Origins : 800 B.C.-A.D. 1000 -- Pythagoras and harmony -- Apocalypse and Eden -- Muhammad and the perfect man -- Hastening the apocalypse : 1000-1500 -- Martyrs, messiahs and assassins -- Crusaders and last days -- Christopher Columbus discovers Eden -- New Edens in an old world : sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- New routes to paradise : relics and indulgences -- The collectors -- The English Eden -- The separatists head for America -- The birth of science -- The decline and fall of witchcraft -- Selling the American Eden -- The modern paradise : 1700-1945 -- The comforts of the new earthly paradise -- Creating the new Adam -- Robert Owen and the godless millennium -- Religious America tries to build a new Adam -- Social Darwinism : Eden by eradication -- Consumer idylls of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries : rural retreats and shopping malls -- A consumer durable Eden -- 'Wilderness is paradise enow'.