Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Part I A Prepared People
- Part II Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger
- Part III The Mormon Dispensation
- 7 Secret Combinations and Slippery Treasures in the Land of Zarahemla
- 8 The Mysteries Defined
- 9 Temples, Wives, Bogus-Making, and War
- 10 The Keys to the Kingdom
- 11 A Tangle of Strings and the Kingdom of God
- 12 Let Mysteries Alone
- Appendix The Sectarian and Hermetic Circumstances of Mormon Origins in Vermont and New York
- Abbreviations Used in Notes
- Notes
- Index
8 - The Mysteries Defined
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Part I A Prepared People
- Part II Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger
- Part III The Mormon Dispensation
- 7 Secret Combinations and Slippery Treasures in the Land of Zarahemla
- 8 The Mysteries Defined
- 9 Temples, Wives, Bogus-Making, and War
- 10 The Keys to the Kingdom
- 11 A Tangle of Strings and the Kingdom of God
- 12 Let Mysteries Alone
- Appendix The Sectarian and Hermetic Circumstances of Mormon Origins in Vermont and New York
- Abbreviations Used in Notes
- Notes
- Index
Summary
They are they who are the church of the Firstborn. They are they into whose hands that Father has given all things – They are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fulness, and of his glory; And are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son. Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God –
Vision of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon at Hiram, Ohio, February 16, 1832In the spring of 1830 Joseph Smith offered himself to the people of the Burned-over District as a prophet of a new dispensation. He was restoring not only the true church but the age of miracles, an age that orthodox religion assumed lay closed in the antiquity of the prophets. In this assertion, Smith not only placed himself in the same posture toward orthodoxy taken by earlier radical and hermetic sectarians but began to replicate the core of their doctrine. Mormonism powerfully rearticulated the fusion of hermetic divinization and millenarian restoration first forged in the fires of the Radical Reformation and the English Revolution.
The restoration of a miraculous connection between heaven and earth, between spirit and matter, was the most powerful attraction drawing adherents to Smith's new church. But miraculous, spiritual powers were a dangerous commodity, constantly in danger of slipping out of control. The first nine years of the history of the Mormon church brought important doctrinal developments, as Joseph Smith began to institutionalize the Mormon path to the divine mysteries.
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- Information
- The Refiner's FireThe Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844, pp. 184 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994