Charles McBryde’s Reviews > Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams & Resurrection > Status Update

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.