Day 4 of YACHT‘s guest-blogging. If you need to play catch-up, check out their previous posts on Freemason Fashion Week, Cults You Didn’t Know Were Cults, and yesterday’s Favorite Secret Cult Rituals. Today, YACHT’s Jona and Claire move on from cults to discuss the occult.
Without a tinge of apocalyptic fervor, you just can’t have a good, rip-roaring cult. Nor can you really live your life to the fullest without being secure in the knowledge that soon — perhaps today, perhaps a decade from now — it will all be taken away by comet impacts, benevolent (or malevolent) aliens, or the Lord’s holy fire. Here are the apocalyptic prophecies we wouldn’t have minded seeing materialize. What can we say? Space brothers, we’re ready to go!
Year: 1987 Prediction: José Argüelles, the same great nut whose sacred, psychedelic mathematics are feeding much of the current ardor for the 2012 Mayan apocalypse, predicted that August 16, 1987, would bring about the “Harmonic Convergence.” The term refers to a perfect alignment of 8 of our solar system’s planets into a configuration called a grand trine, and it was said to correspond with a great energy shift of the earth’s mojo from warlike to peaceful — a new era, and the beginning of the countdown to the end of the world.
Year: 1997 Prediction: Peaceful aliens riding in the wake of Comet Hale-Bopp were going to pass close enough to pick up the hitchhiking souls of “enlightened” humans in order to take them to the next level of consciousness. The only ticketed passengers for this cosmic trip? The 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who strapped on matching Nike sneakers for their So-Cal mass suicide.
Year: 2000 Prediction: The turn of the millennium inspired countless prophecies and millennial cults—some as bombastic as Morningland, which claimed that Christ would return in a UFO “the size of Texas.” The more common cult beliefs were that the world would be destroyed on January 1st, 2000, and that a UFO would spare only those faithful to the group from this destruction (rapture!) Most groups, like the Aquarian Concepts Community in Sedona, Arizona, dissolved shortly after Y2K passed without a peep.
Year: 2001 Prediction: According to the Unarius Academy of Science—a heartfelt pseudoscience group founded in the early 1950s by Ernest and Ruth Norman, who claim to study the “interdimensional psychodynamics of the mind”—the so-called Space Brothers were to arrive in San Diego in a fleet of 33 spaceships, which would become the first of many light-filled institutions of higher learning. By anticipating this arrival, mankind might be able to join the “Interplanetary Conclave of Light,” a cosmic United Nations.
Year: 2003 Prediction: Under the tutelage of Dr. Malachi Z. York, a black supremacist and convicted child molester who claims to be a native of the planet Rizq, the Nuwaubian Church believed that a spacecraft from the planet Illyuwn would visit Earth on May 5th, 2003, and take 144,000 people away and train them for a battle back on Earth a thousand years later against Devil worshipers, called Luciferians. All was quiet on the appointed date, which passed with Dr. York in jail on sex abuse charges.
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