Traditions
The religious and cultural systems that produced eschatologies, and how each imagined the end.
Aboriginal Australian Eschatology (the Everywhen)
An ancestral order that established the world and still underwrites it; a Dreaming without an end, where the land is continuously made.
Andean Eschatology (Pachacuti)
The end as a turning-over: pacha kutiy, the reversal of world and time, when an era-world is overturned and remade. The word became an emperor's title, and the concept met the Spanish Last Judgment as two readings of the same turn.
Anglo-Saxon Eschatology (Wulfstan and the Wolf)
The end preached as an emergency: Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English (1014) tells a collapsing kingdom that the world is in haste and the end approaches — apocalypse as plain-spoken address, the ancestor of England's millenaria…
Armenian and Georgian Eschatology
The Christian Caucasus received Jewish and Greek apocalyptic early, made the Enoch tradition its own, and turned the mountains into the world's last border.
Buddhist Eschatology
Buddhism looks to the decline of the Dharma after the Buddha's teaching, a future Buddha Maitreya, and the cyclic dissolution of worlds.
Christian Eschatology
The teaching that history moves toward the return of Christ, a resurrection of the dead, and a new heaven and a new earth.
Documented Absences
Not every culture imagined an end. Ireland produced the richest otherworld in European myth and no native apocalypse; the Baltic traditions kept their end-times in fragments — a sea that will cover the land, a fire that will not spare it…
Dogon Cosmogony and the Word
A cosmos created in stages from the word of Amma, seeded by the amphibious Nommo, and tied to the star Sirius. An end that is a return, when the scattered word gathers again. Field-recorded by Griaule and Dieterlen; contested in parts.
Egyptian Eschatology
In ancient Egypt the end came not to the world but to each person, who faced a weighing of the heart against the feather of truth.
Ethiopian Eschatology
A Christian kingdom that made the Kebra Nagast a charter of election and blended it with Enochic and apocalyptic expectation under constant siege.
German Eschatology (Götterdämmerung)
A 19th-century operatic reframing of Norse Ragnarök laid over a medieval German record of Last Emperors, sleeping kings, and Rhine Sibyls.
Greek Stoic Eschatology
The cosmos as a breathing thing: at the Great Year's end all matter resolves into fire, and the world is consumed and regenerated, identical, forever. An apocalypse written entirely in physics, with no judgment, no wrath, and no savior.
Hawaiian Eschatology (Pele and the Fire)
The end in the island chain is written in the fire that built it: Pele, the goddess of the volcano, whose eruptions create and consume the land. The Hawaiian end is geological, intimate, and continuous, the land ends every time the lava flows.
Hindu Eschatology
A vast cyclical cosmology of repeating yugas and kalpas, periodic dissolution (pralaya), and the return of Vishnu's avatar Kalki at the age's end.
Igbo Eschatology
An ancestral cosmology of continuous renewal with no terminal event; the world is kept alive by the living, the ancestors, and the earth.
Islamic Eschatology
A detailed end-times schema in the Quran and hadith: the signs, the return of Isa, the False Messiah, and the Resurrection on the Trumpet.
Jain Eschatology (Avasarpini)
The Jains measure time in two vast half-cycles; the present descends through decline toward a bottom, and the universe renews without ever ending.
Jewish Eschatology
From a national hope of restoration after exile to a cosmic end of days with a resurrection, a messiah, and a renewed world.
Korean Prophetic Tradition (Jeonggamnok)
The end as dynastic script: the Jeonggamnok, a secret prophecy circulating from the 17th century, schedules the collapse of the Yi dynasty, the moral deformities of the end-times, the ten refuges of salvation, and the rise of the Jeong lineage.
Maasai Eschatology
A cattle people whose cosmology centres on the god Enkai and a broken covenant of cattle, with no assembled end of the world.
Mappo
The Japanese Buddhist belief in the end of the Dharma, the final corrupt age when the Buddha's teaching no longer takes root.
Mapuche Eschatology (Trentren and Caicai)
The war of the two serpents: the sea-serpent Caicai Vilu raises the ocean to drown the world; the land-serpent Trentren Vilu raises the mountains to save the people. A flood still at war, told across one of the most seismic coasts on earth.
Mesoamerican Eschatology
The end-of-the-world imagination of the Maya, Aztec, and related peoples, built on repeating world-ages and a debt owed to the gods.
Mesoamerican World Ages
The Mesoamerican cosmos is a series of world-ages, each created, destroyed, and replaced. The Aztec five suns, the K'iche' failed creations of the Popol Vuh, and the Maya Long Count all treat the end as rhythm rather than finale.
Mesopotamian Flood Tradition
The oldest written apocalypse tradition in the world: the Sumerian flood of Ziusudra, the Old Babylonian Atra-hasis epic, and the flood of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh Tablet XI — a family of texts that began as divine housekeeping and becam…
Modern Manufactured Apocalypticism
The industrial-age apocalypse: failed dates, reinterpreted prophesies, and the millenarian machine that never stops producing ends, from the Millerites' 1844 to Heaven's Gate and the date that became a shift in consciousness.
Mongolian Eschatology
A steppe Buddhism that received the Kalachakra war and the Shambhala myth, and an older shamanic cosmology of a world renewed by the weather.
Norse Eschatology
The Germanic and Scandinavian worldview of a cosmos fated to die in fire and flood, foretold and unavoidable, yet followed by renewal.
North American Indigenous Prophecy
The world as a series of cleansed worlds: the Hopi Purification and the Great Spirit Massauu's repeated remaking of the earth, the Lakota White Buffalo Calf Woman's promise of renewal. Prophecies nearly identical in shape, told under pressure.
Polynesian Eschatology (Ruaumoko)
The end as geology: the youngest child of the earth mother, never born, sleeps in the womb of the world, and when he turns over the ground shakes — and will one day shake for the last time.
Roman Eschatology (Sibylline Oracles)
Rome inherited Greek oracular prophecy, Christianised it, and turned the Sibyl into a prophet of the end who expected the return of a vanished emperor.
Scientific Eschatology (The Secular End)
The end without a god: heat death and the second law, the Big Rip and the Big Crunch, the sun's red-giant expansion, the Five Ages of Adams and Laughlin. The secular apocalypse promises nothing, judges no one, and carries the same shape …
Slavic Eschatology
No native canonical apocalypse among the early Slavs; what survives is a folk-Christian synthesis of apocryphal visions and a returning just ruler.
Taoist Eschatology (Li Hong and the Incantations)
The end as renewal: the Divine Incantations Scripture (5th c. CE) tells of the messiah Li Hong, who appears at the close of world cycles to rescue the chosen and rebuild society on Taoist lines. Apocalyptic faith that became rebellion.
The Albanian Absence
The Albanian oral tradition carries no native end of the world; its cosmic myths explain origins and continuity, not a final reckoning.
The Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1856–57)
The end of the world with a date and a body count: the prophetess Nongqawuse's visions of the risen ancestors, the command to destroy the cattle and the grain, the promised day when the dead would rise and the colonists vanish — and the …
Theravada Eschatology (Metteyya)
The Buddha named a successor who will come when the teaching is forgotten; the decline of the sāsana is a slow age, not a sudden end.
Tupi-Guarani Eschatology (Land Without Evil)
The end as exodus: the world will be destroyed — by flood, by fire, by darkness — and the people who reach the Land Without Evil (Yvy mara ey) will pass into it and never die. Prophets led entire peoples in migration toward it, especiall…
What Is Eschatology
The study of last things, and the two great shapes end-of-the-world stories take: a single line that ends, and a wheel that turns.
Yoruba World Cycles (Ifá)
The Ifá divination corpus carries the Yoruba account of world ages — the universe as a series of created, inhabited, and dissolved eras whose patterns the diviner reads through the sixteen odu. The end is a rhythm, not an event, and the …
Zoroastrian Eschatology
The first religion built around a future end of the world, where a savior will raise the dead and melt the evil from the cosmos in a river of molten metal.