The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 by John L. Brooke

Author:John L. Brooke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2009-05-15T15:08:00+00:00

But Smith's theology went far beyond the universalism of the revolutionary sects to announce an invisible world structured by three heavens, the potential for divinity, the pre-Creation existence of eternal spirits, and their material nature. Much of this doctrine must be ascribed to a personal predisposition toward a hermetic interpretation of the "mysteries." The culture of treasure-divining in which Smith was immersed in the i8zos, grafted onto his parents' inclination toward witchcraft fears and visionary experiences and reinforced by a popular knowledge of Masonic "secrets," provided the solid groundwork for the development of such a theology. Perhaps, fused with a comprehensive command of the biblical Scriptures, this groundwork in popular hermeticism provided a sufficient framework to shape the new theology as conceived in May 1833.

There were, however, texts written in the broader hermetic-theological tradition circulating in contemporary print culture. Various contemporary theological dictionaries contained capsule summaries of doctrines of materialism and preexistence, for example, noting connections with the Cabala.83 Robert Paul has shown the similarities between the material pantheon of heavenly spheres and the progression of spiritual intelligences described in the theological astronomies of Thomas Chalmers and Thomas Dick and the cosmic orders that appear in Smith's Book of Moses and Book of Abraham. Certainly the writing of Thomas Dick was influenced by a strain of hermetic materialism running from seventeenthcentury science, and Dick was being quoted in Mormon newspapers by 1836. Recently Paul has suggested that language in Thomas Paine's Age of Reason might have been the source of Smith's thinking on the plurality of worlds.84

Michael Quinn has noted that the idea of three heavens, or degrees of glory, was available in Emmanuel Swedenborg's cosmic system, in which three heavens - topped by a "celestial kingdom" - were associated with the sun, the moon, and the stars. Swedenborgian theology, shaped by Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, provided one direct connection to the high hermetic tradition, and its system of a triad of heavens reflected a wide range of occult influences. Swedenborg's cosmos was summarized in various short texts available in Palmyra, and translations of his original texts would not have been too difficult to locate in the 1830s. Swedenborg, like the postrevolutionary radical sects, rejected the concept of original sin, and even rejected the concept of atonement; salvation was universal and guaranteed, dependent only on merit. His elaborate theories of the correspondences between spiritual and material worlds incorporated a kind of material preexistence, where pre-Creation spirits were replaced with brute pre-Adamites that were slowly transformed by divine emanations into a perfect Adamic race in Paradise, from whence they fell. Sometime in the late i83os Joseph Smith is reported to have admitted his knowledge of Swedenborg, telling a Mormon convert from Swedenborgianism that "Emanuel Swedenborg had a view of things to come, but for daily food he perished."85

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