the globe.

The Assassins; Who Were They?

                                 Who Were the Assassins?

In 1167 CE Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish rabbi, visited Syria on a 13-year journey through the Middle East and Asia. His description of Syria includes what is probably the first European account of a group that would provoke horror and fascination in the West: the Assassins. Benjamin described a warlike sect, hidden away in mountain fortresses and obeying a mysterious leader known as the Old Man of the Mountain. Over the next two centuries, returning crusaders and travelers brought back their own stories, adding sensational new details to the legend of the Assassins. It was said that they were experts in the craft of murder, trained from childhood to use stealth and deceit, and that they were so devoted to their leader that they would sacrifice their lives for his slightest whim. Their fanatical determination was the result of intoxicating drugs or a brainwashing process in which recruits were kept in a paradisiacal garden stocked with fine food and beautiful women. It was from these legends that the word assassin soon entered European languages as a common noun meaning “a murderer, usually one who kills for politics or money.”

© Valery Shanin/Shutterstock.com

After the Middle Ages, the Assassin legends continued in Europe, where lurid and titillating stories about the Middle East were always popular, and they still show up in Western pop culture from time to time. A notable recent example is the Assassin’s Creed video game series, which features an order of stealthy hyperathletic killers who scale walls and jump between rooftops to hunt down their enemies.

So, how much of this is based on fact? Were the Assassins real?

They were, sort of. The legends are based on the Nizari Ismailis—a breakaway group from the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam—that occupied a string of mountain castles in Syria and Iran from the end of the 11th century until the Mongol conquests in the middle of the 13th. They captured their first castle, Alamut in northern Iran, from the Sunni Seljuq Empire in 1090 under the leadership of Hassan-e Sabbah, an Ismaili theologian and missionary. Headquartered in Alamut, Nizari forces seized a number of other castles, creating a small geographically discontinuous Nizari state.

Being much weaker than their main adversaries in conventional military terms, the Nizaris relied on guerrilla warfare that included espionage, infiltration of enemy territory, and targeted killings of enemy leaders. One of their most prominent victims was the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who was stabbed by a Nizari fighter disguised as a Sufi mystic in 1092. As word of the invisible Nizari threat spread, their opponents were forced to take a variety of measures—traveling with bodyguards, wearing chainmail under clothing—sometimes to no avail. European crusaders were also targeted; Conrad of Monferrat was assassinated by Nizaris days before he was to be crowned king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1192.

The Old Man of the Mountain, the chief mentioned in the Assassin legends, was a real figure too. His name was Rashid al-Din Sinan, and he led the Nizaris for nearly 30 years at the height of their power in the late 12th century.

But the stories that circulated in Europe weren’t entirely accurate either. It’s important to remember that most of the information about the Nizaris that reached Europe came from two hostile sources, Sunni Muslims and Crusaders, and that the more outlandish aspects of the legends, such as the use of drugs, are not supported by Ismaili sources. Even the name Assassin, from the Arabic hashashi, was a pejorative term and was never used by the Nizaris themselves. Nor were the Nizaris unique in their use of political murder. Sunnis and Crusaders in the Middle East also practiced assassination. And, of course, Europeans were perfectly adept at killing off their political rivals long before the Nizaris came along.