A River Could Be a Tree, tells us about her upbringing in Jasper, Indiana, within the Worldwide Church of God, an apocalyptic, doomsday Christian sect led by Herbert Armstrong, a former Ku Klux Klan member who preached a version of British Israelism, a doctrine that claims the ten lost tribes ended up in Great Britain. Armstrong himself claimed to be descended from those lost tribes, and so his followers, too, at least spiritually, were identified with them.
Angela Himsel was similarly raised on stories. To a young Angela, seventh of eleven children, the biblical figures of Adam, Noah, and Joseph were as real as her shotgun-toting Catholic grandfather and her Lutheran German-speaking grandmother. “I was a literal-minded child,” she writes. “I imagined God hanging out in the neighborhood, popping up on the street unexpectedly. I wished God would do that still, show up at the courthouse square in Jasper or maybe just appear in the backyard while we were playing Red Rover.”
It is not only the literal-mindedness of the stories that would come to guide Himsel’s life, but also a yearning for that divine encounter, that of bumping into God in the backyard. Specifically, what she yearned for was an encounter with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, who would be her path to salvation, to the afterlife, to the rapturing of the faithful to the city of Petra, Jordan—Armstrong’s very specific apocalyptic fantasy—where Jesus was to greet them in a great fatherly embrace.
Which brings us indeed to Jesus—embodying Christian charity and goodness and love and eternal salvation to some, apostasy and persecution and pogroms to others. To Angela though, Jesus was no abstract notion, no theological symbol cloaked in a metaphor of God made flesh, but the central figure in a cosmic drama so real that every smallest deed affected her role within it.
“Life . . . requires life-supporting illusions,” wrote Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of mythology. “Where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to.” As the myth of the Sambatyon and the lost tribes was to me, so the myth of Petra, the place of safety to which the faithful would be raptured, where Jesus himself awaited, was to Himsel. The “life-supporting illusions” of our respective faiths were the stories that gave our everyday life meaning.
What happens, however, when the myths are dispelled?
When the myths are dispelled, the stories lose their power, and as often as not, the edifices built upon them first shake then crumble. Not without a showdown, though, body wrestling with soul, our infant selves yearning for stories with literal meaning and our evolved minds forced to a painful reckoning with truth. “Truth”—life’s certainties previously handed to us in tales of literal, material reality—we now learn, is barely within human grasp, and where does that leave us and our wondrous illusions?
For Himsel, that reckoning arrived slowly, as it did for me, as it does to all of us with imaginations so fierce, so protective of our need for story, that our souls scream in protest for our illusions to remain intact. Illusions, though, have ways of dissolving, and when they do, they leave us fallen, stricken, to contend with a sterile reality.
A chance encounter with a photo-covered brochure of the land of Israel was the gateway to Himsel’s own forced reckoning. A student at Indiana University, she discovered an opportunity to study abroad—specifically, at The Hebrew University in Israel. This was not, to her, Israel the modern state, but Israel, ancient homeland of the Israelites and all the other biblical figures. “I imagined John the Baptist fasting in the desert and David fighting Goliath. . . . Israel was the place that God had chosen for Abraham’s descendants, the place where Jesus had walked and preached.” The tantalizing fantasy of myth actualized. “Modern Israel was just a conduit to the distant past, which was where I hoped I would find the Holy Spirit.”
It was in Israel that Himsel discovered that her mythology required a serious reorientation. These were “not Jews who rode on camels, but people like me who complained it was too hot or too rainy, who told jokes and swore and had their own opinions.” First in her biblical studies classes at The Hebrew University, and then on an archaeological dig, Himsel found the historical basis of her cherished Bible stories in doubt, and so, too, their truth.
“God created Man in His Image,” one of her professors joked, “and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”
Therein lies a truth not only about God but all our beliefs and values, as well as our stories. All of it made by man in his own image.
Civilizations are built on stories, written in different times in different places repurposed by different populations for different reasons, until they come to tell us something far beyond their literal meanings. We still do that today, as we visit movie theaters or get lost in novels, seeking symbols in stories. They speak to our desires, fears, joys, and so they guide us toward meaning. Our stories, Joseph Campbell wrote, speak “not of outside events but of themes of the imagination.”
This more evolved understanding of the function of stories, however, is new to us. It is a relative blip in time from when we considered the historic and the mythic to be one and the same. Christopher Columbus, a sophisticate for his time, who believed in a spherical rather than a flat earth, was also convinced that the Orinoco River, the mouth of which he encountered as he passed between the island of Trinidad and the northern coast of South America, was in fact the biblical Gihon River, flowing directly from the Garden of Eden through the Mountain of Purgatory of Dante Allighieri fame.
To Columbus, Eden was no mere symbolic truth, but material reality. In “History, Prophecy, and the Stars,” Laura Ackerman Smoller writes that Columbus, in addition to having been an enlightened adventurer (as well as an opportunistic plunderer), was “also stirred by a curious blend of astrological prognostications and apocalyptic fervor.” From his journals and letters, we learn that Columbus believed the world had less than 200 years to go before the end times, thus seeing it his mission to convert the natives of the New World to Christianity before Jesus’s return.
A century or so later, in the city of Prague, Johannes Kepler worked out the laws of planetary motion, grounded in mathematics and the empirical evidence of his day, even as he maintained a side gig as an astrologer. As James A. Connor writes in a biography of Kepler: in medieval times, astrology, even to men of science, contained “the story of God’s relationship with the human race.”
In Prague, around that same time, was also a Jew, the great mystic Rabbi Judah Loew, known as the Maharal, advisor to Emperor Rudolf II on the teachings of the Kabbalah. Also: creator of the famed Golem of Prague, a man made of clay, created by Loew using a magical Kabbalistic formula and who was to protect the Jews of Prague from anti-Semitic persecution.
Like the Sambatyon, the golem’s existence was, in my own childhood, as true and as real as any historical fact. The Sambatyon was as real as New York’s East River, and the golem as real as Prague itself, which was, to me, as real as Brooklyn—why would it not be? The Maharal and the magical powers of the Kabbalah required no more corroboration than the existence of the moon and the stars beyond. That the golem’s creation defied nature was a marvel, but so was the airplane and the rocketship and the submarine. So was the electronic calculator on my teacher’s desk. I understood none of it, and so all of it was real.
I remember when I first encountered the notion that the golem’s existence might have been fictitious. I was well into adulthood, around age 24, a father of three, when a friend of mine who had left our insular Hasidic enclave to study at institutions with more modern orientations, where Hasidic lore was ridiculed and all mysticism was suspect, returned with a storehouse of ideas that cast doubt on much that I knew to be true.
“You thought the golem was real?!” I remember him asking once, and the incredulity in his voice made me feel at once foolish and angry. Foolish for my own gullibility. Angry at him for spoiling the myth.
The myths would be spoiled further, over and
