The Little Book of the End of the World (20 page)

First referenced in 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by the University of Chicago’s
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
magazine and counts down humanity’s slow approach towards global disaster, which is represented by midnight.

Over the seven decades since its creation, the clock has moved both forward and backwards, beginning at seven minutes to midnight in 1947. At its closest, the clock was set at two minutes in 1953, with both the USA and USSR testing new nuclear weapons; with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the clock was at its furthest setting of seventeen minutes to midnight.

With the end of the Cold War, the doomsday clock has become somewhat forgotten, although an update is still published each year by the University of Chicago. Since 2007, the doomsday clock has also taken global warming into account, leading to a significant jump towards midnight.

The art for the original doomsday clock, as featured on the cover of the 1947 magazine, was designed by Martyl Langsdorf, whose husband worked on the Manhattan Project.

18

ALTERNATIVE BELIEFS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

While the
völkisch
movement arose in Germany, other parts of the world were experiencing their own resurgence of pagan and alternative religions, and the twentieth century saw a significant increase in new expressions of faith that developed and built on existing beliefs.

Some of these beliefs focused on religion: others simply became well-known conspiracy theories that courted the attention of the media and the public alike.

ALEISTER CROWLEY AND THELEMA

Aleister Crowley has become one of the best-known occultists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He formed the Thelemic movement after he claimed to have had an experience with a divine being named Aiwass during a trip to Egypt.

Crowley believed that Aiwass had dictated a new religious book to him, which became known as the Book of the Law, the basis for a new religion that reintroduced the Egyptian gods to the present day. Crowley considered the twentieth century as the Age of Horus, when a new era of thought and morality would be introduced, and he referred to this religion as Thelema.

Thelema does not have a specific theory of how the world might end but uses some of the imagery common to other religions, including the goddess Babalon, the personification of a divine goddess – she is represented in similar terms to the Whore of Babylon from Revelations.

Crowley was openly involved in two separate secret organisations: the Order of the Temple of the East, itself claiming inspiration from the historical Bavarian Illuminati, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and as with many other secret societies, both of these organisations have become part of conspiracy theories regarding the Apocalypse and the New World Order.

ANTON LAVEY AND THE CHURCH OF SATAN

Born in Chicago in 1930, LaVey is very much the picture of the modern Satanist with his shaved head, goatee beard and ring-bedecked fingers. LaVey’s early life was spent interacting with the arts: he worked as an organist and a psychic investigator, and even claimed to have had a brief affair with a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe.

LaVey had an interest in philosophy and the occult, specifically the imagery that went along with them, and this interest paved the way for the creation of the Church of Satan.

Contrary to the name, LaVey’s Church did not revolve around the worship of the forces of evil, but rather the promotion of the self: LaVey responded to Milton’s human description of Satan in
Paradise Lost
, a proud man in touch with his own selfish ways. In Satan, LaVey saw a representation of humanity’s carnal and base desires that were suppressed by the practises of larger and organised religions.

LaVey also challenged the existence of a God: like Hobbes and Marks, he believed that God was created by humanity as an illusion that provided comfort in the suggestion that there was some benevolent force overseeing a person’s life.

LaVey was a popular speaker and released numerous books and albums inspired by his Satanic creed. LaVey, his family and other members of the Church of Satan made many media appearances to distance themselves from the public opinion of ritual abuse and sacrifice, reminding the media that they were not affiliated with dark forces, but rather the human condition.

So great was LaVey’s belief in the Church of Satan that his youngest child, born in 1993, even bears the name Satan LaVey.

LaVey’s form of Satanism should be considered separately from ‘theistic’ Satanism, or the worship of Satan as a god or divine figure. This type of Satanism supposedly involved human sacrifice and ritual abuse, but proof of its existence is found only in theory and accusations. Nevertheless, humanity has responded to this particular form of Satanism, and it was a contributing myth in the persecution of ‘witches’ and folk medicine and beliefs.

WILLIAM GUY CARR

William Guy Carr served in the Canadian navy during both the First and Second World Wars. When a veteran of two world wars has a theory that a third could be on the way, it makes his argument all the more believable, and Carr became an authoritative conspiracy theorist of the twentieth century.

Carr believed that both of the world wars had been orchestrated to bring about a significant change in worldwide government: the First World War had brought an end to most of the European monarchies, while the Second World War had been caused to construct the victory of Political Zionism over Fascism. Carr foresaw a Third World War involving a conflict between Zionists and Islamic forces, in which both sides would wipe each other out.

Carr believed that these wars were orchestrated by a specific movement that he named the Synagogue of Satan, taken from the Book of Revelations. In fact, Carr suggests that the movement at work in the twentieth century is the same movement as that at work through the Bible, oppressing the faithful at all turns.

Carr provided little basis for proof of his accusations, but his thought processes have proven to be a recurring theme of paranoia and fear aimed at people and beliefs that are not wholly understood.

APOCALYPTIC CULTS: SUICIDE AND DEATH

The latter half of the twentieth century saw widely reported occurrences of mass suicide, many of which had religious and Apocalyptic connotations.

Ritualised suicide is not unique to the twentieth century or the Western world: the Japanese tradition of seppuku involved samurais taking their own life, either because they had dishonoured themselves or were in danger of being caught by an enemy. The practice became well known to the Western world after the kamikaze pilot attacks of the Second World War.

However, the suicide cults of the late-twentieth century had some very different motivators than shame and honour: they specifically saw themselves in relation to the End of the World.

The Order of the Solar Temple

Started in Geneva in 1984 by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, the Order of the Solar Temple styled itself on the existence of the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians and the Priory of Sion. However, the Order of the Solar Temple also had the specific intention of preparing the world for the Second Coming.

The Order spread from Europe to Canada, attracting several high-profile and successful followers, many of whom were happy to financially support the Church. With the End of the World an imminent threat, the Order condoned stock-piling of weapons, arms and provisions as preparations for the Endtimes.

In 1994, Di Mambro supposedly ordered the death of a child that had been born into the Order, claiming that the child was the Antichrist. Rumours suggest that the child was conceived following Di Mambro’s infidelity with the child’s mother. Several of his followers questioned the order, and Di Mambro began to lose authority over his followers.

On 5 October of the same year, forty-eight bodies were discovered at two separate locations in Switzerland, the result of a mass suicide: twenty-three bodies were found at a secret chamber in Cheiry, with a further twenty-five at Granges-sur-Salvan. Authorities were initially alerted to both scenes after locals reported fires.

All of the bodies were found in similar circumstances, with their heads covered in plastic bags, lying on the ground in a star formation. Many had gunshot wounds, and some had been drugged, although it appeared that all of the deceased had died willingly.

Both sites were rigged with devices intended to burn down the locations, with both Di Mambro and Jouret’s bodies found amongst the deceased.

Unfortunately, these were not isolated incidents: shortly after these mass suicides, two further bodies were found in Quebec with ties to the Order; in late 1995 a further sixteen bodies were found in France and in 1997 a further mass suicide took place in Quebec.

Heaven’s Gate

The Heaven’s Gate cult has its origins in 1972 when Marshall Applewhite was hospitalised and met nurse Bonnie Nettles. The two became fast friends and kindred spirits, in more ways than one. Both abandoned their families, although there was no suggestion that they were a couple: in fact, Applewhite’s tastes may have leaned towards a different gender to Ms Nettles.

Applewhite and Nettles both considered themselves to have been enlightened by forces from beyond the Earth. They embraced New Age spirituality, combining it with religious and scientific concepts to create the Heaven’s Gate cult. They believed that the Earth would soon be ‘recycled’, and that humanity was on the cusp of moving on to the Next Level. This transition would require the cult members to abandon all of their connections to the Earthly realm, including their belongings and physical forms. Applewhite and Nettles suggested that extraterrestrial forces would help on their journey to the Next Level.

When Nettles passed away from cancer, Applewhite claimed that she had already moved on to the Next Level and that she had since returned to visit him, encouraging him to prepare for the next step of the cult’s journey.

In March 1997, Applewhite convinced thirty-eight of his followers that the approaching Hale-Bopp comet was the key to their ascension. He was convinced that there was a spaceship travelling behind the comet, and if the cult took their lives, their spirits would be brought aboard the spaceship and to the Next Level.

Applewhite and his followers were discovered dead in a rented mansion in San Diego, their faces draped in purple cloth: all of the cultists had died from ingesting poison, a mix of cyanide and arsenic. One of the Heaven’s Gate cult was later named as Thomas Nichols, the brother of actress Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura in the 1960s TV series
Star Trek.

If Hale-Bopp brought any revelations of the Next Level, there are no suggestions that this was experienced anywhere else other than amongst Applewhite’s followers.

Jonestown

Although not linked to the End of the World, the phenomenon of suicide cults can’t truly be discussed without mentioning the Jonestown mass suicides of 1978.

Born in 1931 in Indiana, Jim Jones was a practicing communist at a time when any such activity was frowned upon in his native USA. Jones formed a Church movement, the Peoples Temple, which participated in faith healing and community outreach programmes in San Francisco; in reality, any ‘healing’ was just a front for raising money, while Jones’ work in the community was a cover for practising socialist ideals in the form of religion.