Joseph: Moroni and the Gold Plates

Mormon Series

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts

One night in the autumn of 1823, when Joseph was seventeen, ethereal light filled his bedroom, followed by the appearance of an angel, who introduced himself as Moroni and explained that he had been sent by God. He had come to tell Joseph of a sacred text inscribed on solid gold plates that had been buried fourteen hundred years earlier under a rock on a nearby hillside. Moroni then conjured a vision in Joseph’s mind, showing the exact place the plates were hidden. The angel cautioned the boy, however, that he shouldn’t show the plates to anyone, or try to enrich himself from them, or even to attempt to retrieve them yet. By gazing into his most reliable peep stone, Joseph further learned that in order for him to be given the plates, God required that he marry a girl named Emma Hale and bring her along on his next visit to the hill, in September 1827.

High on the steep west slope of the hill, Joseph dug beneath the rock in the dark of night, while Emma stood nearby with her back turned to him. He soon unearthed the stone box that he had been prevented from removing four years earlier. The box contained a sacred text, “written on golden plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” which had been hidden on the hill for fourteen hundred years. They were filled with engravings in Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume. The stack of metal pages stood about six inches high. Joseph gathered up the plates and headed home with them. Later, nineteen witnesses would testify that they had actually seen the gold book.

Although the text was written in an exotic, long-dead language described as “reformed Egyptian,” Moroni had also given Joseph a set of divinely endowed spectacles that would allow the person wearing them to comprehend the strange hieroglyphics. By means of these magic glasses, Joseph began deciphering the document, dictating his translation to a neighbor named Martin Harris, who acted as his scribe. After two months of painstaking work they completed the first 116 page translation. Moroni retrieved the golden plates and magic spectacles, and Joseph reluctantly allowed Harris to borrow the manuscript to show his skeptical, disapproving wife. Disaster then struck: Harris somehow mislaid all 116 pages. The prevailing view is that his wife was so furious that Harris had gotten involved in such nonsense that she stole the pages and destroyed them.

In September 1828, however, after much praying and contrition on Joseph’s part, Moroni returned the plates, and the translation resumed, initially with Emma Smith serving as scribe. But the angel hadn’t returned the spectacles along with the plates this time around, so to decipher the Egyptian characters Joseph relied instead on his favorite peep stone: a chocolate-colored, egg-shaped rock.

Day after day, Joseph would place the magic rock in an upturned hat, bury his face in it with the stack of gold plates sitting nearby, and dictate the lines of scripture that appeared to him out of the blackness. He worked at a feverish pace during this second phase of the translation, averaging some thirty-five hundred words a day, and by the end of June 1829 the job was finished.

Nine months after the translation was completed, the 588-page book finally rolled off the presses and went on sale in the printer’s brick storefront in downtown Palmyra. Little more than a week after that – on April 6, 1830 – Joseph formally incorporated the religion that we know today as the Church of Latter-day Saints. The religion’s foundation – its sacred touchstone and guiding scripture – was the translation of the gold plates, which bore the title The Book of Mormon.

Joseph: The Diviner

Mormon Series

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts

Joseph was born on December 23, 1805, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. His father, Joseph Smith Sr., was a tenant farmer, perpetually on the lookout for his main chance, who had lost all his money a short while earlier in a failed scheme to export ginseng root to China. An earnest, good-natured kid with a low boredom threshold, Joseph Junior had no intention of becoming a debt-plagued farmer like his father, toiling in the dirt year in and year out. He spent long hours reflecting on the nature of the divine, pondering the meaning of life and death, assessing the merits and shortcomings of the myriad competing faiths of the day. Gregarious, athletic, and good-looking, he was a natural raconteur whom both men and women found immensely charming. His enthusiasm was infectious. He could sell a muzzle to a dog.

The future prophet’s spiritual curiosity moved him to explore far and wide on both sides of that blurry line, including an extended foray into the necromantic arts. More specifically, he devoted much time and energy attempting to divine the location of buried treasure by means of black magic and crystal gazing, activities he learned from his father. Although “money digging,” as the custom is known, was illegal, it was nevertheless a common practice among the hoi polloi of New England and upstate New York.

His career as a “scryer” – that is to say, a diviner, or crystal gazer – was launched. Soon his necromantic skills were sufficiently in demand that he was able to command respectable fees to find buried treasure for property owners throughout the region. By 1825, his renown was such that an elderly farmer named Josiah Stowell came from Pennsylvania to meet Joseph, and was so impressed by the encounter that he hired the twenty-year-old to travel with him to Susquehanna Valley to locate, with his peep stones, a hidden lode of silver rumored to have been mined by the Spaniards centuries earlier.

Although Joseph had applied himself to scrying with vigor, dedication, and the finest tools of his trade, it seems that he had been unable to find Stowell’s silver mine. Nor, in fact, during the previous six years he had worked as a money digger, had he ever managed to unearth any other actual treasure. When this had come to light, a disgruntled client had filed a legal claim accusing Joseph of being a fraud. The trial, and the raft of bad press it generated, brought his career as a professional diviner to an abrupt halt.

Scrying Stone

Mormon Polygamy

Mormon Series

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts

Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are each convinced that God regards them, and them alone, as his favored children. Both believe that Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, played a vital role in God’s plan for mankind. Mormon Fundamentalists passionately believe that Saints have a divine obligation to take multiple wives. Joseph Smith married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight.

Polygamy was, in fact, one of the most sacred credos of Joseph’s church – a tenet important enough to be canonized for the ages as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants, one of Mormonism’s primary scriptural texts. Mormons esteem three books of scripture above all others: The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.

But even as LDS leaders publicly claimed, in 1890, to have relinquished the practice, they quietly dispatched bands of Mormons to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some of the highest-ranking LDS authorities secretly continued to take multiple wives and perform plural marriages well into the twentieth century. Eventually they adopted a more pragmatic approach to American politics, emphatically rejected the practice, and actually began urging government agencies to prosecute polygamists. Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successfully that it is now widely regarded to be the quintessential American religion.

Mormon Fundamentalists, however, believe that acceptance into the American mainstream came at way too high a price. They contend that the Mormon leaders made an unforgivable compromise by capitulating to the U.S. government on polygamy over a century ago.

Mormon Overview

Mormon Series

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts

At last count, there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion – the first such faith to emerge since Islam. The Church has more than sixty thousand missionaries roaming the globe at any given moment, converting members at an astounding rate. If the expansion of the LDS faith continues at its current pace, governing the United States will become impossible without Mormon cooperation.

The LDS has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and it is currently the largest employer of the state of Utah. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard that city as sinful, iniquitous place that’s been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is in Provo and surrounding Utah County – the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson, and Salem – where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS.

Mormonism is patriarchal religion, rooted firmly in the traditions of the Old Testament. Dissent isn’t tolerated. Questioning the edicts of religious authorities is viewed as a subversive act that undermines faith. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to birth as many children as they can support – which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Utah County is a stronghold of Mormon Fundamentalism.

Salt Lake Temple

Elite Concentrated Authority

Power Elite Series

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, 1958, Excerpts

Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes precarious, the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a critical situation; it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects; and if worsening economic conditions result in political unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must intervene to preserve public order and its own authority. More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of executives and their bureaucratic managers.

In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity’s increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health; nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a genuine democracy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

Billboards and Culture Jammers

Billboard Series

Buyways by Catherine Gudis, 2004, Excerpts

Since the 1970s, a new generation of activists determined to rid the landscape of “litter on a stick,” and impatient with a system that favored corporate over grassroots interests, took up their own “extralegal” means of policing billboards. Their activities ranged from that of the “Billboard Bandit,” who used a chainsaw to cut down billboards along Michigan highways in 1971, to feminist groups who staged demonstrations at the foot of billboards and spray painted or pasted over sexist ads, labeling them demeaning to women.

Similar strategies were revived in the 1980s and 1990s, when urban residents noticed that while wealthy residential areas were billboard free, poor minority neighborhoods were under siege from liquor and cigarette advertisements. Beer and liquor brands have always been leading advertisers in the outdoor medium, with cigarette companies joining them after a forced withdrawal from television and radio advertising in the 1970s. For some time, the two products generated at least 40 percent of all outdoor advertising revenue. 

Frustrated by his fruitless attempts to have such billboards banned in his impoverished African American parish of the south side of Chicago. Reverend Michael Pfleger took matters into his own hands in 1990 with a bucket of red paint and 118 billboards as his target. Soon after that, Reverend Calvin Butts, of the Abyssinian Church of Harlem, also took up battle with a paintbrush, whitewashing the boards in his neighborhood. Pioneers in these billboard-busting efforts are Jack Napier and San Francisco’s Billboard Liberation Front [active since 1977], Ron English, and other anonymous “culture jammers” whose activities are often documented at Web sites and in magazines such as Stay Free! and Adbusters.

Work of culture jammer Ron English

Why Brandalize?

17 Jul 2012

The Brandalism project saw 25 artists from 8 countries coming together for the biggest subvertising campaign in UK history.  Over five days a team of guerilla installers travelled to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and London and put up artworks that seeks to confront the ad industry and take back our visual landscapes.

Gallery Page

http://brandalism.org.uk/gallery-page/