Still Going . . . Cult’s Forecast of Doomsday Defied by World

Confounding the prophesies of a Ukrainian doomsday cult and its imprisoned “living god,” the world failed to end Sunday.

Members of the Great White Brotherhood had expected the doomsday’s highlight to be the suicide and resurrection of their self-styled messiah, Maria Devi Christos.

Instead of ascending to heaven in a huge ball of flame, Christos spent Sunday in jail, where she faces charges of hooliganism and seizing state property.

Police arrested Christos and her husband, cult founder Yuri Kryvonohov, Wednesday inside 11th-Century St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev along with about 60 followers.

Police monitored the square outside Ukraine’s oldest cathedral Sunday, and hospitals braced for reaction from cult members to doomsday--or its failure to occur.

But there was no ball of fire and no resurrection. Just a quiet day in Kiev.

“We waited for them to come. We even had beds reserved in our hospitals and psychiatric wards,” said Deputy Health Minister Viktor Ponomarenko.

Christos, whose name was Marenam Tsvihun before she declared herself messiah in 1990, claims a following of tens of thousands of people worldwide.

Officials suspect Christos, a former Communist youth leader and journalist, and her husband of giving mind-altering drugs to their followers, many of whom are teen-agers.

Authorities have said that Kryvonohov, a former cybernetics engineer, will be charged with influencing minors, publishing slanderous materials against the government and seizing state property.

The charges against Christos carry a penalty of three to five years imprisonment.