Aileen La Tourette finds Harold Bloom “howlingly elitist and politically incorrect” — but loves every word. Here she reviews his new book Omens of Millennium: the Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection (Fourth Estate, £8.99) Omen, Showman... think I love him exactly in the mea- sure that I disagree with him, which is usually large. His famous text, The Western Canon, in which he sets out his criteria for inclusion in the literary canon, is howlingly elitist, politically incorrect and _ beautifully, lucidly, sparklingly, angrily written. I loved every word of it. I haven’t read The Book of J, in which he argues that the Old Testament God is one of the great characters of literature, and that he is also the creation of an Arabian princess, his own book’s eponymous J, but I will get round to it eventually, now that it’s in paperback.
In Omens of Millennium, he sets out “not a scholarly work but a personal religious testimony that reaches out to our common concerns as the Millennium approaches”. I find the way scholars use the word “personal” interesting. In his introduction, Bloom talks briefly about a spiritual crisis endured some years ago. His description is vivid, if that can be the right word for: “An enormous vastation had removed the self, which until then had been strong in me”. He goes on to say that travel and psychoanalysis were both prescribed by his Yale shrink, and he consulted “an eminent Pakistani psychoanalyst” in London. Thereupon “An _ instant hatred sprang up between the London analyst and me, so that I refused to see him again after three visits, but my fury was therapeutic and partly dislodged me from my dark night of the soul”.
Well. There are two other books, namely Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex about the BVM and The [= Harold Bloom. Sometimes I Harold Bloom Quantum Self, whose (female, physicist) author I must rely on my learned readers to know, as one of my children has removed the book from my shelves, and I know which one, too — whose introductions seem to reveal in a peculiarly Freudian-slip kind of way a detail that both underlines and undermines what follows. Warner’s is a little story about breaking down in tears in front of Marian images, furious at finding herself so moved by a love she ought to have and has, intellectually, outgrown; and_ the Quantum woman’s is a confession that she hates her mother.
So we have Bloom hating his shrink and finding the “immediate cause” of his depression irrelevant.
I’m sure he would think me vulgar and polluted with the punk Freudianism he denounces, but I feel his Gnosticism is rooted here.
Likewise, I fear, the whole project of American millennialism which he writes about with such fond skill has its origins in similar emotional quicksand, or primeval slime.
But enough presumptuous reductionism. This is a great book, one that I will go back to again and again, not dy least because I suspect myself of a core sympathy with Gnosticism (I can deny or belie emotion with the best of them). Bloom points out that Americans have always been millennial, the Millennium itself is an irrelevance. He spends much amused, amusing print gently mocking and despairing of New Age lunacies.
Basically, he looks at Gnosticism under three headings, Angels, Dreams, and Not Dying, finishes with a slap-up chapter on Gnosis and a lovely final peek under the veil at what the gnostic schtick is all about.
He laments the sheer banality of present-day angels, conypared to the scary half-monstrous presences of the past, whose provenance he traces to Zoroaster, to whom, it would seem, we owe most of our profoundest religious ideas. The shallow ones came from St. Paul. Bloom free-ranges from Plato through Wittgenstein and is not afraid to visit Shirley Maclaine or even Arianna Huffington, though he says of her work The Fourth Instinct: “Most intrepid of readers, I have attempted it, only to be driven back in defeat by its inspired vacuity”.
He reads Freud closely, not as a failed prophet but a refusnik balking at the implications of his own work.
Dreams as prophecies retain the ambivalent character of much gnostic experience, including the near-death experience, which Bloom notes is always positive in its contemporary versions. His most exciting explorations, for me, are the chapter “Shamanism: Otherwordly Journeys”, where he says: “A self that is the oldest and best part of one, a divine and magical self, which we also call Orphic, seems to me the origin of all Gnosticism, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic...” and goes on to talk of the Gnostic Jesus as shaman, and the “Woman Church”, the largest of the Roman Catholic feminist “shock troops of the New Age” which “knowingly or not works towards a vision of Jesus the shaman whose tutelary spirit was Mary Magdalene”.
There are more gems in this brief section, such as: “shamanism is and was universal and primal: always it has been the resource of groups and individuals who refuse to resign all power to god or the gods. Innate divinity is the center of shamanism...” My other favourite, apart from the genial mockery with which Bloom reviews both “anaesthetic revelation” (taken from William James) and Near Death Experiences, taken from the deathless (sorry) Raymond A. Moody, including his own experiences on both counts, is his consideration of resurrection issues, especially on the differences between resurrection and immortality, and the strikingly simple idea that resurrection may occur before death. I particularly like “Love, interpreting the body of another, participates in a divination or insight that should be called ‘prophetic’. What Sufism (and Christian Gnosticism before it) terms the Resurrection Body is what many of us encounter, in some rare moments of our lives, as the body of love.” But it’s all good — astral bodies, the wrestling-match with Freud, the wonderful end chapters, “Millennium” with “knowing the spark that is the inmost self necessarily involves knowing the selfs potential” and, at the very end, from the “Gnostic Treatise on Resurrection”, on the meaning of resurrection: “It is the uncovering at any given time of the elements that have arisen.” I haven’t fully digested the book yet, which may be painfully obvious, but I would love other people to read it and maybe discuss it at the next conference? Which will be even closer to the Millennium.
Aileen La Tourette is a writer and a former Chair of the SoF Steering Committee.