The Book Of Mormon

I've just been reading a really interesting post about Mormonism over on one of my favourite blogs, The Age Of Uncertainty. It's prompted me to put up something I wrote a few years ago about The Church Of The Latter Day Saints in my book The Joy Of Sects.



The Latter-day Saints, AKA Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints, AKA Mormons


Founded: 1830
Country of origin: USA
Membership: 7,000,000 plus
Gods and guiding voices: ‘God’, Mormon, Moroni
Texts: The Bible, The Book Of Mormon
Famous associates: The Osmonds

Basic beliefs: America was originally settled by people from the Tower of Babel. After his death on the cross, Christ made an appearance in America where he again preached the gospel. Indulgence in caffeine and alcohol is not good for you. Hard work is. The highest heaven is open only to baptised Mormons. The official church does not believe in polygamy any more.


Main blurb

In 1820, Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was confused about which of the many contemporary Protestant sects he ought to join. He solved his problem by asking God directly. ‘None of them,’ He said, appearing before Smith as a pillar of light. It was the first of many visions Smith was to receive in his lifetime.

Just over three years later, in 1823, another divine personage, an angel called Moroni, appeared by Smith’s bedside. He was dressed in a white robe, ‘his feet did not touch the floor’, and he claimed to be the son of Mormon, the departed leader of an extinct American race called the Nephites. Moroni told Smith about a set of golden plates that contained a written history of the mysterious races that inhabited America before the time of Columbus. Then he disappeared to heaven in a shaft of light. A few minutes later Moroni reappeared at Smith’s bedside. He repeated everything that he had just said, and then vanished, just as he had done before. Then he came back again and repeated the same words a third time.

Smith said that he didn’t get much sleep that night. The next day he was understandably exhausted. He passed out when attempting to climb over a fence on his way out of a field – and the angel Moroni came to him yet again. This time he told him where to find the golden plates, buried in the side of a hill named Cumorah (near Palmyra in New York state). Smith went there right away and unearthed the famous plates. Buried alongside them was a pair of supernatural silver spectacles, the ‘Urim and Thummim’, which Smith was to use to translate the hieroglyphics on the plates. These were written in a language called ‘reformed Egyptian’. (Curiously, archaeologists and Egyptologists say that there is no evidence that any such language existed).

Smith spent the next four years preparing himself to do this great work of translation. Then he carried the golden plates home in a buggy (managing to get them there without anyone – not even his wife Emma – seeing them). He then set himself up behind a screen, so that the plates were still concealed, and got stuck into several years’ hard graft.

A great deal has been written about the flaws in the resultant tome, the Book Of Mormon (for more on this, see Appendix 3). It isn’t just the inaccuracies and alleged plagiarisms that have offended the Book Of Mormon’s detractors. Its literary qualities are said to leave something to be desired, too. ‘It is,’ said Mark Twain ‘chloroform in print.’ The celebrated author of Huckleberry Finn also laid into Smith’s habit of peppering his otherwise fairly contemporary nineteenth-century prose with biblical-sounding words and phrases like ‘exceeding sore’, ‘yea’, ‘exceedingly glad’, ‘unto’, ‘great joy’, ‘harkening’ and ‘smiting’. If, said Twain, Smith had left out his favourite phrase, ‘And it came to pass’, then his 500-page bible ‘would only have been a pamphlet’.

When the book was first published in 1830, it was savaged by the press. No reviewer seemed to have any doubt that Smith was a confidence trickster who had invented the whole story. Nor did Smith’s personal life escape criticism. In 1834 an investigative journalist published a series of affidavits from friends and neighbours who described him as a lazy, untruthful, religious con man. They characterised the rest of his family as ‘illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless and irreligious’. They also suggested that it was no coincidence that Joseph’s father, Joe Senior, was a persistent treasure seeker and that the young Joseph Smith had often accompanied him on his expeditions, hoping to find the loot left by Captain Kidd and indulging their fondness for the occult and fortune-telling on the way.

In spite of – or perhaps even because of – the negative publicity he was receiving, Smith soon gathered a considerable following. They gradually moved towards the less inhabited west of the USA to avoid religious persecution – persecution that only increased in 1843 when Smith declared that God had ordained plural marriage. A firm believer in practising what he preached, Smith was said to have gathered 27 wives by the time he died (some estimates put the number as high as 60).

Smith’s death came in extraordinary circumstances, when a mob broke into the jail he was being held in, shot him and threw him out of a window. It was left to his successor Brigham Young to lead his followers on the long arduous trek across the deserts of Utah until they finally settled in Salt Lake City. There, safe from too much outside interference, the faith prospered. Brigham Young (also said to be a prophet – as are all presidents of the Mormon church) was a shrewd administrator and by the time he died the city was thriving. He had collected 140,000 followers and no fewer than 25 wives (‘The only men who become gods are those who enter into polygamy,’ he declared).

Since Brigham Young’s time, the Mormon ideals of hard work and abstinence have paid off in abundance – as has the church’s levy of a tithe on all of its adherents’ incomes. Since officially abandoning the policy of polygamy in the 1890s (although several pockets of fundamentalists still exist who engage in plural marriages – outside the sanction of the church) the faith has become the apogee of American respectability. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns most of Utah, a large part of Hawaii and land in Canada, as well as the Marriott hotel chain, the Beneficial Life Assurance Company, and TV and radio stations. Its morally austere adherents have some of the lowest cancer rates in the US – and some of the best physical fitness. They promote the boy scouts, have short haircuts and the missionaries they send out around the world are scrupulously neat and remarkably polite.

Consequently, the religion is growing faster than any other in the US and spreading around the world at an incredible rate. What’s more, in order to give those unfortunate enough not to be baptised into the Mormon church a chance of attaining the ultimate Mormon goal of divinity (they believe the most devout will get to populate their own planets), the Church is posthumously baptising thousands and thousands of people. If expansion continues at its current rate, by the year 5000, the entire world will belong to the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints. Not bad, considering how it all began.



The Curse of Darkness

As recently as 1978, black males were banned from entering the Mormon priesthood.
Mormon writings had long pointed to a ‘curse’ God put on Cain for the murder of his brother Abel, as told in Genesis. ‘Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to the line of human beings,’ announced the prophet Brigham Young. ‘This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.’ Dark skin was also the curse inflicted on the Lamanites in the Book Of Mormon and there are many passages extolling the splendour of ‘whiteness’.

‘Negroes’ are ‘not equal’ with other races, wrote Bruce McConkie, a church apostle, in his book Mormon Doctrine in 1966. The Latter-day Saints have since modified this doctrine, as they have the other embarrassing doctrine of polygamy, although this puts them in the embarrassing position of having to renounce the teachings of men they consider divinely inspired prophets.


Roving Report

The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints is not a secretive cult. It’s easy to get to talk to Mormons. In fact, I’d recommend it. If you’re ever lost in a strange city, need directions and you see a street preacher with a short haircut, smart suit and black plastic badge declaring him an ‘Elder’, ask him. Chances are he’ll speak excellent English, be scrupulously polite and he won’t steal your wallet. It’s a resource I’ve used on several occasions. Once, when I was in Basingstoke researching my book Crap Towns, an Elder was even kind enough to tell me that he would describe the town as being ‘like hell’.

There’s also a good chance that representatives of the church will come knocking on your door. The fiercely proselytising church sends thousands of young men and women out on missions all over the world each year. As luck would have it, a couple of them came to my house just as I was starting to research this book. I asked them in for a cup of tea – forgetting, of course, that Mormons generally avoid caffeine. They politely declined, settling instead for glasses of water, and started to tell me the incredible history of the Nephites and Lamanites. They knew that the book is true, they said, ‘through faith’. ‘But,’ they went on, ‘there is also scientific evidence. In the pyramids “scientists” found a picture of a white god descending from heaven and teaching people. Therefore the Book of Mormon must be true.’

I was interested to learn that Mormon communities usually ostracised people who left their church – and that people only generally left it because ‘they are lazy’. This started to make more sense when the young men described a typical day on their two-year ministry. They woke up at 6.30 a.m., exercised and studied until 10 a.m., knocked on doors for a few hours before having a one-hour lunch break, and then hit the streets again until 9 p.m. When they got home, they prepared for the next day. TV is strictly forbidden. ‘We don’t really know what’s going on in the outside world,’ they told me.

It’s a tough routine, especially since most people just slam the door in their faces. The travelling Elders often also face violence. The young men told me about a friend of theirs who was chased through Crystal Palace with a blowtorch. Conversion rates can be depressingly low. Although a minister in the poorer, less literate regions of Africa can expect to perform up to 75 baptisms a year, most missionaries in Europe would consider themselves lucky to bring about a single conversion. Still, with 60,000 missionaries out and about every year, even this paltry success rate begins to be significant. Small wonder that the church is growing so fast.

Earnest and serious as the pale men sitting across from me at the table were, we never really reached an understanding. In fact, I got the impression that my persistent questioning began to freak them out. However, they left as politely as they came, giving me a copy of the Book of Mormon as they did. In it one wrote the instructions, ‘Read. Ponder. Pray.’ They certainly weren’t your average twenty-year-olds.


[And here are those appendices... Sorry... The book layout doesn't lend itself well to blogs. Doesn't lend itself particularly well to books either. But that's another story...]

Appendix 2

The Mountain Meadows Massacre


The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognise their leaders as divinely inspired prophets and their teachings as sacred. Sometimes, this can be tricky to deal with politically. One of the less well-known Mormon policies is that of blood atonement. The prophet Brigham Young taught that certain sins could only be amended for with a man’s own blood. Killing can be a righteous act. ‘Loving our neighbours as ourselves … if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood … spill it,’ he said. This policy found its most chilling fulfilment in the Mountain Meadows Massacre when Brigham Young ordered his co-religionists to attack a party of emigrants who were crossing Mormon land on the way to California in 1857. One hundred and twenty men, women and children were massacred.

Some modern adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints have denied that the policy ever existed. However, many still put forward the idea that certain ‘grievous sins’ place the sinner ‘beyond the reach of Christ’s atoning blood’ as a justification for capital punishment.

Appendix 3

The Book of Mormon


While Joseph Smith slaved away behind his screen producing the Book of Mormon he was largely left in peace. At some point during the process, however, an acquaintance of the prophet, one Martin Harris, called round and Smith despatched him to New York carrying a piece of paper with some of the ‘reformed Egyptian’ hieroglyphs on it. Harris took the paper to a professor named Anton, who issued him a certificate saying they were genuine – but then ripped it up on discovering that the characters were supposed to have been sent by an angel. So, tragically, the only piece of impartial evidence for the existence of the plates – and reformed Egyptian – was destroyed. (Smith returned the original plates to Moroni as soon as he had finished the translation. The book does contain several testimonies of other people who claim to have seen the plates – but they were all church leaders, or the relatives of church leaders.)

The work Smith eventually produced, the Book Of Mormon, is the cornerstone of the Mormon faith. Among a lot of moralistic preaching, it explains that America had originally been settled by people from the Tower of Babel, but that these inhabitants had degenerated and perished as a result of their own immorality. A later group of Jews then ended up in South America after fleeing Babylonian captivity. They divided into warring factions, the Nephites and the Lamanites. After his death on the cross, Jesus Christ appeared among these peoples and preached again. But the factions continued fighting and the Lamanites nearly wiped out the Nephites (the price of their victory was a curse – dark skin). After the final defeat, the prophet of the Nephites, Mormon, wrote up the history on gold plates and buried them on the hill – where Smith was to find them more than a thousand years later.

Critics have found it strange that, although it was supposedly written many centuries before the 1611 King James Bible, many passages appear to have been lifted verbatim from that book, complete with its translation errors. They also point out anachronisms like references to the ancient Hebrew use of steel and to domestic animals that weren’t around at the time. Similarly, the book describes American Indians using weapons for which there is no archaeological evidence. Oddest of all, Mormon described elephants roaming around in places where there is no evidence elephants ever roamed.

Other investigators have found an earlier novel by the Reverend Simon Spalding that bears a marked similarity to much of the Book Of Mormon. There’s also another book, The View Of The Hebrews, by the Rev. Ethan Smith (written in 1824, three years before Joseph Smith started work), which also contains many passages echoed in the Latter-day Saints’ holy book.

Organic Peas and Orderly Queues

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Organic Peas and Orderly Queues

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Catullus still rocks 2000 years on

I wrote this for Guardian.co.uk, but annoyingly (for me anyway), their resident classicist Charlotte Higgins had spotted the same story and wrote this neat piece at the same time. Being the freelance, I got spiked. Such is politics. But I still enjoyed writing my version, so thought I'd give it a bit of life here. Especially since I think there may be different ways of looking at the interesting First Century BC context...


More than 2,000 years after his death, it appears that the poet Catullus still has the power to shock and cause controversy. An employment tribunal in London has just heard that Mark Lowe, the millionaire boss of Nomos Capital sent a work experience girl an email containing the phrase “pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” .

The lawyers opposed to Mr Lowe suggested that this line was, inappropriate and likely to "violate" the dignity of the email’s recipient. Lowe, meanwhile, claimed the poem: “… is burlesque, it was always light-hearted in the first century and it still is now.”

Rather wonderfully then, a court case dealing with such specifically modern phenomena as hedge-funds, email communications and Thai prostitutes has stumbled across a question that has been exercising poetry lovers for the last 2000 years: exactly how rude is the poem we now call Catullus XVI?

As far as we moderns are concerned, until fairly recently, the simple answer would have been ‘unprintably so’.

Those plosive-heavy words “pedicabo” and “irrumabo” refer to anal and facial penetration. “I will bugger you and stuff your gobs” is the admirably literal translation suggested by Guy Lee (in the 1990 Oxford translation). Catullus then goes on to refer to Furius and Aurelius, the addressees of the poem with the lovely chiasmus: “Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.” That’s to say, it’s Aurelius who will enjoy the attentions of Catullus’ penis in his mouth and Furius who will get it in his bottom.

For years, these first two lines were considered so indecent they weren’t translated into English. Even in the 1960s the Loeb edition of the poem, with translations by FW Cornish, rendered the contentious line thus: “…” Cornish also refused to print the last 8 lines of the poem, even in Latin. Other editions have seen it translated into Greek, French or just duplicated the original Latin phrase in place of translation. When they have dared tackle the lines, scholars have come up with curious suggestions like: “Nuts to you boys! Nuts!” or “I’ll show you I’m a man!” or “Furius, Aurelius, I’ll work your/ own perversions on you and your persons.”

That probably says more about 19th and 20th Century squeamishness than Catullus’ contemporaries. The marvellous “it was light-hearted in the first century” defence put forward by Lowe is not without substance. Certainly, Catullus is making a joke.

Later in the poem he says that the reason he’s made these threats to his friends Furius and Aurelius is that they’ve suggested his poems may be a bit soft (molliculi) and that he’s less of a man because he’s written a poem addressed to his lover Lesbia suggesting that he’s going to give her many thousands of big kisses.

The most obvious solution to the poem that follows from that is that Catullus is being heavily ironic. Suggest he’s a softy, both in the sense of being effeminate and unable to perform sexually, and he’ll prove you wrong by making vigorous love to your bottom. An act that becomes even more transgressive since Catullus also suggests that the “pius” poet ought to be “castus” (normally translated that the pious poet ought to be chaste.)

Of course, this being Catullus, there are further potential interpretations. The poem is steeped in innuendo and ambiguity. That word “castus” , for instance, could be understood to mean “acting correctly from a masculine point of view”. In which case, having lots of sex wasn’t such a problem. Even the famously censorious Cato the Elder had declared it perfectly acceptable for Roman men to frequent prostitutes.

The joke in the First Century might also have depended on the feminisation of Furius and Aurelius. The important point is that because they have suggested Catullus is a bit of a girl, they are going to become the passive recipients of his attentions. And that could be seen as a serious insult.

The charge of feminity, to give one notorious example, was at the heart of a 62 BC scandal involving Publius Clodius Pulcher. (Neatly, he was the brother of Clodia - the woman whom many scholars suspect is the real subject of the poems dedicated to ‘Lesbia’. The ones to which Furius and Aurelius objected to in the first place…) Clodius had dressed as a woman in an attempt to get close to Julius Caesar’s wife during a rite from which men were excluded - and he had also been caught in incestuous relations with his sister. A massive bribe got Clodius off the hook in the following court case, but his arch-enemy Cicero would attack him ever afterwards on the grounds that he was lascivious and feminised. Suggestions that were meant to really sting – and which took on extra weight thanks to a wide-spread rumour that when Clodius had been captured by pirates during the Third Mithridatic War, he’d paid the price of his freedom with his anal virginity. A rumour whose very existence proves that receiving anal sex as a Roman man was no laughing matter.

In such a context, Catullus’ “burlesque” takes on fangs. Yes, he’s being funny, but he’s also launching into the furthest stratosphere of rudery and insult. As far as the modern court case goes, it seems a shame that history doesn’t record how Furius and Aurelius reacted to this metaphorical fucking. But the fact that it remains troubling after all this time (not to mention hilarious) is testament at least to Catullus’ unique and wayward genius.

Google ego-alert ego-massage

My google ego-alert email service had a link to this review of Sod That today in the Huddersfield Examiner, by one Chris Mellor.

Here's his conclusion:

Walking on fire is over-rated, he says. Ask the 28 people who suffered serious burns during an attempt to break the fire-walking world record in New Zealand.

Going shopping in Milan, riding a gondola in Venice and visiting Florence are all kicked into touch, although I actually did visit Florence. Nice girl.

“This book is a rallying call for common sense and dignified indolence over hectic, wasteful and morally dubious over-activity. Sometimes staying at home is the best thing to do with your time,” he says.

I couldn’t agree more.

I'm all aglow. Especially since Chris Mellor seems to be a fellow (non-) traveller.

A fantastically awkward encounter

Just got back from The Connecting Worlds event at this.

It was an excellent evening, with four moving and entertaining readings. Two of them really brought home the sadness of exile. (Especially a very touching poem from Chenjerai Hove about how you forget to appreciate lovely things when your world is filled with horror). Two of them were really funny.

But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the gloriously awkward conversation I had with the last reader Geoff Dyer.

After Dyer's reading (typically amusing, with a cruel cliff-hanger relating to an involved encounter with a monkey that is probably going to force me to buy the book, the sod), there was a lot of milling around and shuffling home kind of activity. I was keen to get back to the nest myself, mindful that my girlfriend was home alone with a teething baby and that my bike didn't have any lights. So I'd tucked my trousers into my socks and got out my helmet when my friend Nathan waved Geoff Dyer over and introduced him to me and said:

"Geoff, this is Sam he’s a massive fan of yours."

Geoff Dyer remained cool, but a brief flicker in his eyes told me he had the fear. Nathan had just landed him with a stalker. With weird trousers. At this point, of course, Nathan walked off.

Geoff D: I’m glad there’s one here. Fan, I mean.

Me: Hahahahahahaha.
(For just a little bit too long).

Geoff D: Er.

Me: Er.

Geoff D: I see you're on your bike.

Me: Yes my machine is out there.

(I indicate some bike stands visible through the glass front of the building. I have no idea why I called it a 'machine').

Geoff D: Nice weather for biking. Bit windy though.

Me: It’s okay. When you're going downhill.

Geoff D} (Silence)
Me } (Silence)

Geoff D:Are you coming to the dinner?

Me: No. I’ve uh got a wife and baby back home.

Geoff D: That’s nice for you. Cosy.

Me: Er, yes.

Geoff D:Well, goodbye.

Me: Goodbye.

Happy Bloomsday

Here's a Bloomsday extract from my book Sod That: 103 Things Not To Do Before You Die... In which the message is don't read Ulysses.*


Read Ulysses

If you do as we’re all urged and take up James Joyce’s overlong magnum opus, it is guaranteed to clog up your all too short life. Banned, criticised and suppressed on moral grounds when it first came out, it thereby became far more famous and far more durable than it would ever have been otherwise. Had it been published openly originally, the book would in all probability have been openly ignored, or at least gained wider recognition for the pretentious nonsense it is. The lives of generations of English Literature undergraduates the world over would have been considerably eased as a result.

Many readers might experience a strange feeling of guilt at thus disregarding a book that has come to be considered as such an important part of the mythical literary canon. Wading through Ulysses is often regarded as a kind of coming of age. You have to get through it to prove your worth to those invisible cultural arbiters who we imagine sit in judgement of us all. You have to know what happened to Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, even though the answer is, basically, nothing.

The other thing to remember about trying to prove your bookish credentials by knowing about Ulysses is that no one who actually possesses a wide knowledge of literature will believe you if you try to convince them you've read every word. They – having attempted to grind through it themselves – will understand what a thankless task it is and won't believe you.

OK, there are some fine qualities to the book. There’s some magnificent worldplay, some world beating writing and top class rudery. But a few clever turns of phrase and a couple of pervy passages don't make up for the fact that if you want to understand even half of it you have to lug a dictionary user’s guide around with it – unappealing when the book alone already weighs more than a small child.

The only passages that do make sense are the rude ones. So just do what everyone else does and cut straight to them. Skip the rest. Especially skip the 150-odd pages of punctuation bereft prose that starts: ‘Deshill Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshill Holles Eamus’ and ends ‘anyway I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeee one more song.’

Everything you need to know about this section is neatly contained in the word ‘nonsense’.

There is at least one good thing to be said about Ulysses, however. It does at least also have the distinct advantage of not being Finnegan’s Wake. Now that's a book you should die before reading.


Useless Trivia

On Ulysses’ first release the Sporting Times declared that the book: ‘appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic.’ Paper of record the New York Times opined: ‘The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it – even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it – save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.’ The popular critic ‘Aramis’, meanwhile, correctly pointed out that: ‘Two thirds of it is incomprehensible.’

More Useless Trivia

A 2007 poll commissioned by teletext discovered that 28% of Britons confessed to being unable to finish Ulysses, making it the third most unread book in the country, following DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

ADVERT!

Sod That is still available at amazon and perhaps even a few good bookshops. (Beware of poor quality imitations!)

*I may not agree with everything I have written here.

Haworth

Haworth
Originally uploaded by Sam Jordison

Oh the irony!

RBS: Evil rarely has a sense of irony
Originally uploaded by Sam Jordison