Radio Free Mormon: Magic and the Book of Mormon (We Need Dan Vogel's Help!)

[_consiglieri]

William L. Davis, in his new book, "Visions in a Seer Stone," posits that the sermon material in the Book of Mormon, was likely produce by elaboration on a written outline. This was customary for Methodist exhorted of his day.

Note I haven't read the book yet and am going off another's recent synopsis.

[_consiglieri]

It is probably stating the obvious that the outline could have been hidden in the stovepipe hat.

[_Shulem]

William L. Davis, in his new book, "Visions in a Seer Stone," posits that the sermon material in the Book of Mormon, was likely produce by elaboration on a written outline. This was customary for Methodist exhorted of his day.

Note I haven't read the book yet and am going off another's recent synopsis.

OMFG. Radio Free Mormon is indeed on top of things. Oh, I hope you weren't offended by my calling you and Dan "idiots" earlier. It was kind of a term of endearment and I meant it in a positive complimentary way.

This is FRESH (just off the printing press) material that is going to be looking at things from new perspectives.

Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

I would think that Dan Vogel is going to want to examine this, STAT!

Woo hoo!!

[_honorentheos]

Some years ago there was a Radiolab titled Black Box that explored instances where it was observable what went into something, what came out, but the processes inside the black box were opaque. The three examples explored included the mechanism of anesthesia, a 1950s era radio broadcast that attracted millions of listeners based on telephathy, and metamorphosis of caterpillars into moths/butterflies.

The middle episode regarding telephathy and a popular 1950s BBC radio broadcast centered around a couple whose grandson was exploring their legacy and the fact the grandmother who was the surviving member and half of the act maintained the catchphrase from the show, "You be the judge" whenever asked to explain the trick. She never did, and maintained it wasn't something she could convey.

The hosts end the piece by interviewing Penn Jillette who laughed about the supposed mystery. One of his comments that I think applies here was this -

ROBERT: You know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this, because I didn't tell you this. We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick, that -- that Soren and I, because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy.

PENN JILLETTE: [laughs]

ROBERT: Who ruined everything. This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn & Teller. Famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they're done. Now, I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called him and we played him the story, as soon as he heard it he said ...

PENN JILLETTE: Oh, it's a book test, right? It's a book test. It's an envelope switch.

JAD: A what?

PENN JILLETTE: And there are, you know, three or four ways to do them.

JAD: What did he say?

ROBERT: He said basically, "I can tell you how they did it."

PENN JILLETTE: Yeah.

ROBERT: Or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it.

PENN JILLETTE: There -- there you go. The only secret in magic -- there's only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret.

ROBERT: A beautiful secret's the kind of thing that's short and sweet. Like, he folded the hat twice. Or ...

PENN JILLETTE: There's mirrors under that table.

ROBERT: When you hear it, it's like, "Oh! Of course, that's what they would do." And you love finding it out.

PENN JILLETTE: Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.

ROBERT: So what he told us is a magic trick that stays secret is one that's so boring to tell you don't want to tell it, and you don't even want to hear it.

PENN JILLETTE: If I have to say, "He's lying about this and there's gaffers tape over behind there, and they're -- they're not actually telling you the exact truth here," and -- and it gets so -- you don't get an a-ha. One of the strongest feelings you can get in life, one of the most rewarding feelings is the feeling of an a-ha, I finally understand. If you don't have a wonderful a-ha, people won't figure it out. So I'm -- I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will not get an a-ha.

ROBERT: Basically, he said the true answer to this one is gonna kill your joy.

PENN JILLETTE: Yeah, it's ugly.

JAD: So did he -- did he tell you what they did?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, what did he say?

ROBERT: Well, I'll tell you -- I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it.

PENN JILLETTE: Now a book test, we actually do one in our show.

ROBERT: But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were -- we were both like, "Oh, all right. Well, [bleep]."

ROBERT: This is like a kiss with a poisoned dart in it.

PENN JILLETTE: I love how much I bummed your crap.

I think this is attempting to make an ugly truth into a beautiful trick. While I think what matters most is the fact the Book of Mormon doesn't describe ancient America but is very much a product of the 19th century, racist foundation and all, I do have an opinion on the way it came to be. And that is Smith and Cowdery talked about it openly when it was only the Whitmers and Emma around. Most of what we have today is from a three month period where Cowdery and Smith made writing the Book of Mormon their job and the Whitmers supported them. All the showmanship was originally part of what produced the 116 pages but who knows how crappy that was to read, how obviously bad it was, how many verilys and came to passes per page there were. Yeah, they used the hat trick later when being observed, but it's believing in magic Ina different way to ignore the obvious ugly reality there probably wasn't a trick in the end that resulted in the actual work of production.

The modem magician is fine with the audience knowing he isn't really magic as long as they imagine the trick is something magnificent in itself. They don't want you to know how many people were in on the trick to make it work, how mundane the reality is, that the audience was played and manipulated rather than dazzled by some act of singular wonder if still explainable without resorting to the supernatural. The attempt to figure out how it was produced is a deception that keeps up the charade that gives the production more credit than it deserves. It's a lie, a fake, and the most obvious answer is there were a core group of people who were behind it, intended to benefit from it, worked it for all it was worth, had a falling out and took the con in different directions, and today there's a multi-billion dollar corporation as the result. All because people want to believe there's more to this than there really is. And that's the real trick - that people keep chasing the big reveal, the a-ha moment when they see behind the curtain. There's no curtain. Just some fakes making up a fake story.

[_Shulem]

Abraham Lincoln was famous for having stored notes and letters in his hat in which he was able to refer to at a moments notice. This is an example of someone using a stovepipe hat for the purpose of retrieving retained information. How about Joseph Smith? What tricks did he learn from his magician friends in which he came in contact with during his treasure seeking days? What 19th century hat tricks are there for hiding notes within a hat? The thing about tricky Smith is that he stole everything he ever got his hands on. Frankly, I think Smith was too stupid to invent his own hat trick. He stole it from somebody. Smith was a thief with sticky fingers.

[_Dan Vogel]

William L. Davis, in his new book, "Visions in a Seer Stone," posits that the sermon material in the Book of Mormon, was likely produce by elaboration on a written outline. This was customary for Methodist exhorted of his day.

Note I haven't read the book yet and am going off another's recent synopsis.

OMFG. Radio Free Mormon is indeed on top of things. Oh, I hope you weren't offended by my calling you and Dan "____" earlier. It was kind of a term of endearment and I meant it in a positive complimentary way.

This is FRESH (just off the printing press) material that is going to be looking at things from new perspectives.

Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

I would think that Dan Vogel is going to want to examine this, STAT!

Woo hoo!!

I'm fine with Bill's research. It doesn't prove the outline had to be in the hat. I'm not saying it wasn't on occasion, but it's not necessary for Joseph Smith to perform.

[_Physics Guy]

The modem magician is fine with the audience knowing he isn't really magic as long as they imagine the trick is something magnificent in itself. They don't want you to know how many people were in on the trick to make it work, how mundane the reality is, that the audience was played and manipulated rather than dazzled by some act of singular wonder if still explainable without resorting to the supernatural. The attempt to figure out how it was produced is a deception that keeps up the charade that gives the production more credit than it deserves. ... And that's the real trick - that people keep chasing the big reveal, the a-ha moment when they see behind the curtain. There's no curtain.

A very interesting point about modern magic. Between the authority of Penn Jillette and a certain ring of truth, I'm inclined to believe it.

It's not the whole story. There are quite a few famous illusions that really do turn on some natural but marvelous gimmick. Robert Houdin used to catch a pistol ball between his teeth by swapping into the pistol a ball made of gray wax that looked just like wax but vaporized harmlessly when the pistol was fired. He also used to vanish people on stage by using a narrow curtain hanging in front of a matching backdrop. There is the "Pepper's ghost" trick with a huge sheet of glass between the stage and the audience. There are card tricks that work without any sleight-of-hand by mathematical processes that are just complicated enough that it's kind of satisfying to unravel them.

So Yes, Virginia, don't lose all faith: there are some real illusions out there.

But I expect that Jillette is completely right—of course he would be likely to know either way, so what I mean is that I think he's being honest—that in most of magic even the illusion is just an illusion, and the trick is really completely banal and stupid, working by nothing more ingenious than the brute force of having a lot of people and material involved, with nothing marvelous or clever at any point. And in the same way I reckon that most con artistry isn't The Sting, but more like the Nigerian banker mass e-mail.

No doubt it gives Smith too much credit, and even plays into his hand still all these years since his death, to keep looking for ingenious ways he could have faked things. Accounts of disinterested observers cover what, less than 1% of the total production time for the Book of Mormon, no? Only by the desperate standards of normal history, where there is no reason to suspect any deception, and nobody is being asked to believe in angels or prophets, but we are grateful for any shred of evidence pointing one way or the other about historic events, would the hearsay evidence that we have for the production of the Book of Mormon be considered significant.

They probably all just sat around the table cooking up the Book of Mormon and then lied through their teeth. There was no reason for anyone to recant in later life because it would only have made them look either wicked or stupid, whereas as long as they stuck to some core of their story there was always a chance that someday it would pay. Nobody was even remotely honest or pious—that was all just a put-on for the marks—and that's all there was to it.

It's the simplest explanation and it may most likely be true. I still think it doesn't hurt to speculate about how it could have been spiced up with gimmicks, as long as one doesn't get too carried away in pursuit of a trick that may well itself be nothing but an illusion.

[_Shulem]

To me, it's inconceivable and I can't fathom the idea that Smith dictated the ENTIRE Book of Mormon while his head was in a hat without the aid of logical means in which to arrange and tell his story. I just can't believe it. Nobody, no matter what their genius may be can roll a story off their tongue with that kind of complexity while their head is buried in the darkness of a hat. I can't accept it as a legitimate possibility. Such a feat has never been done by anyone else, has it? Could the smartest person in the world with the highest IQ pull that off? When I think about the complexity of the entire novel, although the general content is rather simple, I find it unbelievable that he dictated it out of thin air from his mind without the aid of conventional means.

Don't get me wrong, I can accept the idea that Smith was able to fabricate a large quantity of Book of Mormon stories while dictating in total darkness but there are complicated and intricate matters that arise that would require a normal person to author material in a conventional manner. Crosschecking and arrangement of details in order to keep things in line are basic to normal human thinking. That's why I always kind of figured that Smith and Oliver wrote the Book of Mormon together in the open, on a table -- in plain view. When RFM released his magic podcast my jaw dropped and I was immediately open to new possibilities that seemed very possible considering what I know about the circumstances.

[_Physics Guy]

I dunno, I just don't see it as such a big deal. If you start just improvising, stuff comes out. If you go on long enough, it gets complicated.

If you wrap things up every few chapters, abruptly hitting fast-forward to let your characters die of old age while the next generation takes over, then you don't have to do anything as tricky as character development or nonlinear plotting. If you can get away with just declaring that "times changed and the people turned to sinning" then you don't have to worry about anything having long-term consequences. It's all pretty episodic even though you can technically claim to have a thousand-year epic. Mormon apologists are always finding all kinds of amazing complex stuff in the Book of Mormon but nothing they've found has struck me as anything more than Texas sharpshooting.

Yeah, dictating it all would take an unusual amount of glibness—but not a wildly unusual amount. I have some experience in the direction of making stuff up extemporaneously, and while I don't think I'm at Smith's level, I think I have an idea of what it would take to do what he did.

Producing the Book of Mormon alone without notes would not have been an achievement like writing Hamlet or discovering relativity. I'd rate it somewhere at the level of bowling 300 or memorizing the Quran. Most of us may not be able to do it but some people can.

[_huckelberry]

Shulem ,I can see some cause for your concern about whether the book could be narrated out of a hat. It is hard to be sure what capabilities Joseph Smith had. The surest measure is what he in fact did, but that is what has uncertianties. I find it plausible that the production was verbal. I can fit that within my own sense of what is possible. I am poor at memorizing so the feat Physics Guy mentions, memorizing the Koran, is beyond my comprehension or imagination, yet there are people who can do it.

I would not imagine that the Book of Mormon appeared without preparation and some preplaned form. I think the planing would be done ahead of time, trying to keep up with notes in a hat would be confusing and break the flow of the narrative. I think the darkness of a hat could be conducive of the concentration useful in creating the story. I think various background material such as the Bible or Bunyon could be reviewed a head of time. It would be the specific process of looking away from , setting a distance from those sources which helped Smith to make creative use of them.

Physics Guy makes a good observation about the lack of complexity of development in the book. It is complex only in the sense of having a good many episodes and portions.

A defense of the Book of Mormon has been change in language in various portions which could reflect change of ancient authors. I have seen uncertainty about that but I have suspected that Smith would absorb some word patterns of material he was reviewing a head of time. That would be more likely to work if the rhythm of production was alternation between preparation previewing inspiring material and subsequent recreation out of the hat.(his own mind creating in the quiet darkness)