Joseph Smith: Occultist
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The main quote I remember from Crowley regarding Joseph Smith was in something he wrote to Wilfred Smith, attempting to motivate him regarding establishing the O.T.O. on a larger scale in America. He told Wilfred to take inspiration from this other fellow with the same last name and to remember that he (Wilfred) also has a prophet, an angel, and a book at his disposal - so get on with it!
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I live a hop skip and jump away from palymra, and this region is steeped with Mormons. When I was a teen working for the Rochester Public Library in the local history and genealogy deptartment I had the great opportunity to look at at some remarkable mormon documents that indeed were occult, contained glyphs and sigils and numerical calculations that I had no clue about at the time.
My teacher and I recently caught a spectacular tv program detailing JS and the mormon church as well. I am sorry I cant recall the name, or even the channel...she had dvr'd it for me. Possibly the history channel.
During the summer a huge tourist market is generated based on a pagent that is held on the Hill where the tablets were found.....I have never gone to see it, so I cant say what its like from expierence, I hear it is beautiful and HUGE, I get a little creeped out at the thought of going. Maybe I should buck up, cover up and go... -
Frater Al, 93,
(This is edited twice - my first rushed post wasn't fact-checked)
Your chronology is a bit mangled, but you aren't wholly wrong. Do some digging on Alexander Neibaur, the Jewish Kabbalist who joined the LDS church in the 1840s, and who fed ideas such as Adam Kadmon to Joseph. This is the root of the 'Adam is God' notion in Mormon theology.
The Book of Mormon itself has nothing but scorn for Masonry, which was seen as a scourge of the devil in New York State (and elsewhere on what was then The Frontier) in the first quarter of the 19th Century. Fawn Brodie's classic biography "No Man Knows my History" covers this. The Book talks of the Gadianton Band, who have secret handshakes and passwords, and are all-round bad-guys.
Ii was later, after being initiated (in Illinois, under the charismatic influence of John C. Bennett) , that Joseph realised there were concealed mysteries in Masonry. A lot of Mormon Temple ritual (as opposed to the regular worship done in Ward Chapels) is influenced by Masonry. Had Joseph not been murdered in 1844, he would have developed his quasi-Kabbalistic doctrines further. But he was killed, and thereafter his followers were left with a half-complete mysticism.
93 93/93,
Edward
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93,
Two links. The first is from an article in the greatly missed Gnosis magazine:
and the other from a Mormon publication. Both are by Lance S. Owens:
93 93/93,
Edward
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Frater Al, 93,
I think one thing to bear in mind is that the Mysteries are there. They're not just arbitrary selections of symbols, but something that stems from a deep sub-stratum in the collective psyche. So, once anybody opens the gate to some extent, more of the information will come through. That's been the case with many cults and movements.
I find it interesting that Joseph said he'd been instructed to go and check on the plates each September 21 for four years, until he was permitted to take them home. He was already programmed into a spiritual calendar based around the Equinox. He was also born on or close to the Winter Solstice (December 23, 1805), which might have reinforced his sense of specialness. As a person with a deep involvement with scripture, he was also unconsciously absorbing Kabalistic concepts from his Bible.
He seems to have been very much into auto-suggestion: he believed in his own gift of prophecy, despite a mass of bloopers and miscues. Amid the paranoia that had built up by the time his church moved to Nauvoo, after being evicted from Missouri and made very unwelcome in other places, he looked more and more into mystical solutions to the problem of maintaining a transcendent experience for his people. He was just venturing into these deeper waters when the paranoia overtook his inner compass: he destroyed a newspaper critical of him, and provided an excuse for his arrest. His murder in a case of frontier justice followed.
Do read Harold Bloom on Smith, in The American Religion. He grasps the poet in Joseph the way few other people have done.
93 93/93,
Edward
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Mormonism has always fascinated me, if only because it has been so successful. However, apart from its later success it was not unique in its time. There was a whole slew of "mound builder" novels and speculations, trying to explain away the huge mounds, such as those in Ohio still, most of which were ploughed away with the coming of the modern tractor. White settlers refused to believe that "the Indians" could have made these sophisticated structures. However, one pastor decided differently, and this entry should fascinate anyone:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_Hebrew
All in all, Joseph Smith seems to have cobbled together a religion from anything he could get his hands on, gaining followers in spite of the problems. As the Soth Park episode on Mormonism says, dum dum dum dum dum!
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Frater Al, 93,
My own interest in Mormonism is a casual one. I was a teenager in England, and very curious about everything and anything metaphysical, when I met two clean-cut Utah Mormon elders on a mission. They fascinated me, and I began a decades-long process of intermittently reading about LDS history. It was only recently that I started to find the whole subject boring and not really worth investigating further.
When I lived in Toronto, it was just a day-trip to the Mormon heartland in New York State and Kirtland, Ohio (Joseph also hung out in Toronto for a while when his bank in Kirtland crashed in the mid-1830s), so I checked out all of the main sites over the years. I still like Hill Cumorah, for the wildlife there.
The main thing I learned from all this was to appreciate US history better. Religion was always a key factor in the changing scene, and Mormonism both reflected and diverged from what was happening in that American mainstream. It was always an activist faith, so it has been wrangling with Washington in one way or another for 170 years or more. Its modern arch-conservatism is the diametrical opposite of its Yankee roots, but the leadership is just as zealous coming from the right as it was coming from the New England liberal side.
93 93/93,
Edward
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Agreed on the US history. Mormonism came in at the tail end of the "Second Great Awakening" in America.
Interestingly, this is about the same time that the Plymouth Brethren, Crowley's childhood religion, started out in the UK.
Jehovah's Witnesses, my childhood religion, started in the "Third Great Awakening" and owe a lot theologically to groups like the Plymouth Brethren (there are lots of similarities between them and the early JWs - just called Bible Students back then). And during the Third Great Awakening, other groups, like the 7th Day Adventists, started.
Like Mormonism, the JWs started out with a lot more para-masonic, occult-like, tendencies. C.T. Russel, the founder, was obsessed with biblical prophecy chronology, masonic symbolism, measuring the pyramids in Egypt, etc. Like Mormonism, it went in a more conservative direction as it grew.