Mormons are into the OCCULT

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_Amore
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Re: Mormons are into the OCCULT

Post by _Amore »

Maksutov wrote:Christians are too. "Holy Ghosts"? Sounds pretty spooky and occulty to me. :lol: Then there's that ritual cannibalism thing...yikes! :eek:

Ok, please take it from the beginning, but this time remember you’re Skooby doo.

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_ClarkGoble
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Re: Mormons are into the OCCULT

Post by _ClarkGoble »

Maksutov wrote:Yep, Deuteronomy explicitly condemns necromancy--you know, what Mormons do when they're baptizing the dead, Joseph Smith talking to Moroni, Smith's spirit guardians he used in money digging, magic talismans and daggers. Quite the trickster, no wonder he kept getting in trouble with the law. Some Christians suspect Smith was a secret Satanist. You can see why. :wink:


I know you're just making a joke, but this actually gets at some big complexities in the Old Testament - particularly around the time of Lehi. If you take the Documentary Hypothesis seriously, then the Deuteronomist tradition really arises around the time of Josiah (with many scholars seeing Deuteronomy being written at that time). The Deuteronomist tradition is thus trying to repress or at least reframe elements of Jewish worship. Especially elements often tied to the northern Kingdom. A lot of practices that seems completely accepted as mainstream in parts of the text (Moses' serpent, speaking with the dead, worship outside of the Jewish temple especially in "high places", etc.) get condemned. Even the northern Israel temples, which most scholars see as pretty much the same as Solomon's, get rebranded as Jeroboam's sin. Whereas I think the standard view today is that the two calves have a function more akin to the cherobim on the Ark of the Covenant.

The reason to raise this is that there's pretty strong reasons to think the elements of the Old Testament that tend to downplay or condemn spiritualism or even prophecy independent from the priestly line are really elements of the Deuteronomist or Priestly traditions revising Judaism - largely in the period from Lehi on up to probably around 300 BC after the period of exile is well over.

Now I think it's fair to note that not all of these elements are found in the Book of Mormon. And the more interesting elements we do find such as Enochian literature tend to be late Hellenistic even if elements might go back to pre-exilic times. The traditional problem of course is that what survives is what was retained by the D & P traditions when the canon was formed. Even the other traditions outside of the Canon, such as Enochian texts, are themselves late even if perhaps making use of earlier traditions. What's interesting are that any element of pre-exilic Israel religion that didn't meet the theological standards of D & P survived. So Moses' serpent is remarkable in that sense, for instance.

Where most of the parallels to Joseph Smith's so-called "occult" elements are found is first century syncretic practices. So you have pretty ubiquitous amulets, scrolls and so forth in the magic tradition that have similar mystic words and often have Jewish figures in them. The difference between say a gnostic text with mystic mantras and a pagan text are minor if there are differences at all. Most of these are all seen through a broadly platonic and quasi-Egyptian framework. What's interesting of course is that this survived to Joseph Smith's time. (Largely thanks to the Islamic sacking of Constantinople which brought refugees and texts to the west that had been lost)

Now I am careful. I don't think this justifies these more hermetic, occult, or magical traditions. Far from it. Just that if we're going to be consistent we should acknowledge most of this was around in the period of Christ and the centuries thereafter. Indeed scholars have long noted the use of magical traditions by Jesus such as the mud on the eyes and so forth. While Morton Smith isn't someone I'd appeal to uncritically, I do think his Jesus the Magician does a good job noting the parallels.
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