'The End of Time' is by turns hilarious, perturbing, and thought-provoking. The book is a history of belief in 'End-Time' - the idea that humanity is living in the last days before a great change, upon which most of humanity will be devoured by an apocalypse, leaving only followers of the True Path to move into an earthly or celestial Paradise.

Hilarity: Thompson describes the ideology of the 300,000-member Japanese cult 'Kofuku-no-Kagaku' (The Institute for Research into Human Happiness); its leader, Ryuho Okawa,

'has outlined a history of the creation of the world which makes 'You Are Becoming a Galactic Human', by Virginia Essene and Sheldon Nilde, read like a work of cautious scholarship . . . according to Okawa, Venus was once populated by a highly intelligent life form, a cross between animal and vegetable. Its upper half looked like a lily, and its lower half had legs with foliage on the back of them to facilitate photosynthesis'.

But 'The End of Time' does not only consist of entertaining mockery of nutters. It also shows the alarming ease with which large groups of people can embrace ideas which are stunningly irrational, and in some cases prejudicial or destructive. Rational ideas are not uniformly in the ascendancy; evangelical/apocalyptic Christianity is extremely vigorous, and is taking over large parts of vast new constituencies in South America and, increasingly, China. In these circles, extreme ideas are very common indeed: Pat Robertson, an influential leader of the broadly-based US Christian Right, writes that

'. . . it may be that men of goodwill like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush, who sincerely want a larger community of nations living at peace in our world, are in reality unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers'.

Description is Thompson's strength; when analyzing the reasons for such actions and beliefs, he speaks in relatively general terms (the effects of rapid social change etc). Although it's good that he doesn't jump to unwarranted conclusions about why these ideas are spreading, I found it a little disappointing that he did not (in my opinion) really shed all that much light on the psychological sources of millenarian belief. However, this is the sort of book from which you can draw many conclusions yourself; and for sheer entertainment, it's hard to beat.

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If you want to read online information about freaks and fruitcakes, visit 'The Kooks Museum', or my own page on the subject.

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