Epstein suggests her direct link with God was related to the' power' that I think Julian Jaynes described in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. She was truly a charismatic preacher who drew her first crowds by standing on the street corner in what appeared to be a catatonic state or trance. The marriage was not a success, and she left him, taking her children, following what she believed to be a direct conversation with the Holy Spirit. seemed sweetened with the fresh blood of Christian martyrs.' Following his death from malaria and dysentery shortly after their second wedding anniversary, Aimee moved back to the States where she was courted and married by a Providence, Rhode Island businessman. The Boxer Rebellion had led China to the verge of revolution and missionaries were great targets, which did not discourage them in the slightest, none of them being of particularly sound mind to begin with 'the populous shores. Unfortunately, Robert felt call ed to minister in China in 1910, not a propitious time for Westerners. She was also a beautiful seventeen-year-old, a mighty temptation for even the most pious of male souls. Until the moment when, on a whim, she and her father attended the revival meeting conducted by handsome Robert Semple, Aimee had been a confirmed atheist and typical teenager, confounding her parents by reading novels and dancing, and scandalizing her minister by humiliating him in a debate on evolution. That's what happened to Aimee Kennedy, later to become famous as Sister Aimee, the renowned evangelist. Or falling madly in love with the latest Pentecostal. As a stimulant it might lead to conduct unbecoming a lady.' Like speaking in tongues.

Nice girls in 1908 did not smoke cigarettes or go to cockfights or seek baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Sister Aimee by Daniel Mark Epstein