Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Historicities Part 1

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Shadmax, Moritz, and Bamboozelo

“There once was a shaman from Kenya…”
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This story is about Yūsuf, a late shaman from Kenya. Yūsuf was born in 1890 in Kiambu, a small, destitute village without much contact with the outside world.

When Yūsuf was a young boy, people in his tribe noticed something very special about him; he had incredibly elaborate dreams, and each morning when he woke up, his friends and family would gather around to hear him recite his dreams with a level of detail that convinced many that he had the supernatural abilities of a shaman.

The villagers had a tradition of fashioning trinkets to embody the animal spirits that they worshipped. These animal spirits would often appear in Yūsuf’s dreams, and the interpretations that he shared with the villagers helped them feel more connected to the deities in their world of spirits.

The village of Kiambu was very poor, which didn’t sit well with Yūsuf. When he was a teenager, he tried to break the cycle of poverty by using his skills to earn some money among the neighboring tribes. During his travels, he would ask people to tell him their own dreams, and then – for a small fee – he would make predictions based on those dreams. He rarely got it right, though, so eventually he returned to Kiambu without having earned much at all.

One thing he did gain during his travels, however, was a measure of insight into other religions; during one of his trips, for example, he had visited a Jewish settlement and was enamored by the stories of their ancient prophets and heroes.

These characters began to appear in Yūsuf’s dreams after he returned home, eventually replacing the animal spirits altogether. In one particularly vivid dream, he heard a voice saying that inanimate trinkets should not be worshipped at all. From then on, he started telling his fellow villagers that they should focus their worship around the Jewish prophets rather than trinkets and animal spirits.

At one point he fell deathly ill, and when he recovered, Yūsuf told his tribe that he had visited the world of spirits himself. This rite of passage secured his role as a shaman, and his whole village began to cling to every word of his dreams. Yūsuf wanted to devote himself full-time to spiritual matters, so he asked the villagers to bring offerings along when they visited his home. They were very supportive, and many brought food and valuables. Of most importance to Yūsuf, though, were the tribe members who offered their services as scribes to record his dreams. The dreams grew increasingly complex and began to include not just the Jewish accounts of the prophets’ teachings, but further details describing their daily lives as well.

Yūsuf was particularly fascinated with Ezekiel, Daniel, and other heroes of the Torah who had preached in a foreign land under Babylonian captivity. He had only heard very brief tales of their experiences during his own travels, but he wanted his fellow villagers to know more about their lives. With Daniel, for instance, Yūsuf began to relate not just the well-known accounts of the lion’s den, but also a number of stories about his childhood, his marriage, and his family life with his children. The villagers couldn’t wait to hear each new dream and learn about a new facet of each prophet’s life.

While most of his tribe believed that the events in Yūsuf’s dreams actually occurred, there were a few sceptics who had done some traveling themselves and had learned of a recent consensus among biblical scholars that some of the prophets – including Daniel – were fictional, conglomerate characters and that many of the previously accepted stories were now understood to be apocryphal. They began to promote the idea among the villagers that the lengthy stories about the day-to-day lives of the ancient prophets came straight out of Yūsuf’s imagination.

Some villagers began to realize that if Daniel was an imaginary figure, then so were all of the characters in Yūsuf’s dreams. By this point, the shaman’s whole following was based on the reality of his dreams; his credibility as a shaman was entirely dependent on the notion that Daniel and the other prophets were, in fact, real people and not just fictional characters.

As the doubters spread their views, Yūsuf began to lose adherents. The crowds were shrinking, and with them Yūsuf’s meagre income.

Then one day, to Yūsuf’s delight, a Jewish traveler passed through Kiambu. He had escaped from persecution in Germany and had managed to grab a few scraps from his family library before his home had been burned to the ground on Krystalnacht. Now he was wandering through Kenya selling some of his personal items to help make ends meet.

Among the items he was selling was a torn piece of parchment showing two figures being put into an oven. It was wrapped together with some strange writings that nobody in the village could read. Yūsuf invited the traveler into his hut, and he laid the parchments out on the table:

After taking one look at the fragments, Yūsuf was immediately overjoyed. This fiery furnace had to be the same one he had heard about during his travels. Surely this was a sign from the ancient prophets to prove their own existence to his humble villagers!

Nobody in his village had ever seen characters like the ones on the parchment, so it would be up to Yūsuf to decipher the code for them. He began the process by placing his finger on each character and concentrating with all of his energy until he drifted off to sleep. When he awoke, he wrote down whatever he had dreamed as the interpretation of the particular character that he had been pointing at. He then used the scenes from his dreams to sketch in the missing gaps on the parchment. He kept this routine up over several days while the villagers patiently waited outside his hut.

When he was finally done, he called the villagers together.

“To our joy,” he proclaimed, “we now have absolute proof that Daniel was real!”

The villagers gasped and cheered in response as he presented some twenty translated pages.

“Look at the marvelous history that the spirits have guided into our hands!” he pronounced.

He hung the first page of his interpretation above his entry way so all who wandered past could see the sacred parchment:

“These figures were drawn directly by Daniel himself,” Yūsuf said, “As you can clearly see, the evil King Nebuchadnezzar is placing Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fiery furnace!”

“We know the Book of Daniel is true!” some of the villagers began to shout in unison, stunned and overwhelmed by their good fortune at having run across this sacred, ancient parchment.

“The accompanying text is written in Assyro-Babylonian, which I have been able to translate with help from the spirits,” Yūsuf said, “The writings tell how a winged angel carried the trio out of the furnace.”

The symbols on the parchment were completely different from any form of writing anyone in the tribe had ever seen, so they took Yūsuf at his word. Completely unaware of Yūsuf’s embellishments, the crowd began chanting praises and working themselves into a frenzy. The Jewish traveler stood at the back of the crowd, smiling contently at his good fortune. He needed to get on his way, so he meandered through the crowd and approached Yūsuf to request payment.

The shaman had no money of his own, so he asked for help from the villagers. “Surely this treasure is worth more than houses, lands, or pearls!” Yūsuf exclaimed.

His followers agreed and managed to collect enough gold to pay the traveler his asking price, each of the contributing villagers thus becoming co-owners of the most ancient manuscript ever to have been found anywhere on the planet. But most importantly to them, the parchment proved Daniel’s existence outright and justified their adherence to the shaman’s teachings. Finally, rather than having to take Yusuf’s interpretations on faith, now they had real, physical evidence of his connection to the world of spirits – these were actual words written with an actual quill that the actual prophet Daniel held between his actual fingers!

The villagers were so excited about the finding, in fact, that Yūsuf’s closest adherents formed a “School of the Shaman.” One of this committee’s tasks was to help Yūsuf develop a lexicon to aid those who might undertake the translation of similar parchments that would surely be discovered in the future. With each entry to this piece of work, Shaman Yūsuf related the true meaning behind Daniel’s writings, and the translations expanded into many verses for each of the characters depicted in the parchment.

The grapheme that Yūsuf had interpreted as the character Chai, for example, received the following entry:

“The character Chai depicts the three heroes Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Above the trio are an angel’s wings, carrying them out of the oven. In the reformed Aramaic language, Chai is interpreted as angel in the first degree, as the Holy Trinity in the second degree, and the third degree is so sacred that we cannot even dare to write its meaning.”

The word that Yūsuf had interpreted as Maks-tar received this entry:

“This is the Assyro-Babylonian word Maks-tar, meaning greatest. In the first degree, Maks-tar represents the greatest commandment, which was not to be revealed to the world for hundreds of years but which was revealed to Daniel as the instruction to Love your God and your Neighbor. In the second degree it traces the orbit of the greatest star in the Cosmos, inside of which is housed the world of spirits. The third degree remains a mystery.”

The Shamanites eagerly anticipated further discernments and strove to live worthy enough to receive the future interpretations that had been promised regarding the yet-to-be-revealed mysteries and symbols. In the meantime they busily transcribed copies of Yūsuf’s translations and wrapped them into holy scrolls that were distributed to faithful adherents.

Over the next few years, the villagers adjusted their theology to match the lengthy dissertations derived from the Parchment of Daniel. Due to some of their stranger customs that arose from this new theology, however, they faced a great deal of harassment from neighboring tribes that wanted nothing to do with this newly evolving religion. In the end, they were driven from their village and went high up into the hills of the jungle to be able to worship their chosen spirits without opposition.

They still needed to survive financially, so Yūsuf began sending his adherents out to sell copies of the Parchment of Daniel to the tribes in the surrounding valleys. He visited many villages himself, ruffling feathers along the way by making obstinate claims about his connection to the world of spirits. Especially disturbing to his neighbors was Yūsuf’s claim that only Shamanites get access to the world of spirits – and that Yūsuf himself would be standing guard as the gatekeeper. In the face of the growing conflagration, eventually he set off on a journey from which he never returned, slain by the knife of a competing shaman from a neighboring village.

Upon Yūsuf’s death, the Shamanites strengthened their resolve and held true to their faith in his interpretations.

In the meantime, some scholars in Nairobi had obtained copies of the parchment fragments and debated the meaning behind them. Actually there wasn’t much debate; the scholars all agreed that the characters in the transcriptions had nothing to do with Babylon but that they were really written in German. Rather than being thousands of years old they were at most a few hundred years old.

The scholars asked the Shamanites for the actual fragments so they could prove or disprove their authenticity once and for all with carbon dating. Unfortunately, though, Yūsuf’s hut had been burned down during the earlier attack on the village – and with it all of the parchments in his collection.

Convinced that Yūsuf must have had Daniel’s real writings in his hut, the Shamanites continued to send copies of Yūsuf’s interpretation to the surrounding villages. They faced a great deal of opposition and were disappointed that the original transcripts – and the proof of their validity – had been lost.

Or so they all thought…until a few years later when a German museum curator – unaware of the Shamanites’ existence – decided to put some artifacts collected from pre-war Jewish homes on display. Among the museum’s acquisitions were the possessions of a Jewish traveler, which included some parchments with the very same characters Yūsuf claimed to have translated. In fact, some of them lined up exactly with the missing pieces in the Shamanite transcriptions. The articles on display included several pages that fit together perfectly with the fragments that Yūsuf had deciphered:

The pages were from a story about two mischievous little boys named Max and Moritz, written by the German comic artist Wilhelm Bush. One of the cautionary tales related how Max and Moritz broke into Meister Bäcker’s bakery and ended up being baked in his oven – a typically German tale of consequence for bad behavior. The other page was simply a recipe for bread dough. If there had ever been any argument about the actual contents of the Parchment of Daniel, this newfound discovery was sure to lay the issue to rest.

Everybody now agreed that the character Chai was simply the conjoined letters c and h in the Fraktur font. Maks-tar had nothing to do with the great commandment or a big star in the cosmos but was just Max’s name written in Sütterlinschrift. Nebuchadnezzar’s head, of course, never belonged there in the first place.

Undeterred, though, the Shamanites appointed an expert named Huniblea, the most educated member of their tribe, to defend their case. Huniblea had mastered several Germanic languages, including English and Old German, and had even become well versed in the Sütterlinschrift and Fraktur scripts in which the original documents were written. He firmly believed in Yūsuf’s interpretation of the story and went to work debating the so-called scholars of Nairobi in a written rebuttal.

“Look here,” Huniblea challenged the other scholars, “without any knowledge of Latin or Roman characters, Yūsuf translated the conjoined ch that as the character Chai, which just so happens starts with a “C” and an “H”. Coincidence? Or inspiration?

The Shamanites were amazed at his expert wisdom.

“And besides,” he continued, “Yūsuf correctly interpreted the original meaning of the word Maks-tar, which in addition to the obvious cosmological relevance just happens to be a real Finnish word meaning to deposit, just like these poor wretches were being deposited into the fiery furnace. And besides that, the interpreted word starts with “Maks”, which could be written phonetically as “Max”, which scholars have now unanimously agreed is the real name of a real character depicted on the original parchment!”

The Shamanites were pleased that Huniblea had reached a consensus among the scholars.

“Yūsuf could not have known that these characters spelled Max without divine assistance,” Huniblea continued, “Max, of course, also relates to “maximum,” meaning the greatest of the commandments, which is to love. And to prove the divine authorship and the symbolic mysteries contained in the parchments, if you take those same characters in German, and read them in English, they spell out the word ‘Love’ – which we all know is precisely what the Greatest Commandment refers to!”

The Shamanites ate it up! Huniblea had successfully refuted all of the arguments against their shaman. Nobody else in Yūsuf’s tribe could speak German or English, so they relied on Huniblea’s interpretation and agreed with his conclusion that the only possible way to explain all of these coincidences was that Yūsuf was guided by the spirits in his dreams with a correct translation.

Of course the arguments didn’t make any sense at all to the legitimate scholars. Although much of what Huniblea had previously published was actually well respected in their circles, they saw no relevance nor any credible basis whatsoever for his new arguments. Where sources were available, he had cited them; where they weren’t, he simply made them up, taking on faith that his cause was just and that his ultimate findings would be validated in the future.

The scholars, meanwhile, drafted their own paper, successfully debunking Huniblea’s claims with clear evidence of the parchment’s actual meaning; unfortunately for the Shamanites, though, the believers were told by their reigning chiefs not to read the scholarly rebuttal but rather to let Huniblea have the last word.

So despite the overwhelming consensus to the contrary – most of which never made its way to the Shamanites – they adhered to their belief that the Parchment of Daniel was true. The more the outsiders accused Yūsuf of being an imposter, the more they clung to their convictions and kept transcribing more copies to deliver to every corner of Africa through a growing network of messengers.

Eventually every other scholar in every other country reached the same conclusion as those in Nairobi: The so-called Parchment of Daniel was a children’s book that had nothing whatsoever to do with Daniel. As time went on, some Shamanites adherents also became fluent in both Sütterlinschrift and Fraktur and eventually agreed with the rest of the world.

In the end, even the Shamanite chiefs recognized that their original claim was untenable and had to acknowledge that the translation was, in fact, not literal.

Most Shamanites were never told about this change in position, but those who looked into it generally came to the conclusion that the shaman was just plain wrong in this case. He had seen an opportunity to unite and inspire his followers without any idea of what was actually written on the parchments, and he ran with it.

Unfortunately for any doubting Shamanite, though, the chiefs who followed in Yūsuf’s role kept up a battery of very bold statements claiming that if anything written by Yūsuf was wrong, everything was wrong. So those followers who wished to continue their life as Shamanites – even those who came to realize that Yūsuf had not the slightest skill as a translator – have had to find a way to make him right.

Over time, a wide range of theories has emerged among their ranks to rationalize this predicament. These include some of the following positions:

The shaman didn’t actually sign any affidavit saying that he translated the parchment himself, so his helpers in the “School of the Shaman” are to blame for any errors.
The verb “translate” has many different meanings; in this case it means “think about.”
The parchments were just a tool or a prop to help assist Yūsuf’s clairvoyance, getting him in touch with the Old Testament stories and inspiring his dreams of the spirit world.
The arguments for and against the translations should all be ignored because the proof is in the heart, not in the mind. Proponents of this theory say, “The Parchment of Daniel is a book about love. And love is good. And reading it makes me feel good. I know it makes me feel good. So I know that it’s true. Which is why I know that Yūsuf is a true shaman.”
There must have been some real Babylonian characters written by Daniel’s own hand in the shaman’s possession, which we are no longer worthy to see, so the God of Fire had to consume them in his own fiery furnace when Yūsuf’s hut burned down.
It’s just too complicated. Those who fall into this category say, “Huniblea is so much smarter than I am, so I’m just going to have to trust him. And in the end, Yūsuf will explain all the tough questions to me when I meet him at the entrance to the world of spirits. In the meantime, I might as well do what I can to follow his teachings so he’ll let me pass.”
The caricatures were admittedly drawn by Wilhelm Bush in the 1800s, but the author actually based his book on tales that had been passed down orally over generations – all the way back to Babylon. When Bush wrote the story of Max and Moritz, for example, he had actually just been thinking about the evil King Nebuchadnezzar, so he modeled Meister Bäcker after him.
Yūsuf made it up.

So what is the most likely answer? Yes, any of these explanations might be remotely possible. Some of them, of course, come with dichotomies of their own that defy logic, but is there really more than one probable explanation?

A growing number of Shamanites have reached the last of these conclusion and the simplest of them all: that Yūsuf was just plain wrong. Some of these doubters have left their jungle village and have come down to wander around the big city of Nairobi, mingling with bustling crowds and gazing up at the buildings. But most of the doubters remain in the village and stay silent about their belief that Yūsuf’s translation of the parchment is bogus. That’s an understandable response, because their fellow Shamanites have been told not to associate with anyone who reaches such a heretical conclusion – in this case one that threatens to crack the keystone of the Shamanite faith, which just so happens to be founded on Yūsuf’s ability to translate. And who wants to lose their family and friends over arguments about ancient Babylonian linguistics when tribal life revolves around so much more?

The shaman himself is, of course, long gone now, but the Shamanites are going strong – and they still distribute copies of the misinterpreted parchment. Despite their chiefs’ acknowledgment that Yūsuf’s interpretation was incorrect – well, “not literal” is the way it is typically described – it remains part of their holy writings, wrapped into the same scroll that includes in its title, “Of all the true scrolls, this one is the truest.” The Shamanite chiefs all know full well that Max isn’t Shadrack and that Meister Bäcker isn’t Nebuchadnezzar, but their sacred scroll still says it is. And most Shamanites still believe it to be so. In fact, to this day most Shamanites will claim to know those translations are true and to have received direct confirmation of that fact from the world of spirits.

So the next time a Shamanite messenger comes knocking on your door with a reproduction of the oven drawing that depicts Meister Bäcker as the evil King Nebuchadnezzar, please let them know it’s just a baker. It never was nor ever will be Nebuchadnezzar. Tell them their chiefs have agreed with that conclusion and that it’s ok to Google confirmation of that fact. Maybe the Shamanite standing on your doorstep will have to rethink his or her position; and if that messenger manages to start seeing things from another perspective, he or she might just decide to send a request up the chain to have the Parchment of Daniel removed from the sacred scrolls – thereby freeing themselves from the complicated justifications they have spent their life chasing.

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Now I’ll need to bring this little ditty about Max and Moritz back to Nathan’s challenge, to which my answer is the reluctant, self-incriminating acknowledgment:

I am that (sha)man(ite)!

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Love is in the Air!

And if I can bring this back to the other challenge question that was posed in the Introduction, what do you see here?

I’m happy to hear any opposing explanations, but I’m claiming that it is merely an excerpt of Max’s name, written in Sütterlinschrift. Maybe it looks like it says love, but I know where it came from, and I can trace its origin.

“But that’s not fair!” you may say, “You deliberately excluded a piece of the first letter by cropping it out.”

Yes, exactly! Deliberately withholding pertinent information to alter an intended meaning isn’t fair at all. And that’s the whole point here. When integral parts of the truth are deliberately withheld in an effort to manipulate perception and maintain control – effectively preventing an informed decision among those who limit their information to sanctioned sources – well, in that case I’ll go ahead and call the foul!

If I show you the whole page first, and you then decide you’d like to focus on the part that looks like it says love, well that should be your choice – but you should at least have the option of developing a full knowledge of what lies outside your crop lines before you make your decision.

For those who decide to focus on what lies inside the box, or for those who choose to avoid even glancing at anything that falls outside that box, I have to respect that choice. But when those in authority issue specific instructions not to even look at what lies outside the box under accompanying threats of eternally broken bonds to family, friends, and God Himself – and when my own decision to look outside the box and see any validity in the contents of the rest of the page eradicates my own validity and shuts me out of my own children’s weddings to boot – well, in that case I am driven to do whatever I can to end the ostracism. In the end, that’s the whole reason I’m spending my time writing up my own reflections here and posting them online!

Now if you go ahead and substitute the name of Mr. Hor for Mr. Max in this tale, the analogy becomes my reality, and the rest of this journey of mine merely follows an equivalent path to its conclusion.

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There once was a shaman from Kenya,
Who’s fictional like Zarahemla,
Now that he’s been debunked,
with the trials he flunked,
There’s luckily no more dilemma!
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[Next: Chapter 1 Part 2: Meta-Mormonism]