A Brief History of the End of the F***ing World by Tom Phillips: Don’t panic! We’ve

A Brief History of the End of the F***ing world by Tom Phillips (Wildfire £20, 384pp)

A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World is available now from the Mail Bookshop

There is an organisation in Bedford called the Panacea Society. Its members are followers of Joanna Southcott, who in 1792 predicted that the end of the world was nigh.

Over the next two decades she expanded on her theme in a variety of books, and when she died left a box containing further prophecies. This was only to be opened in a time of national crisis, and in the presence of the bishops of the Church of England.

The Church of England, funnily enough, didn’t want to know.

The society also maintains that Bedford was the original site of the Garden of Eden. The story is typical of Tom Phillips’s book about the people who have predicted the apocalypse.

There’s the odd respectable figure in there – Ibn al-Nafis, for instance, a 13th-century Islamic physician who was the first to describe the circulation of the blood between the heart and lungs.

Though he did think the apocalypse would come about after wars had killed so many men that women ‘will become lustful and lecherous as they cannot find enough men to satisfy them, and there will be much female homosexuality’.

Such (partly) sane thinkers aside, though, most of the cast list are nutters.

The Shakers a 19th-century movement which thought they could hasten Christ’s second coming by taking vows of chastity, unsurprisingly failed to reproduce, though they did manage to recruit new believers, and are still going. Membership stands at two.

Many of the stories are comic, but there’s tragedy as well. In 1856 a teenage girl in the Xhosa lands, at the southern tip of Africa, heard a message telling her that a new order was coming after an apocalypse, and that to make room for it people had to give up planting crops and kill all their cattle. Up to 50,000 people died of starvation.

Some of the doom-mongers were con artists.

For sheer inventiveness it’s hard to beat Mary Bateman, of Leeds, who in 1806 claimed that one of her hens was laying eggs that bore the words ‘Christ is coming’.

End of the world believers can go from the ridiculous to the dangerous: One girl in Africa heard a message telling her that a new order was coming after an apocalypse, and that to make room for it people had to give up planting crops and kill all their cattle. Up to 50,000 people died of starvation

She charged people a penny a time to see them, and sold tokens that would, she claimed, guarantee the holder entry into heaven.

Why do so many people buy into these predictions, when precisely none of them have come true? ‘People believe in the end of the world,’ argues Phillips, ‘when it feels like their world is ending.’

I think Phillips is right in seeing these movements as excuses for avoiding the difficult task of improving the here and now.

And how do the end-of-days merchants react when their predictions fail to come true?

One sect who forecast New York would be destroyed by nuclear armageddon on a particular day claimed they had been vindicated.

It was just that it was the following day and was New Jersey, not New York. And rather than a nuclear bomb, it was a gas pipeline exploding.