Introduction

Western Religious Traditions have as a denominating trait, especially in Europe and the Middle East, and in America, an institutional, historical and dogmatic orientation. This is true for Orthodox Judaism, for Isalmism in its Sunni and Shiite components, and for the Christian world, be it Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. In each of these religions God is conceived essentially as external to the self. In these traditions we find mystics and visionaries who have managed to come to terms with institutional authority, but there has always existed an alternative conception, the way of gnosis, a familiarity with GOD, a knowledge of the GOD within, which has been condemned as heretical by the institutional faiths. In one form or another, for at least the two Millennia of what we have come to call “the Vulgar Era,” gnosis managed to preserve itself, shared first by Jews and Christians, and later by Muslims as well. My experience and my Religious beliefs are a form of Gnosis and in a certain sense all this Book, and not simply its “Coda”, constitutes a sort of Gnostic sermon. My spiritual interests, while remaining the personal ones of an American Jew, are traversed within them by a Universal element that comes from a lifetime of study of Gnosis, both ancient and modern. And this book, though steeped in erudition, is not a scholarly work, but a personal religious testimony that expands to embrace common interests as we approach the new Millennium.

 

Page 12

The fusion of these materials is very ancient compared to our actuality, and can be traced back to archaic Persia and Palestine, to medieval Arabia, Provence and Spain. I have resorted to Christian Gnosticism, Muslim Shiite Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah as explanatory sources because each of them provides me with persuasive interpretations of the links between Angels, dreams, otherworldly travels or manifestations of astral bodies and Messianic expectations.

 

 

Page 12

my feeling of what I call “American Religion”, a syncretic and widely spread faith that seems to me quite different from European Christianity. The interest in Angeology, prophetic dreams, and near-death manifestations as millenarian prophecies is of course universal, but has a particular intensity in the United States, where the American Christ tends to be the Jesus of the resurrection rather than the Jesus of the crucifixion or ascension.

 

 

Pg. 14

In Corbin’s perspective, along the lines of the teaching of the sages, the literal or empirical sense itself is nothing more than a metaphor for a deficiency in vision, which seems to me to be quite true. Between the sense world and the intellectual world, the sages have always experienced an intermediate reality, akin to what we call the “imagination of poets.” If you are a believer (orthodox or heretic, it doesn’t matter), this intermediate dimension is experienced as the presence of the Divine in everyday reality. If you are more skeptical, this presence is primarily aesthetic in nature, or even a form of perspectivism. In this book, the sphere between literal and intellectual realities takes on its traditional designation of the “Realm of Angels,” and is described and analyzed as such.

 

 

Page 15

Zoroaster was at the beginning a Priest of the ancient Iranian cult of the Magi, but then he reformed it, and Zoroastrianism became the Religion of the Persian Empire at least from the VI B.C. until the middle of the VII century of the Christian era, when it was banned by the Muslims. Nowadays there are more or less a hundred thousand followers of Zoroastrianism: the Parsis in India and a few thousand (to say the least) followers in Iraq. A great religion has practically disappeared, except for the fact that Judaism, Christianity and Islam preserve the peculiar mark of its Messianism. Zoroaster’s god, Ahura Mazda, lord of light and wisdom, was benevolent and powerful, but he had an evil twin, Angra Mainyu, lord of evil and destruction. The unending war between the two brothers will end, one day with the triumph of Ahura Mazda and the establishment of eternal peace and joy. As the first millenarian prophet, Zoroaster can be credited with the conception of the resurrection of the dead.

 

 

Page 17

Already in Daniel, however, within the canon of the Hebrew Bible, Angels begin to be named, and for the first time they make a prophecy about the future, even if simply to interpret Daniel’s dreams. Micah and Gabriel, Israel’s guardian angels, are the precursors (as will be seen) of the angelic avalanche that will rush upon GOD’s people in the Books of Enoch. The central image of Zoroaster’s vision is a purifying and regenerating fire that transforms Enoch into Metatron, the greatest of Angels, to whom much of this Book will be dedicated. Metatron, a crucial figure in the Kabbalah, especially in its greatest book, the Zohar of Moses de Leon, is an Angel different from all those who had preceded him in the Jewish tradition.

 

 

Pg. 18

It is paradoxical that Christianity has always seen Islam as a heresy and Zoroastrianism as an exotic vestige, while it owes much of its spirituality to both of these rival traditions.

 

 

Pg. 20

The angelic world whether metaphor or reality, is a giant picture in which to see and study ourselves, just as we head toward what may be the end of our time.

 

 

Page 21

I must invite men immersed in Time to come back into themselves and out of time, to savor their original immortal air.

R.W. Emerson

 

 

Pg. 21

If you seek yourself outside of yourself, you are headed for failure, whether erotic or ideological.

 

 

Pg. 21

In our age a spiritual autobiography, I have believed so far, is best when it is implicit. But there comes a time when you know perfectly well what you will come to know, and when you realize that all the living and reading and brooding you will do will not alter your self any more. I am now in my fortieth consecutive year of teaching at Yale, and my seventh at New York University, and for the last ten years I have taught almost exclusively Shakespeare. Who, in addition to demonstrating superhuman qualities, continually gives me the impression that he knows more than anyone else ever has. To most scholars, that impression is nothing more than a deception, but to me it seems like the naked truth. Knowing myself, knowing Shakespeare, and knowing GOD are three distinct yet closely related goals.

 

Page 21-22

The search for GOD outside oneself is an invitation to the disasters of dogma, institutional corruption, historical prevarication, and cruelty. For at least two centuries most Americans have sought the God within themselves rather than the God of European Christianity. But why, in all this, mention Shakespeare, who in my opinion represents the prototype of the secular writer?

One knows the self primarily by knowing oneself; knowledge of another human being is immensely difficult, perhaps impossible, however much in youth, and even in middle age, one may be able to deceive oneself about it. And that is why we read Shakespeare and listen to him: to meet other selves. No other writer is able to do this for us. Shakespeare as a person we never meet, while it is possible that it happens, within their work, with Dante or Tolstoy.

 

 

Pag . 23

GOD appears e GOD is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.

 

(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence)

 

Pg . 24-25

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the sharpest of modern Catholic writers, warned, “The fact that Jones worships the God within himself ends up meaning in essence that Jones worships Jones.” Mere Gnosticism requires a sharp distinction from such generous self-worship; Bloom does not aspire to worship Bloom, which, moreover, would not really be a religious experience. The current degradation of Gnosticism goes by the name of New Age, a suit of armor big enough to gird Shirely MacLaine and Arianna Huffington together, in which Ms. MacLaine worships Ms. MacLaine (with some good reason) and Ms. Huffington worships Ms. Huffington (with some less reason).

 

 

Pg . 24-25

The New Age, an interminable hilarious orgy of vague cravings, is not really a product of the counterculture as it seems to have been at first; its origins go back to an ancient mixture of occultism and American faith in Harmony suspended halfway between good feelings and prosperity.

 

 

Pg . 27

But what, to simplify, is transcendence? As a divine attribute, it means an ascent beyond the material Universe and ourselves, insofar as we are nothing more than elements of that Universe. As a human attribute, materialists dismiss it as an illusion, yet it leads to a not easy existence in many of us, finding a more solid foothold over the ages in a small handful of individuals: mystics, visionaries, sages, men and women who have a direct contact with the divine or angelic world and are able to convey something decisive in the contact they have with us.

 

 

Pg . 28

Until you have surrendered to Him your self will not have an authentic self. […] Even in the literature of art, no one who takes the trouble to be original will ever really be original: if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring one iota how often it is told) you will succeed, nine times out of ten, in becoming original without even realizing it. The principle applies to all of life, from beginning to end. Give up your self, and you will find the real thing. Give up your life, and you will save it.

 

 

Pg . 32

For Jonas, as for Emerson, the moment of gnosis is the direct perception of the mind, a pure movement and event that simultaneously unleashes a divine spark in the self, and a sense of divine degradation there as well, in the innermost intimacy of the self, because the gnostic fall occurs within the divinity.

 

 

Pg . 33

Self-reliance is a doctrine for loners; it does not at all agree with the Marxian thesis that the smallest human unit consists of two persons. Mere Gnosticism does not lend itself to collective cults, however sporadic such attempts have undoubtedly been recorded. What should a Gnostic prayer be like? An invocation to the self, perhaps, that it might awaken, he said it for us, “The best thing is always that which makes me to myself.”

 

 

Pg . 35-36

Gnosticism, then as now, arises in my judgment as a protest against apocalyptic faith, even when it is constituted within such a faith, as it did later with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A prophetic religion becomes apocalyptic when the prophecy does not happen, and an apocalyptic religion becomes gnosticism when the apocalypse does not revel, as fortunately has always happened so far and, we hope, will happen later. Lognosticism does not fail; it cannot fail, because its God is at the same time deeply rooted in the self and alienated, infinitely remote, beyond our cosmos. Throughout history, Gnosticism has always been the victim of persecutions, ranging from the relatively lenient repudiation of Orthodox Judaism to the tremendous violence of Catholicism against the Christian Gnostics of all times, wherever and whenever the Church has found itself closely allied to a repressive secular power. The last organized Gnosticism in the Western World was destroyed by the so-called “Crusades” against the Albigensians, who put southern France to fire and sword during the thirteenth century, exterminating not only the Cathar heretics but also the Provençal idiom and the troubadour culture, which survived only in the myth and in the prevailing ideal of the Western world of romantic love.

 

 

Pg . 36

The American Religion, in both the indigenous as well as the avowedly Catholic and Protestant versions, is more of a Gnostic amalgam than a European version of historical and doctrinal Christianity, although few people can understand it (or perhaps generally do not wish to realize it).

 

 

Pg . 42

The most extraordinary portrait of an Angel we have ever had, and will ever have, is that of the Miltonian Satan, who uses his freedom to win himself a titanic damnation.

 

Pg . 44

The millennium, or the advent of a Messianic age (in the expectations of some of us) inevitably gives rise to ambivalent feelings even among those who scoff at the arbitrariness of the calculation that presides over calculations of this nature.

 

 

Pg . 49

Enoch-Metatron, as I will argue later, can be considered the true American angel, as first intuited by the Mormon prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith, who identified himself with Enoch and who, if what his followers claim proves true, should by now have been reunited in mystical union with his great precursor.
What we refer to today as the First Book of Enoch has been preserved in its entirety only in an ancient Ethiopian version, but fragments that came to light in the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the original language of the Book was Aramaic, an idiom spoken for several centuries before and after Christ by the Jews and neighboring Syriac peoples. Aramaic, according to certain traditions, would be the language of the Angels, which does justice to the fact that the First Book of Enoch was composed in that language (although there are translations according to which the only language of the Angels would be Hebrew).

 

Pg . 50

Faced with this horror, and the frightening spread of magic and witchcraft by one of the demons, Azazel, GOD sends a flood to Earth and orders the Archangel Raphael to bury Azazel in stones and darkness. Exactly at this point Enoch, the righteous scribe, enters the story. In a dream the watchful Angels send him to rebuke the fallen Angels and warn them of what awaits them. Enoch first ascends to the Throne of GOD, in a sphere of fire, and is allowed to stand before Him. This is followed by a series of journeys into the kingdom of heaven, a sort of excursion into the territory of the Angels and the secrets of the Cosmos. These include the epiphany of a Messiah son of men, and scenes of the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment of sinners.

 

Pg . 50-51

It is extraordinary how much mythopoetic invention penetrates in so many forms in the Third Book of Enoch, perhaps because we are at an archaic stage of what half a millennium later will mutate into the extravagant Kabbalistic imagination. At the center of the imaginative of the Hebrew Enoch we find the radical transformation of Enoch in the Archangel Metatron, prince of the Divine Presence (appellative of the Prophet Isaiah) and sort of viceroy of JAHVÈ himself. In the course of this transmutation, Enoch’s skin is transformed into a Robe of Light, into “flaming torches”, and his human dimensions expand until they reach the dimensions of creation. Moshe Idel, a leading figure in the contemporary study of Kabbalah, accurately observes that the apotheosis of Enoch is the exact opposite of the reversal of the “supreme Adam” in the Adam of Genesis, since the ancient Hebrew texts, both Orthodox and heretical, represent Adam as a Man-God whose Robe of Light was replaced by his skin and by the animal skins with which GOD covered him, while the original giant Adam, who frightened the Angels for his size and his magnificence, was reduced to our human measures. Idel points out that the paradox of another reversal: in certain sources the original Adam “falls” because of the Angels, because his splendor causes them to claim that his power is equal to that of GOD.

 

 

Pg . 51

Enoch was renamed Idris in the Koran, and the Sufis identify Idris with the Hermes of the Greeks, mindful of the fact that the Corpus Hermeticum revolved around the image of Hermes as Perfect Nature, the union of man and God.

 

Pg . 54

As Adam had fallen, so Enoch was allowed to ascend, and the demarcation between man and God blurred, and could blur further. In my opinion the most memorable passage in the Hebrew Enoch is found in the sixth paragraph, when the Angels reject with indignation and solemnity the apotheosis of Metatron, formerly Enoch:

“When I reached the highest heavens, the Holy creatures, the Ofannim, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, the wheels of the Chariot and the ministers of the devouring fire smelled my odor from 365000 billion parasangs and said, “What is this odor of woman born? What is this taste of a drop of white rising from the high heavens to those who share the flame?”

This is a superb, dry summary of what the romanticism of our times obscures and debases: the deep ambiguity of the Angels towards us. The Angels’ mockery is induced by the sexuality of humans: that “drop of white” is the contribution of Jared, his father, to Enoch’s procreation. GOD’s retort to the Angels is both a powerful reproof of them and a stinging accusation against us: “And this I have taken is My reward from all the World below the Heavens.”

 

 

Pg . 56

The great Thomistic intuition is that Angels have a perfect knowledge of their own spirituality, as well as of their freedom. We struggle, aware only of factual realities, while Angels are great Platonists, so to speak, and have a direct knowledge of Ideas, as well as of the totality of facts. Our ability to love is often based on feeling, which of necessity is the realm of imperfect knowledge: Angels, like GOD, love with perfect knowledge. It is unlikely that this assumption, in St. Thomas had ironic intentions, but in fact it backfires by awakening the irony of eros in its totality. When the theologian sets limits to angelic knowledge, they are temporal limits: GOD knows the future, but angels do not, because their limit is not eternal. For me, the most striking Thomistic admonition is that Angels, unlike GOD, are not able to know the intimate nature of men and women, although they are splendid at speculating. It is a case of reflecting on the limitations of all those guardian Angels being worshipped in the America of our times if it is true that they cannot know the hearts of those they are supposed to protect.
St. John of the Cross, the greatest of the Spanish mystics said magnificently that only to himself GOD is neither foreign nor new; the Angels, even the holiest ones, are perpetually surprised by GOD. A French Catholic scholar, P.R. Regamèy, juxtaposed to this observation the splendid formula of the supreme orator Jeaque-Bènigne Bossuet, who, with regard to Christ in relation to men and Angels, had affirmed that the Savior “is more ours than theirs”. St. Paul and St. Peter, as I have already noted, emphasized that Christ’s victory was a defeat for the Angels, a serious assumption that is fundamental to Catholic angelology. Règamey strives to give a justification for it, but it nevertheless remains an essential part of Peter and Paul’s dispute against the Judeo-Christians led by James, perhaps Gnostic Christians. The followers of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect who were thought to be Essenes, now turn out to be a group that had rather more points of contact with the Judeo-Christians and the early Gnostics, and certainly believed that they had as allies Angels who would fight the final battle on their side.

 

 

Pg . 59

The seminal work of the anonymous Neoplatonist is De caelesti hierarchia, arguably the most important text in the entire history of angeology. “Hierarchy” seems to be a word invented by the Pseudo Dionysius, who in the wake of the Neoplatonic Proclus breaks down everything into hierarchical triads. Hierarchies are a creation of Pseudo Dionysius, but the angelic categories date back to St. Ambrose, who took them over from traditions of ancient and unknown origin. There are three hierarchies, each of three orders, of decreasing rank:

1. Seraphim 2. Cherubim 3. Thrones

4. Dominations 5. Vitrums 6. Powers

7. Principalities 8. Archangels 9. Angels

Thomas followed this arrangement, Dante instead reversed the positions of the principalities and archangels. The seraphim traditionally surround the Throne of GOD, chanting uninterruptedly, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Yet there is only one reference in the Bible, the splendid sixth chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah

 

 

Pg . 61

The Denominations, at the first rank of the second triad, have the merit of being the original angels, or the most ancient ones, but they have never aroused much interest. The Virtues, on the other hand, at the next rank, fascinate because their function is to work miracles in our World and to serve as Guardian Angels as mentioned by Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew (18, 10). They have the honor of being the two Angels that accompany Jesus in the Ascension, perhaps because of the reference to Matthew.

 

 

Pg . 62

The Satan of the Book of Job is “the antagonist,” or “the public charge,” a servant of GOD with a good reputation and far from evil. Again in the Book of Isaiah (14:12-15), when the Prophet sings of the fall of Helel ben Shahar, the morning star, the reference is undoubtedly to the King of Babylon, and not to a fallen Angel, as Christian interpreters have held

 

 

Pg . 64

And yet with the Christian Satan one has the feeling of something radically new, taking into account the fact that in the Jahvistic literature there is absolutely no room for him, and despite the fact that some Hebrew apocalyptic texts later give him some attention, particularly in the Books of Enoch, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Life of Adam. But there is still a gulf between these Texts and the New Testament, in which Satan is really an original invention, a concentrate of sin of far more universal and powerful dimensions than our imagination can conceive. The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was fond of saying that Satan owed everything to the seventeenth-century Puritan Milton, but I have a feeling that Shelley would have agreed with me that the devil’s real debt was to St. Augustine, the fourth-century A.D. theologian, to this day the greatest in the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. A superb intellect, he bears the fundamental responsibility for the conception of Satan, who plays a prominent role in the City of God, Augustine’s masterpiece. It is from this book that we learn the fundamental history of Satan’s rebellion, induced by pride and preceding the creation of Adam, so that the seduction of Adam and Eve by Satan is subsequent to the fall of the Angels. At other points in Augustine’s work we come across his most original concept, the absolutely non-Jewish doctrine that Adam and Eve and their descendants were created by GOD for the sole purpose of replacing the fallen Angels, which leads to the less Jewish concept of the Christian tradition: as a result of their Fall, Adam and Eve and their descendants are guilty for eternity and predisposed to sin, especially in the spheres of obedience and sexuality. Only the atoning sacrifice of the incarnate Christ, in the version provided by St. Paul, Augustine’s forerunner, is able to redeem us from our sins.

 

 

Pg . 66

One should never forget that in the Hebrew Bible “Satan” is not a proper name. In the Book of Job the reader encounters ha-Satan, “the Satan,” which comes from legal language, something like “prosecutor.” As one of the b’ne ELOHIM, the “sons of GOD,” Satan is a divine being, or an Angel, Mal’ak YAHWEH, a diplomatic representative of GOD. His title corresponds to something like “accuser”: he is an authorized antagonist of human beings. In Greek an accuser is a diablos, and that was how Satan became diabolical. Forsyth, in The Old Enemy, traces the curious evolution of Satan in the Jewish world, in which an obstacle became a scandal and an agent of GOD became an autonomous adversary of mankind, indebted first to persecute and then to persecute, as it were.

 

 

Pg . 70

Messengers are useless if they have no messages to deliver and if there is no one to send them. To read of the endless reports of alien sightings, one wonders why the people who claim to have suffered an abduction or intrusion are not particularly gifted or intelligent. The same sad question raises the more benevolent and traditional guardian Angels of some recent chronicles. Angels have been relevant only when the human beings with whom they had to deal were people of great importance. Gabriel visited the Prophet Muhammad, who had the creative imagination of a Dante or a Milton. Moroni chose Smith an extraordinary Religious genius. If the approach of the Millennium will be accompanied by descents of Angels, they will be in the direction of authentic prophets who have not yet appeared among us. Therein lies the actual comic pathos, and at the same time the substantial aesthetic weakness, of Kushnr’s Angels in America, in which his gallant, sickly gay prophet simply has no prophecy to pass on to us.
Angels from our point of view, must constitute human rather than Divine events. GOD does not need to believe in Angels, we do, but it is necessary that this belief has a meaning, so that the laws of nature are violated for some purpose. Otherwise Angels would be only blasphemies, insults to Creation. This fundamental lesson is provided by the Koran in a more explicit way than the Bible, and it is a teaching that restores Judaic and Christian truths, as Muhammad claimed. An Angel cannot intervene or be invoked, for a whim of his or ours: it must be because of a superior Will, not to become an abuse neither of the believer nor of the skeptic. In our late epoch, in the shadow of the new Millennium, the Angels that will serve will be extremely subtle creatures, because the great miracles do not suit our condition anymore.

 

 

Pg . 71

Whether the miracle is a contra naturam event depends ultimately on our conception of nature. If we understand nature as the reality of science (in other words, a reality distilled from that other total general everyday reality by the work of a strictly circumscribed, unusual, acquired, and, in every respect, artificial point of view), then undoubtedly miracles involve facts so far removed from their ordinary nature that they can no longer show the presence of GOD. […] GOD has been removed from reality so global that it is impossible for Him to appear. If within this conception of nature one expects GOD to appear, one must expect that He can appear as a physical fact among other physical facts, for example as a child, as the child Jesus playing between the oak and the maple tree, and to whom one can approach in the same biological way as one approaches trees. To believe in the miracle in this form is, in fact, a non-belief. Because in the first place reality (which is, beyond everything, a perception of our understanding with GOD) has been reduced to a system of scientific facts; which means that GOD has been removed from this reality. And secondly, if one asks Him despite everything to reappear in this reality that has become alien to Him in the form of an objective fact, among other (objective) facts, then this means the death of God. The concept that the miracle is contra naturam does not only mean that, in this miracle, it upsets it; it also implies that the miracle that appears in the interstice that is determined shows itself as a (pseudo) natural, (pseudo) physical and pseudo (chemical) fact. The faith of the miracle […] is the faith of a (pseudo) science.

Substitute “Angel” for “miracle” throughout this paragraph and you will arrive at an unquestionable explanation why we had better give faith to any angelic sighting, today and in the future only if it is reported by Prophets, Seers, Revelators or great poets.

 

Pg . 72

For the time being, I would urge anyone who has any interest in Angels, prophetic dreams, near-death experiences and the impending Millennium to evaluate their current encounters with such phenomena on the basis of the best that has been known and written about them in the past. This is the main purpose of the book: to evoke and enlighten these phenomena in order to save them, bringing them back to the interpretative wisdom of the Christian Gnostics, the Muslim Sufis and the Jewish Kabbalists. In the absence of a context that acts as a spiritual parameter, we will drown in the enthusiasm and gratification of the New Age.
The Catholic Church, in keeping with its own traditions, continues to repeat that Angels are closer to GOD than to man, and tends to emphasize their diversity.In Protestant and post-Protestant America this otherness is in decline, and today threatens to disappear altogether. In the dramatic apparition of Gabriel to Daniel, the Prophet first loses consciousness and falls down in a daze, and recovers only when the Angel touches him with kindness. I compare Daniel’s spiritual trauma with the mellowness of current angelology textbooks, one of which actually claims that there are cat-angels that are supposed to appear to our domestic felines. The domestication of Angels makes them dull and honeyed

 

 

Pg . 73

It is an ancient pattern of monotheistic Religions to demote to angelic (or devilish) status the Deities of other faiths or other countries. As Guardian Angels of enemy nations, these creatures, already Divine, it was easy to identify them with evil or calamity. Yahweh’s solitary excellence prevented a complete, manifest mythology from taking shape among the Hebrews, although there are many traces of a similar polytheistic creativity before the rebirth of the Spirit of “Yahweh alone,” which seems to have begun with the Prophet Hosea in the 8th century B.C. By the time that spirit triumphs in Deuteronomy, the way was cleared for a Yahvist religion almost entirely emended of all Angelology. It was not until the rebellion of the Maccabees against Syrian-Hellenistic rule that angelology made a decisive comeback in the Book of Daniel and later in the Non-Canonical Texts; and yet the revival of Judaic angelology had begun long before, at the time of the exile in Babylon. Here the central figure is that of the Prophet Ezekiel; his vision of the Chariot, “the Wheels and their Work,” is the true starting point for all Judaic angelology and esotericism, and must be counted among the greatest angelic epiphanies of all time.

 

 

Pg . 74

In America we do not heed the warnings of St. Paul because an American angelology, slowly but surely, is spreading throughout the country and not only among Mormons and Pentecostals and New Age networks, but among Catholics, Baptists, Jews and the entire spectrum of religious orientations. America has always been a fertile country in the religious sense, especially since the nineteenth century. Because our religion is generally experiential and pragmatic in nature, it has become increasingly detached from European Christianity, where the institutional, sotic, and theological aspects of the faith have remained relatively powerful. Since our tendency is heterodoxy, even when we claim otherwise, it is from us that the Angels take refuge from the spiritual repression inaugurated by St. Paul. For us they become images of our freedom: freedom from the past, from authority, from the necessity of death. And for many of us, I suspect, the Angels are almost independent of GOD. Like the American Jesus, who is primarily the Jesus of the resurrection rather than the Jesus of the crucifixion or ascension, our Angels are variations of the Judeo-Christian, Gnostic and Muslim Christos Anghelos. Each Guardian Angel announces the possibility of a personal resurrection, if not at the stroke of the next Millennium, then perhaps a third of a Century later.
In Chapter IV of this book on Gnosis I will outline a similar pattern between Sufis and Kabbalists. Since there are no direct links between contemporary angelic mania and earlier forms of esotericism, some explanation for certain parallels must be sought. If one is a Yunghian, which is not my case, there would be nothing to explain: we would be dealing with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The most probable interpretation is that gnosis, both ancient and medieval and modern, tries to give an answer to an authentic and permanent spiritual need, that is to reconcile time and death with our clues of immortality.

 

Page 79

2. Dreams

The angel narrator

In the town of Safed, in northern Palestine, the Kabbalah experienced an extraordinary development throughout the fifteenth century. The most important figures were Moses Cordovero, author of a fruitful systematic work, and his pupil Isaac Luria, undoubtedly the most original thinker ever to appear among the Kabbalists. Luria belonged to the oral tradition, wrote little, and the most vital part of his personality is not found in his writings: it has been preserved only because his pupils have transmitted his ideas in their works. After Cordovero and Luria, the most renowned mystic of the school of Safed was Joseph Caro, whose efforts were directed primarily to the codification of the Rabbinic ritual, the Shulhan ‘Arukh. Caro’s mystical orientation manifested itself primarily in his long association with the angelic voice, or Maggid, which served as an alternative self.

 

Pg. 80

There are Maggidim who to some extent deceive, for although they are holy and their roots are in holiness, yet the human action caused .

 

Pg. 81

the Angel thus created will be exceedingly virtuous and inspired and true in every word of his; the same is true of one who reads the Law without making mistakes.

 

Pg. 82

Caro died of natural causes at the beautiful age of eighty-seven. The Talmud states that a dream is only the sixtieth part of a prophecy, so it is to be presumed that even the holiest of angel narrators who control the realm of dreams can be mistaken about the future.

 

Pg. 85

What would Freud have answered to those who proposed him to affix as epigraph of the Interpretation of Dreams this splendid example of Talmudic irony? I have long quoted that phrase (“All dreams go behind the mouth”) on the title page of every edition in my possession of Freud’s extraordinary book of dreams, his masterpiece and yet, at the same time a disrespectful superimposition of his genius on materials unwilling to accede even to his Faustian will.

 

Pg. 86

Maimonides reports the teaching of the Sages that “the dream is the unripe fruit of prophecy,” and St. Thomas Aquinas shows very strong ambiguities about divination through dreams. On the contrary, the Protestant Calvin warned not to neglect dreams that one had a tendency to forget, because it was possible that they came from GOD.

 

Pg. 87-88

There is a sense in which Freud, as an interpreter of dreams, prudently departed from this subversive Nietzschean perspective, which has more in common with Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet, than with anyone else. A hero of consciousness, both Hamlet and Nietzshe question its authority. Even Freud knew how many pitfalls the conscience hid, partly because he was well aware of Hamlet and Nietzshe; but the fact of knowing it is used by him substantially to make it more armored against the world of instincts, of plutions. To say that consciousness is an imaginative commentary of an unconscious text is to deny any authority to the personal point of view; there is no longer a secure base on which to stand. Freud rejected that Hamletian abyss, his project being manifestly therapeutic at least as much as, in intention, revelatory, but also for his book on dreams was concealedly a spiritual autobiography, at the center of which lay his own, astonishing intellectual ambition. And this is precisely the theme of the next paragraph; more pertinent to the nature of dreams would be to realize that Freud knew little, and even less cared to know, about the nature of sleep. He believed that the only function of dreams was to hinder awakening, and he knew very little about the different levels of sleep and their relation to dream activity.
Sleep is essentially a relaxation of the muscles and brain, and it should be remembered that in many ancient traditions sleep was considered the brother of death.

 

Page 89

REM dreaming produces dreams that are more vivid and intense, and undoubtedly more prolonged, but the whole activity of sleeping is punctuated by dreams.
It would also be difficult to reconcile Freud with the most interesting theories in vogue today, first of all that of the Swiss researchers Lehman and Koukkou, according to which while we sleep we are engaged in revising the conceptions we had in childhood on the basis of later formulations.

 

Page 89

And so they are seen in the Sufi thought of Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) as will be seen in Chapter IV, “Gnosis,” but in any case no general outline of the nature of dreams can afford to overlook the most powerful of universal traditions, both Eastern and Western that which associates Angels and dreams.

 

Pg. 94

Pe Socrates, in fact, most of us are essentially in a state of perpetual sleep, and it is only a few philosophers who are awake. Plato perhaps more than Socrates felt awe for dreams, for their superrational energies, but his respect for the dream dimension influenced his late followers, the Neoplatonists (Sufis included), more than the difference for night visions. Doniger points out that many Indian sages more than Freud agree with Plato:

 

Page 95-96

The dream belongs to an angelic sphere in Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, and Jewish Kabbalah. Between the dream dimension of that sphere and ourselves, at the approach of the Millennium, the great inhibiting agent is Sigmund Freud to whose book of dreams we turn our attention again.

Freud’s book of dreams

It could be debated whether The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the end of 1899 was the most influential intellectual work of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Freud’s great book is marred by his scientism, or by his making science a fetish, a defect that nevertheless has not hindered its enduring success as a model of interpretation, as well as a type of spiritual autobiography, a confessional masterpiece. Finished the first draft when the author was 44 years old, the book underwent almost 40 years of revisions, and defies even the most analytical and competent of commentaries.