Omens of Millennium
The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection
(amazon)Harold Bloom (View Bio)
Hardcover: Riverhead, 1996; Paperback: Riverhead, 1997.
"This is a book to be celebrated!" — Boston Globe
"Harold Bloom's latest work of religious and literary criticism places America's recent obsession with spiritual phenomena, angels, near-death experiences, and dream interpretation in the historical context of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Bloom succeeds in writing a comprehensive, concise, and witty commentary on these topics. Bloom, the 65-year-old author of 21 previous works of criticism, uses his highly refined understanding of the Bible, the Kabalah, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Koran, and other religious texts to demonstrate how the world's great religions drew from gnostic and Zoroastrian spirituality the spiritual themes that are being crudely revived in the popular culture of the U.S. today....Ultimately, his humor and cogency preserve this terrific thesis for general interest." — Booklist
"Beautifully written, sparely argued, marvelously full of the revelation of an acute mind at work." — Baltimore Sun
"A sometimes scintillating, sometimes exasperatingly esoteric examination of our American obsession with angels, with parapsychological dreams, with the near death experience and its astral body manifestations and, in particular, their clear analogues in the formative period of ancient Gnosticism. Bloom, the prolific professor of humanities at Yale and English at New York Univ., is fascinated by the belief system, rooted in the ancient Persian faith known as Zoroastrianism and most fully expressed by the ancient sect of Gnostics, that an eternal, divine being is immanent, the self, waiting to be known, rather than transcendent, in heaven, waiting to be revealed.... He is one of the very few contemporary writers to try seriously to trace the underlying religious and intellectual roots of our fin-de-siecle." — Kirkus Reviews
"A provocative book, shot through with wide learning, hard thinking and disturbing ideas.... Bloom takes seriously our millennial obsessions." — Civilization
