The Real History of the End of the World (30 page)

Oddly, there was a minor earthquake on April 20 that caused a number of the Doomsealers who had returned to the city to reconsider their doubts. One paper reported:

Poor George Erickson, who had received the first vision, was unable to flee with the others. He had been arrested the month before, and sent to the insane asylum in Stockton.
¹¹
I have not been able to find out what happened to him.

The disappointment in Oakland did not damage Maria Woodworth's credibility as a revivalist. However, for some time afterward newspapers in towns she visited continued to assume that she was a fraud. A year after her Oakland meetings, it was reported that she was conducting revivals in St. Louis and “has left that city mysteriously, taking with her $600.00, which had been subscribed to the cause.”
¹²

Woodworth wrote a number of books about her life and career as an evangelist. She seems to have believed that the visions had by Erickson and others were genuine and that they were part of a millenarian outpouring of messages from heaven. In her view, “signs and wonders” were happening every day, if one remained open to them. She wrote, “Instead of looking back to Pentecost, let us always be expecting it to come, especially in these last days.”
¹³

The Doomsealers are interesting to me because they encapsulate the history of many such movements. William Miller arrived at his apocalyptic belief through a study of the Bible and careful mathematical calculations, as did Isaac Newton and many others. The Doomsealers bypassed scripture and relied on personal revelation. These two strands run through all the Christian millennial groups that I have studied. And yet, the source of the prediction seems to make little difference to those hearing the message. Believers are converted by some other means than recognized authority. Whether they respond to personal charisma in the preacher, emotional need, their own logic, Divine grace, or a combination of all of the above is not clear. Only the effect can be documented.

1
Indiana Critic,
September 27, 1885, reports on a large revival that Woodworth conducted near Muncie, noting that she was a native of the area.

2
Wayne Warner, “Maria B. Woodworth-Etter and the Early Pentecostal Movement,”
Assembly of God Heritage,
winter 1986-1987, 11.

3
D. A. Hayes, “A Study of a Pauline Apocalypse,”
The Biblical World
37, no. 3 (1911): 171. Hayes had been in the Bay Area at the time of the prediction and was giving his account of the events, comparing them to apocalyptic panics in Thessalonica in the first century. He adds that he was also in San Francisco for the earthquake of 1906 and no one came forward to predict that.

4
Ibid., 172. The tidal wave must have been expected on Lake Michigan.

5
Oakland Tribune,
March 5, 1890, p. 1.

6
Hayes, 173.

7
The New York Times,
April 12, 1890, p. 2.

8
Oakland
Tribune,
April 10, 1890, p. 1.

9
San Francisco Chronicle,
April 18, 1890, p. 1.

10
San Francisco Chronicle,
April 20, 1890, p. 1.

11
Oakland Tribune,
March 12, 1890, p. 1.

12
Logansport Review,
April 27, 1891, p. 2.

13
Maria Beulah Woodworth,
The Life, Work and Experience of Maria Beulah Woodworth
(St. Louis, 1894), 437-438, quoted in Warner, 12.

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

—Robert Frost

 

 

 

 

L
ike most people alive today, I was born into a world that knew it could destroy itself with no help from gods or nature. But even before the invention of the atomic bomb, the twentieth century already had a strong tradition of apocalyptic thinking. Both world wars spawned novels and films detailing the end. Art also reflected concerns about the end of the world that were not always described in religious terms.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century a number of apocalyptic movements seemed to have sprung up. All the ones that I have studied were started or rejuvenated by a charismatic leader. All expected an end of the world as we know it, and most were determined to be the only survivors. For instance, the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT) bought twelve thousand acres of land in Montana near Yellowstone National Park and stocked up on provisions and semiautomatic weapons to wait for the end. Of course, when the projected end date of March or April 1990 didn't happen, and the group's leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the group dwindled.
¹

The CUT combines several of the usual aspects of a doomsday cult: strict rules for living, constant supervision, separation from the outside world, and devotion to the leader. Its beliefs reflect the broadening of knowledge about non-Christian beliefs along with world mythology. Elizabeth Clare Prophet wrote words of wisdom that she channeled from people as disparate as St. Thomas More, King Arthur, the Buddha, and some lawyer from Atlantis.
²
The CUT is a cross between survivalism and New Age philosophy. The followers spend much of the day in rapid-fire chanting to clear their minds for enlightenment but live in bunkers to fight off anyone threatening their utopia.

Even without Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the CUT continues, operating in several countries. They emphasize spiritual growth through knowledge attained from “Ascended Masters” and offer “etheric retreats” to be taken by the soul, just as it was once possible for the citizens of Atlantis to attend in the body.
³
While they state that Prophet did foresee a number of things, the Apocalypse is no longer mentioned.

Another, sadder, apocalyptic group with some of the same traits as the CUT is the one known as Heaven's Gate. The group had not been familiar to most people, although it was on law enforcement cult watches. The leader was a man named Marshall Applewhite who had experienced a life-changing epiphany at the age of forty-five and came to believe that a spaceship was coming to bring him and his followers to a new and better world, where they would live in bliss forever. He and his group were computer programmers and in other tech-related fields. They were steeped in science fiction. Apparently they heard on a late-night talk radio program that the Hale-Bopp comet, predicted to arrive in late March 1997, would be followed by a spaceship, hiding in the comet's tail.
⁴
At the end of March, the bodies of thirty-nine men and women were found at the Heaven's Gate home in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They had committed suicide in an orderly fashion, each dressing in new shoes, packing a small bag, and then lying in bed with a small cloth covering his or her face.

Meidner, Ludwig (1884-1966) © Copyright Apocalypse. 1914. Black ink and pencil on paper, 47.4 x 36.5 cm. Inv. SZ 6. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Juedisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main. Location: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu, Berlin, Germany.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY

Although most people felt the tragedy of these deaths, there was also a great deal of ridicule of Applewhite and his group. How could intelligent people believe that they were on their way to life on another planet? In the sensation of the deaths and titillating revelations about self-castration, the actual beliefs of Heaven's Gate weren't much discussed.

The last website created by Heaven's Gate was still in place when I was researching this book. Reading through Do's (Applewhite's name in the group) manifesto, I found nothing that other groups throughout history had not said.

He saw Jesus as having been inhabited by a “member of the kingdom of Heaven” at the moment of his baptism by John. This is known as
adoptionism
and was one of the heresies of the early church that resurfaced from time to time. Applewhite saw the teaching of Jesus as that of preparing other people to be inhabited by angels and eventually, in those bodies, to ascend to heaven.
⁵

However, after establishing his credentials as being in the tradition of Jesus, Applewhite diverged totally from Christian teaching, following more in the tradition of Gene Roddenberry, creator of
Star Trek
. He states that in 1975 an “Admiral” and his “Captain” began collecting an “away team” with other beings from a higher level. Using meetings and public statements, they chose the human bodies worthy of being inhabited. The next seventeen years were spent in seclusion, training the human bodies to fit into the Next Level. Then in 1995, Heaven's Gate took out an ad in
USA Today
, to let people know that the ship was coming soon. Through that, as well as trips all over the United States, the away team were able to find their missing crew members.
⁶

The website includes their final statement, dated March 22, 1997. Titled “Heaven's Gate ‘Away Team' Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space,” it begins: “By the time you read this, we will be gone.” It ends with Revelation 14:13: “Blessed are those that die in the Lord.”
⁷

The release explains that their human bodies were only borrowed and no longer needed. An earlier page on the website assures the reader that they are not a suicide cult. They would rather take their bodies with them when they go. However, as at Masada and Waco (discussed in the section on the Branch Davidians) circumstances may necessitate abandoning them. They didn't consider it suicide, but moving on.
⁸

One woman summed up her reasons for going in her video message made just before the mass suicide. “Maybe they're crazy for all I know. But I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I have been on this planet for 31 years and there is nothing here for me.”
⁹

Thousands of people have sacrificed themselves in the firm belief that they were going to a heaven. The early Christian martyrs are one example, and the authorities in their own time thought they were as crazy as Heaven's Gate was seen in ours.

One can't help but hope that they found the world they were seeking.

As Christian and Muslim influences were adapted into established religious beliefs in other cultures, the New Age groups, largely in Western countries, blended Eastern religious teachings to their original, usually Christian or Jewish, upbringing. As with the Taiping in China and the cargo cults (see the section on missionaries), groups such as the Church Universal and Triumphant and Heaven's Gate, took what they needed from the other religions without really understanding the dogma and history of them. Of course, in forging a belief system that fits ones own needs, I suppose accuracy doesn't really matter.

Fundamentalist Christians have remained a constant in apocalyptic thought and preaching. Some have made an excellent living at it. Like William Miller, Hal Lindsey has predicted the end several times. In his 1970 book
The Late Great Planet Earth
, he told us that the New World Order under the Antichrist would be established by 1988. When that didn't seem to happen, he wrote
Facing Millennial Midnight
, telling of the apocalyptic horrors that would occur in the year 2000 (see the section on Y2K). When that fizzled, he was not discouraged. He continued to produce books, insisting that the time was ripe, the signs were there, and the end of the world was coming soon. Enough people agreed with him to make Lindsey a very rich man.