MATTHEW
7
CHAPTER VII.
... Caution against false teachers.
...
14
How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way, which leadeth to life: and few
there are who find it!
15
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but
inwardly they are ravenous wolves.
16
By their fruits you shall know them. Do
men gather grapes off thorns, or figs off thistles?
17
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the bad tree bringeth
forth bad fruit.
18
A good tree cannot yield bad fruit, neither can an bad tree yield good fruit.
19
*Every tree that yieldeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be
cast into the fire.
20
Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them.
21
*Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of
heaven: but he that doth the will of my Father, who is in heaven, he shall
enter into the kingdom of heaven.
22
Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy
name, *and cast out devils in thy name, and done many wonderful works in thy
name?
23
And then will I profess unto them: I never knew you: *depart from me, you that
work iniquity.
24
*Every one, therefore, that heareth these my words, and doth them, shall be
likened to a wise man, who built his house upon a rock.
MATTHEW
24
CHAPTER XXIV.
Christ foretells the destruction of the temple: with
the signs that shall come before it, and before the last judgment. We must always watch.
1
And *Jesus being come out of the temple went away. And his disciples came to shew him the
buildings of the temple.
2
And he answering, said to them: Do you see all these things? Amen, I say to you, *there shall not be left
here a stone upon a stone that shall not be thrown down.
3
And as he was sitting on Mount Olivet, the disciples came to him privately,
saying: Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy
coming, and of the consummation of the world?
4
And Jesus answering, said to them: *Take heed that no man seduce you:
5
For many will come in my name saying, I am Christ: and they will seduce many.
6
And you shall hear of wars, and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the
end is not yet.
7
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there
shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places.
8
Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows.
9
*Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall put you to death:
and you shall be hated by all nations for my name's sake.
10
And then shall many be scandalized, and shall betray one another, and shall
hate one another.
11
And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many.
12
And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold.
13
But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved.
14
And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world, for a
testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come.
15
*When therefore, you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken
of by **Daniel, the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let
him understand.
16
Then let them that are in Judea flee to the mountains:
17
And let him that is on the house top, not come down to take any thing out of
his house:
18
And let him that is in the field, not go back to take his coat.
19
And wo to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days.
20
But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the *sabbath.
21
For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the
beginning of the world until now, neither shall be.
22
And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the
sake of the elect, those days shall be shortened.
23
*Then if any man shall say to you: Lo, here is Christ, or there: do not believe
him.
24
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great
signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if it were possible) even the elect.
25
Behold, I have told it to you before hand.
26
If therefore, they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert: go ye not out:
Behold he is in the closets, believe it not.
27
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth, even unto the west:
so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
28
*Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered
together.
29
*And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven,
and the powers of the heavens shall be moved:
30
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all
the tribes of the earth mourn: *and they shall see the Son of man coming in the
clouds of heaven with great power and majesty.
31
*And he shall send his Angels with a trumpet, and a great voice: and they shall
gather together his elect, from the four winds, from the farthest parts of the
heavens to the utmost bounds of them.
32
Now learn a parable from the fig-tree: when its branch is now tender, and the
leaves come forth, you know that summer is nigh.
33
So also you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is near, even
at the doors.
34
Amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.
35
*Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
36
But of that day and hour no one knoweth, no not the Angels of heaven, but the
Father alone.
37
*And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall also the coming of the Son of man
be.
38
For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying
and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
39
And they knew not till the flood came, and took them all away: so also shall
the coming of the Son of man be.
40
Then shall two be in the field: the one shall be taken, and the other shall be
left.
41
Two women shall be grinding at the mill: the one shall be taken, and the other
shall be left.
42
Watch ye, therefore, because you know not at what hour your Lord will come.
43
But this know ye, *that if the master of the house knew at what hour the thief
would come, he would certainly watch, and would not suffer his house to be
broken open.
44
Wherefore be ye also ready, because at what hour you know not, the Son of man
will come.
45
Who, thinkest thou, is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath set over
his family, to give them meat in season?
46
*Blessed is that servant, whom, when his lord shall come, he shall find so
doing.
47
Amen, I say to you, he shall set him over all his goods.
48
But if that evil servant shall say in his heart: My lord is long a coming:
49
And shall begin to strike his fellow-servants, and shall eat, and drink with drunkards:
50
The lord of that servant shall come, in a day that he expecteth not, and in an
hour that he knoweth not:
51
And shall separate him, and appoint his portion with the hypocrites. *There shall be weeping and gnashing of
teeth.
____________________
*
1: A.D. 33.; Mark xiii. 1.; Luke xxi. 5.
2: Luke xix. 44.
4: Ephes. v. 6.; Coloss. ii. 18.
9: Supra x. 17.; Luke xxi. 12.; John xv. 20. and
xvi. 2.
15: Mark xiii. 14.; Luke xxi. 20. --- ** Dan. ix.
27.
20: Acts i. 12.
23: Mark xiii. 21.; Luke xvii. 23.
28: Luke xvii. 37.
29: Isai. xiii. 10.; Ezech. xxxii. 7.; Joel ii.
10. and iii. 15.; Mark xiii. 24.; Luke xxi. 25.
30: Apoc. i. 7.
31: 1 Cor. xv. 52.; 1 Thess. iv. 15.
35: Mark xiii. 31.
37: Gen. vii. 7.; Luke xvii. 26.
43: Mark xiii. 35.; Luke xii. 39.
46: Apoc. xvi. 15.
51: Supra xiii. 42.; Infra xxv. 30.
====================
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Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
by Lance S. Owens
Part 3: Includes pages 166 - 194 (end)
Prophet and Freemasonry
Whatever one concludes about the varied hints of scattered early associations with Hermeticism, Joseph Smith had well-documented connections with one of the tradition's major legacies, Masonry. The prophet's associations with the Masonic tradition are thoroughly documented and discussed by Michael W. Homer in this issue of Dialogue. It is unlikely that Smith would have so fully involved himself and his church with the Masonic tradition if he had not sensed therein some intrinsic compatibility with his own religion-making vision. As Homer demonstrates, the prophet said that Masonry was "taken from priesthood," and his followers continued quoting that observation for fifty years after.104 It is possible that Joseph's interpretation of Masonry as a legacy of ancient priesthood was based in his own understanding of a history extending back hundreds of years, a history entwined with the Hermetic mythos and with Kabbalah, alchemy, and Rosicrucianism. The alliance of this occult legacy with Masonry was well understood by esoterically-inclined Masons; assertions of such links were bandied about by American anti-Masonic publications in the late 1820s.105 As noted, Joseph's own history several times touched Hermetic-Kabbalistic traditions. One could argue that he even interacted with them in a creative, visionary sense.
Joseph's contacts with the Hermetic mythos were sufficient to generate vague assumptions about Masonry's earlier roots, and these assumptions could have been an historical subtext to his remarks about Masonry being a remnant of ancient priesthood. Interestingly, modern historical examination of the occult tradition suggests a shadow of truth in Joseph's statement: Kabbalah and Hermeticism, as representatives of a historical stream of occult knowledge (or as reservoirs of Gnosticism) did claim ancient lineages of "priesthood." Joseph had every reason to take those claims seriously, as do historians today, albeit within a narrower interpretive context. In this light, Joseph's connection to Masonry takes on several different shades of meaning.
The ubiquitous influence of Kabbalah upon the occult traditions of the nineteenth century has been stressed, but its specific import in Masonry requires repeated emphasis. Noted historian of occultism Arthur Edward Waite suggested in his 1923 encyclopedia of Freemasonry that much of the "great" and "incomprehensible" heart of Masonry came from Kabbalah, "the Secret Tradition of Israel."106 He finds such important Masonic symbols as the Lost Word, the Temple of Solomon, the pillars Jachin and Boaz, the concept of the Master-Builder, and restoration of Zion, all derived from the lore of Kabbalah. The organizer of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America, Albert Pike, manifested a similar sentiment and indexed over seventy entries to the subject of Kabbalah in his classic nineteenth-century study, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.107 Though Pike's work was published in 1871, his views reflected lore already established in Masonry during the period of Joseph Smith's Masonic initiations three decades earlier. Indeed, one of the earliest documentary mentions of Masonry appearing in 1691 specifically linked it with these Jewish traditions.108
As Homer notes, the Scottish Rite developed by Pike was an evolution of the eighteenth-century French Masonic Rite de Perfection, which in several degrees was influenced by Kabbalah.109 Kabbalah's importance in Masonic lore is also witnessed by Maritnez de Pasqually and his late-eighteenth century Kabbalistic-Masonic restoration of ancient priesthood in the Order of Les Elus Cohen. Much of this Kabbalistic influence upon Masonry may have come from Rosicrucianism (again recalling their close association), infused as it was with alchemical and Kabbalistic symbolism. But some additional influence might be attributed to esoteric sources like the Frankist movement. The Frankist--followers of Jacob Frank, and successors to the Kabbalistically inclined Sabbatean heresy--had become active in Central European Masonic organizations in the late eighteenth century.110 Given the wide diffusion of a Christianized and Rosicrucian version of Kabbalah into Masonry, Joseph Smith probably heard something about the tradition during the course of his almost twenty-year association with Masons and Freemasonry.
It might be argued that these occult Masonic inclinations were all part of a sophisticated, esoteric form of European Masonry foreign to the world of frontier America. To the contrary--and though not yet fully investigated--there are several reasons to believe that what Joseph Smith encountered in Nauvoo was an esoteric interpretation of Masonry. As mentioned earlier, between the mid-eighteenth and the beginnings of the nineteenth century a multitude of occult orders rose from Masonry. Each of these tended to develop its own interrelated system of symbolic ceremonies for conveying distinct esoteric visions. The different rites also often claimed variant "authentic" Masonic origins: in ancient Egyptian mysteries; in the lineages of the medieval Knights Templar; in Kabbalistic transmissions; and in Hermetic-alchemical-Rosicrucian traditions. Robert Macoy's 1872 encyclopedia of Freemasonry cataloged over forty-five distinct systems of Masonic rites developed during the period from 1750 to 1820.111 In retrospect one might suggest that during this unusual epoch a creatively elite group of individuals coming from many sectors of society encountered in the Masonic mythos a new medium for expressing their visions. Though basic York rite (or Blue Lodge) Masonry with its three degrees was a common grounding for most of these, around that foundation appeared many layerings of esoteric accretions. With the tools of allegory, symbol, and imagination, and in a format suggesting great mysterious antiquity, men touched by the Masonic mythos began producing new "ancient" rituals. One is reminded of Ireneaus' complaint about the Gnostics responding to the creative muse of their times: "every one of them generates something new, day by day, according to his ability; for no one is deemed mature, who does not develop . . . some mighty fiction."112
John C. Bennett, one of the more enigmatic figures in Mormon history, was the indisputable impetus to Masonry's introduction in Nauvoo. Bennett's mercurial career among the Mormons has fascinated and bewildered historians. Seemingly from out of the blue, Bennett appeared in Nauvoo and was baptized into the Mormon church in the summer of 1840. Within less than a year he became mayor of Nauvoo, chancellor of the University of Nauvoo, major general of the Nauvoo Legion, Assistant President of the Mormon church, and an intimate friend and counselor to Joseph Smith. In June 1841, less than three months after becoming Assistant President, he began attempts to organize a Mormon Masonic Lodge. But the Masonry he brought to Nauvoo had several unusual occult aspects. Less than a year later, he made an equally dramatic exit, excommunicated amid a flurry of allegations suggesting widespread sexual improprieties.
By the time he arrived in Nauvoo, the thirty-five-year-old Bennett had attended Athens state university; studied medicine with his uncle, the prominent frontier doctor and Ohio historian, Dr. Samuel Hildreth; helped to found educational institutions in West Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio; organized at Willoughby College the medical school and served as first dean and professor of gynecology and children's diseases; been a licensed preacher in Ohio; been appointed brigadier general of the Illinois Invincible Dragoons; and in 1840 become quartermaster general of Illinois state militia.113 He had also apparently abandoned a wife and children, been ejected from at least one Masonic Lodge for unbecoming behavior, and been accused of selling medical degrees. Bennett's interests, including religion, medicine, the military, and Masonry, suggest a person inclined towards investigating the more esoteric aspects of Masonry. His apparent libidinous proclivity may also have aroused his curiosity about unorthodox sexual practices associated with more creative Masonic rites.
Given the relation between Bennett and Smith, Bennett probably had communicated some Masonic ideas to Smith before petitions were made for the formation of a Nauvoo Masonic Lodge in mid-1841. That the temple endowment ceremony developed by Smith in May 1842 was influenced by Masonry cannot escape notice. But beyond the temple endowment, several other components were developing in Joseph's vision during this period that sounded an even stranger resonance with ideas from esoteric Masonic quarters. Two stand out: organization of an "Order of Illuminati" or political Kingdom of God, and introduction of "Spiritual Wifery."114
Bennett claimed that in a revelation dated 7 April 1841--the day before he was made Assistant President of the church--Joseph Smith personally commissioned him to establish an "Order of the Illuminati" in Nauvoo.115Though the organization was not then specifically called by this name, a revelation received by Joseph on 7 April 1842 commanded formation of "The Kingdom of God and His Laws with the keys and powers thereof and judgment in the hands of his servants."116 More commonly called the Council of Fifty, the organization finally took form in March 1844. Joseph was soon thereafter ordained King of the Kingdom, a ritual of coronation also performed for each of the next two presidents of the church, Brigham Young and John Taylor. Whether Bennett got the idea for an order of Illuminati from Smith, or Smith from Bennett, is open to argument. But Ebenezer Robinson, editor of the Nauvoo Times and Seasons until February 1842 and a contemporary observer, thought the stimulus arrived with Bennett: "Heretofore the church had strenuously opposed secret societies such as Freemasons . . . but after Dr. Bennett came into the Church a great change of sentiment seemed to take place."117 Subsequent history links the idea with Bennett. After Smith's death, Bennett sought out the charismatic claimant to Smith's prophetic mantle, James Strang, and convinced him to establish an "Order of the Illuminati."118
The Council of Fifty in Nauvoo manifest a distinctly Masonic character, and Masonic ceremonial elements were incorporated in the council's meetings. A similar tenor emerged in Strang's Order of the Illuminati. It was only a few months after the claimed revelation commissioning him to organize the "Illuminati" at Nauvoo that Bennett initiated efforts to form the Masonic lodge. But Mormon historians have yet to specifically explored implications of another fact: both the name given by Bennett for the organization, "Order of the Illuminati," and the political concept embodied by the organization had a clear Masonic heritage.119 The parallel is so close that one wonders whether Bennett might have brought this and other more esoteric Masonic concepts with him into Nauvoo. At about this same time the practice of "Spiritual wifery" or plural marriage was also introduced. Bennett made several exaggerated claims in his later exposés about libertine sexual practices, claiming the women of Nauvoo were inducted into three ritual orders based on the sexual favors expected of them. Such claims are not tenable, but nonetheless recent historians have noted the apparent association of the Relief Society with Masonry. And Bennett's more slanderous claims aside, it is a fact that the female leaders of the Relief Society in Nauvoo were at one time all wives of Joseph Smith. Whatever the actual relationship to the practices in Nauvoo, Masonic lodges had existed which did indulge in such practices, the most specific example being Cagliostro's Egyptian rite.120 By all reports, Bennett would have intimate interest in this sort of Masonry--or this sort of Mormonism--and it would be hard to imagine him not encouraging Joseph's ideas about new forms of ritual marriage.
In this context, another question lingers: Is it possible Bennett's meteoric rise to prominence in Nauvoo was related to some unsuspected Masonic factor? Did he arrive in Nauvoo claiming independent esoteric lineages of Hermetic or Masonic priesthood, or some ancient and occult knowledge--declarations that Joseph, because of prior life experiences and associations, choose to honor? Though Bennett finally may have been nothing but a talented charlatan, it must be granted that a complex legacy of spiritual insight was embedded in Masonic rituals, myths, and symbols; they had a history and a lineage reaching back many centuries into Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical Gnosis. John C. Bennett may have brought something more than Blue Lodge Masonry to Nauvoo. And, regardless of his true intentions, what he brought may have been useful to a prophet.
In Nauvoo, in 1842 and after, I suggest Joseph Smith encountered a reservoir of myths, symbols, and ideas conveyed in the context of Masonry but with complex and more distant origins in the Western esoteric tradition. They apparently resonated with Smith's own visions, experiences modulating his spiritual life from the time of his earliest intuitions of a prophetic calling. He responded to this stimulus with a tremendous, creative outpouring--the type of creative response Gnostic myth and symbol were meant to evoke, and evidently had evoked across a millennium of history. But, leaving Masonry, there was still another, more primary transmission of this esoteric tradition that would touched Joseph's creative imagination during his last years in Nauvoo.
Joseph Smith and Kabbalah in Nauvoo
By 1842 Joseph Smith most likely had touched the subject of Kabbalah in several ways and versions, even if such contacts remain beyond easy documentation. During Joseph's final years in Nauvoo, however, his connection with Kabbalah becomes more concrete. In the spring of 1841 there apparently arrived in Nauvoo an extraordinary library of Kabbalistic writings belonging to a European Jew and convert to Mormonism who evidently new Kabbalah and its principal written works. This man, Alexander Neibaur, would soon become the prophet's friend and companion.
Neibaur has received little detailed study by Mormon historians, and his knowledge of Kabbalah has earned only an occasional passing footnote in Mormon historical work.121 Neibaur was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1808, but during his later childhood the family apparently returned to their original home in eastern Prussia (now part of Poland). His father, Nathan Neibaur, was a physician and dentist, who family sources claim, was a personal physician to the Napoleon Bonapart and whose skill as a linguist made him of "great value" to Napoleon as an interpreter (claims perhaps inflated by posterity). Like his father, Alexander became fluent in several languages, including French, German, Hebrew, and later, English. He also read Latin and Greek. Family tradition claims that as the first child and eldest son, his father wished him to become a rabbi, and that the young Neibaur was begun in rabbincal training. However, at age seventeen he instead entered the University of Berlin to study dentistry, and completed his studies around 1828. Sometime shortly afterwards, he converted to Christianity and migrated to Preston, England. There he established a dental practice and married in 1833. In mid-summer 1837, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Joseph Fielding arrived in Preston. Neibaur had been troubled by several dreams about a mysterious book, and his first question for Joseph Smith's apostles was whether they had a "book" for him--which of course they did. He was baptized with his family the next spring. On 5 February 1841 they departed for Nauvoo, arriving in Quincy, Illinois, on 17 April. Four days later Neibaur met Joseph Smith, and on 26 April he notes in his journal, "went to work for J. Smith." Two day later he acquired a quarter-acre lot in Nauvoo, and on 1 June moved his family into their newly complete Nauvoo home on Water Street, a few blocks from Joseph Smith's residence.122
Where and how Neibaur first came in contact with Kabbalah remains a mystery, though a careful evaluation of his history and personal travels offers a few hints. Given his father's position, his childhood in western Poland, his studies in Berlin and his subsequent conversion to Christianity, some contact with a reservoir of Kabbalistic knowledge among Sabbatean or Frankist Jews should be considered.123 If he did indeed undertake rabbical studies in Poland prior to his university education, he could not have avoided some exposure to the subject. That Neibaur brought a knowledge of Kabbalah to Nauvoo has been mentioned in several studies of the period. For instance, Newel and Avery note in their biography of Emma Smith, "Through Alexander Neibaur, Joseph Smith had access to ancient Jewish rites called cabalism at the same time he claimed to be translating the papyri from the Egyptian mummies [which became his Book of Abraham]."124 That he not only knew something of Kabbalah, but apparently possessed a collection of original Jewish Kabbalistic works in Nauvoo, is however documented in material almost totally overlooked by Mormon historians.
In June 1843, Neibaur published in Times and Seasons a short piece entitled "The Jews." The work ran in two installments, in the issues of 1 June and 15 June. As to why he wrote this piece, he states only that his effort was inspired by a talk he had heard Joseph Smith present.125 His essay deals ostensibly with the concept of resurrection held by the Jews. What he discusses for the most part is, however, the Kabbalist concept of gilgul, the transmigration and rebirth of souls.126 The essay is interesting not because of his comments on resurrection, but because of his repeated citations of classic Jewish Kabbalistic texts. In the course of his four-page piece, Neibaur cites over two dozen texts and authors. Of the citations I have been able to identify, at least ten are to Kabbalistic authors or works.127 The tone of the entire piece, and the authoritative use of Kabbalistic materials, suggests Neibaur's respect for Kabbalah.
Neibaur's notations to these Medieval and Renaissance Jewish works illustrates that he probably both possessed the texts and had a general knowledge of their contents. Although transliterations of Hebrew into English remain variable even in modern publications, Neibaur's renderings into English of the titles and authors cited are fairly consistent and accurate to the original Hebrew. The general precision of his numerous citations suggest Neibaur had access to the works he quoted.128 Included among his citations are several "classic" Kabbalistic texts--the most important Jewish Kabbalistic manuscripts circulated between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries--works such as the Zohar, Midrash Ha-Neelam, Menorat ha Ma'or, Emek ha-Melekh, and the 'Avodat ha-Kodesh, as well as a few rarer documents. Much of the material he cites was available only in Hebrew, and to this date has not been translated and published. By any standard, these were unusual works to possess on the American frontier, and certainly an extraordinary collection of texts to be found in the prophet Joseph's Nauvoo.
Joseph Smith and Alexander Neibaur were frequent associates. Neibaur had been engaged by Joseph a few days after his arrival in Nauvoo in April 1841. During the last months of the prophet's life, both his and Neibaur's diaries indicate that Neibaur read with and tutored Smith in Hebrew and German.129 Given this friendly relationship, the interests of the prophet, and the background of Neibaur--and perhaps even the books in Neibaur's library--it seems inconceivable that discussions of Kabbalah did not take place. Kabbalah was the mystical tradition of Judaism, the tradition which claimed to be custodian of the secrets God revealed to Adam. These secrets were occultly conveyed by the oral tradition of Kabbalah throughout the ages--so it was claimed--until finally finding written expression in the Zohar and the commentaries of the medieval Kabbalists, books Neibaur possessed. Kabbalah was the custodian of an occult re-reading of Genesis and the traditions of Enoch, it contained the secrets of Moses. And it was a subject that Joseph Smith had probably already crossed in different versions several times in his life. Can anyone familiar with the history and personality of Joseph Smith--the prophet who restored the secret knowledge and rituals conveyed to Adam, translated the works of Abraham, Enoch, and Moses, and retranslated Genesis--question that he would have been interested in the original version of this Jewish occult tradition? And here, in Neibaur, was a man who could share a version of that knowledge with him.
Whatever the reasons for the similarities, it should be remembered that the Hermetic-Kabbalistic world view parallels Joseph's vision of God in many particulars. Not only might Joseph have been interested in this material, but he would have noted how similar this sacred, secret tradition was with his own restoration of ancient truth. And perhaps Neibaur, on a religious quest--from Judaism and Kabbalah, Europe and England, to Christianity and Mormonism and a new home in Nauvoo--saw or even amplified that intrinsic sympathy in his explications of the tradition for Joseph.
Certainly the first text Joseph Smith would have confronted was the Zohar, the great heart of the Kabbalah. This is one of the works Neibaur cited repeatedly in his article and, as the central text of Kabbalah, is the key book any individual with Kabbalistic interests would have preserved in his library. Familiarity with the Zoharwas a given for a Kabbalist, particularly one with knowledge of works as divergent as those cited by Neibaur, all of which expounded in some degree upon themes in the Zohar. If Neibaur had read to Joseph from any single text, or explained Kabbalistic concepts contained in a principal book, the Zohar would have been the book with which to start. This might explain why in 1844 Smith, in what may be his single greatest discourse and in the most important public statement of his theosophical vision, apparently quotes almost word for word from the first section of the Zohar.
Kabbalah in Mormon Doctrine: The King Follett Discourse
On Sunday afternoon, 7 April 1844, Joseph Smith stood before a crowd estimated at 10,000 and delivered his greatest sermon, the King Follett Discourse.130 Dissension, rumor, accusation, and conspiracy all abounded in Nauvoo on that pleasant spring day, and Joseph was at the center. This would be Joseph's last conference, ten weeks later he lay murdered at Carthage Jail. In this atmosphere of tension, many in the congregation probably expected a message of conciliation, a retrenchment. Instead, the prophet stunned listeners with his most audacious public discourse--a declaration replete with doctrinal innovations and strange concepts that many of the Saints had never before heard. As Fawn Brodie noted, "For the first time he proclaimed in a unified discourse the themes he had been inculcating in fragments and frequently in secret to his most favored saints: the glory of knowledge, the multiplicity of gods, the eternal progression of the human soul."131
Van Hale, in his analysis of the discourse's doctrinal impact, notes four declarations made by Joseph Smith which have had an extraordinary and lasting impact on Mormon doctrine: men can become gods; there exist many Gods; the gods exist one above another innumerably; and God was once as man now is.132Interestingly, these were all concepts that could, by various exegetical approaches, be found in the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. But even more astoundingly, it appears Joseph actually turned to the Zohar for help in supporting his introduction of these radical doctrinal assertions.
The prophet begins his discussion of the plurality and hierarchy of the Gods with an odd exegesis of the first words of Genesis, Bereshith bara Elohim:
By any literate interpretation of Hebrew, this is an impossible reading. Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object, the thing which received the action of creation. Bereshith ("in the beginning") is reinterpreted to become Roshith, the "head" or "Head Father of the Gods," who is the subject-actor creating Elohim.134 And Elohim he interprets not as God, but as "the Gods." Louis C. Zucker, who published an insightful examination of Smith's study and use of Hebrew, notes that this translation deviates entirely from the interpretative convention Joseph had learned as a student of Hebrew in Kirtland. Joshua Seixas, the professor who had instructed Joseph and the School of the Prophets in early 1836, used in his classes a textbook he had written, Hebrew grammar for the Use of Beginners.135 In the Seixas manual (p. 85), this Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 is given along with a "correct" word-for-word translation: "In the beginning, he created, God, the heavens, and the earth." Seixas would not have introduced in his oral instruction a translation entirely alien to the conventions of his own textbook. Zucker comments on Smith's strange translation of the verse: "Joseph, with audacious independence, changes the meaning of the first word, and takes the third word `Eloheem' as literally plural. He ignores the rest of the verse, and the syntax he imposes on his artificial three-word statement is impossible."136I suppose I am not allowed to go into an investigation of anything that is not contained in the Bible. . . . I will go to the old Bible and turn commentator today. I will go to the very first Hebrew word--BERESHITH--in the Bible and make a comment on the first sentence of the history of creation: "In the beginning. . . ." I want to analyze the word BERESHITH. BE--in, by, through, and everything else; next, ROSH--the head; ITH. Where did it come from? When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the first part--the BE--there; but a man--a Jew without any authority---put it there. He thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head of any man. It read in the first: "The Head One of the Gods brought forth the Gods." This is the true meaning of the words. ROSHITH [BARA ELOHIM] signifies [the Head] to bring forth the Elohim. If you do not believe it you do not believe the learned man of God. No learned man can tell you any more than what I have told you. Thus, the Head God brought forth the Head Gods in the grand, head council.133
But Zucker (along with Mormon historians generally) ignored another exegesis of this verse--an exegesis which was a basic precept of Jewish Kabbalah from the thirteenth century on and which agrees, word for word, with Joseph's reading.137 In the tradition of Kabbalah, Bereshith bara Elohim was most emphatically not an "artificial three-word statement," as Zucker implied. Gershom Scholem, in the middle of a long discussion, explains this other view:
Scholem's point is perhaps made clearer by restatement. In the Zohar, and in the commentaries of the majority of older (that is, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Kabbalists), the verse Bereshith bara Elohim is grammatically turned around. Bereshith is understood to refer to the Sefirah of Hokhmah, translated as "Wisdom" and identified in Kabbalistic theosophy as the Supernal Father--the figure who is usually interpreted in Kabbalah as the First of the Godhead. Hokhmah then emanates, or "creates" in the sense of unfolding, theElohim.139 As Scholem notes, the interesting thing here is that Elohim has become the object of the sentence, and is no longer the subject. This is precisely Joseph Smith's reading.The Zohar, and indeed the majority of the older Kabbalists, questioned the meaning of the first verse of the Torah: Bereshith bara Elohim, "In the beginning created God"; what actually does this mean? The answer is fairly surprising. We are told that it means Bereshith--through the medium of the "beginning," [Hokhmah, or "Wisdom," the primordial image of the Father God in the Kabbalistic Sefiroth]--bara, created, that is to say, the hidden Nothing which constitutes the grammatical subject of the word bara, emanated or unfolded,--Elohim, that is to say, its emanation is Elohim. It [Elohim] is the object, and not the subject of the sentence.138
This interpretation of Genesis 1:1 is not deeply hidden in the Zohar, but constitutes its opening paragraphs, and is the central concern of the entire first section of this long book. The Zohar begins with a commentary onBereshith bara Elohim:
So far this is exactly Joseph Smith's reading. In his exegesis Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object which received the action of creation from the first god-image (here calledReshith), just as does the Zohar. Indeed, his words as transcribed by William Clayton, "Rosheet signifies to bring forth the Eloheim," are almost identical with the Zohar's phrasing of the interpretation.142It is written: And the intelligent shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever. There was indeed a "brightness" [Zohar].140 The Most Mysterious struck its void, and caused this point to shine. This "beginning" [Reshith] then extended, and made for itself a palace for its honour and glory. . . . Thus by means of this "beginning" [Reshith] the Mysterious Unknown made this palace. This palace is called Elohim, and this doctrine is contained in the words, "By means of a beginning [Reshith, it,] created Elohim."141
In his next step of translation, Smith interprets Bereshith to become Rosh, the "head" or head God. As Zucker objected, orthodox standards of translations do not yield the word Rosh, or "head," from Bereshith.But it was not "audacious independence" alone that led Smith to changed the meaning. A basis for this reading is actually found in the next verse of the Zohar: By a Kabbalistic cipher of letters--a technique used in Kabbalah to conceal deeper esoteric meanings--the Zohar explains that the word Reshith "is anagrammatically Rosh (head), the beginning which issues from Reshith."143 (To understand the fuller intent of this phrase, one must again remember that Rosh or reshith is here interpreted by Kabbalah to be Hokhmah,the first god-image, the Supernal Father.) Thus in this text Reshith has been interposed as an anagram forRosh--who is understood to be the "Head God," Hokhmah. Could this be what Joseph means when he says "a man, a Jew without authority" changed the reading of the word, perhaps by failing to understand this ancient Kabbalistic anagram?
Finally, Smith translates Elohim in the plural, as "the Gods." The word is indeed in a plural Hebrew form, but by the orthodox interpretative conventions Joseph was taught in his Kirtland Hebrew class (which remain the norm) it is read as singular. In the Zohar, however, it is interpreted in the plural. This is witnessed throughout the Zohar and appears clearly in the following paragraph from the opening sections of the work, where the phrase "Let us make man" (Gen. 1:26) is used as the basis for a discussion on the plurality of the gods:
Within this passage is both the concept of plurality and of the hierarchy of Gods acting "with the permission and direction of the one above it, while the one above did nothing without consulting its colleague." This interpretation is of course echoed in the King Follett discourse and became a foundation for all subsequent Mormon theosophy."Us" certainly refers to two, of which one said to the other above it, "let us make," nor did it do anything save with the permission and direction of the one above it, while the one above did nothing without consulting its colleague. But that which is called "the Cause above all causes," which has no superior or even equal, as it is written, "To whom shall ye liken me, that I should be equal?" (Is. 40:25), said, "See now that I, I am he, and Elohim is not with me," from whom he should take counsel. . . . Withal the colleagues explained the word Elohim in this verse as referring to other gods.144
Two months after giving the King Follett Discourse, Joseph returned to these first Hebrew words of Genesis and the subject of plural Gods. Thomas Bullock transcribed his remarks on the rainy Sunday morning of 16 June 1844. This was to be Joseph's last public proclamation on doctrine; eleven days later he lay dead. Joseph first introduced his subject--the plurality of Gods--then again read in Hebrew the opening words of Genesis and repeated his interpretation of Bereshith bara Elohim, using much the same phrasing recorded two months earlier in the King Follett Discourse. He then turned to Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man," the same passage interpreted in the Zohar to imply a plurality of Gods. After reading the verse aloud in Hebrew, he interpreted the text and found in it the same occult import given by the Zohar: The God "which has no superior or equal" (the Zohar's words), the "Head one of the Gods" (Joseph's term) addressed the "other Gods," Elohim in the plural translation, saying "let us make man." Bullock transcribed his remarks thus: "if we pursue the Heb further it reads [here he apparently read in Hebrew Genesis 1:26] The Head one of the Gods said let us make man in our image. . . . in the very beginning there is a plurality of Gods--beyond power of refutation--it is a great subject I am dwelling on--the word Eloiheam ought to be in the plural all the way thro."145
As he began his exegesis of the opening Hebrew phrase of Genesis in the King Follett Discourse, Joseph stated that he would go to the "old Bible." In Kabbalistic lore, the commentary of the Zohar represented the oldest biblical interpretation, the secret interpretation imparted by God to Adam and all worthy prophets after him. Joseph certainly was not using the knowledge of Hebrew imparted to him in Kirtland nine years earlier when he gave his exegesis of Bereshith bara Elohim, or plural interpretation of Elohim. Was then the "old Bible" he used the Zohar? And was the "learned man of God" he mentioned Simeon ben Yochai, the prophetic teacher attributed with these words in the Zohar?
Joseph wove Hebrew into several of his discourses during the final year of his life. In these late Nauvoo discourses, however, he interpreted the Hebrew not as a linguist but as a Kabbalist--a reflection of his own predilections and of the fortuitous aid of his tutor, Alexander Neibaur.146 But in conclusion, we need to step back from this discussion of words and see that behind them resides a unique vision, a vision characteristic of the occult Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. Harold Bloom called the King Follett Discourse "one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America." It is also a remarkable evidence of the prophet's visionary ties to the archaic legacy of Jewish Gnosticism and to the single most influential force in the evolution of Christian occultism: the Kabbalah.
Kabbalah after Joseph: A Legacy Misunderstood
Kabbalistic theosophy was, if nothing else, complex. Different interpretations abounded among Christian Kabbalists removed from the original Kabbalistic foundations of Jewish culture and halakhic observance. We can imagine how easily such ideas might have been misunderstood by a concretely minded Yankee disciple of Joseph Smith. This may help explain a troubling conundrum of early Mormon theology: Brigham Young's assertion that "Adam is God." Brigham claimed that Joseph had taught him this doctrine--although there is no evidence that Joseph ever publicly avowed such a view.147 In Kabbalah the theme is, however, prominent:Adam Kadmon is indeed "God," and His form is in the image of a Man--as noted earlier. Given the evidence that Joseph did know some elements of Kabbalah and had access both to the Zohar and to a Jew familiar with a wide range of Kabbalistic materials, it seems probable that Brigham heard this concept in some form from Joseph. The Adam-God doctrine may have been a misreading (or simplistic restatement) by Brigham Young of a Kabbalistic and Hermetic concept relayed to him by the prophet.
More than one element in early Mormon theology suggests that subtle visions could be made grossly concrete. Perhaps the most striking example is sacral nature of marital sexual union and the human potential for multiple sacred marriages, a potential shared in Joseph's time by both women and men. As Bloom noted, in Kabbalah and perhaps in Smith's practice "the function of sanctified human sexual intercourse essentially is theurgical."148This was an important undertone in the wider circles of Christian occultism, eventually manifest in several occult Masonic societies. How Joseph interacted with this tradition and vision is the single most interesting and important issue awaiting historians of Mormonism. That this was an issue early in his life is witnessed by the need to marry and have Emma with him prior to obtaining the golden plates of the Book of Mormon.149 That the preoccupation persisted throughout his life needs little argument. Ideas of sacred sexuality permeated Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy, perhaps touching even the mystical vision of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in his overtly Masonic opera, The Magic Flute: "Mann und Weib, Weib und Man; Reichen an die Gottheit an!" ("Man and Woman, Woman and Man, Together they approximate the Divine!").150 By investigating in depth the legacy of ideas and experiences of Kabbalah and Christian occultism, we might begin to understand this perplexing vision shared by the prophet Joseph Smith.
That Kabbalistic ideas persisted among Joseph's disciples is suggested in an intriguing piece of evidence appearing three years after the prophet's martyrdom. To understand this item, a more detailed understanding of Kabbalah as Joseph may have heard it is necessary. Briefly summarized: the most important symbolic representation of the structure of "the Kingdom of God" in Kabbalah was the "Tree of the Sefiroth" (See Figure 1 and 2.). The Tree was re-drawn by Robert Fludd (an important English Kabbalist and Rosicrucian of the seventeenth century) in a slightly different fashion.151 (See Figure 12.) In his figure, Fludd uses the allegorical image of a Tree with roots in heaven above and palm-like "branches" at the bottom (in the Sefirah ofMalkhuth, meaning "Foundation"), extending into the earth. The tree is crowned; the crown representingKether (meaning "Crown"), the first Sefirah and primal god-image. Below this crown, the tree branches into the other nine Sefiroth.
In the Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star in 1847 an interesting figure appears, titled "A Diagram of the Kingdom of God" (Figure 12).152 The artist and author of this small piece was probably Orson Hyde. Hyde's tree is also crowned, and branches in precisely the fashion of Fludd's tree. The only difference is that the Hyde tree has twenty-two branches. This is a remarkable choice of numbers, as any student of Kabbalah will recognize. In Kabbalah there are two important numerical aspects of the Tree of Sefiroth: the first is the number ten, the number of Sefiroth, the second is the number twenty-two, the number of paths between theSefiroth, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus Joseph Smith may have conveyed to one his apostles--or Hyde may have independently found compatible with the prophet's teachings--the most essential symbolic element of Kabbalah, the "mystical shape of the Godhead" contained in the image of the Sefiroth as redrawn by a principal and very influential seventeenth-century Christian Kabbalist, Fludd.
That interest in the subject of Kabbalah and Hermeticism persisted in at least one disciple of Smith's is witnessed by William Clayton. Clayton was Smith's personal secretary and one of his intimate associates during the prophet's last years in Nauvoo.153 Few, if any, individuals had a closer view of Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo period. This may explain Clayton's otherwise unusual interest in Kabbalah and alchemy manifest in his later years. In 1864 someone in Utah loaned Clayton a guidebook of "Cabala," a tract apparently containing several advertisements for esoteric materials relating to "Cabala" and alchemy. As one of Clayton's biographers write, "Though the record is not clear, it may be that . . . he wanted . . . something akin to the so-called Philosopher's Stone of the ancient alchemists--a substance that supposedly enabled the adept, when applied correctly, to transmute metals." Clayton subsequently organized an alchemical society in Salt Lake City, with himself as corresponding secretary, and purchased several mail-order alchemical outfits. The group, which numbered at least twenty-six members, spent months attempting to transmute metals without success before finally abandoning their project.154 Though it appears Clayton was simply duped by a mail-order shyster, his esoteric interests and his faith in them might also be explained by some recollection he harbored about Kabbalah and the prophet in Nauvoo.
Conclusion: Joseph and the Occult Connection
In attempting to understand Joseph Smith and his religious vision, historians have examined both the religious sparks kindled by his time and the social soils from which the young prophet sprang. As useful as some of these efforts have been, I still agree with Paul Edwards: our methods so far have been too "traditional and unimaginative" to comprehend Joseph's history; we remain, even now, blinded by the fears of yesterday--or biased by its erroneous judgments. Chief among the subjects that might be "feared" in Mormon history is Joseph's apparent recurrent association with the "occult" traditions of Western spirituality, and this remains the area of his history least examined and understood. It is impossible for me to present fresh evidence which seemingly links Joseph Smith to what might be interpreted as "the occult" without addressing this wider issue.
The historical record witnesses that Joseph Smith had some intercourse with at least three important manifestations of the alternative and non-orthodox religious traditions that blossomed in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period, traditions sometimes labeled as "the occult": ceremonial magic, Masonry, and Kabbalah. These associations extended throughout his life, and his liaison with each constituted more than casual acquaintance. This is an area of history to which Mormon historians have been hesitant to turn full attention--an area where our fears (or ignorance) have delimited our understanding.
It would be foolish at this late date to maintain that any single tradition engendered Joseph Smith's religious vision. Joseph was an American original--and we need not fear him being cast as a Masonic pundit, folk magician, Rosicrucian mystic, medieval Kabbalist, or ancient Gnostic. Nonetheless, we must recognize that something in the nature of the prophet, some element of his own intrinsic vision, did resonate with the occult traditions of the Western spiritual quest. Into the spirit and matter of his religious legacy, he wove these sympathies. Joseph carried his silver talisman, inscribed with the sigil of Jupiter and Hebrew letters cast in a magic square, upon his person to his death. He called Masonry a remnant of true priesthood, and over a thousand of his men in Nauvoo, including nearly every then current or future priesthood leader of his nascent church, went through the three separate steps of ritual initiation leading to the degree of Master Mason. In his last months, amid dissension and danger, he found time to sit and read Hebrew and perhaps study Kabbalah and the Zohar with Alexander Neibaur. In April 1844, when his congregation expected retrenchment and reconciliation, he turned to that Hebrew, and bequeathed to his disciples an extraordinary vision of God--a theosophical pronouncement which echoed the tones of Kabbalah even to the ear of a critic so far removed in time and culture as Harold Bloom.
It is this last link--Joseph's sympathy for Kabbalah--which may be the key that finally unlocks a pattern, and opens a new methodology for understanding the prophet Joseph Smith. As Richard Bushman noted:
Joseph Smith did indeed bring into America elements of an ancient culture--but that culture was not temporally very distant from the prophet. When Joseph was introduced to Jewish Kabbalah in its classic form in Nauvoo, he found--consciously or unconsciously--the fiber of a thread woven throughout the fabric of his life. The magic he met as a youth, the prophetic reinterpretation of scripture and opening of the canon to divine revelation, the Masonic symbol system: all of these were reflections of an heterodox Hermetic religious tradition that had persisted in various occult fashions within the Western religious tradition for centuries, a tradition of which Kabbalah was a most important part. Call the tradition "occult" if you wish--certainly to survive it was at times hidden--but do not error by seeing it as simply a legacy of ideas from which the young prophet might pick and choose.The power of Enlightenment skepticism had far less influence on Joseph Smith. . . . Joseph told of the visits of angels, of direct inspiration, of a voice in the chamber of Father Whitmer, without embarrassment. He prized the Urim and Thummim and the seerstone, never repudiating them even when the major charge against him was that he used magic to find buried money. His world was not created by Enlightenment rationalism with its deathly aversion to superstition. The Prophet brought into modern America elements of a more ancient culture in which the sacred and the profane intermingled and the Saints enjoyed supernatural gifts and powers as the frequent blessing of an interested God.155
This tradition--as is now well accepted by scholars--was driven by the phenomenon of a rare human experience. As interwoven into Hermeticism, Kabbalah was a tradition not just of theosophic assertions, but of return to prophetic vision. For a millennium or more--perhaps dating all the way back to the suppressed heresy of the Gnostics--men and women within this larger tradition asserted the reality of their vision--and sometimes even used what now seems modern psychological insight in dealing with their experiences.156Individuals caught in this experience not uncommonly saw themselves as prophets, though the force of the tradition sought to maintain a balance in the face of such realizations. Many of them thought themselves kings and queens before God, and some openly proclaimed their royalty.157 They probed the mystery of Adam and Eve, and primal creation, they embraced rituals and symbols as non-verbal expressions of ineffable insights. Their sexuality was sacralized, and not infrequently their sacred sexual practices ranged beyond the bounds of expression accepted by the societies of their times. Their most sacred mystery, the great mysterium coniunctionis, was sometimes ecstatically mirrored in the holy union of a man and a women. They authored pseudoepigraphic works, invoking ancient voices as their own. They told new stories about God because for them God was a living story: and they found their own lives mingled within a story being told by a living God. When Joseph sought a mirror to understand himself he found reflections in a history not so distant as that of ancient Israel. His story, the prophet's story, lived within the occult legacy of his time. He touched that legacy often, and he saw in it the image--even if dimmed and distorted--of a priesthood he shared.
Joseph Smith's life reflected the nature of an unusual human experience, and to understand his history we must understand his experience in the context of history. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dedicated the last half of his long life to elucidating the nature and psychological insights of the Kabbalistic-Hermetic-alchemical tradition. He felt it held the pearl of great price, the treasure forgotten by Christianity in its enlightened Protestant evolution. It was at the Eranos conferences dominated by Jung, that Gershom Scholem, the preeminent pioneer of Kabbalistic studies, opened the eyes of Western scholarship to the tradition's import in our history.158 Moshe Idel, Scholem's brilliant and independent protégé, has subsequently reaffirmed the value of a psychological perception in understanding its phenomena.159 With insights augmented by Scholem's work, the historian Francis Yates pioneered a new understanding of the vast influence of the occult tradition in Renaissance and Reformation culture.160 And recently Harold Bloom has pointed to its import in the creative vision of more modern times.161 Perhaps the thrust of this scholarship is now reaching the cloisters of Mormon history. But should that indeed be the case, Mormon historians must understand that they are embarking into a different methodology of history. A prophet's history flows from two springs, one above and one below, both melding in currents of his life. What story from above the prophet may have heard will remain his secret, the history no man knows. But by turning to the larger realm of prophetic history and its occult legacy, the record of its aspirations, its symbols and lore, and the enigmatic histories of the women and men who have been caught in this unique human experience, we may begin to find a methodology that leads us with new wonder into the unknown history of Joseph Smith.
Appendix: Alexander Neibaur's Library
Below is a summary of citations given by Alexander Neibaur in his article "The Jews," Times and Seasons 4 (1 June 1843): 220-22, and 4 (15 June 1843): 233-34. They are listed in order of first occurrence in his text. When an author or text is cited more than once, only the first is listed. These citations include several of the "classic" Kabbalistic texts circulated between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries--works such as theZohar, Menorat ha Ma'or, Emek ha-Melekh, and the 'Avodat ha-Kodesh--as well as a few rarer documents. I have noted several citations to these important texts in recent of Kabbalah by Moshe Idel and Gershom Scholem.
"Rabbi Manasse Ben Israel says in Nishmath Cajim": R. Manasseh Ben Israel, Nishmat Hayyim, a work published in Amsterdam in 1652 in defense of the Kabbalistic concept ofgilgul, the transmigration of souls. (Neibaur specifically mentions the term "Gilgool".) (Scholem,Kabbalah, 349.)
"R. Issac Aberhaph in his Menorat Hamorr": Israel al-Nakawa is the true author of this important fourteenth-century work, Menorat ha Ma'or. I have not yet identified the author cited by Neibaur, "R. Aberhaph," which is apparently in error. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 66.)
"R. Baccay" (later cited as "R. Bacay" and "Rabbi Bachay"): Possibly R. Samson Bacchi of Casale Monferrato. A seventeenth-century Italian Jew and Kabbalist, and a disciple of the leading Kabbalist in Italy, R. Moses Zacuto. R. Bacchi had intimate knowledge of the Sabbatean movement and several associations with followers of Sabbatai Sevi. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi,501-3) He had studied Lurianic Kabbalah with one of Luria's disciples, Joseph ibn Tabul. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 424.) Another possibility is the twelfth-century philosopher Bachya Ben Joseph ibn Pakuda.
"R. Isaac Abarbanel": R. Isaac Abrabanel (or Abravanel) was a prominent commentator on Kabbalistic eschatology and messianism active in late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Idel notes Abarvanel as one of the commentators who tended to add a Platonic interpretation to Kabbalistic ideas. (Idel, Kabbalah, 3, 144, 281; Scholem, Kabbalah, 71; Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 14.)
"R. D. Kimchi": R. David Kimchi, a thirteenth-century grammarian and biblical commentator.
"Rabbi Naphtali in Emakhamelek": Emek ha-Melekh by Naphtali Bacharach, published in 1648 and considered "one of the most important kabbalistic works." A German kabbalist active in the first half of the seventeenth century, "Bacharach appears as an enthusiastic and fanatical kabbalist, with a special flair for the mystical and non-philosophical traits of Kabbalah. . . . The book Emek ha-Melekh had a great impact on the development of the late Kabbalah. It was widely recognized as an authoritative source on the doctrine of Isaac Luria, and kabbalists from many countries . . . quoted him extensively. His influence is also noticeable in Sabbatean literature" (Scholem, Kabbalah, 394-95).
"Jalkut Kodosh" (later cited "Jalkut Kadash" and "Talkut Kadash"): Yalqut Khadash, a seventeenth-century anthology of Kabbalistic material. This anthology contained a most interesting text on the mystical and salvific intention of sexual union between male and female (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 61-62).
"Medrash Neelam": Midrash Ha-Neelam is a principal section of the Zohar, the central Kabbalistic collection of esoteric teachings. Scholem argues that it may be temporally one of the oldest constituent sections of the Zohar (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 181-88).
"R. Joseph Albo": Spanish philosopher and Kabbalist (ca. 1380-ca. 1435) whose principal work, Sepher ha-Ikkarim, achieved considerable popularity with both scholars and laymen. (Idel, Kabbalah, 144.)
"Aphkat Rackel" (later also cited as "Ophkat Rochel"): Abkat Rokhel, a Kabbalistic book in circulation in the seventeenth century (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 661n.)
"R. Jacanan": R. Yohanan ben Zakkai is a Talmudic figure, and this reference is most likely to him.
"Talmuh Tract Sanhedrin": Talmudic text. (Idel, Kabbalah, 403.)
"Bereshith Rabba": The Bereshith rabbati by R. Moses ben Isaac ha-Darshan of Narbonne, France (eleventh century). (Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 156). R. Moses was a primary source of early gematriot, the cipher of letters to find hidden meanings in scripture. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 338.)
"R. Levi ber Gerohonon": Levi ben Gershon (also Gershom or Gersonides) lived in the South of France (1288-1344), and is often considered the greatest Jewish philosopher after Maimonides. Working in an intellectual atmosphere charged with Kabbalistic and Aristotelian influences, he authored philosophic and scientific works which had a wide influence.
"R. Jonathan": Not yet identified.
"Talmud Tract Resokim": Talmudic text.
"R. Elias": Not yet identified.
"Rabbi Akiba": R. Akiba (or, R. 'Akiva), a second-century Jewish hero and early midrashic commentator, revered in later commentary to have been a source of both halakhic and esoteric knowledge. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 78-79).
"Avodath Hakodash" (also cited as "Abodah Hakadash"): 'Avodat ha-Kodesh, by R. Meir ibn Gabbay. Written in 1531 in "Palestine or Egypt by the leading kabbalist of the generation before Luria" (Scholem, Sevi, 47), this is a "classic exposition of theosophical kabbalah" (Idel,Kabbalah, 399), and "made an especially impressive summary of the teachings of the earlier Kabbalists" (Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 81). It was published in Venice in 1566 (Scholem, Sevi, 47). Ibn Gabbay in this and other works developed the theurgic concept of man as divine in form, influencing the divine. (Idel, Kabbalah, 176).
"Talmud Tract Ketuboth": Talmudic text.
"Sohar": The primary text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. The first printed edition of the Zoharappeared almost simultaneously in two different place, Mantua and Cremona, in 1588-90. Several later editions appeared, but the Mantua edition had the widest influence, and most subsequent editions were based on its text. Portions of the Zohar appeared in Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin Kabbalah Denudata, first published at Sulzbach in 1677.
"Rabbi Simeon, son of Jacay": R. Simeon b. Yochai, the central figure in the text of the principal Kabbalistic text, the Zohar.
"Pesikta Raba": This is the Pesiqta Rabbathi, one of the late midrashim, notable for the impressive eschatological sections and messianic exegesis. This particular midrash was important to Sabbateans, who used sections of it to explain the messianic burden born by Sabbatai Sevi. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 54, 146, 175.)
"Rabbi Jehuda": Not yet identified.
"Rabbi Joshua ben Menaser": Not yet identified.
"The Book Siphri": Sifrei, a midrashic-talmudic text. (M. Idel, Kabbalah, 403.)
"Book Rad Hakemah": Possibly Kad ha-Kemah by Bachya Ibn Pakuda, a thirteenth-century philospher whose work had a strong spiritual affinity with the Arab mystics, and influenced subsequent Jewish mysticism.
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Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
by Lance S. Owens
Part 3: Includes pages 166 - 194 (end)
Prophet and Freemasonry
Whatever one concludes about the varied hints of scattered early associations with Hermeticism, Joseph Smith had well-documented connections with one of the tradition's major legacies, Masonry. The prophet's associations with the Masonic tradition are thoroughly documented and discussed by Michael W. Homer in this issue of Dialogue. It is unlikely that Smith would have so fully involved himself and his church with the Masonic tradition if he had not sensed therein some intrinsic compatibility with his own religion-making vision. As Homer demonstrates, the prophet said that Masonry was "taken from priesthood," and his followers continued quoting that observation for fifty years after.104 It is possible that Joseph's interpretation of Masonry as a legacy of ancient priesthood was based in his own understanding of a history extending back hundreds of years, a history entwined with the Hermetic mythos and with Kabbalah, alchemy, and Rosicrucianism. The alliance of this occult legacy with Masonry was well understood by esoterically-inclined Masons; assertions of such links were bandied about by American anti-Masonic publications in the late 1820s.105 As noted, Joseph's own history several times touched Hermetic-Kabbalistic traditions. One could argue that he even interacted with them in a creative, visionary sense.
Joseph's contacts with the Hermetic mythos were sufficient to generate vague assumptions about Masonry's earlier roots, and these assumptions could have been an historical subtext to his remarks about Masonry being a remnant of ancient priesthood. Interestingly, modern historical examination of the occult tradition suggests a shadow of truth in Joseph's statement: Kabbalah and Hermeticism, as representatives of a historical stream of occult knowledge (or as reservoirs of Gnosticism) did claim ancient lineages of "priesthood." Joseph had every reason to take those claims seriously, as do historians today, albeit within a narrower interpretive context. In this light, Joseph's connection to Masonry takes on several different shades of meaning.
The ubiquitous influence of Kabbalah upon the occult traditions of the nineteenth century has been stressed, but its specific import in Masonry requires repeated emphasis. Noted historian of occultism Arthur Edward Waite suggested in his 1923 encyclopedia of Freemasonry that much of the "great" and "incomprehensible" heart of Masonry came from Kabbalah, "the Secret Tradition of Israel."106 He finds such important Masonic symbols as the Lost Word, the Temple of Solomon, the pillars Jachin and Boaz, the concept of the Master-Builder, and restoration of Zion, all derived from the lore of Kabbalah. The organizer of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America, Albert Pike, manifested a similar sentiment and indexed over seventy entries to the subject of Kabbalah in his classic nineteenth-century study, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.107 Though Pike's work was published in 1871, his views reflected lore already established in Masonry during the period of Joseph Smith's Masonic initiations three decades earlier. Indeed, one of the earliest documentary mentions of Masonry appearing in 1691 specifically linked it with these Jewish traditions.108
As Homer notes, the Scottish Rite developed by Pike was an evolution of the eighteenth-century French Masonic Rite de Perfection, which in several degrees was influenced by Kabbalah.109 Kabbalah's importance in Masonic lore is also witnessed by Maritnez de Pasqually and his late-eighteenth century Kabbalistic-Masonic restoration of ancient priesthood in the Order of Les Elus Cohen. Much of this Kabbalistic influence upon Masonry may have come from Rosicrucianism (again recalling their close association), infused as it was with alchemical and Kabbalistic symbolism. But some additional influence might be attributed to esoteric sources like the Frankist movement. The Frankist--followers of Jacob Frank, and successors to the Kabbalistically inclined Sabbatean heresy--had become active in Central European Masonic organizations in the late eighteenth century.110 Given the wide diffusion of a Christianized and Rosicrucian version of Kabbalah into Masonry, Joseph Smith probably heard something about the tradition during the course of his almost twenty-year association with Masons and Freemasonry.
It might be argued that these occult Masonic inclinations were all part of a sophisticated, esoteric form of European Masonry foreign to the world of frontier America. To the contrary--and though not yet fully investigated--there are several reasons to believe that what Joseph Smith encountered in Nauvoo was an esoteric interpretation of Masonry. As mentioned earlier, between the mid-eighteenth and the beginnings of the nineteenth century a multitude of occult orders rose from Masonry. Each of these tended to develop its own interrelated system of symbolic ceremonies for conveying distinct esoteric visions. The different rites also often claimed variant "authentic" Masonic origins: in ancient Egyptian mysteries; in the lineages of the medieval Knights Templar; in Kabbalistic transmissions; and in Hermetic-alchemical-Rosicrucian traditions. Robert Macoy's 1872 encyclopedia of Freemasonry cataloged over forty-five distinct systems of Masonic rites developed during the period from 1750 to 1820.111 In retrospect one might suggest that during this unusual epoch a creatively elite group of individuals coming from many sectors of society encountered in the Masonic mythos a new medium for expressing their visions. Though basic York rite (or Blue Lodge) Masonry with its three degrees was a common grounding for most of these, around that foundation appeared many layerings of esoteric accretions. With the tools of allegory, symbol, and imagination, and in a format suggesting great mysterious antiquity, men touched by the Masonic mythos began producing new "ancient" rituals. One is reminded of Ireneaus' complaint about the Gnostics responding to the creative muse of their times: "every one of them generates something new, day by day, according to his ability; for no one is deemed mature, who does not develop . . . some mighty fiction."112
John C. Bennett, one of the more enigmatic figures in Mormon history, was the indisputable impetus to Masonry's introduction in Nauvoo. Bennett's mercurial career among the Mormons has fascinated and bewildered historians. Seemingly from out of the blue, Bennett appeared in Nauvoo and was baptized into the Mormon church in the summer of 1840. Within less than a year he became mayor of Nauvoo, chancellor of the University of Nauvoo, major general of the Nauvoo Legion, Assistant President of the Mormon church, and an intimate friend and counselor to Joseph Smith. In June 1841, less than three months after becoming Assistant President, he began attempts to organize a Mormon Masonic Lodge. But the Masonry he brought to Nauvoo had several unusual occult aspects. Less than a year later, he made an equally dramatic exit, excommunicated amid a flurry of allegations suggesting widespread sexual improprieties.
By the time he arrived in Nauvoo, the thirty-five-year-old Bennett had attended Athens state university; studied medicine with his uncle, the prominent frontier doctor and Ohio historian, Dr. Samuel Hildreth; helped to found educational institutions in West Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio; organized at Willoughby College the medical school and served as first dean and professor of gynecology and children's diseases; been a licensed preacher in Ohio; been appointed brigadier general of the Illinois Invincible Dragoons; and in 1840 become quartermaster general of Illinois state militia.113 He had also apparently abandoned a wife and children, been ejected from at least one Masonic Lodge for unbecoming behavior, and been accused of selling medical degrees. Bennett's interests, including religion, medicine, the military, and Masonry, suggest a person inclined towards investigating the more esoteric aspects of Masonry. His apparent libidinous proclivity may also have aroused his curiosity about unorthodox sexual practices associated with more creative Masonic rites.
Given the relation between Bennett and Smith, Bennett probably had communicated some Masonic ideas to Smith before petitions were made for the formation of a Nauvoo Masonic Lodge in mid-1841. That the temple endowment ceremony developed by Smith in May 1842 was influenced by Masonry cannot escape notice. But beyond the temple endowment, several other components were developing in Joseph's vision during this period that sounded an even stranger resonance with ideas from esoteric Masonic quarters. Two stand out: organization of an "Order of Illuminati" or political Kingdom of God, and introduction of "Spiritual Wifery."114
Bennett claimed that in a revelation dated 7 April 1841--the day before he was made Assistant President of the church--Joseph Smith personally commissioned him to establish an "Order of the Illuminati" in Nauvoo.115Though the organization was not then specifically called by this name, a revelation received by Joseph on 7 April 1842 commanded formation of "The Kingdom of God and His Laws with the keys and powers thereof and judgment in the hands of his servants."116 More commonly called the Council of Fifty, the organization finally took form in March 1844. Joseph was soon thereafter ordained King of the Kingdom, a ritual of coronation also performed for each of the next two presidents of the church, Brigham Young and John Taylor. Whether Bennett got the idea for an order of Illuminati from Smith, or Smith from Bennett, is open to argument. But Ebenezer Robinson, editor of the Nauvoo Times and Seasons until February 1842 and a contemporary observer, thought the stimulus arrived with Bennett: "Heretofore the church had strenuously opposed secret societies such as Freemasons . . . but after Dr. Bennett came into the Church a great change of sentiment seemed to take place."117 Subsequent history links the idea with Bennett. After Smith's death, Bennett sought out the charismatic claimant to Smith's prophetic mantle, James Strang, and convinced him to establish an "Order of the Illuminati."118
The Council of Fifty in Nauvoo manifest a distinctly Masonic character, and Masonic ceremonial elements were incorporated in the council's meetings. A similar tenor emerged in Strang's Order of the Illuminati. It was only a few months after the claimed revelation commissioning him to organize the "Illuminati" at Nauvoo that Bennett initiated efforts to form the Masonic lodge. But Mormon historians have yet to specifically explored implications of another fact: both the name given by Bennett for the organization, "Order of the Illuminati," and the political concept embodied by the organization had a clear Masonic heritage.119 The parallel is so close that one wonders whether Bennett might have brought this and other more esoteric Masonic concepts with him into Nauvoo. At about this same time the practice of "Spiritual wifery" or plural marriage was also introduced. Bennett made several exaggerated claims in his later exposés about libertine sexual practices, claiming the women of Nauvoo were inducted into three ritual orders based on the sexual favors expected of them. Such claims are not tenable, but nonetheless recent historians have noted the apparent association of the Relief Society with Masonry. And Bennett's more slanderous claims aside, it is a fact that the female leaders of the Relief Society in Nauvoo were at one time all wives of Joseph Smith. Whatever the actual relationship to the practices in Nauvoo, Masonic lodges had existed which did indulge in such practices, the most specific example being Cagliostro's Egyptian rite.120 By all reports, Bennett would have intimate interest in this sort of Masonry--or this sort of Mormonism--and it would be hard to imagine him not encouraging Joseph's ideas about new forms of ritual marriage.
In this context, another question lingers: Is it possible Bennett's meteoric rise to prominence in Nauvoo was related to some unsuspected Masonic factor? Did he arrive in Nauvoo claiming independent esoteric lineages of Hermetic or Masonic priesthood, or some ancient and occult knowledge--declarations that Joseph, because of prior life experiences and associations, choose to honor? Though Bennett finally may have been nothing but a talented charlatan, it must be granted that a complex legacy of spiritual insight was embedded in Masonic rituals, myths, and symbols; they had a history and a lineage reaching back many centuries into Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical Gnosis. John C. Bennett may have brought something more than Blue Lodge Masonry to Nauvoo. And, regardless of his true intentions, what he brought may have been useful to a prophet.
In Nauvoo, in 1842 and after, I suggest Joseph Smith encountered a reservoir of myths, symbols, and ideas conveyed in the context of Masonry but with complex and more distant origins in the Western esoteric tradition. They apparently resonated with Smith's own visions, experiences modulating his spiritual life from the time of his earliest intuitions of a prophetic calling. He responded to this stimulus with a tremendous, creative outpouring--the type of creative response Gnostic myth and symbol were meant to evoke, and evidently had evoked across a millennium of history. But, leaving Masonry, there was still another, more primary transmission of this esoteric tradition that would touched Joseph's creative imagination during his last years in Nauvoo.
Joseph Smith and Kabbalah in Nauvoo
By 1842 Joseph Smith most likely had touched the subject of Kabbalah in several ways and versions, even if such contacts remain beyond easy documentation. During Joseph's final years in Nauvoo, however, his connection with Kabbalah becomes more concrete. In the spring of 1841 there apparently arrived in Nauvoo an extraordinary library of Kabbalistic writings belonging to a European Jew and convert to Mormonism who evidently new Kabbalah and its principal written works. This man, Alexander Neibaur, would soon become the prophet's friend and companion.
Neibaur has received little detailed study by Mormon historians, and his knowledge of Kabbalah has earned only an occasional passing footnote in Mormon historical work.121 Neibaur was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1808, but during his later childhood the family apparently returned to their original home in eastern Prussia (now part of Poland). His father, Nathan Neibaur, was a physician and dentist, who family sources claim, was a personal physician to the Napoleon Bonapart and whose skill as a linguist made him of "great value" to Napoleon as an interpreter (claims perhaps inflated by posterity). Like his father, Alexander became fluent in several languages, including French, German, Hebrew, and later, English. He also read Latin and Greek. Family tradition claims that as the first child and eldest son, his father wished him to become a rabbi, and that the young Neibaur was begun in rabbincal training. However, at age seventeen he instead entered the University of Berlin to study dentistry, and completed his studies around 1828. Sometime shortly afterwards, he converted to Christianity and migrated to Preston, England. There he established a dental practice and married in 1833. In mid-summer 1837, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Joseph Fielding arrived in Preston. Neibaur had been troubled by several dreams about a mysterious book, and his first question for Joseph Smith's apostles was whether they had a "book" for him--which of course they did. He was baptized with his family the next spring. On 5 February 1841 they departed for Nauvoo, arriving in Quincy, Illinois, on 17 April. Four days later Neibaur met Joseph Smith, and on 26 April he notes in his journal, "went to work for J. Smith." Two day later he acquired a quarter-acre lot in Nauvoo, and on 1 June moved his family into their newly complete Nauvoo home on Water Street, a few blocks from Joseph Smith's residence.122
Where and how Neibaur first came in contact with Kabbalah remains a mystery, though a careful evaluation of his history and personal travels offers a few hints. Given his father's position, his childhood in western Poland, his studies in Berlin and his subsequent conversion to Christianity, some contact with a reservoir of Kabbalistic knowledge among Sabbatean or Frankist Jews should be considered.123 If he did indeed undertake rabbical studies in Poland prior to his university education, he could not have avoided some exposure to the subject. That Neibaur brought a knowledge of Kabbalah to Nauvoo has been mentioned in several studies of the period. For instance, Newel and Avery note in their biography of Emma Smith, "Through Alexander Neibaur, Joseph Smith had access to ancient Jewish rites called cabalism at the same time he claimed to be translating the papyri from the Egyptian mummies [which became his Book of Abraham]."124 That he not only knew something of Kabbalah, but apparently possessed a collection of original Jewish Kabbalistic works in Nauvoo, is however documented in material almost totally overlooked by Mormon historians.
In June 1843, Neibaur published in Times and Seasons a short piece entitled "The Jews." The work ran in two installments, in the issues of 1 June and 15 June. As to why he wrote this piece, he states only that his effort was inspired by a talk he had heard Joseph Smith present.125 His essay deals ostensibly with the concept of resurrection held by the Jews. What he discusses for the most part is, however, the Kabbalist concept of gilgul, the transmigration and rebirth of souls.126 The essay is interesting not because of his comments on resurrection, but because of his repeated citations of classic Jewish Kabbalistic texts. In the course of his four-page piece, Neibaur cites over two dozen texts and authors. Of the citations I have been able to identify, at least ten are to Kabbalistic authors or works.127 The tone of the entire piece, and the authoritative use of Kabbalistic materials, suggests Neibaur's respect for Kabbalah.
Neibaur's notations to these Medieval and Renaissance Jewish works illustrates that he probably both possessed the texts and had a general knowledge of their contents. Although transliterations of Hebrew into English remain variable even in modern publications, Neibaur's renderings into English of the titles and authors cited are fairly consistent and accurate to the original Hebrew. The general precision of his numerous citations suggest Neibaur had access to the works he quoted.128 Included among his citations are several "classic" Kabbalistic texts--the most important Jewish Kabbalistic manuscripts circulated between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries--works such as the Zohar, Midrash Ha-Neelam, Menorat ha Ma'or, Emek ha-Melekh, and the 'Avodat ha-Kodesh, as well as a few rarer documents. Much of the material he cites was available only in Hebrew, and to this date has not been translated and published. By any standard, these were unusual works to possess on the American frontier, and certainly an extraordinary collection of texts to be found in the prophet Joseph's Nauvoo.
Joseph Smith and Alexander Neibaur were frequent associates. Neibaur had been engaged by Joseph a few days after his arrival in Nauvoo in April 1841. During the last months of the prophet's life, both his and Neibaur's diaries indicate that Neibaur read with and tutored Smith in Hebrew and German.129 Given this friendly relationship, the interests of the prophet, and the background of Neibaur--and perhaps even the books in Neibaur's library--it seems inconceivable that discussions of Kabbalah did not take place. Kabbalah was the mystical tradition of Judaism, the tradition which claimed to be custodian of the secrets God revealed to Adam. These secrets were occultly conveyed by the oral tradition of Kabbalah throughout the ages--so it was claimed--until finally finding written expression in the Zohar and the commentaries of the medieval Kabbalists, books Neibaur possessed. Kabbalah was the custodian of an occult re-reading of Genesis and the traditions of Enoch, it contained the secrets of Moses. And it was a subject that Joseph Smith had probably already crossed in different versions several times in his life. Can anyone familiar with the history and personality of Joseph Smith--the prophet who restored the secret knowledge and rituals conveyed to Adam, translated the works of Abraham, Enoch, and Moses, and retranslated Genesis--question that he would have been interested in the original version of this Jewish occult tradition? And here, in Neibaur, was a man who could share a version of that knowledge with him.
Whatever the reasons for the similarities, it should be remembered that the Hermetic-Kabbalistic world view parallels Joseph's vision of God in many particulars. Not only might Joseph have been interested in this material, but he would have noted how similar this sacred, secret tradition was with his own restoration of ancient truth. And perhaps Neibaur, on a religious quest--from Judaism and Kabbalah, Europe and England, to Christianity and Mormonism and a new home in Nauvoo--saw or even amplified that intrinsic sympathy in his explications of the tradition for Joseph.
Certainly the first text Joseph Smith would have confronted was the Zohar, the great heart of the Kabbalah. This is one of the works Neibaur cited repeatedly in his article and, as the central text of Kabbalah, is the key book any individual with Kabbalistic interests would have preserved in his library. Familiarity with the Zoharwas a given for a Kabbalist, particularly one with knowledge of works as divergent as those cited by Neibaur, all of which expounded in some degree upon themes in the Zohar. If Neibaur had read to Joseph from any single text, or explained Kabbalistic concepts contained in a principal book, the Zohar would have been the book with which to start. This might explain why in 1844 Smith, in what may be his single greatest discourse and in the most important public statement of his theosophical vision, apparently quotes almost word for word from the first section of the Zohar.
Kabbalah in Mormon Doctrine: The King Follett Discourse
On Sunday afternoon, 7 April 1844, Joseph Smith stood before a crowd estimated at 10,000 and delivered his greatest sermon, the King Follett Discourse.130 Dissension, rumor, accusation, and conspiracy all abounded in Nauvoo on that pleasant spring day, and Joseph was at the center. This would be Joseph's last conference, ten weeks later he lay murdered at Carthage Jail. In this atmosphere of tension, many in the congregation probably expected a message of conciliation, a retrenchment. Instead, the prophet stunned listeners with his most audacious public discourse--a declaration replete with doctrinal innovations and strange concepts that many of the Saints had never before heard. As Fawn Brodie noted, "For the first time he proclaimed in a unified discourse the themes he had been inculcating in fragments and frequently in secret to his most favored saints: the glory of knowledge, the multiplicity of gods, the eternal progression of the human soul."131
Van Hale, in his analysis of the discourse's doctrinal impact, notes four declarations made by Joseph Smith which have had an extraordinary and lasting impact on Mormon doctrine: men can become gods; there exist many Gods; the gods exist one above another innumerably; and God was once as man now is.132Interestingly, these were all concepts that could, by various exegetical approaches, be found in the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. But even more astoundingly, it appears Joseph actually turned to the Zohar for help in supporting his introduction of these radical doctrinal assertions.
The prophet begins his discussion of the plurality and hierarchy of the Gods with an odd exegesis of the first words of Genesis, Bereshith bara Elohim:
By any literate interpretation of Hebrew, this is an impossible reading. Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object, the thing which received the action of creation. Bereshith ("in the beginning") is reinterpreted to become Roshith, the "head" or "Head Father of the Gods," who is the subject-actor creating Elohim.134 And Elohim he interprets not as God, but as "the Gods." Louis C. Zucker, who published an insightful examination of Smith's study and use of Hebrew, notes that this translation deviates entirely from the interpretative convention Joseph had learned as a student of Hebrew in Kirtland. Joshua Seixas, the professor who had instructed Joseph and the School of the Prophets in early 1836, used in his classes a textbook he had written, Hebrew grammar for the Use of Beginners.135 In the Seixas manual (p. 85), this Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 is given along with a "correct" word-for-word translation: "In the beginning, he created, God, the heavens, and the earth." Seixas would not have introduced in his oral instruction a translation entirely alien to the conventions of his own textbook. Zucker comments on Smith's strange translation of the verse: "Joseph, with audacious independence, changes the meaning of the first word, and takes the third word `Eloheem' as literally plural. He ignores the rest of the verse, and the syntax he imposes on his artificial three-word statement is impossible."136I suppose I am not allowed to go into an investigation of anything that is not contained in the Bible. . . . I will go to the old Bible and turn commentator today. I will go to the very first Hebrew word--BERESHITH--in the Bible and make a comment on the first sentence of the history of creation: "In the beginning. . . ." I want to analyze the word BERESHITH. BE--in, by, through, and everything else; next, ROSH--the head; ITH. Where did it come from? When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the first part--the BE--there; but a man--a Jew without any authority---put it there. He thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head of any man. It read in the first: "The Head One of the Gods brought forth the Gods." This is the true meaning of the words. ROSHITH [BARA ELOHIM] signifies [the Head] to bring forth the Elohim. If you do not believe it you do not believe the learned man of God. No learned man can tell you any more than what I have told you. Thus, the Head God brought forth the Head Gods in the grand, head council.133
But Zucker (along with Mormon historians generally) ignored another exegesis of this verse--an exegesis which was a basic precept of Jewish Kabbalah from the thirteenth century on and which agrees, word for word, with Joseph's reading.137 In the tradition of Kabbalah, Bereshith bara Elohim was most emphatically not an "artificial three-word statement," as Zucker implied. Gershom Scholem, in the middle of a long discussion, explains this other view:
Scholem's point is perhaps made clearer by restatement. In the Zohar, and in the commentaries of the majority of older (that is, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Kabbalists), the verse Bereshith bara Elohim is grammatically turned around. Bereshith is understood to refer to the Sefirah of Hokhmah, translated as "Wisdom" and identified in Kabbalistic theosophy as the Supernal Father--the figure who is usually interpreted in Kabbalah as the First of the Godhead. Hokhmah then emanates, or "creates" in the sense of unfolding, theElohim.139 As Scholem notes, the interesting thing here is that Elohim has become the object of the sentence, and is no longer the subject. This is precisely Joseph Smith's reading.The Zohar, and indeed the majority of the older Kabbalists, questioned the meaning of the first verse of the Torah: Bereshith bara Elohim, "In the beginning created God"; what actually does this mean? The answer is fairly surprising. We are told that it means Bereshith--through the medium of the "beginning," [Hokhmah, or "Wisdom," the primordial image of the Father God in the Kabbalistic Sefiroth]--bara, created, that is to say, the hidden Nothing which constitutes the grammatical subject of the word bara, emanated or unfolded,--Elohim, that is to say, its emanation is Elohim. It [Elohim] is the object, and not the subject of the sentence.138
This interpretation of Genesis 1:1 is not deeply hidden in the Zohar, but constitutes its opening paragraphs, and is the central concern of the entire first section of this long book. The Zohar begins with a commentary onBereshith bara Elohim:
So far this is exactly Joseph Smith's reading. In his exegesis Joseph takes Elohim, the subject of the clause, and turns it into the object which received the action of creation from the first god-image (here calledReshith), just as does the Zohar. Indeed, his words as transcribed by William Clayton, "Rosheet signifies to bring forth the Eloheim," are almost identical with the Zohar's phrasing of the interpretation.142It is written: And the intelligent shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever. There was indeed a "brightness" [Zohar].140 The Most Mysterious struck its void, and caused this point to shine. This "beginning" [Reshith] then extended, and made for itself a palace for its honour and glory. . . . Thus by means of this "beginning" [Reshith] the Mysterious Unknown made this palace. This palace is called Elohim, and this doctrine is contained in the words, "By means of a beginning [Reshith, it,] created Elohim."141
In his next step of translation, Smith interprets Bereshith to become Rosh, the "head" or head God. As Zucker objected, orthodox standards of translations do not yield the word Rosh, or "head," from Bereshith.But it was not "audacious independence" alone that led Smith to changed the meaning. A basis for this reading is actually found in the next verse of the Zohar: By a Kabbalistic cipher of letters--a technique used in Kabbalah to conceal deeper esoteric meanings--the Zohar explains that the word Reshith "is anagrammatically Rosh (head), the beginning which issues from Reshith."143 (To understand the fuller intent of this phrase, one must again remember that Rosh or reshith is here interpreted by Kabbalah to be Hokhmah,the first god-image, the Supernal Father.) Thus in this text Reshith has been interposed as an anagram forRosh--who is understood to be the "Head God," Hokhmah. Could this be what Joseph means when he says "a man, a Jew without authority" changed the reading of the word, perhaps by failing to understand this ancient Kabbalistic anagram?
Finally, Smith translates Elohim in the plural, as "the Gods." The word is indeed in a plural Hebrew form, but by the orthodox interpretative conventions Joseph was taught in his Kirtland Hebrew class (which remain the norm) it is read as singular. In the Zohar, however, it is interpreted in the plural. This is witnessed throughout the Zohar and appears clearly in the following paragraph from the opening sections of the work, where the phrase "Let us make man" (Gen. 1:26) is used as the basis for a discussion on the plurality of the gods:
Within this passage is both the concept of plurality and of the hierarchy of Gods acting "with the permission and direction of the one above it, while the one above did nothing without consulting its colleague." This interpretation is of course echoed in the King Follett discourse and became a foundation for all subsequent Mormon theosophy."Us" certainly refers to two, of which one said to the other above it, "let us make," nor did it do anything save with the permission and direction of the one above it, while the one above did nothing without consulting its colleague. But that which is called "the Cause above all causes," which has no superior or even equal, as it is written, "To whom shall ye liken me, that I should be equal?" (Is. 40:25), said, "See now that I, I am he, and Elohim is not with me," from whom he should take counsel. . . . Withal the colleagues explained the word Elohim in this verse as referring to other gods.144
Two months after giving the King Follett Discourse, Joseph returned to these first Hebrew words of Genesis and the subject of plural Gods. Thomas Bullock transcribed his remarks on the rainy Sunday morning of 16 June 1844. This was to be Joseph's last public proclamation on doctrine; eleven days later he lay dead. Joseph first introduced his subject--the plurality of Gods--then again read in Hebrew the opening words of Genesis and repeated his interpretation of Bereshith bara Elohim, using much the same phrasing recorded two months earlier in the King Follett Discourse. He then turned to Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man," the same passage interpreted in the Zohar to imply a plurality of Gods. After reading the verse aloud in Hebrew, he interpreted the text and found in it the same occult import given by the Zohar: The God "which has no superior or equal" (the Zohar's words), the "Head one of the Gods" (Joseph's term) addressed the "other Gods," Elohim in the plural translation, saying "let us make man." Bullock transcribed his remarks thus: "if we pursue the Heb further it reads [here he apparently read in Hebrew Genesis 1:26] The Head one of the Gods said let us make man in our image. . . . in the very beginning there is a plurality of Gods--beyond power of refutation--it is a great subject I am dwelling on--the word Eloiheam ought to be in the plural all the way thro."145
As he began his exegesis of the opening Hebrew phrase of Genesis in the King Follett Discourse, Joseph stated that he would go to the "old Bible." In Kabbalistic lore, the commentary of the Zohar represented the oldest biblical interpretation, the secret interpretation imparted by God to Adam and all worthy prophets after him. Joseph certainly was not using the knowledge of Hebrew imparted to him in Kirtland nine years earlier when he gave his exegesis of Bereshith bara Elohim, or plural interpretation of Elohim. Was then the "old Bible" he used the Zohar? And was the "learned man of God" he mentioned Simeon ben Yochai, the prophetic teacher attributed with these words in the Zohar?
Joseph wove Hebrew into several of his discourses during the final year of his life. In these late Nauvoo discourses, however, he interpreted the Hebrew not as a linguist but as a Kabbalist--a reflection of his own predilections and of the fortuitous aid of his tutor, Alexander Neibaur.146 But in conclusion, we need to step back from this discussion of words and see that behind them resides a unique vision, a vision characteristic of the occult Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. Harold Bloom called the King Follett Discourse "one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America." It is also a remarkable evidence of the prophet's visionary ties to the archaic legacy of Jewish Gnosticism and to the single most influential force in the evolution of Christian occultism: the Kabbalah.
Kabbalah after Joseph: A Legacy Misunderstood
Kabbalistic theosophy was, if nothing else, complex. Different interpretations abounded among Christian Kabbalists removed from the original Kabbalistic foundations of Jewish culture and halakhic observance. We can imagine how easily such ideas might have been misunderstood by a concretely minded Yankee disciple of Joseph Smith. This may help explain a troubling conundrum of early Mormon theology: Brigham Young's assertion that "Adam is God." Brigham claimed that Joseph had taught him this doctrine--although there is no evidence that Joseph ever publicly avowed such a view.147 In Kabbalah the theme is, however, prominent:Adam Kadmon is indeed "God," and His form is in the image of a Man--as noted earlier. Given the evidence that Joseph did know some elements of Kabbalah and had access both to the Zohar and to a Jew familiar with a wide range of Kabbalistic materials, it seems probable that Brigham heard this concept in some form from Joseph. The Adam-God doctrine may have been a misreading (or simplistic restatement) by Brigham Young of a Kabbalistic and Hermetic concept relayed to him by the prophet.
More than one element in early Mormon theology suggests that subtle visions could be made grossly concrete. Perhaps the most striking example is sacral nature of marital sexual union and the human potential for multiple sacred marriages, a potential shared in Joseph's time by both women and men. As Bloom noted, in Kabbalah and perhaps in Smith's practice "the function of sanctified human sexual intercourse essentially is theurgical."148This was an important undertone in the wider circles of Christian occultism, eventually manifest in several occult Masonic societies. How Joseph interacted with this tradition and vision is the single most interesting and important issue awaiting historians of Mormonism. That this was an issue early in his life is witnessed by the need to marry and have Emma with him prior to obtaining the golden plates of the Book of Mormon.149 That the preoccupation persisted throughout his life needs little argument. Ideas of sacred sexuality permeated Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy, perhaps touching even the mystical vision of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in his overtly Masonic opera, The Magic Flute: "Mann und Weib, Weib und Man; Reichen an die Gottheit an!" ("Man and Woman, Woman and Man, Together they approximate the Divine!").150 By investigating in depth the legacy of ideas and experiences of Kabbalah and Christian occultism, we might begin to understand this perplexing vision shared by the prophet Joseph Smith.
In the Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star in 1847 an interesting figure appears, titled "A Diagram of the Kingdom of God" (Figure 12).152 The artist and author of this small piece was probably Orson Hyde. Hyde's tree is also crowned, and branches in precisely the fashion of Fludd's tree. The only difference is that the Hyde tree has twenty-two branches. This is a remarkable choice of numbers, as any student of Kabbalah will recognize. In Kabbalah there are two important numerical aspects of the Tree of Sefiroth: the first is the number ten, the number of Sefiroth, the second is the number twenty-two, the number of paths between theSefiroth, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus Joseph Smith may have conveyed to one his apostles--or Hyde may have independently found compatible with the prophet's teachings--the most essential symbolic element of Kabbalah, the "mystical shape of the Godhead" contained in the image of the Sefiroth as redrawn by a principal and very influential seventeenth-century Christian Kabbalist, Fludd.
That interest in the subject of Kabbalah and Hermeticism persisted in at least one disciple of Smith's is witnessed by William Clayton. Clayton was Smith's personal secretary and one of his intimate associates during the prophet's last years in Nauvoo.153 Few, if any, individuals had a closer view of Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo period. This may explain Clayton's otherwise unusual interest in Kabbalah and alchemy manifest in his later years. In 1864 someone in Utah loaned Clayton a guidebook of "Cabala," a tract apparently containing several advertisements for esoteric materials relating to "Cabala" and alchemy. As one of Clayton's biographers write, "Though the record is not clear, it may be that . . . he wanted . . . something akin to the so-called Philosopher's Stone of the ancient alchemists--a substance that supposedly enabled the adept, when applied correctly, to transmute metals." Clayton subsequently organized an alchemical society in Salt Lake City, with himself as corresponding secretary, and purchased several mail-order alchemical outfits. The group, which numbered at least twenty-six members, spent months attempting to transmute metals without success before finally abandoning their project.154 Though it appears Clayton was simply duped by a mail-order shyster, his esoteric interests and his faith in them might also be explained by some recollection he harbored about Kabbalah and the prophet in Nauvoo.
Conclusion: Joseph and the Occult Connection
In attempting to understand Joseph Smith and his religious vision, historians have examined both the religious sparks kindled by his time and the social soils from which the young prophet sprang. As useful as some of these efforts have been, I still agree with Paul Edwards: our methods so far have been too "traditional and unimaginative" to comprehend Joseph's history; we remain, even now, blinded by the fears of yesterday--or biased by its erroneous judgments. Chief among the subjects that might be "feared" in Mormon history is Joseph's apparent recurrent association with the "occult" traditions of Western spirituality, and this remains the area of his history least examined and understood. It is impossible for me to present fresh evidence which seemingly links Joseph Smith to what might be interpreted as "the occult" without addressing this wider issue.
The historical record witnesses that Joseph Smith had some intercourse with at least three important manifestations of the alternative and non-orthodox religious traditions that blossomed in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance period, traditions sometimes labeled as "the occult": ceremonial magic, Masonry, and Kabbalah. These associations extended throughout his life, and his liaison with each constituted more than casual acquaintance. This is an area of history to which Mormon historians have been hesitant to turn full attention--an area where our fears (or ignorance) have delimited our understanding.
It would be foolish at this late date to maintain that any single tradition engendered Joseph Smith's religious vision. Joseph was an American original--and we need not fear him being cast as a Masonic pundit, folk magician, Rosicrucian mystic, medieval Kabbalist, or ancient Gnostic. Nonetheless, we must recognize that something in the nature of the prophet, some element of his own intrinsic vision, did resonate with the occult traditions of the Western spiritual quest. Into the spirit and matter of his religious legacy, he wove these sympathies. Joseph carried his silver talisman, inscribed with the sigil of Jupiter and Hebrew letters cast in a magic square, upon his person to his death. He called Masonry a remnant of true priesthood, and over a thousand of his men in Nauvoo, including nearly every then current or future priesthood leader of his nascent church, went through the three separate steps of ritual initiation leading to the degree of Master Mason. In his last months, amid dissension and danger, he found time to sit and read Hebrew and perhaps study Kabbalah and the Zohar with Alexander Neibaur. In April 1844, when his congregation expected retrenchment and reconciliation, he turned to that Hebrew, and bequeathed to his disciples an extraordinary vision of God--a theosophical pronouncement which echoed the tones of Kabbalah even to the ear of a critic so far removed in time and culture as Harold Bloom.
It is this last link--Joseph's sympathy for Kabbalah--which may be the key that finally unlocks a pattern, and opens a new methodology for understanding the prophet Joseph Smith. As Richard Bushman noted:
Joseph Smith did indeed bring into America elements of an ancient culture--but that culture was not temporally very distant from the prophet. When Joseph was introduced to Jewish Kabbalah in its classic form in Nauvoo, he found--consciously or unconsciously--the fiber of a thread woven throughout the fabric of his life. The magic he met as a youth, the prophetic reinterpretation of scripture and opening of the canon to divine revelation, the Masonic symbol system: all of these were reflections of an heterodox Hermetic religious tradition that had persisted in various occult fashions within the Western religious tradition for centuries, a tradition of which Kabbalah was a most important part. Call the tradition "occult" if you wish--certainly to survive it was at times hidden--but do not error by seeing it as simply a legacy of ideas from which the young prophet might pick and choose.The power of Enlightenment skepticism had far less influence on Joseph Smith. . . . Joseph told of the visits of angels, of direct inspiration, of a voice in the chamber of Father Whitmer, without embarrassment. He prized the Urim and Thummim and the seerstone, never repudiating them even when the major charge against him was that he used magic to find buried money. His world was not created by Enlightenment rationalism with its deathly aversion to superstition. The Prophet brought into modern America elements of a more ancient culture in which the sacred and the profane intermingled and the Saints enjoyed supernatural gifts and powers as the frequent blessing of an interested God.155
This tradition--as is now well accepted by scholars--was driven by the phenomenon of a rare human experience. As interwoven into Hermeticism, Kabbalah was a tradition not just of theosophic assertions, but of return to prophetic vision. For a millennium or more--perhaps dating all the way back to the suppressed heresy of the Gnostics--men and women within this larger tradition asserted the reality of their vision--and sometimes even used what now seems modern psychological insight in dealing with their experiences.156Individuals caught in this experience not uncommonly saw themselves as prophets, though the force of the tradition sought to maintain a balance in the face of such realizations. Many of them thought themselves kings and queens before God, and some openly proclaimed their royalty.157 They probed the mystery of Adam and Eve, and primal creation, they embraced rituals and symbols as non-verbal expressions of ineffable insights. Their sexuality was sacralized, and not infrequently their sacred sexual practices ranged beyond the bounds of expression accepted by the societies of their times. Their most sacred mystery, the great mysterium coniunctionis, was sometimes ecstatically mirrored in the holy union of a man and a women. They authored pseudoepigraphic works, invoking ancient voices as their own. They told new stories about God because for them God was a living story: and they found their own lives mingled within a story being told by a living God. When Joseph sought a mirror to understand himself he found reflections in a history not so distant as that of ancient Israel. His story, the prophet's story, lived within the occult legacy of his time. He touched that legacy often, and he saw in it the image--even if dimmed and distorted--of a priesthood he shared.
Joseph Smith's life reflected the nature of an unusual human experience, and to understand his history we must understand his experience in the context of history. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dedicated the last half of his long life to elucidating the nature and psychological insights of the Kabbalistic-Hermetic-alchemical tradition. He felt it held the pearl of great price, the treasure forgotten by Christianity in its enlightened Protestant evolution. It was at the Eranos conferences dominated by Jung, that Gershom Scholem, the preeminent pioneer of Kabbalistic studies, opened the eyes of Western scholarship to the tradition's import in our history.158 Moshe Idel, Scholem's brilliant and independent protégé, has subsequently reaffirmed the value of a psychological perception in understanding its phenomena.159 With insights augmented by Scholem's work, the historian Francis Yates pioneered a new understanding of the vast influence of the occult tradition in Renaissance and Reformation culture.160 And recently Harold Bloom has pointed to its import in the creative vision of more modern times.161 Perhaps the thrust of this scholarship is now reaching the cloisters of Mormon history. But should that indeed be the case, Mormon historians must understand that they are embarking into a different methodology of history. A prophet's history flows from two springs, one above and one below, both melding in currents of his life. What story from above the prophet may have heard will remain his secret, the history no man knows. But by turning to the larger realm of prophetic history and its occult legacy, the record of its aspirations, its symbols and lore, and the enigmatic histories of the women and men who have been caught in this unique human experience, we may begin to find a methodology that leads us with new wonder into the unknown history of Joseph Smith.
Appendix: Alexander Neibaur's Library
Below is a summary of citations given by Alexander Neibaur in his article "The Jews," Times and Seasons 4 (1 June 1843): 220-22, and 4 (15 June 1843): 233-34. They are listed in order of first occurrence in his text. When an author or text is cited more than once, only the first is listed. These citations include several of the "classic" Kabbalistic texts circulated between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries--works such as theZohar, Menorat ha Ma'or, Emek ha-Melekh, and the 'Avodat ha-Kodesh--as well as a few rarer documents. I have noted several citations to these important texts in recent of Kabbalah by Moshe Idel and Gershom Scholem.
"Rabbi Manasse Ben Israel says in Nishmath Cajim": R. Manasseh Ben Israel, Nishmat Hayyim, a work published in Amsterdam in 1652 in defense of the Kabbalistic concept ofgilgul, the transmigration of souls. (Neibaur specifically mentions the term "Gilgool".) (Scholem,Kabbalah, 349.)
"R. Issac Aberhaph in his Menorat Hamorr": Israel al-Nakawa is the true author of this important fourteenth-century work, Menorat ha Ma'or. I have not yet identified the author cited by Neibaur, "R. Aberhaph," which is apparently in error. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 66.)
"R. Baccay" (later cited as "R. Bacay" and "Rabbi Bachay"): Possibly R. Samson Bacchi of Casale Monferrato. A seventeenth-century Italian Jew and Kabbalist, and a disciple of the leading Kabbalist in Italy, R. Moses Zacuto. R. Bacchi had intimate knowledge of the Sabbatean movement and several associations with followers of Sabbatai Sevi. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi,501-3) He had studied Lurianic Kabbalah with one of Luria's disciples, Joseph ibn Tabul. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 424.) Another possibility is the twelfth-century philosopher Bachya Ben Joseph ibn Pakuda.
"R. Isaac Abarbanel": R. Isaac Abrabanel (or Abravanel) was a prominent commentator on Kabbalistic eschatology and messianism active in late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Idel notes Abarvanel as one of the commentators who tended to add a Platonic interpretation to Kabbalistic ideas. (Idel, Kabbalah, 3, 144, 281; Scholem, Kabbalah, 71; Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 14.)
"R. D. Kimchi": R. David Kimchi, a thirteenth-century grammarian and biblical commentator.
"Rabbi Naphtali in Emakhamelek": Emek ha-Melekh by Naphtali Bacharach, published in 1648 and considered "one of the most important kabbalistic works." A German kabbalist active in the first half of the seventeenth century, "Bacharach appears as an enthusiastic and fanatical kabbalist, with a special flair for the mystical and non-philosophical traits of Kabbalah. . . . The book Emek ha-Melekh had a great impact on the development of the late Kabbalah. It was widely recognized as an authoritative source on the doctrine of Isaac Luria, and kabbalists from many countries . . . quoted him extensively. His influence is also noticeable in Sabbatean literature" (Scholem, Kabbalah, 394-95).
"Jalkut Kodosh" (later cited "Jalkut Kadash" and "Talkut Kadash"): Yalqut Khadash, a seventeenth-century anthology of Kabbalistic material. This anthology contained a most interesting text on the mystical and salvific intention of sexual union between male and female (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 61-62).
"Medrash Neelam": Midrash Ha-Neelam is a principal section of the Zohar, the central Kabbalistic collection of esoteric teachings. Scholem argues that it may be temporally one of the oldest constituent sections of the Zohar (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 181-88).
"R. Joseph Albo": Spanish philosopher and Kabbalist (ca. 1380-ca. 1435) whose principal work, Sepher ha-Ikkarim, achieved considerable popularity with both scholars and laymen. (Idel, Kabbalah, 144.)
"Aphkat Rackel" (later also cited as "Ophkat Rochel"): Abkat Rokhel, a Kabbalistic book in circulation in the seventeenth century (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 661n.)
"R. Jacanan": R. Yohanan ben Zakkai is a Talmudic figure, and this reference is most likely to him.
"Talmuh Tract Sanhedrin": Talmudic text. (Idel, Kabbalah, 403.)
"Bereshith Rabba": The Bereshith rabbati by R. Moses ben Isaac ha-Darshan of Narbonne, France (eleventh century). (Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 156). R. Moses was a primary source of early gematriot, the cipher of letters to find hidden meanings in scripture. (Scholem, Kabbalah, 338.)
"R. Levi ber Gerohonon": Levi ben Gershon (also Gershom or Gersonides) lived in the South of France (1288-1344), and is often considered the greatest Jewish philosopher after Maimonides. Working in an intellectual atmosphere charged with Kabbalistic and Aristotelian influences, he authored philosophic and scientific works which had a wide influence.
"R. Jonathan": Not yet identified.
"Talmud Tract Resokim": Talmudic text.
"R. Elias": Not yet identified.
"Rabbi Akiba": R. Akiba (or, R. 'Akiva), a second-century Jewish hero and early midrashic commentator, revered in later commentary to have been a source of both halakhic and esoteric knowledge. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 78-79).
"Avodath Hakodash" (also cited as "Abodah Hakadash"): 'Avodat ha-Kodesh, by R. Meir ibn Gabbay. Written in 1531 in "Palestine or Egypt by the leading kabbalist of the generation before Luria" (Scholem, Sevi, 47), this is a "classic exposition of theosophical kabbalah" (Idel,Kabbalah, 399), and "made an especially impressive summary of the teachings of the earlier Kabbalists" (Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 81). It was published in Venice in 1566 (Scholem, Sevi, 47). Ibn Gabbay in this and other works developed the theurgic concept of man as divine in form, influencing the divine. (Idel, Kabbalah, 176).
"Talmud Tract Ketuboth": Talmudic text.
"Sohar": The primary text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. The first printed edition of the Zoharappeared almost simultaneously in two different place, Mantua and Cremona, in 1588-90. Several later editions appeared, but the Mantua edition had the widest influence, and most subsequent editions were based on its text. Portions of the Zohar appeared in Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin Kabbalah Denudata, first published at Sulzbach in 1677.
"Rabbi Simeon, son of Jacay": R. Simeon b. Yochai, the central figure in the text of the principal Kabbalistic text, the Zohar.
"Pesikta Raba": This is the Pesiqta Rabbathi, one of the late midrashim, notable for the impressive eschatological sections and messianic exegesis. This particular midrash was important to Sabbateans, who used sections of it to explain the messianic burden born by Sabbatai Sevi. (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 54, 146, 175.)
"Rabbi Jehuda": Not yet identified.
"Rabbi Joshua ben Menaser": Not yet identified.
"The Book Siphri": Sifrei, a midrashic-talmudic text. (M. Idel, Kabbalah, 403.)
"Book Rad Hakemah": Possibly Kad ha-Kemah by Bachya Ibn Pakuda, a thirteenth-century philospher whose work had a strong spiritual affinity with the Arab mystics, and influenced subsequent Jewish mysticism.
Return to the beginning of
Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
d Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
by Lance S. Owens
Notes and Captions
CAPTIONS TO THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.A Kabbalist contemplates the "tree" of the ten Sefiroth, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. One of the first printed illustrations of the Sefiroth in this form, it appeared on the title page from a Latin translation of a Kabbalistic work by J. Gikatilla. Paulus Ricius, Portae Lucis (Augsburg, 1516.)
Figure 2.The sacred "Tree of Sefiroth", superimposed upon the Adam Kadmon (as drawn by the early twentieth century student of occultism, A. E. Waite in The Holy Kabbalah.) At the top of the tree is Kether, "the Crown", the first form of God. Below are Hokhmah and Binah, the supernal Masculine and Feminine image of the the Divine. From these pfotencies emanated the other Sefirah, the vessels of Divine manifestation.
Figure 3.The world within the complexio oppositorum, a creative embrace of masculine and feminine natures, here accompanied by their symbolic counterparts, the Sun and Moon. These symbols combined upon facade of the Nauvoo temple embodied in sacred architecture a vision of Divinity unique to Hermetism, Rosicrucianism and alchemy. From a seventeenth century alchemical work. Herbrandt Jamsthaler, Viatorium spagyricum (Frankfurt, 1625)
Figure 4.Hermes Trismegistus (identified by his traditional priestly robes and head-dressing) indicates the twin principles, allegorically represented by Sun and Moon, conjoined in the divine fire of the complexio oppositorum. In his right hand he holds an armillary, indicative of the celestial agencies indispensable to this mysterious, transformative and creative union. Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae (Frankfurt, 1617).
Figure 5.The allegorical beehive (far right) is juxtaposed with the alchemical oven (left), within which the transmutation of matter into the "stone of the philosopher's" takes place. The "false alchemists" (in the center) who misunderstand the Divine nature of this work and seek only vulgar gold, are compared to the useless drones of the hive. From an alchemical work published at the height of the Rosicrucian enlightenment. Michael Maier, Examen fucorum(Frankfurt: Nicholas Hoffman for Theodor de Bry, 1617).
Figure 6.The All-Seeing Eye of God as it appears on the title page of Robert Fludd's 1621 treatise on theosophy and Kabbalah. The words ascending from the prophet, "In alarum tuarum umbra canam" are a direct reference to a theme in the Rosicrucian Fama Fraternitatis, "Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice" (Ps 63:7). Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris... Tomi Secundi Tractatus Secundus (Frankfurt: Johann Theodore de Bry, 1621)
Figure 7."The Seal of the Priesthood" consists of a phrygian cap or crown over the All-Seeing Eye of God; the private seal of the Twelve Apostles is composed of this same emblem surrounded by sixteen letters, an abbreviation for "Private Seal of the Twelve Apostles, Priests of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in the Last Dispensation All Over the World." The seal was apparently first engraven in Nauvoo under the guidance of John Taylor and Brigham Young in January of 1845. (Dean C. Jesse, ed., "Nauvoo Dairy of John Taylor", BYU Studies 23 [Summer 1983]: 34.) It subsequently appeared on the first gold coins minted in Utah in 1849 and 1850, as illustrated here. This same relatively rare symbol is found in a superior positon on the title page of the 1682 edition of Jacob Boehme's collected "Theosophical Works" published at Amsterdam, a book important to German Pietist, strongly influenced by Rosicrucianism and by Boehme's kabbalistically toned writings, who immigrating to Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century. Jacob Böhme, Theosophishe Wercken (Amsterdam, 1682).
Figure 8.Mormon Apostle and theologian Orson Pratt chose this unusual emblem (B) -- the All-Seeing Eye within a heart -- for the banner head of his paper, The Seer, published at Washington D.C. in 1853-4. The figure is a near-exact replication of a Rosicrucian emblem (A) from Daniel Cramer's Latin work, The True Society of Jesus and the Rosy Cross, published at Frankfurt in 1617. This small work contained forty allegorical engravings developing Rosicrucian themes, each associated with a scriptural verse and a motto. To this emblem was associated the verse "In thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9), and the motto, "I see the light in your light, let darkness be far away. He is wise who gains wisdom from the book of the Lord." (Daniel Cramer, Iesu et Roseæ Crucis Vera: Decades quatuor emblematum sacrorum... (Frankfurt, 1617), reproduced in, The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer(Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1991), 29.) The image of the Eye within the Heart again appeared in the 1682 edition of Jacob Boehme's collected works. (Frontispiece to Von Christi Testamenten, in Jacob Böhme,Theosophishe Wercken [Amsterdam, 1682].)
Figure 9.The alchemical King and Queen, Rex and Regina, standing upon the dual eternal principals represented by sun and moon, join in the holy wedding, the hierosgamos. The image of this eternal, transformative union was perhaps mirrored in Joseph Smith's ritual of celestial marraige. Trismosin, "Splenor solis" (MS., 1582)
Figure 10.The 1650 edition of a thirteenth century alchemical work by Albertus Magnus contains one of the earliest allegorical representations of the key symbols later subsumed by both Masonry and Mormonism: the compass and square. Christ as Adam Kadmon appears within a sphere of light and dark, marked with the ubiquitous sun and moon, suggesting the complexio oppositorum manifest in creation. Within his body are encircled the four primal elements: fire, air, water, and earth. In the four corners of the madala are placed symbols of the divine work: the compass, the square and ruler, the scale of justice, and (perhaps) the vessel of chrism--an anointing oil of mercy balanced against the scale of justice. At the top appear the ten sacred numbers (represented also by the ten Sefiroth of Kabbalah) by which creation was mediated. Albertus Magnus, Philosophia naturalis (Basel, 1650).
Figure 11.The prophet being anointed by Elijah, as imaged in a 1619 work by the Rosicrucian and Christian Kabbalist, Robert Fludd. Fludd explained: "The gift of prophecy can come directly from God, or else indirectly, through the ministration of [spirits]. Examples are to be found in many biblical figures, and also in those of Antiquity, such as Mercurius [Hermes] Trismegistus.... Just as the Sun shines perpetually on all men, so God incessantly offers his pearls of wisdom, and those who receive them become prophets. Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris... Tomi Secundi Tractatus primi (Frankfurt: Johann Theodore de Bry, 1619), 3-11.
Figure 12.The Kabbalistic "Tree of Life" from Fludd's 1621 Rosicrucian work, and the "Kingdom of God" as drawn by Orson Hyde in an 1847 number of the Millennial Star. The crown represents Kether (which means in Hebrew "crown"), the first emanation of Divinity.
NOTES
- Paul M. Edwards, "The Irony of Mormon History", in George D. Smith, ed., Faithful History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 26.
- Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992), 99, 105.
- Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 260.
- Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 21.
- For a discussion of the antiquity of Kabbalah and Kabbalistic myth, also see Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 65-92.
- G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 97; Scholem,Major Trends, 75.
- For example, see David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel's Vision (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1988); Peter Schafer, Gershom Scholem Reconsidered: The Aim and Purpose of Early Jewish Mysticism, the Twelfth Sacks Lecture Delivered on 29th May 1985 (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1986), 3; David Flusser, "Scholem's Recent Book on Merkabah Literature," Journal of Jewish Studies 11 (1960): 65; Ithamar Gruenwald, "Jewish Merkavah Mysticism and Gnosticism," in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, eds. Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982), 41-55. Dan Merkur reviews these objections inGnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 155-80.
- C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 242.
- For a recent summary of these approaches, see Merkur's chapter "Defining Gnosis," 111-16. Couliano provides a variant but equally insightful view, emphasizing the theory of independent reoccurrence in Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 23-63; also see Stephan Hoeller, "What is a Gnostic?" Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions 23 (Spring 1992): 24-27.
- Merkur, 116.
- Three traditions historically linked to the Gnostic milieu of antiquity are often listed as agents of this transmission: Kabbalah, Hermetism, and Alchemy.
- Underpinning this declaration is an assertion that men can have experiences--call them intuitions or visions--that carry revelatory power and the savor of divine origin. It was the topography of this experience that the Kabbalist sought to explore, and perhaps to map. See Idel, Kabballah, 29.
- Idel, Kabbalah, 59-73.
- Moshe Idel, ed., Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 1-31.
- Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 94; see also Scholem, Major Trends, 225.
- See Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 155. Moshe Idel discusses the sexual polarity of divine qualities in Jewish mystical tradition. Most striking of such evidence is the image of the cherubim that adorned the Arc of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. In talmudic tradition the cherubim were male and female and were sometimes found in sexual embrace (see G. Scholem, Kabbalah [New York: Dorset Press, 1987], 130). The Talmud states, "When the Israelites came up on the pilgram Festivals the curtain would be removed for them and the cherubim shown to them, their bodies interlocked with one another, and they would say to them, `Look, you are beloved of God as the love between man and woman'" (Yoma 54a, Bababatra 99a). For a detailed discussion of the symbolic history of the cherubim and this sexual image, see Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3d ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 67-95.
- Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 103-104. Each Hebrew letter has a numerical value; words carry the value of the sum of their letters. These numerical sums are used in Kabbalah to extract various relationship and occult meanings from biblical texts, a practice called gematria. The numerical value of the Tetragrammaton (the name of God composed of the four letters, Yod he vav he, and read as Yahweh or Jehovah) is 45, exactly the same value carried by the name Adam; thus "Jehovah" = "Adam."
- Scholem, Kabbalah, 190.
- Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 3-4.
- Though Kabbalah entered into the Christian consciousness mostly by passive transmission and assimilation, this was not always so. Abraham Abulafia, a seminal thirteenth-century Kabbalist, considered himself a prophet sent to Jew and gentile. This belief led him--despite warnings he would be burned at the stake--to Rome in 1280 on an ill-fated quest for audience with Pope Nicholas III, an adventure from which he escaped alive only by the good fortune of the Pope's sudden death. (Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, 3). From the end of the thirteenth century, a number of Jewish converts to Christianity also brought with them into the gentile fold a knowledge of Kabbalah and christological speculations on Kabbalistic texts (Scholem, Kabbalah, 197). The works of Catalan philosopher and Christian mystic Raymond Lull (1232-ca. 1316) witness that elements of Kabbalah began penetrating Christian thought as early as 1300. Lull exhibits the influence of several Kabbalistic concepts on his quest to develop a universal system of science and religion--a philosophy he hoped would reconcile religious conflicts among Jews, Moslems, and Christians (Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 17-22).
- Walter Scott, ed., Hermetica (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 31-2. Through patristic sources the name Hermes Trismegistos was well known in the Middle Ages; Roger Bacon called him "Father of Philosophers." The meaning of "Thrice-Great" was variously explained. Marcilio Ficino suggests it refers to his triple capacity of priest, philosopher, and king, a divine triad that recurs in various manifestations throughout the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition (including perhaps the 1844 coronation of the Joseph Smith). See Frances A. Yates,Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 48-49.
- In 1614 Isaac Casaubon correctly dated the works to the early Christian centuries. This, however, did not entirely or quickly penetrate into the more devoted Hermetic circles. See Yates, Giordano Bruno, 16, 398-431.
- Corpus Hermeticum I, Poimandres, 21 (this translation in Yates, Giordano Bruno, 25).
- Corpus Hermeticum XIII (Yates, 29).
- Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 17-22. Yates provides an earlier and more tentative evaluation, but with great detail, in Giordano Bruno, 84-129. Scholem gives a summary, from the view of Jewish Kabbalah, inKabbalah, 196-203.
- Scholem, Kabbalah, 197.
- Yates, Giordano Bruno, 86.
- See ibid., 85.
- Yates, Occult Philosophy, 14.
- Ibid., 19.
- The Tabula smaragdina or "Emerald Tablet" was supposedly engraved by Trismegistos himself with the essence of all truth. Its content was known to medieval scholars, and this, its central dictum, is often repeated in Hermetic writings from the Renaissance on. As with other Hermetic texts, the Tabula smaragdinaprobably dates to the first or second century C.E.
- Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris . . . (Oppenheim: Johann Theodore de Bry, 1617), sec. a, 145, translation in Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds(London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 14.
- In Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Genesis, begun in 1831, one finds a clear parallel. Smith gives this new reading for Genesis 2:5-9: "For I the Lord God, created all things of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth . . . for in heaven created I them, and there was not yet flesh upon the earth . . . . all things were before created, but spiritually were they created and made, according to my word." In Genesis 6:66 he continues the idea, "And behold, all things have their likeness . . . . both things which are temporal and things which are spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the earth...both above and beneath, all things bear record of me." (Joseph Smith's "New Translation" of the Bible, [Independence, MO: Herald Publishing House, 1970], 30.) Brigham Young developed the idea: "We cannot talk about spiritual things without connecting with them temporal things, neither can we talk about temporal things without connecting spiritual things with them. They are inseparably connected...." Leonard Arrington emphasized the importance of this concept for an understanding of early Mormonism's evolution: "Joseph Smith and other early Mormon leaders seem to have seen every part of life, and every problem put to them, as part of an integrated universe in which materialities and immaterialities were of equal standing, or indistinguishable, in God's kingdom. Religion was relevant to economics, politics, art, and science." (Leonard Arringtion, Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958; reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press], 5-6.) It is a view closely parallel by the Hermetic tradition.
- The Latin terms used were sciencia, intellectus and mens.
- See Peter French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (New York: Dorset Press, 1972), 19.
- Yates, Giordano Bruno, 88.
- See Moshe Idel, "Jewish Magic from the Renaissance Period to Early Hasidism," in Jacob Neusner, ed.,Religion, Science and Magic in Concert and in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 83.
- The legacy of this strange vision, itself transmuted, was a foundation of the science leading our own age to summon from a metamorphosis of mathematical symbols the dread dream of nuclear fire.
- Yates, Occult Philosophy, 46.
- Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 7.
- Although a few authors (the most notable being C. G. Jung) have seen alchemy as a direct offspring of classical Gnosticism, this is problematic. For a critique of this view and a summary of Gnostic elements in alchemy, see Merkur, 37-110.
- The works of Magnus remained important to seventeenth-century alchemical scholars, as evidenced by the inclusion of two of his works in the influential compendium Theatrum Chemicum, vol. 2 (Usel, 1602), xxii, and vol. 4 (Strasbourg, 1613), xxxvii; another of his alchemical works was published as late as 1650: Albertus Magnus, Philosophia naturalis (Basel, 1650). (See figure 9.) Several alchemical treatises were attributed to Aquinas. Though probably all pseudoepigraphic, the Aurora Consurgens does date to a time close to his death in 1274 and could have been by his hand (as von Franz believes) or from the school surrounding him. Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy (New York: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXVII, 1966).
- Richard S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141-6. Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 160-90. A summary, with references, on the alchemical studies of Locke and Newton appears in, Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 10. Yates suggests, "Behind the great exoteric movement typified by Newton's achievements in the fields of mathematics and physics, there was also an esoteric movement, connected with the exoteric movement through the importance which it attached to number, but developing this through another approach to nature, the approach through alchemy" (Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 204).
- Edward F. Edinger, Goethe's Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1990), 9.
- C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 140. The concept of matter as uncreated caused considerable tension during the early Christian centuries, the period of alchemy's earliest evolution. Augustine attributed the idea to the Manichaeans (De Actis cum Felice, 1:18) and specifically attacked the concept of co-eternal matter and spirit expressed by Simon (Contra Faustum, XXI, 1, in Willis Barnstone, ed., The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha, Gnostic Scripture [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987], 680). That a figure named "Faust" would subsequently emerge as the archetypal literary image of the alchemist is a complex and interesting historical side note to Augustine's comments. Hippolytus attacked this same heresy expressed by the Gnostic Hermogenes (a name meaning "born of Hermes"): "God created all things from coexistent and ungenerated matter" (Refutation of All Heresies, 7:10, 10:24). The concept of the increatum as the mother of all created things is fully developed in later alchemy, particularly in the work of Paracelsus; for a discussion, see C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 320-23.
- That the stone was the "pearl of great price" is evidenced by the early sixteenth-century Aldine edition of a treatise by Giano Luciano, The New Pearl of Great Price: A Treatise Concerning the Treasure and Most Precious Stone of the Philosophers . . . , trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1894). I know of no association between this metaphor and the Mormon Pearl of Great Price, first published in London in 1852.
- In alchemy, the stone was the "orphan"; the term "son of the widow," now associated with Masonry, may be of Manichaean origin. For an evaluation of this theme in alchemy, see Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 17 ff.
- The best recent scholarly summary of the Rosicrucian movement is in Francis Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). Still useful, though dated, is Arthur Edward Waite's The Real History of the Rosicrucians (London: George Redway, 1887). In these comments I rely heavily on Yates and her analysis of the movement, but I emphasize that all scholarship on this realm of history--including the work of Yates--involves conjecture and interpretation.
- Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 42.
- All quotations above from the Fama are from the English translation of the manifestos published by Thomas Vaughn in 1652, as corrected and presented by Yates in her appendix to The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,238-51. The texts of the original Vaughn translations, as well as the 1690 Foxcroft translation of theChymical Wedding which Yates omits, appear in Waite.
- See Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 49.
- Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 45. The full title, as given by Vaughn, is Confessio Fraternitatis or The Confession of the Laudable Fraternity of the Most Honorable Order of the Rosy Cross, Written to All the Learned of Europe, in Yates, 251.
- Confessio Fraternitatis, in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 256-57.
- This text is from the first English translation, The Hermetic Romance: or The Chymical Wedding, trans. E. Foxcrort (London, 1690), reprinted in Waite, 101.
- So proclaimed the Fama, "...for Europe is with child and will bring forth a strong child, who shall stand in need of a great godfather's gift."
- Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (d. 1689) traveled widely throughout Europe. Having been greatly impressed by the writings of Jacob Boehme, he later influenced the Cambridge philosopher Henry More, the Rosicrucian mystic Franciscus Mercurius Van Helmont, and the philosopher Leibnitz. During his last two decades, his role as a senior official and close adviser to Prince Christian August in Sulzbach, Bavaria, gave him prominence in broader cultural and political circles as well. His Kabbalah Denudata, The Kabbalah Unveiled, or The Transcendental, Metaphysical, and Theological Teachings of the Jews was published in Sulzbach in two large volumes, 1677-84. Scholem, Kabbalah, 416-18. A complete English translation of this important work has yet to be accomplished, but an excerpt appeared in S. L. McGregor Mather, The Kabbalah Unveiled(London, 1887).
- Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 200-202.
- This was in line with the declared Rosicrucian program: "Also we do testify that under the name of Chymia many books and pictures are set forth in Contumeliam gloriae Die. . . . And we pray all learned men to take heed of these kind of books" (Fama Fraternitatis, in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 250). TheConfessio explains further that the books are "so we may verily foreknow and foresee the darkness of obscurations of the Church, and how long they shall last. From the which characters of letters we have borrowed our magic writing, and have found out, and made, a new language for ourselves, in the which withall is expressed and declared the nature of all things. . . . We speak unto you by parables, but would willingly bring you to the right, simple, easy and ingenuous exposition, understanding, declaration and knowledge of all secrets" (Confessio Fraternitatis, in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 257, 259). A detailed survey of the evolution of this hieroglyphic tradition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with reproductions of its principal works, appears in Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century (New York: George Braziller, 1988). A large collection of alchemical engravings and pictures, along with a complex historical and psychological critique, is found in C. G. Jung's Psychology and Alchemy (Princetion, NJ: Princetion University Press, 1968).
- See Confessio Fraternitatis, in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 254-55.
- Writes Elias Ashmole, "And certainly he to whom the whole course of Nature lyes open rejoyceth not so much that he can make Gold or Silver or the Divells [devils] to become subject to him, as that hee sees the Heavens open, the Angells of God Ascending and Descending, and that his own name is fairely written in the Book of Life" ("Prolegomenia," in Theatrum Chemicum Bitannicum [London, 1652]).
- A symbol's "meaning" is perpetually open to interpretation, but in this particular case there is strong historical precedent for assuming a deeper allegorical text. This exact metaphor of the honey bee as the alchemist and the hive as the alchemical retort is presented on the title page of Michael Maier's Examen fucorum(Frankfurt: Nicholas Hoffman for Theodor de Bry, 1617), facsimile in Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game, 65. (See Fig. 5.) The bee and beehive seems to have entered the symbolic vocabulary of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through a rediscovered and influential work of the third century Neoplatonist Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum (On the Cave of the Nymphs). In this short essay, Porphyry examined several verses from the thirteenth book of Homer's Odyssey and showed how they were to be interpreted as an allegory of the immortal soul's passage through mortality and on to liberation. The bees and hive are among the objects encountered in this "cave of generation." As Kathleen Raine notes in her introduction to Thomas Taylor's translation of the work, "Porphyry's interests in symbols and myths is central--in what Henry Corbin has called the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world where sensible images are informed with meaning, and where higher worlds may be discerned under symbolic forms. . . . With the revival of Neoplatonic learning in Renaissance Florence, De Antro Nympharum spoke immediately to the imaginative genius of those gifted painters whose works communicated the profoundest philosophic realizations in the lightest vestures" ("Introduction" in, Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs [Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1991], 10, 13.) It is this same intent to convey an understanding of "higher worlds" through symbolic forms that subsequently animated the seventeenth-century genre of "hieroglyphic" alchemical emblems; and it is only natural that they would pay homage by echoing imagery from De Antro Nypharum. Porphyry associated Homer's Cave of the Nymphs with the cave-temples of an ancient mystery religion and gave a long discussion to the symbolic, allegorical meanings of the bees and honey combs found there. The web and beehive were subsequently linked together in emblems identifying the royal patron of the Rosicrucian enlightenment, Fredrick V, Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia (this linkage helps identify their joint origin in Porphyry, a fact I have not seen elsewhere noted). Fredrick's reign became the focal point of reformative aspirations, and under his patronage in Oppenheim several of the most influential emblematic "Rosicrucian" books were published. These included works published by the de Bry firm and several authored by Michael Maier (Examen fucorum, noted above, is an example--on the title page Maier identifies himself "Count Palatine, Free Knight of the Empire, Doctor of Medicine"). The Rose Cross, spider's web, and beehive are again linked on the title page of Robert Fludd's and Joachim Frizius's collaboration, Summum bonum, The True Magic, Cabla, and Alchemy of the True Fraternity of the Rose Cross (Frankfurt, 1629) (Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 72, 102). The symbol of the beehive subsequently entered into Freemasonry as one of the ten emblems (including the "All-seeing Eye") given to a Master Mason at the time of his ceremonial initiation; in Masonry it was associated with the motto "industry" (Jabez Richardson, Richardson's Monitor of Free-Masonry [facsimile reprint, Chicago: Charles T. Powner, Co., n.d.], 40). Nearly every priesthood leader of Joseph Smith's church present in Nauvoo was "given" these two symbolic emblems when entered as Master Masons (see discussion below). In a bizarre historical twist, after the failure of the reign of Fredrick V, the next political kingdom to which this symbol would be widely linked was Brigham Young's Kingdom of Deseret. The beehive and the motto "Industry" remain today the emblem and motto of its successor, the State of Utah.
- Upon a dwindling remnant of Utah's nineteenth century Mormon facades these symbols still remain. See Allen D. Roberts, "Where are the All-Seeing Eyes?" Sunstone 4 (May-June 1979): 22-37.
- Jung gives extended discussion and documentation to each of these specific themes in Mysterium Coniunctionis.
- Yates touches some of these issues in her chapter "Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry" in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 206-19. For further discussion of the Hermetic tradition's influence on Masonry, see Yates,Giordano Bruno, 214, 414-16, 423, and The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 303-305.
- Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 210.
- Douglas Knoop and G. Jones, The Genesis of Freemasonry: An Account of the Rise and Development of Freemasonry in Its Operative, Accepted, and Early Speculative Phases (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1949), 274.
- The allegorical nature of Masonic rituals is thoroughly evidenced in records of the eighteenth century. When these the rituals took form is a matter of supposition; Gould posits an origin of the Masonic rituals in the seventeenth century, but subsequent historians have suggested that the rituals as currently recognizable originated during the 1720s (see Michael W. Homer, "`Similarity of Priesthood in Masonry': The Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism," in this issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry, 4 vols. [New York: John C. Yorston & Co., 1885-89]; Knoop and Jones, 274-75, 321-22).
- Material published in German by J. G. Buhle in 1804 served as the foundation for De Quincey's work "Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origins of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons," reprinted in Collected Works, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh, 1890), 13:384-448.
- Waite, 402-407.
- Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 218.
- This association, though recognized, was not cast in a positive light by the wider culture. Quinn provides several examples of America anti-Masonic material from this period associating Masons, Kabbalah, and Rosicrucians in a negative context (164-65). Much of this material probably took form from the evidence provided by Buhle and De Quincey. Links to Rosicrucians and Kabbalah were also variously affirmed in esoteric Masonic myth.
- In his nineteenth-century encyclopedia of Freemasonry, Macoy gives a partial summary of these, listing forty-eight rites or systems of symbolical ceremonies designed to convey "Masonic ideals"; the vast majority of these originating between about 1750 and 1810 (Robert Macoy, General History, Cyclopedia and Dictionary of Freemasonry [New York: Masonic Publishing Co., 1872], reprinted as A Dictionary of Freemasonry [New York: Bell Publishing, 1989], 326-29). As Ellwood notes in his review of the movement, "There was no unity of rite or structure among groups using that title [of Mason]. The name was immensely popular, and so was adopted by any sort of society with a secret handshake and pretension to ancient lore. These ranged from the Swedenborgian rite lodges . . . to the inimitable Cagliostro" (Robert S. Ellwood, Jr.,Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973], 64).
- Massimo Introvigne, "Arcana Arcanorum: Cagliostro's Legacy in Contemporary Magical Movements,"Syzrygy: Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture 1 (Spring/Summer 1992): 117-35.
- A review of these various movements is in Ellwood, 60-69.
- Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988), 183-360.
- Quinn, ix-x.
- Ibid., xi-xiii.
- Yates, Occult Philosophy, 46.
- See n60. "The appearance of ancient bodies of literature, Neoplatonic and hermetic, in Latin and Italian translations, together with the rendering of a significant corpus of Kabbalistic literature into Latin and Italian, precipitated the emergence of a new attitude toward magic, first in the circles of the Florentine literati, and afterward, under their influence, in a long series of European Renaissance and post-Renaissance figures all over Europe. . . . For them, magic was the lore taught by ancient masters like Hermes Trismegistus. . .a lore based on a vast knowledge of the universal order, a knowledge that culminated in actualizing the potentiality inherent in human nature. Instead of being the practice of obscure and peripheral persons, the Renaissance magician came to designate the apex of human achievement, to be cultivated by the elite in order to exercise the human qualities that testify to the fullness of human perfection. It was not so much the subjugation of the material world to which the learned magicians of the Renaissance aspired, as to the fulfillment of their spirit." Moshe Idel, "Jewish Magic from the Renaissance Period", 83.
- Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), 228. Thomas's study is itself dominated by an interest in the folk magical.
- At the same time, it must be recognized that there was an important mystical and alchemical element in some sectors of seventeenth-century Purtianism. See Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 167.
- Meric Casaubon (1599-1671) was both the son of Issac Casaubon, the distinguished philological scholar who had dated the Hermetica, and a staunch Anglican critic of the Hermetic and magical movement. Quoted in French, John Dee, 13.
- Godwin, Robert Fludd, 11.
- In evidence, as this paper went to press I received an advance copy of a comprehensive and very important new study of Mormonism's relationship to Hermeticism: John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Prof. Brooke reviews much of the material I have presented above, and draws very similar conclusions: "The Mormon cosmology constructed by Joseph Smith was as optimistic as Renaissance hermeticism and shared with it a startling number of common themes. . . . [Smith] reproduced the three heavens of the Cabala and hermeticism in the three Mormon heavens, the telestial, terrestial, and celestial kingdoms. Both hermeticism and Mormonism celebrate the mutuality of spiritual and material worlds, precreated intelligences, free will, a divine Adam, a fortunate, sinless Fall, and the symbolism and religious efficacy of marriage and sexuality. And, as in hermeticism, Adam, 'the father of all, prince of all, that ancient of days,' would occupy a central position in Mormon cosmology. . . .Three centuries after the height of the Renaissance, Mormonism echoed the hermetics--and explicitly rejected Calvinism. . . . Joseph Smith gave Mormon hierarchy the same authority that the hermetic alchemist assumed: human means to immortality, indeed divinity." (Ibid., 13.) See my review of Brooke's work in this issue of Dialogue.
- These are discussed and illustrated in Quinn, 53-111.
- The magical square on the back of Joseph's talisman appears, pregnant with symbolic meaning, in one of Albrecht Dürer's most famous engravings, "Melancolia" (Horst Michael, Albrect Dürer: The Complete Engravings [Artline Editions, 1987], plate 72); for a discussion, see Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 135 ff. See also the chapter "Cornelius Agrippa's Survey of Renaissance Magic" in Yates, Giordano Bruno, 130-56.
- Quinn, 81-97.
- Ibid., 96.
- Ibid., 83.
- Paracelsus (ca. 1493-1541) was a seminal figure in the alchemical and medical tradition. Paracelsian alchemy was central to Rosicrucianism. His works were even among the items supposed to be in the mythic tomb of Christian Rosencreutz. During the early and mid-nineteenth century in England and Europe Mesmerism was closely linked with spiritual alchemy by occultists interested in visionary states, and as Merkur notes, "In the Gold und Rosenkreuz, a development of the alchemical tradition of Paracelsus and Boehme in late eighteenth-century German, the insignias of the ninth and highest degree, Majus, consisted of a `gleaming and fiery' Urim and Thummim with a Schemhamphorash. It is at least probable that the German alchemists named their engraved brooches in allusion to their use in crystal-gazing and scrying" (55).
- Jolanda Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 134, emphasis added. Paracelsus also prophesied of the coming of the prophet "Elias" as part of a universal restoration, another idea possibly affecting the work of Joseph Smith (Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 93).
- Dan Vogel offers an exception by briefly noting the influence of spiritual alchemy on the important seventeenth-century Seeker John Everard. See Dan Vogel, Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988), 9n50.
- Quinn, 80.
- E. Gordon Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counter Culture (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 27-30.
- Ibid., 6.
- Ibid., 62, 122-23.
- The commune apparently possessed Kabbalistic texts, including the Zohar (ibid., 87), and may have even instituted an order associated with one of the Rosicrucian variants of Freemasonry (ibid., 70; Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1800; A Critical and Legendary History of the Ephrata Cloister and the Dunkers [Philadelphia: Printed for the author, 1899-1900], 1:354f.). That Sachse, a late-nineteenth-century Masonic historian, would perceive a variant Masonry in practice at Ephrata again indicates both the wide acceptance of Rosicrucian ties in Masonry in the nineteenth century and the wide latitude of esoteric things allowed classification as "Masonic."
- Noted are: the presence of a Rosicrucian cross on the Smith family "Holiness to the Lord" magical parchment; the similarity of rituals used in the Ephrata commune for conveying Melchizedik priesthood and performing proxy baptisms for the dead to forms later incorporated by Joseph Smith; the use of pseudonyms exactly like those adopted in early Mormonism ("Enoch" as a code name for Joseph Smith) within the Ephrata Rosicrucian society; and the similarity between one of Joseph Smith's 1829 revelations (recorded as D&C 7) and a Rosicrucian legend (Quinn, 133, 180-81, 169; Alderfer, 88).
- As unusual as this combination would be, Joseph Smith did apparently come close to having all three in Nauvoo during the last two years of his life, as will be discussed below.
- The "Tree of Sefiroth" is a diagram depicting the ten Sefiroth or divine emenations within the archetypal structure of the Godhead (see Fig. 1). For a example, see the illustration in Robert Fludd, "Aboris Sephirothicae," in De Praeternaturali utrusque mundi Historia, Vol. 2, 157, part of the larger work,Utruiusque cosmi maioris . . . (Frankfurti, 1621). This image or an image like it seems to have been copied by Orson Hyde in 1847, as discussed later.
- Joe Sampson, Written by the Finger of God (Sandy, UT: Wellspring Publishing, 1993).
- Ibid., 87-104.
- This situation also has precedence in the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. The writings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme have such a strong Kabbalistic flavor that his students have long thought he must have had some direct contact with Kabbalah, even though no firm historical evidence of this has yet been developed. (Interesting in the present context is that the most likely source identified by historians from whom Boehme might have learned about Kabbalah is a "Dr. B. Walter" who had traveled widely in the East and collected esoteric knowledge of magic, alchemy, and Kabbalah.) Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 43, 147.
- In 1842 the Apostle Heber C. Kimball quote Joseph Smith saying: "thare is a similarity of preast Hood in masonary. Br Joseph ses masonry was taken from preasthood but has become degenerated. but menny things are perfect" (Quinn, 185). In 1899 Apostle Rudger Clawson related the opinion that "Joseph . . . was aware that there were some things about masonry which had come down from the beginning and he desired to know what they were, hence the Lodge. . . . Joseph inquired of the Lord concerning the matter and he revealed to the prophet true Masonry as we have in our temples" (in Stan Larson, ed., A Ministry of Meetings: The Apostolic Diaries of Rudger Clawson [Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1993], XXX).
- Quinn, 164-65. This same assertion had been widely publicized by De Quincey in his London Magazinepiece, "Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origins of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons."
- Arthur Edward Waite, A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (London: William Rider and Son, 1923), 1:47.
- Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Charleston, SC, 1871), cited in Hoeller.
- Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Faires (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1933), 107-108. Kirk's original manuscript is dated 1691.
- Homer makes particular note of the 28th degree of the Scottish rite, which is based on the 23rd degree of the Rite de Perfection. This degree is known as the "Knight of the Sun," "Prince of the Sun," or "Key to Masonry." As Homer suggests, the ritual of this degree has several motifs familiar to the Mormon temple ceremony: Father Adam is the presiding officer, accompanied by seven angels, including Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Auriel; and the rite is to be administered in a room painted like a vast garden, with open fields, forests, and mountains. The rite has an obviously alchemical and Hermetic flavor, leading Macoy to suggest the "28th degree of Freemasonry must have been composed by Freemasons who were also members of the Order of the Rosy Cross." The seal of the degree (illustrated in Macoy) is emblazoned with the Hermetic motto of the Tabula smaragdina ("That which is above is also below"); over and under the image of God reflected in himself as dual white and black triangles interwoven in the Seal of Solomon are inscribed the terms common to Rosicrucianism and alchemy, "Macroprospus" or macrocosm and "Microprosupus" or microcosm. In the ceremony, a five-pointed star represents man, the microcosmos, and the staff of Hermes, the caduceus, sits at the right hand of Adam. The collar donned in the rite bears the single "All-seeing Eye" of God, and the medal worn is a golden Sun similar to the Nauvoo temple sunstones. Macoy, 209-11, 331.
- Scholem, Kabbalah, 284, 304.
- Macoy, 326-29.
- Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 1.18.1.
- Hill, 279.
- A third issue deserves brief notation: the "Joseph Smith to Joseph Hull" letter, mentioned by Durham, said to have been written by Joseph Smith about Freemasonry. A copy of the original is in my possession, and a transcript (with some errors) was published with the Durham paper as Appendix A (No Help for the Widow's Son: Two Papers on the Influence of the Masonic Movement on Joseph Smith and His Mormon Church [Nauvoo: Martin Publishing Co, 1980], 29.) This torn and undated letter was discovered around 1966-67 in a group of miscellaneous manuscript materials by George Rinsland, an Eastern manuscripts dealer. In April 1967 Rinsland sent it, unsolicited and free of cost, to Steve Barnett, then an active collector and dealer of such materials in Salt Lake (Barnett to Lance Owens, 12 Feb. 1991). I have made an extensive study of the Smith-Hull letter's content and handwriting. It is my opinion that the letter is not in the hand of Joseph Smith, though the similarities are strong enough to suggest a period forgery of his hand. The signature essentially matches Smith's post-1840 signature (when he ceased to append "Jr.").
The letter itself is interesting, regardless of the author, and represents the type of esoteric Masonic thought to which Joseph Smith might have been exposed. In an esoteric disquisition, the Masonic temple is metaphorically interposed upon the world and the offices of the temple are placed geographically over the face of the globe, as they are arranged within the Masonic temple ceremony. Symbolically, Masonic ritual is seen as an image of greater forces working historically in human society--a telling example of esoteric Masonic thought. This is just the type of expanded, esoteric interpretation one might expect Joseph Smith to impose upon Masonic ritual.
The dualistic view of humankind's guiding genius is also interesting: "Mankind is guided through this life by two Spirits viz light & Darkness two opposites & Thay appear in ten-thousands Shapes & thay have as many names as thay have Shapes." This theme of a compexio oppositorum, played against the image of the single all-seeing "Eye/I" of God, is echoed again in the cryptic poem on the last page of the letter: "that our 2 eyes Sprang from his 1; that our 2 Spirits did the Same; Light; Darkness." This dualism of two natures within the single "I" of God, of two eyes and two spirits, of Light and Dark, being born from his singleness, is the crux of an ancient heresy echoed in Joseph's vision of God: a holy wedding of uncreated matter's darkness with the supernal light of consciousness, intelligence or knowing, a creative union ceaselessly bearing new Gods in the dark/light transformation of man/woman.- Klaus Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty in Mormon History (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 55-71.
- Minutes of the Council of Fifty, 1880, cited in Hansen, 60-61. Given the forty years elapsed between the events and this recording of the history in 1880, it is possible that the date of the revelation was 1841, as Bennett claimed, and not 1842.
- The Return 2 (June 1890):287, cited in Robert Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 249.
- Prior to joining Strang, Bennett asked, "Can I depend upon my old place? . . . While you will be the Moses of the last days, I hope to be your Joshua, my old position, while you stand as the crowned Imperial Primate, I will be . . . your General-in-Chief." Noord notes, "With the arrival of John Cook Bennett in Voree came stirrings of a royal order, of a kingdom, and of power for James Jesse Strang. [Wrote Bennett:] `I have many things to tell you when I come that I cannot commit to paper--some very important indeed.' " One thing Bennett told Strang after his arrival to Voree, Wis. in the Summer of 1846, was the details about an "Order of the Illuminati". Shortly after his arrival, the "Order of Illuminati" was formed, with Strang as imperial primate and Bennett as his general-in-chief: Bennett was indeed again "Joshua" (Roger Van Noord, King of Beaver Island: The Life and Assassination of James Jesse Strang [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988], 45, 48-49.) Among Strang's followers were others who remembered the organization in Nauvoo, including another prominent disciple of Joseph Smith, George Miller, first Worshipful Master of the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, member of the "Holy Order" that first received the endowment in 1842, and an original member of Joseph's Council of Fifty in 1844.
- The most specifically example is Adam Weishaupt's prominent Masonic organization of the same name founded in 1776 in Bavaria. The concept of the Illuminati appeared in varied forms and was widely attacked in anti-Masonic material circulating in the period. Ellwood, 64.
- In Cagliostro's Egyptian rite the female Masonic consorts were known as "doves." Quinn illustrates a "masonic medal" Smith gave to his plural wife Eliza R. Snow; though otherwise unidentified as to origins, it is interesting that the medal is of a dove. Timothy O'Neill, "The Grand Copt", Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions 24 (Summer, 1992), 28; Introvigne, 117-35.
- Brief notations on Neibaur and Kabbalah are found, for example, in Newell and Avery's biography of Emma Smith (325n36). Susa Young Gates presented the first published biographical note on Neibaur in the Relief Society Magazine 9 (1922): 132-40. Gates apparently obtained much of her material from Neibaur family sources. A typescript biography of Neibaur is found in LDS archives. This is the most complete biography I have found and contains several stories about Neibaur attributed to family recollections. These sources of information on Neibaur are supplemented by a biographical note in the papers of Louis C. Zucker, a Jewish scholar and Professor of English at the University of Utah who researched Joseph Smith's contacts with Hebrew (see Louis C. Zucker Papers, Special Collections, Marriott Library). A brief recension of this material appears in Theda Lucille Bassett, Grandpa Neibaur was a Pioneer, (Salt Lake City: Published by the author, 1988).
- The biographical material contained here is obtained principally from the undated typescript in LDS archives.
- Frankist Jews in this area had nominally converted to Christianity. A Sabbatean or Frankist source would have interesting implication for Joseph Smith's understanding of Kabbalah as interpreted and presented by Neibaur--particularly with regard to the concept of the mystical intent of sexual intercourse and anomian sexual relationships. For discussions of these issues, see G. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), and his notes on Sevi and Frank in Kabbalah, 244-309. Niebaur's parents were both Jew's born around 1780 in western Poland (then part of Prussia) during a period of intense Frankist foment. Though Alexander was born in Alsace-Lorraine, the family apparently had returned to and remained in Unruhstadt (now Kargowa, Zielona Gorz, Poland) after 1814. Kabbalistic interests fostered by the Hasidic movement also were present in this area, and the young Neibaur might have had some contact with them in his studies. Neibaur Family Group Sheet, LDS Geneological Library.
- Newell and Avery, 325n36.
- "The Jews," Times and Seasons 4 (1 June 1843): 220-22; 4 (15 June 1843): 233-34. The article is introduced by editor John Taylor: "The following very singular notions of the Jews, with regard to their resurrection, will no doubt, be read with interest by many of the curious, especially the lovers of Jewish literature." On the composition of this piece, we have only Neibaur's brief explanatory endnote: "Having commenced this sometime since--and having had the privilege, a few Sundays back, to hear our worthy prophet on the same subject, I was determined to go on with it, and hand it over to you. If you think it will be of any interest to your readers, I shall take another time to continue the subject, and tell you the means, as held by my brethren the Jews, whereby the Lord will bring to pass this glorious work." The proposed continuation never appeared.
- See G. Scholem, "Gilgul: The Transmigration of Souls", in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 197-250. The concept of transmigration of souls received further discussion in early Mormonism. William Clayton records in his diary arguments among Mormon companions over the idea of "baby resurrection," or rebirth as a mortal infant. See George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1991), 429-30.
- Given the importance of this material to the discussion that follows, I have provided an Appendix to this essay listing each citation made by Neibaur in his Times and Seasons article.
- If he did not have the works at hand, then it would appear he either possessed an exceptional memory or had previously compiled and maintained a fairly comprehensive set of notes listing his citations. A third option, that he relied on a single secondary source which provided all of the citations remains possible. His own note on the essay's composition suggests that he took some time and effort with its compilation, perhaps supporting the view that he labored to collate sources. A single work containing this wide collection of citations has not yet been brought to my attention. If Neibaur was quoting from a compilation instead of using the original texts, it is apparent by the material contained therein that his source or sources were Kabbalistic in nature, and that he would have recognized them as Kabbalistic. I have found no mention of Neibaur's books after the Nauvoo period, and at his death documents relating to his estate of do not list personal effects such as books. See documents relating to the estate of Alexander Neibaur, LDS archives.
- Alexander Neibaur Journal, 26 Apr. 1841, and entries between 24 May 1844 and 17 June 1844. Neibaur's journal begins with his departure from England, and has sporadic entries made throughout 1841, 1842, and 1844. There are no entries for 1843. The more frequent entries made during May and June 1844 indicate Neibaur was a regular companion to Smith. On 24 May 1844 Neibaur also records Smith's recounting to him of the "First Vision". Neibaur Journal, 1841-62, LDS archives. Smith's journal records several additional study sessions between the men during the spring of 1844: on 18 March, "At home reciting German with Neibaur"; 23 May, "reading Hebrew with Neibaur"; and 3 June, "read German with Neibaur." Scott Faulring, ed., An American Prophet's Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1989), 460, 481, 487. On 23 March 1844 William Clayton notes that Neibaur accompanied Smith on a sensitive trip to confront Robert Foster about allegations of Smith's sexual improprieties. Smith, An Intimate Chronicle, 127.
- A newly amalgamated and authoritatively edited text of the King Follett Discourse appears in Stan Larson, "The King Follett Discourse," Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Winter 1978): 179-225. Three excellent interpretive articles appear in conjunction with the discourse's text in the same issue.
- Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 366.
- Van Hale, "The Doctrinal Impact of the King Follett Discourse," Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Winter 1978): 213.
- Larson, "King Follett Discourse", 202.
- The phrase "Rosh--the Head Father of the Gods" is used by Smith to clarify his translation shortly after the above text. Ibid, 203.
- The Hebrew grammar for the Use of Beginners was published in 1833 and 1834, and a copy is found in Special Collection, Marriott Library. See the discussion in Louis C. Zucker, "Joseph Smith as a Student of Hebrew," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3 (Summer 1968): 41-55.
- Zucker, 52-53.
- Steven Epperson's recent study offers an example of the failure by even a well-trained Mormon historian with interests in Judaism to recognized the Kabbalistic sources in Neibaur's essay. Epperson makes brief mention of Neibaur and his article, but essentially quotes Zucker. Steven Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 101.
- Scholem, Major Trends, 221. Yehuda Liebes also comments on this same Kabbalistic interpretation of Genesis 1:1 in Studies in the Zohar, 153-54.
- In Kabbalistic interpretation, the "Hidden Nothing" in Kabbalah is not "nothing" in the common sense, but the vast unorganized mystery preceding creation. There is no truly ex nihilo creation in Kabbalah. Thus Joseph's translation "organized" accords with Kabbalah. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 102-103. See also Idel,Kabbalah, 220.
- Interpretively, this verse can be read in Kabbalah to mean that the brightness or Zohar from which creation emanated is Intelligence, the first Being of God. The sympathy of this view with Mormon theology is apparent now, as it perhaps was then.
- Zohar I:15a. All translations used here and below comes from the Sperling translation of the Zohar: Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, trans., The Zohar, in five volumes (London: Soncino Press, 1931).
- In the amalgamated text, the phrase is taken from William Clayton's transcription given here (Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of the Joseph Smith [Orem, UT: Grandin Press, 1991], 358). In Larson's amalgamation, the bracketed words in the reconstructed text "ROSHITH [BARA ELOHIM] signifies [the Head] to bring forth the Elohim" are interposed by Larson based on the assumption that in the original other Hebrew words may have been spoken but not recorded (Larson, 198 n15). Clayton's transcription stands well without these interpolations. Joseph's use of the words "bring forth" is also significant; this is a closer translation of the Kabbalistic concept of emanation implied in the verse and perhaps a better choice than the word "created" used by the Sperling translation of the Zohar quoted above (Scholem,Kabbalah, 98-99).
- The full text of this passage in the Zohar is as follows: "A further esoteric interpretation of the word bereshith is as follows. The name of the starting-point of all is Ehyeh (I shall be). The holy name when inscribed at its side is Elohim, but when inscribed by circumscription is Asher, the hidden and recondite temple, the source of that which is mystically called Reshith. The word Asher (i.e. the letters, Aleph, Shin, Resh from the word bereshith) is anagrammatically Rosh (head), the beginning which issues from Reshith" (Zohar I, 15a). It should also be noted that each Hebrew letter has an independent meaning; the letter resh has the meaning "head."
- Zohar I, 23b.
- Ehat and Cook, Words of Joseph, 379.
- In the King Follett Discourse on two occasions Smith noted he had been recently "reading from the German," and he does actually read aloud in German near the end of the discourse. Neibaur was Joseph's tutor in German and Hebrew, and was the only person in Joseph's immediate company who knew German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, the languages Smith mentions or uses during his oration. And Neibaur was the figure in Nauvoo who knew Kabbalah and perhaps even possessed a copy of the Zohar, containing the exegesis Smith used in his greatest doctrinal discourse. Hale notes that the sections of the King Follett Discourse containing foreign languages probably receive some advanced preparation (Hale, 210). It seems probable that Neibaur helped.
- See David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Spring 1982): 14-58.
- The Zohar says, "The King [God] seeks only that which corresponds to him. Therefore the Holy One, may He be blessed, dwells in him who (like Him) is one. When man, in perfect holiness, realizes the One, He is in that one. And when is it that man is called one? When man and woman are joined together sexually. . . . Come and see! At the point at which a human being as male and female is united, taking care that his thoughts are holy, he is perfect and stainless and is called one. Man should therefore act so that woman is glad at that moment and has one single wish together with him, and both of them united should bring their mind to that thing. For thus has it been taught, `He who has not taken a woman is as if he were only a half'" (Zohar III, 81a).
- See Quinn, 138-40.
- Mozart was of course a Mason, and his royal patron, Joseph II of Austria, (reign 1780-90) was both a Mason and a patron of Masonry (Ellwood, 64).
- Robert Fludd, "Aboris Sephirothicae," in De Praeternaturali utrusque mundi Historia, Vol. 2, 157, part of the larger work, Utruiusque cosmi maioris . . . (Frankfurti, 1621). One also notes that Joseph Smith's presidential campaign poster (illustrated in Smith, lxxxvi) is similar to several other illustrations in this volume by Fludd.
- Millennial Star 9 (January 15, 1847): 23-4.
- "Since Clayton attended virtually all meetings from general chruch conferences to Joseph Smith's private prayer circle, and was often appointed to take minutes, he was usually present when Smith delivered prophecies and revealed new doctrines" (Smith, An Intimate Chronicle, xxiii).
- James B. Allen, Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton, a Mormon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 331-36.
- Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 184.
- "The theosophical system of the Sefiroth was interpreted by Abraham Abulafia as referring to human actions and psychological states . . . [I]n principle, the psychologizing of Kabbalah in the ecstatic trend served to bridge the immense gap between it and philosophical psychology, which never emphasized the esoteric nature of this realm of speculation" (Idel, Kabbalah, 254-55).
- For example, see Scholem's discussion of this practice among the Sabbateans in his Sabbatai Sevi, 426-32.
- The Eranos Society met each summer in Ascona, Switzerland, beginning in the 1930s. From 1933 through the 1950s Jung was a dominant presence in these conferences--gatherings which united many of the great minds of the time. In 1949 Gershom Scholem first lectured at Eranos and continued to lecture almost annually until 1961. These eleven lectures now compose the body of two books by Scholem, The Mystical Shape of the Godhead and On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Jung and Scholem shared a warm intellectual friendship, though Scholem was hesitant to develop his studies of Kabbalah using purely psychological terminology. See William McGuire, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 152-54. See also Joseph Dan's foreword to Gershom Scholem, The Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 1-14. A six-volume collection of papers from the Eranos conferences edited by Joseph Campbell has been published by Princeton University Press as Bollingen Series XXX.
- "Analysis of the psychological implications of using Kabbalistic techniques to attain paranormal experiences cannot be avoided. If the approach proposed here to see Kabbalah more in terms of experiential phenomena than has been previously done is correct, then psychology, as an invaluable tool, must gradually be integrated into future study of this kind of mysticism." Idel, Kabbalah, 25.
- For a summary of Yates's debt to Scholem, see the introduction to her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, 1-3.
- In addition to The American Religion, see Bloom's Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); and his critical interpretation titled "A Reading," in Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 111-21.
