Mormonism goes with post-Tribulation rapture.

If you think that the rapture happens before/at the beginning of Tribulation, then obviously there's no need to prep to survive it. If you believe that the Rapture happens during or post-Tribulation, on the other hand – and that these events are imminent – then you might get into doomsday prepping.

(Whilst we're here: guess what we *don't* know about London Bridge?)

in which parts of the fur are darker where the skin is cooler, because the enzyme that produces melanin and leads to dark fur doesn't work well at higher temperatures!

This rhyme is clearly about the dangers of cold winters. Perhaps during winter famines people were reduced to eating cats?

Secondly: inevitably at some point someone will come along and decide that actually this rhyme is clearly about something else instead. For example: oh, this rhyme about cat fur getting darker around danger must be based on the real phenomenon of fur colour in cats with point colouration...

This all illustrates two points:

Firstly: these rhymes do not stay stable over time. Just look at the variation even in those few examples. You want a rhyme to stay stable over *centuries*? These things don't even stay stable across decades (or across distances of more than a few miles).

Opie and Opie actually suggest that it basically originates from May games in which rings/crowns of flowers appear. People have been weaving flowers into rings and crowns for a long time.

There are also German versions of what's clearly based on the same type of rhyme, but are equally, if not harder, to construe as being about disease. (having to kiss the person you like best is hardly a good plague-prevention technique)

Here’s an American version from 1790: ring a ring a rosie / A bottle full of posie, / All the girls in our town, / Ring for little Josie.’

Or, my favourite: Ring around the roses / a pocket full of posie / one two three – squat!

E.g, this one: ‘a ring, a ring o’ roses, / a pocket-full o’ posies; / one for Jack and one for Jim / and one for little Moses! / a curchey in, and a curchey out / and a curchey all together.’ (I think ‘curchey’ = curtsy). That version is from Shropshire, recorded in 1883.

Of the earliest 7 version reported in England, most of them don’t make sense as references to the plague:

Previous studies of the rhyme before the 20th century don’t mention the plague idea. It seems to be a fairly new invention (all sources for it are post-WW2) in the grand scheme of things.

So this rhyme has to be going on unrecorded for hundreds of years before anyone first writes it down. Not *impossible* but very unlikely given other things like that *were* recorded earlier.

No mention of it is made in sources like Pepys’ diary (a “careful record of hearsay during the long months of the plague”) they don’t even seem to have been interested in sneezing as a symptom of plague. In fact, no mention of it is made anywhere until several hundred years later.

Evidence seems to show”, according to Opie & Opie (1985) ‘The Singing Game’, that “at one time the point of playing both ‘Ring a Ring o Roses’ and ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ was to determine who among the players was to be next to reveal the object of her affection.”

Ring games are a trope of singing games, most of which involve a group of people holding hands in a circle and dancing around one person in the middle, and everyone falling over at the end. The falling over at the end is not specific to one song. It is a feature of the genre.