 This Is The Way The World Ends This Is The Way The World Ends It'll Be With A Bang (Don't Whimper) The Prophet Margin So the Millennium is here and if you haven't figured out that time is about up then you are either in love, in a coma, or with your head stuck in a bucket of shit labelled "money". And so now you want the details, all the important dates and locations, right, so you can plan your post-apocalyptic retirement home, so you can know when to convert your G.I.C.s into bulk rice and bottled water, so you can know how much time you've got to get your boarding pass for the Salvation Shuttle? What you're looking for is the prophet margin. Because, you know, if you've got a few more years to ride whatever gravy train you've hooked your wagon to then it'll make the retirement all the cushier, right? But you don't want to misjudge and be in the throes of moral decay just as the spiritual axe comes down. So who's got the straight goods? Well the first place you have to look is the single greatest recorded series of prophecies in our cumulative culture, which is of course the Bible. Now I don't know what kind of juries you got working for you, but mine came back a long time ago on this one: The Bible is Bigtime. And if you're opinion is based on Sunday School and that copy of Watchtower you leafed through on the bus then you don't have one and you should shut up. You didn't even trust anyone else's judgement of the Pamela Lee and Tommy video. And you can't blame the source just because a certain percentage of the population uses it as an excuse to act like idiots. You never would have watched Star Trek if your first exposure had been at a Trekkie convention. Read the Bible, figure it out for yourself. And do some background, check out the books that got edited out of the standard version, the Sumerian origins for Genesis, any of the many commentators. Taken together it's a strangely powerful set of documents in a wide variety of expressive forms that may very well depict with astonishing vividness a period of intense interaction between humans and higher beings, a history that may be returning in our time. So what does the Bible say about now? The obvious problem with most ancient prophecy is that it is usually expressed in allegory, and so open to broad interpretation. Even the apostles didn't understand the parables of Jesus, and had to ask. Christianity basically split with Judaism because of the interpretation of one prophetic vision. Since "proof" for just about any interpretation is possible, let's just presume that the main stream of modern end-time Bible scholarship is correct, and figure out what to look for. First of all, there has to be a temple in Jerusalem. Now this might not mean anything to you, but it may turn out to be the central issue for our time. You see, the Jews don't exist without their temple, and there can be only one, and it's not there now. In its place is a Muslim dome shrine that's been there for most of the last two millennia. Against all odds the Jews, who have been scattered since their homeland and temple were ravaged by first the Babylonians and then the Romans, have gotten themselves back into a nation state in the Holy Land in this century, but still don't own the temple mount and so can't build. In this equation the best probable candidate for a predicted "Peacemaker" is King Hussein of Jordan, who fulfills the prophecy by being a descendant of Mohammed, and whose tiny kingdom at the moment controls just about nothing except the temple mount. It was Hussein who first allowed the Jews to even get near the site in the 60s. Supposedly the Peacemaker will make it possible for the temple to be built, but then will reveal himself as the Antichrist, defile the temple, and set in motion events leading to Armageddon (WWIII set in the Middle East). If you survive this phase you'll see the arrival of the Christ, defeat of the Beast, and beginning of a thousand years of peace. It should be noted that many inheritors of the original Jersualem church, and Christians, believe that this prophecied temple is a spiritual edifice and therefore needs no physical correlate, which throws this prophecy wide open, but watch out for the building of an actual new temple anyway - at that point you'll know you've got seven years until all hell breaks loose. Unless you're one of the Christian faithful who are caught up bodily in the teleportational Rapture. This little miracle could happen at any moment, so if a bunch of the devout suddenly go missing all at once (and you're not one of them) that'll be a good sign that things are about to go south in a hurry. Revelations (the Bible's inscrutable apocalyptic end-note) also talks about what could be asteroid strike, nuclear war, global plague, etc. Other much-touted signs are the arrival of a one-world government (watch the UN) and the Mark of the Beast (embedded credit card chips?). There are so many interpretations of the literal meaning of the symbols in Revelations that you'd be better off reading it yourself and coming to your own conclusions. Islam also has its prophecy, with a Messianic return of the "Mahdi", and an Antichrist figure, though the timelines are somewhat different. There is a considerable shuffling of power in the region that must take place, leading up to Christian domination, before the Mahdi leads Islam into the final battle, so it would seem we have plenty of lead time on this one. However, one of their signs, that there would be a solar eclipse during Ramadan (the holy month), might coincide with an upcoming occurrence in December of 2002. The sophisticated ancient cultures of Central and South American had elaborate prophetic mythologies with many remarkable parrallels to that of the Old World. Probably best known for their grasp of time are the Mayans, who unquestionably had access to profound astronomical wisdom, and boasted one of the most sophisticated calendars this species has produced It starts in the year (by our calendar) 3114 BC and very specifically ends on Dec.12 2012. Not a lot of their literature survived the Conquistadors, but enough to ascertain they also expect the big date to be ushered in by a period of vast earth changes and the return of a great spiritual leader with extraterrestrial implications. Some see the recent spate of astonishing UFO sightings over Mexico City and the escalation of volcanism in that area as signs that the calendar may be accurate. Also from this side of the globe are the visions of the native tribes of North America, most of which also speak of the return of the White Brother at the end of things, a Christ-like figure they say visited them thousands of years ago. The Hopi, in particular, got very specific in their predictions, which seem to have included the coming of the white man, wagons, railroads, highways and the telegraph/telephone system. A few seem very contemporary. "The seas will turn black" (Alaska oil spill?), "a city in the sky will fall to the earth as a blue star" (Skylab in '79, which Australian observers say looked blue as it burned on re-entry?). There is reference to a distant war that will rain "gourds of ash" on their land (fallout, anybody?). One of the signs is that an eagle will touch the moon, so you can imagine what they thought when they heard the first words humans (that we know of) spoke on that planetoid ("Houston, the Eagle has landed"). But ask the average person for the name of a prophet and most of the time you'll get Nostradamus. This was a doctor in 16th Century France during the Spanish Inquisition when prophets were witches and burned at the stake. He wrote his volumes of future history in a secret code of dense symbolism, rife with anagrams and wordplays, and which jump around in time and place. It's pretty easy to read these as meaning anything you want, but a lot of smart people have been trying to unravel them for centuries, and if those scholars are to be believed it now seems clear that he was right on the money about the French Revolution, Napolean, probably Hitler, and maybe the Kennedy assassination. It seems that he also mentions 1999 as the beginning of a time that would involve vast earth changes, something falling to the Earth, and the rise of an Antichrist figure ("Mabus") that would usher a devastating war. The second name you get when you ask about prophecy is usually Edgar Cayce, the American seer from earlier this century. This untrained doctor's vastly-documented record of telepathically-acquired cures proved he was without a doubt tapping into a metaphysical motherlode, and when he looked into the future he accurately called the stock market crash, the end of WWII, and the fall of Communism. Unfortunately his end-time prophecies seem to have fared less well. He also sees vast earth changes, global plague and a great war (not to mention the rise of Atlantis), but he was often very specific with dates and most of his deadlines have already passed. Of course he might have just been bad with numbers. Once you're into the modern prophets things get downright spooky. Prophecy is epidemic. Did you know that hundreds of people on this continent have had recurring identical dreams of a greatly changed landmass, supposedly the result of global upheaval? Gordon Michael Scallion is one of the best of the new breed, a proven healer and psychic who recommends you get the map, find a safe spot and hunker down, right now (according to the map Canada looks pretty safe, but get away from the coasts and Great Lakes). Many telling the same story do so from a decidedly Biblical angle, and whether their visions come from meditation, the Virgin Mary, or lightning strikes, they all spin essentially the same end-time scenario with only minor variations. The one thing agreed upon is that the time is short. Our age has created some decidedly unique approaches to reading the future. Consider remote viewer Ed Dames who uses a telepathy technique apparently created by the CIA to analyze enemy targets. His personal research into time has also revealed an incipient earth change, Antichrist and global war. Looking at Revelations he thinks the first five (of seven) seals are already opened, that the Mark of the Beast is an incipient mandatory (and faulty) AIDS vaccine, and that the "abomination of the desolation" that Jesus refers to as a sign of the end is gay priesthood! He also has some extremely interesting notions about the role of extraterrestrials in the whole thing. And speaking of them, let's not forget the warnings given to alien abductees, of which there are now thousands on record. The most common message from this source is also one of nuclear and tectonic holocaust (and the possibility that one reason for their genetic sampling is to take a record of our kind before we disappear). Note should also be made of an emerging trend in the growth field of crop circle research that believes the small percentage of verifiably non-human-made "agrigylyphs" are in fact increasingly complex warning signs of imminent doom, possibly coming from the planet itself. And then there's psychonaut pharmo-archaeologist Terence McKenna who has devised a way (using the I Ching and advanced mathematics) of analyzing history called the Timewave. According to his projections the Timewave suddenly stops in the year 2015. If he's right then the phrase "end of time" may actually refer to a literal thing. And you don't have to be cruising at the fringe to see the end of it all. Modern science is increasingly dire in its self-prophecy, warning of potential imminent annihilation by everything from nuclear disaster to pole shifts and cometary strikes, and pointing out the near-certainty of a total biosphere collapse early in the next century given our present course of consumption. The Y2K bug may turn out to be just one of the many timebombs we've built into our program that are all about to go off at once. So what does this all add up to? The details vary - maybe each prophet only sees one possible timeline, maybe each person creates their own reality and whichever prophecy you concentrate on becomes your destiny, maybe all these people are just loopy… but you'd have to be a fool to miss the pattern that emerges from any serious look at the body of published human prophecy. On any kind of cosmic scale this shit is going down tomorrow, and whether that ends up being a week tomorrow or a decade-and-change, a flood has already been loosed and is on its way, metaphorically (and possibly literally), and it's time to choose your high ground. Or maybe you're like the many for whom an end to these self-obsessed times is so unthinkable that they prefer to die with it. I guess I just have one suggestion you: time to party like it's 1999. Do your own search of the hundreds of prophecy-related sites on the web (plug in "prophecy" or "doomsday" or "apocalypse" or "end-times" or "place your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye"). Links to modern prophecy:
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