The only thing that resonated as spiritual was magic. The wizards of fantasy novels appeared to have more direct access to some spiritual reality than my rabbi did. They didn’t wear prayer shawls, but they did commune with higher powers. The supernatural monsters that populated those Saturday morning B movies, however overtly fake in their rubber masks and makeup, could still induce chills and feelings of dread because they drew from real legends and myths. Vampires, werewolves, and mummies—even when incarnated by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff—led directly into old, maybe even ancient, locks in our unconscious. When Colin Clive playing Victor Frankenstein, in the 1931 Universal Pictures version, imbues his monster with alchemical life and he cries out, “It’s alive!” his eyes reflect a mad ecstasy, a revelation that there are powers and realities beyond the known phenomenal world.

The colorful fantasies of comic books lent a heroic dimension to the implausible, and none treaded in the far-fetched more than those cosmic adventures Marvel Comics published. I bypassed Spider-Man and the Hulk for the enormous, galaxy-spanning adventures of the Fantastic Four, in which the team of misfits met anthropomorphized forces of nature, like the world-eater Galactus, Ego the living planet, and the Celestials, ancient giants whose vast technology secretly altered Earth’s history by creating the wondrous Eternals. In the other team comic, The Avengers, there were characters like the all-powerful alien Korvac, who wrestled with his godlike powers, a time-traveling despot known as Kang the Conqueror, and the Kree, a race of military scientists forever battling the shape-shifting Skrulls.

These stories’ majesty and vigor cooled the anxiety that was becoming a little heated wire under my skin. In these strange environs, I felt cozy. With the Marvel Universe one could create a massive family tree, an elaborate cosmic drama involving gods, mutants, androids, and heroes. Encyclopedias and atlases mapped out every detail of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and even the music of progressive rock bands like Styx, Rush, and ELO that slid down the record player’s spindle one after the other seemed crafted out of intricate stories and mythologies. It wasn’t just about getting lost in these otherworldly chronicles; my anxiety was soothed by the vastness of worlds beyond my home. Whether or not they were fiction was irrelevant. Their details made them real. And if they could be real, maybe my own imagination had the power to become actualized.

By the time I was 14, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns began to take on a different quality, a more profound sense that what we were playing had ramifications for our own lives outside the game. If I was the one to defeat the dragon, my luck would change at school. The jock who intimidated me every day and sneered with a face full of fury would recognize something powerful in me and know, without understanding why, to leave me alone.

Then, like a cliché right out of a parents’ handbook on the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons, I started to collect books on magic and witchcraft and imagined what it would be like to have real sorcerous powers. I didn’t desire the power to make girls love me or know the future so much as I yearned for magical knowledge. I wanted to know if the astral plane was real, if spirits inhabited rocks and trees and could be communicated with, if behind the veil angelic and demonic beings were engaged in a celestial war. I wanted to know if God was real. This search for spiritual awareness by occult methods was not unique. I was a stowaway on a boat that, by the time it made it to the American suburbs, had undergone such a battering from the winds and storms of time and culture that all I had left was a sliver of wood and a paddle.

Those days were a gold mine for the weird and the uncanny—by the late ’60s and early ’70s, the commingling of all these various spiritual ideas manifested into an impenetrable mixture of correspondences. Go into any New Age bookstore to see the result. Everything is permitted, nothing is discerned. Zen sits side by side with The Satanic Bible; Rosicrucians snuggle up against accounts of UFOs and ancient astronauts; tarot cards, rune stones, astrology, and water divining are just to the left of JFK assassination conspiracy theories and exposés on the truth of the Knights Templar.

This pockmarked, bumpy, and often treacherous spiritual highway wound its way right into the suburbs north of Boston, where I could be found sitting on the floor, rolling dice and reading the eternal statistics tables in the D&D manual, wishing that the magic within the confines of the game was not merely drawn from fantasy novels and mythology, but offered a shadow of something genuine. If magic was real, then maybe these suburbs were also a shadow of some greater reality. Even though the townhouse we lived in was built in the 1970s, maybe the spirits of Native Americans that could have hunted on the very spot where my parents parked their car were still haunting this once hallowed ground. The pulp horror author H. P. Lovecraft wrote about ancient alien gods worshipped in the small towns of New England. Could a similarly strange cult have performed their arcane rituals where the mall now sat, and might their terrible deities be waiting for a neophyte to unlock their secrets? But beyond even these questions was another greater mystery: What, if anything, did the God my rabbi spoke of have to do with any of this, with any of these feelings, these imaginings?

Bus number 455 picked me up right in front of the townhouse association and went straight into Salem, which, I assumed, was the best place to learn about magic. It was here, after all, where real witches lived; at least, that was what the whole city wanted you to believe. The history of the city, whether real or imagined, has attracted self-identified Wiccans and neopagans for decades, and so there really is no better place for a 13-year-old dungeon master to get a book on real arcane knowledge. So, I took a bus alone for the first time, in search of a primer on witchcraft. I chanced upon The Key of Solomon the King, a medieval grimoire (magical text) made popular in the late 19th century during what is called the Occult Revival.

I had never seen another book like it. This was very different from what I had imagined magic was, as described by the fictional worlds I spent so much time inhabiting. In the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, magic was something you collected in the form of spells and objects. There was no ritual, practice, or discipline. Spells worked immediately and either hit their intended target or missed, depending on the laws of chance generated by the dice. Magic was not mysterious or dangerous. It involved no sacrifice. You simply learned new spells as you went along. In fantasy novels, magic could be deadly to wizards, but it was usually because they were inexperienced or evil and deserving of their fate. But mostly wizards were drawn as if their power were innate, not anything that required much more than studying a few books, maybe cooking up a potion or two.

The Key of Solomon explained how, through an intensely detailed preparation and ritual, one could conjure demons and bend them to the magician’s will, as well as perform other magical feats, like invisibility and flight (with the aid of some magic garters, no less). The rituals involved the construction of magic circles and the use of implements, such as seals, swords, and particular clothing, all of which had to be prepared in almost impossible ways. A spell for invisibility involved writing a certain phrase on the skin of a toad and suspending it from a hair in a cave at midnight. The text was filled with strange sigils, magical seals, and long incantations. While I had read about spells and tarot cards, Ouija boards, and spirit knockings, I had never before read something so old and, well, religious. All of the spells in The Key of Solomon included prayers to God, and much of the text used Hebrew. This was magic that required great preparation of mind and body, a devout belief in God, and the willingness to risk one’s soul. There was almost no practical way in which I was capable of attempting any of the spells or conjurations, but just owning the book was like having access to a source of great power. It was the manifestation of what I wanted to be true about the world, while at the same time being too complex for me to really use. I could barely get away with lighting a candle without instantly alerting my mother’s sixth sense of anything on fire. My innate skepticism was held at bay by the impossibility of it all. Nevertheless, the Key was an actual key, one that could unlock the secrets of the world.

Having no control over my surroundings, I thought magic seemed like the perfect organizing principle, except that for every stone unturned, another, even stranger one appeared in its place. When all I had to soothe my anxiousness were video games and role-playing, the kind of magic found in The Key of Solomon offered some small hope that there was a secret order and meaning to the universe, that all things on Earth were a mere reflection of some greater divine truth. That hope, however, led to an even greater confusion. I wasn’t sure I knew what I would do if I really did turn invisible or fly. Would I sneak into the girls’ locker room or take Fantastic Four #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 from the wall behind the clerk’s counter at the comics shop?

These weren’t the things I wanted magic to attain for me. Even when I played D&D, I was loath to use magic as an offensive weapon. It felt like cheating to cast infinite magic missiles at the hopeless horde of orcs. But I studied the book and felt that smoldering around the edges of the words was something not unlike those forbidden experiences I gleaned from the pamphlets on illegal drugs, and very much like the Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums in my brother’s stack of records.

While I wanted to understand something about magic, my instincts told me that God and magic were somehow incompatible, or at least that magic might not be the right tool if what I was looking for was spiritual in nature. So I had to ask myself what I was after: Was it mysticism or magic, communion with God, or power over his angels?

Excerpted from Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood by Peter Bebergal. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Bebergal. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Soft Skull Press.

As early as the Roman period, Jews used amulets as a best defense against evils—both real and supernatural—that lurked outside their doors, a practice that continued into the late 17th and 18th century. The amulets could be made on flattened bits of metal inscribed with the names of angels or on small, encased scrolls, much like the mezuzah. But there were other kinds of magic as well. Medieval Jews called out God’s name and those of His angels to smite enemies and to gain affections. In addition, Jews of all ages practiced astrology and looked for omens in the form of animals. Since traditional liturgy made little room for personal prayers, these extra-liturgical means helped people combat what they saw as constant threats.

It was the Jews of the Middle Ages, however, who helped to create a more systematic approach to magic. Mystical writings have always detailed the strange and mysterious levels of heaven, but it was Jewish magicians who provided the correct formulas and rituals needed to pass through the gates. They had to make magic seals (small tokens engraved with Hebrew names), which forced the angel or demon on guard to flee, belying the essential belief that Hebrew letters are filled with divine energy that can be manipulated for various ends, from conjuring demons to making golems. This form of Jewish magical practice, along with mystical and kabbalistic texts, was to be a major influence on later non-Jewish occult practitioners. And this is a phenomenon that really took root during the Renaissance.

What we typically refer to as Western occultism—that is, the body of knowledge related to the supernatural workings of the universe—started in the Renaissance, an era that maintained both an abiding interest in astrology, magic, and alchemy and a growing interest in empirical thought and Greek philosophy. To Renaissance thinkers, the natural world was a reflection, or imitation, of the divine and through certain magical practices—such as communing with spirits and astral projection—a person could achieve true salvation. At the same time, Jewish mystics similarly believed that God is inseparable from his creation, and the non-Jewish Renaissance magicians looked to Jewish mystical texts to map out proof that of that fact and to glean secrets about God through magic; such texts offered very specific instructions, often involving the use of seals and the recitation of angelic and divine names, which were used to try to understand the divine. These ideas and symbols wound their way through the centuries, through fraternal and secret societies, and the Freemasons, theosophists like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, and New Age Wiccans incorporated Jewish mystical and magical elements into their own mythologies.

Among the methods that mystics used in their quest for understanding was gematria, the art of finding hidden meaning by assigning numerical value to Hebrew letters. For non-Jews, performing gematria on Hebrew words that seemed to correspond to occult ideas became central to magical practice. It mattered little whether or not the meaning of the words was understood within the context of the Jewish religion or the Torah. Judaism was irrelevant to what was perceived as mysterious. Even more significantly for non-Jewish occultists, Hebrew letters took on a kind of occult power. Adorn something as simple as a pentagram with the tetragrammaton (the name of God rendered in the Torah as yod, heh, vav, heh) and you suddenly have a symbol that looks like it has great magical power.

Such beliefs persisted at least until the late 19th century, when many Jews became intent on embracing modernity and rationalism. By the time of the immigrant wave to America in the later part of the 19th century, the superstitions of the shtetls—that dybbuks could take possession of the body, or that the demon Lilith would come for misbehaved children, for instance—were largely left behind. Still, American immigrants couldn’t leave it all in Eastern Europe and many Jews in North America grew up tossing salt over their shoulder to ward off the evil eye and avoiding touching themselves when describing the illness of another person lest they contract the same affliction.

As Judaism struggles between assimilation and the preservation of tradition, Jewish magic suggests that Jews are very much like everyone else in so many beliefs. Ghosts, evil spirits, bad luck, and good are a part of a world view that co-exists with an omnipotent God and a complex moral system. And despite how far into the modern world Jews have moved, they continue to hear the echo of Sefer Hasdim, the famous medieval text, which advised, “One should not believe in superstitions, but it is best to be heedful of them.”

The next thing that happened was my other sister arrived, and then Eric’s wife. We stood outside with my father, and talked about what to do next. We walked in small circles around each other like pigeons, moving from one to the other hoping someone would take control. And then my brother’s wife, now a widow, said that Eric had wanted to be cremated. This was all we needed to know. This gave us a direction of where to go next. We gave over to her request assuming not only that she would be the one who would know what Eric wanted, but that as his wife, she should be the one to decide. And we were, for a moment, glad. None of us knew what else to do. I looked at my father and felt relieved that he would be free of the obligation of deciding how to bury his own son.

While we were all in shock, none of us were really surprised that Eric took his own life. Even as a young man he was obsessed with the idea, once even getting literature from the Hemlock Society. It was as if he kept suicide in his back pocket like a pamphlet on a possible way out. It wasn’t until the last years of his life that I knew how sick he had become, how hopelessness and regret had colored everything for him. That he wanted to be cremated seemed a part of this desire to take himself out of the world completely.

After the memorial service, performed by a Reform rabbi, we had nothing left to do. There would be no gathering at a cemetery, no discussion of what his headstone should say. My mother was buried in a Jewish cemetery, one in which cremains are not allowed. He couldn’t be buried near her.

Jewish law itself is not always clear on why cremation is prohibited. Deuteronomy states that even a criminal should not be left to hang from a tree for the carrion feeders, but should be buried right away. The rabbinical tradition invokes respect for the body, for the entire world; to burn the body is an act of violence against God’s creation. For his part, Maimonides wrote in his 13 principles of faith, that “that the dead will be brought back to life.” Since ashes do not a body make, those who have been cremated cannot be resurrected when God decides to raise up the dead. Given the association between cremation and Nazi death camps, many Jews cannot fathom any reason a Jew would ever choose such an option. And while more liberal schools of Jewish thought will allow the burial of cremains, there is still unease that winds its way through much of the commentary on the subject.

Sometime after the memorial service, Eric’s wife scattered his ashes on a beach 25 miles from our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just as he had wanted, there is nothing left.

But now there is nothing left to mourn, either.

Is this then, the reason for the Jewish prohibition against cremation? That without the body, shrouded and placed in a simple wooden box, no headstone, and no burial mound, we are without the tactile sensation that so much of Jewish ritual insists on? Observant Jews bind their head and arms with phylacteries and on holy days, even Reform Jews can be seen touching their prayer books to the Torah as it makes its rounds through the congregation. We thump our chests on Yom Kippur and shake our lulavs on Sukkot. We salt our water on Passover, and extinguish our Havdalah candles with a satisfying pshhhh at the end of the Sabbath. When we mourn, we rend our garments, sit on low stools, and clutch the dirt with our hands to throw on the casket before it is lowered into the ground.

The one thing I knew I would miss most of all, is the placing of a pebble or rock on the headstone as a reminder…to who? To God, to ourselves, to the universe that we were there and that we remember. What was there now for me, for any of my family, to do with our trembling, impatient hands?

A few days after Eric’s service we went to his house and his wife distributed items that she thought each of us would want. I took some toy cars my brother collected and a non-stick frying pan, things we use all the time now without a thought. I can remember Eric by these things, but they will never be a memorial to him. They are the detritus of a life, more stuff to add to the pile of my own.

Suicide is a crushing blow to those who survive. I am still angry at my brother, despite my understanding that he was sick. I am angrier still at myself that I did not ask to keep a part of him, if even a few grains of his ashes. My brother’s death took him from me, but now it’s as if he never existed. There is nothing left.

Then, earlier this fall, I had an idea to go to a beach on the north shore of Boston where his ashes were scattered. I wanted to collect some of the sand, place it in a jar, and set it on a shelf in my house. It’s possible there is still some of him still there in that sand, if only in a single grain. It might be enough to remind me that he once was really here.

My father picked me up from the train station and together we drove out to what is called a shingle beach, mostly rock with little sand. This was my brother’s favorite place, Winter Island, where a barrack that was used for aircraft during World War II still stands. I had hurt my leg the day before, and my father is arthritic, so together we shuffled and limped down the rocky shore. We stopped at an open area littered with broken clam shells, the remains of the hard work of the gulls that drop the clams from a great height so that they shatter, revealing the moist prize inside. I looked out over the water. My father and I had the same conversation we always have when talking about Eric. How we were shocked at the manner of his death, but not surprised. How despite all his regret and depression, that there was so much good in Eric’s life and why couldn’t he see it? But we talked as if on autopilot, as if we were obliged to say something when in fact there was nothing at all to say.

So I bent down and gathered the pebbly sand and imagined that some part of him was here. But then, as I took in the beauty of the beach—the huge gulls, the small abandoned lighthouse, the calm green water—I understood finally that this very place is Eric’s graveyard. The rocks are his headstone, the marks of the shells on the sand the engraving on the marble that read that he was born and he died. Eric was buried here.

I still took some of the sand home to keep, along with a handful of shells I gave to my son. But soon, I will take him to this beach and we will toss handfuls of pebbles into the ocean. I can even say Kaddish here, because although there is nothing left of Eric that will turn slowly to dust over time, this whole beach is where he remains, as long as there is sand and rock and shell.

My rabbi was suspicious of me: a Jewish boy who had been taught very little about Judaism. I was equally suspicious of him. His Judaism, so different from the cultural variety I grew up with, was both a source of bafflement and wonder. Even his home was a mystery: the quiet wife I rarely saw, his children with their long and thick sidelocks. I knew I was ignorant about what he was there to teach me, but I was prepared to enter into the mystery of it. I longed to be shown a reality beyond the rational. But he always presented religious truth as logical, something that could be understood like one of my LEGO kit manuals.

As I fell asleep on the Saturday nights before my lessons, I would try and come up with questions to ask him. They weren’t trick questions. They were about the things I loved that I wanted to fit into the puzzle of religion we put together on his dining room table. One morning I queried, “What about dinosaurs?” To this the rabbi quoted Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” For a pre-adolescent raised on a steady diet of The Land That Time Forgot and Land of the Lost, this was a revelation: The Bible mentions dinosaurs! But more than that, it was a strait bridging two continents, my late night spiritual yearnings and the world of reason and logic. I took some slow unsteady steps across. I tried to imagine these “giants” were the giant reptiles that would slowly transform their way over time into birds; their scales turning into pinions, snouts into beaks, cartilage into hollow, weightless bone.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the now famous 2005 case tried in Dover, Pennsylvania—in which school board members voted to include a statement about intelligent design in the biology curriculum of their local high school—U.S District Court Judge John E. Jones ruled against the school district on the grounds that intelligent design was poor science. But he also remarked, “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” Intelligent design, Jones argued, was just creationism in disguise. Despite what the judge calls their hidden motives, the school board’s intelligent design proponents still likely believed in its fundamental claim: Life is too complex to have been a result of random processes or natural selection; an intelligent designer must have been involved.

Nevertheless, more than two years later there has been little to stem the tide of creationism and intelligent design theory. Last spring, the Creation Museum, founded by Ken Ham, opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham, who also runs the extremely popular Christian web site Answers in Genesis, believes not only in the six-day account of creation found in Genesis, but also that there is scientific evidence for a ten-thousand-year-old earth, that the Grand Canyon is verification of a great flood, and that cave drawings and other fossil records illustrate that human beings and prehistoric behemoths lived together. This, of course, discounts the accepted idea that dinosaurs walked the earth more than a hundred million years ago. The museum is a sprawling sixty-thousand-square-foot compound housing animatronic dinosaurs (in some displays carousing with humans), a walk-through ark, displays on original sin, the killing of Abel by Cain, and the Tower of Babel. In one exhibit a triceratops is fitted with a saddle.

In early 2007, Newsweek released a poll that revealed, yet again, what has by now become very familiar data. When asked whether Americans accept the theory of evolution, nearly half say no. The poll also reveals that one third of college graduates believe that the world in all its variety came into being fully formed as described in the Bible. Three out of four evangelical Christians believe this event took place about ten thousand years ago.

Also last year, Ron Paul, the one Republican candidate that even some progressives believed would make a respectable president, had this to say when asked what he thought about evolution: “I think it’s a theory, the theory of evolution, and I don’t accept it as a theory.” What is most disturbing here is not Paul’s answer, but the way he forms it. By calling evolution a theory, he uses the word in its colloquial sense; something that is less than a fact. But evolution, as Stephen Jay Gould was fond of saying, is both a theory and a fact, when these terms are used in their proper context.

More recently the film Expelled, written and narrated by Ben Stein, portrays evolution as the root of modern evils, such as Nazism. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is depicted as a benign but rigorous theory that simply wants to critique evolution, suggesting that the idea of a designer is a rational, not necessarily religious, idea.

It’s humorous to imagine a family at the museum, the father placing his child in the saddle of the great horned beast, the child giggling, the mother smiling, and in the air around them the message that their faith is reasonable, that theories—the same that make DVD players whir and spin, that engineer hybrid SUVs—are in line with Scripture. But I can’t find it funny. Not just because children visiting the museum will likely walk away with a skewed idea of the history of the physical world, but more because they will walk away with a skewed understanding of the religious imagination.

Religious experience begins with an encounter, which is then given form by the imagination. We then turn this form into texts, prayers, rituals, and of course, myths. Communities gather around these stories and continue to use the religious imagination to keep them relevant. The very notion of being in communion with God, whether through prayer or ritual, in believing that a man died and was resurrected, or in eating unleavened bread for a week, is the least rational of endeavors. But this is where its power lies. If the moments we commemorate through our rituals had simply occurred in history, there would be little possibility of giving them new meaning in the way, for example, the American slaves saw in the miraculous moments of the Jewish Exodus story a vision for their own liberation. When ritual is seen as the retelling of a mythological event, then its ability to function as a metaphor is enlivened each time. A purely historical event is static. While it might offer a moral lesson, there is nothing inherently symbolic about it. The mythologizing of events makes them part of our ritual and liturgy and allows us to reimagine them. But the religious imagination has been replaced by a need to rationalize religious faith. The motto of the Creation Museum is “Prepare to Believe,” but revelation is not the intent of the exhibits. The purpose of the museum is to prove that the Bible is truth, and to induce religious stupor it plays on an ignorance of science and what the doing of science really means.

Religion functions because we do and say the same things over and over again, not to prove them, but to keep them alive in a world that demands we respond rationally most of the time. Even the most fervent biblical literalist usually goes to the doctor when he or she gets sick, and is happy for the medicine offered, medicine that was discovered and developed with that old stick-in-the mud, science, the same discipline that helps us to understand our world in all its complexity. Prayer might make the ill feel less hopeless, but it’s reason that gets the healing chemical compounds into the bloodstream.

Despite my wish to trust my rabbi’s teaching on the origin and the age of the earth, I was still not fully convinced. The next week, after we had said the morning blessings and opened the Chumash to begin, I asked, “But what about cavemen? What about Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men? They found their skulls.” I was almost rising up out of my chair. He waved his hand and started turning pages. “Those aren’t old at all. They’re just the skulls of black people.”

This time I didn’t believe him. I knew that he was misreading the text, maybe even purposely. And it broke my heart.

I was incapable of doing anything else, so I found my place in the book and waited for him to begin. But even if this were to happen today, what would I say? Is there any kind of evidence that I could present that would show him how not only wrong, but how fundamentally sinister this idea really this? Like the exhibits at the Creation Museum, built on their own foundation of scientific interpretation, this kind of reason can’t be combated with a set of logical or empirical facts. The contemporary religious model is one that eschews doubt for certainty, which is the ruin of the religious imagination. The only artifact left standing is a concrete reality that holds no mystery.

Squaring what we know about the natural world with biblical faith is an attempt to sift out the rational chunks from the deposits of religion. Even the smallest gold nugget can make the faithful feel prosperous: Religious faith is not irrational and some of its most important aspects conform to what we know empirically about the world. But the attempt to reconcile religious faith with rationality has revealed this gold to be nothing more than pyrite (yes, fool’s gold), for its ability to trick even the most meticulous prospector into thinking he had struck it rich.

I’m certain many of the Americans polled by Newsweek don’t want to be unreasonable. Most people enjoy the benefits that science provides, from the technological wonders of iPods and Tivos to cancer treatments and mosquito-repellent candles. But most Americans also believe in God, something that they know intuitively contradicts a scientific world view. What to do? The idea that science is fallible in some regard, that we are not under its thrall no matter how much we take advantage of what it offers, is a small comfort. Maybe evolution just happens to be the place where science gets it wrong. This has long been the general American position on this issue. Many scientists of Darwin’s time felt the same way. If evolution is true, the specialness of human beings is called into question. For Christians this is particularly profound. If man evolved from lower forms then there couldn’t be the historical people known as Adam and Eve, created by God and given dominion over the earth. If they didn’t exist then they didn’t eat the forbidden fruit. If they didn’t eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil then there would be no original sin. And if there is no original sin, then redemption by Jesus is unnecessary. For religious people in general, whether or not they believe in Jesus, the threat is just as real: If we weren’t created in God’s image, where is real meaning for our lives found?

Scientists today are loath to admit that religious belief played an important part in their forebears’ impetus to examine and understand the natural world. Any sentiment that has even a scent of religious feeling is greeted with pinched noses, with great skepticism if not outright contempt. This is true even for those religious ideas that one might consider moderate or even liberal. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, himself a student of neuroscience and a staunch atheist, suggests that the religious moderate is just as dangerous as the fundamentalist because the moderate leaves the door open to religious ideas in all their forms, including the damaging literal ones.

Even as arguments about God’s existence were waged in the cloisters, the exploration of the world, both in fact and by exaggerated accounts, was turning up wonders by the hundreds. As knowledge of the world expanded, explorers believed that our knowledge of God expanded as well. The Bible might be the central source of knowledge, they believed, but they knew it was not the only source. Second only to the Bible was the natural world. And as the Bible was a source of moral example, then the book of nature must be also. In this way the inspection of nature was a twofold enterprise. There was much to be learned about the behavior of beasts and birds, but there was also a secondary, metaphorical lesson. Nature represented something about God.

In a medieval bestiary translated by T.H. White there is a description of an animal called a Vulpus. The Vulpus, a kind of fox, covers itself in red mud and lays down until carrion-feeding birds land on it hoping for a tasty meal. A vicious and wily killer, the Vulpus easily devours them. But the description of this fabulous beast doesn’t end there. The bestiary goes on to explain that the means by which the Vulpus exploits the birds are those by which the devil exploits humanity. When people are concerned only with their earthly appetites, they are not aware of the devil and he, like the Vulpus, effortlessly consumes them. Only when our attention is turned to spiritual things can we recognize the devil for what he is. While the bestiary is a catalogue of animals, in its brief description of the Vulpus the book also comments on the failings of birds (and people). The writer finds a moral lesson hidden in the workings of nature. The moral meaning supplanted any factual account, and in fact many of the beasts found in these compendiums were fantasy.

For medieval thinkers, nature continued to hold this dual quality, as a vehicle for moral instruction and a reflection of God’s creative will. But eventually new discoveries in science suggested nature had an organization and purpose all its own. The fanciful creatures in the bestiaries couldn’t compete with the actual specimens of real things even more wondrous. As knowledge expanded, ideas about God began to take on a less supernatural quality. Maybe, some argued, nature was removed from any divine purpose. For the many who were deists, God had indeed made the world, but he took no interest in it, never intervened on behalf of his creatures, and certainly did not act in history. God set the universe in motion and left it on its way. For thinkers like Rene Descartes, nature was a kind of mechanism, and human beings automatons. But we possessed something else: a spirit. The body was imbued with reason and will by God.

In the late seventeenth century the theologian William Paley tried to reconcile the independent workings of nature and with his belief in a personal God in his book Natural Theology, where he introduced what has come to be known as the “watchmaker analogy.” Paley describes himself walking along a garden lane and coming across a watch in the grass. It’s easy to deduce that the watch didn’t grow out of the ground. Something so complicated must have had a maker. Paley then goes on to look at the world around him, ants crawling with purpose, ancient trees rising up, the sun warming the earth. How could these things, so much more complex than even a watch, not have had an intelligent maker also? God did make the universe, but he had not abandoned it.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an explosion of scientific expeditions was bringing to home ports all manner of plants and animals, not just supposed unicorn horns and tales of dog-men. The diversity of the natural world was displayed in all its glory in public museums, not hidden away in private collections.

On May 28, 1807, two hundred years to the day before the opening of the Creation Museum, the Reverend Louis Benjamin Rudolph Agassiz had a son who would be the first in a long line of Agassiz men not to become a Protestant minister. Instead, he would develop an inordinate fondness for fish and become a leading figure in the field of ichthyology. This wouldn’t be his only legacy. Louis Agassiz, founder of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (now part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History), wrote one of the most important works on taxonomy, An Essay on Classification. In 1859, the same year the museum opened (a museum that would be the envy of many other institutions), Darwin’s book The Origin of the Species was making its way to booksellers. While Agassiz built his museum to be one of the finest collections of scientific specimens—barrels of fish and other creatures were constantly being delivered—Agassiz himself was a staunch opponent of Darwin’s new theory. His religion was informed by the deists who came before him, naturalists and philosophers who didn’t believe in a God that offered personal salvation, but held that the natural sciences proved, in effect, the existence of a divine will. In his book Agassiz wrote, “The organization of living beings in their connection with the physical world . . . prove[s] in general the existence of a Supreme Being as the Author of all things.”

Agassiz’s museum set the bar for all natural history museums, but there was one thing that all this collecting and classifying and storing of specimens made clear to its founder: The handiwork of God is clearly visible in the natural world. There is more evidence here than even the Bible could hope to demonstrate. What happened next is well known. Darwin forced the hand of the naturalists, and science sloughed off whatever religious sentiment was left. But Darwin also forced the hand of those religious communities that had no interest in science in the first place.

While philosophers, theologians, and naturalists were trying to show that faith was rational, that one could be an intellectual and a scientist, could enjoy the comforts of modernity and still hold to a religious worldview, many Christians decided they didn’t need God to be something that could be quantified. Faith isn’t rational because it relied on revelation. One didn’t come to God by way of philosophical analyses. You were born again and then, if you wanted to know something about God, you read the Bible. But Darwinism and modern approaches to religion (literary criticism, archeology) were threats to the very core of Christian theology: the centrality of man in God’s creation, his ultimate fall and original sin, and his redemption by Jesus Christ. To defend against this frontal attack, biblical literalists took up a peculiar kind of weapon. It wasn’t enough to simply defend belief as an experience. They began to use the language of science to prove that the natural world provided evidence for the biblical account.

A century after Paley and twenty years after the publication of The Origin of the Species, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote what some believe is his finest poem, “The Windhover.” The poem reads like an attempt to return to the prescientific vision of nature, but even that effort seems influenced by the naturalist’s spirit. The first stanza contains the naturalist’s meticulous inspection of nature and the spiritual yearning of the Psalms:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Hopkins recognizes the value of nature as a source of religious meaning, but he also understands that nature (in this case a falcon) still exists independent of that meaning. God might be found in nature, but nature can be understood without God. Even Agassiz, who wasn’t a biblical literalist, still uses literal language when writing about God. But Hopkins disregards any literalism. In fact, the poem is a litany of metaphors. There is not a single image that does not contain multiple meanings or possible interpretations. Nevertheless, the religious imagery is palpable. Take for example the use of the word “ecstasy,” long employed as being related to a particular religious state. Is the ecstasy that of the bird or of Christ, watching as his creation bears witness to God’s glory? Hopkins channels William Paley and the deists but he forgoes the rationality of their method for something else. Look, he says, at the wondrous workings of this falcon, so much like the complications of a clock. First, he acknowledges the desire to merge the rational and the religious, but he also returns the religious to its long lost home: irrationality.

Only metaphor can create a relationship between human beings and their world that is not one of pure empiricism. Religious language may pretend to literalism, but this is disingenuous at best. In his essay on Moby Dick, the literary critic James Wood equates Melville’s unending metaphors of the whale with those that stand for God. For Melville, the fact that language was capable of even attempting to contain the ineffable was both a wonder and a terror. Language says something and nothing about God, Wood writes: “Thus language does not help us explain or describe God. Quite the contrary, it registers our inability to describe God; it holds our torment. . . . Yet language is all there is, and thus Melville follows it as Ahab follows the whale, to the very end.” It is precisely because language is all there is that religion has tried so hard to move beyond language towards some kind of empirical evidence.

The “giants” my rabbi was referring to were taken from a passage that is part of a mythological story about divine beings who take mortal women as wives. Their offspring are called nephilim, described in Genesis as “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown”—not Tyrannosaur and Triceratops. In the story of the nephilim, my rabbi saw an opportunity to trick a naive kid into believing the Bible was a legitimate source of knowledge about zoology. There was nothing in science to contradict it.

There was, however, another reading that I might have embraced had the rabbi not worried so much about his faith appearing sane. The stories of the angels, of heavenly beings taking mortal women for wives and rearing a race of giants who would go on to do legendary deeds is precisely the kind of tale I wanted my religion to hold. As much as I held to a scientific world view, I ached for a mythic sense of time and history. I knew giants didn’t really exist, but this didn’t matter. The stories of giants, of heroes and angels, become metaphors for our relationship with the world, metaphors that point to its holiness. Whether tales are true or false is beside the point. And to try and make them true in the same way that archaeological evidence proves humans did not attach carts to lumbering brontosaurus is to maim—maybe even destroy—what their real value for us is.

Was it possible to have any objectivity when writing about your own mother?

Eleanor, right, with friend.

I don’t believe in objectivity, in the sense that human beings are by nature subjective. But I do believe that I could see my mother—especially in her young womanhood, long before I was born—as honestly as I could see anyone else.

I often felt that my brain was cut in two when I was working on this book. The journalist and historian wannabe was thinking about where I was getting material from, whether I could find so-and-so for an interview, etc. At night with my wife, the son’s part of the brain would take over. I would either talk excitedly if I’d found something joyous—say, her falling in love in high school. But more often, I’d kind of let out a long, heavy sigh, and talk about some sadness I’d found—how my grandmother had to pick garbage, how my mother’s first husband cheated on her, how desperate she’d been in pressuring my father into marriage.

But do you see any virtue in making the biographer part of the story?

I have no problem with the idea of author as participant. The problem I have is the kind of revelations that come out about books like Fierce Attachments, where years after the fact you find that Vivian Gornick made up stuff. I remember very clearly listening to Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air give this incredibly pained, and very poignant commentary about what it was like as someone who had loved Fierce Attachments, to find out that it had been partly fiction masquerading as fact, how hurt she was as a reader. I thought, that’s exactly why you don’t do it.

It seems there’s a similar hazard in constructing your mother’s life from the views of others. How could you be sure their accounts were true?

I went to great pains to cross-check everything with either a written record or a second or third source. And actually, I often had undeniable confirmation in the form of photos or home movies or letters. Virtually every biography written, except for the “authorized” sort, uses exactly the methodology I did. They all rely heavily on the views of others.

One of the hardest must have been Selma, who married Eleanor’s old flame, Charlie.

That was what I felt was going to be the touchiest interview, because when Selma met Charlie, he was overwrought about the breakup with my mother, and then when he died, she found Eleanor’s picture in his belongings. Selma was candid and guarded at the same time. We were certainly feeling each other out, and some trust built very slowly over numerous interviews. Also, after Charlie and Selma were married, my mother begged for him to break up with Selma and to marry her, and he didn’t. So maybe that made it somewhat more possible for Selma to talk to me.

Charlie and Eleanor had quite a love affair. Was Charlie a kind of ghost in your home growing up?

I had heard only a vague thing, that my mother had had a Catholic boyfriend, that she was serious with him, and that my grandmother Rose threatened to jump off the roof to break them up. But when you hear something like that, you don’t know if it’s true or partly true. Is it a bubbe meise? I really didn’t know. Obviously, I’m glad she didn’t marry him, or I wouldn’t be here. The most enigmatic thing, the most difficult thing to come to an answer for, was why my mother didn’t just marry Charlie Greco, her Italian boyfriend, over her mother’s objections. And that was the thing I struggled with the most.

In the book your mother often recedes in the light of these other people’s stories, such as your grandmother Rose.

Well, I discovered a whole different aspect of my grandmother writing this book. Growing up I couldn’t know her, really. She was hard of hearing, and wouldn’t wear her hearing aid. She didn’t speak English fluently. All her visits to our house were informed by the bitterness between her and my mother. It was really at my father’s behest that we saw her at all. Very much over and against my mother’s objections, my father would make sure to give us access to our grandmother. But I accepted, fairly unquestioningly, this sense of her as this impossibly Old World person. What could she have to recommend her?

But writing the book I was to find out exactly what had happened to Rose’s family. She had tried to do anything to get her family out of Europe. When I did this research and met my relatives in Uruguay I realized, these people are alive because of her efforts. When I saw this valiance in her, I saw this person hurling herself against history, and against all her own limitations.

Even with all these stories of people who lived much of their lives before you were born, your book still looks much like what you purposely strove against, which is family history. Do you still see it as limiting?

Well, I think the limitation isn’t in the form. It’s in how it’s been practiced. And I don’t think it’s so much a limitation as a dereliction of duty. It’s much more a case of people, in my mind, who want to have it both ways, who want the power of saying, “This is true,” without the responsibility of truth.

One of the things I find in a lot of memoir, especially when it’s written by people who are relatively young, is that they tend to sort of view their parents solely through the lens of being a parent. They are somehow wrenched loose from whatever the social or historical context of their life is. All through the process of working on this book, I was paying attention to everything that was going on in the world around my mother and her family and looking for the places where it intersected with her lived life, and her parents’ lived lives.

Was there anything you learned about your mother that disappointed you?

It was painful to see how much my mother leaned on her beauty, how much she needed constant affirmation of her allure, and how that went directly into her tragic decision not to have a mastectomy.

Did you write this book to make amends with your mother?

Absolutely. I felt that I had lost the right to consider myself her son. I had to do some kind of atonement, some kind of penance, to earn back my son-ness. I was very close to her when she was alive and I was living at home. Paradoxically, because we shared a lot—a love of books and writing, especially—I felt it imperative somehow to put distance between us when I went to college. But the day she came to visit me and I made her sit on the other side of the room in one of my classes has haunted me ever since. As did my failure to visit her grave for almost 30 years. It took this book to exorcise those feelings. Doing this book was a very long process of al chayt, the confession of sins.