Visions in a Seer Stone

Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

William L. Davis

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655673
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1, 000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.

CHAPTER ONE

Seer Stones and Western Esotericism

In 1829 Joseph Smith Jr., the future prophet and founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, produced the Book of Mormon in an extended oral performance.¹ His process of spoken composition, however, was anything but usual: taking a mystical “seer stone,” an object in Western esotericism that functioned much like a crystal ball (also described as “peep stones,” “spectacles,” “crystals,” “glasses,” and “show-stones,” among other terms), Smith placed the stone into the bottom of his upturned hat, held the hat to his face to block out all light, and then proceeded to dictate the entire narrative to his attentive scribes. Smith would later describe the seer stone, along with another translation implement that he described as “spectacles” and “interpreters,” by using the term “Urim and Thummim,” endowing his instruments with a more prestigious biblical nomenclature.² As he proceeded with his project, Smith recited the text at a steady phrase-by-phrase pace, pausing only long enough for his scribes to repeat each transcribed phrase back to him in order to ensure the accuracy of the text.³

Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never referred to notes, manuscripts, or books during the course of the actual dictation, though many scholars believe that he occasionally consulted a Bible.⁴ The account of Emma Smith, Joseph’s first wife, remains the primary source for this claim. In February of 1879, nearly fifty years after Smith finished the dictation in the summer of 1829, Emma provided a relatively detailed, though somewhat ambiguous and certainly belated, firsthand account of her experience with this process, recalling how Smith sat at their table “with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.”⁵ To his observers, Smith’s prodigious flow of verbal art and narrative creation was nothing short of miraculous, and the seer stone represented an essential component of that ritualized oral performance.

Smith’s use of a seer stone to produce the Book of Mormon raises a number of issues related to the origins of the Latter Day Saint movement, particularly with respect to Smith’s worldview and the role of Western esotericism in his nascent church. The topic, of course, remains controversial and has understandably received a great deal of attention. Readers interested in pursuing such discussions and ramifications have an abundance of materials to explore.⁶ For the purposes of this study, however, this chapter will provide a brief historical context of Smith’s use of a seer stone for readers who might be unfamiliar with the topic of folk magic and Christian occultism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America.

Esotericism in the Smith Household

Smith’s use of a seer stone in the oral performance of the Book of Mormon immediately calls attention to the religious and esoteric preoccupations of the Smith family, particularly regarding their willingness to search for spiritual enlightenment by means of religious experimentation in both conventional and unconventional ways. No doubt the area where the family settled in Western New York fueled these preoccupations. In the nineteenth century the region “bounded by the Catskill Mountains on the east and the Adirondock [sic] Mountains on the north,” and stretching to the far western edge of the state, encompassed a hotbed of religious fervor that surged with successive waves of revivalism.⁷ The area would later become known as the “Burned-Over District” in reference to “the prevailing western analogy between the fires of the forest and those of the spirit.” Rife with mixtures of religious ideologies and intensified religious expression, this “Burned-Over” region, with its “people extraordinarily given to unusual religious beliefs,” provided an ideal environment for the Smith family’s own religious searching.⁸

In their quest for religious truths, Joseph Smith’s parents, Joseph Sr. and Lucy, investigated different religious ideologies as frequently and as restlessly as they moved from one farm to the next, without making permanent commitments to any of them. They were known as “Seekers,” a form of Primitivism, which sought to restore Christ’s church and all its practices to “the primitive or original order of things as revealed in Scripture, free from the accretions of church history and tradition.”⁹ For the Smiths, this meant that “both parents had broken out of the standard church orthodoxies while at the same time remaining pious and searching.”¹⁰ Over the course of their religious quest, their exposure to religious traditions included New England Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Universalists, along with the religious ideologies of Primitivism, Millennialism, and Restorationism.¹¹ As Richard L. Bushman observes, “The Smiths were exposed to a conglomeration of doctrines and attitudes, some imported from Europe, others springing up in New England, none sorted or ranked by recognized authority, all available for adoption as personal whim or circumstances dictated. The result was a religious melee.”¹² But these arguably conventional, though actively evolving, avenues were not the only sources of spiritual knowledge to which the Smiths turned for greater understanding of God’s ways and mysteries.

The impulse to resist or embellish the dogmas and power structures of established religions encouraged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Seekers to look outside the boundaries of traditional Christianity, where a panoply of philosophies and practices awaited the curiosity of those who sought alternative systems of belief among the various traditions of Western esotericism. Such alternatives included astrology, alchemy, versions of Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Masonic philosophies and rituals, a variety of occult sciences (studies in secret knowledge, not to be confused with “cults”), mesmerism (and related ideas of “animal magnetism”), and a variety of folk magic practices.¹³ Rather than looking to contemporary theologians or their immediate antecedents for answers to life’s most pressing questions, inquirers after these philosophies attempted to reach back to the dawn of mankind “to recover the divine power and perfection possessed by Adam before the Fall, and indeed before Creation.”¹⁴

This impulse was often driven by millenarian ideologies that predicted a restoration of God’s knowledge and power to the earth before the last days. “Such knowledge, once possessed by Adam,” Walter W. Woodward observes in his study on John Winthrop Jr.’s fascination with the occult sciences in colonial New England, “had been lost at the Fall, but it would be regained, many believed, through a process of research and discovery that would foreshadow Christ’s Second Coming.”¹⁵ In postrevolutionary America, when the nation was entering uncharted waters of democratic institutions and wrestling with ideological displacements caused by radical and unprecedented changes, the steps toward a more perfect form of governance were often anchored in conceptions of a primordial past, when all the earth operated in perfect harmony. “From the perspective of many who lived during and following the [American] Revolution,” Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen observe, “that event was the infinitely grand, cosmic battle that, now at last in these latter days, had begun the process of making the primordium contemporary.” Moreover, they add, “the millennium typically constituted a restoration of the primordium, and all profane history that had intervened between these two end times was obscured, ignored, and transcended.”¹⁶ Within this grand teleological scheme, the search for hidden mysteries and secret knowledge played a significant role, and Christian occultism and Western esoteric practices represented some of the more intriguing avenues of discovery.

This conceptual framework of history and knowledge thus opened a critical space where the “supernatural” and the “miraculous” acted as highly charged manifestations of divine power and hidden (hence “occult”) mysteries. Such knowledge had the potential to reveal how the natural world and all the operations of the universe existed in perfect harmony; how pure “Adamic” or “Angelic” languages held the Neoplatonic power to name accurately all creatures and substances according to their pure linguistic forms; and how unadulterated celestial knowledge could be harnessed to endow the righteous seeker with the power to foretell the future, exert control over the forces of nature, summon a variety of miracles, and communicate to God directly or through his ministering angels.¹⁷ Moreover, as Samuel Morris Brown argues, “This pure language contained the possibility that humans could gain access to God’s presence.”¹⁸ Evidence of such a mysterious ancient system of greater knowledge littered the Bible, providing Christian occult practitioners with examples of what they might seek to obtain.

If Moses and Aaron could become instruments in God’s hands, using Aaron’s rod in a conjuration duel with Egyptian sorcerers, turning rods to snakes, rivers to blood, or calling forth frogs and lice to cover the land, then a greater understanding of God’s mysteries could potentially endow His righteous modern-day inquirers with similar power. If Moses had the power to part the Red Sea, then those with divine knowledge and “faith as a grain of mustard seed” could literally move mountains. If Hebrew high priests utilized oracular stones called “Urim and Thummim” to communicate with God, then mystical objects and the righteous power to invoke them were genuinely possible. And, if the appearance of a star revealed the birthplace of the Messiah, or if Jesus could proclaim that “the sign of the Son of man” would appear in the heavens to foretell his return, then it naturally followed that God revealed the future through astrological and earthly phenomena.¹⁹ “Because God authorizes them,” Brian Copenhaver observes, “extraordinary events that we might call ‘magical’ are not only real—meaning that they are factual, not illusory—but also legitimate.”²⁰ The restoration of God’s pure knowledge thereby made up one component of the restoration of His primordial order for all creation.

Thus, while the scriptures were rife with passages condemning evil magic, the texts also revealed an opposite form of God’s virtuous power, which, shrouded in mystery, only the truly righteous could hope to discover. Within this system of knowledge, the history of mystical phenomena and the accounts of God’s divine power intertwined, collapsing the distinction between “magic” and “miracle,” between “occult” and “revealed,” into an all-encompassing cosmology. To be certain, this brand of occultism was not nefarious, with a perverse aim to unleash the powers of darkness onto the world. Rather, this was enlightened Christian theurgy, with the goal of discovering God’s hidden mysteries in order to harness greater spiritual knowledge and power.²¹ For the lay religious seeker, delving into such secrets offered the opportunity to uncover and amalgamate new systems of personal belief that could potentially bring the believer closer to God’s ancient undefiled religion, while simultaneously creating a space for liberated expressions of faith and self-determination. As David Hall observes, “Prophecy and magic were alike in helping people to become empowered, prophecy because it overturned the authority of mediating clergy and magic because it gave access to the realm of occult force.”²² Within this shifting milieu of mainstream faiths, popular culture, and fringe philosophies in Western New York, Joseph Sr. and Lucy developed their ideas and fostered their personal magical practices.

In an 1870 interview, Fayette Lapham, a farmer from a neighboring county, described his 1830 visit to the Smith family home, stating, “This Joseph Smith, Senior, we soon learned, from his own lips, was a firm believer in witchcraft and other supernatural things; and had brought up his family in the same belief.”²³ Though a negative observation, and one remembered long after the time of the actual events, the comment was not unfounded. In the 1845 preliminary manuscript of her family history, Joseph’s mother Lucy apparently confirmed the Smith family’s preoccupation with mystical practices. When insisting that all the members of her family were hard workers and not, according to their critics, a group of lazy and shiftless people, Lucy informed the readers of her biography that they should not assume that the Smith family members “stopt our labor and went <at> trying to win the faculty of Abrac[,] drawing Magic circles or sooth saying to the neglect of all kinds of bu<i>sness[;] we never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation but whilst we worked with our hands we endeavored to remmember [sic] the service of & the welfare of our souls.”²⁴ Lucy’s comment remains a point of debate among scholars: some argue that Lucy was admitting b...