Charles McBryde > Recent Status Updates

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

Saint Paul and Saint Peter, as I have already observed, emphasize that the victory of Christ was a defeat for the angels, a severe contention that is fundamental to catholic doctrine concerning the angels. Régamay attempts to explain this away, yet it seems to have been a crucial part of the struggle of Paul and Peter against the Jewish Christians led by James who may have been Christian gnostics.

The great Thomistic insight is that angels have perfect knowledge of their own spirituality and so of their own freedom. We stumble about, knowing nothing but facts, while angels are great Platonists, as it were, and know the ideas directly, yet also know all the facts. The most surprising of Thomistic admonitions is that angels, unlike God, cannot know the inwardness of women and men.

The Shekinah, the feminine element in Yahweh, his in dwelling presence in the world, is served by Metatron, even as he serves the divine throne and chariot. Since the Shekinah among us, this means that Metatron is the grand vizier of YHWH on earth, even as in heaven. The magnificent metamorphosis here of Enoch, a mortal man, into the lesser Yahweh contrasts overwhelmingly with the subsequent dethronement of Metatron.

Enoch was named Idris by the Quran, and the Sufis identified Idris with the ancient Greek Hermes, remembering that the hermetic corpus centered upon the image of Hermes as the perfect nature, the union of man and God. Metatron might well be interpreted as the unique Angel of Reintegration, which is why he became the most important of angels for the Zohar and for all subsequent Kabbalah.

Enoch’s apotheosis is the point-for-point reversal of the collapse of the “supernal Adam “into the Adam of Genesis, since ancient Jewish texts, both normative and heterodox, initially represented Adam as a god-man whose garment of light is replaced by his own skin and the animal skins in which God clothed him.

After God took him, Enoch became an extraordinary angel, perhaps more a God than an angel, because frequently he was called “the lesser Yahweh.” Aramaic, by some traditions, is the language of the angels, which makes it appropriate that 1 Enoch should have been composed in that tongue (though other traditions insist that angels speak only Hebrew).

The apocalyptic literature of roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE is the true domain of the angels, and is associated with Enoch. Enoch, a mysterious patriarch of whom we are only told that he “walked with God, and then was not, because God took him,” is the single most crucial figure in the long history of the angels, even though he began existence as a man.

Whatever his actual power, Solomon does not seem to have adopted the full panoply of ancient near eastern despotism, with all its hierarchical bureaucracies. But in Babylon, the Jews be held what must have been an immense and elaborate royal court, whose structure mirrored the supposed hierarchy of the heavens.

Are we only a parody of the Angels? Or were we created to supplant them? In a fragment of Valentinus, the most imaginative of the gnostic heresiarchs, we are told that the angels were terrified when they gazed at the unfallen Adam, and in that terror, they spoiled their creation of our world.

The anarchistic Brethren of the Free Spirit in the 15th century, like the Provençal Cathars in the 12th, join the Manichaeans as the three large instances of gnostic movements that transcended an esoteric religion of the intellectuals. Ancient gnosticism, like romantic and modern varieties, was a religion of the elite only, almost a literary religion.