Speaker 1: The pattern of American religion basically picks up certain Old
World patterns, but patterns which in the Old World were
kind of on the fringe. And then what America does
or has done, is to take these these sort of
fringe patterns and carry them forward and actually, you know,
make them sort of successful in mainstream. But in order
to become successful in mainstream, one of the things that
they have to do is they have to they have
to shed some of the more let's say, the more
enchanted aspects of the European fringe, which in traditional forms
of religion have ways of being integrated. But whenever an
American religion goes mainstream, it has to secularize in certain ways.
So basically that's the whole case that I want to make.
And the reason that I'm interested in Mormonism is I
am personally far enough away from it that I can
It's an interesting test case. It's like an interesting kind
of control group.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Peeshel. Welcome to the symbolic world. So
hello everyone.
Speaker 3: We are back here with Universal History with Dekon Seraphim,
and this is the day that we are supposed to
talk about Mormonism. But just before we started recording the koond,
Seraphim just started to panic or to say, I don't know,
I don't know.
Speaker 2: Like what's going to happen? And so I don't even
know what is what is it going? What's gonna happen
with get okay? Well that's what's going on. What's going on?
Speaker 1: So the first thing I want to say is that
I'm very afraid today. I'm very, very afraid. And the
reason that I'm afraid is h I probably have more
people reach out to me about the last two episodes
than has ever it happened with anything I've done. When
I say reach out to me, I mean like hunting
down my cell phone number to give me a call,
or shipping me books in the mail, or sending me
like DMS being like, Hey, you don't really understand Mormonism.
Let me hook you up with somebody who'll like, really
explained Mormonism to you. I was like, anyway, it was.
The response was a little overwhelming, and then there were
just so many angry people in the comments. I do
not normally read the comments, but last video, my goodness,
people just got their noses all out of joint. And
I think part of it is, you know, I actually
I do not. I'm the sort of person I do
not mind being disagreed with, but I hate being misunderstood.
And so I want to actually begin and I'm going
to really see if I can just like do this
to stall for time for forty minutes and then be like, oh, whoops.
That was another episode we avoided talking about Mormonism. So
the problem with talking about the history of early Mormonism
is that you go and you read biographies, and you
read different books and things but written by Mormons, and
read things written by non Mormons and everything, and then
you say, okay, well, Joseph Smith was this kind of
person and he went and did these things, and here's
the historical record. And then people do not enjoy that,
and they say, no, he didn't actually do or say
any of those things, and and so that like even
the literature is just I mean, it's just an absolute
minefield out there for Mormonism. And this is and it's
actually quite remarkable that it's the case, given the fact
that he's you know, lived much more recently than like
biblical figures or early Church fathers or you know, even
George Washington, like we you know, it's easier to say
things about George Washington than it is about Joseph Smith,
because Joseph Smith is such a polarizing figure. For one thing,
and there's actually different lots of different branches that kind
of split off as the Mormons make their way west.
There's different branches that split off, and some of those,
you know, branches were founded by people his brother, people
like one of his many wives, and those branches they
retained things including like letters, papers, writings, things like this
that you know, they believe, you know that there's there's
no reason to doubt those things were authentically created by
Joseph Smith. And but then you know, other people say no,
that those you know, just a bunch of schismatics, you know.
And and so the problem is all the Mormons have
reached out to me in the last few months, every
single one of them, all of them, and.
Speaker 4: It's been pretty it's been pretty overwhelming.
Speaker 1: And of course also all of the ex Mormons have
reached out to me and and said, hey, here's a
really good book that you should read. This really helped
me understand the history of the Olds Church and so on.
So I have been inundated with books and links and
podcasts it's been scary and and I don't now. What
I will say is that none of these people have
been rude, so it's not scientific levels. Yeah, yeah, good
on all of you guys for you know, more current Mormons,
ex Mormons, reformed LDS, you know, different groups. Everybody this
resout has been quite kind, so thank you for that.
Uh but the just the sheer amount of stuff that
you have to kind of wade through to even sort
of piece together the narrative of Joseph Smith's life other
than the just the really basic he moved here on
this date, and even some of that stuff is kind
of hotly argued about. It's quite it's quite intimidating, and uh,
I you know, so I'm gonna I'm gonna try.
Speaker 2: Really maybe you asked for it. I'm just saying, yeah,
I'm not.
Speaker 1: You know, it is so I I understand that I
was just like, hey, you know, Mormonism has these interesting
patterns that seem to be the patterns of you know,
other American religion. And then it's like the yeah, it's
like the meme where you know, the guy opens his
computer and it's all football news and just like all
the football's just yeah, that's that is what has happened
to me in the last few months. So I'm going
to try to talk about this, but i want to
kind of give a little context, a little more context
for why I'm interested in looking at this. This is
not a channel where we just like go debunk other religions.
That's not the point of what we do in the
symbolic world. Obviously, if you want to know Jonathan and
I believe, you can look up the Nice and Creed,
you know, just like it's you know, we're we're obviously
we're Orthodox Christians. We're not making any bones about that.
But what I'm interested here in here is not making
a big point about whether something is true or false.
Obviously I believe Orthodoxy is true. Obviously I believe that
Mormonism is false. But what I what I'm the thing
that I'm I'm interested in talking about here is is
this idea that American religion seems to follow a certain pattern.
And lots of people have noticed this, people who are
sympathetic to it, people who are again it. As we
say down here, I was down here in the sunny sunlands,
except that it is currently you're waiting for snow, ice
is falling from the sky right now, which is not
a thing that should happen where I live. Yeah, I
think we're due to for like twelve to eighteen inches
of snow this weekend, which for you guys is like
a light dusting.
Speaker 4: For us, that is the end of days, all right.
Speaker 1: So anyway, so the thing that I'm interested in is
this pattern of American religion. And the argument that I
want to make is that the pattern of American religion
basically picks up certain Old World patterns, but patterns which
in the Old World were kind of on the fringe.
And then what America does or has done, is to
take these these sort of fringe patterns and carry them
forward and actually, you know, make them sort of successful
in mainstream. But in order to become successful in mainstream,
one of the things that they have to do is
they have to they have to shed some of the
more let's say, the more enchanted aspects of the European fringe,
which in traditional forms of religion have ways of being integrated.
But whenever an American religion goes mainstream, it has to
secularize in certain ways. So that's the that's basically, that's
the whole case that I want to make. And I
think the reason that I'm interested in Mormonism is because
it is it's like a I am personally far enough
away from it that I can It's it's an interesting
test case, right, It's like an interesting kind of ConTroll group.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So if I talk about Southern Baptists, there's always going
to be like some certain amount of like some of
that is going to be personal for me, right, But
when I talk about Mormonism and the various groups that
split off, I know somebody's going to be mad already
that I've been using the word Mormonism instead of calling
them the Latter day Saints and all this stuff.
Speaker 4: But anyway, broad.
Speaker 1: Term, if I, if I, if you know, with that,
with those particular groups, right, you can see the same
patterns playing out, but it's in first of all, kind
of an extroverted way, you know, from like a Southern
Baptist perspective, right, it's an extroverted way. Obviously you have
like lots of polygamy, lots of shootouts at the jailhouse,
things like this. Although I'm sure some Southern Baptists had
shootouts at a jail house. I will I will tell you.
My old church, which is the second oldest Baptist church
in Texas. They never had a shootout, but there was
one time I wanted in the eight there was like
shootout potential. So it's in the in the the meeting
minutes of that. There was one Sunday where the pastor
preached with a pair of revolvers on the pulpit because
because the the comanches were in the area kind of rating,
and it's like we might have to like go out
and like shoot it out with some comanches during Sunday
morning worship. So in any case, I love stuff like
that so much. So that's that's why the interest in Mormonism.
So what I'm going to try to do is talk
through some of the stuff, and I'm going to be
looking at it not from a perspective of here's the
entire history of Mormonism with every you know, like there's
there's books for that, there's biographies for that. You can
get that stuff from lots of different perspectives. That's not
what we're trying to do today. What we're trying to
do today is to look at the ways that the
European fringe religion survives and thrives in America in kind
of these really unexpected ways. So that being said, a
lot of what I'm going to be talking about today
in reference to Mormonism will come from.
Speaker 4: And I can already hear people getting angry about this
in the audience. But this is a book.
Speaker 1: I have two copies because they were sent to me
by two different Mormons. Okay, so so I have two
copies of this book. This book is called Early Mormonism
and the Magic Worldview by doctor Michael Quinn, who's a
member of the LDS Church and a professor I think
at Brigham Young and then he was excommunicated for publishing
this book. I do not know what his current status is. However,
the book is. You can't see it.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: Early there we go is the Magic and the Magic Worldview?
Speaker 1: All right, Yes, this is nice light reading. I want
you guys to know the things I do for you.
This book is six hundred and thirty pages long. You
didn't read the whole thing, Yes I did, Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4: Why do you think I keep postponing this this recording?
Speaker 2: You just keep reading books and people send.
Speaker 1: You like it's that's the problem of talking about all
of this stuff. Is that just the amount of literature
on it, Like it's quite difficult, Like you can you
cannot become an instant expert and all this stuff. All right,
that being said, stop making excuses for myself, all right,
and I'm going to try to Actually we'll just get
into this. But what I really want to again focus
on is going to be like, let's talk about these
things and then let's you can help me with the
sort of the symbolic understanding.
Speaker 4: Okay, So.
Speaker 2: I said I would never do it again, but here
we are.
Speaker 3: We are announcing the Symbolic Girls Summit in May twenty
twenty six. I have so many great people around me
that I'm just excited to do it, even though I
thought it would be crazy to do it again.
Speaker 1: Our summit's going to be from May fourteenth through sixteenth
in Broadview Heights, Ohio. You can buy tickets at Symbolic
World Summit dot com. We have early bird pricing going
right now, fifty dollars off of general admission and VIP tickets.
Keynote speakers this year are father Josiah Trenham and doctor
Mary Harrington, which is a combination nobody knew that they
wanted but I think it's going to be absolutely incredible.
And of course Jonathan and I will be speaking, as
well as several people from around the symbolic world community.
Speaker 2: A lot of people that you like, that you've seen are.
Speaker 3: Going to be there, are going to come, We're gonna
have book signings.
Speaker 2: It will be a lot of time for people to
meet and to greet.
Speaker 3: We're also doing Supra as well, and so come and
join us. We can't wait for this and we're excited to.
Speaker 2: Meet you in person.
Speaker 1: That being said, let's install a little more by going
all the way back to the Bible. So and the
beginning of his book, Quinn basically makes the argument that
what modern again, like I think this question of like, well,
what's what's magic? Yeah, and what's like, you know, what's
like a legit supernatural activity?
Speaker 4: What is you know?
Speaker 1: So, for our purposes today, we're going to use a
very theologically imprecise word magic to refer to all of it. Right,
let's say any kind of supernatural activity that comes with
a ritual element. So we'll be this is the way
that anthropologists talk about magic. So then they'll break that
down and they'll talk about you know, magic in the
church folk magic, you know, the occult, which would be
like a secret society.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't consider the sacraments magic in that definition, or
would you?
Speaker 1: I would not, and it does not see well, I
mean obviously no, I would not, but I mean I wouldn't.
I also wouldn't consider the a lot of the other
things I'm about to call magic, I would not personally
consider magic. This is just Quinn's wording, right, Okay, now
that yeah, So anyway, that being said, it seems like
anthropologists do also make kind of a sort of distinction
when it comes with the sacraments, although there are throughout
the Middle Ages kind of like some magical uses or
associations with the Eucharist or things associated with the Eucharist
in particular in like medieval folk magic. But we're not
talking about that today, Jonathan, Dude, I'm trying to talk
about Mormonism and you're just getting me all distracted.
Speaker 4: Ah, gosh, gosh, Okay, all right.
Speaker 1: So his argument is that magic beliefs and practices are
pervasive throughout America in the early colonial period or the
from colonial times to the early national period. That this
is not limited to the uneducated or irreligious, but it
includes Harvard graduates, it includes ordained clergy, it includes governors
of colonies and states, it includes devout Christians, and that
actually this sort of goes back all the way to
the Bible, and in fact these people would have used
the Bible as a justification for their various magical practices.
So just to give some examples, the divination by cups,
you find this in early colonial Bible commentaries on Genesis
forty four, right where Joseph we find out has a
divining cup or something which is not elaborated on or
explained throughout the rest of the Bible. Magic by means
of this is another quote from that period. Magic by
means of the use of the Holy name, that is,
the tetragramaton was actually sanctioned, and the results that were
sought by different little, if at all, from the object
of heathen magic. So some biblical examples here, and of course,
not surprisingly many of these come from Genesis, though not
all of them. You have Jacob's use of hazel rods
to produce spotted offspring. I have here, By the way,
I've heard some weird explanations for how this works. Is
like some chemical in the bark of the hazel or
something like this, and it's like, I remember, get to try.
Speaker 3: To explain that one to me scientifically, and I was
like fourteen years old.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, not buying this.
Speaker 4: Sorry, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually, to help us stall for time a little more, John,
I think, could you just explain, like, what is the
symbolism of the of the rods in that Genesis story.
Speaker 4: That's a serious question though, I've always wondered.
Speaker 1: And no, let's not talk about that, dang it seriously, Okay,
all right, okay. Uh So you've got Jacob Jusef Hazel rods,
You've got Joseph's silver divination cup, You've got they would
they would.
Speaker 4: Include how uh you know.
Speaker 1: Quinn includes things like the brass serpent as an example
of of like apertrophate magic, right uh, as well as
things like Elijah's bones, reviving a corpse, Paul's handkerchiefs.
Speaker 4: You know, healing and reviving people.
Speaker 1: Uh, casting lots to choose Pathias as an apostle in
the Book of Acts, another example sort of magic of
you know, magical selection. Obviously, again, I'm not saying all
of these things are magic. This is Quinn saying this okay,
and then of course, uh, a lot of Jesus miracles.
So Jesus using spittle to heal the blind man in
the Gospel. According to Saint John, I guess there's some
kind of sele life of magic that was going on
in Egypt maybe at some point in the ancient world.
So a lot of people say, like, oh, look, it's
an example of that Araic words and Greek healing accounts,
this idea that maybe a foreign word is kind of
part of a magical spell, like in Mark chapter five,
what's what's uh? And of course you know Celsus Celsius,
who's the the the Greek anti Christian.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, the one of.
Speaker 1: The one of the early enemies of Christianity against whom
Origin rites. Celsus accuses Jesus of having gone off to
Egypt to have like learned alexandri in magic and then
just coming back and practicing it and all this stuff,
and uh.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Then then other early pagans are like, uh, actually they
take the reverse tack. They say, well, obviously Jesus was
a rubbish magician, because our miracles are so much more
impressive than any of the ones that he did, And
so so on and so forth, you know, things like this,
all right, so uh this this. So the argument that
Quinn sort of makes is that you have this there
are there are a series of ritualistic and or miraculous
practices which go back to the early you know, early
books of the Bible, and that these people, and when
we say these people, I mean the sort of the
non Roman Catholic theological fringe of Europe who many of
whom emigrated because of religious persecution to the colonies to
the New World. They basically would look back at that
and they would be like, oh, well, here's Jacob using rods,
so why can't I use rods? Later on it will
be here's Jacob practicing polygamy, so why can't I practice polygamy?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: That kind of thinking, and you still still run into
this sort of thinking today.
Speaker 1: Man, you know, there's there's at least one YouTuber who's
making been making a splash lately because he's trying to
get everybody in the polygamy train.
Speaker 4: Again. I wouldn't even say who it is because I
don't want to give him attention.
Speaker 1: But you know, every once in a while, I'm just
you know, this thing crops up every every now and then.
So within medieval Christianity you have these magical practices that
can kind of coexist along side official doctrines. So you
have Christian intellectuals openly embracing Kabba law during the Renaissance,
especially in Italy, and this idea that hey, maybe there's
actually the ceremonial magic out here that's not in conflict
with the scripture, but it's it's like an extra path
that's going to lead us to some extra divine knowledge
that's not found in the tradition of the church or
the sacramental ritual life of the Church. But you know,
maybe as like this other secret God wants us to have.
Speaker 2: That's a little different.
Speaker 3: I mean, the idea of using yeah, that's that's yeah,
that's practice in order to attain knowledge. Is it's not
exactly the same as the desire to create phenomena through.
Speaker 1: Magic, right to like heal so to do that. The
thing is that it seems like the distinction you just
made is not one that these a lot of these
people made. Oh yeah, okay, Like that's that's the weird thing, Like,
like I get what you're saying, and that's it's one
of the things that Quinn talks about in the book,
because he says something and I was I was reading
this particular chapter in a park full of a lot
of very noisy children, only some of which were mine.
So I'm not going to get the quote exact, but
he says something to the effect of of you would
think it was just sort of like, oh, there's the
here's the here's the witch doctor types over here doing
the who do and then here's the just the intellectuals
over here, and for them, it's just like this intellectual
pathway to God. But actually, if you actually look at
the practices of these people, even you know, the people
who are like you know, university deans or or deans
of seminary or you know, clergy or things like that,
they are the ones like trying to turn the lead
into gold, right, They are the ones who are also
engaging in the practices that are trying to trying to
affect phenomenon in various ways. And I do actually wonder
if even the thing that you just said, and I'm
not accusing you, Jonathan of being a materialist, but even
the thing you just said is maybe like maybe like
a kind of like that's the place we go to
with modern people like we immediately go to, Okay, well,
maybe there's a way that this can just be sort
of a path to inner enlightenment and it's not going
to like, you know, I'm not going to use it
to find water or turn lead into gold or do
any of these other kind of traditional things you're trying
to do with magic, when in actuality it might be
that the physical and you know, the physical and the spiritual,
the scene and the end scene were just much more
closely related for people even at this point in the
early modern period, because it seems like people really were
trying to do both. So you have, for instance, Marsilio Ficino,
who is a Renaissance Roman Catholic priest but also an
astrologer and occultist. He foretells papal elections. You have people
drawing up a Roman Catholic cardinal in Italy who draws
up a Nativity horoscope for Christ Why, I don't know.
Pope six is the fourth who's a noted astrologer. And
you have Johann Reuchlin, who's of course publishing major works
on the Kabalah in the late fifteenth early sixteenth century.
Even Thomas Moore's Personal Book of the Hours. You know,
this is a man for all seasons, Thomas Moore. He is,
his Personal Book of the Hours has like astrological, magical
sort of texts in it as well. So this is
at some point, this just becomes a certain part of
the the part of what is sort of accepted as
a norm for uh, educated gentleman with somewhat esoteric tastes.
Speaker 3: So yeah, because we always have to remember and people
struggle to differentiate, I think in in in the world,
like the difference between the witches that were accused in
the early modern period and the court as the court magician.
Speaker 1: Like John Deevele, who obviously you know what it was,
or you or Johann Kepler, Yeah, a good Protestant, Protestant
court magician, Johann Kepler.
Speaker 4: I guess d was Protestant too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this this but basically, as long as there
is kind of an establishment church and an establishment including
like uh like powerful patrons, kings, queens, et cetera, to
patriotize you, you have there's kind of enough legitimacy.
Speaker 4: But what happens is.
Speaker 1: That in the in the uh, the aftermath of the
Protestant Reformation, And this is one of the things we
talked about, I think in our first our first episode
of this, in this very ill conceived project, one of
the things that we talked about was the way that
the Protestant Reformation did not take the sort of enchantment
out of Christianity, which is something which a lot of
people you know would say, you know, a lot of
people like me would would sort of make that argument now,
but that actually initially that is not what happened. What
happened was there was no no, there was no sort
of check, There were no kind of boundaries or guidelines around,
or at least none that were enforceable around what kinds
of enchanted practices you could engage in. And so what
happens is that after the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe,
in particular in certain parts of Germany, certain parts of Poland,
there's a massive explosion of these kinds of enchanted practices. Now,
one of the things that we didn't talk about is
that these kinds of enchanted practices.
Speaker 4: Had the effect.
Speaker 1: Or really really took off in particular among people who
were otherwise theologically heterodox. Now, what do I mean by this,
I'm talking about Anabaptists and Unitarians in particular. So there's
early Unitarian movement happening that eventually gets brought over to
the US because of religious persecution. There's also an early
Anabaptist movement that happens mainly in Germany, and a lot
of those people come over to the US, again mainly
because of religious persecution.
Speaker 4: Obviously, we're talking about the.
Speaker 1: Amish Mennonites, but also a particularly weird and interesting group
of people from Pennsylvania who I will now, who I
will now talk about. I was like, I'll come back
to them later. Nope, we're going to talk about them
now because I am going to try to I'm trying
to stick to an outline here today.
Speaker 4: This is how desperate I've gotten. Yeah, No, what were
you going to say?
Speaker 2: The Shakers are the Quakers that you're talking No.
Speaker 4: Not the Shakers, the Quakers.
Speaker 1: Uh, you're you're you're you're going down the right direction
with a let's say, uh, the the verb, the verbs
you're going at But you should be looking more at
the Dunkers or Tunkers. Dunkers as in like their Anabaptists,
you know, they they they Yeah, but there's a guy
named Conrad Vissel, who is h he's a Pietist. He's
part of one of the Brethren groups. So the Brethren
groups are like a pietistic offshoot of Lutheranism. But actually
that that makes it sound like that there was like
an amicable like, oh, you guys, go do your pietistic thing,
which is not what happened. Vissel actually got expelled from
the Lutheran clergy for of a variety of heterodots from
their perspective practices, which included things like, you know, obviously
he's Anabaptists and pietistic leafs, but also things like, uh,
his practice of astrology and magic, Kabbalism and so on.
By the way, I also want to say a bunch
of the Kabbala people also reached out to me within
the last few months, and we're all very worried I
was going to misrepresent Kabbala to the to the world.
Speaker 2: Jewish.
Speaker 1: No, no, the Jewish yeah yeah, And and at least
two people reach out and I said, listen, the.
Speaker 3: Conservapim call of a sudden like being plunging into the
esoteric world, and then I just did not the world
gush a resourcerer is going to write.
Speaker 1: You every Yeah, I said listen, I said listen, thanks.
I'm actually just interested in how Christians have tried to
use these things. And they were like, we don't care
about that. It was like cool, all right, So anyway,
that's that's that's uh. Yeah, it's just been it's been
a it's been a it's been a little hectic. It's
been a little hectic. My bookshelf behind me. Actually every
video that I made recently is just getting less and
less organized because I like, between videos for different things,
I'm like pulling books off and flipping.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, it's just been spit a little nuts, been a
little nuts.
Speaker 4: So let me talk about Visel Trek.
Speaker 3: You're gonna have to have that stamp, you know, for
for a study purpose only in the erea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not helpful with like the hair getting long
and the beard getting crazy either.
Speaker 4: Like it's just like you.
Speaker 2: Know, I'm reading, but it's just from my video.
Speaker 1: I gotta go to, like I gotta go to like
a football game or something soon, just to like rebalance
the humors.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: So Vissel is a German Pietist. He's been expelled from
the Lutheran clergy for among other things, his magical practices,
but also for his kind of like he's got these
very mystical and there was always within Germany, in even
in the Middle Ages, think of somebody like mister Record,
there was always this kind of mystical.
Speaker 4: Practice.
Speaker 1: And so he's got some weird combination of all of
these things, including of course Rescrucianism mm HM, which is
really big among the Anabaptists who emigrate to Pennsylvania and
immigrate to I was as surprised to learn this as
you are. And I will just say, if you're out there,
you're watching this, you are a Resicrucian. Please do not
send me any literature, please, all right. So, so what
he does is he goes to Lancster, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
which is of course where a lot of the amash
A and I've spent actually just an enormous amount of
time in my life in that area. Never lived there,
but I visited that. Yeah, the Lancaster County and Lehigh
Valley of Pennsylvania just seems like a lot in the
course of my life, even before I was Orthodox. I
don't know, it's a it's a really interesting it's such
an interesting part of the country. Yeah, because you have
you have all of these actually almost all the city
you know, the towns there have names like you know Bethlehem, Ephreta,
you know Emmaeus right where Father Andrew lives, and so on.
Like you have all of these places that have these
biblical names. It's because they were They were all founded
by these little societies, mostly of Brethren or other Pietistic
groups who came over in the initial wave of immigration,
and we're trying to basically found the New Jerusalem. And
this this is going to be a dominant theme within
American religion, is this sense of the New Jerusalem is
going to be a place and we're going to found it,
We're going to make it happen, and we're going to
make it happen here. And in Mormonism that becomes very
explicit certain tracts of land which are going to become
the place where like the New Tabernacle is built in
the Escaton and all these different things. But long before Mormonism,
you had these groups coming and already trying to kind
of do this thing. They're trying to refound the Holy
Land in America and make America.
Speaker 4: Into sort of a New Holy Land. And this is
not a bad impulse.
Speaker 1: Like when I'm pointing these things out and I'm just
pointing them out, you guys like I'm not. You know,
these are people who had some very strange practices, which
we'll talk about a moment that they took. Ultimately, they
took their faith very seriously, much more seriously than most
modern Americans do today. So as an example, what Viisel
does is he he founds a monastery. He founds a monastery,
and it's very much along the European patterns. So there's
a men's house and a women's house, and they have celibates.
And then they have also married couples who come and
live with them and take a vow of celibacy. And
at that point they married couple separates. They're still married
and they still do things together, but they're you know,
they sleep in different places, and they sleep in on
a fifteen inch wide wooden bench. By the way, you
can still go and see this place and you find
pictures of it. Some of this sleep on monasteries, you know,
like yeah, well okay, yeah right, yeah, so you could
sleep so you sleep on a fifteen inch wide wooden
bench with a wooden block for a pillow, so it's
not comfortable. You're allowed to sleep exactly for six hours
a night, though there you interrupt that to get up
and watch for the return of Christ, you know, kind
of a thing. And you know, they live on a
very strict vegetarian diet except for Sundays when as part
of their communion service they would eat lamb like they
worked meat into their communion service, which is one of
the strange practices. The rest of that stuff obviously sounds
perfectly fine, but the sort of people who were drawn
to this community Feisel brought in resecrutions. He brought in
also Philadelphians, who I think are originally part of a
French Masonic lodge. But again, Masons do not send me
any literature. I just can't at this point with you guys.
But but I will say that in America there there
was a there's a pretty long standing connection between low
church Protestantism and the Masons.
Speaker 4: And I don't mean this in like a.
Speaker 1: Well I mean, I just mean it as a matter
of fact, like every Baptist church in the South for
a long time was also where the launch met. Yeah,
and that was true. That's that was true in churches
that I grew up in. Like, you know, this has
been around. This has been around, you know, this connection
has been around a long time. So, uh, here we
brought people in from these different sects, these different groups,
and then they would, you know, they would practice this
very kind of strict life. But instead of like praying
the monastic office or something like that. Instead, what they're
doing is they're pursuing alchemy. They're you know, both spiritual
and material transformations through the practice of alchemy. They're pursuing astrology,
they're presuming, they're they're practicing treasure divining through the use
of divining rods that practice for like treasure seeking, treasure
digging we were talking about earlier. They're practicing other kinds
of ceremonial magic. We'll come back to a couple of
examples in a moment, and they are they are practicing
very importantly two things which will turn out to be
really important for the history of Mormonism. Look, guys, we're
getting there. One is the practice of uh actually, let's say,
let's say really kind of three things. One is the
practice of baptism for the dead. So this this practice
of like doing a proxy baptism for your dead ancestors.
As far as I can tell, that is where this
practice kind of starts up in America. And it was
something like there were there were weird sectarian groups, especially
in North Africa that practice this during their early entries
of the church, and then the Church you know, eventually
ultimately had to condemn it. So there's you know, canons
against it and so on. So you have, but you
have this practice of baptism for the dead, these you know,
proxy baptisms on behalf of your ancestors to get your ancestors,
you know, into heaven or so on. The next thing
was in seventeen thirty eight, they had one day Conrad
Weissel comes to twelve other men in his community. So
again you've got like one guy with twelve followers. Sort
of see a pattern, you know, again, nothing wrong with patterns,
but this is what he was doing. And he leads
them in a ritual purification because he says we're going
to have a vision together. So he leads them in
this like thirty three day again, thirty three days, thirty
three years, right, okay, So he leads them in his
thirty three to grete day process of ritual pure vacation,
and at the end of that period, the seven archangels
are supposed to have appeared to them and revealed all
these esoteric secrets of the universe to them. Well, this happens,
and then two years later the community has another appearance,
which has another another series of visions, which results in
uh Vissel being renamed Uh being renamed actually actually the
leaders of the community they get new names. So one
of them, Israel Echering, becomes Onesimus, one of them becomes Jabez,
prayer of Jabe's people get in the comments, and one
of them becomes and then Conrad himself becomes Enoch, of course,
and Uh. When this happens, they are consecrated to the priesthood.
And so what they're revealed in you know, what's revealed
to them in his vision is that the priesthood, the
Melchisedic priesthood of Christ, was lost after you know, whenever
the Great Apostasy, the death of last Apostle, whatever, And
now God has returned to restore the Melchizitic priesthood here
in Ephrita, Pennsylvania, and he bestows the Melchizic priesthood upon them.
And now they have this. They have the the the og,
the original, the the the priesthood has been restored. Now
this is a very important, uh, this is a very
important moment. It turned out to be very important for Mormonism,
which I'll talk about in a moment. But it also
kind of sets a pattern which, although it will not
be it won't it won't be as it won't be
as like exaggerated, it won't be as extroverted within other
groups of American Protestantism Evangelicals in particular, it does kind
of establish a pattern which which you can say is
something like one of the defining features of American religion.
And if your response to this is, oh, my denomination
doesn't believe that, great, they probably did at some point though,
if your denomination started in this country. Okay, yeah, so
you know, if your denomination started in some other country
and then they just came to America, you guys get
a pass on this one. Okay, you don't have to
tell us, we know, but I'm talking about talking about
denominations religious groups. I've had so much weird correspondence. Yeah, anyway,
and just talking about religious groups that start in America.
One of the defining features is this idea that you
already see happening actually in the theological fringe of a
Western Europe, which is this idea that the Holy Spirit left,
or the true faith was lost, or something happened, there
was some kind of a rupture. And it's not just
that there's been a church, but it's been corrupted and
in need of reformation. It is there's been no church. Yeah,
there's been no priesthood. But now in these latter days,
God has appeared to us, the seven of us in
this room, the thirteen of us in this room. God
appears specifically to us, gave us the Melchizedek priesthood. And
so now if you want to be, you know, a
part of the actual church, you have to be with us,
right And this idea will pop up again, you could
call it restorationism. This will pop up again later in
things like the Stone Campbell movement, which created the Churches
of Christ, and other things like this. And I'm not
saying it was exactly articularly the same way in every case,
but it is one of the defining features of the
American religion.
Speaker 4: Is this idea that.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this area of Pennsylvania and the
nearby area of New York State. This is not the
only time this happened. I'm picking, I'm zooming. I'm zooming
in on this particular community for a reason which I'll
get to in a second. But actually, there are lots
and lots of people, you know, who were saying things like, oh, yeah,
the Father and the Son appeared to me, and they
made me the new priest or. Oh, the Holy Trinity
appeared to us, and you know, made our community where
the new You know, this was happening everywhere in this
particular part of the country, and of course eventually this
revivalism continues into the early twentieth century and is why
that part of the part of the country was referred
to as the burned Over District.
Speaker 4: We talked about that last time.
Speaker 3: But there are, like you said, for people to know,
like in the in the kind of great like great
blessing or whatever they call it, like the Pentecostal return,
there was all of that narrative was there, which is
that the Holy Spirit has been kind of pretty much absent,
you know, And and that's why they're no miracle, that's
why there's no healing, that's why there's all that.
Speaker 2: And so now is the time when, like you said.
Speaker 3: In these in these late days where the Holy Spirit
is now back. Now we have this new blessing and
now it's going to start to propagate through the nation
like a lot of charismatic narrative.
Speaker 2: That's what it is.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: I know people that are even involved in like Catholic
charismatic groups and those those charismatic groups are pointing to
Tertullian and his and his Montanist as being the place
where the break happened.
Speaker 2: And it's like, dude, that's wild.
Speaker 3: Like before Nicia, You're you're basically putting the break and
then you you're a Catholic. How can you be Catholic
and then say that there's a this break happened, you
know with the Montanists, it's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, charismatic Catholics. Send Jonathan all your literature. He has questions,
all right. So yeah, so we have these these restorationist claims,
all these different things. This of course is later what
Joseph Smith will claim that heavenly messengers came and sometime
between eighteen twenty nine eighteen thirty five. Again, people like
to argue about the date the Melchizedic priesthood was restored
to him, So now he's the one that has.
Speaker 2: It, and they use that precise terminology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that precise and it is obviously biblical terminology.
Speaker 4: So yeah.
Speaker 1: In the Book of Hebrews, Saint Paul makes the argument that,
you know, because because you like, one of the counters
to Christianity would be to say, well, how can you
say Christ has this priestly role when he's not of
the tribe of Levi, Right, he's not descended from Aaron,
you know, at least not on his father's side. And
so Saint Paul's answer to this is basically say, well,
there's an earlier priesthood, that is the priesthood of Melchizedic. Right,
and Abraham comes and he offers a sacrifice, you know,
via through Melchizedek. That is, Melchizedic acts as Abraham's priest,
and since everyone descended from Abraham was in Abraham's loins
in the Jewish way of thinking about things, therefore the
Melchizedic priesthood supersedes the Ironic priesthood. And then he points
to a verse in the Psalms in which David says,
of the Lord, the Lord said, into my Lord, sit
at my right hand, Psalm nine hundred and ten, depending
on your numbering. It's the most quoted Old Testament passage
in the New Testament. The Lord said to my lord,
sit in my right hand, till your enemy's become your footstool.
I have made you a priest forever after the order
of Melchizedek, right, and so so that's what Saint Paul
draws on. Of course Christ drew on that passage, Peter
drew on that passage and so on. So this is
definitely his biblical language. And you know, again not trying,
I'm really trying to avoid talking and just sort of
like comparative religion polemical kind of terms today. But you
could say, from an Orthodox perspective, we have no issue
with the idea of a Melchizideic priest. So we would
say that is the priests of Christ, which he gave
to his apostles and which is just not like just
hasn't gone anywhere.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So another interesting thing, by the way, is that Joseph
Smith will also use the name Enoch in early in
early Mormon revelations. So the same name that kind of
a vessel took. So Vicel and I'll talk about the
connection between them in a moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's something there's like there's actually there's a
weird esoteric strain about Inochian initiation, you know, and this idea,
and it's to there actually in Islam too, weirdly, like
this idea that there's a form of initiation that is
not linear, that is kind of that that is radic,
that sort of jumps, Yeah, that jumps and then just
kind of comes down. Uh, And and that you can
be you can kind of have a kind of initiation
without being in line with with the tradition, you know.
And so it's not surprising that characters like Enoch, you know,
or or John the Baptist and these kind of characters
would be used as as images of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So another one of the things that was going on
at this community, that the Effrodoc Communion community, was the
use of like esoteric garments, like secret garments for you know,
performing various rites. In this case, they're drawn from they're
drawn from the resecution kind of tradition, I guess. So
this is the way Quinn describes it. A man wearing
a religiously occult garment featuring the salamander, the astrological symbol
for Saturn was on the man's crown, and the symbol
for Jupiter on his forehead on the left breast of
his garments, surrounded by flames was either the Christian dub
symbol of the Holy Ghost or the mythological phoenix symbol
of resurrection, probably both. So this is gonna which Quinn
sort of ties this to the special temple garments that
are gonna later on become part of early Mormon temple practice.
The Effort community was not a flash in the Pan movement.
It continues as a celibate order till eighteen fourteen, and
I believe the last surviving member of one of like
of that lineage died like in nineteen ninety eight or something.
Speaker 2: What.
Speaker 4: So it continued continued on.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously it was never large, It was never large,
but it was still going in Eprotait in eighteen thirty five,
which is the same year that the first Mormon temple
was completed in Kirkland. Now what's the connection between this.
Obviously this is all kind of in that same neck
of the woods.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously Pennsylvania and New York these are different states, but
you know, they're pretty close. They're pretty close to each other,
especially by especially by Texas standards. You guys, you know
you can fit all of Canada and Texas. Jonathan, I
don't know if you know. That doesn't sound right. That
doesn't sound right, sounds true? Pretty sure, it's not y.
I actually heard a hilarious joke about this. But I'll
save it. I'll save it, save it for later, Save
it for later, all right. So the connection between all
of this is the Whitmer family. So located this is
this is what Quinn says, located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvan
These Rosicrucian mystics lived only four miles from Peter Whitmer Senior.
His five sons later become the special witnesses of the
Book of Mormon. So this is a family that's very
closely involved with Joseph Smith early on in the history
of Mormonism.
Speaker 4: They're the special witnesses.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who see the plates, They're the ones
who see the angelic revelation. They're connected with this restoration
to the Melchizic priestsint all this stuff. But they grew
up just four miles away from a place where all
the same stuff was happening. You have esoteric texts, baptism
for the dead, you have you know, you know, are
the archangels appearing. You have divine apparitions that results in
the restoration of the Melchizedic precint and so on and
so forth, and there is and in fact, there's a
note here that Hiram Page are married to a Whitmer
who's a part part of the larger you know, Mormon
family from early on was married to Whitmerre daughter later
became notorious for his own sear stone, which produced revelations
that competed with Joseph Smith's revelations. This crisis in eighteen
thirty led to the Doctrine and Covenant twenty eight, which
established that only Joseph Smith could receive revelations for the
whole church. Page of stone gazing was the same practice
that Joseph used. The problem was basically the authority, right.
So this idea that of course we talked, we talked
before about these treasure diggers. This this practice of treasure digging,
which probably comes is related to esoteric alchemical practices in Europe. Ultimately,
it's this practice that was very common in New England
and in Pennsylvania of people and upstate New York of people,
you know, believing that there were, you know, there was
treasure that had been buried and then was being guarded
by like a hostile spirit. So what you had to
do was you had to have somebody who would see
where the treasure was and then also have know the
right ritual and magic and everything to placate the hostile spirit.
And it seems that Joseph Smith definitely worked as a
treasure seer in this way for some amount of time,
and in fact, the finding of the Golden plates kind
of follows that pattern. And the way that he translates
the golden plates, which is like you know, putting his
searstones into his hat and then putting you know, looking
into his hat, that's the same, the same sort of
that's the techne, that's the that's the method that treasure
sears use. And so Hire and Page, who married one
of the Whitmer daughters, he gets his own searstone and
starts looking into his own hat, starts having his own revelations,
and then it's like, okay, well whose revelation is real?
They're both using the same methodology, So like which guy.
Is it so so that the Whimmers brought with them
when they moved to New York. They brought with them
Pennsylvania German folk beliefs about witchcraft, encounter charms. They brought
this proximity to Rosicrucian practices, alchemy, astrology, treasure divining, ceremonial magic.
They brought with him a familiarity with this idea of
proxy baptism for the dead, and the concept of the
Melchizitic priesthood being conferred by laying out of hands. These
are all things that are going on in Pennsylvania German
folk practice in places like the Efrotak community.
Speaker 4: And then they are all.
Speaker 1: Things that becomes of the major defining elements of early Mormonism.
So we mentioned Joseph Smith. He has a stone that
he uses for treasure digging, and he uses it to
of course translate the Book of Mormon, and that also
continues to be used for revelations well into the eighteen forties.
There's a first hand account of his using this that says, now,
the way that he translated was he put the urim
and the thumbum. That's what he calls his two stones,
urum and thumbum and he puts them into his hat
and darkened his eyes. Then he would take a sentence
and it would appear in bright Roman letters, so he
would like see the sentence spelled out in like in
you know, King James English, Yeah, inside the hat, and
then he would say write this down.
Speaker 4: Would he be would he.
Speaker 2: Be like looking through the hat kind of thing?
Speaker 3: Like like let's say like if you well hat, you
put it over your eyes, you kind of see the
light kind of filter through.
Speaker 1: I know, I I think that the idea with the
the way that searstones was used was like he used
that hat or something else to completely occult so you
have no outside light sources coming because the idea is
the light is supposed to shine out of the searstonesh okay,
right yeah yeah yeah. So this is the technique that
was used for treasure seeking, and it's also the same
one that is used for scriptural translation, right uh, for
by Joseph Smith. There's also this guy named Oliver Cowdery
who is his cousin by marriage, and he is, uh,
he is a major He's a major rod guy. I
don't know, like like he he has a divining rod
that he uses for for revelation. He was also Joe
Smith's primary scribe during the Book of Mormon translation, and
he has this dividing rod that he's able to use
for various kinds of revelation, and that his use of
that rod was actually, you know, Quinn points out, was
actually enshrined within doctrines and covenants, which is, you know,
again like an official statement by the bye by Joseph
Smith basically saying that he has that that he has
the gift of Aaron, or he is the rod of
the rod of nature.
Speaker 4: Of the gift of Aaron.
Speaker 1: He's got the ability to you know, like his his
gifts are legitimate things like that. So you have kind
of all of the stuff going on. Quinn goes into
a lot of details about the timing of the revelation,
like when the you know, the angel Boroni is supposed
to have appeared to Joseph Smith, and how the the
sort of things that Joseph does Smith is recorded to
have done preparing for it is all basically follows what
you find in occult handbooks being published in that same
part of New York at that time about how basically
how to how to you know, basically the astrological and
ritual stuff necessary to summon angels. So you could argue
that Joseph Smith did or didn't read these books, but
that point is they were being published, you know where
he lived, and the things that he does kind of
corresponds to them exactly. And honestly, I don't want to
go into the details here because I don't really want
to talk about the specifics of weird occult rituals on YouTube.
You know, I'm sure somebody else is doing that already.
And then and then Joseph Smith went on to have
you know, he's got Quinn's got lots of evidence. Something
that was really important in Smith's kind of early life
was he's he has various amulets like little parchments with
prayers or or you know, spells of protection written on them,
which is, you know, something that even even the Gospel
has been used for. In the Middle Ages, it was
very common for folk people as kind of a folk magic.
You would take the Last Gospel, which is the first
perickopee from the Gospel according to Saint John, in the
beginning was the Word, which is the thing that's being
read at the end of every mass. Right, so they
would take the Last Gospel and they would have somebody
write it down in Latin. Of course they can't read it,
but they'd have it and then you know, roll it
up in a tiny little scroll and they would wear
it around their charm like an amulet. And so there's
various things like this that Joseph Smith has and kind
of uses throughout his life, including like stuff that's got
astrological symbols for Mars and Jupiter and so on, and
all this stuff. Anyway, you have all this stuff, and
then what happens, and this is kind of where I
want to shift things to a little bit, is that
after Joseph Smith's death, Brigham Young becomes the He becomes
the second president of the Mormon Church after Joseph Smith's death.
And Brigham Young is born in Vermont, much like Joseph
Smith and grew up in that kind of the same
magical enchanted New England, New York, Pennsylvania, that same sort
of enchanted newieu. But he is part of the transition
from this all this sort of enchanted background stuff to
trying to push the church to being sort of like
more mainstream in public, yes church, yeah, the od s.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he takes. He takes kind of a dual stance,
so according to according to people who knew him during
his lifetime, in public, he's very against astrology and against magic,
so like he dissolves the astrological society in Salt Lake City.
He warns against astrology and sermons, but then privately he
still says he believe is true. He carries like an
amulet for protection. He's really worried about witchcraft and which
is kind of running around Salt Lake City, the things
that they're doing, the ways that they're affecting his church,
and so on and so in in the eighteen thirties
eighteen forties, you still have a lot of these magical practices,
especially the use of searsones and divining rods, still continuing
publicly to the point that you know, there was like
in Sale when they were in Salem, like they were
looking for you know, they were doing treasure digging. While
in Salem they would actually anoint your magical instruments, like
you could bring your divining rod into the temple to
have it anointed for use, you know. And then kind
of starting in the eighteen fifties eighteen seventies, they start
to move away from that stuff and just start to
kind of push it towards the fringe. And some of
this seems to have happened. There were a bunch of
Methodist ministers who converted in like the eighteen seventies, and
so as they come in, they kind of bring a
lot of elements of the LDS church into more to
line with the kind of you know, the sort of
the mainstream Protestant practice. And this is I'm sure that
this is related. I'm sure this is related to the
fact that you know, a lot of LDS churches, you know,
like a lot of the hymns they sing are the
same hymns that you would hear sung and just like
an evangelical church, right.
Speaker 3: And so my big question I have So, I mean,
one of the things that's interesting to notice is, you know,
the the idea that with the Protestants, especially the more
radical Protestants, there's all of this magic practice that gets
joined with the with the church. You know, it's fascinating
because you can really you realize how complicated it is
because on the one hand, it's mostly in the Protestant
lands that the witch trials happen, uh, right, And because
it's like it's like a mess. It's I feel, this
is what it feels to me, like it's like everything's
kind of we don't know what's right, what's okay, what's not.
And there's this weird desire also to totally convert all
the folk people to like evangelize them and everything. And
so there's this pressure on folk practices. But at the
same time there's this badquestion of these types of practice
that are in the clergy itself, that are in the
that are in.
Speaker 2: Some of the pastors.
Speaker 3: But I guess my question is, so, for example, you
talk about this man who publicly denounced astrology but secretly
practiced it, was that still the normal vision? Was it
mostly prescribed but practiced in secret or practiced in kind
of informally.
Speaker 1: My sense, having read a lot now on this period,
not just within mormonths, but my sense is that in
America in general that was probably the case until maybe
the eighteen sixties or eighteen seventies.
Speaker 3: That what that it was prescribed but practice kind of
in secret anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and there's there's you know, there's even
there's weird things from my childhood kind of growing up
out in the country, you know, where obviously they would say,
you know, all this stuff is bad. Don't do ouiji boards,
don't do astrology stuff like this. But then also like
you know, there are always those people, you know, there's
always those people who are like, oh, you got a
problem with your cow, Like go talk to this person,
you know, Like, I.
Speaker 4: Don't know.
Speaker 1: The thing that I want to I think that the
arc that I want to kind of draw for this video.
The thing that I'm most interested in is not the
truth claims of Mormonism. It's not like the recent history
of it and all that stuff, or the various sects
and the things that they believe. In particular they broke
off and you know, obviously there's all the polygamy, right
what the thing that I'm kind of interested in is
that in the secularization of religion, which of course ultimately
happens in the during the Enlightenment on the continent and
then much later begins in America, and the secularization of religion.
They're one of the things that you do if you
want to sort of keep your faith or you want
to like accept the truth claims of your religion, but
also you're too much of a material to kind of
accept things like that could happen now is you do
this move and this is the this is the move
that was done in the churches that I grew up in,
which was of course God worked that way back then. Yeah,
but he doesn't do it that way now. That was
just necessary because it was at the beginning of the religion.
But now, because we have the scriptures, we don't actually
need the miraculous, we don't actually need miracles, we don't
actually need mystical experiences. I sure hope nobody has watched
these videos and come away with the idea that Deacon
Zeraphim doesn't believe in the miraculous or mystilical experiences. I'm
I'm I'm certain that I'm so far past the Overton
window on this stuff that if I were to tell
you all the stuff I actually believe happens, a lot
of you would just be really freaked out.
Speaker 4: That's That'd be my guess. That'd be my guess, you know.
Speaker 1: But But the thing so, but the thing that's interesting
to me is that mormon Is did that entire arc.
But they did it in like one hundred years. So
they went from they went from magic, miracles, mysticism, you know.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 1: You can believe that that that was their authentic experience,
even if you don't believe it came from God. Right,
they went from magic miracles, mysticism too. Well, that was
kind of back then in the early days of the church.
But we don't need that stuff anymore, and so now
everything's kind of very much feels very kind of whitewashed.
Everything feels kind of very you know. In fact, when
I've talked to LDS people about this, that's basically what
they'll say. They'll say the same thing about the polygamy, right,
So it's this, oh, yeah, it was early days, you know,
things like this, but now now it's all you know.
So it's just it's really interesting to me to kind
of bring all this together. What I would say is
that again, there was this sort of low enchantment that
survives the Reformation, that crosses the atlant that flourishes in
early America, especially in the Northeast. Now I have mentioned
before that we'll have to come back at some point
and do the other Americas. This idea that there's just
sort of like one American religious experience is obviously not correct.
There's a massive amount of of territory the Americas that
was mainly colonized by Roman Catholics. And so you know,
so there are you know, uh, Marian apparitions and all
kinds of other things to to deal with and talk
about and grapple with. That is not this podcast today.
We'll get to it eventually eventually. But uh that this
this this kind of low enchantment flourishes in the Northeast,
in uh, in of state New York, in Pennsylvania, in Appalachia,
and then it uh and then one of the things
that kind of grows up out of that soil is
this restorationist impulse, right to say that, uh, historical Christianity
lost something essential. They lost the priesthood, they lost the
spiritual gifts, the gifts of the spirit, they lost purity.
They lost this something and that us we our group
has uniquely recovered it through special revelation. Now, there were
groups in Europe who believed this. Most of them honestly
just didn't survive, but they survived and thrived in America.
And this pattern appears at Efrita in the seventeen forties,
It appears among the Campbellites in the eighteen hundreds, among
the Mormons in the eighteen twenties, among the Adventists in
the eighteen forties, among the Pentecostals in the early nineteen hundreds.
And to me, this belief is one of the defining
features of what you could call the American religion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's also I think the other thing that
you mentioned which is very interesting and fascinating to think
about is, you know, we have a trope now that
exists in Orthodoxy and Catholicism and in certain branches of Protestantism,
which is too un understand the kind of mystical occult
magical practices as being Satanic. Right in the broad sense,
it's all Satanic, and it's all outside the Church, and
it's all of it's an assault on Christianity. But I
think that in order to fully understand the picture, we
have to kind of understand that these are a lot
of these things are are strange outgrowth from within the
Christian tradition. That is, uh, you know, whether it is Rosicrucian.
The Rosicrucians were kind of like they come out of Christianity,
like they they like their vision is mistaken.
Speaker 2: It's the same with Freemasonry and all of these things.
It kind of.
Speaker 3: Is like a weird expression of a of a strange
moment in Western Christianity where these these things kind of appear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean probably ultimately related to even you know,
there are groups in the Eastlake, the Bogomiles and so
on that are that are that are definitely in relatedous
like the Cathars and so one.
Speaker 4: Like you you know, these things pop up.
Speaker 1: But there was the moment right at the end of
the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the beginning of the of
the modern period that that moment was just like the
moment in European history of the West for these various
groups to kind of pop up and actually actually you
know have legs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were often clergy like, it wasn't yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's what I'm trying to emphasize, Like it wasn't
just like yeah, and there's some some let's say, certain
aspects and this is this is going to be a
harder one to talk about, but like there are certain
aspects of that which are seen as evil in itself
because of more material this point of view, rather than
our spiritual heritage. Right, the idea that you can influence
the world through through influence, you know, this kind of
natural magic thing. I'm not saying people should practice natural magic.
What I mean is that these types of behaviors, they
seem to us often as being purely evil, in part
because we're materialists and we think that it's a kind
of weird thing that never like that can't that can't happen,
because it's like it's a supernatural in the strangest sense,
you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Quinn talks about this a little bit in the
first chapter of his book. He talks about how like
Founding Fathers, people like Thomas Jefferson, you know, how they
sort of approach magic and the Bible and all these
other things, and there's always definitely been you could say,
simultaneously a a an impulse to be kind of embarrassed
by that sort of stuff. So, for instance, let's see
if I can find this in my notes here. Yeah,
so this is a quote from Keith Thomas, who's a scholar.
He says, for those Protestants who believe that the age
of Christian miracles was over all supernatural effects, necessarily spraying
from either fraudulent illusion or the workings of the devil.
So this is the one side of things, right, one
side of things, which is because God doesn't work that
way anymore, if you encounter the sort of thing in
the world that has to always come from the devil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've heard, I mean, I've seen, I've known
so many products that believe that. And therefore, if there's
a miracle, it's not a it's actually not a proof
that God is acting in the world. It's a proof
that these people are the rail and that this is heretical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they would actually look at, you know, somebody,
somebody coming from this point of view, which was the
point which it does not describe every Protestant. I know,
I know, you don't have to get in the comments guys,
I know, but it does describe the Protestants that I
was raised with. Now they would still say things like, yeah,
God might miract. The funny thing is everybody always had
a personal story about how God fixed their car or
like healed them when they were sick and dying or
something like that. People did have like personal stories. But
if if you were like, oh, yeah, there's uh, you know,
I don't know, the statue with the local Roman Catholic
church is weeping or something like that, be like, obviously
that's the devil. Yeah yeah, yeah, so, and yet the
interesting thing is that magic persists, and it persists in
groups like the Puritans. We talked about this a little
bit before, and I will come back to it. We
will do at least one more episode before like, just
for my own sanity, You guys gotta give me Mormonism.
Speaker 2: Is that what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: You guys got to give me like a little break
and let me just go like do some like medieval
Irish stuff or something. I don't even care. We could
do Persia. I just gotta like, I just gotta take
like a little break from the modern world because it's
just like it's a little too much for me. But
we will do in our next episode, we will look
in much more depth at the way that the Puritans,
the Puritans were using Kabba law and the influence that
this may have had on, you know, the early early
founding of the American colonies.
Speaker 4: So we are going to look at that.
Speaker 1: But what he says is what Quinn says says for Puritans,
there were significant effiminities between reformed Christianity and magic that
labeled layfolk to switch from one to the other without
any sense of wrongdoing, and not just layfolk, but also
the clergy. Yeah, so you've got all these magical texts
in the early libraries at places like Harvard and so on,
which which began as seminaries for the educational clergy. So yeah,
so I don't know, there's there's a lot more that
we could say. The thing that I was really interested
in in the context of universal history again is this
is like what are the features of the American religion?
And it's a multi headed hydra, right, It's a multifaceted question,
and but I think I think to me one of
the one of the interesting ones is a pattern that
you could say something like, is that is something like
magical beginning secularized end right, where eventually the thing that
we have to do is just kind of look good,
you know, on the stage with the president. Like the
thing that we are eventually kind of going for is
like a kind of larger, kind of respectable thing, you know.
And so that's one of the reasons that a lot
of Mormons don't like Quinn's book, because they feel like
it kind of makes the whole thing seem like, you know,
like it's just cheesy or goofy or too magical or
something like this. And simultaneously, I would also say that
if your argument against Mormonism is its magical origins, like
or the fact that the supernaturalist involved, like, to me,
that seems like a very silly argument to make. Lots
of other good reasons to be an orthodox Christian not
a Mormon.
Speaker 4: But there's all that, you know.
Speaker 2: The restorationism, which is part of the.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the restorationism, yeahsticism of folk magic, you know,
this kind of these kind of connections, a form of
restorationism which would justify some of the things that are happening,
you could say, and then ultimately a secularization.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about America and like American religion
really is different. I mean I think it's it's, for
one thing, Americans just take religion, at least it's in
certain ways. Americans take religion probably more seriously than any
other country on the planet, and just in certain ways,
not in other ways. Like it's it's just it's different.
And that that's why it's so hard for Americans like
to go to another country and be like, oh, these
people are a bunch of you know, godless heathens with them,
which they might be but they might might also like
the way that Americans take religion seriously is to like,
you know, pummel you in the face with it, right,
that's you know. And but but because Americans are so
sort of natively religious, right, so that even even the
founding of our country has this of course, the faulting
of all countries has has a religious overtone. But our
country is just a new one, right, So actually, I
don't know if there's a if there are religious Is
there a religious to the founding of Canada?
Speaker 3: Well, for sure, I mean, yeah, the French explorers that
came here, they came on a miz you know, I
like champ.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, those guys for sure. But I meant like
when the English come in and they ruined everything for.
Speaker 3: You, The English, you know, the English were they were
just they were just thinking about making money.
Speaker 4: That's all they were. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't have that glorious vision of bringing the
word of God to uh, you know, to God.
Speaker 1: God has has recently severely rebuked my my my slagging
off the French through through several through several different things,
one of which of course, was was that my my
wife got this amazing French cookbook for Christmas and she's
just been cooking out of it every day this month,
and holy cow, you guys like I had no I
am sorry, I did not recognize your game.
Speaker 4: I know you're mysh.
Speaker 2: You know they're all this boiled.
Speaker 3: So anyway, I want to I want to tell you
one thing before we end, is that you know this
this podcast, like what we're doing together and like talking
about this as inspired Jean Philipp, JP Marceau and I
to do a kind of universal history of Quebec and
so in French we're doing this kind of analysis of
French Canada and now we're going through Champlain's story and
kind of talking about the miracles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I am gonna have to get it.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to get that translated or get that
robot to translate it or something like.
Speaker 4: I really would I really would enjoy I would really
enjoy that.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I feel like, lest I be a hypocrite,
I need to switch to slagging off the English for
a little bit, So no offense English.
Speaker 4: That's that.
Speaker 1: That's what we're gonna do for the next little bit,
just to kind of like balance things out a little bit.
Like I can't not just make fun of somebody, you know,
like that's obviously that's not an option.
Speaker 4: So we're gonna switch to the English for a little bit.
Speaker 1: But no, in all seriousness, because America is such a
such a it's just such a fertile place. This thing
that happened with Mormonism and then happened later with the Charismatics,
you know, so like one hundred years later Charismatic group again,
it's restorationist. There's a working in this case. It's not
the Melchizedic prechood. It's some other working of the Holy Spirit.
But there's a working of the Holy Spirit that's been
totally absent, but now it's here. Zuza Street Revivals, all
this stuff, and then it starts to take this arc.
And the place that the arc for some people eventually
has to sort of end is going to be saying, well,
we want to be treated like a more respectable religion.
So there are these various aspects of traditional Christianity, the
Trinity and so on, you know, church fathers, et cetera,
et cetera, and we need to embrace some of those
things so we don't seem like we're just sort of
on the fringe. But then somebody will come along and
it's always happening. I talk at least once a week
to somebody who tells me God appeared to me and
he told me. Yeah, once a week.
Speaker 3: They told you that God appeared to you and that
he's the new He's the new priest in the Order
of mik No.
Speaker 4: No, it's not always that.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's like a little Sometimes it's just like a
little personal revelation and they're like, was this from God
or not?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 1: You know, I mean our cathedrals right in the middle
of a large, really huge urban area. You know, a
lot of people who who have no prior religious experience,
they come in because like our church looks like a church,
and so they wandering off the street and they're like, hey,
you know, God appeared to me and told me x
y z whatever, Like do you think this is you know, real?
Or you know, sometimes sometimes there are people who are
totally insane and you know, and like sit at the
back of the class making signs about how they're Jesus
of Nazareth or something like that. You know, just that
you have all these different things that happened. But but
but people, people still take these kinds of personal revelations
very seriously, and they do for certainly for like fundamentalist
Christianity present a huge kind of risk.
Speaker 4: They're the sort of huge problem.
Speaker 1: And the answer to that is to always say, you
know this, this couldn't have ever come from God, you
know so anyway. But what's interesting to me is that
this is a pattern. It seems to repeat, be repeating,
and I predict predictions are dangerous things.
Speaker 4: I'm not a prophet.
Speaker 1: I don't have little stones to put in my hat
and look inside and see what's going on. But if
you read the pattern, if you look at the ways
these patterns replicate each other, I predict this will happen again.
I think this is part of the kind of the
American pattern of things. So is that somebody will, yeah, definitely,
they'll have a they'll have a revelation, have something. And
of course this happens other parts of the world. But
what seems to be interesting about America, and then also
obviously places of America has influenced heavily.
Speaker 4: Someday.
Speaker 1: I don't think I'll ever do a podcast on religion
in South Korea, but somebody should do that. But the
thing about America is that when these movements take off.
They some of them have real legs. I mean, which
is which.
Speaker 3: Is actually something it's right there. It's not that it's
not completely because mostly these types of things burnt out
in one generation. By the time that's right, profit is
dead then gone. But there's something about uh, some of
these movements, especially the Mormon especially the LDS and and
the and I would say, like the Pentecostal movement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's like if it's.
Speaker 1: Much larger, I mean it's it will be, it will
buy the numbers probably be the largest form of Christianity
in America, if it's not already, it's the only it's
the only form of of you know, just just again
just by the numbers. It's the only form of Protestantism
that is still growing in America right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like even in terms of LDS, I mean,
I forget who it was recently that that I think
it was actually Jordan Peterson, right, I saw two days
you last week. He said if you had to pick
a place to live in the United States, Salt Lake
City wouldn't be so bad now with it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll just say, like, uh, if I were
if I were looking at plant if I was looking
at the plan an Orthodox parish somewhere right now, Salt
Lake Cities where it go. It's one of the fastest
growing parts of the world, parts of the country. It's
there's a lot of people. They are really interested in
Orthodoxy for various reasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so all right, anyway,
all right, was.
Speaker 2: That Enore one more America?
Speaker 3: Now we're gonna if we're I was like, are we
going to talk about Cabala today? And and we can
barely talk about Mormonism, Jonathan, We're barely talking about more
next time?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yes, So we'll talk about Kabala next time,
but it will be it'll be the special American version
of Kabala. So if you know things about Kabbala from
somewhere else, you would just assume that nothing I say
will apply to you. I'm only interested in Puritan Kabbala.
Speaker 2: So you don't like any Madonna La Kabbala? What about
that one?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, well I think that's I
think that's the thing these two different guys that reach
out to me. I think that's the thing they were
afraid we were going to do. And I was like,
I was like, no, no, that's you know, no, we're
not We're not going to do that. So all right,
I'm not going to do that. Oh my gosh, this
is such weird energy. Yeah, this is a good episode.
This is fun, This is fun.
Speaker 4: Yep yep.
Speaker 1: So anyway, thanks to everybody who sent me books, Thanks
everybody who reached out. Thanks for all your kind messages.
I I you know again, at the end of the day,
I believe the fulfillment of everything Mormonism and everything else.
Speaker 4: You're going to find it in the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 1: And but thank you very much for all your your
kind notes and messages and books and YouTube videos and
d ms and calling me on the phone and sending
me letters in the mail and.
Speaker 4: All of it.
Speaker 1: Thank you for all of it. Truly truly a weird
life that I leave. I leave, but happy to be
doing it with you.
Speaker 4: Jonathan.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's great, all right, everyone happy you get
the brunt of it too. It's even better for me.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh. Yeah, please send Jonathan some stuff you guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, it was great to talk to you,
and this is fine. We will talk to you very soon.
Speaker 4: Bye bye, bye, guys.
Speaker 5: Greeting's friends, cosmographers, fellow symbolists. This is Joshua from Eighth
Day Books, inviting you to join me and studying a
remarkable cosmic coincidence. Why is it that writers, philosophers, and
prophets from many times in places have all told us
that contemplating the night sky makes our own souls similarly
more beautiful and more ordered? Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese.
They've all told us that looking up is the same
as looking in, and that we are as much citizens
of the sky as we are of earth. In February,
we will be looking at Pythagorea and folk tales, biblical wisdom, literature,
and contemporary novelists to ask these questions. It'll be a
challenging course, but not technical. I teach medieval philosophy and
Renaissance literature, and I'm condensing a year year's worth of
information into a few wonderfilled hours. Please join me for
some Plato, some poetry, and some practical skygazing, all to
help us pursue the art of imitating Heaven. See you
very soon.
Speaker 3: If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel and books to purchase. So
go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank you
for your support.