Countdown! E-Book

Sir Patrick Moore

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Written with his trademark combination of wit and accessible science, and updated to include the latest theories on asteroids and climate change, this is a must-read book for anyone with an interest in popular science in general, and how the world might end in particular.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

1. William Miller – and Others

2. The Astrologers

3. The Jupiter Effect

4. The Menacing Moon

5. Comets of Doom

6. Cosmic Bullets

7. Star-Crash!

8. Ordeal by Flying Saucer

9. And So to Science

10. Aftermath

11. 2010

Plate Section

Copyright

Introduction

Do you remember anything about 31 December 1999? I know what I was doing; I was at my home at Selsey getting ready for my New Year’s Eve party. I take little notice of Christmas, because Christmas is a family occasion and I do not have a family, so I give my party on 31 December; 1999 was no exception.

Yet in many parts of the world there was considerable tension. We were saying a goodbye to the old century and welcoming in the new – in fact, the new millennium. People wanted to know whether or not this meant anything special. Of course there were the usual prophets of doom, and they were decidedly vocal. Two thousand years since the beginning of the Christian era, and surely this had to be marked in some way. But just how? All kinds of dire predictions were made. There would be thunderstorms, floods, lights in the sky and celestial manifestations of all kinds. But quite apart from this it was suggested that there might be marked effects upon our everyday existence, because – like it or not – we live in a world ruled largely by computers. They had no trouble in changing over from 1998 to 1999, but 1999 was assumed to be the very end of the millennium, and this could confuse a computer very thoroughly. In particular, aircraft and aircraft controllers do depend now upon their computers, and the were serious warnings that a flight over midnight would be dangerous in the extreme. Many people were alarmed, and bookings were heavily down.

But could there be any truth in this? Looking at the Christian point of view the answer had to be ‘no’, because whenever Jesus Christ was born it was not the year AD 1, and there was no year 0 – a point to which I will return later. (En passant, there are modern groups which object to the use of BC and AD, and want to replace these with something that has no connection with religion. I recently read a perfectly serious book in which the author referred to an event which took place in the year 1250 ACE. It took me some time to realise that he meant AD 1250.) But though we can forget about this kind of thing, there is something to be said about the possible confusion of computers.

Of course, all these predictions were without foundation, and there were no effects at all. Computers coped very nicely, there were no earthquakes or thunderstorms, and the new millennium glided in quite smoothly. But now, a decade later, it may be interesting to look back and see if there is any possibility that the world will come to an end rather unexpectedly.

A few years ago I was walking along Charing Cross Road, in central London, when I came across a man who was wearing sandwich-boards. Normally I would have paid little attention to him, and I would have assumed that he must have been protesting about something quite mundane, but in fact his message was much more dramatic: ‘Sinners Repent. The Hour of Doom is at Hand!’ I was tempted to question him, but at that moment he stepped off the kerb and was smartly knocked down by a passing cyclist. Rising to his feet, he drew a deep breath and unloosed a volley of lurid invective. He went on speaking for at least five minutes, saying something different all the time; and had I approached him with a mild query, he would undoubtedly have thrown his sandwich-boards at me. Therefore I considered discretion to be the better part of valour, and went on my way.

Actually, end-of-the-world prophets of this kind are much less common than they used to be, which is perhaps a pity; the world would be a duller place without its Independent Thinkers, as I have called them. But they still exist, and in recent years they have been particularly vocal. As the twentieth century passed into history, myriad dire prophecies failed to materialise, but the doom-mongers were not discouraged. Some of the doomsday prophets are purely religious; others fear that we may be blasted out of space by a collision with a comet, an asteroid or even a passing star; yet others maintain that the end of civilization, if not of the world itself, will be brought about by the evil machinations of alien beings in flying saucers. I cannot pretend to be particularly apprehensive, except of the real possibility that some politician will press the wrong button and spark off a nuclear war which would certainly eliminate the human race. And yet the Earth will not last for ever; nothing in the universe is eternal – perhaps not even the universe itself. Our world came into being because of the Sun, and in the end the Sun will destroy it.

I do not want to sound alarmist. The Sun, fortunately for us, is a steady, well-behaved star, and even though it may have fluctuated sufficiently to produce the various Ice Ages (the last of which ended a mere 10,000 years ago) it is not likely to change much in the foreseeable future; indeed, it will remain much as it is for at least a thousand million years, and probably rather longer, so that there is no immediate need for us to pack our bags and start searching for a planet safer than ours. We have a long respite, and if we refrain from blowing each other up we may well hope to find a solution before the crisis becomes really pressing.

However, end-of-the-world seers are still with us, and some of them are ready to give their reasons in great detail. In this book, I want to look at the various theories and try to decide whether or not they are valid. It is a fascinating subject, and it will take us from the realms of astrology and mysticism right through to pure astronomy. I hope that you will enjoy it – and let me say at once that in my view, at least, you will have ample time to read these pages before anything traumatic happens to the world which is our home. If I am wrong, please accept my apologies in advance.

1

William Miller – and Others

The year was 1843. A brilliant comet blazed down from the sky, ‘shaking its fiery locks’. There was great tension in America, and there were thousands of people who believed that the Last Trump was about to sound. This was the time of the Millerite movement, which led to one of the greatest end-of-the-world scares ever known. It was centred on the United States, though traces of it spread further afield, and were slow to fade away. The whole episode had been sparked off by a New England farmer named William Miller.

Miller was not a scientist; he was a student of the Bible, and he was eccentric. Indeed, it is not too much to say that he was as nutty as a fruitcake; but he had a tremendous following, and he was completely sincere. To him, the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and he regarded it as his bounden duty to spread the word among his fellow men – in which he succeeded only too well, aided and abetted by a clergyman named Joshua V. Hines, who acted as his publicity agent and who fanned the flames with uncanny skill.

I have started this chapter with William Miller because his crusade of doom was so incredibly successful. Even when the fateful year of 1843 was over, the Millerite movement did not perish abruptly; it petered out slowly, and echoes of it lingered on. However, it is best to deal with matters chronologically, and so let us delve back much further than the nineteenth century to see what we can find out.

I do not propose to say much about ancient religions, because they do not really come into the story, and in any case most of them regarded the Earth as eternal. (The same was true of the gods, with the notable exception of those in Norse mythology; you may remember that in the final battle between the Æsir and the forces of evil, the chief god Odin was unceremoniously swallowed by the wolf Fenrir – which was unfortunate for Odin, and may well have given Fenrir indigestion.) So we really begin with St Augustine, who is always remembered as being the man sent to England to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. In this he had considerable success, starting with King Ethelbert of Kent. To be candid, history has been rather kind to Augustine; he came to England with marked reluctance, and his lack of tact very nearly ruined the entire mission. Still, he made his mark, and he was certainly forceful.

Augustine lived in the sixth and seventh centuries AD, and his meeting with King Ethelbert took place in the year 596. Apparently he believed that the Church would last for 1,000 years but no longer, and this paved the way for the first of the religious end-of-the-world scares. If Christ had been born in AD 1, then presumably the year 1000 would complete the cycle. Druthmar, an English monk, even gave a definite date: 24 March – and the stage was set.

There is an immediate flaw here, because, as we have seen, Christ was certainly born well before AD 1. At that time the most powerful man in the European world was Augustus, ruler of Rome. He was Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, and had come to power after ousting Mark Antony, who had been too preoccupied with wooing Cleopatra to give his attention to more pressing matters. Augustus is also memorable for having upset the calendar merely because he wanted August, the month named after his honour, to be as long as Caesar’s month, July; this is why we now have two consecutive months with thirty-one days each.

However, the approach of AD 1000 was dreaded in every country to which Christianity had penetrated – and this, of course, included England, though the panics were much greater in Italy, France and what is now Germany.

It was, incidentally, a peculiarly unpleasant time for most people. Warfare was widespread, and in addition Europe was in the grip of one of those plagues which have been prevalent every now and then. Many victims may well have thought that the forthcoming end of the world would be a relief rather than otherwise. The Church did not agree, and much money and effort was spent in erecting new cathedrals and renovating old ones – the basic idea being, presumably, that those who were busy upon such noble projects would be given VIP treatment when the world was no more. The English were having extra problems, since Ethelred the Unready sat upon the throne, and the Danish raids were increasing all the time. Ethelred was completely unprepared for them, and it is permissible to think that he would have been equally unprepared for the end of the world, but the matter was never actually put to the test, because nothing happened. The year 1000 came in, passed by, and expired without any divine manifestations whatsoever. It must have been rather galling for the thousands of Christians, mainly from continental Europe, who had sold up all their possessions in 999 and made haste to Jerusalem, where the Second Coming might logically have been expected.

The fears of AD 1000 were decidedly nebulous, and were based upon a mere timescale rather than anything specific in the Bible. Much later came a Spaniard, St Vincent Ferrer, who was born in or about 1350 and died in 1419. He concluded that the world would last for as many years as there are verses in the Psalms. As there are 2,357 verses, there seemed no reason for apprehension.

To catalogue all the individual prophets who forecast doomsday on purely religious grounds would take a long time, and would be rather tedious, but I cannot resist saying something about Solomon Eccles, partly because he was English and partly because he was so odd by any standards. He seems to have been born in London in 1618, and his early career was conventional enough; he was a talented musician, and when still in his twenties he was making a good living by teaching stringed and keyboard instruments. Later he fell in with the Quakers, and began to have visions which told him quite plainly that the end was nigh. Music, of course, was a pastime of the Devil, so he disposed of all his equipment and became a shoemaker. This in itself would have aroused no comment, but he also disposed of his clothing (or most of it; at first he retained a loincloth to cover the appropriate part of his anatomy) and began to burst in upon religious services, imploring the congregation to take heed and be saved while there was still time. It was hardly surprising that preachers did not take kindly to this sort of interruption, and the usual result was that Eccles was thrown out, metaphorically upon his ear. He was even imprisoned, which apparently troubled him not at all.

His strange career approached its zenith, so far as London was concerned, in the years of plague and fire, 1665 and 1666. No doubt he regarded these events as warnings of the holocaust to come. He even attracted the attention of the great diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote in 1667: ‘One thing extraordinary was, this day a man, a Quaker, came naked through the Hall at Westminster, where all the courtiers assembled, only civilly tied about the loins to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone up in his head did pass through the Hall at Westminster crying ‘Repent! Repent!’

Since the stupid Londoners refused to take him seriously, Eccles decided to venture elsewhere; he went to Scotland, and was arrested again. On his release he made for Ireland, where he regarded even a loincloth as an unnecessary encumbrance. Yet he met with no better fortune, and when he streaked naked into Cork Cathedral during a solemn service, both the Church and the civil authorities were outraged. He was whipped through the streets, and then expelled from the city with stern warnings never to come back.

He did join a Quaker missionary party to the West Indies in 1671, and then went to New England, where he was at once arrested and subsequently banished. Nine years later we find him in Barbados, speaking to gatherings of Negro slaves; the authorities intervened and shipped him back to England, where he died. Eccles did not seem to have selected any particular part of the Bible to bolster up his views. He relied upon his instinct and his visions, which is always a risky thing to do; and though he achieved considerable notoriety, he never mustered a following in the way that William Miller managed to do later.

In London, the next important prophet of doom was the Rev. Dr William Whiston, sometime friend of Newton; but since Whiston’s theory involved a comet, I propose to defer its discussion for the moment and pass on to the year 1761, when the city was shaken by a couple of earthquakes. Both were very mild, and there was little damage, though a few chimneys were toppled and the shocks were strong enough to be noticeable. They are relevant here only because they led to a noteworthy panic, due entirely to the ravings of an ex-soldier whose name was William Bell.

It is often thought that earthquakes in England are uncommon, but this is not strictly true; a thousand have been recorded altogether, though only one death has been established – in 1580, when a moderate shock dislodged a stone from Christ Church and deposited it upon the head of a luckless youth who happened to be standing underneath.* In 1761 the jolts were separated by twenty-eight days, and Bell jumped to the conclusion that after another twenty-eight days there would be something much worse – enough, in fact, to destroy the world. He gave the date as 5 April and, for reasons which remain a total mystery, people believed him. Panic broke out, and spread through wide areas of London. A general exodus began; carts and coaches drew out of the city, and camps sprang up in regions which have now been swamped by the spread of London but were then pleasant villages, such as Highgate and Hampstead. Boats were bought up, and the Thames was crowded, presumably because it was thought that water would be safer than dry land.

Bell became famous; everything he said was magnified out of all proportion and by the time that 5 April came the scene was one of utter chaos. Predictably, the day passed quietly, and there was a sense as much of anti-climax as of relief. Bell’s enthusiasm for his cause was not dampened, but the authorities had had more than enough, and the luckless ex-soldier was quietly stored in the nearest asylum, where he died some days later. It was a curious episode in every way, and there was no logic behind it.

I can pause only briefly to mention a lady named Mary Bateman, who achieved fame in 1806 when she announced that one of her hens was making a habit of laying eggs with Jesus Christ’s personal seal upon them; clearly, this meant that the Second Coming and the end of the world were imminent. Unfortunately it was found that the eggs had been skilfully treated by Mary herself, so that Christ was not involved. It was, in fact, a pure confidence trick, and Mrs Bateman’s subsequent career was no more creditable; it came to an abrupt end after she had been caught giving two wealthy clients a tasty-looking pudding which had been liberally laced with arsenic.

There was also John Tom, a Cornishman who called himself Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtney, and actually stood twice for Parliament. He fought the Canterbury constituency in 1832 and collected 375 votes, which was 372 more than he managed at his second attempt some years later. Eventually he announced that he was the new Messiah, and that he had been sent to give news of the impending destruction of the Earth. Courtney, too, came to an untimely end after he shot a policeman who had been ordered to break up a mob which he had collected and was leading along the road from London to Dover.

Recently, of course, we have had the great expenses scandal when it was found that the Hounourable Members had been using taxpayers’ money in ways that were hardly likely to be of much use to their constituents. One MP claimed money for building an island for his ducks, and another charged a large sum having the moat around his house thoroughly cleaned. A senior cabinet minister actually put in a claim for several pornographic films which her husband enjoyed watching. There was an outcry about all of this, and Honourable Members are hardly likely to be admirers of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper which broke the story. However, let us forget the present crop of dubious MPs, and return to the greatest of all prophets of doom, William Miller.

Judged by any standards, Miller was a phenomenon. His background was quite normal; he was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and his parents were farmers in a modest way. They were also Baptists, which was admittedly harmless. William’s only sign of eccentricity was that he was an avid reader who devoured any book he could find, which was by no means common at the time. When he and his family moved to the state of Vermont, he became known as a young man of learning, and he was elected Constable of the town of Poultney; in 1809 he was even made Sheriff, and clearly he was cast in a different mould from most of his contemporaries. He married and at that stage was by no means of a religious turn of mind. He went so far as to declare that the Bible was nonsense, an attitude which horrified his parents.

Meanwhile, storm clouds were gathering, and war against the English was more than probable. Miller decided to serve his country, and so he joined the army. In 1810 he was commissioned, and by 1812 he held the rank of captain. He saw plenty of action, but he also met with an accident which probably changed the whole course of his life. The exact details of the mishap are unknown, but involved a fall from a cart, and the fact that Miller landed on his head may well have been the root cause of his transformation from an energetic, practical men into a fanatical end-of-the-worlder. We will never know. However, the change was not immediately obvious, and he stayed in the army until 1815, when he resigned his commission and established a farm at Low Hampton, which was then a remote part of New York State.

It was at Low Hampton that Miller found God – or thought he did. His lifestyle changed entirely, and he began to spend more and more time reading the Bible, particularly the Book of Daniel. The walls of his study were festooned with charts and graphs, and he became more or less a recluse. Eventually he decided that the Second Coming of Christ was nearer than most people imagined, and would signal the end of the world as we know it. What of the date? By 1832 he had the answer; the world would be destroyed in 1843, probably at midnight at the spring equinox on 21 March.

At first he was cautious. Should he announce the dread news, or wait until the Earth was snuffed out like a candle flame in the wind? To say nothing might be more merciful. On the other hand, there was plenty of sin around (though no doubt much less than there is today), and it would be only right to give the sinners time to repent so that they could face their Maker with confidence and a bright smile. Moreover, there were other prophets who were giving wrong dates. (One was a certain Harriet Livermore, whose career is decidedly obscure, but who expected the Last Trump to sound sometime in 1847. Another was a Captain Saunders, and yet a third was Joseph Wolff, who lived appropriately in Jerusalem, and who held the same opinion. Wolff expected Christ to appear on top of the Mount of Olives. One of his followers was Lady Hester Stanhope, a niece of William Pitt, who subsequently repaired to the top of the Mount taking two white horses with her – one for Jesus and the other for herself.)

Eventually Miller made up his mind. He must spread the word, and there were only a few years left. In 1832 he began his campaign by preaching in the local church. From all accounts, he was an excellent orator of the Hitler variety, and he was certainly positive. The end was nigh, he thundered; those who had led evil lives must make full atonement before it was too late, or they would be cast down into the flames of hell. It was a depressing prospect.

At first his success was modest. Some of the locals took him seriously, while others dismissed him as a crazy old man. What may have helped him was the meteor shower of 1833 when, for some hours, shooting stars ‘rained down like snowflakes’, indicating divine displeasure. Nowadays we know that the shower was due to the meteors known as Leonids. Periodically the Earth plunges through the main swarm of tiny particles, scooping up many of them. They are associated with a periodical comet, Tempel-Tuttle, which has an orbital period of thirty-three years. When the comet returns to the neighbourhood of the Sun, we are sometimes treated to the spectacle of a major ‘meteor storm’, as happened in 1799 and again in 1833.* To Miller, this was a sign that he was thinking along the right lines.

Gradually his fame spread. Over the following years he preached almost 1,000 sermons, and when challenged by sceptics he was able to give as good as he got; so far as the Bible was concerned he had done his homework extremely well, and of his sincerity there was no doubt at all. The Millerite sect became firmly established, and the year 1843 was awaited with considerable apprehension. It was at this juncture that Miller met up with a man who was destined to play a major role in the whole episode – the Elder Joshua V. Hines, a Baptist who had considerable influence in the city of Boston.

Hines is something of an enigma. While Miller was an honest fanatic, Hines was more of what we might call a con man. He may or may not have believed in the approaching holocaust; on the whole it seems that he didn’t, but in any event he decided to appoint himself Miller’s business manager. He invited him to preach at the Chardon Street Baptist Chapel in Boston, and hundreds of people turned up. The meeting was an outstanding success, and Miller followed it with more sermons throughout the following week. Hines organised things with consummate skill, and placards and advertisements began to appear, together with the inevitable men wearing sandwich-boards (shades of the Charing Cross Road!). Next came a series of meetings in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the results were much the same. The Millerites gained ground every day, and Joshua Hines resigned his official position as preacher in order to devote all his time to the movement. He even founded a paper, Signs of the Times, in which the message was given in unmistakable terms. Whether any issues of this periodical survive I do not know; I have been unable to locate any, but during the peak of Millerism it was all the rage.

Even New York was not immune. Wall Street and skyscrapers lay in the future, but plenty of people lived there, and Miller descended upon the city like an east wind, bellowing out his warnings and exhorting all sinners to repent. Whether New York had more than its fair share of sinners is open to question, but at this stage there were many Millerites who had sold all their belongings and joined in the crusade, firmly convinced that the Lord was about to swoop down from above and remove the Earth from the universe together with everybody in it.

Things were not helped by the appearance of a brilliant comet which dominated the night sky and caused a great deal of alarm and despondency. It was now 1843, and the Millerite movement was at its zenith; it did not even matter that William himself was ill with fever and had temporarily withdrawn from the scene. As the spring equinox approached, hysteria took over. On the evening of 21 March there was a great exodus from Boston, presumably because the Lord would be more likely to descend in open country than in a city, with the attendant danger of being impaled upon a chimney stack or something equally inconvenient. Alas, nothing happened, but stirring events were taking place elsewhere. In the town of Westford, Massachusetts, hundreds of Millerites had assembled, and when they heard the sound of a trumpet they were naturally convinced that the end had come at last. Several people fainted before it was discovered that the trumpet call had been given by a local drunk, who had a perverted sense of humour and who had become thoroughly tired of being kept awake at night by the sounds of chanting and praying.

The world was still intact when 22 March dawned. There had been quite a number of casualties, including one man who had attempted a flight to Heaven by fitting himself with artificial wings and jumping out of a top-storey window – with the predictable result that he broke an arm. (According to some sources, this happened during the later stages of the scare rather than at the spring equinox itself, but the episode seems to be true.) The Millerites were not too depressed; 1843 still had many months to run, and it was too early to change course. Hines and his campaign managers continued the battle, and as the year drew to its end the hysteria was almost as great as ever. The panic had spread far and wide, and on 31 December a huge crowd gathered outside William Miller’s house, no doubt anxious to receive the latest bulletins from on high. Still nothing happened. But Miller was not downhearted; suddenly he discovered a mistake in his predictions – they should have referred to the Jewish year, which was not due to end until 22 October 1844.

Clearly this was a serious blunder, but it could be put down to human fallibility, and the situation remained much as before. According to contemporary records, there were more than average numbers of admissions to lunatic asylums, and still the Millerites preached and thundered. Once more the crowds gathered. Once more, to their chagrin, the Lord refused to oblige. Miller made one more attempt; the end would come, he said, on the seventh day of the seventh month – but when this too passed without incident, he gave up. Joshua Hines retired from the arena (he lived to the age of ninety), and the Millerite movement faded away, with its members returning to their homes and doing their best to pick up the threads.

William Miller himself died soon afterwards. At least he had made his mark, and he never recanted; all that was wrong, he maintained, was the timescale. To him, the Book of Daniel was infallible. Probably he regretted that he had not been more accurate, but there was nothing that he could do about it – he did not even show any marked desire to saddle up a third white horse and accompany Lady Hester Stanhope to Jerusalem.

To the best of my knowledge, ‘Second Coming’, end-of-the-world predictions have been confined mainly to the United States. Miller’s was by far the most notable, but there have been several since, one of which was sparked off in 1925 by two people: a Los Angeles girl, Margaret Rowan, and a German-born housepainter whose name was Robert Reidt. It was centred on California, and never spread further. Neither did it affect thousands of people, as the Millerite movement had done, but I feel that I ought to mention it. (I do not remember it myself, but as I was then at the early age of two, and lived in Bognor Regis, this is hardly surprising.) Reidt was based at Patchogue on Long Island, and his predictions were entirely Biblical. He gave the date of doom as 13 February, and so did Margaret Rowan – on the authority, she said, of no less a person than the Archangel Gabriel, who was presumably in an excellent position to know. The Messiah would appear in the eastern sky, in the form of a small cloud. He would draw closer, and on arrival would scorch the world to a crisp, wafting the faithful to Heaven while the sinners (that is to say, the bulk of the population) would be left to fend for themselves in the equivalent of Dante’s Inferno.

Eyes were turned skywards on 6 February, when the Messiah was due to make his entry. However, the anticipated cloud failed to materialize, and by the 13th the Messiah was still an absentee. Both Margaret Rowan and Robert Reidt claimed that he had been detained for some reason or other, and would be along shortly, but the few hundred followers began to show signs of discontent, and gradually drifted away. What happened to the two prophets does not seem to be known, but at any rate nothing was heard from them.

Next came the Revd Charles G. Long, of Pasadena, who returned to the Book of Daniel. (This seems to be a favourite end-of-the-world text, though most people will remember it better for its description of a slight contretemps involving lions.) Long decided that the end would come at 5.33 pm, Pacific Time, on 21 September 1945. He founded a sect calling itself the Remnant of the Church of God, and for some years he preached away, gaining a few converts but failing to make much of an impact upon a world which was far more concerned with Adolf Hitler and the warlords of Japan. Seven days before the expected end, Long and his followers gave up eating (which was bearable) and drinking (which, under the circumstances, probably was not), and made their preparations. When 5.33 came and went, they gave resigned sighs and went back to their normal humdrum existence.

Next, in this admittedly very incomplete catalogue, I come to May 1954. This time the seat of activity was not America, but Rome, the Eternal City, where the Colosseum stands. According to legend, the world will come to an end when the Colosseum falls. When cracks suddenly started to appear in the fabric of the amphitheatre, people became alarmed. For some reason that I have been unable to discover, 24 May was regarded as D-day, and there was a noticeable panic in which many Romans endeavoured to allay their fears by means of alcohol. Not to put too fine a point on it, they became as drunk as newts. The Pope was not impressed, and went so far as to issue an official denial. This had a calming effect; the Colosseum still stands: the end of the world has not come yet.

Even during the last decade there have been at least two curious episodes. In 1992 a cult in South Korea announced that the end was imminent, and hundreds of people gathered in the expectation of being lifted heavenward in a cometlike flash known as ‘the rapture’; when nothing happened they went home in disgust. In the same tradition, the Great White Brotherhood of the Ukraine predicted the end of the world for 24 November 1993 – later revised to 14 November because of a slight miscalculation. The main cult prophetess was a lady named Maria Khristos, who called herself Marina Tsvygun and announced that she was God. She managed to whip up a surprising degree of hysteria, and photographs of her, dressed in white robes and carrying a crucifix, were widely distributed. At the appointed time a large crowd assembled at the eleventh-century cathedral of St Sofia, in Kiev, which, proclaimed Marina, was ‘the closest point to the cosmos’. Disturbances broke out when the police intervened, and fire extinguishers were used, covering much of the cathedral with foam. Eventually the crowd was dispersed, and Marina and her husband were taken into custody charged with various offences. Valentin Nedrehavlo, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, closed the proceedings by declaring that ‘Today is off. The end of the world is hereby cancelled.’

What are we to make of all this?