Sylvia Browne (2008) written with Lindsay Harrison, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World.

The publication date is important here, 2008. Let’s say Sylvia Browne wrote the book in 2007. That gives us a baseline to work out how accurate her prophesies are in May 2022.

Confirmation bias tends to confirm what we already know, or think we know. Sylvia Browne cannot see a human race beyond the end of this century. With global warming that seems possible, if not probable.

‘…we’ve got a planet that’s slowly warmed to the point of cataclysmic flooding and violent weather events because of extreme levels of greenhouse gases. Rather than preserving our global forests we’re clearing them to create toilet paper…Tragically, we’ve become a cancer here, sending species after species into extinction and apparently forgetting that we as humans are every bit as vulnerable to extinction as any other species on Earth.’

One swallow does not a summer make. But you do not need to follow Postcards from the Anthropocene Age to know we’re on the same page. Our weather is switching on and off and once-in-a-lifetime events are common and becoming more probable. The lungs of our planet, and creator of our weather patterns, the Arctic is gone. A NASA study in 2019 verified that it had become a net emitter of greenhouse gases in the hottest recorded month in the history of our planet. Disasters are fine, as long as they are somewhere else. What Mystic Meg and NASA scientists is the same thing. We’re all connected.  When nothing matters, everything changes.

I’d put a tick beside Browne’s name for her prediction about the coronavirus outbreak.

‘In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatment.’

A cross against her name for

‘By 2013 we’re going to see an amazing development in the treatment of mental illness.’

Mental health problems have grown exponentially, especially, among the young. No cure involving ‘electromagnetic impulses’ as she believed. Her model is based on there is something lacking in the individual that a magic wand of technology can fix. Rather that societal pressures that also need a magic wand, but of a different sort that treats richness as an economic illness that  poisons politics and pollutes the wider ecosystem and stunts individual growth of the disadvantaged poor.  

‘We will have a very substantial drop in the crime rate’. She attributes this to satellite spy technology that monitors everyone. And the collection of a global database and an upgrade in forensic science that means there can be no secrets. We said much the same thing in the nineteen century with fingerprinting and in the twentieth century by DNA analysis. Twenty-first century fingerprinting will be of our eye iris.  Crimes such as femicide grow year on year, but are not picked up. Classified as crimes of passion. No eye in the sky can stop what goes on in our homes. And hard-core criminals aren’t stupid. They adapt new technologies and don’t think they’ll get caught as crime moves online.

‘The year 2020 will mark the end of the US Presidency.’ She might have a point there, with the Trump farrago and storming of Congress from the moron’s moron foot soldiers. The moron’s moron fulfils all her elements of a doomsday cult leader. Supported by the church vote, he too could be described as antichrist.

‘Any prophet/messiah who claims to be infallible is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who claims that all those who criticise him or disagree with him are evil and doomed to God’s eternal punishment are a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who insists that no one cares about you or understand you as much as they do is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah who believes he or she is exempt from the laws of God and society and is entitled to divine immunity from consequences is a liar.

Any prophet/messiah whose power is based on fear, abuse and threats is a liar.    

The moron’s moron’s Presidency was based on fear, abuse and threats, but it didn’t end with him leaving office.

Browne therefore gets it totally wrong with her prophecy that the Presidency would end and the President would die in office of a heart attack (although Joe Biden might, soon). As she did with the idea Republicans would grow a backbone and gain some kind of moral legitimacy. The opposite has happened. For example, Browne’s belief in a  public health system and tax bonuses for those with careers in the arts, education…’ based on a ‘flat-rate’ tax is just hoo-ha. Thatcher introduced it here in Scotland, it was called the poll tax. A morally and economically bankrupt idea. You don’t need to be a prophet to tell which way a regressive taxation system works, but it helps if you’re an economist like Thomas Piketty.

‘Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored…The long-term effects of the reorganised government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of accountability and public trust, and state government will follow no later than 2024…’  

 Everyone’s favourite prophet, Nostradamus, predicted the world would end around AD 3797, but his quatrains were of the time and of the event. For example,

The young lion will overcome the older one.

On the field of combat in single battle.

He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage.

Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

Nostradamus had to be careful what he said or wrote, because he could have been burned as a heretic and witch. Ambiguity was his friend. Context is everything. But Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, who ruled after a lance killed the king, during a jousting tournament, after passing through the ‘golden’ face mask of his helmet and piercing his eye, protected Nostradamus. The prophet predicted his own death with unerring accuracy.

In the year 1999 and seven months

The Great King of Terror will come from the sky.

He will bring back Genghis Khan  

Before and after War rules happily.

I have no idea what that means, but the reference to Genghis Khan could be a reference to Putin as the third antichrist, or maybe not. We see with our beliefs. Narcissistic sociopaths seems to be in the job description for the leaders of of doomsday cults. She lists some, such as Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, Heaven’s Gate; Jim Jones and the People’s Temple; David Koresh and The Branch Davidians; Sun Myung Moon and The Unification Church; Jeffrey Lundgren and the Reorganised Church of Latter Day Saints; Charles Manson and The Family. You could add L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology to that list. But then it gets a bit hard to stop. Donald J.Trump. Vladimir Putin. What about religions were someone says God spoke to them from a burning bush? Or was born to a Virgin, or went into a cave and came out with the word of god on his tongue, waiting to be transcribed? I quite like the story of Buddha under the Bodhi tree. But that’s an aside.

Biblical eschatology used to be like crosswords. Everybody was doing biblical calculus, trying to work out end of days. Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, when he wasn’t working on how gravity behaves or light bends, drawing on biblical sources, concluded he world would end in 2060. I’ll be about 100 by then. Maybe I’m the antichrist.

Checklist:   I’ll be dead. [tick] or worse have dementia. But Browne claimed it would be cured by now.

Heaven in these kinds of books always ends up sounding like a shopping centre you don’t want to go to, but end up there anyway.

‘As long as Earth exists, our Other side will exist too.’

Aye, read on. Free download of this book before the world ends.