Customer Reviews

The Millennium Myth: Love and Death at the End of Time

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I write this to balance off the previous review, which states that "Grosso's book displays an utter lack of understanding of the Book of Revelation, the function of apocalyptic literature, the meaning of other ancient myth systems he examines," and which accuses the author of being "either completely intellectually dishonest or completely ignorant" (although the reviewer fails to provide any support for his position, or any indication of what a "true" understanding of these topics might look like).

As with all of Michael Grosso's books, the strength of "The Millennium Myth" is its breadth: he writes from the rare position of taking no position at all -- which can put him in the risky position of offending people who hold *any* of the dogmatic positions he writes about. He requires a reader as open-minded as he is. Rather than indicating intellectual dishonesty, I take this nuetrality as an indication of Grosso's intellectual integrity. As the editorial reviews indicate, Grosso is a generalist and writes all over the map, making connections and thinking between the boundaries which normally separate the fields of history, science, sociology, literature, spirituality, and the arts. In fact, I find it hard to define exactly what the book is *about* -- for it is about how all these things, when taken as a whole, reveal an underlying human preoccupation with the idea of a "millenium": a "future time" when the human condition will transform for much the better or worse.

This generalist quality can also make Grosso's writing a challenge, however: it is dense. I had to read a few pages at a time, and then put the book down for a while to process what I had just taken in. Grosso throws out ideas and connections at a rapid rate, and being a generalist, his line of thinking is not always linear. The reader has to work to follow the through-line of the book, but the work is enjoyable and rewarding. It helps that Grosso is a good, clear writer with a sense of humor -- not academic or dry.

This book was my introduction to the provocative work of Michael Grosso. My copy is dog-eared now, many pages folded over to direct me back to insights that I've never found anywhere else about the New Age and its place not only in American culture but in the human psyche. Grosso explains how the idea of a decisive turning point in history (the millennium myth), whether we envision it evolving painfully through an apocalypse or positively through a new age of harmony, has become ever more fundamental to being human. Resting on profound scholarship in history, myth and culture -- and expressed in often breathtaking language - this book is essential for a full understanding of the New Age in all its guises, not to mention ourselves and what drives us. The astute and rollicking last chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

I have read many books on apocalyptic phenomena and the millennium in the course of writing one of my own. Grosso's book displays an utter lack of understanding of the Book of Revelation, the function of apocalyptic literature, the meaning of other ancient myth systems he examines (e.g.,Babylonian Enuma Elish and Zoroastrianism) and virtually every other of the many topics he purports to shed light on.

The primary value of this book is as an example of how ostensibly educated people can be either completely intellectually dishonest or completely ignorant.