The Victorian sex cult that predicted the end of the world
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One of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons begins with Homer Simpson watching a film called The Rapture and persuading a busload of other Springfield residents that the end of the world is indeed nigh. Soon they are all standing on a rocky outcrop outside town holding balloons, while Homer checks his watch and confidently performs a countdown. Nothing happens. “My watch must be running fast”, he reassures everyone. “Wait for it… wait for it…” Several hours pass, rain starts to fall, and Homer’s voice becomes a plaintive croak. “Wait for it… wait for it…”
It’s tempting to view this scene as a contemporary satire. After all, there’s no shortage of modern doomsday cults, from The Children of God – which relocated from California to Thailand in preparation for an apocalypse that was predicted to take place in 1993 – to the notorious Heaven’s Gate commune, 39 members of which committed suicide in 1997 in the expectation that they would be picked up by an alien spacecraft and whisked off to eternal happiness in outer space.
That’s in addition to the more recent phenomenon of wealthy survivalists who are currently building sophisticated bunkers – Mark Zuckerberg’s compound is reported to cost up to $270 million – as part of their preparations for any future breakdown of social order.
Yet predictions that civilisation is coming to an end are nearly as old as civilisation itself, and religious leaders in particular have long enjoyed darkening the present with shadows cast by the future. The nineteenth century was certainly no exception. In Germany, one archdeacon announced that the world would end in 1823, and settled with his followers in Konigsberg, where they were accused of promoting sex as the only way to sanctify the body, while in New York State a group known as The Brotherhood of the New Life was hailed by its founder as “The New Eden of the West”.
Meanwhile, in Britain, more mainstream evangelical worshippers were convinced that, in the words of historian Thomas Macaulay, “the Messiah will shortly establish a kingdom on the earth, and visibly reign over all its inhabitants”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/victorian-sex-cult-doomsday/.
