During Ms. Saotome's rather-unhinged rant about the end of the world towards the beginning of the Rebellion movie, she says the following:
とある宗教の祭礼の日にあわせて、日食と月食が６回起こっちゃうという話です！
I'm talking about how on the festival days of a certain religion, six solar and lunar eclipses will occur!
Is this a reference to a real-world practice, or is this some sort of weird Madoka-universe eschatological thing?
After quite a lot of digging, I think I've figured out what's going on here.
Apparently, over the course of 2014 and 2015, there will be a series of four lunar eclipses ("blood moons") and two solar eclipses that occur on Jewish holy days.1 While the supposed eschatological consequences of this are not entirely clear to me, they are apparently dire. As reported in The Jewish Press:
There will be a string of four "blood moons" in the year 5775 [i.e. 2014-15 CE], and one of them will shine over the Passover seder. Whenever this happened in the past, enormous events took place in Jewish history.
1 For more information, see: Red Moon Rapture; FreeRepublic; The Jewish Press.
