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

[Guest]

We are living in exciting times! We are closing in on how Joseph Smith convinced others that he translated an ancient Book of Mormon, when what he did was to compose a story about a fictional civilization to answer the theological questions of his time (with the help of Adam Clark's commentary and other texts and oral traditions) and then perform a translation as a magic trick.

Now, people have long speculated that there was a text at the bottom of the hat. What RFM has done is to explain a plausible method through the lens of the prestidigitator's art. It was always the hat. This is huge. What made this convincing? Smith had always used the hat. It was part of his shtick as a treasure seer. Here he used it in a new way. But people did not suspect he was doing something different because he already had a reputation as a treasure seer who looked into the hat to see things in his stone!

In their minds what changes is the presence of the plates. This is what is new to them, and what they pay attention to. Their curiosity turns to the plates, and they don't think about what is at the bottom of the hat. Why would they? They never doubted he was looking in a stone in the hat before when he was looking for treasure!

What was at the bottom of this hat? It could have been nothing, sure. So, maybe there is no there there. Maybe he is just memorizing an outline and filling in the details on the fly. But it may have been a small manuscript bearing a shorthand outline. An outline, in other words, written in a code or symbolic mnemonic device. This could be where we get the "caractors." So Reformed Egyptian is nothing more or less than Smith's shorthand system used to write an outline of the content of the Book of Mormon. He can fill in the details from memory. This is why the end product reads so much like an oral composition. To a large extent it was, but the amazing structure was worked out in advance, and it was committed to paper in chunks to keep Smith on track.

And the lovely thing about using a hat is that Smith can always keep it close to him in order to prevent others from closely examining it. They were already inured to Smith's use of the hat in another context. It invites no suspicion for that reason. If someone starts to get a little curious, however, he can always pick the stone out of the hat and put it on his head, shoving the manuscript into its compartment in the hat or up his sleeve in the process. Or, simply by placing it on his head, he relies on the fact that good manners discourage touching it once he has it up there.

Fantastic work, RFM. This is impressive stuff.

Now, I know that the Mopologists, while squirming about the jig being up, will say that RFM can't really prove this is what Smith did. True. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to go back in time and steal that hat to see how he rigged it, if he did. But the surrounding evidence in favor of this kind of scenario is very suggestive. The elephant in the room is that Smith was already involved in a con game that relied on orchestrating the impression that there really was treasure in the ground that simply wasn't there. This meant that deceit and misdirection were called upon to keep people enthused about finding a treasure that would never be found. Which person in the treasure conspiracy would be charged with coughing at the wrong time, or dropping a dirt stained board in the ground?

The skills and methods were already there in the treasure digging companies. All that was required was to find a mark, someone who could be made to believe in the reality of the treasure and then fork out the money to pay the con artists who were duping him. In the case of the Book of Mormon, of course, that person was the credulous Martin Harris, a man who would lend his name to a handful of different wacky religious claims. A man who believed he saw the Lord Almighty in the form of a deer. A man who was just wealthy enough, and naïve enough, to give Joseph Smith thousands of dollars.

Folks, we have seen it a thousand times, and it is a con as old as the hills. Today we have phony "archbishops" peddling poisonous disinfectant as a miracle cure. Back then there were thieves, mountebanks, and jugglers who dealt in buried treasure, finding lost objects, and providing secret Masonic initiations. A large percentage of the population is willing to be duped. They want the quack cure and the fictional secret knowledge. They want to go to a seminar or through a secret initiation that will solve their problems or give them an edge over the competition. Joseph Smith is not a different character. He is a very common character. He is an interesting example of one of the oldest, most common phenomena there is.

[_Shulem]

All good points Kishy!!

We have a choice. Either smith really did translate like he said through miraculous means or he simply made up the story with his head in the hat either through his own genius or more likely using notes in the bottom of the hat. I opt for the notes and the hat trick. I opt that Oliver was duped! Three cheers for Radio Free Mormon our HERO!

[_Chap]

Either smith really did translate like he said through miraculous means or he simply made up the story with his head in the hat either through his own genius or more likely using notes in the bottom of the hat.

This is a classic instance where the arguments of David Hume apply very well:

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. X: On Miracles (1748)

91.The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.' When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Which would be more miraculous if it were true - Smith's account of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, with angels, gold plates and the interpreters (and indeed the existence of a whole unsuspected Jewish and Christian culture in the Americas unknown to archeology), or that he simply used some easy tricks to deceive the credulous?

Not really a hard one, I suggest ...

[_Shulem]

Amen, Chap. All good points. Knowing what I know about the Book of Abraham and the Explanations of the Facsimiles, there is no way I could ever believe that Smith translated Egyptian. Joseph Smith lied. The whole thing was a con job. To believe otherwise would require me to lie to myself and deny that the sun is shining overhead. Never!

[_Fence Sitter]

By the way, a great place to hide the notes or text off of which Joseph Smith might of been reading, would be........

under the cloth with the "plates" themselves.

[_Shulem]

Don Bradley in 2010 over on Mormon dialogue & discussion board:

Bradley is thinking it through, intelligently, and with insight and unknowingly almost cracked the code by discovering the TRICK, but I'm afraid that his testimony-monkey got the better of him and he was blinded by the craftiness of Joseph Smith. But maybe now, he will rethink it and realize that it really was just a put-on -- a magic trick performed by a con artist.

Take, for instance, Joseph Smith reading the Book of Mormon translation "out of a hat." This has certain disreputable connotations to many people today, because they interpret it as an inappropriate and silly use of an object, like child's play or like Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe, and as a parallel to the trickery of stage magic. But these readings of the process are purely modern overlays--they have literally nothing to do with what this process meant in the temporal, situational, and scriptural context in which the Book of Mormon emerged. To those actually involved in the process, the hat had no inherent meaning--it was just a tool to provide darkness in which Joseph could best perceive the spiritual light associated with his seer stone. Joseph could just as well have sat in a darkened room--but this would have made it difficult for his scribe to record the translation as he dictated it. So he used the hat.

The real significance was not, therefore, in the hat, but in the darkness. It was against the backdrop of darkness that the light could shine most clearly. And the participants perceived in this a powerful, concretized symbolism of darkness and light--e.g., in the imagery of D&C 6, the first revelation for Oliver Cowdery.

Imagine this scenario--from Oliver's point of view at the time of the revelation:

You're taking dictation as Joseph receives the words of the revelation through the stone, just as he receives the translation. Joseph (in the shared understanding of essentially everyone close to the process) in some way sees the sacred text written in letters of light against the backdrop of the darkness within his hat. And then, out of that darkness and from those luminous words, he reads: "Behold, I am the light that shineth in darkness."

Wham! How could Oliver possibly miss the connection? The words shining in darkness declare themselves, both in their denotation and in their perceptible form, to be "the light that shineth in darkness"--Jesus' self-identification from the Gospel of John.

What a jarring disconnect between this interpretation in the original context, where what was important was the symbolism of darkness and light--and how this pointed to Christ, and the interpretations so natural to the present-day context, where what stands out to people is the entirely insignificant white stovepipe hat, with the weirdness of its being looked into (who looks into a hat?!) and its easy, if entirely misleading, connection to illusionists' tricks and the cliché' imagery for making something up--"pulling it out of hat"!!

But wait. Four posts later consiglieri weighs in!



It will take 10 more years for the Night Stalker to solve the crime!

[_Fence Sitter]

The argument that the hat needed to be dark enough to read the words on the stone is, of course, nonsense but one that made sense to those contemporaries of Joseph Smith who he was trying to fool. For proof of how one can read text off an inanimate device in normal light look no further than the text you are reading right now or the tweet you just read off of your own phone.

People want to keep comparing the seer stone to our modern phones. Well our modern phones do not need a hat placed around them in order to read them. But hey, maybe the Mormon God of the 1800's didn't know what contrast was.

[_Shulem]

Amen, Fence Sitter! Now it's time to review the whole story and see things in a new light.

PART II is now up:

Radio Free Mormon: 163: Magic and the Book of Mormon Part 2

:surprised:

That was another great podcast. So much to think about and it will need a second listen.

The big question came up at the end. Did Smith have a confederate in translating the Book of Mormon?

My first reaction concludes that Oliver was duped but I need to study things further in light of all this new information. As far as I'm concerned, Oliver and Emma are both suspects of being confederates. Moreover, so also is father Smith.

So much to consider. I'm going to get to the bottom of this if it damned kills me.

[_moksha]

But wait. Four posts later consiglieri weighs in!



It will take 10 more years for the Night Stalker to solve the crime!

Reading pages in a hat is not a crime. Better to say it will take Consiglieri 10 more years to solve the mystery. I still want to hear Consiglieri read something out of Bill Reel's white stovepipe hat. The Prologue from the Canterbury Tales in Early Modern English would be delightsome to my ears. Notice the great vowel shift as Consiglieri reads it, as though it had been waiting all these years to be read out of a hat.

[_Simon Southerton]

But wait. Four posts later consiglieri weighs in!



It will take 10 more years for the Night Stalker to solve the crime!
[/quote]

Are you serious? Did he really make this genuine prophecy 10 years ago?