I have never known a time when cranks weren’t yelling about the end of the world. Periodically, some crank emerges, we’ll call hall him the Master Crank or Crank Superior, and picks a hard date for the end of the world which is near enough that he can expect to see it. He makes a “persuasive” argument and gathers a large group of believers who dutifully get ready for it. When the date fails to deliver the end, sometimes it gets revised upward, and so on.
Now, it could just be my western bias, being an American without deep knowledge of the world beyond the west, but I never hear about eastern doomsday cults. I know about certain beliefs about cycles of rebirth and destruction from certain flavors of Hinduism, but I never hear about this as an event to expected soon (or worried about, much). Am I correct in this observation? Is doomsday obsession a western phenomenon? Is it somehow related to Christian beliefs in the Apocalypse?
If that last were the only explanation, then I’d expect there to have been an uptick in doomsday cults in places following an expansion of Christianity.
I think a lot of people had beliefs about the end of the world, but perhaps it really was the Jews (not just Jesus – I think the Dead Sea scrolls were written by a group with similar beliefs) that began to claim that it would come imminently.
There are plenty of cranks everywhere. It may be more of a Western thing than Eastern, but that might partly be because there’s tendency in Eastern philosophy to see destruction heralding the way for rebirth or creation (you know, the yin/yang thing).
I know that Hindus have a calendar that calls for periodic destruction of the world.
The Aztecs and Mayans may not be Eastern per se, but are good evidence of non-European doomsday believers. I think the Americas below the Rio Grande were pretty much full of people who believed the end was nigh except for a steady stream of sacrifices. (Yes, I’m sure there were plenty of peaceful, non-sacrificing exceptions).
Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese cult that believes in a nearing apocalypse. Of course, they’re something of a mishmash of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions so I suppose you could blame Western influence.
But… we could blame Judeo-Christianity’s apocalypse fixation on Zoroastrianism, which was itself Eastern.
Damn, I knew about Aum Shinrikyo, but I don’t have a solid grounding in what they’re all about.
I should have remembered Meso-America, a lot of their mythology is pretty bleak (well, Aztec mythology, I can’t claim special knowledge of much of the rest of the area).
Lastly, interesting point about Zoroastrianism. Just so, it still feels like it’s much more widespread in Europe and the US. I’m ignoring the possibility that I’m just being obtuse and ignoring the evidence, for the moment, but I may have to accept that hypothesis later.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the Maya, but it seems like most of middle and South Americans believe in a sort of death/creation cycle. The sun dies each night and then is reborn each morning, for example. Sacrifices were used as part of the whole system - by causing death, you also cause the creation or rebirth. Both seem to heavily emphasize the cyclical nature of days, years, seasons, moon phases, etc. So they didn’t necessarily believe in one single apocalypse, but in a cycle where you’d have a period of destruction followed by a period of growth.
Except for the cyclical nature, that’s awfully similar to the Judeo-Christian apocalypse, where Armageddon is followed by a period of peace, plenty, health and closeness to God. (Whether you see that as a physical here-on-Earth thing or a disembodied there-in-Heaven thing varies from one group to the next).