The end of the world has been announced, with a date, more often than can be counted. It is one of the most reliable events in the history of religion. So is what follows it. The day arrives, the sun goes down in the ordinary manner, and a group of people who had given away their furniture are left to decide what to do about breakfast.
This calendar collects twelve such mornings, drawn from the small movements documented in the archive, chiefly from Alasdair Penhallow's Bestiary of Small Cults and its sources. The tone is light because the material invites it. The interest is serious. As our field guide explains, a failed prophecy seldom finishes a movement. What matters is the response, and the responses fall into a small number of types.
The five responses
Before the calendar, the classification. When the date passes, a group will generally do one of five things.
- Recalculate
- The date was right in principle and wrong in arithmetic. A new one is issued.
- Spiritualize
- The event did take place, but invisibly: in heaven, in the heart, or on a plane not open to inspection.
- Claim the credit
- The catastrophe was averted by the faith of the believers. The world owes them its survival and does not know it.
- Blame the test
- The prophecy was a trial of loyalty. Those who doubted have failed it.
- Disband
- The members go home. This is the rarest outcome and usually the quietest.
The first four keep the group together, and the third often makes it grow. Each entry below is marked with the response adopted.
The calendar
January: the Watchers at the Weir
In the first week of January 1923, some sixty people gathered on a river bank, having been told by their teacher that the waters would rise and carry off the unprepared. The waters did not rise. It was noted that the river was, if anything, rather low for the season.
Response: recalculate. The teacher announced that he had reckoned by the old calendar. A new date was fixed for thirteen days later, on which it rained, and this was held to be sufficient.
February: the Second Company of the Sealed
On a February night in 1954 the Company assembled in a hired hall with their bags packed for removal to a better world. They sang until four. At five the caretaker asked them to leave, as the hall was wanted for a rummage sale.
Response: claim the credit. By the following Sunday it was understood that their singing had moved the powers above to grant mankind a further term. Membership rose by a third within the year.
March: the Fellowship of the Imminent Morning
The Fellowship has named a date in March on four occasions. The most recent failure, readers of the cabinet's strange dispatches will recall, was attributed to the parish hall having been let to a dog show.
Response: recalculate. The Fellowship is unusual in giving practical reasons for each postponement. Scholars are divided on whether this represents a decline in faith or a healthy growth of realism.
April: the Brethren of the Last Furnace
The Brethren expected the world to be melted down and recast on a date in April 1938. They met in a pattern shop, in their working clothes, and waited through the night.
Response: spiritualize. It was concluded that the furnace had been lit but that the charge would take longer to come to heat than had been allowed for. They have been waiting, with a tradesman's patience, ever since.
May: the Household of the Open Door
The founder of the Household taught that on the first of May 1971 every door in the world would open of its own accord and remain so. Members removed their locks in preparation. Nothing opened. Two of the households were burgled.
Response: disband. The founder returned the subscriptions, apologized by letter to each member individually, and became a locksmith. This is the only case in the calendar in which the prophet is known to have said that he was wrong.
June: the Pilgrims of the Longest Day
The Pilgrims held that the sun would stand still at the midsummer of 1899 and not go down again. They climbed a hill to watch. It went down at the usual time, a little after nine.
Response: blame the test. Those who had brought lanterns for the walk home were accused of lacking faith and were expelled. The remainder descended in the dark, with several sprained ankles, and regarded the injuries as a distinction.
July: the Society of the Unpaid Debt
According to the Society, all debts were to be canceled by supernatural decree on the fifteenth of July 1932, and the ledgers of every bank would be found blank. Members had borrowed heavily in anticipation.
Response: recalculate, repeatedly. The date was moved forward by a year on eleven successive occasions. The Society is the only body in the calendar to have been wound up by its creditors.
August: the Children of the Fixed Star
A woman in a seaside town announced that a star would descend over the bay in August 1961 and take up the faithful. A crowd of some hundreds gathered on the promenade, including a number of vacationers who had no idea what they were waiting for and stayed because of the crowd.
Response: spiritualize. The star was said to have come for one person only, the founder, who was no longer to be found. She had taken the evening train.
September: the Assembly of the Unlit Lamp
The Assembly kept oil lamps trimmed and unlit against a night on which every other light would fail. The night was fixed three times, most firmly for a date in September 1967.
Response: spiritualize. After the third failure the governing committee declared that the darkness had occurred inwardly. The lamps were kept all the same. Penhallow thought it the most restful religion he had met with, and nothing in the record contradicts him.
October: the Remnant of the Ninth Hour
The Remnant numbered eleven. They sold what they had in the autumn of 1909, took a house on a moor and waited for the end, which was due at three in the afternoon on the last day of October. At a quarter past three their leader looked at his watch and observed that it might be fast.
Response: disband. They are recorded as having walked down to the nearest town in a body and taken tea. Several remained friends for life. One of them said, many years later, that it had been the best month she had ever spent and that she had never been sure why.
November: the Order of the Hollow Bell
The Order believed that a great bell would sound, heard everywhere at once, on a November morning in 1946, and that those who heard it would understand everything. Members sat in silence from dawn. At about ten a church clock struck in the next street.
Response: claim the credit. A minority insisted that this had been the bell and that they now understood everything, although they were unable to say what. The majority felt the claim was undignified. The Order divided, and both halves survive.
December: the Friends of the Tin Sun
On the last night of 1999 a small circle met to see out the world. They had no revelation of their own. They had the general alarm about the date, and a mock almanac whose cover promised that the year ahead would not arrive. They laid in candles, tinned food and a book, as it advised. At midnight nothing occurred. They are thought to have been the first readers of the Tin Sun Almanac held in our library, and its compiler, who never believed a word of it, may well have been in the room.
Response: all five, in order, over the course of an hour, after which somebody made tea.
What the calendar shows
Three conclusions may be drawn.
The first is that prophecy is seldom the point. Movements that survive the failure of their central prediction were evidently held together by something else: the company, the meetings, the sense of being engaged in something that mattered. The date gave them a reason to gather. Once gathered, they had less need of it.
The second is that the responses are not, on the whole, dishonest. To an outsider, the announcement that the catastrophe happened invisibly looks like evasion. To someone who has given up a house for a belief it is the only alternative to concluding that the last several years were wasted. People will do a great deal to avoid that conclusion, and it is not obvious that the rest of us would do better.
The third is that the end of the world has a perfect record. It has been scheduled on thousands of occasions and has failed to appear at every one. This proves nothing about tomorrow. But it does suggest a certain modesty in anyone, religious or otherwise, who feels sure that the present crisis is the last, and it lends weight to the advice of the almanac: be civil to prophets, expect less, and let somebody make the tea.