A Tale of Two Josephs: How Smith Shows Campbell That There’s No Power in Myth

Joseph Smith was a master myth maker. In a period of about 15 years until his death, he succeeded in convincing thousands of people (and millions since) that a small group of Israelites sailed in a custom-built barge to America, forged a civilization that lasted for over a thousand years, and became the principal ancestors of every Native American in the western hemisphere. He also convinced them that this great civilization left behind a historical summary of their thousand-year history buried in his own backyard. The record was engraved on sheets of gold, in an unknown language called reformed Egyptian. An angel named Moroni told him where the golden record was buried, and through the use of magical seer stones he translated the reformed Egyptian characters to English. The resulting book became the most correct book of any book on the earth. The authentic Christian religion had been lost during the Dark Ages, and Joseph Smith was the man that was chosen by God to restore it to earth.

Not bad for a simple farm boy living in upstate New York. And we’re just scratching the surface.

Joseph Smith’s teachings have been adapted and changed with time, but the essential elements of his myth remain in tact. While his religious innovations are certainly an important measure of his genius, I believe that his real genius lied in his ability to get people to believe that his stories were more than myths. People believed that he taught the literal truth, and they acted upon it. That was Smith’s power. The same principle applies today. For the modern-day general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is no power in myth.

If you watch PBS, you’ve probably seen or heard about Bill Moyers and his conversations with author Joseph Campbell on "The Power of Myth." Or you may have read Campbell’s book by the same name. A review of the book that was written for the Christian Research Journal summarizes Campbell’s premise:

For Campbell, the "power of myth" is the power of metaphor and poetry to capture the imaginations of individuals and societies. Myth supplies a sense of meaning and direction that transcends mundane existence while giving it significance. It has four functions (p. 31): The mystical function discloses the world of mystery and awe, making the universe "a holy picture." The cosmological function concerns science and the constitution of the universe. The sociological function "supports and validates a certain social order." Everyone must try to relate to the pedagogic function which tells us "how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances." America, Campbell believes, has lost its collective ethos and must return to a mythic understanding of life "to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual" (p. 14).

Campbell defends the benefits of myths as literally false but metaphorically true for the broad range of human experience. [emphasis in original]

Sounds pretty good, especially for Mormons like me that have discovered that the foundational stories of the faith they grew up with aren’t literally true. A metaphorical understanding of the church’s teachings works well when you want to keep participating in the faith community without having to believe all the nonsense. The problem is that Gordon B. Hinckley and the rest of his cohorts certainly aren’t going to pin a gold star on your shirt for believing in the church metaphorically. If you openly admit that you think that Joseph Smith’s stories are myths, you probably won’t be excommunicated. But you might become a bit of an outcast. And you could also break some hearts.

Sometimes myths serve a noble purpose. Who doesn’t like to hear the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree? What about the story of the apple bonking Sir Isaac Newton on the head? While these stories may not necessarily be true, they are harmless enough, and you don’t suffer dire consequences if you don’t believe them. Do you lose your U.S. citizenship if you say that the cherry tree story was just made up by a creative biographer?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has very little tolerance for mythological believers. As Gordon B. Hinckley famously stated in General Conference in 2003:

Each of us has to face the matter—either the Church is true, or it is a fraud. There is no middle ground. It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing.

I used to think that I could be a heterodox believer. Not anymore. I see no room in the church for heterodoxy. Indeed, not long ago, a dear TBM family member told me, "There is no such thing as heterodoxy. That is a lie of the adversary."

While of course I don’t believe that heterodoxy comes from Satan, I do agree that there is no such thing as heterodoxy, at least in the Mormon church. Besides, people who don’t believe in the literalness of Joseph’s stories aren’t going to sacrifice their entire lives to further the Mormon kingdom. They certainly wouldn’t be likely to faithfully pay ten percent of their income. They wouldn’t support the brethren on some issue when the brethren are clearly wrong. I don’t think the church has much use for mythological believers. Not that it couldn’t… just that it doesn’t.

This is my tale of two Josephs. Joseph Smith has shown Joseph Campbell that there’s no power in myth, at least not in the Mormon church. In this context, Smith’s immortal words still ring true even today: "Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation." And although Smith probably didn’t intend it, the tragedy is that one of the sacrifices that is required today is the sacrifice of the mind.

FARMS, Geographical Mitosis, and Cumorah's Cave

While the cave accounts may stir questions about the Hill Cumorah, perhaps the more important issue is what the firsthand witnesses may have learned from their encounters with the cave and, in turn, how their experiences were used to teach others. It is apparent from the existing records that many of the early church leaders viewed the cave experience as a legitimate event, whether an actual physical experience or a visionary one. By looking at the accounts and the context in which they were shared, one can see that regardless of the metaphysical nature of Cumorah's cave, it has served to teach important gospel principles—principles such as God's miraculous dealings with man, his dominion over all things, consecration, and continuing revelation.

Thus wrote Cameron Packer in an article published the FARMS Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, which can be found here. The article discusses the accounts of the early followers of Joseph Smith of a visit to a cave in the Hill Cumorah. In my opinion, the statement quoted above is one of the most ironic statements that I have ever read coming from FARMS. My reasons for this are given below.

According to the Book of Mormon, the hill called Cumorah was the site of the final battles of both the Jaredite and Nephite civilizations. According to the limited geography theory (LGT) that has been invented by John Sorenson/FARMS to create a plausible geographical setting for the events described in the Book of Mormon, Cumorah was located in Mesoamerica, perhaps within the vicinity of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This view developed due to the impossibility of the earlier Hemispheric Model which comprised the entire continents of North and South America, with the "narrow neck of land" corresponding to the Isthmus of Panama.

Since Joseph Smith claimed to find the golden plates in a hill near his home in upstate New York, LDS apologists have insisted that the New York hill, which is called Cumorah by the church, could not possibly be the same Cumorah that is mentioned in the text of the Book of Mormon, which is supposedly located in Mesoamerica. Thus Cumorah has experienced a geographical mitosis! According to the apologists, there are two Cumorahs, the "real" one in Mesoamerica, and the one that is "called" Cumorah by the church. They claim that the one that is "called" Cumorah in upstate New York was mistakenly identified as such in the early days of the church, since Joseph found the records there.

The truth is that the Two Cumorah Theory is a modern invention that has been created to resolve the text of the Book of Mormon with the beliefs of early church leaders. The case of the apologists is complicated further by additional tidbits of Mormon history, including Joseph Smith’s story of the white Lamanite named Zelph and the accounts of the Cumorah cave.

There are numerous accounts of the Cumorah cave story given in Cameron Packer’s article. In these accounts, Cumorah was said to contain a cavernous repository of ancient Nephite records. One account was taken from the journal of Wilford Woodruff:

President Young said in relation to Joseph Smith returning the Plates of the Book of Mormon that He did not return them to the box from wh[ence?] He had Received [them]. But He went [into] a Cave in the Hill Comoro with Oliver Cowdry & deposited those plates upon a table or shelf. In that room were deposited a large amount of gold plates Containing sacred records & when they first visited that Room the sword of Laban was Hanging upon the wall & when they last visited it the sword was drawn from the scabbard and [laid?] upon a table and a Messenger who was the keeper of the room informed them that that sword would never be returned to its scabbard untill the Kingdom of God was Esstablished upon the Earth & untill it reigned triumphant over Evry Enemy. Joseph Smith said that Cave Contained tons of Choice Treasures & records.

Another account by Brigham Young can be found in the Journal of Discourses:

Oliver Cowdery went with the Prophet Joseph when he deposited these plates. Joseph did not translate all of the plates; there was a portion of them sealed, which you can learn from the Book of Doctrine and Covenants. When Joseph got the plates, the angel instructed him to carry them back to the hill Cumorah, which he did. Oliver says that when Joseph and Oliver went there, the hill opened, and they walked into a cave, in which there was a large and spacious room. He says he did not think, at the time, whether they had the light of the sun or artificial light; but that it was just as light as day. They laid the plates on a table; it was a large table that stood in the room. Under this table there was a pile of plates as much as two feet high, and there were altogether in this room more plates than probably many wagon loads; they were piled up in the corners and along the walls. The first time they went there the sword of Laban hung upon the wall; but when they went again it had been taken down and laid upon the table across the gold plates; it was unsheathed, and on it was written these words: "This sword will never be sheathed again until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ." I tell you this as coming not only from Oliver Cowdery, but others who were familiar with it, and who understood it just as well as we understand coming to this meeting. . . . [Don] Carlos Smith was a young man of as much veracity as any young man we had, and he was a witness to these things. Samuel Smith saw some things, Hyrum saw a good many things, but Joseph was the leader.

In both of these accounts, the experiences are portrayed as literal events that occurred in the hill Cumorah, which at that time was understood to be the hill near Joseph Smith’s home in New York. No indication is given that these experiences were metaphorical or visionary, though we can safely assume that they were, since no such cave exists at the New York site. In his book An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, Grant Palmer makes the case that such visionary experiences were not unusual within the magical worldview espoused by the uneducated folk of nineteenth-century rural America.

Grant Palmer’s book had a significant impact on me. I had already heard or read about most of the points he makes in his book, but his writing allowed me to synthesize these ideas into a larger whole. The book was originally distributed by Deseret Book, but it was pulled from the shelves after its contents were more closely examined. The greatest tragedy of Mr. Palmer’s story is that he was disfellowshipped for his work, after an earnest search for answers and many years of service in the Church Education System. He summed up the tragedy with this statement in a KCRL radio interview on December 9, 2004, in Salt Lake City:

"I don't know how to repent from something that's true, or probably true. I don't know how to do that. I shouldn't have to."

And he’s right, of course. He was disfellowhipped for telling the truth as he saw it. The problem was that this truth did not agree with the whitewashed, correlated version of history that the church presents. A major theme in Palmer’s work is that many of the experiences of early Mormons were subjective and visionary, consistent with a magic world view. The Cumorah cave story is one example.

Palmer drew ire from church leaders by applying the same logic to other experiences of early Mormons, ones that are critical in the church mythos of the restoration of the gospel. Examples include the accounts of the witnesses of the golden plates of the Book of Mormon and the accounts of the restoration of the priesthood.

FARMS picked up on him before his church leaders did. In volume 15, issue 2 of the FARMS Review, four FARMS scholars attacked Palmer and his book. In typical FARMS fashion, the attacks were mostly personal. On the subject of visionary vs. literal experiences, the following is a sampling of statements that were written in response to Palmer’s book:

From Davis Bitton, pp. 257–72:

Determined to portray the witnesses as confused simpletons living in a daze and unable to tell the difference between what they saw and what they imagined, Palmer shows no ability to negotiate such pathways, or even to recognize them.

From Steven C. Harper, pp. 273–308:

It is hard to imagine a precedent more like [Martin] Harris’s own versions in which he emphatically asserts until the day of his death the actuality of the angel who "came down from heaven" and who "brought and laid [the plates] before our eyes, that we beheld and saw," while also reporting, according to others, that he "never claimed to have seen them with his natural eyes, only with spiritual vision."

Also from Harper:

An honest inquirer who examines all the evidence as presented by the eleven witnesses themselves will be convinced that they believed that their testimonies—as printed in each copy of the Book of Mormon—were real and true in the most literal sense.

From Mark Ashurst-McGee, pp. 309–64:

The reason that Palmer tries to pack [so many people, including the witnesses of the Book of Mormon,] into the [Cumorah] cave is to argue that their witness experience is indistinguishable from the cave vision. If I am reading him correctly, he implies that these experiences are one and the same.

These statements highlight why Cameron Packer’s dismissal of the Cumorah cave stories, quoted at the beginning of this blog post, is so ironic. He postulates that the Cumorah cave accounts could have been describing some kind of "visionary gospel learning experience," and that we ought not to focus on the obvious questions that arise. FARMS wants to dismiss the Cumorah cave stories because it thinks that the stories are not credible, or are too fantastical. But from the viewpoint of an unbiased observer, are they they any more fantastical than the stories of witnesses of the golden plates? The real issue is that the Cumorah cave stories are not part of the church's correlated mythos. So for FARMS, it's safe to dismiss them.