4 Cults That Prophesied the End of the World

“I don't pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times, and began again in the morning,” the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes in her book Salt. It’s a powerful quote about how things that can seem like the end of the world might look different by the light of a new day.

It's also extremely applicable to some members of various cults across history who resolutely believed doomsday was coming on a certain date—only for the promised cataclysm to simply not happen. Unfortunately, sometimes, members of these cults took things into their own hands and tragically ended their own lives before they could realize that the end was not actually coming. 

The term “doomsday cult” describes a group of people who follow a certain leader or religion that claims the world is about to end. Often, these people believe that only those who follow their group's doctrines will be spared. These groups are often led by charismatic leaders, some of whom display talents for preying on people’s vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Some have had significantly more severe consequences than others.

1. Montanism
2. The Society of the Women in the Wilderness
3. Aum Shinrikyo
4. Heaven’s Gate

Montanism

Montanism began as a subsection of the Christian church that emerged in the 2nd century C.E. in Phrygia, Asia Minor, which is Turkey today. Most writings from the group no longer exist, but according to some historians who chronicled the event, the group began with Montanus, a Christian convert who began claiming that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him around the year 156. He soon gained two female followers, Priscilla and Maximilla, who also began to prophesize. Their sect quickly attracted followers across Asia Minor.

One of the group's key beliefs was that the Second Coming of Christ and its ensuing burst of apocalyptic judgment was set to happen soon. They were not the only sect of Christianity to espouse this belief, but the Montanists specifically believed that heaven was going to open up on Earth in a specific location in Phrygia, and many followers left their homes to go there. The Montanists were excommunicated from the church around 177, but some of their beliefs continued to persist for centuries.

The Society of the Women in the Wilderness

One of the earliest known apocalyptic religious communities to settle in America originated in Germany, where a mathematician named Johan Jacob Zimmerman began amassing followers by blending teachings from Pietism, a version of Lutheranism that emphasizes personal holiness over church doctrine, with his studies in alchemy and astrology. 

Zimmerman wound up predicting that the world would end in 1694 based on some mathematical calculations and a single line in the Bible: “And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.” He decided that 40 of his male followers should move to the New World settlement of Pennsylvania, where William Penn had developed a reputation for allowing a wide variety of religious groups to practice, and await the apocalypse there. 

Zimmerman died before his vision could materialize, but a Transylvanian named Johannes Kelpius took up the mantle and successfully oversaw the group’s journey to Pennsylvania's Wissahickon Valley. Once there, he also spearheaded the construction of a large wooden tabernacle that included a chapel and an observatory. One member of the group was assigned to watch the sky each night for signs of the world’s end, but when the world still existed after the end of 1694, they changed their predicted end date to 1700.

That year, on the summer solstice, some group members claimed to have seen an angelic being in the woods. However, the world didn’t end then either. Kelpius died in 1708, and the group mostly dissolved after that. Still, the group’s legacy has persisted in a rather unexpected way: some of the hymns that members composed remain in rotation today.

Aum Shinrikyo

The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo is best known for unleashing a cloud of the nerve agent sarin into a series of Tokyo subway stations, killing 13 and sickening thousands of others.

The group emerged in Japan in the 1980s and started as a spiritual organization that mixed Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Its founder, Shoko Asahara, claimed he was Christ as well as the first enlightened master since the Buddha.

The group attracted thousands of members, including many highly educated yet disillusioned university graduates. It eventually descended into a doomsday cult that claimed World War III was nigh, and only their followers would survive and usher in a subsequent golden age.

The group escalated its violent tactics amid fear that the Japanese government was coming after them, leading to the subway attack. Its leader was executed along with twelve other high-ranking cult members in 2018, but a new version of the group has continued to exist, though it now calls itself Aleph.

Heaven’s Gate

The cult that came to be known as Heaven’s Gate began when a former theology student named Marshall Herff Applewhite met a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. The pair were both in transitional periods in their lives and quickly formed a spiritual bond. 

Eventually, they both came to believe that when the Bible mentioned angels and God, it actually was speaking of a race of extraterrestrials who would soon come to Earth, sparing those who were faithful to them and destroying the rest. The pair began teaching classes based on this belief, and soon attracted followers. As their influence grew, so did the scale of their claims. The pair soon began saying they themselves were aliens who had come to Earth to guide people towards the truth.

After Nettles died of cancer in 1985, Applewhite began espousing a belief that death was really a way of shedding one’s human body so the soul could be moved into an alien body. He also began claiming that the U.S. government was working with evil aliens. 

In 1995, astronomers announced that the Hale-Bopp comet was set to pass Earth in 1997. Applewhite latched onto this idea and began preaching that the comet was really a cover for an incoming spacecraft that would take worthy Earthlings into the cosmos, thus saving them from impending destruction. Between March 22 and 26, 1997, 39 people including Applewhite committed suicide, believing their consciousnesses would be saved and brought to heaven.

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