By John L. Brooke
Mormon non secular trust has lengthy been a secret to outsiders, both brushed off as anomalous to the yank non secular culture or extolled because the such a lot actual production of the yankee mind's eye. The Refiner's fireplace provides a brand new and entire knowing of the roots of Mormon faith, whose theology grants the trustworthy that they're going to turn into "gods" in the course of the recovery of historical mysteries and regain the divine powers of Adam misplaced within the fall from Paradise. Professor Brooke contends that the origins of Mormonism lie within the fusion of radical faith with occult principles, and organizes his ebook round the difficulties of demonstrating the survival of those rules into the 19th century and explaining how they have been manifested in Mormon doctrine. within the concluding bankruptcy, the writer presents an summary of the way Mormonism because the 1850s steadily moved towards conventional Protestant Christianity. in addition to faith, the booklet explores magic, witchcraft, alchemy, Freemasonry, counterfeiting, and state-formation. John L. Brooke is professor of background at Tufts collage and the acclaimed writer of the guts of the Commonwealth: Society and Political tradition in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (CUP, 1989), which has gained, between different prizes, the association of yank Historians' Merle Curti Award for highbrow background and the nationwide ancient Society ebook Prize for American heritage.
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Additional info for The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844
Example text
28 Three centuries after the height of the Renaissance, Mormonism echoed the hermetics - and explicitly rejected Calvinism - in its advocacy of universal salvation and the freedom of the will, its replacement of the doctrine of original sin with that of the fortunate Fall, and its denial of the efficacy of grace alone. In granting priestly powers "to seal up the Saints unto Eternal life,"29 Joseph Smith gave the Mormon hierarchy the same authority that the hermetic alchemist assumed: human means to immortality, indeed divinity.
45 These works were read both as chemical treatise and as spiritual revelation, side by side with translations of Jacob Boehme's writings, selections of which began to appear in 1645, after a capsule biography in 1644. In 1647 work began on a comprehensive translation of Boehme's works, completed in 1661. Some, like the radical John Webster, saw the key to the primal universal language in Boehme's cosmology of unifying signatures and correspondences between visible and invisible worlds, continuing the search for the secret code to the cosmos that had consumed Ficino and Dee.
8 A Prepared People Revolution with currents of millenarian prophecy and a conviction of the imminence of the restored Kingdom of God, hermetic divinization posed a potent challenge to Christian orthodoxy. It also prefigured the cosmology constructed in the 1830s and 1840s by Joseph Smith, who was born in - if not of - a Calvinist culture and moved from the ranks of the cunning folk to the status of an Adamic magus as the prophet of the Mormon restoration. This chapter, and indeed the entire book, explores the particular affinities, latent and manifest, running between the religious culture of prophecy and restoration and the occult cultures of popular conjuring and esoteric hermeticism.