Omens of Millennium - Softcover

Harold Bloom, the celebrated intellectual and literary critic, addresses our millennial preoccupations – angels, dreams and near-death experiences

Throughout history, as each new century approaches, people become increasingly fascinated with angels,dreams and near-death experiences. But what exactly are angels? How and when did they enter into human consciousness? What resemblance do angels of today have with their ancient predecessors? Where does our notion of the near-death experience come from? What roles do angels, dreams and near-death experiences play in our world as we approach the 21st century?

In this brilliant and revelatory book, Bloom explores one of his long-standing passions, tracing our fascination with these ancient phenomena to their origins in Zoroastrian, Hebraic, Christian and Sufi traditions. In so doing he rescues them from what he considers their contemporary debased condition, restoring them to their original grandeur and convincingly demonstrating that our current obsessions are a basic part of our intellectual and cultural past as well as our present.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. Author of more than 20 previous books, including the best-selling The Western Canon and The Book of J, Bloom is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a past Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard, a member of the American Academy, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. He is currently writing a book on Shakespeare’s characters.