Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished

The publication of The Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism is to be saluted. Shoham sheds light on religious and philosophical-religious traditions - Gnosticism, Kabbala and existentialism - for which, as stated by the book's subtitle, The Centre Does Not Hold. The result is one of those rare books in which the newness of the view is accompanied by penetrating insights into the already familiar. The Gnostic traditions, examined in their great historical variability, reveal some surprising similarities. Born in a profound situation of crisis, from the destruction of the Second Temple up to the destruction of the European Jews during World War II, they have demonstrated their capacity to strike root. Gnostic traditions, with their capability of feeding a twofold politics of desire, are explained by the author in the context of two great Greek mythical models - the Sisyphean and the Tantalic....In reality, the mythogenes, in the penetrating psychoanalytical rereading offered by Shlomo Shoham, represent - imaginatively - life's fundamental phases: commencing with the trauma of birth; passing on to the constitution of a separate self via separation from the maternal bosom; to a phase where complex mechanisms of desire-repulse are formed, which will thereafter accompany the infant throughout his or her life. But it is not only individuals who engage in desire-repulse formations and dichotomy. It is the author's penetrating insight that demonstrates how a religious history may be retraced through the study of the great mythogenes.