This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Apocalyptic Movements gathers three groups three centuries apart, chosen because each expected the end of the world on a specific timetable and each shows a different outcome when that timetable failed or was pressed toward by force.
The Fifth Monarchists were English Puritans of the 1650s who read the book of Daniel as naming four past world empires due to be followed by a fifth, everlasting monarchy of Christ they believed imminent and were called to help establish, by force if necessary. Their political influence collapsed at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and the movement effectively ended after Thomas Venner led a failed armed uprising in London in January 1661 to hasten the promised fifth monarchy.
The Millerite movement grew in the 1830s and early 1840s around the Baptist preacher William Miller's biblically calculated prediction that Christ would return between 1843 and 1844. When a final recalculated date, 22 October 1844, passed without the expected return, the failure became known among Millerites as the Great Disappointment, dissolving the movement's unified following, though several successor bodies, most notably Seventh-day Adventism, trace their origin directly to its aftermath.
The Manson Family took the apocalyptic pattern somewhere neither of the others went: formed in California in the late 1960s around Charles Manson, it blended countercultural themes with Manson's own apocalyptic idea of an impending race war he called Helter Skelter, and is studied by scholars as a case of coercive psychological dominance rather than as a religious tradition in the ordinary sense, distinguishing it sharply from the two earlier movements' scriptural timetables.