Cults and False Prophets
Prophets who promised the end of the world, messiahs who gathered followers, and communities that lived by their own rules: how each began, what it taught, how its members lived and how it ended, told from the records.
Some of these groups caused harm and deaths; others were peaceful communities. Every page is written as history, from records and scholarship, without graphic detail. Scholars often prefer the term “new religious movement”.
Waiting for the end
Movements that expected the end of the world, and the catastrophes some of them caused.
- Branch Davidians How an Adventist offshoot near Waco, Texas, came under the leadership of David Koresh, and how a federal raid and a 51-day siege ended in fire on 19 April 1993.
- Jonestown How Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple grew from an integrated Indianapolis church into a commune in the jungle of Guyana, where 918 people died on 18 November 1978.
- Heaven’s Gate How two spiritual teachers built a UFO religion that promised escape to a Level Above Human, and how 39 of its members died near San Diego as Comet Hale-Bopp passed in 1997.
- Solar Temple How an esoteric order inspired by the Knights Templar drew professionals in Switzerland, France and Quebec, and how 74 of its members died in three waves between 1994 and 1997.
- Aum Shinrikyo Founded as a yoga circle in 1984, Aum Shinrikyo grew into an armed apocalyptic movement whose 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway killed 14 people and shook Japan.
Prophets and messiahs
Self-proclaimed messengers of God, their prophecies and what followed when they failed.
- Frankists In eighteenth-century Poland, Jacob Frank led a heretical messianic movement from Judaism through Islam to Catholic baptism, ending as a secretive court in Offenbach am Main.
- Joanna Southcott A Devon farmer’s daughter who became England’s most famous prophetess, Joanna Southcott sealed thousands of believers, announced a messianic pregnancy at 64 and left behind a mysterious box.
- Skoptsy The Skoptsy, a secret Russian sect founded in the 1770s by Kondratii Selivanov, sought purity through ritual castration and survived two centuries of persecution before dying out.
- Millerites William Miller’s reading of the Book of Daniel convinced tens of thousands of Americans that Christ would return in 1843–1844, ending in the Great Disappointment of 22 October 1844.
Communities apart
Groups that withdrew from the world to live by rules of their own.
- Shakers The Shakers, followers of Mother Ann Lee, built celibate, egalitarian villages across America, worshipped in dance and left a legacy of craftsmanship and song that outlived them.
- Oneida The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, practised shared property and ‘complex marriage’ in upstate New York before becoming a famous silverware company.
- Rajneeshpuram How followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh built a city on an Oregon ranch in 1981, and how it collapsed in 1985 amid a poisoning, criminal convictions and deportation.