Transcription
[music] Radio Free Mormon here, broadcasting behind enemy lines. [music] Episode 447 tonight. Mormon Temple at Treasure Quest. [music] We've got a great show [music] tonight with a great guest. The one, the only, [music] the man, the myth, the mystery, Dr. John Lundwall is with us tonight. He's going to be sharing with us [music] a fascinating new theory that he's come up with, which may explain the [music] origins of the Book of Mormon in ways that are better, at least in some ways, than other theories that have been proposed. He goes back into Joseph Smith's early days, into his treasure-digging activities, and proposes that perhaps the [music] Book of Mormon shows signs of being influenced by grimoires, or [music] spell books from hundreds of years ago. Books that taught you how to do all kinds of spells, especially summoning of spirits, summoning of angels, summoning even of demons. We're going to find out about this theory from Dr. Lundwall right now. Dr. Lundwall, how are you doing this evening?
>> I'm doing great. Good to see you, RFM. Good to be on your show.
>> Well, thank you so much. I know that we had a little bit of trouble there at the beginning. I kind of had to do that a couple times, but we're in it now. We're in it to win it. And I love this theory. This has already been broached by you. Um, it was actually a week ago tonight that we're recording this. We're recording this on March 24th, 2026. It's Tuesday evening. It will premiere next Saturday. But you had originally done this on, um, Mormonish. It was over three hours.
>> Yes. Sorry about that.
>> No, don't be sorry about it at all. But I was very interested in it. I know you and I was, I, I didn't know the theory, but I wanted to find out what you had to say. Very, very interesting. So, I've listened to it a couple times. I asked you on if you'd give an abridged version. And then in the second part of this, I'm going to talk to you about some things that I saw in the temple, I don't know, 15 to 20 years ago. Never really talked about it, never written about it. It doesn't fit in, kind of, except that when I heard your theory, all of a sudden, I thought, maybe what I saw in the temple had found a home at last.
All right. Now, this is what the thumbnail ended up being. Mormon Temple as Treasure Quest with Dr. John Lundwall. And I know that you recognize that background. I did it there as an homage to you because I feel like you live your life in homage to him.
>> Sort of, a little bit. I got to tell you, when I show you my first slide, I was out in the middle of the desert. I don't have a signal, and suddenly my phone rang, and I'm like, how is this happening? And I looked at it, and it said RFM. I'm like, well, I guess that's how it's happening.
>> RFM doesn't need a signal. He calls by the Holy Ghost. [laughter]
>> Where'd you get that? [snorts] Talking about, for those listening on audio and not watching this, so you can't see. This is Indiana Jones in the background. That's who we're talking about.
>> Yeah.
>> You got a desert picture of me because my hair is all messed up.
>> Do you remember this picture? This is you and me. This is over in New Hampshire.
>> Oh, that's, that's right. We were in New Hampshire together.
>> I think it was the summer of 2024, the summer of love. And we were having a great time looking at some old, uh, what do you call it? Ruins.
>> Yes.
>> Native American ruins in New Hampshire.
>> Ish. Yes.
>> Is?
>> Okay. Very, very interesting. And the sun went down, and then we went off to a restaurant. We took this picture there, and we'd had a long day of digging, hadn't we?
>> Yes. We went to Dartmouth and, uh, all kinds of places.
>> All kinds of places. But this isn't the way. This is the way this ended up. This is the way it was going to be before this. [laughter] Mormon Temple is Treasure Quest. We got a temple in there, at least. But then I thought, no, we got to go Indiana Jones because we've got John Lundwall on the show. And even before that, it was going to be this.
>> Oh, nice.
>> The, you like that one?
>> I do like that one.
>> What do you like about this one? Yeah, because that's that's that's that's the, uh, topic of tonight's show.
>> Yes. The Book of Mormon as Grimoire.
>> Yeah.
>> And then we'll go into the other part, which is Mormon Temple as Treasure Quest. But now I'll get these off the screen. I'll let you put up your slides on the screen.
>> Do you see me?
>> I see you. I see me.
>> All right.
>> But I don't see the slides. Should I add them to the stage?
>> There. Now they're on the stage.
>> All right. Do you see the picture of this magenta sunset?
>> Yes. John Lundwall is kind of flying blind here. He can't see everything on the screen, but he can see his slide. So, you just look in the general direction of the camera, and you're going to be great.
>> This is where I was at when your phone rang. When my phone rang with you on it, I was out. That's a standing monolith stone, and it was a gorgeous sunset. That's a true magenta sunset with the moon and Venus sitting on the horizon. So, I, I just thought I would show your guests, uh, what I was doing when you called me.
>> That's beautiful. That was a Friday evening, wasn't it? It was just before the weekend, and you were going out to spend the weekend.
>> That's right.
>> In the desert.
>> Out, out in the desert. And I'm kind of sunburned, uh, from. It's like 85 degrees in Utah in March. It's crazy. All right. Uh, let's do this. Uh, the name of my presentation is "I Nephi, Having Been Born from Invocation." Um, I'm, I'm going to give a quick, truncated, uh, version of what was released on Mormonish. Uh, so I'm just going to run through a couple of these arguments. Uh, the Book of Mormon scholars and apologists say that the opening, uh, verses in many of the books are colophones. "I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, and I was taught somewhat in the learning of my parents," right? They call this a colophone.
Uh, a colophone is a brief scribal or publishing note, usually at the beginning or end of a text, that records information about its production, such as the author or scribe, date, place, or authority of the work. So, colophones have dates. There's specific dates to the calendar system of the culture that where the text is being written. It lists the author of who's writing the text. Most of them actually list the place of where the text is being written. And it's a specific place for who the text is being written for. Generally, uh, some statement about the patron or a blessing or curse on the text. The most important thing about an ancient colophone, though, is it's a parext. That is, it's a signature that the author is identifying himself and contextualizes the text, but it is not part of the primary text of the argument of the text. It's, it's an aside. It's a signature.
>> John, can I jump in here because some people may be puzzled at this point, >> as we've jumped right into colophones >> and, uh, you've indicated, but I want to underline >> this element that this idea of a colophone, how do you pronounce that, John?
>> Colophone.
>> Kolophone is something that is identifiable in many ancient texts, and this is what Mormon apologists have done over the years is try and find things in ancient texts like a colophone and say, "Aha, we found that in the Book of Mormon." So, but even back in the '80s, when I was an apologist, I knew about this term colophone, though I didn't know about it as detailed as you did. I just thought it was Nephi having been born of goodly parents, etc. I thought that was a legitimate colophone. The idea is to prove the Book of Mormon is true by proving it ancient through the use of these kind of apologetic arguments. And what you're showing, what you just showed, is all the elements of a true colophone. Correct?
>> Correct. Those are the elements of a true colophone. And we don't get those elements in the Book of Mormon text. In fact, um, I quoted, I'm, I'm just truncating it, but I quoted an actual colophone. It had a regal date that said, "This was written on the fourth month of the season of the inundation under King Alexander, son of Alexander." So, you've got an agricultural date and a regal date under the kingship of Alexander. It identifies the scribe and all of his titles, his genealogy, his royal authority to write the text, and then it contains a protective curse. Um, that is an actual colophone. The Book of Mormon, "I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents," doesn't. Nephi is the author, but there's no formal date from an official accounting. There's no formal ruler for which the text is written. Uh, there's no local specific location as to where the text is being written. No institutional authority, no priestly titles, no curse dedication. But most importantly, Nephi's prose is not a parext, as in a signature outside of the primary text. Nephi's prose is the primary text. "I, Nephi," he is dictating history in first-person speech and narrative. Um, that's not a colophone. And in fact, everything they're calling the Enos does the same thing. Jacob does the same thing. These are all first-person prose, primary texts, part of first-person narrative of the Book of Mormon, and none of them are colophones. So,
>> But you understand why the apologists want them badly to be colophones.
>> Well, yes, because it links it to antiquity. And, uh, they're arguing Joseph Smith could have never known about colophonic structures, and therefore Joseph cannot be inventing this text. He must be translating an ancient text.
>> Unfortunately, there's no ancient text that contains any kind of first-person prose introduction in the way the Book of Mormon does.
>> Uh, so ancient colophones are normally parextual scribal notes, secondary written elements added by scribes to frame, identify, authenticate, or contextualize a text without being part of the text's narrative or argument itself. First Nephi 1:1-3 is integral narrative prose. Calling this a colophone relies on redefining the term. [clears throat]
>> Not matching established colophones. So.
>> I can ask you a question.
>> Yes.
>> The title of this slide is "Schrödinger's Colophone."
>> I'm familiar with Schrödinger's cat. And I think the basic idea is the cat's either alive or dead in the box depending upon whether you're looking.
>> That's right.
>> So why, why do you call it Schrödinger's Colophone?
>> The Book of Mormon's text is either a colophone. It's a colophone depending on who's looking in the box. [laughter]
>> Very good.
>> If it's an apologist, it's a colophone. If it's anyone else, it, it's not a colophone.
>> Anybody else, it's just a dead cat.
>> Yeah. Anybody else, it's just a dead cat. Um, I quote, uh, William Davis, because he takes on this argument that there are colophones in the Book of Mormon. Um, anyway, this is a very academic, straightforward.
>> John, I'd be happy to read. I want to allow you to do what you want to do and teach us about this theory of yours because it's wonderful. It's exciting, but I also want to put myself at your disposal. If you need anything read, just let me know.
>> Uh, well, please read this.
>> Okay, so from William Davis, "But the speculative leap, the speculative leap from the structures of ancient colophones to the summaries in the Book of Mormon strains for evidentiary support." So, there he's agreeing with you.
>> Yeah.
>> "The transformation requires a scenario in which ancient Nephite authors adapted and modified colophones and perhaps superscript." So, he's saying this is what would have actually had to happen if the apologists were right.
>> Correct. So, these ancient Nephite authors adapted and modified colophones and severely abridged them and changed them, by the way, to create the prefatory outline that appears in the Book of Mormon, or outlines. In other words, a scenario in which they created an entirely new and innovative textual apparatus that no longer constituted or functioned as a traditional colophone, but emerged as an entirely different parextual feature for ancient texts." Now, here, do you disagree with him about the parextual?
>> Well, he's just arguing this would be a brand new parextual feature, except all the first-person prose in the Book of Mormon is not a parext. That's a text outside of the main text. All the prose in the Book of Mormon is the primary text. So, we're, we're dealing with something completely other than a parextual feature.
>> Yeah. It's like the old joke about the defense attorney in closing argument: "Other than three eyewitnesses, a signed confession, and DNA evidence, what have they got?" [laughter] "Such a theory does not provide any," what the apologist theory. "Such a theory does not provide any evidence to explain this abrupt and historically idiosyncratic transformation, e.g., how scribal conventions for copied text transformed into authoral notations in original compositions. Nor," boy, he's really letting him have it, isn't he?
>> Yeah.
>> "Nor does it offer explanations as to why the character Nephi, born and raised in Jerusalem and purportedly the only Book of Mormon author to receive a classical Hebrew/Egyptian education, immediately dropped the convention of his scribal culture to create such radical transformations."
>> Yeah.
>> I think what he's saying is that seems, uh, this idea is unlikely.
>> Exactly. Uh, ancient writings served the state, and so the scribal schools, they were, they were functionaries of state schools. We, we forget the ancient Israelite temple was the cult of the state. The literate scribes were actors of the state. It begs the question, where does Nephi even learn to write? But the writing schools are very codified, and there's a very rarified class of people who get educated in writing in 600 BCE, and they are given conventions which they would follow meticulously. And basically, Davis says, as soon as Nephi learns to write, he drops all the conventions he was given, and he starts a brand new school of literacy. [laughter]
>> Well, he was a, a smart one, that Nephi. He was very clever. Um, so it, I, it just begins as a, as a eyebrow raise. Uh, this is hard to explain. I actually, uh, can explain it in one sentence. Uh, these aren't colophones. There's not a single colophone in the Book of Mormon. What the apologists have argued as colophones are primary texts, not parexts. Uh, so we're dealing with something, um, that's in the, that is part of the text, as it is a structural feature of the Book of Mormon text. So, uh, what are we left with? Um.
>> So, I'm going to be asking you this question, John.
>> Yeah.
>> In a segment of this presentation that we've titled "The Book of Mormon as Grimoire."
>> Yes.
>> Why on earth have you taken us upon this entertaining but apparently irrelevant side tangent talking about colophones?
>> Uh, that's a good question. Uh, I, I started with the colophones because when I read the Book of Mormon, uh, with orality and literacy in mind, you know, people, uh, priests in 600 BCE weren't practicing, uh, Israelite religion through texts. They were practicing it through rituals, through dances, through sacrifices. Um, the Book of Mormon begins as a fully literate, textual religion, which is anachronistic. But as I read it, all the first-person speech in it bothered me. And so that led me to the arguments of the colophones. But sadly, First Nephi writes in first-person narrative throughout the entire book. So does Jacob. So does Zenus. So does Jerham. So does the Kings of Omni. So does Alma the Elder. So does Zenith. So does Mormon. So does Moroni. This is bizarre. And if you've read, uh, a host of ancient texts, especially histories, we're going to go over them, you realize nobody's doing this. So where is the Book of Mormon getting this convention of of writing and recording history in first-person dialogue and narrative?
>> Uh, so that's why I began with a colophone because I wanted to show that they're arguing these introductory first-person narratives are colophones, and I had to get that out of the way by saying, actually, they are not colophones. They're not even colophonic in nature. Uh, so this, we're simply dealing with first-person dialogue and narrative. The other thing I know, RFM, through my studies, is the majority of first-person dialogue and narrative in antiquity that is recorded in text turns out to be performative text. These are texts that were performed in some performance context in some way. The, uh, epics of Homer are not literary texts. They're performative texts. They were performed orally by a bard. The epic of Gilgamesh was performed orally by actors. The Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation epic, was performed orally by Mayan priests.
>> John, does this mean that the, they're assuming different roles within the epic and speaking as if they were those people?
>> Sometimes that is true. The Homeric bard, uh, recites what we have as books 9 through 12 in the Odyssey. And that is a first-person, you know, that's a lot of first-person speech and narrative from the point of view of Odysseus. It's the story of Odysseus, and the bard takes on the persona, the mask of Odysseus, and performs the role of Odysseus.
>> So, um, so as I know that most of these texts are performative in nature in antiquity that have this kind of first-person dialogue and narrative, uh, what does that mean for Book of Mormon history? It's archival history. It's linear history. And by the way, we don't get that kind of history writing till centuries after Nephi and Lehi leave Jerusalem. I mean, our first Herodotus, Diodorus, Thucydides, um, Tacitus, you know, that's centuries after they leave. And we still don't get first-person narrative. We get first-person dialogue in them. So, as I'm reading the Book of Mormon with orality and literacy in mind, this kind of pervasive first-person narrative stood out to me, and it, it was a fingerprint. It suggested that even in Joseph Smith's day, the text was being performed. That I'm not reading literary text, neither an ancient literary text as it purports to be, nor a modern contemporary text of Joseph Smith's day. It has the fingerprint of oral performance. The person creating the text is acting the modality of each character in first-person dialogue, um, in an oral performance. And of course, how do we know that the Book of Mormon was created? [laughter] Everyone's like, "We'll get to it," but.
>> Well, the performer, the performer would have to be Joseph Smith as he dictates and speaks the Book of Mormon into existence.
>> Correct. And actually, if you read the Book of Mormon text with oral performance in mind, there are fingerprints all over the text that show you the text is being orally performed and is not some sort of ancient literature or a copy of a more contemporary literature. It is an oral performance piece. All those "and it came to pass" is an oral comma, a way for an oral performer to pause to get from idea A to idea B. That kind of redundancy of that phrase is simply a way an oral podcaster would pause and move on to the next idea. That's why there's all those "and it came to pass" in it. It's, it's part of oral performance. Chiasmus is part of oral performance. The repetitiveness and redundancy in the Book of Mormon is part of oral performance. It's imagine being a writer writing on ancient plates. The real estate of ancient metal plates is so precious that everything you write would be in short, precise, very economical packets of information. And by the way, this is how largely the Bible is written. It's, uh, you know, it doesn't give us these long, flowing narratives and sermons. It's written in very short packets of information that doesn't divulge all the motives or background of the characters. You, you're given, uh, you're giving given the minimum. And this is, this is how authors would write on plates. And yet we get this, uh, very flowing oral sermon performance with all, with all kinds of fingerprints of oral performance over it. So.
>> And I will add that, um, even Royal Scousen, who did the, um, critical edition of the Book of Mormon and worked for years and even decades on the subject and knows more about the Book of Mormon than any human being on the planet has a right to or does, he says that it's very clear that the Book of Mormon text, the original manuscript, shows that it was dictated. It wasn't written out. It was dictated, and it shows all these indications of it being a dictated text, which I knew as an apologist, and it made sense because Joseph Smith is dictating it. But I never put the two and two together, John. Which is why is it that if he is translating a written text, it ends up showing conclusive signs of being a dictated text?
>> Well, that's a, that's a real question, isn't it?
>> Yeah. [laughter]
>> Uh, do you want to, uh, read that paragraph here?
>> Yes. "What are we left with? Writers in the Book of Mormon are crafting first-person narratives as primary documents. Indeed, the Book of Mormon is so laden with this rhetorical style that most of its content is first-person dialogue and narrative. Almost all sermons are written in first person. Curiously, every author who writes on plates also writes in first person. Third-person narratives such as Mosiah, Alma, and Helaman constantly convert to first-person dialogues. This makes a 1000-year history with multiple authors across a millennium all sharing the same tradition of writing their histories in first person. Well, I find that to be a massive problem. Uh, and just as my own take, again, we'll look at comparative, uh, comparative histories to see where's Nephi if it's an ancient text. Where is this, uh, tradition coming from? Nephi immediately drops the traditions of his scribal school, scribal tradition. And that tradition is this: anyone writing on Nephite plates writes in first-person dialogue and narrative. And I went through the Book of Mormon and showed this. All the, uh, authors of the small plates, First Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Gerham, and the Kings and Omni, all write in first-person dialogue and narrative. They're all touching the small plates, writing on the actual plates. Well, the large plates are being edited by Mormon and Moroni. And Mormon and Moroni write in first-person dialogue and narrative. But then within the edited plates, we get the stories of Zeniff. And what happens? Zeniff leaves Zarahemla to rediscover the land of inheritance, the land of Nephi. He creates his own set of plates to tell his story. And Zeniff writes in first-person dialogue and narrative. Alma the Elder, uh, from the court of Noah, does the same when he goes to the waters of Mormon. And so we have a thousand-year history from Nephi to Moroni where all the scribes throughout Nephite history write in first-person dialogue and narrative, if they're writing on plates. This is bizarre. What I didn't share in Mormon is because I forgot to put it on the slide. This is a death blow because Ether. Ether is not an Ephite. But where does Ether come from?"
>> RFM.
>> Well, the old, old world.
>> Right? Yeah. He's a descendant from the Jaredite. He's a Jaredite. Descended from the Jaredites coming from the, the great tower supposedly. Uh, the book of Ether is, uh, edited. It's being, um, narrated by Mormon. So, it's the narrative is told in third person. One of the few books where it is told in third person. However, Ether writes, and Mormon tells us in the last chapter, "These are the last words Ether wrote on the plates. These are the 24 gold plates of the Jaredites." And then he quotes Ether. And what does Ether do? Ether speaks in first-person dialogue [laughter] and narrative.
>> Now, why are you laughing? Is it just because this reminds you again of Schrödinger's Colophone? [laughter]
>> It's definitely, it, it reminds me of Schrödinger's Colophone. That's right. Um, this is, this is a completely different civilization with a completely different, uh, supposedly literary tradition, religious tradition, scribal tradition, and yet we get the exact same thing.
>> Well, they just happened to both civilizations write in first hand. Is that so amazing? Well, you know, as I look, to me, this seemed outlandish and historically implausible, but here's what I did. RFM.
>> Yes.
>> Oh, I, I went through and I looked at the content of the Book of Mormon to try to come up with. I actually asked AI, Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot, um, to estimate each book's first-person speech and narrative content. And then I overviewed what AI gave me. And I think this is pretty accurate. Uh, do you want to read this on on the left here?
>> Where it says "Anomalous"?
>> Yes.
>> "Historiography."
>> Yeah, I missed, I misspelled it. Thank you.
>> Okay. [laughter] "The Book of Mormon is." I thought maybe there's a new word. "The Book of Mormon is not a single continuous narrative voice. It is a layered composite consisting of: Number one, first-person records, such as Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Mormon, and Moroni. Number two, third-person abridgements from Mosiah to Helaman. Those books. Three, extended embedded first-person discourse, including sermons, prophetic speeches, letters, prayers, autobiographical digressions." So, those are the three. Then you go on. "Crucially, sermons dominate the text, and sermons in the Book of Mormon are almost always first person. Scholars explicitly note that the book contains major portions of both first and third-person narrative, with entire books written in the first person and others oscillating heavily between narrative modes."
>> Yeah. So.
>> Is there any sermon that's not in first person? Well, the narratives in Mosiah, Alma, Heliliman, and Ether are, um, they are in third person because Mormon is summarizing supposedly the plates. So, he's telling it in, uh, third-person narrative. But here's the problem. This is something I didn't share on Mormonish. I actually went through and I began color-coding each verse of the Book of Mormon. I don't recommend it. [laughter]
>> Not everyone.
>> Everyone.
>> How many colors?
>> Uh, well, I had a system, but I wanted to know was what is the narrative portion and what is the sermon portion. So, I had two colors, one for narrative, one for sermon. And, um, it quickly became obvious to me that, uh, you know, what I wanted was, if 10 people were color-coding this, would we all select the same demarcations?
>> Mhm.
>> And it quickly became obvious that that would not be the case. It was too subjective. The narrative is constantly turning into sermon, and the sermon recapitulates the narrative and then goes back to sermon. And I really struggled as to, is this still narrative? Is this still sermon? Is this, I, I, you know, I, I read the Book of Mormon. I don't know how many times did you read it as a faithful, uh, apologist, RFM? I, I read it.
>> Around 25. Oh, well, that's. I read it at least 15, 20 times in my life, let alone the thousands of citations in church and Gospel Doctrine and Elder's Quorum and all that. Um, and it never, it never hit me the way it hit me as I was color-coding the verses. What I surmised is that the narrative and the sermons are the same genre of text. That to me was a bomb drop. Uh, because that means the narrative and sermons are are essentially built in very similar ways. The narrative is constantly sermonizing. The sermons are referencing the narrative to get back to the sermonizing. And it made me realize that the narrative is a, is a sort of a structural technology to deliver sermon, and the entire text is sermon-driven. And by the way, that's anomalous. What, what culture in antiquity records history as sermon? And the answer is none. Um, so the, so the fact that, for me at least, the narrative and sermons are the same genre of text, though articulated in slightly different form, also tells me the entire thing is an oral production, is an oral story created by an oral storyteller who has crafted a narrative that is the same genre of the sermon, and everything's oriented to deliver the sermon. That was my assessment as I was trying to divide narrative from sermon. And, um, you know, people can disagree, but that's, that was one of my early conclusions. And to me, that was very clear: the Book of Mormon is an orally dictated story. Um, in any case, here we have small plates, 80 to 90% first person. Uh, the large plates, 40 to 50% third. And Nephi, 70 to 80%. Mormon, 80 to 90%. The entire book estimate is first-person dominant, 60 to 70%. Well, you know, so for me, this creates two problems. The first problem is, what culture in antiquity is writing in this way? And I already know, but I went and relooked anyway, but I already know that there's nothing I've read that is anywhere close to what the Book of Mormon is doing. But then this creates a second problem. And the second problem is, if it's not written in antiquity and Joseph Smith's making it up, where's he getting this from? Because the, you know, still, and we'll get to this in a slide, but the major, one of the major theories is the Spalding-Rigdon theory, where he's copying another text. And the problem with that theory is any other text you're going to get in Joseph Smith's milieu is not going to be written in first-person narrative and speech dominant the way the Book of Mormon is.
>> It's also going to come out looking like a written text, and the Book of Mormon.
>> Yes.
>> Explain.
>> It doesn't. It looks like an oral text. It looks like it was written by somebody who's dictating it, not reading it.
>> Yes. Yes. And I should say, dictating it out of their mind rather than reading it off of paper.
>> Well, to me, this is, I mean, it doesn't preclude a prototext, but the text that we have is not being copied from a prototext. Do you understand?
>> Yes.
>> Um, to me, this is quite obvious. And yet somehow, as I, as I looked at all the arguments, I didn't see anyone making what to me was a very obvious argument that the Book of Mormon can't be a copy of a text because of the style. Do you understand?
>> Right. Yeah. Because of the style in which it is written. Exactly. Or dictated. And I would say that's one of the most, uh, concrete things that Royal Scousen's critical edition studies of the Book of Mormon came out with, which is that it is obviously a text that was dictated.
>> Well, I wonder how Scousen deals with that. How do you, yeah.
>> I haven't asked him. It probably has to do with the ghost committee. [laughter]
>> I knew that would get a lot.
>> Yeah, that, that's. So, we're going to talk about the ghost committee.
>> Oh, that's right. We are. Yes.
>> We are going to talk about the ghost committee. [laughter] I, it's okay.
>> I do hope there will be some ghosts in your ghost committee. [laughter]
>> Well, it's Schrödinger's Colophone. So, we'll get a few ghosts.
>> I think it's Schrödinger's Colon. That's the problem.
>> It is Schrödinger's Colon. All right, we're having fun. Uh, so [clears throat] I just looked at your standard Greco-Roman histories. I had AI again, using two different AI platforms, go through. I'm asking it to look for first-person verb constructions, first-person pronouns, identify first-person speech as opposed to first-person narrative, um, and then look at the texts: Herodotus, The Histories; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; uh, the History books by Diodorus; Parallel Lives, Plutarch; The Founding of the City by Livy; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, The Jewish War; Tacitus, Annals of Rome; and, um, I am getting.
>> Of Rome, by the way.
>> Yes. Well, we are talking about colons. So.
>> You got a theme. [laughter]
>> You got to change the thumbnail. [laughter]
>> All right. Uh, what I'm being told, and, uh, I reviewed, uh, I've read out of all of these texts, but, you know, admittedly, it's been a long time for many of them, but I did review some of them, uh, just to make sure that AI is in the ballpark, and, um, I, I believe it is. I, it's all single digits. Herodotus is 5, 10, 5 to 10% first-person speech. It's commentary, it's not autobiography. Herodotus will say, "I, I was in this city, and I spoke to this priest, and he told me this," and then he tells the story in third person. Thucydides introduces himself at the beginning in first-person speech and then writes the history in third person. Xenophon actually, um, interestingly enough, he refers to himself in the third person, but he doesn't speak in the first person. Uh, so Diodorus, uh, 1% first person. Plutarch, 3 to 5%. Livy, 1%. Josephus, 3 to 5%. Tacitus, 1%. Now, remember, the Book of Mormon is 65% first-person speech and narrative.
>> And we are all under 10% through all these histories in antiquity.
>> It sounds statistically significant. It is statistically significant. And more importantly, uh, these aren't nar, these aren't first-person narratives where the historian inserts himself as part of the primary text of the narrative. These are often editorial aides, uh, first-person commentaries or quotations of other people where they are quoted in first person, but not what the Book of Mormon is doing. Well, I went from the histories to other religious texts because I've read all of these, and admittedly, I've, you know, I, I read a condensed version of the Vedas, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads. Um, but I have read either a condensed version or a full version with academic commentary on all these and more. And what I know in all this reading over the past couple decades that I've done in my own academic career is that, uh, first-person speech is actually common in epics and religious texts, but first-person narrative is not. It's very rare. And so I just wanted to see the context of how first-person speech shows up. And, uh, so I did an AI analysis of all these texts. 5 to 10% first-person direct speeches from actors in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Uh, again, books 9 through 12 in the Odyssey. The bard is performing the role of Odysseus, and that's why we get an uptick in the first-person speech in the Homeric epics. But still, overall, they're single digits. Uh, the Indian epics, 10 to 15% first-person speech, again, these are being orally performed by actors playing the role of deities and people. Um, and you go down the high Greek dramas. I, I did Aeschylus, "The Oresteia" as exemplary of the Greek dramas, as 65, 75% first-person speech because what do you.
>> Oh, the actors are acting as people in first person. Of course, it's going to be that high.
>> The rest is the chorus or something.
>> The rest is the chorus. Uh, ironically, the chorus often acts as a narrator and speaks in third person, but the chorus, uh, performs a different oratory role than the actors. Um, in, in any case, uh, you can go through these. All of those are interesting, but as I made the point on Mormonish, everything we should be comparing the Book of Mormon to should be coming out of the Americas. I need to be comparing the Book of Mormon to texts we're finding in the Americas because you have a thousand-year history, actually more than that with the Jaredites, a 3,000-year history of literate societies writing in first person, recording archival history in first person. Um, we, we should have thousands, tens of thousands of scraps of texts from this society, like we do from Rome.
>> The good news is, the good news is I have some birch bark scrolls to sell you. [laughter] Um, I, it is a little disconcerting because, you know, at this point, the, you know, what LDS archaeologist is making an argument for the Book of Mormon? You have to do this. Um, there, there are no texts to cite. Uh, so I'm, in any case, if you read the Popol Vuh, and I love reading the Popol Vuh, it's 2 to 5% first-person speech, and it's divine command speech from the deities. The Mayan codices have no first-person speech. Uh, so there's your American examples. All right. So, the conclusions from, and, you know, that took me a few, it took me a few months. [laughter] This is what I do in my spare time, RFM, when I'm not in the desert. I'm sitting at the computer going over scores of texts. Uh.
>> Well, I'm glad that you do, and I wish you would do more of it. [laughter]
>> Color coding the verses in the. I don't. Why do I do.
>> Look, I did that on my mission. Okay, true story time. Truth or dare? I had one marker on my mission. It was actually a china plate marker that I got from home, but it's kind of cool. And you unwrapped the top of it. It was red, and I would underline verses because we read as a, uh, four, all four missionaries. We would read through the standard works. I wanted to make sure on every page there was something marked so that in the future, for my mission, when I'm sitting next to a cute girl in seminary or church and I open up my scriptures to look up the scripture that I'm being asked to look up, she's going to see, "Wow, that guy knows his scriptures." [laughter] So that's why you marked it up for the.
>> That was the entire reason.
>> Well, you know, that's a valid, noble reason. RFM, did it work?
>> No, not a bit. [laughter] It never happened. I remember thinking, "This is a great plan," but it just never worked. It never came up.
>> All right. Do you want to read my conclusions on the right there?
>> Yes, sir. "Textual Conclusions. First-person speech is common. First-person." Okay. "First-person speech is common. First-person narration is rare, even when first person is philosophically or theologically central, i.e., in the Upanishads."
>> Or in the Bhagavad Gita.
>> Thank you, Gita. "It is not historiographical." Okay.
>> Can you give me that one in English?
>> Even when we get, uh, large portions of first-person speech, >> in theological or philosophical text, it's not being given as history like we get it in the Book of Mormon. We're being given, uh, Plato's dialogues are almost entirely in first person. And what people forget is Plato's dialogues were performed by two people arguing the, the idea in the school, in the Platonic school, surrounded by people who would witness the argument, and then they would discuss. Right? Even that is an oral performance context. It's not historiographical, as in they're not writing histories in this way.
>> So, thinking back on the Book of Mormon, "I, Nephi, and my dad has a vision, and we go down into this valley. Then we go back to get the plates, and then we get the plates. Then we go back to the valley and go back to get the girls, and we come back to the valley. Then we head off down." It's all first person, but he's telling the story, the narrative, in first person. Is that what you mean?
>> Yes. The story is being told from first person. "I, Nephi, did this. I will go and do what the Lord commands. I went into the city. I argued."
>> "I went into Jerusalem by night, not knowing beforehand what I should do."
>> Yes. All given in first person.
>> Okay. So then you go on. "Extended first-person narrative blocks. Okay. Some texts give us extended first-person narratives, such as such as in, I'll bet, such as in the Odyssey, chapters 9-2. But these are special performances and not the default motive how the narrative is told. These narrative blocks were literally performed by bards or actors. This sharply contrasts with the Book of Mormon, where history, theology, and sermon are routinely carried by first-person voices across entire books." And you're doing this not only to show what it was that Joseph Smith was not using in order to come up with this model of performative art that he used for the Book of Mormon, but also, I think, to show, hang on a second. Oh, to lead us to where it is that he probably did something that does match the criteria that we find in the Book of Mormon, which we don't find in these other ancient works.
>> I began pretty early, uh, constructing the idea because the Book of Mormon is orally performed and it's dominant first-person speech, oral performance, context speech. I wanted Joseph Smith to be, he's the oral performer. He's practicing oral performance. I want him learning from an oral performance context, and that immediately, of course, he's growing up in the Second Great Awakening. He is surrounded by these flowing, highly intelligent and educated first-person sermons from preachers preaching in first person. And the Book of Mormon is a solid sermon narrative. Sermon and narrative are the same genre of text, I argue. And so, originally, I thought, well, Joseph Smith is picking up his oral rhetorical style from the sermon culture of his day. This is what William Davis argues so brilliantly in his book, "Visions in the Seer Stone." And I fully agree with Davis's, uh, takedown, uh, in that book, and I highly recommend your audience read it. Um, but as I began looking at the text, there were a few other problems that were popping up. So, we'll, we'll talk about it, but let's continue with this.
>> Okay. Really good. Can you start with the Popol Vuh?
>> Yes. I'm so sorry. Yes. I was trying to look up something else here.
>> No, you're good.
>> I apologize. I'm not as good.
>> I can't see you. I just see my screen.
>> I don't know what I'm doing. [laughter]
>> Okay. Which is reading at this point. The Popol Vuh is a ritual performance. Codices are technical charts and text. By the way, codex is like a book, basically.
>> Yes. I, this is the only American examples I can compare the Book of Mormon to. We have Mayan codices and the Mayan creation epic. And, um, you know, they, they're not the same genre of text as the Book of Mormon. Not even close.
>> Right. And you write, "The only indigenous American example of religious epic, which is what the Book of Mormon is, right?"
>> Was a religious ritual performed by priests. The codices are astronomical charts.
>> Yeah. So where's this coming from? If it's coming from antiquity.
>> Um, we have text genres use first-person speech differently. First person is situational, depending on who's performing it. It's voiced and not archival, as in it's being performed. It drives its authority from presence, from performance, and not authorship. And so this is what we learn when we go through all these ancient texts. And the Book of Mormon is an outlier. It's, it's, uh, it's completely out of the grid. Uh.
>> So, if it's coming from someplace, this model, it's not coming from the ancient texts that we know about.
>> Yes. It's not, it's not coming from that. I did an analysis of the Bible because if there's anything Joseph Smith is going to copy, it would be the Bible. And we know he is copying out of the Bible. Um, but what the Bible shows is essentially the same thing that we just saw on the previous two slides. We do get a lot of first-person speech. I divided my study of the Bible into different genres of text because the Bible is, you know, has different, different kinds of texts: histories, the Torah, which has a lot of oral tradition in it, wisdom literature, the prophets. And, um.
>> I would almost think that the prophets would be the most significant in that list for emulation in the Book of Mormon.
>> Yes, you do get, uh, a lot of oracles. Lord, there's a convention in antiquity where the gods speak in first person, and, uh, Yahweh, Hebrew Bible, almost always speaks in first person. Uh, so in the, when you get the oracles, God will speak in first person. Often the prophet will speak, "God told me this," and so he speaks in first person. Uh, the wisdom literature has a high uptick of first person. Um, but again, the narrative is still third person. They're not writing, "I, Isaiah, went through the city and took a sword and and took the head." Um, the, the narrative is still single digits of first person, very low or absent. And the, and the speech can have high degrees of first-person speech within the context of the kind of literature that it exists in in the Bible. Does that make sense?
>> I think so. I mean, Isaiah is mostly first person. It's mostly prophetic poetry. But then again, you do have a few bits of history thrown in there, like, um, oh, what was it? The battle of, uh, well, where the Assyrians got destroyed.
>> Yes.
>> Right? And the angel of death. What was it? "Spread his wings on the blast and blew his breath in the face of the foe as he passed." That's right. So, "when they woke up in the morning, they were all dead men," is the famous line, right?
>> Yes.
But it's the they part. Yes, it's third person. When it goes into history in Isaiah, it goes to third person. It's not I Isaiah from the battlements looked below and saw that all of these uh other soldiers were dead.
My question is this. As I'm reading and going through this research, where's Joseph Smith picking up this oratory style? If he's reading a text like the Bible, again, the narrative frameworks are almost always third person, why is he converting it to first person? Because a lot has to change when you convert a third person narrative to a first person narrative. Why? Why do that? Why not just tell your story as he does sometimes in Mosiah and Alma? Keep it in third person. Why is it first person dominant?
Um, and because it's being orally produced, my my gut, my my uh hypothesis early on is he is he's he's he has to perform the Book of Mormon text. And so he's learning this oratory rhetorical style in an oratory context. Mhm. And so I even though he's quoting heavily from the Bible, my first impression was he's getting this this oratory style from how he's going to perform it, which he has to hear, not read. Right? Everyone is arguing texts. And I am arguing that the Book of Mormon needs to be dissected using oral composition, not literate composition. And and there are different a priaryy assumptions between those two different models. So um and Davis goes into some of that.
In any case, uh what we I we have a heat map here where we have first person speech, 10% in the epics, overall 30% in the Bible, 40% in philosophical texts, 70% in Greek dramas, 65% in the Book of Mormon as an average. First person narratives, however, 2% 3% 2% 1% 60%.
>> that's where you're laying your bets, isn't it? on the first person narrative.
>> Yes, >> that's uh remarkable.
>> It's completely out of uh it's uh it's its own fish. The Book of Mormon is singular. So it doesn't that kind of ortorial sty that scribal tradition doesn't exist in antiquity. So um that is and and again even with the first person speech again first-person speech in the Book of Mormon very often is part of the narrative whereas in antiquity it's contextual to its performance context. So I I'm laying my head on both those things.
Will you read my conclusion?
>> I will. Is this first person? You can make it first person. [laughter]
>> I, John Lundwall, hereby state, the Book of Mormon's pervasive firsterson voice is easier to explain as the product of oral performance and sermon dialogue culture than as the product of ancient historioggraphical convention. So it's spoken, not written.
>> Yes.
>> In antiquity, first-person dialogue is situational. It is voiced and not archival. Help.
>> Not arch. No one's recording archival history in first person. They're specific performance context. Are are the Nephite historians performing all their histories in plays and then someone writes what the play said? Because that is how the Book of Mormon is coming across.
>> Yeah. And there was quite a trick with a Benadai sermon as to who wrote that down as you know.
So let me go ahead now that you've explained it and thank you for that. I'll start at the beginning of that sentence. In antiquity first person dialogue is situational. It is voiced and not archival and its authority derives from presence and not authorship as in it has to be performed. It's not being written by a special editor who's saying I am writing this record to preserve to the people. Okay. Indeed, first person discourse is overwhelmingly a mode of oral performance, epic enactment, dramatic embodiment, or philosophical dialogue rather than a vehicle for sustained historical narration. So that's the way it is in these other things as opposed to the way it comes across in the Book of Mormon which is almost exactly the opposite.
>> Exactly. I know I speak a little academic I
>> flown. [laughter]
>> I apologize.
>> I'm asking you what the hell you mean. [laughter]
>> Who was it? It was Fineman said, "If you can't explain your theory to a bartender, it's no damn good." I I got a
>> Well, maybe a bartender could understand that, but now with your help, I can too.
>> Okay. [laughter] All right.
So, the Book of Mormon then just has a series of problems. Uh there's no colophones in the Book of Mormon. To call what they call a cholophone that only exists in the Book of
>> Sorry, what did you say? Could you say that sentence again?
>> There no call. what they call a cholophone in the Book of Mormon is not a colophone. Um, if just every aspect, remember a colophone, you need a date. The dating system in the Book of Mormon doesn't exist outside of the Book of Mormon. It's a narrative unit to drive the narrative. It's not an abstracted dating system in this month, on this day, in this year. That's what a colophone needs. And all we get is so many years from when this person left Jerusalem,
>> right?
>> Um, metal plates. Uh, all the writing in antiquity on gold are ritual plates, ritual texts, ritual performances. We're being told that this writing is archival linear history.
>> There was at least one of those tiny little post-it plates that contained a spell, wasn't there?
>> Yes. uh all the writing in gold. I did that analysis several years ago. You have the orphic gold plates, the rituals, you have, you know, the scripture central uses the Darius gold plates. That's a dedicatory ritual.
>> Found those posted plates like around Bulgaria or somewhere. And the the story behind them is that they were found during World War II or something by a soldier and then much later got this was like around the year 2000 I think
>> the orphic gold book.
>> I don't it could be I don't know. I'll look it up. You go ahead.
>> All right. Bottom line the his geography of the Book of Mormon doesn't exist except in the Book of Mormon. the scribal schools of everyone who touches and writes on plates writing in first-p person narrative that only exists in the Book of Mormon. All of this only exists in the Book of Mormon. So, um
>> that's exactly it. It's the that's exactly what it is. This was such a huge deal. I was so enthusiastic that not they had found writing on gold plates that were actually connected by
>> rings. Yes. Rings.
>> Yes.
>> They don't put a ruler next to them. at least not in the um the farms uh insights newsletter. They didn't do that.
>> But it was astonishing and they come from the right time period.
>> You know, I was so thrilled that really the Book of Mormon was being proven true. That is a a ritual uh for the afterlife. There's nothing. It's not all writing on gold in antiquity is sealing the person performing a ritual to the divine. So it's a ritual. It's not a
>> It's like the temple is what you're saying.
>> Yeah. Right. If you were to record something on gold plates, it would be a ritual endowment. It would not be the history of of the Nephite civilization.
>> Look, I used to be an apologist. I can make anything. No matter how you describe it, I can make it prove Mormonism true.
>> That's the job.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh well, you know, that's true, but more and more they argue from the absence of evidence by moving the gold post continually. Um you you point these contextual problems out and I you all you can do is argue from the absence of evidence. We we just haven't found the right stuff yet. We just have Abraham was actually translated from
>> right.
>> So,
>> so if if you've got that kind of evidence and people will believe against it, then I mean, what can you say? You can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't arrive at by reason in the first place.
>> They've got they've got over on one of these apologetic channels with the um the Paulbearers, the Paul brothers, excuse me.
>> Yes.
>> and they're talking about they got some guy on there. I just saw the thumbnail where he's got a new theory about where the Book of Mormon took place. Okay? And people are eating this crap up. And I'm just sitting there thinking, okay guys, if you would just think for a second and sit with the idea that nobody knows where the Book of Mormon took place, even though we know what happened in the Western Hemisphere, and even though we have all kinds of details that are given in the Book of Mormon, that should allow us to locate it with some degree of confidence. Nobody knows where it took place. We have two huge schools of thought battling to the death among faithful Mormons about it. And the leadership says, "Don't ask us what you think we're prophets."
>> Yeah. Do you know uh where the uh it's supposed to have taken place in this new theory? I believe it's Baja California.
>> Oh, is it? I didn't actually watch it. Is that that new a theory? Because I've heard that ages ago. I I've heard that ages ago as well, but I believe that's what it is. And it it can't be that. There's no perennial rivers in Baja California that can drive urbanized agriculture. And you need that for the Book of Mormon.
>> Well, you know, things were different before Jesus came.
>> Jesus screwed everything up when he came over to the Americas.
>> That's right. The lands and the valleys and the mountains, they all swap places.
>> They all are completely different back then. Yes, they had. Yes, that's right. I I forget that Atlantis was just off the coast of Baja.
>> Baja California was like it was the garden spot. It was the Riviera of the entire western continent.
>> Narnia. It was Narnia.
>> Yes. [laughter]
>> Okay. All right. Uh, problem number two. So, I did that analysis. Uh, the Book of Mormon doesn't get this rhetorical style from antiquity. Is Joseph Smith getting it from the most common text? people are arguing that he copied the Book of Mormon from. So I did some analysis, the late war, Review of the Hebrews, manuscript found. I did Pilgrim's Progress. I did I did a few other documents. Um and you know, I mean here here are the big three that I put on the screen. Um it's 1% first-person speech, 0% narrative for the late war. Same for the view of the Hebrews. Same for manuscript found Solomon Spalding.
>> So it doesn't look like it was something in any of the proposed candidates for him to have maybe used for the Book of Mormon.
>> To me, this is damning. Um it's um
>> in what way?
>> This is just a summary, but uh in this way right here. Do you want to read that?
>> Well, yeah. Prototex for the Book of Mormon. This is the thing you find damning. Yes.
>> If there were a third person source, the Book of Mormon would have to be an adaptation, a systematic recoding into a first person record.
>> In other words, if he's copying a a lost manuscript from Solomon Spalding, uh there's a 99.9% probability that Spalding would write a history in third person like everybody does. So this is an argument against Solomon Spalding.
>> So if if he's got a proto text that he's copying, it would be written in third person. And then what has to happen to convert a third person lost manuscript from Spalding into the first person dominant text we have in the Book of Mormon. This is my argument.
>> Yeah. And by the way, it's not just for manuscript found. It's also for pretty much any other book in Joseph Smith Mill.
>> Correct. That is correct.
>> The result is a rethinking. No, excuse me. The result is a reauthorizing.
>> Reauthorizing.
>> Okay, we're going to get this. This is one thing everybody's going to remember, especially me.
>> What time is it? Have I already lost you? [laughter]
>> I started trying to pronounce this half an hour ago. The result is a reauthoring.
>> Yes.
>> Does he'd have to change everything from third to first? as he performs it.
>> The result is a reauthoring because viewpoint architecture and knowledge mechanics would have to be rebuilt. Third person narratives are written from the omnisient perspective using overview techniques that jump locations, times, and peoples, easily summarizing and compressing complex material into dispassionate descriptive frameworks. The Book of Mormon is written from an editorial first-person perspective that focalizes focalizes
>> focuses on first person techniques.
>> I like that. Focalizes on situated techniques. Okay. First person techniques where linear storytelling builds an architecture of personal discourse used to promote specific sermons. It sounds like a lot of work. The sermons are being told as they are heard and performed, suggesting that the narrative behind them is first person scaffolding whose purpose is to produce firstperson sermons. So in other words, this is your argument against Joseph Smith using third person narrative, which is pretty much all he had access to in the books that were around him and those proposed as likely candidates for the Book of Mormon. Um, correct.
>> Yes,
>> this is a torpedo in the rigged Spalding theory. uh because that uh spalling manuscript would have been written in third person. He would have to change everything to get it into first person. Why would you do that? Why not just copy the text?
>> Yeah. And the view of the Hebrews, it's also a torpedo there and the late war.
>> Yep.
>> He's not using these in order to copy.
>> Correct.
>> It's not saying he's not using ideas that may be mentioned.
>> Correct.
>> Okay. But people are saying he's copying a text and I'm saying he is not. Um, how are we doing on time here? Let's uh
>> we're an hour and 10 minutes into this. And once I get the stuff edited out, it'll probably be an hour and nine minutes.
>> Okay, we're doing great.
>> We haven't made that many mistakes and they're kind of brief. Um I just wanted to go over the argument that the Book of Mormon is an oratory performance. Uh this is a great book to read on this uh visions in a sear stone by Davis uh where he argues the Book of Mormon is best understood as an extended oral performance. This is true. Joseph Smith's dictation drew heavily on 19th century sermon and ortorial culture. True. the narrative structures of the Book of Mormon reflect standard oral composition strategies. Um, and he gives a brilliant example of this in his arguments on laying down heads. So um in oral sermon culture a preacher was trained and by the way preachers in Joseph Smith's day were highly trained oricians and that they were trained in memory techniques part of which is the laying down of a head. They also memorized entire books of the Bible. I mean like the four gospels they would memorize word for word. we forget this. So, just, you know, just be aware this is a different world that we're dealing with that Joseph Smith is in. Um, in any case, um,
>> it's a very religious world and a world without TV.
>> Yes. Right. without Tik Tok and email and TV. Uh the people spend their intellectual tender in in in the second great awakening and all the ideas that surface in the Book of Mormon. [laughter] Uh so one of the things Davis argues is that these preachers would give a bullet point called a head or a skeleton of their sermon at the beginning of the sermon. I you know I will teach ABCDE and then they go through and they preach their sermon ABCDE. Okay, it's a standard practice that was done in oral sermon making and then he opens the Book of Mormon and what does he find? He finds oral sermon heads laced throughout the Book of Mormon. In fact, you open First Nephi, it begins with a laying down of a sermon head. And that is the preface to First Nephi 1-3. We supposed to be a cophone, but it's not. But this is the words that appear before chapter 1. And we forget that this outline was not later added to the Book of Mormon. This was gi dictated by Joseph Smith with with his head in the hat. In other words, these were supposed to be written on the gold plates. Do you want to read that or do you want to summarize it?
>> I will summarize it. Okay. Because it's a very lengthy one. Yeah. And this is kind of uh unusually lengthy as far as chap not chapter headings but book headings.
>> Yes.
>> In the book more the chapter headings are added later. Yes. And I think were written by Bruce or Manki. Those are the italicized segments in front of each chapter. But this is the italicized segment in front of the entire book.
>> Yes.
>> And the first book of Nephi, his reign in ministry, it's an account of Lei and his wife Sariah and their kids. And it goes through all these different things they do. And they take their journey. They go uh this is about their sufferings. They take the daughters of Ishmael to wife. They go into the wilderness. They have bad things happen to them there. The course of their travels. They come to the large waters. He gets down to him building a ship and they even call the place of the name Bountiful. And then they cross the large waters to the promised land and so forth. This is according to the account of Nephi. Or in other words, I Nephi wrote this record. Do you think that that would that would qualify as a cholophone, John? [laughter]
>> No, it's not a colophone.
>> Well, that's too bad.
>> It is an oral sermon head. And that's how the Book of Mormon begins. [laughter]
>> Why are you laughing? It's a good idea, isn't it, to have it be a colophone? [laughter]
>> No, it is a good idea to for it to be a colophone. But does it contain the name of the author, the place where it was written, a specific date, the king or patron it was written for, a curse or a blessing? Doesn't have any of the colifonic elements in it. Okay, it's
>> a bullet point
>> of what we're about to read in the book of First Nephi, which Joseph Smith begins as he dictates First Nephi out of a hat, which tells you what tells you he knows the content of First Nephi.
>> Yes,
>> he already knows the story. It's already in his head or it's already in his hat. Um, so he lays it all out for us in a sermon head and then he gives it to us. What does Scousin say about that?
>> I'm not sure what he says about that. I I expect it would be from a a faithful point of view, which is this is an evidence the Book of Mormon really is a record because obviously whoever wrote it knew the end from the beginning. And you also have places like where uh Mormon shows up and says, "Hey, we're all going to die." But actually, that's if you take into account the fact that the translation goes from Mosiah around to words of Mormon, it makes more sense that way that he would already know what happens. I think Joseph Smith knew from the beginning that all the white people were going to be the advanced race and the righteous race usually and they were going to get all killed by the dark-skinned people because they were the only ones who were going to be left when the pilgrims showed up and later the colonists. And um then they had the entire mound builder myth built around that idea. So, I think Joseph Smith probably knew going into it what the end was going to be.
>> I I agree. I I do believe that there's what's fascinating to me about I have a great admiration for this project that Joseph Smith did. I think there is semi-extempiraneous elements to it. So I think he knows the story, the entire trajectory of the story, but you know, I think that he pivots and and semi-extemporaneously adds and subtracts as he needs to depending on who he's dictating to, who's listening, what's happening around him. Uh so I think there's that element too. Your thoughts on that?
>> Yeah, I think he leaves room for the Holy Ghost.
>> Okay.
>> to be guided in what it is he's going to say.
>> Yeah. No,
>> you know, if I were Joseph Smith, I'd be pretty darn amazed at myself if I had dictated an entire book into existence. And I might think that there was more behind it than just me acting on my own.
>> Sure. Yeah. No, that's very plausible.
>> Yeah. No human being would dictate books like that. [laughter] H well um uh do you want to read this slide? from I'm arguing. Uh,
>> yes. I'm so sorry. You can't see me, can you?
>> No, I can't. It's a good thing.
>> It's titled to match an oratory and rhetorical style. First person sermons were the dominant religious speech form of the second great awakening. Preachers did not narrate doctrine. They embodied it. Authority flowed through performance, exhortation, and personal first-person address. I say unto you, this kind of rhetoric was regionally pervasive and structural, not theological. Sermons presented present tense moral crisis. God is a consuming fire. This life is the time for men to prepare to meet God as examples. Binary framing. If you do not repent, the Lord will not redeem you. Life and death are now before you. And delivered as if the listener were present and immediate. The Book of Mormon sermons align structurally with this revivalist tradition, employing the same rhetoric of immediacy, personal authority, and moral confrontation. This kind of sermonizing is absent in indigenous cultures or oldw world cults, suggesting that the Book of Mormon text is created from contemporary revivalist rhetoric rather than ancient historiographic convention. Now, that really, I think, summarizes William Davis's conclusion in his book about visions in a seer stone. But you think that something else is necessary to explain the Book of Mormon than just the contemporary revivalist rhetoric of Joseph Smith's neighborhood.
>> I do. So, um, let's, uh, go to that. And I'm just going to skip through these. Um I do uh there's one huge you read that was my summary of Davis's argument. What's going on in the Book of Mormon text? Um I mean ideally we could argue that Joseph is learning this first person speech uh from sermon culture because all the sermons are being duplicated. The style,
>> yes,
>> and structure of the Book of Mormon sermons are the same style and structure of the sermons he's hearing in his MU. They don't exist in antiquity. Um, so
>> preeminent Joseph Smith scholar, um, help me out. Uh, Rough Stone Rowling, Richard
>> Bushman,
>> thank you. Richard Bushman agrees that the sermons in the Book of Mormon reflect Joseph Smith's, uh, day and age sermons, mostly Methodist in nature. Yeah, but please note that the narrative given in first person is the same genre as the sermon. I had such a difficult time dividing narrative from sermon that I realized, well, actually it's they're the same. The narrative is just a different version of the sermon. Um, this is really problematic. But the bottom line is, um,
>> it sounds like it's all coming from the same source then. as if
>> that's right. It's all coming from the same source, from the same creator. That is correct.
>> And so then we should be done. Joseph Smith creates the Book of Mormon with uh by training himself in the sermon culture of the day. The problem is the original manuscript and printer's manuscript is full of early modern English colloquialisms and those were not being preached orally in Joseph Smith's Mu. The preachers were not preaching in early modern English.
>> So really quick, early modern English is around Shakespeare's time. So it's around what 600
>> 1475 to 1725. is early modern English
>> 200 years before Joseph Smith roughly.
>> Yes. Yes. Uh this is on your screen. So uh Shakespeare, King James Bible, their early modern English uh earliest manuscripts are filled with early modern English idioms that are actually not contained in the King James Bible. So he's not getting the idiomatic speech which is being orally performed in an oral performance context from the sermons who are quoting the Bible which is King James English which is early modern but not in the idioms that are present in the Book of Mormon. And so
>> Carmarmac and Scousin. Yes. Not one of his finest powers. [cough]
>> This [clears throat] is a summary of their argument
>> and I'd be happy to summarize it.
>> Would you pray?
>> Basically what they're saying is there's uh what is it? EOD E or EM
>> early modern English.
>> Yeah. In the Book of Mormon. So 200 years before. And they're saying what the heck is this doing here? And they're sort of like um if we read them in the original edition, which I've read, but I didn't know about the eod thing. It sounds kind of like uh bumpkinesque uh English, but it's an earlier form of English, or at least these forms are found in earlier forms that were apparently not being replicated, though. How they prove that is a tough one in Joseph Smith's day. So, how on earth did early modern English colloquialisms from the time period show up in the Book of Mormon? Oh my gosh, how can we explain it? Well, because it's Scowin and because it's CarMac, it's weird and therefore it must prove the Book of Mormon is true somehow some way. So, what they said was, "Well, here's what must have happened." And I'm not kidding. I did a show about this not too long ago. It might have been
>> I watched it. I watched it. It was
>> about the ghost committee. Oh my gosh. These guys who are actually legitimate scholars and Dan Peterson bought off on it and you know you did too, Dan. Don't try and deny it now. is that there was a committee that wrote the Book of Mormon and then beamed it down into Joseph Smith's head in some manner because obviously he's not looking at the plates, right? And this committee was composed at least partially of dead people, therefore ghosts who had lived in early modern English times. And they even went so far as to suggest, was it Tindale? I think Tinddale was on the committee, the ghost committee. These guys, they they had it all figured out who was on the ghost committee. And that's how the Book of Mormon was created. That's why early modern English shows up in the Book of Mormon. And that is why the Book of Mormon is true. I think they've since stepped back a bit from that theory. [laughter]
>> I It's a bit confounding, isn't it? I I in any case,
>> you guys have degrees.
>> It's Royal Scousin. He spent decades studying every edition of the Book of Mormon, including the earliest manuscripts. He's a man of letters. He's not an idiot, but I guess his broken watches write twice a day.
>> Scousin's work is brilliant, but instead, so look, it's full of early modern English colloquialisms that shouldn't be there. I call it a textual graffiti. To me, this is good news. That's a fingerprint. Whoa. There's early modern English idioms that are not coming from the King James Bible in the printer's manuscript
>> being orally performed by Joseph Smith. Therefore, he's picked up early modern English idioms in a register that he is speaking in while he dictates the text.
>> So, you're not going with the ghost committee theory?
>> No, I'm not going with the ghost committee. Here is a a wordprint study by Rod uh Rob Terry. He did a uh EM uh did plus verb construction through the Book of Mormon and showed that it rarely showed up in the sermons, though it still does. It showed up much more in the narrative portion of the text. But again, I want to know how he divided narrative and sermon because that was very often difficult for me.
>> [snorts]
>> Um, but I mean there are clear narrative portions and clear sermon portions, but also that it exploded in the late portion of the text as opposed to the early. So, this was interesting to me because if Joseph Smith naturally spoke in these early modern English idioms, I would think that they would be evenly distributed throughout the Book of Mormon text. But here we we see that there's more of them in the narrative than in the sermon portion and then more of them in the later narrative than in the early narrative. Uh so that that's interesting. We put that on the table. Um let's just go to my conclusion of what I wanted to see. I wanted a linguistic register, a way of speaking that is performed in first person because that's how the Book of Mormon is performed. Performed in first person speech in a for formal oratory practice like a sermon, a sermon school where people were trained to speak uh in an elevated way in first person speech that allows Joseph Smith to think in first person narrative and voice. But I want this from the early modern period. [laughter]
>> So there would have to be something obvious. Well, I think it would be obvious. It I'm thinking in writing. I suppose it could be handed down orally, but probably something in writing that for whatever reason is written in early modern English and contains forms such as those contained in the Book of Mormon.
>> Yes. But I want it to be an oral practice, not an ancient text or an older text like Pilgrim's Progress. Again, uh again, it's difficult when you're dictating a 270,000word text, 330,000 words if we include the Lost Manuscript, um to take all these archaic uh idioms that you're reading in older texts and then vocalizing them in an oral performance. you would speak the way you speak,
>> right? It would be something that you're comfortable with.
>> Yes. So, to me, arguing that he's picking these up from older texts is problematic. I want him picking it up from an oral practice.
>> He's not speaking this way in order to make it look like something else that looks ancient like the Bible. He's speaking this way because that's the way he's used to speaking, at least when he is performing in this mode.
>> That's correct. Okay. Well, I actually when I was able to articulate this is what I need to see at first I was like, well, how the hell am I going to find that? That is I have no idea. By the way, this is an excellent excellent version of looking at the evidence and winnowing it and looking at it some more and winnowing it some more and finally boiling it down to a good solid question.
>> Yes. Yeah.
>> That's the question. And now you have to find the answer.
>> That's right. And when I was able to articulate I I just have to say when I was able to articulate that question I it was like in the morning I was doing my color coding and and I was like I I have no idea how I'd ever find that and I would have to do I have to read history and I have to know all about I'm not a Mormon historian and I I just thought this is my dead end like so many other deadends I reached I I'm like that's just too much work for me to go find that. And uh by that evening of the same day, [laughter] I sat down and it just hit me, what am I thinking? I know exactly where there's an oral performance context that's that is performed in first person speech. And I I and of course what it is it it's Joseph's magic practice. So to get there his treasure digs if we um
>> it's right in front of us, isn't it?
>> It's right in front of us. I one of the things so I spent again a few months reading grimmoirs. Stephen Skinner is the great scholar who's compiled a lot of grimmarss that are now now actually published. They're kind of expensive and I bought a few. Um, but as I began reading through them, I realized everyone everyone seems to be calling Joseph Smith's magic practice folk magic,
>> right?
>> And that is not what it is. Uh, grimoire magic is formal ceremonial magic. Folk magic is taking your your stick and going out into the woods and finding water or taking a little talisman and casting a healing spell or a love spell. Um, it's done by cunning folk, country folk, community specialists. There's charms said in the local vernacular. That's folk magic. Ceremonial magic is textual and instructional. Grimoire as a manual, highly formalized ritual sequences, use of protective circles, consecrated tools, sacred names, formal ceremonies. Well, do we know Joseph Smith is drawing magic circles? Yes. Do we know he's got consecrated tools? Well, we got a llmen. We got a Mars dagger. We got a Jupiter talisman. Yes, there's arguments about who had what when. Uh but we have lots of adaptation attestations that Joseph is creating magic circles and performing formal ceremonies in his treasure digs. Um, there is a cosmology involved in the grimmoirs and it's the same cosmology you find in the book of Abraham. And um uh language is marked by first person authority and speech. I conjure, I command, everything is performed by the magician in first person command speech. And often in the grimoirs, as you invoke an angel or spirit or demon, you uh re you will also invoke a biblical story often in first person. And and I have to say, RFM, when I began reading the Grimars, I I keep making the same mistake. And the mistake is I read the grimars for content and I'm like there's no way he's using grimmire to make the Book of Mormon. This is gibberish. And then I had to stop and say, "Well, I am I'm an idiot. I can't read the Grimmooire for content. I have to read it for structure." Do you know why?
>> I'm just going to jump ahead and just say that's really funny because that's exactly what I had to do with the Temple Endowment to see its actual structure, which we'll get to eventually. I had to stop reading it for its content and read it for its style or its structure.
>> Right. Well, so there you have it. You you had the same epiphany. I I actually keep telling myself this um because it changes the game. But when I began reading the grimmoirs structurally and then I began looking at the Book of Mormon, I realized, well, this is really the answer to that question I posed. Um, anyway, structurally they're technical, ritualistic, astrological, pneumonic. They have um all kinds of preparations. And again I gave this example where there was one purification blessing that you gave before you gave an invocation and this is what opened my eyes. Uh you it's a little prayer. It's a small paragraph that you would say on day one morning and evening. Then you would repeat it on day three morning noon and evening. Then on day five, morning between noon and morning, noon between noon and evening, evening. Day seven, you did it seven times. Day nine, you did it nine times. In other words, you perform this prayer generally memorized word for word uh almost 30 times uh before you even began your magical ceremonies. And then as you did your ceremonies, each one of those had elements structurally that required a lot of repetition, a lot of blessings to be said. And the blessings in the grimoirs are all Christian prayers that sound very much sermonesque. And I was reading a uh a oral rhetorical performance uh method that was different but analogous to the sermon culture. He and so if Joseph Smith is using a grimmoire, a formal grimmoire to do formal treasure magic, he would be performing a hundred ceremonial elements using oral dictative practice, repeating prayers, Christian prayers, lists of names, and uh I made a rather large blunder on my podcast last week. I when I said one of the things you do is you you uh invoke a list of names. These are the names of the spirits that you want to have power over and there's hierarchies. So you want the lesser spirits and the greater spirits and then the great spirits and the archangels. And so these list of names could be 20 names long. Some of them are 200 names long. And Rebecca asked me, "Are there any IH names?" And I'm like, "Well, I just remember the eel names. There were a ton of names that were turned Hebrewesque by adding eel at the end of them. But then I thought, I really need to go through and look at all the lists of names because there's a formal register of of hierarchy of angels in some of these grimoars. And sure enough, they were filled with ah names. And simply because the Book of Mormon is filled with ah names. Ma, am Ammoniah, Amalachiah, Mosiah, right? Um, and and if Joseph is using a grimoire and and saying 200 names in a row, E L N I Ah, he is and he does this multiple times for one treasure dig. He has 30 treasure digs that we know of, plus all the ones that we don't know of. He's performed thousands of these ceremonial elements before he's even dictated a single word of the Book of Mormon. And this would constitute a formal linguistic register that is in first person speech referencing first person narrative written in the early modern English period with early modern English idioms in it.
>> You say if Yes, I I well I I believe this is what has happened.
>> Um but people will argue, you know, he definitely read out of the magus. I don't think that's what he's using. He's >> say the magus. That is a grimoire of the time.
>> Yes, Simon Barrett's the magus. The magus. Um it is a grimoire. We know he's using it. We know that there's images on Hyram's llama that are out of that text,
>> but those folks what a llmon is. I know that. Or layman.
>> Yeah. Yeah. That's a magical parchment that has magical seals on it and magical words on it used in ceremonial magic that was worn that was put in a leather pouch and worn around the body of Hyram. Dan Vogle might have uh more to say on that, but
>> right because Dan Vog I mean this was passed down along his descent. Yes. And his descent marked the patriarchs to the church, the eldest faithful male of Hyram. Uh Joseph Smith senior through Hyram was the patriarch of the church up until they did away with it. But Dan Vogle met with Oh, who was the last patriarch? It was last name was Smith. Okay, you give me the first name. It was it was E something. It was an unusual name. Uh
>> anyway,
>> it'll come to me. But um but yeah, and Dan Vogle went and visited him and he said, "Hang on, I want to show you something." Went to a room, got his leather pouch out, and showed him all the the llamins. They still have them. They're treasures, of course. But you're saying that there are certain things on the llamins because it's covered with writing and diagrams that a number of the diagrams are directly out of this grimoire that you mentioned.
>> Yes. Yes. The magus. Um and I I have I have reasons to believe he's using probably a couple grimoars from the Solommonic tradition. Um, in any case, uh, doing that, using that, he would have performed thousands of these firsterson speech elements before he dictated a word of the Book of Mormon, which means he's done this before he's trained in sermonizing. [laughter] And so, uh, this is what to me is what is getting Joseph Smith to perform the entire book in first person speech and narrative.
>> He's Eldred G. Smith, by the way, Eldred G. Smith. Is there a connection that you found between grimoirs and the spells that are in them and treasure seeking? Um, well, you use the grimoars to treasure seek. Treasure seeking is necromancy. You're calling forth good and bad spirits. The treasure is often guarded by a nefarious spirit that you have to control. And so you you have to summon them. And uh as a result um you have to do all kinds of preparations. You have to summon very often a good spirit that can control and command the bad spirit because [clears throat] the bad spirit is going to deliver the treasure.
>> Um and so uh yes, treasure digging um incantation magic and treasure digging. That's what's happening with treasure digging.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> Okay. Um, so basically here is an example of an invocation as first person command speech that also invokes biblical narrative. And I, you know, I've contracted it. If you want to read the left paragraph and I'll summarize it and then I'll summarize my argument and then we'll move on to the next part of this podcast.
>> So this is actually from this represents the beginning of a spell.
>> Yes.
>> where you would put your name in here and say I and I'm gonna say Joseph Smith or John Lunwell because I don't want to say my real name. Who the heck knows what I might end up conjuring. [laughter]
>> That's right.
>> I Joseph Smith conjure ye by the most potent name of El Adoni Sabah which is the god of armies. And that's the last one. Sabah oath is the god of armies, right?
>> Yes. um ruling in the heavens which Joseph invoked and this is Joseph of Egypt. So this is your reference to the Bible
>> which Joseph invoked and was found worthy to escape from the hands of his brethren which Moses invoked and he was found worthy to deliver the people of Israel from Egypt and from the servitude of Pharaoh which Moses invoked and having struck the sea it divided into two parts in the midst on the right and on the left which Moses invoked and all the waters returned to their prior state and enveloped the Egyptians. so that not one of them escaped to carry news into the land of Misim. So yeah, a whole lot of biblical uh antecedants being quoted, cited to invoked uh to show that what the God that you're appealing to has all this power and may be flattered by your recollection of it.
>> And also Joseph and Moses are magicians. This is part of the occult. The Bible is a
>> grimoire. Joseph's cup
>> and the patriarchs are maguses who can command the spirits and that's why Moses can split the sea. That's why the fire comes down from heaven. That's why he can talk to God at the burning bush because he's invoking the same powers that Joseph is invoking when he is uh you know uh collecting angels and demons, right? Joseph was a cup diver.
>> A cup diver.
>> Yeah.
>> Yes.
>> There was the cup. There's a story in the Old Testament about the cup that had been taken and they find it.
>> I'm talking about Joseph Smith, not Joseph of the Bible.
>> Oh, well, they're both cup diviners.
>> They are both cup div, right?
>> That's right.
>> One's a cup, another's a hat.
>> Um, sure enough.
>> And Moses is the magician. He's the super magician cuz he beats Pharaoh's magicians. This is at the foundation of Mormon cosmology and theology. What is the priesthood?
>> The power of God to do these things which comes through magical invocation and evocation. And when you give a priesthood blessing, what do you do? You speak in first person command speech,
>> right? as opposed to a prayer.
>> Yes.
>> Sacrament is prayers, but other things like uh blessings are first person.
>> Yes. So, uh you know, now we're starting to peak peak into that peeping stone. Um, so, this
>> the power of God, the power of God that just uh it lines up so good with the temple.
>> Yes.
>> which we're going to get to really quick. So, this shows us first person performative authority, formulaic structures, uses archaic syntax and elevated registers. Speech does not describe action. It enacts power. That's how first-p person narrative is used in the Book of Mormon. By the way, language preserved through ritual repetition, not everyday speech. And it's filled with early modern English. But if plural was formal conditional clauses consistent use across ritual contexts early modern English preserved in lurggical and magical registers long after disappearing from daily usage. All right. So concluding hypothesis Joseph Smith's ortorial formation is best understood as drawing on two distinct but complimentary training streams. revival preaching and ceremonial practice. From the sermon culture of the second great awakening, Smith absorbed the dominance of first-person exhortation, immediiacy of address, and the expectation that moral authority is enacted through spoken performance. At the same time, his earlier ceremonial activity, especially treasure seeeking practices, practices rooted in grimar magic, trained him in a different but convergent mode of speech, highly formulaic, situational, explicitly first person. Crucially, these ceremonial texts and recitations preserve early modern English idioms in grammatical construction.
>> Wait a second.
>> Yes. Are there early mod early modern English idioms in grimoir magic?
>> Yes,
>> I think we skipped that connection.
>> Um,
>> that's an important connection. We shouldn't skip that.
>> Well, can you go backward on this? Yes, you can. Good.
>> I am. Let's see.
>> Yeah, that's an important element. There are these old middle English or early middle English early modern English emod e
>> that show up in the book of Mormon also show up in the grimro and if this is how Joseph Smith is using and what it is that
>> he's uh invoking
>> uh when he's performing the book of Mormon then it would be a
natural conduit for the emod e to enter the book of mormon. Right, so the one one example I gave is Terry's analysis of the did plus verb form, which is early modern English, that runs throughout the Book of Mormon, and we find that in the grimoires. Here's a quote from one of the grimoires, Goetia.
"This is the form of the secret seal of Solomon, wherewith he did bind up and seal up the affirmation spirits. Also by a seal, King Solomon did command all the affirmation spirits and did seal it up with the same seal."
This did plus verb form, um, that runs through the Book of Mormon, runs through the grimoires.
Okay. And this is just illustrative. I'm sure there are other.
Yes.
Examples of emodi in the Book of Mormon. Okay.
Yes. Now, um, many of the grimoires I read had been formalized much like the way the Book of Mormon had. The early modern English has been taken out of the idioms have been taken out of the Book of Mormon text. Um, they are there. This all goes to his training in the grimoire. He was trained in it. I'm arguing he's trained in it from Lumen Walters.
Mhm.
Um, who is then it it would if if he if they had a handwritten grimoire, it would be filled with early modern English colloquialisms, um, you know, but we don't have it. I have to make that hypothesis, and which I do. And this is where he would pick it up in a formal register. Every time he put his head in the hat, that's how he spoke because he's using the hat for his ceremonies far before he uses it to dictate the Book of Mormon. But he uses it to dictate the Book of Mormon. That's very interesting. The plates are optional. They're often not in the room, but the hat and the stone are always there. That is what is mandatory. When Joseph Smith is leading treasure digs with his stone and his hat, and he places his face in the hat with a stone in it, I had just always thought, well, he just sees locations or something and somehow points over there and this is where we go. Are you suggesting that he's doing more with his face in the hat? Is he making invocations? Is he summoning or commanding spirits?
All right, hold on to your britches. There are two mandatory things a magician must do to invoke or evoke a spirit or demon. He must, or she must, stand in a consecrated magic circle, which will protect him from the potent power. You are drawing in this worldview from a from the tectonic plates of the cosmos when you are drawing up a spirit, whether it's a good or bad. So you have to be protected. So you must create a magic circle, which requires ceremonies to create, and you must stand in it while you perform your invocation. Joseph is using his hat and stone in his treasure digs. Why? So again, this is a hypothesis. The inside crown of his hat is a circle. He has sewn or engraved or written, inked, threaded a. And when he puts his head in his hat, he is standing. It becomes a portable altar, a portable magic circle. Every time you put.
I'm not sure if this is going to show up on the recording, but right when you got to the key part of that last sentence, what's engraved in the inside of the bottom of his hat? Can you say that again?
In the Joseph has a top hat. The inside crown of the top hat is a is a circle. Yes.
A magic circle. Okay.
So, every time he presses his face in the hat, he is standing in the circle. You must be standing in the circle in order to invoke a spirit. There's another thing that you must have, and that is a talisman, which will capture the spirit, and it can be a it could be a seal written on a parchment. It could be an object, uh, such as a brass ball. It can be a seer stone. You put the stone in the hat, which is in the middle of your magic circle, and you invoke a spirit. Your head's in the hat. That puts you in the circle. That allows you to do ceremonial magic. And the stone captures the spirit. It is a mandatory magical requirement that he has these things, a circle and a talisman, and he's carrying around a rock and a hat the entire time. Therefore, I hypothesize the circle's in the hat, and the stone is the talisman that carries the spirit. Now, listen, he is dictating the Book of Mormon by reading words on the stone. I believe he's invoked a spirit and, uh, he is in some sense he's semi-extemporaneously performing a pre-prepared, uh, story. But in that worldview, you could see how he could say, I the the spirit is giving me the oral dictation because he's creating it. He's telling the story. Uh, but he's, you know, he's prayed for the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost is helping him, uh, deliver the the sermon and the narrative.
But he's evoked the spirit.
Yes.
Which is captured in the stone.
Yes.
Which is telling him what to say.
Yes. So, it is the ghost committee after all.
Yeah. Well.
It could be Tindale.
It could be Tindale.
No, that's fascinating. I do have to ask you this question though. Is this purely a theory on your part, or are you aware of examples of hats that have, um, magic circles?
No, it's my theory.
It's my theory. I I know that they all have to, uh, create a magic circle, uh, to be in in order to do the magic.
Mhm.
Um, we have instances where Jo we're told Joseph Smith used his rock and a hat to perform treasure digs. And the question is, why? Why is he carrying around his rock and his hat? He needs a talisman and a circle. So sure enough, this is my hypothesis, RFM. Um, but it explains in ritual magic context the the necessity of him carrying this around the entire time.
Mhm.
Um, so take it for what it's worth, but that's my hypothesis.
Okay. Very good. And I understand you're saying that your main hypothesis is about his being involved in this grimoire magic, and only just secondarily as an idea that he had the magic circle embroidered in his hat, which is not necessary for your hypothesis to stand, right?
Correct. Correct. Correct. Uh, and ironically, my hypothesis is on the slide, but that's for, uh, him picking up early crucially these ceremonial texts and recitations preserve early modern English idioms and constructions functioning as authorized ritual language rather than everyday speech. When Smith later dictated the Book of Mormon, these two streams, sermon and ceremonial magic, converged. The sermonic tradition supplied the performative preaching framework, while the ceremonial tradition supplied an archaic first-person register, allowing early modern English forms to service naturally within sustained first-person narrative and discourse.
Bravo.
All right.
Very good. I think that's a fascinating hypothesis, and I appreciate you coming on this show to share it with this audience. And some things that you didn't share with Mormonish, and other things that you got wrong when you were talking with Mormonish that you've corrected here.
Yeah, that's correct.
That's even better. And as a super bonus, now we're going to go into the temple, which is the name of the thing, right? Which is about, uh, Mormon temple as treasure quest. Okay, here we go. I'll just give you the whole thing. You got to get rid of all the the content, right? And just look at the structure. And for whatever reason, I did that. You know, you go to the temple, some people are interested in the temple, some people are just looking at their watch and wondering when they can get out of there. But if you're there and you're trying to figure out what does all the symbolism mean and how does it fit together, what I would do a lot of times is I would look at the individual components and try and figure out what they meant with greater or less success, however you define success in an endeavor like that. But at one point, and I don't know why, but I went and I took the 20,000 or 30,000 foot view and just said, "What happens if I look at the temple ordinance, uh, the the endowment, mainly as a, um, as, uh, just one thing and see how it's structured, how the different pieces fit together?" This is what I came with. By the way, if you haven't been to the temple, this is going to make very little sense to you, okay?
Because I'm not going to go through and explain everything that happens in the temple. In fact, in some ways that would be counterproductive to what it is I'm trying to do. But if you remember what happens, okay, first thing is this. All right, you go to the temple and you get washed and you get anointed. You get cleansed and you get consecrated for your quest. And then then you receive a new name. Now, that name is secret. Nobody else knows that name except for you. Of course, now we know that they're recycled on a regular basis. But the idea is that this is a secret name that only you know. Now, that's very important because that means you have a name that nobody else knows. So no other power or being can control you because it's through knowing an individual or being's name that we gain control of them. Which is why angels in the Old Testament, for example, are extremely reticent to give their name when asked on several occasions. So you can't, and and by the way, that's one of the things I thought you were gonna say when you invoke a spirit that you need you need to know their name.
Right, that's one of the things.
Correct. Correct.
You don't know their name, you have no power over them. So if you have a name that nobody else knows, then you're protected against other people having power over you. Presumably God knows, but none of the bad ones, okay? So now you're ready to go. Now let me go to the end of this all right, because the quest of the temple is one thing and one thing only, and that's to get power, and it's to get health, and it's to get strength, and it's to get all three of these things not only for you, but upon your posterity forever. And that strength is not just physical, it's also sexual, okay? You see how I'm avoiding saying the most sacred thing in the entire temple, which can only be given at one place at one time, and you're ever to tell anybody else. In a temple endowment full of sacred things, there is one thing that is the most sacred of all, and that's the whole point.
Who gives it to.
What?
Who gives it to you?
In the temple?
God or an angel?
So that's the that that's the other problem of the quest, which makes it interesting, which is no human being can give you this. It can only be given you by a divine being. So how do you get this boon, this blessing, this power, the power in the priesthood, remember?
Yes.
How do you get it from a divine being when you go to the temple? Especially when you would wither in the face of the divine being without the power. So how does the divine being give you the power when you can't see the being without having the power in the first place? All right, so this is how it goes, right? There's, uh, first token of the ironic priesthood. I hope I'm okay saying that. First token of the ironic priesthood, which is with its accompanying name, sign, and penalty. So you learn name, sign, penalty, uh, excuse me, name, sign, token that are associated with that, together with the penalty, because for each of these sacred and secret items of information, you must take an oath that you will never reveal it to anybody else. That's how sacred these are because we can't have just anybody learning these, right? It has to be guarded with blood oaths. So you get the first token, uh, of the ironic, second token of the ironic, first token of the Melchizedek, second token of the Melchizedek. And all of those have names, signs, and tokens. And they used to have penalties. And I think the penalties are important, especially within a magical context. So everything has to be sworn to with blood oaths that you will never divulge any of these things. Okay. So I'm trying to think how am I going to talk about the second sign of the, um, the Melchizedek priesthood, right? Which used to be in the Adamic language, said in a foreign language.
Is it okay to say "ple"? Now.
How many, how many, how many, uh, ironic priesthood signs and tokens are there?
There's two ironic.
How many Melchizedek?
Two.
How many total?
Four.
Each with its name, sign, token.
Yes.
Okay. When you stand in a magic circle, you invoke. Remember, you're not reading this for content, you're reading it for structure. When you stand in a magic circle, you invoke the four, you invoke the four directions. There's an angel or spirit that is over each of the directions, each with a power, each with a name and a power. Okay? So, when you do the endowment, you, um, have four name, signs, and tokens, and that's followed by what? Well, the prayer circle.
You actually stand in a magic circle.
And you invoke.
And what happens?
Magic circle.
And what happens?
I like it. Okay. So, here's the thing. All right. This is why you learn all of these things. There's a structure to it. The structure is is that you have to learn all the name, signs, and tokens so that you can then go into the prayer circle and repeat them. All right? You give all the name signs and tokens, used to be penalties, up to and including the last sign, second sign of the Melchizedek priesthood, which is where everyone raises their hands and they used to say, "Pay lay ale," as they lower their hands, which being interpreted means, "Oh God, hear the words of my mouth." It is a prayer that God appear and that he at least hear. Okay. It's a prayer that God hear what you have to say. I'll be strict in my analysis. All right. The thing is is that as soon as everybody's done saying that, and by the way, they're replicating what Adam did earlier in the endowment when they do this part, they pray to God, want him to hear the words of their mouth. And if you take out now the prayer that now the, um, oh, the person at the altar offers, and then everybody repeats whatever he says. It's kind of a standard prayer, standard Mormon prayer, right? And everybody repeats what he says after every phrase. If you take that part out, okay, immediately after they're done praying, God appears behind the veil because now we're going to be introduced to the veil, and God is on the other side of the veil. That's because we can't bear his presence. But the whole point of this entire quest has been to get God to appear.
Which he will only do if we use all the name signs and tokens in the prayer circle, and he appears on the other side of the veil. Now we are finally prepared to approach God, as it's presented in the endowment, at the veil, and get from him what it is that we have been wanting to get, the power. So we have to go now to God, the individual representing God, obviously, but God in the context of the endowment, whom we have summoned, whom we have summoned.
That's right.
And show God through the veil, once again, on an individual basis. It's like polling the jury, you know, do each of you agree that this is the verdict of the jury? Well, we did it in the prayer circle. Now we have to do it individually, and we have to show him that we have learned and know all the the name signs, tokens, okay, um, of the of the four things. And at that point, now God gives us what it is that we've been seeking. And it is a long phrase. It's several phrases, but like I said, what we get is health.
Mar.
Power, I should say, strength, both sexual and physical.
Yes.
Okay. And priesthood power, not only upon me, but upon all of my descendants forever. There's nothing, I don't think there's anything bigger than that that you could get. And that's the point. We get it. And now we are prepared. Now that we've received it, now we can go through the veil. Now we can see God, and the veil doesn't separate us anymore. What do you think of that? Does that sound at all like, um, ceremonial magic in Joseph Smith's day?
Yes.
And the other thing I have to ask you is this, because I know that obviously there are other elements going on in the endowment. There's, there's, uh, there's Moses, the book of Moses, or the the creation account, and the the Garden of Eden account, and the fall account that's going on. There's also a lot of masonry coming in. But what I wanted to ask you was, because I don't know masonry, I know a lot of connections that it has with Mormonism, but I don't know masonry that well. Does the Masonic temple ritual also have a similar structure to where you're trying to get this power, and you have to go through all of these different steps in order to get it?
Um, the I would answer that question by saying Joseph is a syncretist.
Mhm.
So he's taking ritual elements from Freemasonry, hand clasps, signs, tokens, but, um, the structure of the endowment is not from Freemasonry. Maybe someone will disagree with me. Do I keep flipping out here?
You freeze a bit and you have occasionally.
During the course of tonight's show.
But I haven't mentioned anything about it because it's only for like a second or two, and I think we can catch what it is you're saying.
Okay. Uh, the narrative of the Masonic ritual is about Hiram, and that's completely different. The narrative in the endowment is biblical. I would argue that the endowment is structurally grimoire, ritually Masonic, narratively biblical.
I like it.
And it is how Joseph works. He takes the structure is the important thing. That's the priesthood. The power and the priesthood be upon me.
And, uh, but then he is adapting and innovating elements around him. This is how he creates Mormonism. Elements around him, um, and, uh, creating what eventually becomes Mormonism. I actually think I have a lot to say about the Mormon Endowment, and that will be on future releases.
On Mormonish.
I'm on. Well, I'm actually, uh, trying to make a video, so it'll be my own release.
You mentioned that on Mormonish that you were trying to get somebody was like, uh, knew what they were doing, a professional to do a really good job of it.
Yes.
That must be a mark of how you think about this discovery.
Yes.
That you think is pretty good and pretty solid.
Robust.
Okay.
[clears throat] Yeah. Because, um, I mean, you know, there's times when you find things and you go, eh, that could be something, it could be nothing, and then you realize it's nothing, or sometimes you think it could be something, but who knows. But then there's sometimes when you look at it, and you look at it really hard, like you have, and you think, I think I got something here.
I think I got something here.
Okay.
[laughter] Is there anything that I've said about the temple endowment as, uh, the structure of it? You, you've been, you've been, you've got the, you're touching the tiger's tail, RFM. Yeah.
Okay. I was wondering if there's anything that you would correct or add to.
Well, I, there's plenty to add. Um, but I mean, that's the trajectory of it. What you said.
You're.
[clears throat] Keeping your cards close to your vest.
I'm keeping my cards close to me.
[laughter] Hey. Uh, in the Doctrine and Covenants, everyone who, uh, receives the full power of God enters the celestial glory. And what do they get?
A seer stone.
Yes.
Isn't that amazing that this wasn't just in Joseph Smith's early days? He was talking about this all the way up until he died. This was like a year or two before he died.
He's talking about a seer stone.
Remember, my hypothesis is the seer stone is what?
It was. Hang on. Hang on. It's a. Oh, you, you're, you're capturing a. Something. What's that called? What did they call that in Ghostbusters where they had that gizmo that would trap the spirits?
[laughter]
Remember.
The Ghostbusters?
I'll look it up.
It's not a Tesseract capacitor. That's Back to the Future.
That's a different. That's for the next year. That's '85, not '84. Go ahead and tell me what was, were you going to say?
Well, all the elements are are there, right? You you have to have the talisman to carry the power of the spirit, and you now possess and command it.
You are now co-equal with it. And and so to obtain a seer stone in the celestial order is to what? Is to be co-equal with the spirit of God. That's funny because that's what Joseph Smith taught in the, um, King Follett discourse. Co-equal shows up. Funny how that shows up.
Yeah. Co-equal with God, which B.H. Roberts bent over backward trying to make him say something else. Co-evil. E V A L, which meant coexistent. No, that's not what Joseph Smith said. He said co-equal.
Yeah.
With God. By the way, it was a containment unit.
[laughter]
That's not very romantic. But at least the proton pack was used to weaken and wrangle the ghosts.
The ghost. No, the ghost trap to capture them. These along with the containment unit, that must have been a thing in the wall for long-term storage, are their main tools. So it was the ghost trap.
Still one of the greatest movies ever made.
Absolutely.
[laughter] Okay. So, you're saying that when we get to the celestial kingdom, what Joseph Smith is teaching is that we get a stone that has a spirit captured in it. Well, structurally.
Where's he, where is he getting this cosmology from?
Mhm.
So that's all I'm saying is all the elements are there that are in the treasure digs. One could say the endowment is just a modified treasure dig.
Yeah, absolutely. It's got all the complications, maybe not quite as complicated. You know, all those complications and those grimoires. I have to think at some point that it's made complicated so that when things don't happen, you got something to blame.
Well, right, cuz, um, they almost never happen the way.
Right. They never happen. I screwed it up. I only.
[laughter]
Washed three times this day instead of, you know, four times or something.
Yeah. But, you know, here's the point. Uh, you can invoke not just for treasure digs. You can invoke to to bless your fields. Love magic was the second most, uh, largest use for this kind of invocation magic. And as I said on Mormonish.
I believe every time he tried to partner with a girl, he did a magic ceremony. And if that's true, then it seemed to work because he seemed to partner with a lot of girls.
Didn't work on Nancy Rigdon.
No, it didn't. But.
[laughter]
It it did, uh, it did work in the barn.
Yes, it did.
[laughter]
Well, this has been fascinating. Uh, Dr. Lendwell, I want to thank you because I know that I was trying to get with you this week sometime, and it was difficult with your schedule. In fact, impossible to get with you before this coming Saturday, even though it's only Tuesday right now when we are recording this. But thank you. You look like you've had a long day already, and adding this on top was that was just very kind of you, and I appreciate it.
I got to get your setup, your lighting, your your audio.
Oh, yeah.
You look magnificent. I look kind of pasty and sunburnt.
You'd be surprised how often I hear that.
[laughter]
Well, I'll check out your OnlyFans.
All right.
[laughter]
That's why love potions would be number one today. They may have been number two back then. What was number one, by the way, back then?
Number one.
The use of, uh.
Invoking spirits for, uh, for invoking good and evil spirits. Treasure magic was high on the list of why you would do that. So money.
Yeah. Money. And then the second was sex, right?
I guess that makes sense.
Yep.
All right. You know, if the first one worked, you usually don't need a spell for the second one.
I'm just saying.
Personal experience.
[laughter]
All right. I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much, Don. I appreciate it. And I'll talk to you later. Okay. I'm just going to take us out here. I'll put you back in the green room. All right.
All right. Thanks, Har.
All right. Well, everybody, that was fascinating, wasn't it? Please hit like. Please hit subscribe. If you haven't yet, please go to radioreef Mormon.org and make a donation today. You'll feel much better about yourself. I guarantee. And thank you to all of you who have made those donations. Your donations literally keep Radio Free Mormon broadcasting behind enemy lines. Well, that's about all for tonight. Until next time, this is Radio Free Mormon signing off the air.
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