Bloom's strategy is to relocate the nexus of spiritual growth and development in the "self" and not in any institutionalized, dogmatic religion, an attitude he claims is reflected by popular interests in the paranormal and the apocalyptic. While "Bloom does not wish to worship Bloom" (p. 17), he repudiates the superficial self-interests of much New Age spirituality which he sees as a mix of "occultism and American harmonial faith suspended about half way between feeling good and good feeling" (p. 19). The search for transcendence as he sees it requires the seeker to move beyond both the material universe and the empirical, everyday self into the indwelling divine source of immortality. This is not a matter of faith but of knowledge (gnosis), of knowing and of being known, of seeing the divine spark within, even in the fallen condition of incarnate life. He strongly emphasizes this element of the "estrangement or even alienation of God" (p. 27) who abandons the cosmos while leaving the spark of divinity in every person. For Bloom, gnosticism arises as a "protest" against failed apocalypticism, as a consequence of resistance to the ever-turning wheel of historical becoming. He notes the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Carthars, and the Manichaeans as three similar gnostic protest movements, particularly among the elite where he locates many of the currents of contemporary American gnosticism, degraded in popular occult interests. Angel lore, near death accounts, out-of-body experiences are all signs of the implicit gnosticism that underlies the surfacing millennial fever.

Bloom then tackles angels, first by dismissing much of what is written as superficial, holding up Milton's Satan as a great

In discussing dreams, Bloom harkens to the role of dreams in the Kabbalah (Isaac Luria and 16th c. Safed) and the presence of angels as revealers and interpreters of dreams. Yet, dreams as discussed in the Babylonian Talmud were seen as ambiguous, both revelatory and misleading, a kind of minor prophecy mixed with "worthless things" that depended on diverse interpretations for understanding. Bloom reads dreams as primarily devalued and mistrusted in mainstream Judaism and Christianity, epitomized by Freud's hermeneutic suspicions. Yet, within western esoteric traditions, the dream could be revelatory, divine epiphanies opening to the suprasensual world. For Bloom, dreams can give "intimations of immortality" (p. 98) and may well overlap and be shared among multiple dreamers. Then, unexpectedly, we meet a diversion: Bloom's analysis of Freudian dream theory which he takes pains to refute, dragging in Wittgenstein to counter "free association" and Richard Wollheim to dismember Freud's neurotic symptomology of dreams. Sufism and Kabbalah provide Bloom with a means for recovering the value of dreams in post-Freudian, psychobiological America; he sees the Kabbalist Shekhinah, a Sophianic, indwelling divine female presence, or alternatively the Angel Christ,

In discussing life-after-death and astral or out-of-body experience, Bloom is a bit too caustic and in some ways, superficial. One distraction in his work is a tendency to satirize and denounce what he disagrees with or thinks is just plain nonsense. I don't dispute his right to not believe any number of things, but I found his sporadic satire distracting. Dismissing Raymond Moody (and Kenneth Ring) and holding up his own Cocteau-like near-death-experience as undercutting Moody's (strictly theoretical) stages, Bloom turns to "shamanism" as a more reliable source for understanding the gnostic element in modern out-of-body experience. Relying heavily on Dodds' (1951) classic work on Greek irrationalism, Bloom presses the reader to distinguish between soul (psyche) and the "occult self" (pneuma or daemon). This occult-self is "older than the body" and should not be confused with the more astral, bodily image of a present incarnation. Equating shamanic ecstatic trance (via Eliade) with true gnosis, he argues that the gnostic Jesus is really a shaman (p. 140). In this context, contemporary near-death experiences become parodies of "authentic shamanism" because they lack knowledge of the innate divinity or "occult self". Ironically, Bloom seems completely unaware of the post-Dodds literature on shamanism which has strongly discredited Eliade and attacked Anglocentric definitions of shamanism as wholly inadequate representations of indigenous spirituality (see Daniel Noel, The Soul of Shamanism, 1997). Here Bloom is simply recasting his argument in terms of compatible non-indigenou s thinking while ignoring the actual phenomenological reports of out-of-body experience. I agree that commercialization has sentimentalized and glossed over actual experience but the shamananic analogy is much too simplistic and highly problematic.

His overview of the Sufi "subtle body," which he equates with the "resurrection body," is much more original and central to his concerns. Every soul has an inner image, often personified as a "being of light, " which acts to epitomize his or her highest spiritual potential (the angelic self). Often mistaken as a "guardian angel," this visionary image is a reflection of the "inner essence" sought by the gnostic. The task is to empty the everyday self in order to absorb that angelic self; this celestial prototype is the basis of gnostic revelation and the

Bloom then reviews Gnosticism as articulated in the Hermetic-gnostic texts, ranging from the Egyptian Hermes (using Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes, 1986) through the Corpus Hermeticum (Brian Copenhaven, 1992) and the Valentinian paradigm as articulated by Hans Jonas, Peter Brown, and Bentley Layton, including later Christian and Sufi analogues. From Bloom's perspective, the failed Jewish apocalyptic writers influenced or perhaps "became Gnostics," making gnosticism a possible "Jewish heresy rather than a Christian one" (p. 186). He reads the core of Christian gnosticism as knowing how to release the inner spark, to recover knowledge of the divine Fullness, and to leave behind the fallen material world. The body goes to dust, the soul survives, and the spark returns to primal divine origin; the true self is this spark, the sought after source of all gnostic illumination. Such an illumination, produced by dying to the world, leads likewise to the Sufi "world of light" over which Sophia-Fatima (or Shekhinah) is the presiding archangel, yet another image of inward divinity. The Kabbalah offers a similar image in Metatron, analogue of the Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, who shows Moses the way to the divine throne and who is nothing less than God in angelic form, imaging the divine self. Passing through the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, Bloom demonstrates this same analogy: the withdrawing of divinity leaving only divine sparks which provide a means for a return to the most primordial source of all gnostic revelations.

Finally, we arrive at the American millennium and an estimated hundred million Americans expecting the return of Christ. Bloom predicts an unrealized apocalyptic expectation will only strengthen

There are certain counter points that can be raised in contrast to Bloom' s rather classical views of gnosticism. Gnosticism need not be world-denying nor anti-incarnational, nor does the inherent divinity of humanity need stem from an alienated god. The very concept of anything approaching a coherent, shared view of gnosticism has been repeatedly criticized by many scholars of religion (particularly in Michael Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, 1996). In fact, gnosticism may be thought of as variable semantic reference to a wide diversity of orientations, not all world renouncing or socially elitist. In the American context, it seems far more likely that the gnostic strain will become increasingly aesthetic and embodied along panpsychic lines of religious practices reclaiming intimacy and concern for the natural world without in any way diluting its appeal to direct religious experience. Further, Bloom's view of angels is thoroughly romantic and saturated with literary references that tend to overwrite entirely any phenomenology of angelic encounter, as is his general dismissal of out-of-body experience which is far more complex and diverse than the now dated Moody materials. Additionally, the gnostic stream of some New Age spirituality is much more sophisticated than the parody that Bloom gives as normative. The tie between western esotericism and much thought and practice in contemporary non-traditional American spirituality has long been engaged with the very materials that Bloom reviews in his book (see Wouter Hanegraff's New Age Religion and Western Culture, 1998). However, I found this book very stimulating