5 THE ORIGINS OF MORMONISM

AMONG the religious or pseudo-religious sects widespread in America, the Mormon sect is assuredly one of the oldest and most important, and we believe that it would not be without some interest to look at its origins.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there lived in New England a Presbyterian pastor named Solomon Spalding, who had abandoned his ministry in favor of commerce, where it was not long before he went bankrupt. After this setback, he began writing a kind of novel in biblical style which he entitled Manuscript Found, and which, it seems, he counted on to restore his fortune; in this he was mistaken, as he died before he could find a publisher. The subject of this book concerns the history of the North American Indians, who were portrayed as the descendants of the Patriarch Joseph; it was a protracted account of their wars and their supposed migrations from the time of Sedecias, king of Judah, up to the fifth century AD. This account was supposed to have been written by various chroniclers, the last of whom, named Mormon, is said to have deposited it in an underground hiding place.

How had Spalding struck upon the idea of compiling this extremely boring, incredibly monotonous work written in a deplorable style? It is hardly possible to say, and one wonders whether this idea came to him spontaneously or was suggested to him by someone or other, for he is far from having been alone in searching for what had become of the ten lost tribes of Israel and in the attempt to resolve the problem in his own way. We know that some tried to find traces of these tribes in England, and that there are even Englishmen who stoutly claim the honor of this origin for their nation; others sought these same tribes much further afield—as far even as Japan. What is certain is that there are very old Jewish colonies in some regions of the East, notably Cochin in southern India, and also China, which claim to have been established there since the time of the Babylonian captivity. The idea of a migration to America seems much more unlikely and moreover has occurred to others than Spalding; in fact there is a rather remarkable coincidence to be noted here. In 1825, a Jew of Portuguese origin, Mordecaï Manuel Noah, former consul of the United States in Tunis, bought an island named Grand Island situated in the Niagara river, and issued a proclamation urging all his co-religionists to come and settle on this island, which he named Ararat. On September 2nd of the same year, the foundation of the new city was celebrated with great pomp; now, and this is what we wish to draw attention to, the Indians had been invited to send representatives to this ceremony in the capacity of descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and they also were to find a refuge in the new Ararat. This project came to nothing, and the town was never built. About twenty years later, Noah wrote a book in which he advocated the re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine, and, although his name may be almost forgotten today, he must be regarded as the real promoter of Zionism. The episode that we have cited took place almost five years prior to the foundation of Mormonism; Spalding was already dead, and we do not think that Noah had known of his Manuscript Found. In any case, at that point the extraordinary fortune that was reserved for this work could hardly have been foreseen, and Spalding himself probably never suspected that the day would come when the multitudes would consider it a new divine revelation. At this period no one had yet formed the premeditated intention of composing so-called ‘inspired’ writings such as the Oahspe Bible or the Aquarian Gospel—wild imaginings which find among the Americans of this day and age a milieu well-prepared to receive them.

IN Palmyra, Vermont there was a young man of rather bad reputation named Joseph Smith. He had first attracted the attention of his fellow citizens during one of those periods of religious enthusiasm that the Americans call revivals, by spreading the account of a vision with which he claimed to have been favored; after that he became a ‘treasure hunter’, living on money given to him by the credulous people whom, thanks to certain divinatory processes, he promised to lead to riches buried in the ground. It was at this point, twelve years after the death of its author, that he laid his hand on Spalding’s manuscript. It is believed that this manuscript was given him by one of his accomplices, Sidney Rigdon, who could have stolen it from a printery where he was serving his apprenticeship. Still, the widow, brother, and former associate of Spalding recognized and formally affirmed the identity of the Book of Mormon with the Manuscript Found. But the ‘treasure seeker’ claimed that, guided by an angel, he had pulled this book from the earth where Mormon had buried it, in the form of plates of gold covered with hieroglyphic characters. He added that the angel had also led him to discover two translucent stones—none other than the Urim and Thummim—which figured on the breast-plate of the High Priest of Israel,^[2] the possession of which, bestowing the gift of tongues and the spirit of prophecy, had allowed him to translate the mysterious plates. Ten or so witnesses said they had seen these plates; three of them even asserted that they had also seen the angel, who had then taken away the plates and kept them under his guard. Among the latter was a certain Martin Harris, who despite the opinion of Professor Anthon of New York, to whom he had submitted a sample of the alleged hieroglyphics, and who cautioned Harris against what seemed to him no more than a common hoax, sold his farm to meet the cost of publishing the manuscript. It is to be assumed that Smith had procured some brass plates upon which he inscribed characters borrowed from various alphabets; according to Professor Anthon,^[3] they were mainly a mixture of Greek and Hebrew characters, as well as a crude imitation of a Mexican calendar published by Humboldt. It is extremely difficult to say whether those who helped Smith in the early stages were his dupes or accomplices. In the case of Harris, whose fortune was seriously compromised by the initial lack of success of the Book of Mormon, he did not hesitate to renounce the new faith and to quarrel with Smith. The latter soon had a revelation which charged his followers with his upkeep; then, on the April 6, 1830, another revelation came appointing him prophet of God, with the mission of teaching men a new religion and establishing the Church of Latter-Day Saints, which one had to enter through a new baptism. Smith and his associate Cowdery administered this baptism to each other; at the time the Church consisted of only six members, but after a month it numbered about thirty, including Smith's father and brothers. This Church, in short, differed little from the majority of Protestant sects; in the thirty articles of faith which were then drawn up by the founder, there is reason to note only the condemnation of child baptism (article 4), the belief 'that a man can be called to God by prophecy and by the laying on of hands' (article 5), and that miraculous gifts such as 'prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, exorcism, and the interpretation of tongues' are perpetuated in the Church (article 7), the addition of the Book of Mormon to the Bible as being the 'word of God' (article 8), and finally the promise 'that God will again reveal great things concerning His Kingdom' (article 9). Let us also mention article 10, couched as follows: 'We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and the restoration of the ten tribes; we believe that Zion will be rebuilt on this continent, that Christ will reign personally on the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and will receive the heavenly glory.' The beginning of this article curiously recalls the projects of Noah; what follows is the expression of a 'millenarism' which is in no way exceptional in Protestant churches, and which, around 1840 in this same region of New England, would also give birth to the 'Seventh Day Adventists'. Finally, Smith wished to reconstitute the organization of the early Church: Apostles, Prophets, Patriarchs, Evangelists, Elders, Deacons, Pastors, and Doctors, plus two hierarchies of pontiffs, one according to the order of Aaron, the other according to the order of Melchizedek. The first adherents of the new Church were people with very little education, for the most part small farmers or craftsmen; the least ignorant among them was Sidney Rigdon, the one who had probably put Smith in possession of Spalding's manuscript; and who, also by a revelation, was given responsibility for the literary part of the work; and to him is attributed the first part of the book of Doctrines and Alliances, published in 1846, and which is as it were the Mormon New Testament. Furthermore, Rigdon did not hesitate to compel the prophet, to whom he had become indispensable, to have another revelation that shared the leadership between them. Meanwhile, the sect began to grow and to make known its existence abroad: the English Irvingites,^[4] who also believed in the perpetuation of miraculous gifts in the Church, sent a letter to Smith signed by a 'council of pastors' and expressing their sympathy. But Smith's very success made for him enemies who did not hesitate to recall his less than honorable past. And so, from 1831, the prophet judged it prudent to change his residence; from Fayette, in Seneca County, New York, where he had started his Church, he established himself at Kirtland, in Ohio. Then he and Rigdon took a journey of exploration in the regions of the West, and on their return Smith issued a series of revelations ordering the 'Saints' to go to Jackson County in Missouri to build a 'Holy Zion'. Within a few months, twelve hundred faithful responded to this appeal and set about working to clear the land and to erect the 'New Jerusalem'. But the first occupants of the region underwent all sorts of vexations which finally forced them to leave Zion. During this time, Joseph Smith remained in Kirtland where he had founded a business and bank, from whose till—as we learn from his own autobiography—he and his family had an unlimited right to help themselves freely. In 1837 the bank failed, and Smith and Rigdon, threatened with prosecution for fraud, had to flee to their followers in Missouri. Four years had already passed since the latter had been driven out of Zion, but they had retired into neighboring regions, where they had acquired new properties; upon his arrival, Smith told them the hour had come when he was going to 'trample his enemies under his feet.' The Missourians, having learned of his attitude, were infuriated, and hostilities began almost immediately. The Mormons, defeated, had to surrender and started to leave the area immediately; the prophet, handed over to the authorities, managed to escape his guards and rejoin his disciples in Illinois. There the 'Saints' began to construct a town, the city of Nauvoo, on the bank of the Mississippi; proselytes arrived, even from Europe, for a mission sent to England in 1837 had resulted in ten thousand baptisms, and a revelation summoned the new converts to hasten to Nauvoo 'with their money, their gold, and their precious stones.' The state of Illinois accorded the city a charter of incorporation; Joseph Smith was made mayor and organized a militia of which he was named general; thenceforth he often made a show of appearing on horseback and in uniform. His military adviser was a certain General Bennett, who had served in the United States Army. Bennett had offered his services to Smith in a letter in which, while professing a complete incredulity as to the latter's divine mission, and even treating the Mormon baptism he had received as a 'joyous masquerade', promised the prophet 'a dedicated assistance and the appearance of a sincere faith.' The growing prosperity of the faith carried Smith's vanity to such a point that he dared, in 1844, to declare his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. It was around this time that polygamy was introduced into Mormonism. The revelation authorizing it is dated July 1843, but for a long time it was kept secret and reserved for a small number of initiates. Only after ten years was the practice admitted publicly by the Mormon leaders.^[5] Yet despite the efforts that had been made to conceal the revelation, the outcome of it had been known in spite of everything; a body of opposition formed in the very bosom of the sect made its protests known in a journal called The Expositor. The partisans of the prophet razed the journal's workroom; the editors fled and denounced Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram to the authorities as disruptive of the public order. A warrant for their arrest was issued, and in order to execute it, the Illinois government appealed to the military. Joseph Smith, seeing that he could not resist, judged it prudent to give himself up and together with his brother was locked up in the county jail at Carthage. On July 27, 1844 an armed crowd invaded the jail and fired on the prisoners. Hiram Smith was killed on the spot, and Joseph, trying to escape through the window, misjudged his jump and was dashed against the foot of the wall; he was thirty-nine years old. It is unlikely that the assailants had assembled spontaneously in front of the prison; it is not known by whom they were led or at least influenced, but it is very likely that someone had an interest in causing Joseph Smith's disappearance at the precise moment when he saw all his ambitions being realized. In any case, if he was undeniably an impostor—although some had tried to present him as a sincere fanatic—it is not certain that he himself had thought up all his impostures. There are too many other more or less similar cases, where the apparent leaders of a movement are often only the instruments of hidden instigators, whom they themselves perhaps do not always know. A man such as Rigdon, for example, could very likely have played an intermediary role between Smith and the likely instigators. The personal ambition that was part of Smith's character, joined to his lack of scruples, could make him suitable for the realization of more or less shadowy plans; but, beyond certain limits, it risked becoming dangerous, and as is usual in such cases, the instrument is broken mercilessly; this is precisely what happened to Smith. We point to these considerations only by way of hypothesis, not wishing to establish any connection; but this is sufficient to show that it is difficult to make a definitive judgment on individuals, and that the search for those truly responsible is much more complicated than those who hold to outer appearances imagine. AFTER the prophet's death, four claimants, Rigdon, William Smith, Lyman Wight, and Brigham Young, disputed his succession. It was Brigham Young, a former carpenter and president of the 'College of Apostles', who finally prevailed and was proclaimed 'seer, revealer, and president of the Latter-Day Saints'. The sect continued to grow, but it was soon learned that the inhabitants of nine counties were United in the intention of destroying the Mormons. The leaders then decided on a migration en masse of their people to a remote and deserted region in High-California belonging to Mexico. This news was announced by a ‘catholic epistle’ dated January 20, 1846. The Mormons’ neighbors agreed to let them go quietly, on condition that they leave before the beginning of the following summer; the ‘Saints’ took advantage of this delay to complete the temple they were building on the summit of the Nauvoo hill, and to which a revelation had attached various mysterious blessings; the consecration took place in May. The citizens of Illinois, seeing in this a lack of sincerity and the sign of an intention on the part of the Mormons to return, brutally drove from their homes those who were still there and, on September 17, took possession of the abandoned town. The emigrants began a punishing journey; many of them were left by the wayside, and some even died of cold and privations. In spring, the president went on ahead with a body of pioneers; on July 21, 1847, they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake and, struck by the similarity of its geographic configuration to that of the land of Canaan, resolved to found there a stake of Zion, while awaiting the time when they could reconquer the real Zion, that is, the city in Jackson County that Smith’s prophecies assured them would be their heritage. When the colony was assembled, they numbered four thousand people. It grew rapidly, and six years later the number of its members had already reached thirty thousand. In 1848, the country had been ceded by Mexico to the United States; the inhabitants asked Congress to establish them as a sovereign state under the name ‘State of Deseret’, taken from the Book of Mormon, but Congress only established the country as a Territory under the name of Utah, which could only become a free State when its population numbered sixty thousand men. This encouraged the Mormons to intensify their propaganda in order to attain this number as quickly as possible and so legalize polygamy and their other particular institutions. In the meantime, the president Brigham Young was named governor of Utah. From this moment, the material prosperity of the Mormons as well as their numbers continued to grow, in spite of some unfortunate episodes, among which may be noted a schism which occurred in 1851. Those who had not followed the emigration formed a ‘Reorganized Church’ with its center at Lamoni, in Iowa, which claimed to be the only legitimate church. They appointed as their head the prophet’s own son, young Joseph Smith, who had been living in Independence, Missouri. According to an official statistic dated 1911, this ‘Reorganized Church’ then numbered fifty thousand members, while the branch in Utah numbered three hundred and fifty thousand.

THE success of Mormonism may seem astonishing. It is likely that it is due more to the hierarchical and theocratic organization of the sect—very cleverly conceived, it must be acknowledged—than to the value of its doctrine, although the very eccentricity of the latter enabled it to exercise an attraction on certain minds; in America especially, the most absurd things of this kind succeed in an incredible fashion. This doctrine has not remained the same as it was at the beginning, which is easily understood, since new revelations could come along and modify it at any moment. Thus in the Book of Mormon polygamy was called an abomination—‘an abomination in the eyes of the Lord’—which did not prevent Joseph Smith from receiving another revelation by which it became ‘the great blessing of the last Alliance’. The strictly doctrinal innovations seemed to have been due especially to Orson Pratt, under whose intellectual domination Smith had fallen toward the end of his life, and who had a more or less vague knowledge of the ideas of Hegel and some other German philosophers, popularized by writers such as Parker and Emerson.^[6]

The religious ideas of the Mormons are the grossest anthropomorphism, as these extracts from one of their catechisms proves:

QUESTION 28. What is God?—An intelligent and material being, having a body and limbs. QUESTION 38. Is he also susceptible to passion?—Yes, he eats, he drinks, he hates, he loves.

QUESTION 44. Can he live in several places at the same time?—No.

This material God inhabits the Planet Colob; he is also materially the Father of the creatures he has begotten, and the prophet says in his last sermon: 'God did not have the power to create the spirit of man. This idea would diminish man in my eyes; but I know better than that.' What he knew, or claimed to know, is this: initially the Mormon God was a God who 'evolved'; his origin was 'the fusion of two particles of elementary matter,' and, by a progressive development, he attained human form:

God, it goes without saying, commenced by being a man, and, by a path of continual progression, he has become what he is, and he can continue to progress in the same manner eternally and indefinitely. Likewise, man can also grow in knowledge and in power as long as it pleases him. If man is thus endowed with eternal progression, there will certainly come a time when he will know as much as God now knows.

Joseph Smith says again:

The weakest child of God who now exists on the earth, will in his time have greater domination, subjects, power, and glory than Jesus Christ or his Father have today, whereas the power and elevation of the latter will grow in the same proportion.

And Parly Pratt, brother of Orson, also developed this idea:

What will man do when this world is overpopulated? He will make other worlds and fly off like a swarm of bees. And when a farmer will have too many children for his portion of earth, he will say to them: My sons, matter is infinite; create a world and populate it.

In addition, the representations of the future life are as crude as possible, and consist of details as ludicrous as the descriptions of Summerland by Anglo-Saxon spiritualists: 'Suppose,' says the same Parly Pratt, that of the population of our earth, one person in a hundred partakes of a happy resurrection; what portion could each of the Saints have? We reply: each of them could well have one hundred and fifty acres of land, which would be fully sufficient to gather manna, erect splendid dwellings, and also to cultivate flowers and all things liked by the farmer and botanist.

Another 'Apostle', Spencer, chancellor of the University of Deseret and author of the Patriarchal Order, also says:

The future residence of the Saints is not something figurative; just as in this world, they will also need houses for themselves and their families. Literally, those who have been deprived of their goods, houses, land, wife, or children, will receive a hundred times more.... Abraham and Sarah will continue to multiply not only in this world, but in all the worlds to come.... The resurrection will restore your own wife, whom you will keep for eternity, and you will raise children of your own flesh.

Some spiritualists, it is true, do not even wait for the resurrection to speak to us of 'celestial marriages' and 'astral children'! But this is not all. From the idea of a God 'in the making'—an idea not exclusively theirs, as witnessed in more than one instance of modern thought—the Mormons soon passed to that of a plurality of gods forming an indefinite hierarchy. In fact, it was revealed to Smith 'that our actual Bible was no more than a truncated and perverted text that he had the mission to restore to its original purity,' and that the first verse of Genesis should be interpreted thus: 'The Godhead engenders other gods together with the heaven and the earth.' Furthermore, 'each of these gods is the special god of the spirits of all flesh which live in the world he has formed.' Finally, something more extraordinary still, a revelation from Brigham Young in 1853 informs us that the God of our planet is Adam, who is himself only another form of the archangel Michael:

When our father Adam arrived in Eden, he took with him Eve, one of his wives. He helped with the organization of this world. He is Michael, the Ancient of Days. He is our father and our God, the only God with whom we have anything to do.

In these fantastic stories some things remind us of certain rabbinical speculations, whereas in other respects we cannot help but think of the 'pluralism' of William James. Are not the Mormons among the first to have formulated the conception, so dear to the pragmatists, of a limited God, 'the invisible king' of Wells?

The cosmology of the Mormons, as far as one can judge from the rather vague and confused expressions, is a kind of atomist monism in which consciousness or intelligence is regarded as inherent to matter. The only thing that has existed for all eternity is

an indefinite quantity of moving and intelligent matter, of which each particle that now exists has existed through all the depths of eternity in a state of free locomotion. Each individual of the animal or vegetable kingdom has a living and intelligent spirit. People are only tabernacles wherein resides the eternal truth of God. When we say that there is only one God and that He is eternal, we do not designate any being in particular, but this supreme Truth which inhabits a great variety of substances.

The conception of an impersonal God which appears here seems to be in absolute contradiction with the anthropomorphic and evolutionist conception noted earlier. But no doubt it is necessary to make a distinction and to admit that the corporal God who lives on the planet Colob is only the chief of this hierarchy of 'particular' beings that the Mormons also call gods. We must add as well that Mormonism, the leaders of which pass through a series of 'initiations', really has an exoterism and an esoterism. But to continue: 'Each man is an aggregate of so many intelligent individuals, which he incorporates into his formation of particles of matter.' Here we find something which simultaneously recalls Leibnitzian monadism understood moreover in its most outer meaning, and the theory of 'poly-psychism' held by certain 'neo-spiritualists'. Finally, again in the same order of ideas, the president Brigham Young, in one of his sermons, proclaimed that 'the recompense of the virtuous will be an eternal progression, and the punishment of the wicked a return of their substance to the primitive elements of all things.' In several schools of occultism, those who are unable to gain immortality are similarly threatened with 'final dissolution'; and there are also some Protestant sects, the Adventists among others, who allow for man only a 'conditional immortality'.

We think we have said enough to show the worth of the Mormon doctrines, and also to make it clear that, in spite of their singularity, their appearance does not constitute an isolated phenomenon; in short, they represent in many of their particulars, tendencies that have found multiple expressions in the contemporary world, and of which the actual development even seems a rather worrisome symptom of a mental disequilibrium that risks becoming widespread if care is not taken. In this respect, the Americans have given Europe some truly deplorable gifts.