Weird Mormon History

🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕
 
I was painting a Book of Mormon, page by page, in “Ultra Pure White” paint while a video version of myself was sweeping the desert floor under the rug and watering plastic white roses with bleach—cleansing, sanitizing, purifying, killing 99.9%.
 
The moment when I felt that the work in this exhibition was communicating clearly was when someone I really respect burst out in uncontrolled laughter. he squeezed between laughs, “it’s just so ridiculous”
 
Yes, white supremacy and settler colonialism are horrifying. literal forms of terrorism.
AND their logics are ridiculous. absolute absurdities. especially when you go back in time and find their roots.
 
So I hope you all find balance in this struggle and this unfathomable cruelty with love, community, and a healthy dose of absurdity and magic ✨

1. Moon Quakers

Joseph taught that people live on the moon and that Mormons would proselytize there.

“The inhabitants of the moon are…~6’ (tall). They dress very much like the Quaker style. They live to be...near a thousand years. This is the description of them as given by Joseph the Seer.” - Oliver B. Huntington

Our Sunday chapter: "The inhabitants of the moon"
“Astronomers and philosophers have, from time almost immemorial until very recently, asserted that the moon was uninhabited...But recent discoveries, through the means of powerful telescopes, have given scientists a doubt or two... Nearly all the great discoveries of men in the last half century have, in one way or another, either directly or indirectly, contributed to prove Joseph Smith to be a Prophet. As far back as 1837, I know that he said the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this earth" - Oliver B. Huntington. published in “The Young Woman's Journal 1891-1892

Joseph Smith Sr. told both Lorenzo Snow (in 1836) and Huntington (in 1837) in their patriarchal blessings that they’d go to missions on the moon.

In “One-Minute Answers to Anti-Mormon Questions,” (1995) Stephen W. Gibson writes:
“At the present time, man has no scientific or revealed knowledge of whether or not there are inhabitants on the earth’s moon. The fact that a handful of astronauts didn’t see any inhabitants in the tiny area they viewed when they landed on the moon decades ago certainly gives no definitive information, any more than visitors to earth who might land in barren Death Valley would have any idea of the billions of inhabitants elsewhere.”

Moon quakers set next to another of Joseph’s scientific theories, his Book of Mormon Indigenous race theories, make them lighter to me. Not to negate any of the very real violences that this theory has shaped. More that, when I hold them together, it just becomes silly. Super harmful, and silly. 

2. “Canes of the Martyrdom”

After a militia rushed the Carthage Jail and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844, their bodies were brought to Nauvoo, in rough-hewn oak coffins.

Soon after, pieces of the bloodied oak planks were used to make canes, with some containing locks of the brothers' hair in the ivory knob. Willard Richards, Heber C. Kimball, Dimick Huntington, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young, all had one.

Inscription reads: "Presented by Brigham Young to Sidney Rigdon, 1844." On display at the Church History Museum.

The knob on this coffin cane bears the inscription: "Presented by Brigham Young to Sidney Rigdon, 1844." It is one of two coffin canes on display at the Church History Museum.

“And the day will come when there will be multitudes who will be healed and blessed through  the instrumentality of those canes, and the devil cannot overcome those who have them.” - Heber C. Kimball

I can’t find a source but I remember reading/listening about Brigham having Prophet-imposter-syndrome because he wasn’t a mystic like Joseph. But after a dream/vision/visitation from Joseph Smith, he could channel his Prophet abilities through the casket cane.

3. Astrology, ceremonial magic and Joseph’s quest for go(l)d. 
Content notice: connects temple ceremonies to Joseph’s occult practice

So, the Smiths are involved in various forms of occult activity and Joseph is living where a wave of religious fervor and occult activity was sweeping the Burned-Over District of New York. 

He uses the ceremonial-magic he’s learned from “The Magus: A Complete System of Occult Philosophy” as a treasure seeker and dowser. He uses his same rock in a white top hat method in treasure seeking as he does transcribing the plates. 

This book contains, what I understand to be, appropriative Jewish mysticism. 
This ties to Joseph’s interest in restoring the magical Priesthood of the Old Testament and the ceremonial magic practiced in LDS temples today.

The connection between Joseph Smith as magician to Joseph Smith as prophet is a direct one, a solid line rather than a dotted line, for it was the ritual of magic that produced the Book of Mormon and created a religion.
 
In this tradition the veil between the spiritual and the physical is thinnest during the equinoxes.

In the spring equinox of 1820, Joseph Smith had his first vision. 

In the fall equinox 1823, Moroni visited Joseph Smith  and directed him to the gold plates 

Joseph used his ceremonial magic to reveal the metaphysical location of the plates
He finds them, but because his heart was not “pure (and delightsome)” (gold is symbolic of material purity in Joseph’s occult tradition) because he was thinking of getting rich on the gold and not of higher spiritual matters he lost the plates.

Moroni instructed Joseph to return on the next fall equinox. and the next fall equinox, and the next fall equinox, and the next fall equinox.

Four fall equinoxes later, Joseph is allowed to remove the plates. 

And then the first, General Conference was held in spring equinox 
And the rest of the annual General Conferences are held near the spring and fall equinoxes.

click to read this article