What ends—and what continues? A guided catalog of stories, sources and distinctions.
How to read this catalog
End-time narratives ask what can survive when an established world breaks apart. Some describe a final judgment, some a restored creation, some recurring ages. A calendar transition is something different again. “Myth” here names a meaning-bearing narrative, not a synonym for a lie.
This catalog compares ten traditions without claiming that they all teach the same thing. A sacred text documents a teaching; it does not verify a future event. Dates, translations, community perspectives and differences within traditions matter.
Each entry identifies a narrative, its form of time and a limit to the comparison. The closing sections add a reading guide and a record of the main corrections to the notebook.
Zoroastrianism · Frashokereti
Frashokereti describes the final renovation of creation and the overcoming of evil. Later Zoroastrian accounts include resurrection, a saviour and purification. The destination is a perfected world, not an endless alternation of destruction and rebirth.
Time pattern: a history moving toward final renewal. The notebook’s summary incorrectly placed Zoroastrianism among repeatedly cycling worlds. A sequence of ages within a story does not make its final outcome cyclical.
Source limit: Encyclopaedia Iranica distinguishes early material from more developed later sources. Similarities with Jewish, Christian and Islamic ideas deserve study, but a simple claim that one tradition directly supplied all the others goes beyond what the evidence settles.
- Encyclopaedia Iranica · Eschatology
Specialist account of final renovation, textual layers and disputed influence.
Norse traditions · Ragnarök
In the Prose Edda, the breakdown of bonds and an immense winter precede a battle in which major gods die. Fire and the sea overwhelm the world; afterwards, the earth rises green again. Survival and renewal belong to the story alongside destruction.
Time pattern: catastrophe followed by a renewed world. This is not enough to establish an indefinitely repeating cycle. Snorri’s account is one medieval witness to older traditions, not a transcript shared by every Norse community.
Reading question: what changes when the powers expected to protect the world are themselves mortal? The narrative can be read as a confrontation with limits rather than as a coded timetable for modern events. That is an interpretation offered here.
- Snorri Sturluson · Prose Edda
Historical English translation; the account includes destruction and the returning earth.
Hindu traditions · Kali Yuga and Kalki
The Bhagavata Purana’s twelfth book describes moral disorder in the Kali age and the appearance of Kalki, an incarnation of Vishnu. After his intervention, a new Satya or Krita age begins. The cited chapter places this within a succession of four ages.
Time pattern: recurring ages and the restoration of dharma. Ending an age is not the same as permanently ending time or all existence.
Source limit: the linked Vedabase text is a devotional translation and commentary from a particular Vaishnava tradition. It supplies a clear textual example, not a single voice for all Hindus. The narrative should not be turned into an endorsement of contemporary violence against people labelled impure.
- Bhagavata Purana · 12.2
Primary religious text in a Vaishnava translation, with commentary.
Buddhist texts · Seven suns and Maitreya
The Seven Suns discourse, Anguttara Nikaya 7.66, uses the progressive drying and burning of the world to teach the impermanence of conditioned things. It is not a modern astronomical forecast.
The future Buddha Metteyya, better known by the Sanskrit name Maitreya, appears in a different discourse, Digha Nikaya 26. There the setting includes the recovery of long life and prosperity after decline.
Time pattern: impermanence and long transformations, described through different teachings. The notebook combined the seven suns and Maitreya into one continuous sequence. This edition separates them: the presence of both motifs in Buddhist literature does not make them consecutive episodes of a single text.
- Anguttara Nikaya 7.66
The Seven Suns discourse.
- Digha Nikaya 26
Separate discourse describing the future Buddha Metteyya.
Christianity · Judgment and new creation
Revelation contains images of confrontation, judgment and a transformed creation. Chapter 21 describes a new heaven and earth and the end of death and mourning. Its horizon includes restoration, not destruction alone.
Time pattern: a decisive transformation toward a final state. Christians differ in how literally they interpret the imagery and how they relate its scenes to history. The catalog therefore does not offer a universally accepted sequence of coming events.
Reading question: is the narrative being used to sustain hope and responsibility, or to assign today’s enemies a predetermined role? The existence of a sacred image cannot, by itself, verify a present-day political identification.
- Revelation 21
Primary text: new creation and the ending of death and mourning.
Islam · Resurrection and the Hour
Qur’an 7:187 places knowledge of the Hour with God. A report in Sahih Muslim 2901a lists signs including the Dajjal, the descent of Jesus, Gog and Magog, and upheavals in the natural world.
Time pattern: the approach of resurrection and judgment, rather than an indefinitely recurring sequence of worlds. The Qur’anic passage and the hadith are different kinds of textual evidence and should be identified separately.
Source limit: this brief entry does not collapse Sunni and Shiʿi accounts, or their differing expectations of the Mahdi, into one timetable. A list of signs is not a warrant to calculate a date or declare that a particular news event fulfils it.
- Qur’an · 7:187
Knowledge of the Hour.
- Sahih Muslim · 2901a
Primary hadith collection: the reported signs.
Judaism · The Day of the Lord
Amos 5:18–20 challenges those who desire the Day of the Lord: the passage describes darkness rather than the easy victory they expect. It directs attention back toward the community being addressed, rather than assuring it that judgment belongs only to outsiders.
Time pattern: divine intervention and judgment in a prophetic setting. This passage is not a complete account of Jewish beliefs about the messianic age, resurrection or the world to come.
Reading question: what happens when an anticipated day of triumph becomes a demand for self-examination? Keeping that question visible avoids reducing a diverse tradition to a single catastrophic finale.
- Amos · 5:18–25
Primary text in the Sefaria library.
Hopi · Begin with the living community
The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office describes traditional knowledge as teaching people how to live, carried through speaking, listening and multiple levels of meaning. It also documents the harm of publishing and reusing cultural material without permission or context.
Verification limit: the “nine signs” and “blue star” list in the notebook has not been established here as an authorised or universally shared Hopi teaching. This catalog therefore leaves that prophecy sequence unconfirmed rather than repeating it as fact.
No time pattern is assigned on that incomplete basis. The entry remains an invitation to learn from properly attributed public Hopi voices. Leaving a gap visible is more accurate than filling it with an attractive story borrowed from an uncertain source.
- The Hopi Tribe · Cultural Preservation Office
The community’s own account of traditional knowledge and cultural authority.
Nahua / Mexica · The Five Suns
The Five Suns narrative places the present world among a succession of earlier worlds. An expert explanation published by Mexicolore connects the fifth era with the sign 4-Movement and its anticipated ending through an earthquake.
Time pattern: successive world eras. This is different from claiming that every destruction automatically begins another identical cycle, or that a calendar sign supplies a unique date on our calendar.
The notebook treated Huitzilopochtli as an uncomplicated name for the current sun and made the end depend on sacrifice ceasing. Those compressed claims are not retained here without a source establishing that particular version. Different accounts and the interpretation of the Sun Stone need their own context.
- Mexicolore · The fifth world and 4-Movement
Specialist educational account; supports the limited claim about the fifth era.
Maya · A calendar turn, not doomsday
The Smithsonian’s Living Maya Time project identifies 21 December 2012 as the close of an important Long Count cycle. Its account explicitly challenges the doomsday story built around that date.
Time pattern: calendar reckoning and the completion of a period. The Maya entry belongs in this catalog partly because outsiders turned a calendrical boundary into an end-of-world claim.
The earlier image of a counter simply resetting to zero is too blunt. A completed cycle does not mean the whole calendar, the culture or the future disappears. The museum project also centres Maya people as a living presence, not a vanished civilisation whose meaning outsiders alone can interpret.
- Smithsonian · The meaning of 2012
Museum account of the cycle ending and its interpretation.
- Smithsonian · The calendar system
Long Count and Calendar Round context.
Compare without flattening the differences
Three distinctions help. Final renovation is not the same as endless recurrence. The destruction of a world is not the same as a change of age. And a calendar boundary is not, by itself, a prophecy.
Some of the accounts gathered here share images of fire, upheaval, judgment or renewal. That resemblance invites comparison; it does not establish a single hidden message, a common origin or an identical social function.
Our interpretation is that these stories can open questions about justice, loss, responsibility and continuity. They can also be used to legitimise exclusion. Read the particular text, ask who is telling it and notice whose voice is missing. A useful comparison makes the differences easier to see.
What changed in this edition
Zoroastrian final renewal is no longer called a repeating cycle. The Buddhist Seven Suns discourse and Maitreya passage are treated separately. The Hopi prophecy list remains unverified. The Maya calendar is distinguished from the modern doomsday story.
Unsupported details and quotations were removed or qualified. Links now sit beside the relevant entry. English and German carry the same revised content; the German page is no longer an English source text with only a translated introduction.
The original Obsidian notes remain unchanged. This is a sourced editorial overview, not an exhaustive account of any religion. Differences of interpretation and the explicitly identified gaps remain open to further study.