Joseph Smith Post-Revolutionary Pseudo-Prophet

                     Joseph the American Romantic Revolutionary

As stated in an earlier post, my captivation with Morgdoc centered in the theology. The idea that God revealed His intentions to Man was the crux of my interest in religion. From the moment in second-year Seminary the various forms of Revelation were presented, I embarked on the quest of ascertaining where and when and in what form they took place. To me it seemed that any man was certain to have foibles and follies, sufficient to preclude him in a man’s eyes from being worthy of divine communication. Consequently, I never stopped to investigate Joseph Smith until the very last. Although I doubted God to be of the nature and character he was purported to be by Christianity, I chose to give Him the benefit of doubt, believing He was honest and trustworthy, but men were not always. Looking for the evidence of divine manifestation became the central question I had in all matters of religion. The favorable stories I’d heard about Joseph and other church functionaries I accepted as plausible, while the reports of deception and fraud by his critics were themselves lies and deception—IF the matter of revelation could be proved.

My second year of CES seminary was taught by Max Pinegar, twin brother of Rex Pinegar who was elevated into the quorum of Seventy beginning in the mid 1970’s. Max taught us there were several different forms of divine revelation, the appearance of the Father and/or the Son, Angels, or inspiration by the Holy Ghost. There was a specific form, as defined by Joseph Smith, to the appearance of Heavenly Beings. Apparitions with no specific intelligence to convey were not of God, for God was not in to frivolous, meaningless appearances. Personages of Spirit were intangible and would not extend their hand to the recipient, since physical matter would pass through and no contact possible. To do so on the part of a Messenger was intent to deceive, and therefore not of God. The appearance of resurrected Beings however, required the recipient to be overshadowed by the power of God to survive death. Their Glory was intolerable to human flesh. Uh-huh, well I let that one slide, first looking for the evidence.

The only materials I had to work with until historical books about the Church founding began appearing in the bookstores were the Church’s own scriptures and the Journal of Discourses. The other early publications were only to be found through connections with people who had access to Church archives until it was all digitized and marketed as the LDS Collector’s Library by Infobases in the mid 1990’s. Thus began the laborious reading of hundreds of pages of history, looking for evidence of revelation subsequent to Joseph Smith’s. The only thing I found of significance was Brigham Young’s disclaimer about “open revelation”, the types that Joseph had. His position was that all the necessary revelation of that type was given to Joseph, and since then only the influence of the Holy Spirit was required. Convenient. Well I never found any historical evidence of divine appearances in the Church archives, until I heard about Lorenzo Snow’s story of Jesus appearing to him in the Salt Lake temple, just outside the president’s office. What that was about no one had any idea. Not even Lorenzo revealed what the appearance was about. Until Spencer Kimball announced a revelation on the Priesthood issue, I had not found a single instance of Angelic intervention in the Church since Joseph’s last proclamations in Nauvoo.

I waited with great anticipation for the written account of Spencer’s revelation. And waited. And waited. Even after the Church’s policy was changed there was still no account published. (I eventually did find an account by Bruce McConkie published by Deseret Book in an obscure booklet about ten years later.) To my knowledge, the change in policy concerning Blacks and the Priesthood was not even presented to the Church membership for ratifying acceptance, which is a procedure established by Joseph himself and covered in the Doctrine and Covenants. Spencer and his cohorts had failed to follow the Church’s own regulations. They had good reason not to, but that is another matter. By this time I knew that something serious was up in the Church, and that many of the changes taking place were quite suspect. My investigation into Church history continued and it was not until the latter 1990’s that I discovered Heber J. Grant discontinued the personal witness requirement of the Apostles as condition for acceptance into the Quorum of Twelve. Max had taught us that having the special witness of Jesus was a requirement to being ordained an Apostle. It was especially true for the succeeding president of the Church. But I never found evidence of it anywhere in public Church records. When I found Heber had made that change I finally understood why fundamentalist splinter groups were claiming the Church had fallen into apostasy during president Grant’s administration. It was at this time I secretly harbored the strong suspicion of the same. Doctrines were changing, albeit slowly. Church publications and teaching manuals were slowly renovating the Gospel principles I was taught by the CES in Seminary and Institute classes.

Still I clung to the notion that heavenly influence was present in the Church, even though the evidence began to mount that more and more high officials were acting on their own initiative. They constantly asserted what God’s Will was, but never once offered bonafide evidence of divine intervention. But I did find mounting evidence on the Infobases’ CD rom and publications by Church researchers to indicate no such revelation had ever taken place. Ultimately, after excommunicating the Church from my life, I did find evidence that all the apparitions Joseph laid claim to were extraordinarily convenient to particular circumstances involving mass exodus from his church.

There are those, no longer members, who consider Joseph a genius. I could not accept that conclusion. An accomplished mountebank did not have to be a genius, especially if he surrounded himself with people who had expertise in history, religion, and theology. Joseph had access to these resources in spades, and what made it possible for him to successfully impose on people’s credulity was the fact that it all took place during the frontier period. The best information available at the time was newspapers and hearsay public meetings. The vast majority of converts were uneducated by today’s standards. Written English had not yet been standardized.

In the early days of my excommunicating the Church, I had a brief discussion with a professor of history concerning Joseph Smith’s creative abilities. He opined that Joseph was a genius. My estimation of that word is it is one of the most misused and therefore abused words in the English language. There are six definitions of it in Webster, and all but two are obsolete. Of these, the most common is the sixth:

a) great mental capacity and inventive ability; esp., great and original creative ability in some art, science, etc.
b) a person having such capacity or ability
c) popularly, any person with a very high intelligence quotient.

Saul Bellow argued on the subject of novelists that “Genius is always, without strain, avant-garde. Its departure from tradition is not the result of caprice or of policy but of an inner necessity.” The concept of “avant-garde” here is the key: they are leaders at the forefront of new or unconventional movements according to Webster. The only “necessity” driving Joseph Smith was his documented, professed ambition to financially provide for his family. It began with stone peeping and treasure hunting, a form of hawking that he continually modified and embellished as necessity required to “keep the spice flowing.” At every historical vignette of Church history, we find him attaching some element of ideology from his associates, Rigdon, Cowdery, Pratt, Bennett, Seixas, the Occult of his father, the circuit preachers, contemporary religious oratories, and the extant methodology of social and political revolution inherent in Free Masonry. Taken as a whole we don’t see an over-arching creation of a new religion born of the “restoration” so favored by Rigdon, but a desperate amalgamation of ideas born of impending church dissolution. Apologists for the Church massage the whole of it to appear as a long sequence of revelations to sustain the restorative theme. But any person possessed of ordinary inquisitiveness finds far too many discrepancies, convenient alterations and additions to staunch the exodus every time his scheme was exposed. Before his death he boasted:

“In all these affidavits, indictments, it is all of the devil--all corruption. Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.” Sunday, May 26, 1844 History of the Church V6, Ch19, p408

It is clearly evident from this boast his lack of education and indisposition to read. His command of history is virtually nonexistent. As a product of the prevailing dogma, he does not realize he is perpetuating the Inquisition’s obsession with evil and the Devil. Paul started a corrupt church that filled the world with Inquisition. Peter, James, and John continued the community that Jesus taught, while by some accounts Jesus lived out his life in anonymous exile. Anyone in Nauvoo with a lick of sense could observe that the Campbellites kept the Church of Christ together without the turmoil Joseph, by his wanton disregard of the law, brought upon himself. The Quakers had been around for a century also without shakeouts.  Twelve days later William Law his eschewed first counselor, publishes the first exposé of Joseph’s misconduct. A month almost to the day of Joseph’s boasting the conniving, lying brothers were dead and Joseph’s precious church thrown into confusion, intrigue, conspiracy, and fragmentation. In the succession squabble to follow, designee heir to the church younger brother Samuel dies a month later precipitously and conveniently before Brigham returns with the other Apostles. Quinn makes a fairly good case for assassination by the Danites. Shortly thereafter William is made patriarch to take Hyrum’s place but succeeds in getting disfellowshipped over a triviality and eventually excommunicated. With that ends the Smith dynasty and control over Joseph’s Zionist machinations.

To say that Joseph Smith was a genius is to denature the creative works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Michelangelo, etc. He wasn't a man ahead of his time as these men were, he was a product of it—of that itching quarry of rabble craving a spiritual guide. He was an adept innovator and plagiarist in the style of Bonneville, Buonarotti, Nodier, Gébelin; innovators of the revolutionary spirit that arose in Strasburg, Germany. These are just a sampling of men who, working within and through the Masonic organization, attempted to foist a political and (when that fizzled out) social revolution in continental Europe during the same period. Freighted with conspiracy and secrecy at every level, with hubris oozing as sudoriferous glands they thought, each in his own manner, to change the landscape of their world. Joseph was precisely in this state of mind when John C. Bennett appeared in Nauvoo (1841-2), proposing Joseph take up Masonry with the obvious purpose of allying about himself a cabal of loyal people, willing to lay down their lives to prevent his extradition and prosecution. Here Joseph finds the exact mechanism to implement Rigdon’s Far West Salt Sermon ideology while avoiding personal culpability.  Since the anti-Masonic movement of his youth had subsided, Joseph had no qualms in frontier Illinois to resort to such revolutionary devices to strengthen his grip on his ever fluctuating cabal.

The element most missing from the history of the Church and Joseph in particular is the influence of Masonic ideology that suddenly appears in the Church in 1842. It is instructive for the historical student to examine the European revolutionary movements at this time, and its ripple effect throughout all of Masonry. While it is unlikely that Joseph had any direct contact with these groups, the ripple effects definitely were apparent in American society earlier than the Jacobins. What we see is just as the nations were transformed from the events leading up to World War I, so the nations were also ideologically transformed beginning with the French Revolution, sparked by the American. The American “revolution” was the beginning of a century of Western civilization revolution, producing the political crises of the 20th century. There was an equal fever and zeitgeist far broader than that which stormed over upper New York during Joseph’s youth.

The essential influence of Masonry manifesting in the Church can be recognized by summarizing the revolutionary characteristics Mr. Billington outlines in his book, Fire in the Minds of Men. Every one of them appear during the rise of Mormonism:

Late 18th century occult Masonic revolutionary elements:

•  Movements begin with a lust for a “new order” (all religions are false/apostate)
•  Observance of prime numbers in the organization (presidency of three, five sets of three apostles, seven presidents of seventies, etc.)
•  Idealized distant past of Christianity (Rigdon)
•  Communal—Utopian islands; gathering places and communitarian practices
•  Perpetuation of revolutionary Faith (aggressive missionary force)
•  Fundamentalism in elevating moral virtues
•  Secular revolution concurrent with religious evolution (United Order)
•  True Believing religious ideology within a moral meritocracy
•  Creation of a revolutionary (Zionist) vernacular
•  Employment of the press for the dissemination of ideology
•  Civic mobilization through militarization and political infiltration/domination (Nauvoo)
•  Censorship, denunciation, and surveillance (Nauvoo)
•  Appeal to rapture and emotional persuasion (testimony bearing and speaking incoherently)
•  Appearance of multiple radical splinter groups and the consolidation of power in a sequestered cabal
•  Creation of pseudo-egalitarian societies (priesthood hierarchies and Relief Society)
•  Global political pretensions and radical social change
•  Creation and preservation of oracular mystique (insistence of direct revelation without evidence)
•  Inner circles of fraternal orders (Aaronic and Melchizedek quorums)
•  Employment of ancient symbols, numerology, astrology, and music to establish links with ancient movements (temple, garments, organizational structure, pervasive Restoration themes)
•  Relegation of women to secondary status in the hierarchy (polygamy and female society)
•  Presence of messianic mission, hubris, and divine favoritism often accompanied by a measure of megalomanism (celebration of Joseph more than Jesus, etc.)
•  Adoption of kingship, kingdoms, elitism, and Millennialism with egalitarianism external to the movement’s core (only the Second Anointed gain status over the rabble membership)
•  Implementation of purges to prevent betrayal/exposure (usage of excommunication and slander)
•  Revolutionary movement modeled on Masonic (Illuminist ideology) structure
•  Ascension in the hierarchy conditional on loyalty, not oracular power or wisdom
•  Total confidence, obedience and veneration of the leader
•  Highest fraternal circle is sequestered from the common membership (Apostles & Seventies)
•  Progression of intelligence from lower to higher spheres (Plan of Salvation and priesthood pecking)
•  The sense of persecution and longing for liberty
•  The ultimate end of the revolutionary movement is a “deocracy” or theocratic Republic
•  Leadership always composed of journalistic intellectuals rather than politico-military figures

From this extensive list it is quite obvious that Joseph had no “revelation” concerning Masonic practices and its ideology. What Joseph had been doing was the very essence of it. The previous half-century of Masonic development was rife with revolutionary thought and energy. John Robison writes of it at great length; James Billington charts its origin from that same locale and ideology that precipitated the Inquisition. Alexis de Toqeville describes the rooting of it on American soil.

Billington ponders the reasons for the difference in revolutions between America and the several uproars across Europe. (The differences are outlined in Democracy in America.) He never quite gets the idea that the driving force of revolutions is the acute repression felt by the dispossessed. He does not realize that the United States did not really revolt. There was no ideological shift of the populace as there was across Europe. In the words of Franklin the motive was “to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers….” But of course we are told in grammar school it was all about Independence from English economic and political oppression. The “ideological” revolution in America took place over the preceding century as Europeans voted with their feet against the prevailing European powers, abandoning their homes and comforts for the arduous opportunity the new frontier afforded, removed from the bureaucracy, taxation, and constant warring among royal relatives. While Europe passed the nineteenth century in belligerent, ideological revolt against monarchy and then Imperialism, the United States was heralding the century of corruption and “the audacious confidence man”; the huckster and the sucker. Here everyone in business, politics, or religion was on the take—the obsession with materialism and property de Toqeuville discourses on. (Once again we see that Emma’s father Isaac Hale knew the score early on.) After the examples of Adams, Hamilton, and Washington bending the Federal government to their own apotheosis with covert Constitutional violations, the common citizen was onto the scam as much as the preachers who blazed across upstate New York in a fit of mock piety. In such an age and social movement, Joseph Smith found it his milieu.

It is common knowledge that a charismatic man is a romantic and idealist, both in his world view and his sexual relations. The magnetic personality as they called it back in Mesmer’s day (late 18th century) was essentially the hustler who had a talent for subtle pandering to vanity, of both their own and everyone else’s. How else could Joseph have been taken in by the Kinderhook plates? Free Masonry during Joseph’s impressionable years was wide-spread across America. It is now known and documented the Smith family (father and Hyrum) were immersed in it, particularly the Captain Morgan debacle, with Joseph applying his polygamist charm to Morgan’s widow Lucinda, just a decade later. Continental Europe’s Free Masonry, composed of its own form of Zionist Millennialism, along with the occult Mysticism transmogrified from Hermeticism, was every bit a part of American society. All the elements we see in Joseph’s “prophetic” career are plainly manifest in American culture of the period. There wasn’t a single aspect of his religion that was new. Every piece of it can be found in full fruition across American society of the era. From pumping his maid Fanny Alger in the barn, to scamming the investors in the Kirtland Safety Society, to his coronation as King over all Israel, he was doing exactly what so many of the elite were doing in political circles. His “inventiveness” was no more original than that of Charles Russell (Jehovah’s Witnesses), William Miller—James and Ellen White (Seventh-day Adventists), George Fox (Quakers), or Thomas and Alexander Campbell, whom Sidney Rigdon plagiarized, striving to do one up with his own version of the Campbell Bible. All these “inventors” of religion did was produce a variation on a theme, upping the ante of a predecessor.

That which is most ironical is that within the pages of The Book of Mormon we find all the proscribed behaviors therein being practiced by the very people who produced it! If there was any valid prophecy that Joseph uttered, it was his unwitting declaration about his own cabal:

“And they were kept up by the power of the devil to administer these oaths unto the people, to keep them in darkness, to help such as sought power to gain power, and to murder, and to plunder, and to lie, and to commit all manner of wickedness and whoredoms. And it was the daughter of Jared who put it into his heart to search up these things of old; and Jared put it into the heart of Akish; wherefore, Akish administered it unto his kindred and friends, leading them away by fair promises to do whatsoever thing he desired.

And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God; For the Lord worketh not in secret combinations, neither doth he will that man should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of man. And now I, Moroni, do not write the manner of their oaths and combinations, for it hath been made known unto me that they are had among all people, and they are had among the Lamanites. And they have caused the destruction of this people of whom I am now speaking, and also the destruction of the people of Nephi.” Ether 8:16-21

One must remember Hannah Arendt’s exposition of the immoral nature of the central cabal. Mendacity is its modus-operandi. This is the religion and the "prophet" purporting to possess exclusive authority to save all of humanity, both the living and the dead! A true American revolutionary of the Masonic caste.

SethSmee


REFERENCES
James Billington Fire in the Minds of Men
John Robison Proofs of a Conspiracy
Eric Hoffer The True Believer, The Ordeal of Change
Milton Mayer They Thought They Were Free
Hannah Arendt  The Origin of Totalitarianism
Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, Orson Pratt Ether 8 Book of Mormon
De Toqueville Democracy in America Book 2 Chap 12; Chap 20

Vanick et al Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon
Gore Vidal The Essential Gore Vidal Essays
http://www.olivercowdery.com/smithhome/smithhis.htm