Posted by:
esias
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Date: September 21, 2018 11:08PM
Chapter 12
The Trouble With Visions: A Tale of Two Visions
Shakespeare’s nihilist masterpiece composed with honeyed words of so sweet breath honed from the gods of the sugary summit of Mount Olympus as made the world more rich is a dissection of the corporeal temple and the heartless spiritual search for a Meaning of Life. Hamlet is confined by custom to the Castle of Elsinore and the claustrophobia of the court of King Claudius, the usurping king by virtue of his poisoning Hamlet’s father, bedding and wedding Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and snatching the crown of Denmark. Denmark’s a prison. The world’s a prison:
When the play opens Claudius has obtained the crown of Denmark by secretly poisoning the King his brother. One month after the funeral and coronation he has married Gertrude, the wife of his dead brother and the mother of Hamlet. A Ghost, in the shape of the dead King, appears on the battlements of the castle of Elsinore. It discloses the crimes of Claudius, and commands Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. In the play Hamlet’s problems develop from the fact that he does not immediately obey this command by killing the King his uncle. Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel
The play’s opening gambit — ‘Who’s there?’ — between two witching-hour guards on the battlements of Elsinore Castle sets a half-light semitone heart-twitch of uncertainty, and shoots straight to the heart of the Meaning of Life — who is there?
The first scene is insistently incoherent and just as insistently coherent. It frustrates and fulfils expectations simultaneously. The challenge and response in the first lines are perfectly predictable sentry-talk, but — as has been well and often observed — the challenger is the wrong man, the relieving sentry and not the one on duty ... The audience’s sensation of being unexpectedly and very slightly out of step is repeated regularly in Hamlet. Stephen Booth, On the Value of Hamlet
Hamlet’s world, pointed out Maynard Mack, ‘is predominantly in the interrogative mood. It reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed’ (Maynard Mack, The World of Hamlet). The prevailing emotion is doubt:
Bernardo: Who’s there? (I i 1)
Francisco: Who is there? (I i 14)
Marcellus: Who hath relieved you? (I i 17)
Bernardo: What, is Horatio there? (I i 19)
Marcellus’ question posed on behalf of the audience — ‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’ — is our first hint of an impending date with the dark side and throws a searchlight on who is there:
Bernardo: I have seen nothing.
Marcellus: Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy. (I i 22-23)
Bernardo’s nothing is the first parlay of Shakespeare’s answer to the play’s opening question of ‘Who’s there?’ Claudius utters to court attendants, ‘We doubt it nothing’ (I ii 41); emasculated Ophelia whimpers to Hamlet, ‘I think nothing, my lord’ (III ii 110); Gertrude is confronted by Hamlet but is not privy to the urgency of the vision: ‘Nothing at all yet all that is I see’ (III iv 133); the grave-digger down among the dead men, ‘For no man, sir’ (V i 118).
The miasma of dilemma swamping the battlements of the castle infects first Bernardo: ‘Is not this something more than fantasy?’ (I i 54), but contrasted with the healthy certainty of Hamlet whose even-handed assessment of the ghost — ‘a spirit of health, or goblin damned’ (I iv 40) — transmogrifies into a verdict flying in the face of evidence: ‘It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you’ (I v 138).
Horatio joins the sentinels all along the watchtower battlements of Elsinore Castle: ‘Tush, tust, ’twill not appear’ (I i 29). ‘The bell then beating one’ (I i 39) the Ghost invades the stage, the spitting image of the late King, but refuses to speak to the sentinels or Horatio: ‘Most like — It harrows me with fear and wonder’ (I i 44). Horatio confesses the heart-knocking news to Hamlet, who resolves to converse with the ‘spirit of health or goblin damned,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/ Be thy intents wicked or charitable’ (I iv 40-42).
The next night, in a ‘nipping and an eager air’ (I iv 2) Prince Hamlet the Dane w-w-w-wrapped in the language of dilemma — ‘Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?’ (I iv 57) — braves the battlements to confront the Ghost. ‘Where wilt thou lead me?’ (I v I):
What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthliness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence. Charles Marowitz, College Hamlet, Introduction
So does the Ghost ‘Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell’?
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself ...
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. (I v 2-4 & 12-13)
The Ghost we suspect is not Heaven-sent with uplifting news and racing tips from the verdant pastures of Elysian Fields:
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres. (I v 15-17)
The Ghost repeatedly harrows Hamlet to revenge ‘Murder most foul’ (I v 27) topped unseemly by, ‘that incestuous, that adulterate beast ... Won to his shameful lust/ The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen’ (I v 41 & 45-46). The corporeal, spitting venomous disgust of the Ghost over- spills when directed to the lusty loins of King Claudius, ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/ A couch for luxury and damned incest’ (I v 82-83).
It cannot be an entirely innocent and heavenly spirit that would wander on earth to demand a son to avenge his death. Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, 1876
Coleridge’s cold psychological deconstruction of Hamlet condemns with faint praise, ‘Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve’. G Wilson Knight’s landmark essay of 1930 contrasts Claudius as a cool, contented competent community controller with Hamlet who is condemned as inhuman and:
... a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death ... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. G Wilson Knight, The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet in The Wheel of Fire, 1930
G Wilson Knight wrote, ‘The ghost may or may not have been a “goblin damned”; it certainly was no “spirit of health”’. But to C S Lewis in 1942, ‘The appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world’ (C S Lewis, Hamlet: The Prince of the Poem). The demonic die-hard God of the Old Testament demands a decent killing spree and claims a patent to the dispensing of revenge — so is the reformed, reshaped cuddly Christian God of C S Lewis likely to sanction instantaneous revenge for a former King found guilty of ‘foul crimes done in my days of nature’? ‘And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14).
The Ghosts in revenge plays consistently resist unequivocal identifications, are always ‘questionable’ in one of the senses of that word. Dead and yet living, visitants at midnight (the marginal hour) from a prison-house which is neither heaven nor hell, visible to some figures on the stage but not to others, and so neither real nor unreal, they inaugurate a course of action which is both mad and sane, correct and criminal. To uphold the law revengers are compelled to break it. Catherine Belsey, Revenge in Hamlet
C S Lewis’s assessment of the evolution of Hamlet-criticism delivers like a sermon through Christian-clouded spectacles: ‘Their error, in my view, was to put the mystery in the wrong place — in Hamlet’s motives rather than in the darkness which enwraps Hamlet and the whole tragedy’ (C S Lewis ibid.).
‘The ambiguity of the Ghost is of fundamental importance’ writes Professor Philip Edwards in Tragic Balance in Hamlet. ‘Hamlet, by contrast is a figure of nihilism and death’. And Hamlet’s soul threatens to cleft in twain from mighty opposites — ‘Is Hamlet’s sense of mission divine or demonic?’ Edwards explains the evolved differences in literary criticism: ‘It is the common currency of Hamlet criticism to deplore, not Hamlet’s failure to carry out his mission, but the mission itself’.
The contamination of the vision is carried by Horatio, a credible witness: ‘It beckons you to go away with it’ (I iv 58), but decays into ambiguity with his eye-witness diagnosis of Hamlet, ‘He waxes desperate with imagination’ (I iv 87). The ambiguity of the messenger Shakespeare reserves and revives as a revered theme:
The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! The Merchant of Venice I iii 97-101, Antonio to Bassiano and Shylock
And Hamlet surprises, despite his initial readiness, with the resurrection of a rosy scepticism:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil. And the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Hamlet soliloquy II ii 573-575
Our list of ambiguities swells like London smog along the battlements of the castle: the ambiguity of the sentinels in the opening scene; the ambiguity of Horatio as a witness; the ambiguity of validity of the vision; the ambiguity of the Ghost on a mission from God; the ambiguity of the message of revenge; the ambiguity of family incest; the ambiguity of a fear of Hell and a ‘fault to heaven’; and Hamlet’s ambiguous resolve to revenge the murder of a Hyperion father.
The critical element in this tragic structure is the notion that God is neither absent nor obviously present. If God is dead, or if God is clearly known, the tragedy (Goldman says) cannot exist. The special irony of the tragic hero’s position is that the difficulty of trying to live out what God wants is compounded by the difficulty of knowing what God wants, or even whether He exists. Philip Edwards, Tragic Balance in Hamlet
Hamlet is no knight of faith for he has communed with the dark side. Hamlet has in mind the evidence for action — the Ghost may be an unreliable witness — but Hamlet’s wavering resolve is too too human. Hamlet and the courtiers of Elsinore are victims of the Ghost of Death. We all are God’s victims condemned to death on a cold lonely planet — born sick, commanded to be sound. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48). The quest to conquer the Meaning of Life is charged as an impossible mission. The consoling measure of success is confined to our preserving of sanity:
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Kierkegaard holds that we have an absolute duty to God. But the fault lies with God for imposing the duty, a duty to be. Or not to be. Hamlet can hardly be guilty of an absolute duty to the Ghost. Our first instinct, a Kierkegaardian leap of faith from a safe distance, calls on Hamlet to carry out the charge of revenge, but who are we to rise above the mass and impose a duty of violence? Let the devil do his damndest; let the Ghost wreak his own revenge. ‘There can be no question about the extent of Hamlet’s failure’ writes Philip Edwards. But despite Hamlet’s feigned madness, despite Hamlet’s havoc of his love for Ophelia and Gertrude, despite Hamlet’s wavering resolve, Hamlet wins by retaining his wits and reserving the last vestiges of humanity.
What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? (III i 128-129)
Hamlet fronts the Queen with highly human words he should have unleashed on the Ghost: ‘Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave? ... I’ll rant as well as thou’ (V i 258-259 & 264).
The lonely abandoned human is the victim of mighty opposites of Heaven and Hell and our only defence is the safeguarding of our fault-infested humanity. We lucky few. For Hamlet, ‘He was a man, take him for all in all’ (I ii 186). Kierkegaard is wrong — the highest passion in a human is not faith, but the determination of the human animal to rise above our inheritance as victims, and treasure our vulnerable free will, for all in all.
***
‘That incestuous, that adulterous beast’ (Hamlet I v 42) Joseph Smith ‘waxes desperate with imagination’ (I iv 87) and with ‘a tale unfold, whose lightest word/ Would harrow up thy soul’ (I v 15-16) that is ‘a fault to heaven./ A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,/ To reason most absurd’ (I ii 101-103). ‘O, horrible! O, horrible! O, horrible!’ (I v 80) ‘What a falling-off was there!’ (I v 47) from the hallowed heights of English literature to the harrowing depths of Joseph Smith’s ‘foul crimes done in my days of nature’ (I v 12). Reader, ‘disjoint and out of frame’ (I ii 20), ‘something is rotten in the State of’ (I iv 90) Mormonism, ‘but bear me stiffly up’ (I v 95) for ‘I am sick at heart’ (I i 9) to reveal ‘in the gross and scope of my opinion’ (I i 68) the dreariest, demonic depths of imagination and penmanship that ‘’Tis an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed: things rank and gross in nature’ (I ii 135-136). ‘It is not nor it cannot come to good’ (I ii 158). ‘O most pernicious’ (I v 105) man!’ ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ (I v 108).
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure to get a surprise. If you go down to the woods today, don’t eat the mushrooms:
5. Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester, there was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion ...
13. At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. I at length came to the determination to ‘ask of God’, concluding that if he gave wisdom to them that lacked wisdom, and would give liberally, and not upbraid, I might venture.
14. So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.
15. After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
16. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction — not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being — just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
17. It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other — ‘This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!’
18. My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong) — and which I should join.
19. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’
20. He again forbade me to join with any of them; and many other things did he say unto me, which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven. When the light had departed, I had no strength; but soon recovering in some degree, I went home. And as I leaned up to the fireplace, mother inquired what the matter was. I replied, ‘Never mind, all is well — I am well enough off.’ I then said to my mother, ‘I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.’ It seems as though the adversary was aware, at a very early period of my life, that I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom; else why should the powers of darkness combine against me? Why the opposition and persecution that arose against me, almost in my infancy? (Joseph Smith — History 1:5&13-20 viz Pearl of Great Price)
‘O shame! Where is thy blush?’ (III iv 83) ‘Such an act/ That blurs the grace and blush of modesty’ (III iv 42-43), ‘’Tis as easy as lying’ (III ii 333) — ‘Then I would you were so honest a man’ (II ii 177). ‘I like him not’ (III iii 1). ‘All is not well;/ I doubt some foul play’ (I ii 253-254). This ‘goblin damned’ (I iv 40) brings ‘blasts from hell’ (I iv 41) and with ‘intents wicked’ (I iv 42) sinks ‘Into the madness wherein now he raves’ (II ii 150). ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it’ (II ii 205). Madness in grating ‘ones must not unwatched go’ (III i 187). ‘O, Joseph! Thy ‘offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ (III iii 36). ‘Confess yourself to heaven’ (III iv 150). ‘Alas, he’s mad!’ (III iv 106)
What in the name of Bruce Wayne inspired the Godfather and the Boy Wonder Jesus to conspire with the gangsta paedophilic sociopath conman joker Joseph Smith in the woods? After thirteen and a half billion years of evolution the Godfather is back for a Mafiosi meeting to induct the new made-man Don Joseph.
The trail of evidence leads down the wooded garden path and is perhaps the worst example of the Long Con perpetrated in the modern era. Religious revivals were common but the local religious revival that supposedly inspired Joseph Smith did not kick off around 1820. Joseph was raised in a religious household so this can hardly be his first attempt vocally to pray. If you go down to the woods today — call the cops!
Re: ‘It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty’.
Yep. I’ve been to the sacred grove in the spring. I think it was in early May.
The ground was pure mush. The only thing that kept me from sinking was the thick layer of leaves.
I walked there via a modern-day paved road. If I’d had to walk across fields to get there I would have been knee-deep in mud. It would have been a mess. The sacred grove is a very wet woodland. There were droves of huge mosquitoes that made it miserable. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was told that they now spray to keep the mosquitoes from carrying off the tourists. They also put down thick mulch on the path to control mud.
The only time it wouldn’t be muddy is in the middle of summer, or when the ground is frozen in winter. Mia, Recovery From Mormonism board post 7th June 2012
The flowery prose which Joseph struggles to imitate — ‘I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me’ and ‘Thick darkness gathered around me’ — tries to prove too much. Joseph was ‘seized’; the darkness was ‘thick’. How would the devil know that Joseph is consecrated to be the new Mormon Don wooed in the woods? Why would the devil bother freezing Joseph’s tongue when all rash efforts were bound to prove futile?
This stretched account of struggling with forces of darkness, prior to a Skull-n-Bones tap on the shoulder from the Almighty, is a common theme which Joseph plagiarises from familiar visions:
12. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and lo, and horror of great darkness fell upon him.
13. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years. Genesis 15
God works not so much in mysterious ways as with mass insanity, for having shown little interest in the fate of any Church for thousands of years, God is convinced that 1820 is high time to get serious with a fascist structure, and Joe is the man to handle the plan. God neglects to vouchsafe the human race with a scientific explanation for the Meaning of Life, or with a vast vault of valuable information, or even a Widow’s mite of information, or more importantly racing tips for winners at Royal Ascot. You can picture Marlow Brando as the Godfather puffy-cheeked and pointing to His cool golden Nordic Consigliere — ‘This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!’ God seems to have swallowed His tongue since the verbal diarrhoea happy days and killing sprees of the Hivites and Canaanites and Hittites. Hot-to-trot Jesus has hardened the holy message in eighteen hundred years — no more blessed — no more big-hearted shepherd — but flocks of faithful sheep are ‘far from me’; their hymns and prayers are quickly dismissed as ‘an abomination’ and ‘corrupt’; the unassuming soporific Sunday sermon is slated as ‘the commandments of men’; and Lard alone knows what is meant by ‘they deny the power thereof’. Just in case Joseph jeopardises and disjoints the story with a superfluity of flowery prose, the reader is rejected from the jaw-jaw with Jesus, and Joseph alone is privy to a private Mafioso meeting of minds — ‘many other things did he say unto me’ — CENSORED — ‘I cannot write at this time’. An absence of two thousand years and just as we joint to the juicy bit, Jesus pulls the Jacob’s ladder of communication and we get jack-shit.
The sham ‘goblin damned’ Joseph Smith never requited his Hamlet the ‘same strict and most observant watch’ (Hamlet I i 71) as the family black-winged Bible for he fails to doubt the validity of his visitors who are more likely to have ventured from the dark side than the lush Elysian Fields of God’s private kick-a-about hanging gardens.
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil.
And the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Hamlet soliloquy II ii 573-575
The ‘indifferent honest’, ‘proud’, ‘ambitious’, money-digging, stone-staring Joseph Smith, ‘with more offences at my beck that I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape’ (Hamlet III i @ 122) is not bright enough to have smelted this tall tale alone, and just as we can identify the elements of literature available in Joseph’s home town that alchemised the forging process of the Book of Mormon, we can identify the long tall tales that simmered in the library and folklore of Joseph’s home town:
As I lay apparently upon the brink of eternal woe, seeing nothing but death before me, suddenly there came a sweet flow of the love of God to my soul ... There appeared a small gleam of light in the room, above the brightness of the sun ... I saw two spirits, which I knew at the first sight. But if I had the tongue of an Angel I could not describe their glory, for they brought the joys of heaven with them. One was God, my Maker, almost in bodily shape like a man. His face was, as it were a flame of Fire, and his body, as it had been a Pillar and a Cloud. In looking steadfastly to discern features, I could see none, but a small glimpse would appear in some other place. Below him stood Jesus Christ my Redeemer, in perfect shape like a man — His face was not ablaze, but had the countenance of fire, being bright and shining. His Father’s will appeared to be his! All was condescension, peace, and love. Norris Stearns, The Religious Experience, cited Richard Bushman, The Visionary World of Joseph Smith
By their metaphors ye shall know them: Stearns supposedly sees a ‘Pillar’ with heavy emphasis on a fiery light from two flighty spirits who despite a lack of features are identified; and like a rozzers’ line-up of lantern-jawed heavies — the ‘will’ of the one matches the ‘will’ of the other.
Physician and preacher Elias Smith helped cobble a clutch of churches that eventually merged with other like-minded local churches to form the Christian Connexion. Elias Smith also founded The Herald of Gospel Liberty, perhaps America’s first religious newspaper, dedicated to promoting ‘religious liberty’ and news of religious revivals. And the no-less ambitious Elias Smith almost psychedelically trips into the woods with sheep on his mind:
I went into the woods ... a light appeared from heaven ... My mind seemed to rise in that light to the throne of God and the Lamb ... The Lamb once slain appeared to my understanding, and while viewing him, I felt such love to him as I never felt to any thing earthly. My mind was calm and at peace with God through the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world ... It is not possible for me to tell how long I remained in that situation. Elias Smith, The Life, Conversion, Preaching, Travel & Sufferings of Elias Smith pp 58-59, 1816
If in 1816 you go down to the woods that day you’re sure of a big surprise. If you do down to the woods that day, you’d better go sheeped in disguise. For every God that ever there was, will gather there for certain because, 1816 is the year the Golden Boys have their hick-clique.
Another 1816 baahrmy woolly-minded lamb of the Lard hungry for the good grass of the Gospel was the splendidly named Solomon Chamberlain. Solomon visited Palmyra where he met with the Smith clan in 1829 and would eventually become a Mormon:
About this time the Lord showed me in a vision, that there were no people on the earth that were right, and that faith was gone from the earth, excepting a few and that all churches were corrupt. I further saw in vision, that he would soon raise up a church, that would be after the Apostolic Order, that there would be in it the same powers, and gifts that were in the days of Christ, and that I should live to see the day, and that there would a book come forth, like unto the Bible and the people would [be] guided by it, as well as the Bible. This was in the year of 1816. Autobiography of Solomon Chamberlain 1788-1850
In 1821 Charles G Finney, inspired by a passage of scripture, found himself overcome by the urge to retire to the woods alone — a strange habit among New-England men — where he ‘attempted to pray’ but was ‘dumb’ with ‘an overwhelming sense of my own wickedness’ ‘verging fast to despair’, and weak-kneed sinks to prayer:
I then penetrated into the woods ... I crept into this place and knelt down for prayer ... But when I attempted to pray I found that my heart would not pray ... But lo! when I came to try, I was dumb; that is, I had nothing to say to God; or at least I could say but a few words ... Finally I found myself verging fast to despair ... I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees ... Just at that point this passage of Scripture seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light: ‘Then shall ye go and pray unto me, and I will harken unto you. Then shall ye seek me and find me.’ Charles G Finney, Memoirs of Revival of Religion
Asa Wild complained in the after-heat of his 1823 vision, ‘I was much persecuted and called deluded’. Sound familiar? Oh Joe, say it ain’t so.
It seemed as if my mind ... was struck motionless, as well as into nothing, before the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah ... He also told me, that every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt ... Much more the Lord revealed, but forbids my relating it in this way. Asa Wild, The Wayne Sentinel 22nd October 1823
The Mormon historian Richard Bushman has identified at least thirty-three reported visions between 1783 and 1815. For the reader to believe every one of them, this places the Godfather loitering around New England for fifty years with intent to secure a suitable blue-eyed boy.
Joseph Smith commits the final version of his First Vision to 1820 but we find no published account until the 1840s, and the revelation that the Godfather Himself likes to frighten little boys in the woods would have sprung a supreme surprise on early Latter Day Saints:
The fact that none of the available contemporary writings about Joseph Smith in the 1830s, none of the publications of the Church in that decade, and no contemporary journal or correspondence yet discovered mentions the story of the first vision is convincing evidence that at best it received only limited circulation in those early days. James B Allen, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
With a slick sales pitch the corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints (Mormons) seeks to promote its shop-front version of Joseph’s Final Vision rather than reveal a loose stock of patchwork visions.
Salt Lake City — A Mormon student surfs the Internet for a school assignment and discovers that Mormon founder Joseph Smith had multiple wives, even marrying a 14-year-old.
A returned Mormon missionary, preparing a Sunday school lesson, comes across a website alleging that the Book of Mormon was plagiarized from a novel.
Surprised by what they find so easily online, more and more Mormons are encountering crises of faith. Some even leave the fold and, feeling betrayed, join the ranks of Mormon opponents. The Washington Post 1st February 2012, article Peggy Fletcher Stack: Mormons Confront Epidemic on Online Misinformation
The incendiary discovery by Morg victims that the varnished final version has an under-layer of primary rot comes as a shock.
The first extant evidence for a version of the Final Vision is a handwritten entry in a letterbook for 1832: Lard Jesus in ‘a pillar of fire above the brightness of the sun at noon day’ hears Joseph’s ‘cry in the wilderness’. Joseph’s sins are forgiven him in that footpath throw-away style of the New Testament; but gone are the golden days of Jesus gathering sheep, chicks or other farmyard animals:
... none doeth good no not one they have turned asside [sic] from the gospel and keep not [my] commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them
Jumping Jack-Flash Jesus lets rip eighteen hundred years of explosive frustration. On a cold November day of 1835 Joseph spins a fireside version of the First Vision to a house visitor Robert Matthias, a religious conman masquerading as alias Joshua the Jewish minister. And later that day Joseph lays the hotly hatched version of the Vision to a scribe: two unknown personages in a Pillar of light, Joseph’s sins are immediately forgiven, but no mention of religious revivals or corrupt Christian sects ... ‘And I saw many angels in this vision’.
From 1835 to the first published account of the First Vision of 1842 the two unknown personages mutate monstrously into the Godfather and the Boy Wonder Lard Jesus with their own lighting system and plans for a new fascist structure, and how best to extract a fast buck of 10% protection money on penalty of a fear of Hell.
The gullibility of early Mormons about the genesis of their new-world religion illuminates what was understood by the First Vision. The second polygamous prophet Brigham Young — him of the handcart scandal — testified as late as February 1855:
The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven, in power and great glory, nor send His messengers panoplied with aught else than the truth of heaven, to communicate to the meek, the lowly, the youth of humble origin, the sincere enquirer after the knowledge of God. But He did send His angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith Junior who afterwards became a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and informed him that he should not join any of the religious sects of the day, for they were all wrong; that they were following the precepts of men instead of the Lord Jesus; that He had a work for him to perform, inasmuch as he should prove faithful before Him. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2:171
The resourceful reasonable researcher may ridicule the Mormon zealot for a readiness to receive the revelations of the reprobate Joseph Smith, but the resilience of the mind to evidence, and the addictiveness of the religious promise of eternal life, and the real fear of Hell for rejecting the true gospel, fuse to form a formidable defence to cocoon the credulous.
To be a Mormon is to believe some really crazy stuff ... You kind of have to up the ante ... The idea that Christianity is American I think is an amazing entitlement. Bill Maher, Religulous
Our response recognises the contrast of rapt victim and rapacious perpetrator: no-one is immune to the fatal attraction of magical thinking, cosmic promises and a Meaning of Life.
The rapscallion receivers of private visions may not foresee the devastation heaped on millions of lives, and what started as the plagiarised mischief of a gold-digger from a fogbound era of fairy tales, magic thinking, visions and religious revivals has resulted in the worldwide catastrophe of a viral evil.
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