The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 6

The name of author and proprietor of the Book of Mormon was inadvertently assumed and quickly discarded. The title of prophet, seer and revelator was a growth.^[1] Joseph's first prophecy, at the age of eighteen, concerned Deacon Jessup and the widow's cow;^[2] his last revelation, called the Appendix, concerned the second advent.^[3] In their variety Smith's prophetic utterances comprised items on the Ancient of days, Boarding-houses, Celestial glory, the Day of vengeance, Emma Smith, Far West City,—and so on through the alphabet. As head of the church, Smith once said, 'We never enquire at the hand of God for special revelation only in case of there being no previous revelation to suit the case.'^[4] The acceptance of these allocutions among his followers passes all understanding, ​unless their notions and crotchets are taken into account. Among them there was an underlying belief in the predictive and oracular. Thus Daniel Tyler said that his grandfather prophesied that his father would live to see the true church organized; and he himself joined the Latter-day Saints, because it was predicted that he should become a preacher of the gospel.^[5] Wilford Woodruff revolts at the assertions of his Presbyterian friends that there are to be no more prophecies and revelations. In his perturbation he walks by the sea and receives 'the sign of the prophet Jonah: a large fish rises near the shore and looks at him with penetrating eye.'^[6] He allies himself to Joseph the wonder-worker because of what old prophet Mason had predicted, years before, about the restoration of primitive gifts.

Joseph succeeded in his vaticinations because the ground was prepared; his was a prophetic neighborhood. Jemima Wilkinson, the Sibyl of Crooked Lake, was not disturbed in her mouthings, since she advertised the region opened up by Phelps and Gorham.^[7] The Shakers, in Wayne County, were uttering millennial warnings.^[8] More rabid Millerarians infested the parts around Rochester, although ​it was not until October 25th, 1844, that the followers of Miller took a red aurora for the final conflagration, and gathered in their ascension robes to meet the last day.^[9] But the Mormon prophet did not make the mistake of selecting a date for the end of the world.^[10] His eschatology possessed an air of practicality. His millennium was, on the whole, marked by such an indefinite immediateness that there was little to criticize. He gives this confidential statement:—

'I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following:—

'Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man: therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter.'

I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see His face.'^[11]

Apostle Pratt, who derided the Millerites and their dates, asserted that Joseph Smith never was mis​taken in his revelations.^[12] Unfortunately ten years before this Smith had made his classic blunder in telling Bishop Whitney to go to New York, Albany and Boston, and 'warn the people of those cities that the hour of their judgment is nigh.'^[13] But in general as a prophet of woe, Joseph's forebodings were well timed; he had learned when to get on the bear side of the millennial market. Thus, the persecutions of the Latter-day church and the general financial depression were coincident with this announcement:—

'Hearken, O ye people of my church, the voice of warning shall be unto all people, by the mouths of my disciples, whom I have chosen in these last days.

And they shall go forth and none shall stay them, for I the Lord have commanded them.

Behold, this is mine authority, and the authority of my servants, and my Preface unto ​the Book of my Commandments, which I have given them to publish unto you, O inhabitants of the earth:—

Wherefore, fear and tremble, O ye people, for what I the Lord have decreed, in them, shall be fulfilled;

And verily, I say unto you, that they who go forth, bearing these tidings unto the inhabitants of the earth, to them is power given, to seal both on earth and in heaven, the unbelieving and rebellious;

Yea, verily, to seal them up unto the day when the wrath of God shall be poured out upon the wicked, without measure;

Unto the day when the Lord shall come to recompense unto every man according to his work, and measure to every man according to the measure which he has measured to his fellow man.

Wherefore the voice of the Lord is unto the ends of the earth, that all that will hear may hear:

Prepare ye, prepare ye for that which is to come, for the Lord is nigh;

And the anger of the Lord is kindled, and his sword is bathed in heaven, and it shall fall upon the inhabitants of the earth;

Wherefore I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth, called upon my servant Joseph.'^[14]

​The voice of warning to all people was accompanied with promises of comfort to the Saints. In January, 1831, there came this message: 'Behold the enemy is combined, fear not for the kingdom is yours and I hold forth and deign to give unto you greater riches, even the land of promise; and that ye might escape the power of the enemy, I gave unto you the commandment, that ye should go to the Ohio.'^[15]

The spiritual timeliness of the early oracles is in marked contrast to the unedifying definiteness of the later covenants and commandments. One exception should be noted. A month before the founding of the Church 'a commandment, of God and not of man,' was given to Martin Harris. In this it was said: 'Thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing of the Book of Mormon. Pay the printer's debt. Misery thou shalt receive, if thou wilt slight these coun​sels.'^[16] As time went on the personal equation and the dollar mark became more conspicuous. On April 26th, 1832, a month after being tarred and feathered by a mob, Joseph received the message beginning, 'the anger of God kindleth against the inhabitants of the earth.' On January 19th, 1841, at Nauvoo, this advice reached the ears of the prophet:

'And now I say unto you, as pertaining to my boarding house which I have commanded you to build for the boarding of strangers, let it be built unto my name, and let my name be named upon it, and let my servant Joseph, and his house have place therein, from generation to generation.'^[17]

The Saints have attempted to relieve the bathos of Joseph's revelations,^[18] by quoting the so-called ​'Prophecy of the Rebellion.' It is indeed a remarkable forecast,^[19] but its authenticity is dubious. The most specific revelation of this kind written by Joseph, occurred as early as March, 1831, but it is more pertinent to Armageddon than the Civil War:​—'ye hear of wars in foreign lands, but behold I say unto you they are nigh even unto your doors, and not many years hence ye shall hear of wars in your own lands.'^[20]

To turn to Smith's doings as a seer: here was the first of his dabblings with the occult. How far the 'wonderful power' of 'Peep-stone Joe' was fictitious, how far due to unconscious self-suggestion it is hard to decide. The statements of his followers make his actions mystic; the statements of his family suggest the hypnotic; his own description of the Urim and Thummim as 'like unto ​crystal' at once suggests that he was an inadvertent crystal gazer. Although his psychoses may be put in terms of present day experiment, his own notions must be traced to his historic setting. His contemporaries were anachronisms; belief in divination,—both through 'second sight' and the 'shew stone'—was brought over in the Mayflower along with other antique mental furniture.^[21] Without harking back to old-world superstitions,^[22] it is a fact that divining rods and seer stones were still used to find springs and locate hidden treasures in the rural districts of America. Especially did money diggers from Cape Cod to Lake Erie have their tales and fables. So Joseph's father was a firm believer in ​witchcraft and other supernatural things, and Joseph himself refers to the divining rod as the rod of nature and informs his friend Cowdery 'behold there is no other power save God, that can cause this rod of nature to work in your hands, for it is the work of God.'^[23]

The very charges against the Smiths betrayed the credulity of the times. The 'seeing-stone' with which Joseph is alleged to have sought for the Susquehanna silver mine, had previously been used in attempts to trace a lost child.^[24] As if it were a ​recrudescence of fetish worship, stones of strange shape or peculiar markings were highly prized, as well as those of a mysterious origin. An existing Mormon seer stone, from Missouri, is nothing but an Indian slate gorget.^[25] Three generations ago there seems to have been only an inkling of the truth, that the 'influence' was to be attributed rather to the person seeing than to the object, to the seer rather than to the stone.

Joseph's own neighbors were particularly in the dark; one Willard Chase sent sixty or seventy miles for a certain conjurer; Chase's sister found a green glass through which she could see very many wonderful things.^[26] Whether this was the identical stone which Joseph used is conjectural and immaterial,^[27] although there is new information on the point.^[28]

​How early he stumbled on the discovery of his 'gift' is more important.^[29] His father testified that, when a lad, 'Joseph heard of a neighboring girl, who could look into a glass and see anything however hidden from others. He looked into this glass which was placed in a hat to exclude the light. He was greatly surprised to see but one thing, which was a small stone, a great way off. It soon became luminous and dazzled his eyes, and after a short time it became as intense as the midday sun. . . . He often had an opportunity to look in the glass, and with the same result. The luminous stone alone attracted his attention.'^[30]

By 1825, Joseph's fame as a 'peeper' was widespread. Josiah Stoal came from Chenango County to get Joseph's 'assistance in digging for a silver mine, on account of having heard that he possessed ​certain keys, by which he could discern things invisible to the natural eye.'^[31]

So far the youthful seer had been using a translucent quartz pebble such as was to be found in the glacial drift of western New York. In September, 1827, he procured his 'interpreters.' These he himself described as two transparent stones,^[32] and his mother as three-cornered diamonds, which he kept constantly about his person.^[33] If one may hazard a guess, these 'curious instruments, called by the ancients the Urim and Thummim,'^[34] were probably a couple of prisms from an old-fashioned chandelier. Whatever the object, the purpose was the same,—to produce a condition suitable for the 'seeing of visions.' What this condition really was, Joseph knew as little as the Specularii of old. But that many people hypnotize themselves,^[35] without knowing it, is as true as that Monsieur Jourdain had been speaking prose all his life, without knowing it.

Since the classic experiments of Braid, the Manchester surgeon, the means of producing hypnosis are too well known to need description: in a likely subject, steady gazing at anything from a teapot to the tip of the nose will induce the primary state of ​reverie. Of the scientific procedure Joseph, of course, was absolutely ignorant, yet his method of 'glass-looking,' was, in fact, one of the easiest ways of producing slight hypnotization, namely that by sensorial excitement. He did not need strong or luminous rays, but only that slight and prolonged excitement, gained by fixing the eyes on an object, brilliant or otherwise, placed near the eyes.^[36] Unlike some of his followers Joseph does not seem to have been especially liable to what they denominated the open vision.'^[37] His was not the rarer type of person, who ​can call up the hallucinative image, spontaneously and while awake. His acts, as a seer, required time, preparation and some apparatus. An eyewitness thus describes his methods: 'At times when Brother Joseph would attempt to translate, he would look into the hat in which the stone was placed, he found he was spiritually blind and could not translate. He told us that his mind dwelt too much on earthly things, and various causes would make him incapable of proceeding with the translation. When in this condition he would go out and pray, and when he became sufficiently humble before God, he could then proceed with the translation. Now we see how very strict the Lord is; and how He requires the heart of man to be just right in His sight, before he can receive revelation from Him.^[38]

These fluctuations in the psychological moment—really due to a restless temperament—were interpreted as due to the alternate granting and withdrawal of the 'gift.'^[39] For this reason, there is little ​doubt that Joseph, at least at the start, considered his 'translations' to be inspired. For all that, his mystic writings may be resolved into their elements of Bible knowledge, petty information and every-day experience. It is curious and noteworthy to trace the workings of the seer's imagination in the lather of words given by his devotee: 'I will now give you a description of the manner in which the Book of Mormon was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.'^[40]

That the Book of Mormon was an imaginative elaboration of presentative material, is corroborated by this account of its mystic genesis. Joseph's process of translating by means of his Urim and ​Thummim^[41] may be compared with a recent experimental study of visions.^[42] Although artificially produced they resolved themselves mainly into natural sources, namely,—what had been previously seen, heard, read and thought, besides representations and revivals of the experience of the hypnotic personality of which the waking consciousness has never had knowledge.

All this is applicable to Joseph's first act of 'translating.' To those who care to dig below the threshold of consciousness, the mystic after-image, the recrudescence of the subconscious may be an explanation of the alleged Greek and Hebrew letters in the transcription of the gold plates. One glance at Bible in the original tongues may have been enough to stamp the visual image on the boy's impressionable mind. This objectification of images, which exist unconsciously in the memory, is a fact in dreams and a likely surmise as to the analogous phenomena of semi-hypnosis. Whatever the explanation, the fact is this,—Joseph the seer was a good visualizer.^[43]

​Smith's method was so far the commonplace method of the trance-medium. The act of fixing the eyes on one particular point, supplemented by a state of quietude through prayer, prepared the way for the influence of self-suggestion. His external acts are one thing, the subtle and self-deceiving nature of his hallucinations another. He knew no more about the subconscious self and the law of association of ideas, than he did of the fact that his 'Reformed Egyptian' resembled the irregular and spasmodic writings of hypnotic subjects. Now that the transcription of the gold plates is a veritable piece of automatic writing, is evident from a com​parison of the reproduction of the 'Caractors' with modern experimental scrawlings. An attempt of a patient, in a semi-hypnotic state, through planchette or a pencil held loosely in the hands, will show equally mysterious figures and back-handed signatures.^[44]

The relation of Joseph's crystal gazing to the composition of the Book of Mormon, brings more important information. It furnishes an explanation of certain peculiarities in the text. The style of the ancient prophet Mormon is the style of the modern spiritualist. The lack of punctuation may be laid to the fact of dictation, but the slips in grammar and the endless repetition of such phrases as 'came to pass,' resemble the painful errors and damnable iteration of messages from the unseen world.^[45]

Furthermore, the length and complexity of the Book of Mormon is rendered additionally possible, if one cares to believe the assertion, that hypnotic suggestion arouses into activity the dormant psychic power,—brings to the subject's fingers' ends all the knowledge that he has ever had, and, finally, in​spires him with an overwhelming confidence in himself.^[46]

Was it hyperæsthesia or hard work that evolved the Record of the Nephites? To those who neither hanker after theories of the subliminal self,^[47] nor believe that the Book of Mormon required any quickening of the intellect,^[48] the author's crystal gazing may yet have important relations to his writings. At the least, it was a moving cause of the acts of his disciples. Because of their magical guise, his associates believed that they were bound to take down their seer's every utterance; consequently, they gave him abundant help. Emma Smith confessed that she wrote at her husband's dictation day after day;^[49] while Christian Whitmer and ​Oliver Cowdery were his scribes for seven solid months.^[50]

To Joseph's performances as a seer, the usual clairvoyant and telepathic embellishments were added. Martin Harris said that Joseph proposed to bind his 'directors' on his eyes and run a race with him in the woods^[51] David Whitmer avowed that this was the same stone used by the Jaredites at Babel. He relates that he could see nothing through it, but that Joseph, placing it to his eyes, could read signs one hundred and sixty miles distant, and tell exactly what was transpiring there. He then adds the statement:—'When I went to Harmony after him, he told me the name of every hotel at which I had stopped on the road, read the signs, and described various scenes without having ever received any information from me.'^[52]

The most marvelous occurrence is one that is said to have happened about June, 1829. Joseph's ​mother recounts that, as he was translating by means of the Urim and Thummim, he received, 'instead of the words of the Book, a commandment to write a letter to a man by the name of David Whitmer, who lived in Waterloo, requesting him to come immediately with his team, and convey himself and Oliver to his own residence, as an evil-designing people were seeking to take away his (Joseph's) life, in order to prevent the work of God from going forth to the world.^[53]

Of these three occurrences comment is almost superfluous. The running blindfolded is not said to have taken place; if it had, it could be compared to the heightened sense-perception of the hypnotic subject, when he walks about a room with bandaged eyes, or in absolute darkness, without striking against anything.^[54] Again Joseph's reading innsigns, miles away, is no proof of the dubieties of supersensual thought transference.^[55] As the added ​details show, the itinerant seer had traveled the same road as his disciple, who took no account of Joseph's naturally retentive memory. Lastly the form of the letter to the Whitmers, and their fulfilling the writer's request implies a previous ac​quaintance with that family. In brief, Joseph's failures are in accord with the modern failures in mental telegraphy, through the medium of crystals.^[56] The alleged long-distance messages were simply 'reproduced past experiences without recognition.' Other Mormons may furnish telepathic experiences, but they are more curious than convincing.

Thus far Smith's occult performances meet with psychological negation; this is not the result in their ethical import, if the inference is allowable. It is somewhere in here that the dividing line must be drawn between self-deception and conscious duplicity. From the silence in his own writings, as to these three episodes, it is evident that the prophet and seer did not believe himself an entire success as clairvoyant and mind reader. And more than that as respects the translating of the plates, there is a suspicion that he early recognized that there was something the matter. To his progenitors anything preternatural was supernatural; to the prophet the supernatural was now merging into the merely abnormal, else he would neither have persevered in his methods of obfustication, nor have tried to monopo​lize the use of the seer-stone,^[57] nor finally have given it up altogether.^[58] The various changes in his methods are especially significant. As money digger, he was wont to hide his face in a hat; as translator, he sometimes kept behind a curtain,^[59] dictating to his scribe on the other side; finally by May, 1831, he had a special 'translating room' of his own.^[60]

There was method in this concealment; it was to keep from the sight of his followers the fixed gaze and the blank expression of the auto-hypnotic. There is here implicated no such mystic paradox as that Joseph was conscious of his unconsciousness; ​if, at the time, the trance-medium does not know what he has spoken, he yet knows that he has spoken. The light hypnosis is not characterized by entire loss of memory. That the prophet, as early as 1831, was cognizant of the abnormality of the ecstatic condition, is borne out by his disrelish for such excesses as those of the Kirtland convulsionists, their 'wallowing on the ground, their diabolical acts of enthusiasm.' Exactly when the personal discovery was made is a matter of opinion. It may have been with the failure, in October, 1825, to find the fabulous silver mine of his father-in-law. It was in October, 1825, he relates, that he 'prevailed upon the old gentleman to cease digging after it.'^[61]

​Subjective 'glass looking' was found to be no royal road to objective fortune; but disillusionment of self was not the disillusionment of others. About four years after this, Joseph saw fit to acknowledge, in his own peculiar way, that the power of self-suggestion was not confined to himself. In April, 1829, a revelation came to Oliver Cowdery: 'behold thou hast a gift, if thou wilt inquire, thou shalt know mysteries which are great and marvelous.^[62] This 'gift' of Oliver's was shortly afterwards explained as a 'key of knowledge concerning the engravings of old records.' These announcements of mutually shared 'gifts' or 'keys' form one of the dividing lines in Joseph's career. With the discovery that suggestion was a rule that worked both ways, he ceased to be a mere self-centred visionary, and became in truth a revelator to others. Once when his high priests wished to ​behold 'concourses of angels,' as president of the church, Smith employed the conventional means of inducing the trance vision. There was insistence on faith, fasting and prayer, laying on of hands, fixity of thought, and rigidity of position.^[63]

The origin of Joseph's functions as a revelator is, like all origins, rudimentary and somewhat obscure. It was, however, natural that the first believers in his visualizing powers should be found among his kith and kin. What he imagined he saw, he got them to imagine they saw. As his mother says of him, during the evening conversations, when 'he would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent,—I presume our family presented an aspect as singular as any that ever lived upon the face of the earth—all seated in a circle, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and giving the most profound attention to a boy, eighteen years of age.'^[64]

But Joseph's success was not confined to a family of constitutional visionaries; his sphere of influence soon enlarged. Because he asserted he had seen a vision, he was persecuted 'by the great ones of the most popular sects of the day, and was under the necessity of leaving Manchester and going to Pennsylvania.'^[65] Opposition was what he needed; he ​was advertised by his enemies, until his fame as a beholder of visions was as wide as his early reputation as a 'discerner of invisible things.'^[66] Thus the acts of the prophet and seer paved the way for the acts of the revelator. Of these latter acts the most conspicuous was that of the vision beheld by his scribes. It is embodied in this remarkable document accompanying all editions of the Book of Mormon:—

The Testimony of Three Witnesses.

Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, unto whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, his brethren, and also of the people of Jared, which came from the tower of which hath been spoken; and we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for His voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety, that the work is true, And we also testify that we have seen ​the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shewn unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an Angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true; and it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God, Amen,

Oliver Cowdery,
David Whitmer,
Martin Harris.