Status Updates From Omens of Millennium: The Gn...

This guy just threw Shakespeare and G.K. Chesterton at me on the same page... I feel like I'm in Catholic high school all over again lol

We die solitary deaths, but dream communal dreams.

Yet psychoanalysis was, and is a shamanism; its affiliations with occultism or parapsychology are far more authentic than its supposed links to biology, as a discipline… Freud attempted a remarkably successful (though impermanent) usurpation of the dreamworld, particularly in the West.

A grand charismatic, with extra extraordinary, well-nigh hypnotic powers of suggestion, Freud must have recognized, sometimes “unconsciously,“ that he had a marked telepathic or clairvoyant effect upon his patients. Though the greatest of demystifiers, surpassing Nietzsche and Marx, Freud almost allows himself to hint that he is a secular Messiah.

Freud‘s ambition was prophetic; though intensely secular, he belonged to be the profit of a new revelation, possibly even a new Jewishness, though hardly a new Judaism. In a marvelous irony, he intended to establish his status as a prophet by denying to dreams any prophetic function whatsoever.

In Homer, the dream is a person or a god, frequently seeking toward off impending disaster from a hero… As messengers, as guardians, as thresholds to transcendence, some of our dreams appear in distinguishable from angels, and may as well be seen as such. The Zoroastrian Avesta, the Bible, the Quran, the Sufis, and Kabbalists all concur with Indian and Chinese sacred texts in treating dreams as divine epiphanies.

The Talmud says that a dream is only 1/60 part of prophecy, so presumably, even the holiest of answering angels who govern the dream realm can mistake the future.

Smith evidently studied Kabbalah, and came to the understand that as the resurrected Enoch, his ultimate transformation would be into the Angel Metatron… who is also the angel Michael and the resurrected Adam. Though orthodox Islam refuses such an identification for Muhammad, the Sufis insisted upon it, and Joseph Smith thus brings together the three great esoteric traditions of Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabbalah.

The likelier interpretation is that ancient, medieval, and modern Gnosis all seek to answer an authentic and lasting spiritual need, which is to reconcile time and death with our intimations of immortality.

We have always been a religiously fecund nation, particularly from about 1800 on. Since our religion tends to be experiential and pragmatic, it increasingly has departed from European Christianity, where institutional, historical, and theological aspects of the faith have remained relatively strong. Since we tend to be heterodox, even when we assert otherwise, angels return to us from the spiritual repression…

It is an ancient pattern among monotheists that the gods of other faiths and nations are demoted to the status of angels (or of demons). As guardian angels of rival states, these former gods easily could be associated with evil and with pestilence.

In Avicenna’s angelology, the monotheistic cosmos of the Koran tends to be dispersed into a kind of pragmatic polytheism, much resented by literalist orthodoxy in Islam, both now and then. The tension in all angelology, then and now, is between monotheism and the elevation of other heavenly beings to a status that seems to rival God’s. And yet the major monotheisms—X, J, Z, I—are all pervaded by angels.

Paul’s influence upon the church fathers was to eventuate the image of Satan as Christ’s envious younger brother, who seeks to serve the kingdom of God from Christ. Augustine culminates this tradition by carrying the division between Christ and Satan all the way back to the first day of creation, when God divided the light from the darkness, and part of the angels chose the darkness, in an initial sin of pride.

Paul understood implicitly, long before Augustine, that the difference between Judaism and Christianity was between a belief that God‘s image survives in one, even if partly hidden by sin, and a faith that the image was blotted out by sin except for the work of the atonement. To the extent that Christianity is essentially Pauline, it had no need and little use for virtuous angel.

Satan and his subordinates were thus permanently stationed at the heart of the Christian story, which seems to me as radical a departure from Yahwistic religion as the Incarnation itself was… The names of the angels came from Babylon, and the evil nature of the fallen angels came from Persia. Zoroaster, rather than the Yahwist or Isaiah, is ironically, the authentic ancestor of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine.

Elsewhere in Augustine, we are confronted by this most original notion, the highly un-Hebraic doctrine that Adam and Eve and their descendants were created by God for the single purpose of replacing the fallen angels. This leads to the least Hebraic idea in Christianity: by their own fall, Adam and Eve and their progeny are eternally guilty and predisposed to sin, particularly in regard to obedience and sexuality.

The English Romantic poet Shelley liked to say that Satan owed everything to the English seventeenth-century Puritan poet Milton, but I suspect that Shelley would have agreed with me that the Devil’s true debt was to Saint Augustine… bears the ultimate responsibility for molding the Christian Satan, who occupies a vital position in The City of God, the Augustinian masterwork.

Neil Forsyth’s The Old Enemy traces the Devil to Huwawa, opponents of the Siberian hero Gilgamesh, and to the equally rancid Humbaba, among the Assyrians. Many others got into the blend, including Tiamat, the Babylonian sea dragon, and Ahriman, the adversary according to Zoroaster. Yet there is a radically new element in the Christian Satan, because there is no room for him whatsoever in Yahwistic literature.

The sectaries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, once thought to be Essenes, seem now to have been a group who had more in common with the Jewish Christians and early Gnostics, and certainly saw themselves as being allied to angels, who would fight the final battles at their side. Islam, which developed from this Jewish Christianity, gave Christ the status of an angel who couldn’t be crucified, thus rejecting the incarnation