Customer Reviews

Omens of the Millenium

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Omens of Millennium is a personal and erudite synthesis of Gnosticism, Hermetism, Sufism, and Jewish Kabbalah (and Emersonism). Prof. Bloom writes with the conviction of a "believer" and the rigor of a disinterested scholar. I first read this book three years ago and since then I have come back to it in many occasions. Omens of Millennium is a wake-up call to Knowledge. The book also introduced me to the extraordinary works of Hans Jonas, Mose Idel, and Henry Corbin.

Omens of Millennium is a consistently enjoyable, delightful work. Bloom is especially insightful when discussing Freud, and in his focus on the relationship of Enoch and Metatron. I don't agree entirely with everything Bloom says, of course, but still, this has been an enormously influential, important and loved book for me. I highly recommend it.

This book is very insightful, like other reviewers I do not agree with a few things, but over all the book is filled with interesting and historical views on Angels, dreams, resurrection, and religion. I really enjoyed the section on near death experiences, and Freud's ideas of dreams were a bit strange but I am not well read on Freud's psychoanalysis work however sometimes I wonder if he was drinking a bit too much Absinthe. I am also far from anything of an expert on Judaism, Islamic Sufism or basically any other beliefs outside of Catholic or Christian, so the chance to learn a bit on all of them was a wonderful opportunity. The last section there was some part that he brought up the fact that some religions predict the end of the world, like Millerites and Jehovah's witnesses by the way how many times did they predict the world was going to end? I have to ask them the next time they come to my door. Over all I have to say what a wonderful book.

This is a readable & enjoyable book. If one takes it as a confessio fidei gnosticae tinged with hilarious malicious remarks on American & global fads ( NDEs etc.)- the study fulfills the purpose. However: when scrutinized as a scholarly ( even gnostic) effort to disentangle various threads in Western esoteric tradition, the comparativist monologue miserably fails. Just a few illustrations: 1. Bloom stubbornly equates "astral body" with the Sufi "Man of Light". However, jism-i-latif (subtle/astral body ) is a banality in Sufism. 2. He misreads shamanistic practices as extraphysical journeys of the "Higher Self". Just, the trademark od shamanism is a multiplicity of "souls", psychic selves; the Self ( "Atman") is an extraneous, Indian invention grafted onto a foreign milieu. 3. Bloom bizarrely misinterprets ( p. 171.) Shaikh Ahsa'i doctrine of Resurrection - the point 2,. "spiritual flesh", is just jism-i-latif, not a divine spark Bloom so desperately searches for and fails to locate it in the point 4. where it tacitly abides. 4. And much, much more: a) Bloom's neglect of spiritual worlds ( olam atziluth, alam-i-jabarut, Shivaloka, the world of Platonic ideas/forms,..) b) complete neglect & conspicuous avoidance of Jung's heritage ( particularly concerning the subjects as enthralling as dreams & Self ) c) false characterization of Christian religions in the US as quasi-gnostic ( sorry Harold-only a piece of wishful thinking, St.Paul was even more triumphant than you can bear.) d)averting the eyes from Indo-Tibetan traditions that would disperse much of the fog in Harold's head.. Yet-it's a good read.

Harold Bloom, as I imagine most everyone reading this review knows, made his mark with a work of almost unbelievable insight and genius, The Visionary Company. In it, Bloom effectively disemboweled and laid to rest the dried up "New Criticism" and "Neo-Classicism" that was in the ascendant at the time. He did no less than knock T.S. Eliot off his critical pedestal: a dragon-slayer indeed! The Visionary Company took its title from a line in a Yeats' poem referring to several poets (some, like Lionel Johnson, of exquisite merit) who shunned material success and followed their own visionary and masterful style of poetry and ended up dying young, drunk and destitute. (L. Johnson, for example was such a classical languages genius that he was offered a position at Oxford when he was barely over 20! Instead, he decided to pen his masterful poetry while drinking himself to death. He died after falling off a barstool at around the age of 30).- The full line from the Yeats' poem is "I would be one with the visionary company."-But the reader will take note that neither Yeats nor Bloom consumed himself with his genius in such a way. This, in Bloom's case, is somewhat unfortunate (I'm not going to delve into Yeats here.). After The Visionary Company, his prolific works can be graphed onto a parabolic downward swoop ending with this book...In the middle of said swoop, you can find works such as The Western Canon which, while idiosyncratic and a touch pompous and presumptuous(understatement?), still makes one catch one's breath at times at the profundity of the insights contained therein....But OK, first of all, Omens of Millenium is not truly Bloom's book at all, but a kitschy rip-off of The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas (Note how many times Jonas is mentioned in Bloom's book.). The problem is that Jonas was a painstaking scholar and wrote as such, and most readers will find him inaccessible to some extent, just as some readers found The Visionary Company. SOOO, Bloom solves everything by writing this nice little book relating Gnosticism to Western literature...Right?....Wrong!!...Bloom himself is guilty of what he dismisses the New Agers and such for: ill-informed boot-licking of the mass culture's obsession with all sorts of ridiculous things.-Sorry Harold, if you can't take it, don't dish it out.-My advice to readers is just to go back and read any of the great Romantic poets. They and the Gnostics are essentially the same on a spiritual level, and the writings of the poets are much more beautiful.-But please go ahead and check out Hans Jonas if you really are interested in the historical and technical aspects of this fascinating worldview.