Harvey Birenbaum

William Butler Yeats once wrote to his friend, Lady Gregory, "Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots." Thus starting an obscure history of people wondering what on earth he meant. Appropriately, this quote opens Harvey Birenbaum's comparative cultural ontology of the two thinkers, both of whom are Gnostic Saints in Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.

While necessarily academic in nature, the writing is clear. It does suffer from typically academic faults such as including more material at the expense of efficient communication, but those are easily overlooked.

What is not easily overlooked is how much of a tease this book is to any magician. Often comparisons to mythical models and structures of meaning, common among magicians, are sidelined by grasping at straws for academically approved philosophers to fill in the gaps.

To understand why Yeats wrote what he did, you need to think how he did. Yeats was a magician and saw the similarities between William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche as fellow mystical artists engaged in magical creation transcending objective reason, or as Nietzsche fans love to say "post-truth".

Birenbaum's chosen style does seem to reduce the two thinkers to static caricatures of themselves. A flaw of the compare/contrast format. Due to this, the primary sources from Blake are The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience. For Nietzsche it is Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Anti-Christ and Beyond Good and Evil. Other works from both are used in the middle sections of the book, where Blake's and Nietzsche's myth making is examined separately, but when combining the two, a smaller scope is mostly used. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does lend itself to occurrences where a studied reader of either can easily think of contradicting evidence at times.

Nonetheless, Birenbaum gets really close to how I view, in heterodoxy to academia, what really unites Nietzsche and Blake. Like I mentioned above, teasing always just so close but never quite there. When Birenbaum jumps into territory of "ecstatic myth making" to convey a "truth beyond the scope/horizon of rationality" it's like watching your friend ask out a crush, then chicken out at the last moment. Even more so during the final sections of the book where symbol, sign, and ineffable truth get wrapped up in "the Word". A word which conveys truth but will always conceal another.

To reconcile the different approaches Nietzsche and Blake use towards myth-truth, Birenbaum makes another grasp at a straw, this time frustratingly hitting the mark more spot-on than he seems to realize, by invoking Laotse's struggles with the ineffable Tao. Yes, another Gnostic Saint enters the picture. At this point I simply facepalmed with the open book. It's enough to make you want to toss the author down the Well of Mimir and ask "Do you see now? Would you know yet more?!"

I'll leave you with the two final (and completely non-sequitur) quotes ending the text, plus a third they reminded me of:

"WILLIAM BLAKE one who is very much delighted with being in good company. Born 28 November 1757 in London & has died several times since." - William Blake in an autograph.

"One pays dearly for being immortal: one has to die several times while alive." - Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo

"Die Daily." - Aleister Crowley in The Book of Lies, Chapter 16… (mere)