|
|
 |
|---|
The end of the world is coming soon! THE LAST LAUGH? by Dick Teresi and Judith Hooper (from OMNI 1/90) Subtitle: The end of the world is at hand, again. Will we survive another wave of woeful prophecies? "Apocalyptic thinking is in the air," University of Connecticut psychologist Kenneth Ring says. "As we approach that subjective date, 2000, images stored in the collective unconscious begin to populate our dreams and visions." And nightmares, of course. There are, we found, a lot of people who think that the world will end soon -- around the year 2000, as a matter of fact. Religious fundamentalists find that cryptic verses in the Bible's apocalyptic texts actually refer to a nuclear Armageddon within the next few years. At the same time an astonishing number of people claim to be in contact with UFOs, and the message they are getting from the "space brothers" is that time is running out for our planet. The Hopi prophecies are in vogue, and they tell us that our world is currently teetering on the brink. The Mayan/Aztec calendar points to the year 2012 as the end of this age, an age that began more than 5,000 years ago. Of course, people thought the world was going to end in A.D. 33, too. And in 999. And in 1013, and in 1844. And in 1914. One of the characteristics of millennial thinking is that the end is always near. There is something different about 2000, however. "Since 1945 it began to be technologically feasible to end life on this planet," muses Michael Grosso. a philosophy professor at Jersey City State College, who contemplates starting a newsletter called _Millennium Watch_. "The prophetic symbols percolating in the collective unconscious of the West are now assuming an objective content they never had before." Now the lamentations of the early prophets are infused with the reality of H-bombs, chlorofluorocarbons, chemical weapons plants, oil spills, holy wars, and mutual assured destruction. "Many people feel that the world is now so hopelessly sinful, or just plain messed up, that there is no possibility that it can survive," notes Daniel Cohen, author of _Waiting for the Apocalypse_. We must admit that while researching this article we sometimes fell into an apocalyptic malaise ourselves. Badly printed religious tracts began to assume a weird kind of logic, and we began noticing eerie coincidences between Ezekiel and the UFO people, the Hopi and Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, Our Lady of Fatima, the Mayan calendar stone, Jerry Falwell, and the National Academy of Sciences, all of who agree we're in perilous times.
Sixteenth-century French prophet Nostradamus foresaw 1999-2000 as a time of tremendous upheaval, wars, even (possibly) nuclear annihilation. Edgar Cayce, the famous "sleeping prophet" of Virginia Beach, Virginia, saw 1998 as the beginning of a New Age -- right after a catastrophic shift of Earth's axis. Jeane Dixon forsees an evil and charismatic Antichrist leading the youth of the world astray in this decade. New Age millennialists focus on the year 2000 as a collective turning point for humanity, a shift into a more ethereal kind of consciousness. There are even a few messiahs around, notably an avatar of "Maitreya the christ" who lives incognito as a Pakistani in London. One can't help noticing that an awful lot of people are looking forward to the end of the world. Religious fundamentalists expect to be supernaturally "raptured out" of the coming cataclysm; New Age millennialists try to "heal the planet" with love and good vibrations. Bob Nelson, also known as Mobius Rex, a California radio talk-show host and author of _Prophecy_, a compendium of doomsday predictions across the ages, expects that "less than one third of the world's population will be around by 2020." He adds, "It might be best for this planet and humanity if this civilization collapses as quickly as possible." Perhaps the world really is going to end. Or perhaps the ancient vocabulary of apocalypse is simply the handiest way to express the anxieties provoked by extraordinarily rapid cultural change. "Beholding the world coming to its end amid storm, earthquake, flood, and fire [is] a typical experience of a prophet whose psyche is registering the emotional impact of the end of an era," says John Perry, author of _The Heart of History_. At any rate, something is going on "in the collective," as they say in California.
In the minds of many apocalyptic seers, there's no doubt the world will end in the year 2000 or thereabouts. The only debate is over the method of destruction. There are many "scientific" scenarios. Here's how they stack up in credibility -- or lack of same.
SCENARIO: The earth hurtles through space at 67,000 miles an hour. Think of it. What if you drove your Ford Fairlane that fast down an interstate? And what if you piled too much luggage on your roof rack? Why, you'd topple ace over teacups when you hit the first good curve. That's essentially what pole shift doomsayers predict. Namely, too much ice is piling up on ;the polar ice caps. This will cause the earth to topple and the poles to shift, maybe in a matter of hours, maybe so much as to switch places. As you can imagine, this would be very, very bad: enormous tidal waves, electrical storms with hurricane winds, tremendous earthquakes and lava flows; even poisonous gases. Not to mention the resultant damage from millions of back issues of National Geographic tumbling over in attics all across North America. WHO SAYS? Many psychics have staked their reputations on this ending: Edgar Cayce, Immanuel Velikovsky, and Nostradamus, among others. Plus hints of a pole shift can supposedly be found in the Bible and Native American prophecies, according to John White, author of _Pole Shift_. One of the modern "researchers" White cites as supporting this theory is one Emil Sepic. Mr. Sepic's credentials? "I think I went to second grade in school and after that I don't remember...." SERIOUSLY, NOW: Some scientists do think a pole shift is at least an outside possibility. "It's a consideration," says Donald Trucotte, chairman of the department of geological sciences at Cornell University. "Pole shift is a well-established principle. It's the same concept as continental drift. Continents shift around the earth, so it's possible that poles might shift toward the equator." Not too many scientists, however, believe the poles will actually change places. But even if this "true polar wander," as geologists call it, does occur, you don't have to worry about tying your house down yet. The poles would move at about the same speed the continents drift now, which really isn't fast enough to knock you off your feet. "It's not going to happen overnight," says Turcotte. "Even a million years would be rapid in terms of geologic time.
SCENARIO: Remember Noah? The doomsayers say we'd better start building arks again because we're all going to get very wet thanks to some wicked tsunamis. If you're ordering your Chris Craft now, make sure that there's plenty of room for your new Akita puppy and a mate so that we can repopulate the earth with various species after everything dries out. WHO SAYS? Edgar Cayce predicted a California with coastal cities submerged, with the Carolinas and Georgia sinking into the Atlantic. SERIOUSLY, NOW: Actually, there's a basis for this one. Except that the flooding won't be the result of earthquakes, as Cayce predicted, but of a more recent phenomenon, the greenhouse effect. The burning of fossil fuels causes an increase in carbon dioxide, which in effect turns the atmosphere into a greenhouse. The CO2 absorbs infrared rays and prevents them from radiating back into space, and we all end up like hothouse tomatoes. A little side effect is that the polar ice caps will melt as the temperature soars upward by as much as 9 degrees Centigrade during the next century. Ocean levels could rise seven feet, submerging the Nile Delta, the Louisiana Delta, and the New Jersey wetlands. In other words, another global flood, a la Noah. However, James E. Hansen, head of a greenhouse effect study at the NASA?Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the atmosphere is too complex to predict exactly what will happen. At the present time there's no computer model capable of handling all the variables. Interestingly, while the greenhouse effect is one of the most serious -- and bona fide -- dangers facing the earth in this century and the next, it was predicted by none of the great seers over the past thousand years.
SCENARIO: Those pesky glaciers, which gave us the Great Lakes and terrible weather, will come again. But this time, even if we don't freeze to death, the new ice age will at the very least reduce the acreage available for farming and we'll all starve. WHO SAYS? Ice age aficionados include California doomsday connoisseur and talk-show host Mobius Rex and New Age seer/UFO contactee Earlyne Chaney. Get this: Chaney believes the ice age will be an offshoot of the greenhouse effect. You probably thought that the greenhouse effect meant everything would heat up. Well, so did we, but Chaneian logic goes something like this: Carbon dioxide will keep the heat from escaping. The heat will then vaporize the oceans, and the resultant excess moisture will be carried to the poles, where it will freeze, and the glaciers will grow bigger. Got that? This will all happen, says Chaney, between now and 1999. However, there's hope. Many will die, but some will be rescued by the White Light Star Ship. SERIOUSLY, NOW: Actually, there is some evidence for a new ice age, No less an authority than physicist George Gamow predicted the return of the glaciers: "We must expect the ice that retreated some ten thousand years ago to come back again." Don't get out your summer snowshoes just yet. Chaney's 1999 deadline may be a bit off. Gamow set the date for this new ice age some 20,000 years from now.
SCENARIO: A comet or asteroid collides with Earth, and we're all killed or at least seriously shook up. In 1954, for example, a meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, bounced off a radio, and hit a woman on the hip. The next time it will be even worse, warn the doomsayers. WHO SAY? Jeane Dixon prophesied that a comet would crash into the earth around 1985 (whoops), causing massive tidal waves and flooding. Nostradamus also seemed to be referring to an extraterrestrial object when he predicted that "a great spherical mountain of seven stades [about a mile in diameter] will roll end over end, sinking great nations." Comet disaster was also predicted by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). (Hildegard was a kind of upscale twelfth-century Jeane Dixon. Adviser to three popes and two emperors, she had a pretty good track record, predicting the coming of Protestantism and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.) SERIOUSLY, NOW: Ordinarily, we'd pooh-pooh such alarmism. Unfortunately, this past March a large asteroid passed within half a million miles of Earth, or twice the distance between our planet and the moon. This particular asteroid, a quarter to half a mile or more in diameter and zipping along at 46,000 miles per hour, would have hit Earth with an impact that would have obliterated New York City or Los Angeles. It would have carved out a crater half a mile deep and five miles wide. A water impact, according to NASA's Bevan French, would have created waves several hundred meters high that could have swept over coastal areas. But how about death by comet, which the seers seem to favor over asteroids or meteorites? Again, this is possible. The comet that exploded over the Siberian forest in 1908 (the so-called Tunguska Event) was estimated by Russian scientists to have been several miles in diameter and to have weighed close to a million tons. But a really big comet could be a hundred miles in diameter and would do some real damage. What is the chance of any of this happening by the 2000 or thereabouts? Here the scientists differ with the doomsayers. The mathematical likelihood of a collision between Earth and a comet is about once ever 100 million years. We can't, however, be quite so blase about the asteroid that just missed us. Scientists report that this collection of rock and dust orbits the sun once a year and regularly buzzes our planet. "Sooner or later," say Henry Holt, scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, who discovered the asteroid, "it should collide with the earth or the moon."
SCENARIO: The earth will shake and split asunder. Buildings will topple. Charlton Heston will grit his teeth, just like in the movie. Coastal cities will slide into the oceans and be seen no more. WHO SAY? Just about everybody who is anybody in apocalyptic thinking seems to agree on this one. Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce both predicted widespread earthquakes around the year 2000. Hildegard of Bingen prophesied quakes, and psychic archaeologist Jeffrey Goodman predicted that the U.S. coastline would end up in Nebraska and Kansas by the year 2000. The Book of Revelation describes a terminal earthquake, and even Isaiah got into the act: "The earth will reel like a drunkard and it will sway like a hut ... until it falls, never to rise again." SERIOUSLY, NOW: Yeah, sure. Cities falling into the ocean? This will come as a shock to most doomsayers, but continents are not like rafts floating on the water. They are quite solid, with continental shelves sloping downward under the water, where they meet the ocean floor. These things are well built and firmly attached to the planet. Who do you think the contractor was, Morton Thiokol? Seriously, how are you going to knock big slices of a continent into the sea? The strongest quake ever recorded, in Chile in 1960, killed an estimated 3,000 people and dropped some 5,000 square miles of Chilean territory about six feet. Even so, large chunks of the country did not go slip-sliding away into the ocean.
SCENARIO: You know how this one goes. George Bush dies in a electric guitar accident, and newly sworn in President Quayle says, "Hey, Marilyn! What happens if I push this big red button over here?...." There's an exchange of missiles and lots of people get blown up. Others die of radiation. But enough survivors climb from the wreckage to rebuild civilization, once they've wrested control back from the mutant apes ruling the planet, that is. WHO SAYS? The Hopi, Mayans, Nostradamus, the Seeress of Prague, and the Fatima prophecy all vaguely agree. The Hopi said that "gourds of ashes" will fall from the sky, causing a disease for which there is no cure. Nostradamus predicted a horror "enclosed in containers. Launched from a fleet of ships, in a single night it transforms a city to dust and vapor...." The seventeenth-century Seeress of Prague, who predicted Queen Victoria and Hitler, described a war in which men "will sow a Mushroom, whose Seed will fall from the Sky to Earth....Life is wiped out." The 1917 Fatima prophecy predicts a great war in the second half of the twentieth century in which "fire and smoke will fall from heaven, and waters of the oceans will become vapors....Millions and millions of men will perish...and those who survive will envy the dead." SERIOUSLY NOW: It's hard to argue with this one. Nuclear holocaust is going to be a bummer. Our only hope is to count on the corruption of the defense industry and the ineptitude of the military: Maybe none of the missiles or warheads will actually work. The big scientific news of the decade, however, is the nuclear winter theory, which holds that where there's fire, there's smoke, and it's the smoke that will really get us. According to Mark Harwell, director of Cornell University's Global Environment Program and one of the architects of the nuclear winter theory, just 100 warheads exploding in major cities in the Northern Hemisphere could generate enough smoke to create a "reverse greenhouse effect." The smoke will travel to the stratosphere and cut off sunlight. The earth will grow cold, as much as 15 degrees Centigrade colder, and our major grain crops will die. In other words, we're more likely to starve than burn. "Most people point to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the models for the aftermath of a nuclear war," says Harwell. "But the entire world will be a lot more like Ethiopia and the Sudan." Previously, the potential body count of nuclear war was estimated to be "only" in the tens of millions in the United States and a few hundred million globally. That would still leave four and a half billion humans on the planet, but Harwell says the long-lasting effects could eventually kill another 4 billion. What to do? Move to New Zealand. It's way the hell south and there are 30 sheep per capita, says Harwell. You can survive on lamb chops until the smoke clears out of the stratosphere.
"And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. "And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake...." --Revelation 16: 16-18 The final shoot-'em-up described in the Book of Revelation has long been the preeminent model of the end of the world, inspiring hosts of medieval commentaries in lavishly illustrated manuscripts. Nowadays, thanks to a chorus of Protestant fundamentalists, the "seven vial judgments" of Revelation (giant hailstones, earthquakes, careening heavens, and so forth) are being interpreted in the light of a thermonuclear war. According to Hal Lindsey, a former Campus Crusade for Christ staff member and author of the best-selling _The Late Great Planet Earth_, Armageddon geopolitics involves an Antichrist who heads a "ten-nation confederacy" (probably a strengthened Common Market), achieves world domination, goes to Jerusalem, and proclaims himself God incarnate. Armageddon will start when a multinational army led by "Gog of Magog" swoops down on Israel from the "uttermost parts of the north," i.e., the Soviet Union. (One of Lindsey's chapters is titled "Russia is a Gog.") There will be a "nuclear exchange" in the Middle East, then a Chinese army of 200 million will march in. The "seven vial judgments" will be released just before the return of Jesus Christ. All the armies of the world will fight it out in Armageddon, wiping out most of the earth's population in the process. Then comes a Utopian thousand-year-long kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ himself. This doomsdayism might be a mere cult curiousity if it were confined to a few biblical literalists in San Bernardino. But _The Late Great Planet Earth_ influenced millions. And at several press conferences, the former leader of the free world, Ronald Reagan, let slip his belief in a nuclear Armageddon based on prophecies in Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and the other prophetic texts of the Bible. The times they are apocalyptic.
According to the Bible, the last days will be just like an episode of Dallas: "In the last days...men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient of parents, ungrateful, unholy, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God ...." -- II Timothy 3 Just like the seven o'clock news: "And he said, Take heed that ye be not deceived; for many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ: and the time draweth near; go ye not therefore after them; "But when ye shall hear of wars and commotions, be not terrified..... "Then said he unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. "And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.... "....when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand." -- Luke 21 Just like the United Nations General Assembly: "For nation will make war upon nation, kingdom upon kingdom; there will be famines and earthquakes in many places....Many false prophets will rise, and will mislead many; and as lawlessness spreads, men's love for one another will grow cold." -- Matthew 24 Just like a conference of transpersonal therapists: "And it shall come to pass in the last days...I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams...." -- Acts2 But take heart, secular humanists. Most of the biblical passages that supposedly presage World War III really concern ancient politics, according to mainstream theologians. To fundamentalists the "king of the north" is a Soviet leader who will help launch Armageddon. But in Daniel, Chapter 11, the "king of the north" clearly refers to one of the Seleucid rulers of the Hellenistic Empire, according to Catholic University biblical scholar Joseph Jensen, O.S.B. The "beast" of Revelation, says Father Jensen, represents the Roman Empire, and its notorious ten horns "are not a ten-nation confederacy but probably represent contemporary governors in the Roman Empire...." As for the Antichrist, "a widely held understanding of the 'number of the beast,' 666, is that is represents the numerical value of the Hebrew letters that spell Neron Caesar (i.e., Nero)."
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been filling our skies. "Marian visions have been increasing since the nineteenth century," says Michael Grosso, an expert in the visions. "It's a very confounding phenomenon connected with millennialism -- and with UFOs." While the typical UFO contactees are a middle-aged couple with a penchant for writing newsletters who hail from a sparsely populated Western state, the average BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) contactee is an innocent child from a Catholic area. Both types of apparitions typically involve puzzling supernatural events and grim prophecies. In 1917 "a beautiful lady from Heaven" appeared to three children in a field near the village of Fatima, Portugal, while other observers saw baffling flying-saucerlike phenomena. "There were apparitions over a period of six months," says Grosso. "And during this time crowds of witnesses were seeing globes of light in the sky, hearing rocketlike sounds, and so forth. There were also UFOlike effects during the recent Medjugorje [Yugoslavia] apparition. The most spectacular case was the Marian apparition outside Cairo in 1961, when thousands of people of all religious persuasions witnessed extremely dazzling apparitions of a goddess figure." There have also been recent Marian visions closer to home: Since 1970 more than 280 such messages and apparitions have appeared to Long Islander Veronica Leucken. Grosso thinks that Marian apparitions, like UFO sightings, could be a case of "collective psychokinesis" brought about by millennial anxiety. The destructive potential facing our planet, from nuclear war to AIDS, is inciting a global pattern of psychic phenomena -- including more visions of Mary." Our Lady of Fatima left behind a three-part prophecy, the first two parts of which were a vision of Hell and of World War II. The Papacy has kept most of the third part under wraps, although it was scheduled to be unveiled in 1960. But in 1963 the German journal News Europe published the alleged text, which contains many of the familiar ingredients of apocalypse: "A great war will break out in the second half of the twentieth century. Fire and smoke will fall from heaven, and waters of the oceans will become vapors....Millions and millions of men will perish...and those who survive will envy the dead. The unexpected will follow in every part of the world, anxiety, pain, and misery in every country." Et cetera.
New Age millennialism has a rather different flavor from the biblical Last Judgment variety. For one thing, the big event is not necessarily Armageddon, though there may be some rough sledding ahead for planet Earth. The apocalypse is more often interpreted according to its secondary meaning ("a disclosure regarded as prophetic; revelation") -- that is, as a collective coming of age, a gigantic planetary Bar Mitzvah. Take, for example, the following prophecies: The world will end in A.D. 2012, according to the Mayan calendar stone, as interpreted by Jose Arguelles, New Age eschatologist, art historian, and author of _The Mayan Factor_. But don't worry: There's a new world coming. The Mayan calendar, or Tzolkin, describes a 5,200-year Great Cycle beginning in 3113 B.C. and ending in A.D. 2012, Arguelles claims. This cycle, in turn, is embedded in a longer, 26,000-year cycle, composed of five Great Cycles, which also ends in 2012. (Meaningful-coincidence buffs may note that this long cycle, which Arguelles equates with the life span of Homo Sapiens, corresponds to the 26,000 years of Plato's "Great Year" and of the astrological precession of the zodiac.) "What we are experiencing," he concludes, "is the climax of our particular species and evolutionary stage -- the very last twenty-six years of a cycle some twenty-six thousand years in length!" Hoping for a heavenly kingdom sans Armageddon, Arguelles masterminded the harmonic convergence, on August 16-17, 1987 -- the very date that Aztec prophecies identified as the end of the nine cycles of hell that began in 1519 -- when thousands of people took to the mountaintops and the deserts to, well, be apocalyptic. In 2012, according to Arguelles's interpretation, will begin a paradisiacal Solar Age, a postindustrial Utopia. "Everyone will be a channel -- a medium -- and what we understand today to be psychic impressions or channeling will be but child's play compared to our actual potential." We'll live harmoniously in posttechnological New Age villages -- equipped with "solar temples," lush gardens, synesthetic pleasure domes, and "houses of energy and information" -- and hobnob with UFO' ("E.T.'s, UFOs, the 'space brothers' -- these are not alien entities but emanations of being itself") and the returned Mayan masters. If we're around, that is. Uh-oh. There's that date again. A.D. 2012. That's when Terence McKenna's prophetic software goes hyperdimensional. McKenna is a scholarly Berkeley-educated visionary who may be unique among New Age prophets in avoiding such New Age cliches as "cleansing the planet" and "increasing the vibrational frequency." His compellingly literate "raves," as he calls his monologues, have make him a star of underground radio and the human-potential circuit. He also operates Botanical Dimensions, a sanctuary for rare plant life in Captain Cook, Hawaii. He peers at the future through a computer program called Timewave Zero, based on the ancient I Ching oracle system, which McKenna believes is the "smashed-up remains" of an ancient lunar calendar. "I noticed there was something in history that science had missed," he explains. "I named it Novelty waves. It has been increasing since the universe began." McKenna's software uses fractal mathematics to map this "Novelty" as it becomes denser and denser, until -- in 2012 -- "all cycles come to zero, a dimension emerges that goes off the graph. We are caught in a temporal maelstrom, spinning around the presence of some transdimensional object." The I Ching's system of 64 hexagrams describes a nested set of timekeeping cycles, he maintains. For example: Life began on Earth about 1.3 billion years ago. Divide 1.3 billion by 64 and you have a cycle within a cycle that started 18 million years ago, at the height of the Age of Mammals. Divide by 64 again and we come to 4,300 years ago -- around 2300 B.C., historical time. Then things get really postmodern. "The last cycle began with Hiroshima, August 5, 1945," according to McKenna. "This sixty-seven-year, one-hundred-four-day cycle at or near the end of the larger, forty-three-hundred-year cycle will terminate on December 21, 2012. This comes precisely at the end of the Mayan calendar. For some reason ancient people had a fixation on this winter solstice 2012." The fact that McKenna's apocalypse coincides with the one Jose Arguelles has gleaned from the Mayan calendar does not mean that McKenna is a harmonic convergence groupie. McKenna says it was he who first brought A.D. 2012 to Arguelles's attention. "I never thought that when I came up with the date 2012, I'd have to elbow my way through a crowd," McKenna says. "Now people say, 'Oh, you're a Jose-ite.' But there is something about this 2012 date. The Mayans were obsessed with it. We shouldn't underestimate the power of mass psychology."
"In the year 1999, and seven months from the sky will come the great king of Terror. He will bring back to life the great king of the Mongols. Before and after War reigns happily unrestrained." Take the famous king of Terror prophecy above by Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French seer. What does it mean? Beats us. In her newest book, _Final Prophecies of Nostradamus_ (1989), Nostradamus exegete Erika Cheetham proposed, "In this gloomy prediction of the coming of the Third Antichrist [the first two -- we think but aren't sure -- were Napoleon and Hitler] in July 1999, Nostradamus seems to foresee the coming of the Millennium...." Other Nostradamusologists think the king of Terror may be a nuclear warhead or something ominous from outer space. Anyway, consider spending the month of July 1999 vacationing under the North Pole or at the very least avoiding Mongolian cuisine.
Ever wonder why all those people are smiling as they hand you poorly illustrated tracts called _End of the Word; World War Three_? It's because your world is going to end, not theirs. Christian fundamentalists have a golden-parachute clause known as the rapture. The rapture, based largely on two passages in 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, means that the Lord will personally swoop down and whisk all good Christians into Heaven before the end -- indeed, most fundamentalists believe, before the seven-year "tribulation" preceding Armageddon. (These pretribulationists often get into Scripture-quoting wars with the posttribulationists, who think true Christians will have to stick it out right up to Armageddon with the rest of us.) When will the rapture happen? "We don't know," says Lindsey. "No one knows. But God knows." But most people who are into doomsday arithmetic believe they'll be raptured right out of their Ford Fairlanes any day now. (Hence the ever-popular bumper sticker, IN CASE OF RAPTURE THIS VEHICLE WILL BE UNMANNED.) If you want the exact time, ask Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer from Little Rock, Arkansas, who spent 14 years studying 886 biblical prophecies. "1988 is the Rapture of the church.... Fifty-seven people will either die or be raptured within the next seven years," he proclaimed in a widely circulated booklet, _88 Reasons Why the People Rapture Will Be In 1988_, that targeted September 11 to 13, 1988 as the date. Some people were so impressed they went out and ran up huge bills on their Visa cards, but, of course, everybody woke up in the same vale of tears on the morning of September 14. There's a variation on fundamentalist rapture -- and it comes from outer space. Soltec, a space being channeled by an Arizona-based psychic who goes by the name KaRene, announced last New Year's Eve: "Should you have a cycle closing out because of nuclear devices, don't you think for one moment that your air would not be filled with craft of all sizes....All of us...and I speak for every member of the substation platform...are all working on the Exodus Plan." The Exodus Plan, or World Evacuation Project, is to New Age "star people" -- that is, UFO contactees and would-be contactees -- what the rapture is to fundamentalist Christians. The extraterrestrials who have been communicating with Earthlings in recent years warn that Armageddon, or something like it, is near, and when it comes, the space brothers will arrive in their ships and save the believers. "Some will be put to sleep to lessen the trauma," explains one Commander Jycondria, assistant to Ashtar. "Some will remain on the ships....Some will be escorted to their planets where acclimation is possible, while others may be transferred to the tremendous citylike ships. Destination depends upon the individual survivor, his life patterns and spiritual evolvement.... "
While we're all sitting around getting ready for rapture, let's not forget that the end is near not for the first time. George Santayana once said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. When it comes to apocalyptic doom, those who don't know their history may actually have to not repeat it. Before making any radical preparations for the Big Nothing, reflect upon the following remembrances of ends past: A.D. 1033 Judgment Day Various European Prophets Shortly before 1033 a great famine struck Europe, inspiring fears of an imminent doomsday. "It was believed that the order of the seasons and the laws of the elements...were now fallen again into the eternal chaos, and the end of the human race was feared," according to commentator Rudolph the Bald. As soon as the crops recovered, these anxieties subsided -- for a while. April 3, 1843 Judgment Day William Miller One of the most influential doomsayers of recent history was William Miller, a fundamentalist Protestant and biblical literalist from New Your State. Hundreds of Millerites gathered on the New England hilltops to await the coming of the Lord in 1843 -- a date based on a passage in Daniel 8:13-1 about "2,300 mornings and evenings" since the desolation of Jerusalem. (Assuming the desolation happened in 457 B.C., 2,300 years later would be 1843.) When nothing happened, the Millerites fastened their hopes on March 21, 1844, then on October 22, 1844. Despite the Savior's no-show, the Millerites evolved into the Seventh-Day Adventists. 1910 Life On Earth Destroyed By Comet Newspapers After some scientists predicted that Earth would pass through the tail of Halley's Comet, headlines proclaimed the news that poisonous gases in the comet would asphyxiate all life on Earth. February 1962 End Of The World Hindu Astrologers In February 1962 there occurred an ominous alignment of eight planets in Capricorn, prompting Indian astrologers to predict the final curtain and millions of Hindus to panic. The fateful year 1962 -- with its astrological peculiarities -- also figures in psychic Jeane Dixon's prophecies as the year of the birth of the Antichrist. Mid-1980's Comet Strikes Earth Jeane Dixon "Earthquakes and tidal waves will befall us as a result of the tremendous impact of this heavenly body in one of our great oceans. It may well become known as one of the worst disasters of the twentieth century." -- Dixon, _My Life and Prophecies_ 1988 Judgment Day Fundamentalist Prophets Several fundamentalist Protestant doomsayers have gravitated to the year 1988 for various arcane reasons -- such as the fact that it was 40 years (one biblical "generation") after the founding of the modern state of Israel. Last, but certainly not least, there's the Big One: the Apocalypse A.D. 1000. You've probably heard that in A.D. 999 people sold all their possessions and headed for Rome to await the coming of the Lord. Cathedrals were left unfinished, and work came to a halt as the end of the world neared. Every thunderstorm, every shooting star, caused panic. In Aquitaine the sky was said to rain blood; in England a meteor caused stark terror; strange omens were reported in Rome. It was millennium madness. This story had been repeated so often that it's part of the collective unconscious, prompting odd expectations for New Year's Eve 1999: sackcloth and ashes in Times Square? Donald Trump tearing down his glittering condos? Just yesterday we picked up a copy of Psychology Today and read an excerpt from Richard Erdoe's just-published _A.D. 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse_, which restates the end-of-the-world scene popularized in the nineteenth century by Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_. The only thing is, it never happened. At least not that way. "It's a legend," says Father George Dennis, a historian at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. The Italian author Umberto Eco agrees: "On that famous night [December 31, 999], nothing happened," he wrote in a recent article. "Oddly enough, the uneasiness did exist, but before and after." The year 1000 -- the Latin M to medieval man -- would have held no particular numerical significance, and millennial thinking more often revolved around the dates of empires, according to Father Dennis. Besides, the end of the world has been foretold so many times before. "There is simply no contemporary evidence that such a panic took place," concludes author Daniel Cohen in his book _Waiting for the Apocalypse_. In conclusion, then, the one thing about the coming of the apocalypse seems to be that it's forever coming. Since the beginning of history, the first thing we started thinking about was the end of history. Maybe that's what makes the apocalypse so human; it's always on the verge of being, just as humans themselves are always on the verge: of the present, the past, and the future. Anyway, have a nice day.