How nigh is the end?

Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophesy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

Revelation, chapter one, verse three.

Which is pretty handy if you feel lacking in the blessed department. If your life hasn't turned out as you had hoped. If you're worried that your time is near. If you don't want to die alone. If you would like to be set above those other idiots. If you want to get out of this world alive. If life is too short, or too long or too lifelike. If shopping won't solve things. If sometimes you feel like a bird on a wire or a drunk in a midnight choir. If XO won't solve things. If you can't accept you are a non-entity. If some days you feel you don't like the world. If other days you feel the world doesn't like you. If, in fact, you are more or less normal.

The seductive promise of apocalypse, of outright universal death, has long been the easy living of the mystic. People have been predicting the end of the world since records began. In 1925, reporters found Robert Reidt shouting to the skies with a megaphone: 'Gabriel, we're ready. Oh Gabriel.' Reidt promised newsmen: 'Every one of my little flock will be transported by a supernatural power to California, possibly on a cloud.' Before that, Jehovah's Witnesses foresaw 1914 as the end. Before that Christian evangelists pencilled in 1842 as the year of Rapture (or the taking up to heaven of the just), a date that is now referred to as 'The Great Disappointment'. That, of course, is the problem with Armageddon - it is damned tricky to pin down.

Few appreciate this more than Charles Taylor, the American preacher who called time in 1976, 1980, 1988, 1989 and 1992. On this last date Taylor and his disciples travelled to Israel for the Rapture. At the airport he was reported to have deliberated longer than expected in response to one devotee's question: 'Single or return, sir?' As 2000 approaches, the signs are once more encouragingly gloomy for the prophets of doom. The Bible's many references to the millennium - a thousand year period of rule - can be read in a number of ways and while it has not yet prompted the outbreaks of mass panic, suicide, lawlessness and indolence that greeted New Year's Eve in 999, for most Armageddon mongers it still spells The End. Added to this decidedly round figure, are the visions of the 16th century French visionary Nostradamus whose predictions, according to most interpreters, suggest global conflagration before the end of the century.

Then, there are the soothsayings of Malachy, the 12th century Irish saint who said the next Pope after our current one (John Paul II) would be the last. Most significant of all is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecies concerning the return of Israel in 1947. This has prompted a number of complete, if tenuous, interpretations of Revelation, the Bible's last hallucinatory book.

New Age bookshelves creak with a growing selection of works offering readers the chance to choose their own Apocalypse based on a wide variety of interpretations and expressed in a mind-numbing number of scenarios - alien invasion, volcanoes, pestilence, nuclear Armageddon ? Yessir! The apocalypse is almost upon us. Check the time on your American-made Jehovah's Witness watch inscribed 'One Hour nearer The Lord's Return'. Glue on your Adventist bumper sticker telling folks, 'If you hear a trumpet, grab the wheel'. Stay in the Millennium Hotel, Los Angeles. Drink Millennium beer. Slice steak with the Millennium cutlery set. Invest in The Matrix Institute of New Hampshire's newsletters advising on how to profit from apocalypse. Get their Future Map of the United States 1998-2001, which shows how, due to floods, volcanoes and earthquakes, you will be able to buy beach-front property in Denver, Nebraska and Arizona. Relax with Paco Rabanne's new book Has The Countdown Begun? or with any number of blockbuster movies which deal with planetary disaster, cataclysmic world war, the end of civilisation as we know it.