The cult of Anne Hamilton-Byrne sounds like a nuclear family parody of The Stepford Wives. She started establishing a colony in Victoria, Australia, in the 1960s, which eventually included 28 adopted children—many of them were obtained illegally and persuaded she was their biological mother. The kids were subjected to severe domineering physical and emotional abuse in addition to being clothed in the same traditional garb along gender lines, having their hair harshly groomed the same, and wearing the same traditional apparel.

In the same way that Hamilton-Byrne had turned to yoga to help her deal with the traumatic loss of her first husband, she eventually turned to psychedelics as well. There, she came to believe that she was Jesus Christ and that her family should take LSD with her while she preached. She also told them that they would be the master race after the end of the world. Due to the marginalization of LGBT people at the time, she was also able to enlist a number of wealthy ladies in unhappy marriages.

Two youngsters were eventually forced to flee their incredibly sick home in 1987, and their reports led to a police raid. When the enormously affluent Hamilton-Byrne was finally apprehended after two years of eluding the law, she was only found guilty of one offence and paid a small fine before senility set in and it was decided she was no longer competent to stand trial. She passed away in 2019, still substituting a doll for her young victims. Speaking of apocalypse, Dustin Koski and Jonathan Wojcik wrote Return of the Living, a book that explores how ghosts coexist after the world has been destroyed.

Shoko Ashara went above and beyond many of the cult leaders we've seen so far when he founded his organization in Japan in the 1980s. He asserted to be a reincarnation of both Buddha and Jesus Christ, at least in terms of enlightenment. As overly dramatic as that may sound, even before the organisation received official registration in 1989, his supporters valued him highly enough to pay for his hair, bathwater, and in at least one instance, a drink of what was purported to be his blood, totaling more than £6,000.

Supreme Truth is better known to adults who were teenagers in the 1990s as "Aum Shinrikyo." After the fall of the Soviet Union, a large portion of Ashara's followers found his claims that mankind will perish on its own following World War 3 to be considerably less persuasive, and the cult then started using violence.

Ten of the seventeen terrorist operations carried out by Aum Shinrikyo between 1990 and 1995 reportedly featured the use of poison gas. For alleged disloyalty, 19 of its own members were murdered by other members. Most notably, the group attacked the Tokyo Subway on March 20, 1995, resulting in the deaths of 12 people and the trampling of thousands of others in the ensuing panic.

Many of the organisation's most important members were apprehended and put to death during the inevitable crackdown, which also caused the group to alter its name to Aleph and go through other transformations. Since 1998, there have been rumors that the group may have not only recovered but also started to grow again.

The Shincheonji Church of Jesus, established in 1984 by Lee Man-hee, is dedicated to the idea that only Lee Man-hee can bring Jesus Christ back to life and that only through him may believers avoid damnation. They have embraced such ideologies as the notion that getting sick is a sin because it prevents a believer from being able to preach the gospel as they have grown to be one of the biggest and most extremist doomsday cults in South Korea.

In February 2020, this cult briefly became well-known on a global scale. They were the perfect superspreaders of the then-emerging Covid-19 pandemic because of their relentless services in incredibly crowded rooms and their exceedingly active preaching. One of the first major cities in South Korea to be affected, Deenghu, was said to have experienced a personal spread of around 75% of all cases by one devotee identified as Patient 31. They have thus far gotten the closest to bringing it about of all the doomsday cults in the globe.

Beijing Counter-Cult Association is a comprehensive anti-cult task force that was established by Chinese authorities after the religiously driven Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s claimed the lives of almost 20 million people. Both the Church of Almighty God and Eastern Lightning are names for one of the cults that have received the most media attention.

It is predicated on the idea that a mysterious woman from the central Chinese province of Henan was a reincarnation of Jesus. She was constantly accused of failing her government entrance examinations, which is one of the few similarities she has with Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion and the self-declared reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She keeps to herself because most members are not permitted to inquire about her whereabouts or get in touch with her.

The use of violence as a recruiting tactic is said to be one of the group's core beliefs. A follower entered a school on December 14, 2012, the day the cult predicted the end of the world, and stabbed 22 students. When a woman in a McDonald's declined a recruiting attempt in October 2014, five members of the cult beat her to death with chairs and a mop and later referred to her as a demon while holding her in prison. Pastor Dennis Balcombe claims that during the members' six-month brainwashing process, they were instructed to kill their own children. It's difficult not to support the Chinese government in its fight against the cult if those reports are true.

While David Berg placed a strong emphasis on the reverse of what Applewhite did, he placed tremendous weight on sexual purity. Not that he adopted that as the first goal statement when he founded his commune in 1968 at Huntington Beach, California. It was a self-isolating cult that claimed to be closer to Jesus Christ's original spirit during the first ten years of its existence by rejecting traditionalist ideals; Christ was so anti-establishment that the Pharisees persuaded the Romans to have him put to death. However, even the most extreme application of Christ's teachings would find it impossible to defend the 1978 activity Berg, who lived in continuous isolation, referred to as "flirty fishing."

It was basically prostitution-level free love used as a recruitment strategy. Berg defended it by using 1 Corinthians 6:20, which states that although God owns our bodies, using them to advance the faith is still righteous. It was so prosperous that it increased the cult's membership to 14,000 at its peak and led to estimates of 223,000 services being rendered through it. It supposedly also contributed significantly to child abuse.

By the time the AIDS crisis hit in 1987, prostitution for God had all but disappeared. The end of the world, according to Berg, would occur in 1993. He himself, though, stopped in 1994. The cult shrank down into the much smaller Family International after losing its main figure.

One of the most tragic organizations, the Human Individual Metamorphosis was founded in 1975 by former music teacher Marshall Applewhite and his wife Bonnie Nettles after they read the Book of Revelation and thought the reference to two witnesses to the end times in Chapter 11 Verse 3 ("And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth") was referring to them. They convened that year in Oregon and California because they thought a UFO would take them to a higher realm of existence. When that didn't happen, they relocated to Texas and lived as a commune for a few decades. They got active in early web development in the 1990s.

In his writings as of 1994, Applewhite made it clear that he did not think suicide would be required for ascension. However, the gang had developed certain routines, such as purging on tea, pepper, and maple syrup. They also believed in acting in unison, which is why one of their final actions in public was going out to eat and having everyone order the same thing. They were all wearing similar black shirts and black shoes when they committed mass suicide in three waves in 1997 because they thought their souls would be transferred to bodies in a spaceship after the Hale-Bopp Comet.

We'd like to close by making a few observations about the infamous fact that Applewhite and other men were castrated. First off, just eight of the 18 male members had consented to the procedure. In addition, a former member claimed that at the time of the operation, even the members were giggling and laughing. Maybe there are some celibate (or not) people who can relate to the feeling.

Even though the preceding entry's circumstance was tragic, what we know now pales in comparison to what Roch "Moses" Thériault perpetrated on his followers. They drifted from community to community before settling in Burnt River, Ontario in 1977. The excommunicated member of the Seventh Day Adventist church recruited his small group of followers on the promise that the world will end in February 1979. Their main interaction with the neighborhood was the sale of baked goods at the neighborhood general store.

The end of the doomsday didn't have any effect on Moses' power. Despite not having a medical education, he developed the bizarre habit of conducting all surgery on his followers, including appendectomies, castrations, and amputations without anesthesia. Before Gabrielle Lavelle staggered away from the compound in 1989 minus a newly amputated limb, his followers were too scared of him to leave. Some of them were also so under his control that they would accept penalties like beating their own legs with sledgehammers. Ultimately, Thériault was detained in 1989, given a life sentence in 1993, and met his own demise at the hands of another prisoner in 2011.

One of the most frequent methods used in Brazil's capital city of Brasilia to perpetuate the practice of enslaving people is religious indoctrination by outlawed organizations. For instance, during a series of police searches in 2018, it was discovered that 565 individuals were being forced to work for free at a church called Igreja Crist Traduzindo o Verbo (roughly translated as "Church Translating the Word"). What is their method?

In the raid on the Laodicean Remnant Adventist Church in March 2019, 79 people were made to work as forced laborers while being promised salvation before to the end of the world in exchange for their labor. They were required to wear hazardous equipment while sleeping close to pesticide canisters, sleep in tents, and pay for their own food and other essentials. The slaves said at the time of the raid that they had not requested police assistance and did not want to be set free. Because of this, Brazilian law forbade the police from ejecting them from private property without their choice.

Although the Plymouth Brethren were among the first to introduce doomsday ideas to the United States, by the time a group of German immigrants under the leadership of Johannes Kelpius arrived in Philadelphia in 1694, their ideas were dated. In Revelation 12:6 a lady runs into the wilderness and is fed by God; this verse served as the inspiration for their moniker.

They intended to establish a society of their own in a remote area and wait for the end of the world to occur before the year was through, as implied by what they said. Since they believed that the number 40 had spiritual significance, they kept their ranks at forty persons, which made them a close-knit community by necessity.

Additionally, they chose Wissahickon Creek as their new home after figuring out that it was located at a longitude of 40 degrees. They also constructed a 40-foot-tall tabernacle, which was exceptionally challenging to complete with the equipment at the time and only using wood as a building material. They kept an eye on the heavens from their numerically significant tabernacle, looking for signals that the end was near.

It must be acknowledged that not everyone in a cult of dread is a depressing drone. The sect was actually quite progressive by Colonial American standards. They brought the first telescope and established the first observatory in the American colonies. They produced popular music that has been played for many years. The forty of them happily assimilated into the local Lutheran communities in the decades after 1694. Too bad more cults aren't as friendly.

According to popular consensus, a doomsday cult that is still active today was established in 1831 close to Dublin, Ireland. John Darby, a clergyman, and his non-clergy partners, including John Bellett, an attorney, and Anthony Groves, a dentist, formed it. Since they all claimed to directly study the bible, the group did not really see a problem with having a distinct clergy from the congregation. In 1860, it arrived in America and quickly grew to 50,000+ members.

According to John Spinks, a member for 22 years, it picked up some strange beliefs along the road. For instance, members are not permitted to watch television or even go to the movies. All pets were to be put down, according to a 1964 regulation, because they served as a distraction from God. Members are required to attend a service every day, save Sunday, as a sign of their dedication to the doctrine. They are expected to attend five on Sunday.

The Left Behind film series is the best-known example of how the Plymouth Brethen's ideology has affected popular rapture media in modern times. John Darby avoided a blunder that many of the other doomsday cults described here avoided, which contributed to its growth and survival. He only stated that the rapture and tribulation would occur at the conclusion of the "Church Age," the final of the seven ages he identified in his division of human history. He did not give a specific date or even a year.