Any individual monitoring the pre-primary Election 2008 chatter, can’t have missed that one of the biggest issues thus far has been Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and what it means. There are many good reasons to find Romney disturbing– like his apparent lack of an ethical center and core identity, but Mormonism is not one. There’s a double-standard in American religion against any faith that has its originS in the New World. This is not unique to Mormonism– take, for example, the case of the Nation of Islam or the Moorish Science Temple of America. In the popular and scholarly literature, both are discussed as social protest groups but ignored almost entirely as serious expressions of religious faith.
This isn’t to say that Mormonism isn’t ridiculous. Of course it is. Religions are inherently unable to withstand rational scrutiny from without. This is the real Mystery of Faith; that people are able to accept and believe ideas both supernatural (i.e., the resurrection) and social (i.e. love thy enemy, turn the other cheek) that make no logical sense. It’s no different if you’re Christian or Muslim or Scientologist. There’s an inherent hypocrisy to the debate circling around Romney– as if believing that Jesus appeared in the Americas is somehow more implausible than believing that he appeared, resurrected from the dead, to that doubtful fellow Thomas.
Because I have a weak spot for Mormonism, the Romney candidacy excites me, if only for the prospect of revisiting the origins of the religion. Over the last few decades, the Church of LDS has softened, becoming Christ-centric and moving away from its early history and its prophet, Joseph Smith. That’s too bad, but understand. Outside of Mormon circles, Smith has a terrible reputation as a charlatan and a conman.
While there’s no reason to believe that Smith was anything but sincere, I do think that he is best understood as a late practitioner of Western occultism. Prior to his discovery of the Golden Tablets, Smith had been employed as a treasure-hunter; his final method of divination was via the use of scrying stones, and indeed, it is through scrying crystals, which he called Umrim and Thummin, that he “translated” what became the Book of Mormon. When Smith was assassinated, a talisman of Jupiter was found on his body– it took decades to identify but eventually was traced to an 1801 book entitled The Magus by Francis Barrett. The Magus is kind of a catch-all primer on Western occultism– unsurprisingly, it instructs the reader on how to scry via crystals and stones.
Perhaps most fascinating is that the Book of Mormon, and its method of delivery, has a direct antecedent in the magical workings conducted during the reign of Elizabeth by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Like Smith, Kelly and Dee employed scrying stones, some of which are still in the British Museum. They used these stones to communicate with Angels, who gave them a systematic form of religion (since dubbed Enochian magic) that was used by the Golden Dawn and now plays a role in the OTO. A central part of the story of Mormonism is Smith being lead to the Golden Tablets, like Dee, by an Angel. Nor should we overlook the instructions to Dee and Kelly of wifeswapping (which eventually ended their partnership), another direct parallel with Smith’s eventual revelation of polygamy.
The meaning of any of this is beyond me– it’s fascinating to contemplate that there is an outside chance that soon there could be a presidential candidate whose religious faith traces to time-honored and hoary occult practices. Romney’s the occultist’s choice!
UPDATE: Incidentally, this post was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
