This might not be impressive (or even interesting) to most Dopers, but I’m amazed.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has published pictures of Joseph Smith’s “seer stone”, apparently the one he placed in his hat while translating the Book of Mormon golden plates.
I shared an office with a Mormon, attended Church events with him, and was his best man at a (non-Temple, obviously) LDS wedding in upstate New York, not far from the Smith homestead. After that I pulled up stakes and lived in Salt Lake City while getting my doctorate. Although never a believer, I’ve long been fascinated by religions, and feel that I got a pretty good overview of the LDS experience. I’ve been to the Hill Cumorak pageant, the Mormon Miracle pageant, visited lots of Church sites, and read histories of the Church by members and nonbelievers. Joseph Smith’s use of his Seer Stone is written and spoken about in many places. I didn’t know the Church still had it.
It’s actually a very pretty stone, with interesting banding and a smooth polish. Descriptions I’d read before called it “chocolate colored”, but that doesn’t really do it justice.(It’s not to be confused with the Urim and Thummim, which Smith said was found with the golden plates, and which I’ve seen depicted in early Mormon art. I can’t recall ever seeing any depictions of this stone before.)
Did the church buy them from Steve Hoffman? pretty hard to see how these “aided” joe Smith’s sight-but since the “golden plates” disappeared, at least we have this.
I think you mean Mark Hoffman, mastermind of the Mormon Documents Scandal. and, no, I don’t recall anything about any lDS artifacts – the LDS Church DOES have lots of Church memorabilia squirreled away in their vaults. this is apparently one of their rare releases of a bit of history.
SLC joke in the years after Hoffman’s imprisonment – “Did you hear, Hoffman was let out of prison! He got a pardon from Brigham Young himself!”
The golden plates were on the table next to Joseph Smith. (He didn’t need to directly, physically interact with the plates during the translation process.) Joseph Smith would put the stone into his hat, put his face into the hat so that it was dark, and look into the bottom of the hat at the stone. According to Smith, he would then see each successive character from the plates in glowing gold light in the darkness within the hat, with the translation next to it (or beneath, I can’t remember). He would then dictate the next word or phrase to a scribe in the room: for much of the BoM, that scribe was Oliver Cowdery.
Growing up in the LDS faith, there was no doubt that the information concerning the stone was not wildly disseminated. We were taught the Smith used the Urim and Thummin for the translation. Interestingly, most of the art which would accompany the manuals and such would show Smith directly looking at the plates, often on the same table as the scribe.
However, once South Park showed the translation process more accurately than the church, the use of the seer stone become more widely known.
I’ve written about this before, but Joseph Smith came into the religion directly from a mystic, treasuring-seeking background. This same seer stone was used by Smith to look for buried treasure and often thought be be kept safe by the spirits of dead guardians or when almost uncovered would “slip” further into the ground.
The natural progression from magic and treasure seeking does make more sense for Smith to have used his seer stone rather than the Urim and Thummim. His family and friends were already used to him using the stone in his treasure seeking, so finding the gold plates with the stone and then using the stone for translation purposed is more internally consistent.
When I was coming of age, well before the Internet, we simply had no idea that the history we were being taught and then in turn teaching others did not reflect what had actually occurred. This specific issue of the translation process was cited as one of the top reasons for people to begin to search out more information. Once that happens a lot of people find out too much,. and leave.
It’s really hard to describe this to outsiders, because the history of most other religions is so far distant that it’s almost a given that there would be discrepancies. However, with Mormonism it’s fairly recent past, and the stories are taught to be taken at face value. If you were to have asked my high school self, I would have laughed the suggestion that Smith used a rock to translate scripture. We knew how he did it and that was with the Urim and Thummim.
A lot of Mormons experience betrayal when they start to find out these uncomfortable facts. From there, a lot of people leave. Enough so that a few years ago, the church was forced to start to slowly release more and more information in what they acknowledge is an attempt at inoculating members, so that when people stumble on more accurate accounts that the shock will be less.
After a false start or two, the bulk of it was run off in a two month period (April-June 1829).
Not that I know of, but the general rule in Mormonism is that physical objects of power are useless unless you personally have the faith/calling/priesthood/worthiness to use them. For example, many Mormon men carry small vials of consecrated olive oil for healing the sick or injured, but to anyone else it would just be plain olive oil. Same for a nonmember who tried to wear the Mormon undergarment; it would be useless, or even worse than useless.
So the rock is probably just a rock if you aren’t Joseph Smith.
NB: I’m presenting these things as neutrally as possible, but please don’t confuse that for my believing any of them personally.
I’m still kicking myself, the one time I was approached by some missionaries, about 10 minutes into the conversation I mentioned the seerstone and they stumbled a bit, made their goodbyes and vamoosed. No one’s come around since.
I encountered Mormonism well before South Park, and I recall several images, even within LDS Church Art, of Joseph Smith translating the plates, sometimes with that hat (containing the stone) over his face. It was certainly well enough known for a non-LDS to come across it.
And when they opened up the Museum of Church Art across the street from Temple Square, I recall one piece of “naïve art” depicting the Urim and Thummim with the Golden Plates. The U and T were depicted like a pair of spectacles, which is how they were sometimes (possibly metaphorically) described. The art took it seriously and literally.
The plates didn’t even need to be in the same room. They would sometimes be hidden out in the woods behind the house.
This account of the translation process is, unfortunately, second-hand. Like many other aspects of early Mormonism, the accounts seem to change depending on who Smith was talking to.
This account has actually been questioned by many apologetic Mormons because it presents a problem for the historicity of the BoM. This is what is called the “tight translation” theory, in that Smith read in English what was translated by divine power.
However, there are too many errors in the BoM so rather than chalk it up to poor divine power in the translation process, many people prefer the “loose translation” theory, in which Smith received a feeling of what was on the plates and put them into his own words. Unfortunately, that contradicts testimony of Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife (first one, of course – this was before his experiment in polygamy) and others.
Back in the 60s through the mid 80s when I left the church, I never saw a depiction of the stone in the hat. It would have been enough of a shock that I would have remembered it.
It doesn’t surprise me that you would have been aware of it before most of the Mormons. John Dehlin, the now excommunicated founder of the MormonStories podcast conducted a survey of several thousand ex-Mormon on why they left. One of the top reasons was historical issues and Joseph Smith’s credibility as a translator was listed first. It wasn’t explained if that was the top reason, but still it was given a prominent location. As I wrote in my earlier post, Smith’s use of a stone was explicitly given as one reason why people leave. His finding can be found in a powerpoint linked here.
The BoM claims to have been written in what they say is “Reformed Egyptian” rather than Hebrew which would have been the native language for the authors.
The BoM was produced before the Rosetta Stone was known to Americans so Egyptian was thought to be untranslatable. Smith believed that each character in Egyptian corresponded to whole sentences or sometime even paragraphs of English text.
Correct. Oliver Cowdery, the aforementioned principle scribe to Smith attempted to use his divining rod to translate the BoM, but was unable. God told him, through Smith, that he didn’t have enough faith and didn’t understand the process.
Hoffman was actually pretty nuanced. Saying that he was “blackmailing” the Church doesn’t quite express it well enough. He was providing forgeries of what people expected, and hoped to find. He was a wish-fulfiller.
For instance, his first public forgery was the Anthon Transcript. We have a description of these characters, supposed to have been copied from the Golden Plates and given by Smith to Martin Harris, who took them down to New York to show to Prof. Anthon. We also have a document called the “Anthon Transcript” (now owned, IIRC, by the Community of Christ (which used to be the Reformed Church of Latter-Day Saints), but it doesn’t look very much like the description. It’s written horizontally, the desc ribed one vertically. It lacks a terminal circular glyph that the described one is supposed to have.
Hoffman’s transcript follows the description – it is what we would hope to see. Its letters are arranged in vertical columns. It has at the end a circle filled with glyphs. Furthermore, the glyphs in the existing “transcript” look lie bad copies of the ones in the documernt Hoffman claimed to have found. It looked better than the already-existing one in all sorts of ways.
And to top it off, Hoffman claimed to have found it between the stuck-together pages of a Smith family Bible, which he produced.
Hoffman dealt in dreams – he produced what people wanted. It was kinda like a real-life version of the devil in Stephen King’s Needful Things.
And, as in that book, things went bad. Hoffman would then surreptitiously cast doubt on his own find. He could get the Church salivating over his find, get them to buy it, then embarrass them about it.
He did this multiple times with the LDS Church – not only the Anthon transcript, but the Joseph Smith III blessing, the White Salamander Letter, and ultimately the McLellin Collection, which he couldn’rt produce, forcing hi m to the bombings.
Complex guy. He did a lot of other forgeries, many unrelated to the LDS Church. Theyaren’t by any means certain that they’ve found them all.
