The Enduring Problems with Prophecy: from Early-Modern Times to 2012 and Beyond

Publisher Marketing: Have you ever wondered why prophecies are, well, usually pretty off target? It seems that every few years we have an impending 'end of days' scenario (there were two in 2011 alone), with all manner of prophets of doom foretelling a grim future, and then.... on the appointed day the world continues to turn, the sun rises as normal, the birds sing and nothing much is changed. Then a few days later, up springs another prophet, with news of the grisly details of another impending Armageddon on the way. This timely, intelligent and entertaining collection of essays by a heady mixture of well-known and new writers, including Julian Vayne, Ramsey Dukes, Al Cummins, Helen Frisby, Cynthia Grannon, Dave Lee, Dave Evans, Siobhan Monroe and Francis Breakspear, examines this recurring phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, academic, scientific, economic, esoteric, philosophical and historical, and comes up with some surprising conclusions, both about modern doomsayers (2012, the Y2K bug etc) and older historical instances of the end of the world, and muses on why nobody, of all the modern prophets and psychics alive today, was able to predict 9-11. Along the way we examine John Dee, British Civil War women prophets, class war, oil spills, aeonic succession, a new way to date our calendar (and how 2012 might already have passed us by without anyone realising), portents of doom in Victorian England, Terrence McKenna and the Timewave theory, the Mayan Calendar, economic meltdowns and much, much more besides Read it now, just in case the next prophecy is right...