How kabbala shaped Mormon faith
Tomer Persico ("Haaretz," October 3, 2012)
Mormonism is a subject of fascination to Americans and the
rest of the world. Its unusual sets of beliefs were widely
discussed and studied long before U.S. presidential
candidate Mitt Romney strode onto the national stage. Less
well known and studied is the way the doctrine is shot
through with kabbalistic beliefs.
In a book from the early 1990s, "The American Religion,"
literary critic Harold Bloom mourned the transformation of
respectable American Protestantism into a Gnostic dispensary
of fundamentalism. To Bloom, the religion of Europe’s
Puritans had grown wild and unrestrained in the liberated
soil of America. This, he said, led to the flowering of all
sorts of strange religious movements, like Christian
evangelism, various New Age movements and, of course,
Mormonism.
Bloom was particularly interested in Joseph Smith, the
religion’s founding prophet. He had created a truly
“American religion,” writes Bloom, which taught religious
devotion to family, community and financial success.
In addition to being a talented and original theologian and
a highly charismatic figure, Joseph Smith was the source of
many of the esoteric theories pervading the North American
continent in the first half of the 19th century. And, his
theories were colored by the supernatural-theological
worldview of the kabbala.
Citing the many points of similarity between Mormonism and
kabbala, Bloom posits the “more direct influence of the
kabbala on Smith than what we know.”
This would help explain the extreme divergences between
Smith’s views and those of the conventional Protestant
denominations that were his jumping off point.
God's wife
According to Smith’s theology, the God who controls our
world was once a human like us. He had a spouse and the two
of them had corporeal bodies of flesh and blood. God is a
model for men on earth in that every Mormon is also capable
of becoming a deity of his own star along with his wife.
This, of course, implies that there are many gods who rule
over many stars.
Smith held that his doctrine was the recounting of the
esoteric knowledge revealed to the first human, Adam, by the
deity of our star. From Adam, God’s wisdom was passed down
through the generations, passing through Noah, Abraham,
Moses and the ancient Hebrew priests and finally, was
revealed to Smith's followers.
The purpose of the doctrine is to facilitate the
realization of human potential by transforming men into
gods. This notion is not just foreign, but in fact,
antithetical to the Puritan Christianity from which it
emerged.
Puritanism saw man as a vessel full of guilt and disgrace.
Born into sin, the best this wretched creature could hope
for was to claw his way toward salvation through shamefaced
submission to the Son of God. Man was light-years away from
being some sort of galactic deity.
What Smith was offering his followers was a stark
alternative to the severe and ascetic Christianity of
Puritanism. He promised them the renewal of prophecy, the
building of paradise on Earth and ultimate personal
empowerment. As an added bonus, he threw polygamy into the
deal.
Jesus' second coming, in America
Joseph Smith was born in 1805, the fifth of 11 children
from an impoverished family in Vermont. When he was 14,
following a period of severe mental distress, Smith had his
first vision where the deity himself assured him that his
sins had been forgiven. Along with this, God warned him not
to join any of the churches in the vicinity because they all
distorted the true word of the Bible.
In 1823, three years after his first vision, Smith fell to
his knees again and called out to God for guidance in the
depths of another mental crisis. This time the angel Moroni
appeared before him and told him that he was the last
survivor of an ancient Hebrew civilization that arrived on
the shores of North America at the time of the destruction
of the First Temple in Jerusalem. These ancient Israelites
did what Jews always do and fought amongst themselves until
one sub-group among them (henceforth known as the evil ones)
put to the sword the members of the other group (the good
ones) and annihilated them.
The evil ones, after being cursed by God, developed over
time into the different tribes of American Indians. All that
was left of the good ones were the tablets of gold upon
which were engraved their history in the ancient Egyptian
language.
The angel Moroni directed Smith to the spot where these
tablets were buried and instructed him to dig them out of
the ground. After Smith laid his hands on the tablets he
immediately began translating the ancient Egyptian writing
on them. The result was an impressively broad volume
containing hundreds of pages of narration that told the
history of the bad ones and good ones.
Perhaps even more importantly, this narrative also included
the second coming of Jesus Son of God to humanity – an event
that occurred on American soil before these very same
ancient Hebrews who had reached America.
This was “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” as was
proclaimed in the sub-heading of the Mormon's holy book.
Clinging to his holy book, Smith went out to acquire
believers. He succeeded well beyond his expectations.
In order to understand the secret of Smith's success – and
the success of his bible – it is worth taking a step a back
and gaining a bird's-eye view of the above-mentioned
occurrences and placing them in their proper context. This
period was the peak of the Second Awakening in the United
States, a period of religious revival during which many
Americans joined various Protestant denominations. Around
Smith, the religious muses were ubiquitous, with new
prophets popping up seemingly from under every tree.
Not far from the home of Smith, Jemima Wilkinson exhorted
sexual abstinence and fidelity to the Ten Commandments.
Handsome Lake, a Native American prophet, preached fiercely
against alcohol, witchcraft, gambling, violence against
women and homosexuality. There was Joseph Dylkes, who
announced that he was the Messiah who had come to rebuild
Jerusalem; George Rapp, who established a community of
religious hermits and announced the approach of the Second
Coming of Jesus; Bernhard Muller, who dubbed himself the
"Lion of Judah" and declared himself the messiah; William
Miller who founded the largest messianic movement in U.S.
history and declared that Jesus would return to this world
by March 1844; John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the early
socialist Oneida Community, who preached about sex without
ejaculation as means of achieving spiritual elevation; and
of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who left his position as a
reverend of the Unitarian Church and commanded, “Cast behind
you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with the
Deity!” He was a clear precursor of New Age spirituality.
An age of prophets
The age was ripe for prophets and their followers, and
Smith was no exception. His was an attempt to create a new
society in which sexuality served as an important source of
spirituality. He preached neither sexual abstinence nor sex
without ejaculation, but polygamy. Instead of a faint
promise of the future coming of the messiah, Smith's
prophecy was a megalomaniac attempt to establish the Kingdom
of Heaven in the present, on Earth.
Where did Smith derive his inspiration? He was undoubtedly
an exceptional person, with a vivid imagination and enormous
creativity. But every creative spirit needs raw material.
Smith found his in the esoteric literature of his era, which
led him to the kabbala.
As a curious teenager, Joseph Smith was able to read a fair
share of Western esoteric literature at his neighbor's homes
or in different public libraries.
The esoteric literature of the period included the legacy
of the Renaissance, Hermetism, the kabbala, Neoplatonism,
alchemy, astrology and Magianism.
Hermitism was an esoteric practice based on ancient texts
that were apparently written by a god/king/prophet/ master
sorcerer named Hermes Trismegistus. This Hermes was,
apparently, a contemporary of Moses and revealed to humanity
the secrets of the universe at the exact same time that
Moses gave the Torah to the Israelites. The historical
source for the more ancient parts of the hermetic corpus is
found in the early centuries of the Common Era, in
Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, and therefore contains a mixture
of Greek and Egyptian myths.
In contrast to many Western tracts, the Hermetica
emphasized the greatness of man and the ability for the
complete synthesis of spirit and matter. Based on this
doctrine, the soul is a refined type of matter, and
therefore this materialist and sordid life is not a thing
unto itself; there is even the possibility of achieving
divinity without separating from life.
"You are the light and the life, as God the Father from
which man was born," states Hermes, echoing similarities
with Mormon theology.
Kabbala for Christians
With respect to the kabbala mentioned here, this wasn't the
same Kabbala diligently pored over by the students of the
Vilna Gaon or the Lubavitch Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi,
founder of Chabad Hasidism, during this time period, but
rather the kabbala translated into the vernacular for a
Christian readership. In the eyes of the Christians who were
interested in it, the kabbala was thought to be the secret
Torah that Moses gave to Joshua, and from him to the elders
of Israel, and from them to the prophets. But unlike
traditional rabbinic Judaism, the Christians believed that
the kabbala was also given to the Israelite priests. The
inclusion of the ancient Israelite priests was likely due to
every story about the Temple in Jerusalem being seen by
Christians as having some esoteric and mystical value (this
was also true for the Freemasons, another movement that
flowered around the same time). The Christian kabbala
included different translations of the Hebrew texts into
vernacular with additional commentary that presented it as a
universal bible that in practice was philosophically
Perennialist (meaning, that it stands at the base of all
human knowledge).
Smith’s interest in the Hermetica and the kabbala alone are
enough to shed light on the sentence found at the beginning
of the Mormon cannon, in the Book of Nephi, the first volume
of the Book of Mormon. After the first verse in which the
narrator presents himself, the second verse states: “I will
make a record in the language of my father, which consists
of the learning of the Jews and the language of the
Egyptians.” The Jews were a muse to Joseph Smith. The use of
“the language of the Egyptians” ties the Book of Mormon to
the Hermetica.
The comprehensive research of Michael Quinn -- a historian
of the Mormon religion and follower himself whose research
findings led him to be kicked out of the Mormon church --
paints a portrait of Smith as a fairly committed
esotericist, despite his eclectic and autodidactic
education. The world of the young Mormon prophet included
astrology, Magianism, the preparations of talismans, trading
in holy relics, remote viewing and especially, prophetic
visions.
Quinn demonstrates different links between Smith's
prophecies and the book, “Traditions of the Jews," written
by the anti-Semite Johann Andreas Eisenmenger that was
translated from German into English in the 18th century. It
appears that this book taught Smith that the Hebrew word for
God (elohim) is actually written in plural form, an
understanding that aided the development of his
anti-monotheistic theology, which explicitly acknowledges a
plurality of gods.
Other books in Smith's environment hybridized the
kabbalistic meaning of “original man” (the first emanation
of the divinity after its contraction) and the biblical
meaning of “Adam” (as the first human, in the Garden of
Eden). This compound meaning was passed onto Smith,
apparently leading him to view the first human as a being
with godly powers, and Adam's descendants – that is, today's
humans -- as having a latent potential for godhood.
A Jewish convert to Mormonism
Above and beyond the books Smith read, it appears that much
of his education on the secret Jewish Bible was acquired
from a Jew named Alexander Neibaur, who arrived on the
shores of the U.S. from London and converted to the faith of
the Mormon prophet. As Moshe Idel writes in his book “Olam
Ha'malakhim” (“World of Angels”), we have in our hands a
list of Neibaur's books, which include several important
works of kabbala. The encounter between these two figures
occurred in 1841, and between 1842 and 1843 the official
Mormon newspaper published articles on kabbala, some of them
written by the Jewish convert, mentioning, for example, the
book “The Sohar” (referring to “The Zohar,” widely
considered to be the most important book of kabbala.) It
seems Smith learned from Neibaur to take the first verse of
the Bible, “At first God was created” and to interpret it in
one of his last teachings as the invitations issued by the
chief god to the other gods to a supreme council in which
the creation of man and the transfer of the secrets of
eternal life to him and his descendants were discussed.
Smith had one purpose, to renew the Israelite nation of
yore. For this purpose, prophecy was renewed, priestly
orders were established, and temples (not churches) were
built. Even the polygamy of the Patriarchs was renewed.
Smith wanted to build "Zion" on American soil. Smith spoke
of a new society, where people would share their property,
and were faithful to the true Bible coming from the lips of
their leader. The same leader, Smith, pretended to rule this
utopia as a “prophet, priest and king” entrusted by God to
be responsible for the fate of his subjects.
In 1844, after they were chased out and expelled from
Missouri, tens of thousands of Mormons moved on to Illinois.
There, Smith established the city of Nauvoo, which grew
rapidly and soon numbered more than 10,000 inhabitants,
approximately the size of Chicago at the time. Smith himself
was the city's mayor, and when the harassment of the Mormons
began again he announced his candidacy for the
U.S.presidency. in elections scheduled that year. His secret
plan was to annul the separation of church and state after
his election and to establish a kingdom of priests, with
himself at its head. Several months later, he was killed in
a lynching.
In his book, Harold Bloom writes that “If there is already
in place any authentic version of the American Religion
then, as Tolstoy surmised, it must be Mormonism, whose
future as yet may prove decisive for the nation, and for
more than this nation alone.”
Bloom perceived with his sharp senses that the esoteric
path to godhood (or at least to economic success) in our
days added up to much more of an ethos than penance for
Original Sin.
