It's disconcerting, but many of our ancestors didn't expect us to be around by now. The hullabaloo about the Mayan calendar's end in December 2012 is only the latest in a parade of end-of-the-world predictions throughout history (happily, all false so far). In addition to well-known prognosticators such as Nostradamus, who forecast Armageddon to arrive in July 1999, many amateur doomsayers have tried to predict The End, pegging the date to comets, planet alignments and half-cooked calculations.

The word apocalypse originally referred to any revelation of divine will; only in the modern era did it come to mean the end of the world as we know it. For many early believers in apocalypticism, as with later "millennialists," the end of this world would herald a heavenly new era, albeit with tribulations.

In 448, Moses of Crete, a rabbi, claimed to be the Messiah and led his followers to the sea, which he said would part so they could reach Palestine. Having given away all their possessions, Moses, followers cast themselves into the Mediterranean. Seeing his adherents crash on the rocks and drown'the rabbi declined to follow and "suddenly disappeared," leading some to conclude he had been "some malignant fiend" in human form.