Joseph Smith and the Technologies of Seership

Speaker 1

Our next speaker will be Don Bradley, who’s sitting over here. And Don is a writer, editor, and researcher on Mormon origins. And he has some fascinating things to say about Mormon origins. For those of you who know him, man, it’s a treat to talk with him about it. He is finalizing his master’s degree, writing his first book. Titled The Lost One hundred sixteen Pages: Rediscovering the Book of Lehi, and planning to pursue a doctorate in religious studies. Don is also an avid runner and hiker and a single father. He will be speaking on Joseph Smith and the technologies of Searship.

Don Bradley

Thank you, Lincoln. Just a minute ago, I decided I should check the schedule to see exactly when I was up. And I’m glad that I checked before Lincoln announced that I was up, because that would have been quite a shock to me.

Don Bradley

In 1933, LDS theologian and general authority B. H. Roberts wrote that he’d once examined the cedar stone that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon. and, while handling it, had the impression that doubtless it was radium, or had been made radioactive by contact with radium, and hence its power to become luminous when placed in the dark.

Don Bradley

Joseph Smith employed four such scrying stones to receive revelation and discern things not visible to the unaided eye. I might need to make better use of the sound technology here, I’m being told. Four such scrying stones: a semi-transparent white stone, two transparent crystals that comprise the lenses of the ancient Nephite interpreters, or Urim and Thummim, and the What people referred to as chocolate-colored stone that reportedly shined in the dark while he translated the Book of Mormon.

Don Bradley

While Roberts believed the stone Smith used for translating possessed special properties, More recent Latter-day Saint interpreters like Brant Gardner have downplayed the stone, confining it to the psychological role of helping Joseph Smith induce a state of trance or high concentration. What did Joseph Smith think? Were these ordinary rocks he used to enhance his focus, or were they extraordinary materials whose properties enabled him to access hidden channels of information? The prophet’s actions indicate that he, like Roberts, understood the stones to have special properties as information media.

Don Bradley

For instance, as a teenager Joseph Smith journeyed three hundred miles well, a hundred and fifty miles out to Lake Erie and then back in order to acquire his white stone. Had he understood one stone to be as good for scrying as another It’s difficult to imagine that he would have invested so much into acquiring that particular stone. Smith viewed his seer stones as tools enabling him to achieve things he otherwise couldn’t, that is, as technologies.

Don Bradley

The idea of optical technologies that could render the invisible visible was long familiar by Joseph Smith’s time. It had been over two centuries since Galileo used the telescope to disclose the secrets of distant planets, and a century and a half since and you’re going to have to I looked this up and I can’t remember the pronunciation, Van Leuhenhoek. used the microscope to discover hidden organisms, and since Newton used the refractive prism to discover the spectrum of colors within ordinary white light. And in Smith’s day, many, including his father, enhanced their vision using spectacles.

Don Bradley

It’s thus perhaps not surprising that Smith’s experiences with his scrying instruments Mirrored the functioning of spectacles and other contemporary technologies that manipulated light. Joseph Smith understood the interpreters to function as spectacles. He described them as shaped like spectacles, wore them like spectacles and called them spectacles.

Don Bradley

The way Smith experienced images through the interpreters also closely paralleled the functioning of another optical technology of his day. Smith’s early confidant, David Whitmer, reported that when Smith used the spectacles to translate the Book of Mormon’s Golden Plates, the image of a character in its English translation would quote appear on the lenses. Minister Truman Co. provided further details after hearing the prophet describe the process in Kirtland in 1836. By putting his finger on one of the characters and looking through the Yurman thumbum, he would see the import written in plain English on a screen placed before him.

Don Bradley

Kind of like this, I guess. The interpreter’s mechanical details, as relayed through Whitmer and Co. , have it functioning much like a slide projector here Or more familiar to Joseph Smith, a 19th-century slide lantern. And here’s a place where I had intended to use technology, have images of slide lanterns. So basically, they’re lanterns where, of course, there’s a candle or source of light in the middle. And then there are things that are kind of like little stained glass windows on the edges so that when the light passes through, it casts an image onto a wall. The interpreter’s mechanical small image appearing on the lenses was projected in larger form onto the quote-unquote screen before him.

Don Bradley

While the form and function of the interpreters evoke the familiar technologies of spectacles and slide lanterns, the operation of Smith’s other sear stones evoke one of the day’s emerging technologies. To understand the connection, it’s first necessary to know that Smith typically gazed into one of these stones only after shielding it from external light, for instance by placing it into the bottom of his hat. With the stone in his hat, Smith would see a book of Mormon character and its English translation written on the stone’s surface, not in ink, but in letters composed of spiritual light.

Don Bradley

Joseph Smith’s practice of staring into a hat might strike us as undignified, rather like Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe. However, Joseph didn’t understand himself to be looking into a hat, but as using a hat to exclude ordinary visible light so as to better perceive the spiritual light of the stone. The effect wrought by this spiritual light within the darkness was transformative.

Don Bradley

The hieroglyphs on the Book of Mormon plates were reportedly set out in black against a bright background of gold. Conversely, the translated words Joseph Smith saw on the seer stone, included in his hat, were light against darkness. Thus, by the instrumentality of the stone, the record’s original untranslated state was inverted. Its meaning, previously hidden in the gold plate’s black characters, now stood written in strokes of light, words ablaze against a black page of ambient darkness. Like the development of a negative into a photograph, transposing dark with bright, Joseph Smith’s process of translation rendered, in place of opaque hieroglyphs, lucid English. In the literal etymological sense, this itself was photography, writing with light.

Don Bradley

It would be natural to assume that at this point Joseph Smith was already familiar with the technology of negative photography, but he was not. William Henry Fox Talbot invented the process in England in 1834 and 1835 and held back on announcing it until 1839 after the introduction of the daguerreotype. Smith’s eighteen twenty eight and twenty nine photographic visions transposing darkness with light thus preceded negative photography by several years.

Don Bradley

It would be remarkable if the negative positive transformation in Smith’s translation experience were unrelated to the near contemporaneous, if slightly tardy, invention of negative photography. But it’s clear but it’s unclear, rather, just what should be made of the parallel. Possibly, though the evidence for this that I’ve seen is thus far weak, negative photography had antecedents that Joseph Smith would have known of, and his experience was tailored to imitate these. or to generate a freewheeling theological speculation, perhaps revelation was delivered to Smith in a way that anticipated photo negative technology. Either as a sign to the seer and his associates, or to help teach them that God uses technology like, but exceeding, what humankind develops.

Don Bradley

Whatever the answer to that riddle, we’ve seen that Joseph Smith used seeing instruments, functioning in ways similar to both the familiar and the emerging technologies of his time. But if Joseph Smith understood the seeing instruments themselves as technologies, how did he believe they worked in scientific terms?

Don Bradley

In interviews with Smith’s Harmony, Pennsylvania neighbors, Frederick G. Mather gathered the following information about his use of sear stones, or as the locals like to call them, peak stones. When peaking, he buried his face in his white stovepipe hat, within which was the peak stone. He declared it to be so much like looking into water that the deflection of light sometimes took him out of his course. And Joseph Smith’s brother-in-law Reuben Hale is supposed to have made similar statements.

Don Bradley

According to the neighbors, then, Smith explained that he sometimes failed to pinpoint a lost treasure with his stone. Because the image of the treasure was displaced as the light bearing it passed between mediums, namely between the air and the sear stone. The correct name for this phenomenon, which we commonly encounter when an object at the bottom of a pool appears in a false location, or when a straw a straight straw seems to bend in a glass of water, is not deflection, but refraction. On Smith’s explanation, the treasure was not where it had appeared through a stone, because of how the light refracted when it entered the stone.

Don Bradley

However interesting this may be as a study in rationalization, it’s much more interesting as a study in Smith’s understanding of the spiritual light conveyed through his searstone. To account for his scrying failures in this way, Joseph Smith must have understood the light focused by the seer stones as subject to the same laws of optics as ordinary visible light. To Smith, then, the spiritual light of his scrying was not an incomprehensible spiritual substance a supernatural substance rather but a form of natural light not visible to the unaided eye.

Don Bradley

What we learn from Smith’s understanding of this light and of his sear stones is that the aspiration to interpret divine action in scientific and technological terms is not new with twenty first century Mormon transhumanists. It was already a century old when B. H. Roberts offered his radioactive interpretation of Smith’s stone. Scientific and technological interpretations of Mormonism are as old as Mormonism itself. The attempt to understand experiences of divine action in early Mormonism in terms of technology and scientific principles began contemporaneously with those experiences. Joseph Smith, while acting as seer, speculated on the scientific and technological basis of God’s revelations to him, setting a precedent for such interpretations of divine action in Mormonism today.

Don Bradley

Mormonism is distinctive, if not unique, among the theistic religions in its relationship to science and technology. Unlike other theistic faiths, Mormonism understands God not as supernatural but as an integral element of the natural order, implying that divine powers can eventually be explained in scientific and technological terms and therefore acquired by others besides God. While other theistic faiths have modern thinkers who will sometimes speculate on God’s use of natural law, Mormonism has a founder who believed God communicated with him via technology. Naturally, the horizons of Joseph Smith’s technological imagination were bounded somewhat by his time, but as one who speculated that God gave revelation by advanced technology The founder of Mormonism himself would have made a fitting speaker at the Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference.

Don Bradley

Can we similarly imagine Muhammad addressing an Islamic Transhumanist Association conference, or John Calvin keynoting the annual conference of the Double Predestinationist Transhumanist Association? Perhaps the reason we are here today, the reason Mormonism is the first religion in which the transhumanists thrive, is that it is the first religion to have been founded by one.

Speaker 3

As you were starting out, and perhaps the rest of your speech kind of answered this already, but I was thinking the question, how would you mesh this idea that the searstones were technology that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph with the incidence of, was it, Oliver Cowdery’s attempt and fail failure to translate with them?

Don Bradley

Okay, so for one thing, Oliver’s translation attempt wasn’t through a gift as a seer. He’s told that he has another gift. Which one of his gifts actually is working with the rod, which I guess could also be seen as a technology. I’m not actually suggesting that the seerstone was a technology. Rather, I’m arguing that based on Joseph Smith’s use of the phenomenon of the refraction of light to explain some of what he experienced with the Cedar Stone, he was viewing it in scientific and technological terms.

Speaker 4

I guess based on that cut. From the Mormon perspective, do you think it’s like the sear stone was more like training wheels or a dumbo’s feather? Training wheels or what? Or dumbo’s or dumbo’s feather. Oh.

Don Bradley

Um certainly the Searstone, I don’t know, it certainly was a stage in Joseph Smith’s Progress as a prophet. So after the Book of Mormon Revelations, he generally doesn’t need to use the stone anymore.