I posted 2 more interesting conversations with BYU professor Dr. Richard Bennett this week. I must say that I was real surprised to hear him tell me that Spiritualism may have influenced the idea to do endowments for the dead. You can listen here, iTunes, or YouTube.
Spiritualism, the practice of communing with the dead, adulterated today by Ouija boards and things like this and telekinesis and paranormal, but Spiritualism is well-known in American history as flowering after the Civil War with so many dead and lost and the great desire of many families to know what happened to their sons or their fathers or their brothers.
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In the 1870s there’s a lot of comment by general authorities, leaders of the church, particularly Orson Pratt about this is a counterfeit, but it has its place. We understand why people are seeking the dead. Was that a factor in the beginning of endowments for the dead for the church in 1877? I claim that it may have been one of the factors to begin to address how we really think about them. There is redemption for the dead but it’s not that way. So was it a factor? I argue that it probably was one of the factors.
Have you ever heard this before?
We also discussed why early Mormons chose to be sealed to general authorities like Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, and others, rather than their ancestors as we do today.
Baptism for the dead opened that door, to actually begin to do ordinances for the dead. But could we be sealed to our ancestors like we do today? We take it so for granted. You’re just being sealed to your ancestors. Well if they’re not receiving the gospel, we don’t want to take the risk of being sealed to them because what’s going to happen to us if they don’t accept the gospel?
Until it became clear that the fullness of the gospel was being taught to them, the deceased, and that they were receiving the fullness of the ordinances, better be on the safe side and be sealed to a living prophet or a deceased prophet maybe like Joseph Smith and we’ll be sealed. Until we know more clearly what’s going to happen, let’s be sealed to the prophetic priesthood lineage of the prophet Joseph priesthood claim and therefore it’s a done deal. Can I use that term? It’s a safer way than, we don’t know what’s happening to our ancestors. That’s going to change as we learn better and more clearly, especially in 1877 with Wilford Woodruff when he announces that from now on, we’re going to do endowments for the dead. We don’t begin to do endowments for the dead until 1877. That’s 40 years after Nauvoo, 30 years after Nauvoo.
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I don’t think you can talk about the Law of Adoption without understanding the development of the doctrine of the Spirit World and the doctrine of the gospel being taught in the Spirit World, which really doesn’t come to fruition in our doctrine and our history until Joseph F. Smith’s great revelation in 1918 and what was going on in the spirit world. It’s a progressive doctrine about the souls of men and women that are living in the spirit world.
Were you aware that this is why church members were sealed to prophets and other general authorities? What are your thoughts on these changes in temple ordinances?
Wheat & Tares 
I actually was aware of that, and it’s interesting history. Joseph was acutely aware of the social trends around him, and he tended to ponder, so it’s probable that the practices of spiritualism got he and his successors thinking. His nephew’s later vision rounded things out.
It seems obvious that the LDS temple endowment has evolved, and by quite a bit more than the changes we observed in 1990, with the shortening of the ceremony and elimination of certain covenants, or the more recent revisions of the films into the excruciatingly slow and painfully over-acted versions we now have. Without going into too much detail, there are accounts that make this clear. In addition, it seems clear that Brigham Young actually did believe, at least for part of his adult life as President of the Church, that Adam was in fact God the Father. (He and Orson Pratt, bless his stubborn heart, disagreed vehemently about it.) It is difficult to see how he could make that error had the endowment been in anything like its current form.
It is an interesting example, in my book, of the way in which our understanding of things divine, even with the assistance of living prophets, evolve and become more clear over time. Since we live in an age where, in the LDS Church, we seem to be enamored of the view that we know everything and every word from the prophet’s mouth is a pearl of wisdom from God, it would behoove us to study our history a little more closely.
Most people my generation raised in the church were aware of the many major changes in the temple ceremony several times, including for one example, the elimination of the oath of vengeance probably around 1930. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_vengeance
(The wiki article is a bit of a whitewash because it seems to imply that God would do the vengeance but the way it was understood was that we were to do the vengeance in the name of God upon the government.)
I recall vaguely many folk tales as a youth growing up in a rural Utah town with many relatives born before 1900 that could be classified as involving spiritualism, or efforts to communicate with the dead. I would be surprised if old collections of Mormon folklore didn’t document many such stories and that this was widespread, believed to be true and even normative of that generation. A part of our history has been scrubbed away by the correlation movement.
The ward where I grew up in the 1960’s seemed to experience an aberrant resurgence of this tendency. A perfect storm of large families (average sibling set of over 6 with over 200 YM/YW in the ward), encroaching modern lax child disciplinary practices, busy clueless parents, bored youth,a fascination with cemeteries, rampant sexual activity and experimentation with various substances including a sprinkling of pot, LSD, mushrooms, etc. all combined to result in a number of paranormal experiences of which I was aware, among other things.
I will never forget one bizarre testimony at our summer youth conference held at BYU where this mostly inactive guy with long hair testified that he and his friends got stoned, were visited by a witch named Hecate who led them to the cemetery where he claimed they exhumed the body of a young girl whom we all knew had died from an overdose. Her coffin was empty except that her clothing was folded neatly in the corner. This was offered as a witness of the reality of the resurrection. He skipped the part about the enslavement of her spirit by the witch, which he shared with us later around a campfire.
I am not relating this story for the purpose of discussing its historical or doctrinal accuracy, although more than a few of us believed it at the time. But only offer it as an example of an account from a more recent generation that fits the previous widespread pattern of esoteric spiritualism of the past. Mormon pioneers and their descendants are anything but boring.
My great-grandmother, sister to John Taylor,had four failed marriages. Her daughter, Mary Taylor Schwartz, married President Joseph F. Smith and during my great-grandmother’s later years, she was sealed to Joseph Smith. This sealing was ratified by President Howard W. Hunter. There are over 500 women sealed to Joseph Smith, many seal after he died.
I failed to mention that the sealing was encouraged and overseen by President Joseph F. Smith.
I wish someone would donate a multichannel and an equalizer to you.
But I wish you well on your project.
Steve, sorry for the tough audio. I only had 1 microphone that day (and my camera microphone.) I did the best I could to enhance the audio, but I think my next interview with Dr. Darron Smith will be better. I have also ordered a new microphone. But if someone wants to donate, I will definitely put it to good use!
Also, is there anyone or any topic you would like me to address? (Smith will be addressing modern-day racism in and outside the church.)
I’m not Mormon, but I’m curious about this belief of “sealing” families together. The whole human race is connected, and at the very least, we are all very distant “cousins” to each other. The further we go back in our family trees, the more they cross and intersect on many lines; we all share some common direct ancestors (even if many aren’t documented). I have read that this is especially true for people of European descent, e.g. If we go back 500 years, we all have about a million grandparents from then (sometimes the same set appears on more than one lineage), and there are many ways that our lineages mingle & cross paths. So, it seems to me that if Mormons keep on sealing people together, wouldn’t it eventually end up that everyone would be sealed together as one large family?
Correction: I meant that if we go back 500 generations, not years.
Yes, Tessa, that is certainly the goal–to seal all families together.
Of course Mormons believe in the concept of free-agency. God won’t force anyone to be baptized or sealed against their will. Even if Mormons baptize or seal the whole world together, there’s no reason to believe that the person will accept it. Some will accept, some won’t. We won’t know until after the final judgment.
Thanks for visiting and commenting!
Tessa says, The whole human race is connected, and at the very least, we are all very distant “cousins” to each other.
Yup. Although in conversation and testimony we tend to emphasize the beauty of being able to live with our loved ones again, in reality, we are sealing together the entire family of God. (This is “the gospel according to Ike,” although I think it’s a logical extension. Kristine A has also riffed on this a bit in the past.) After all, my children, to whom I am sealed, will themselves grow up and be sealed to their spouses, and have children born in the sealing covenant, etc. I don’t expect them to spend eternity as kids in my household. (Been there, done that. Two of mine are already married.) So, in effect, all of us will be one family; you are correct.
There is a family in our ward to whom we are sealed. 🙂 I used them as an object lesson to illustrate this at one point. Mark, the husband, and Tracy, his wife, are sealed; his sister Deb is sealed to my wife’s 2d cousin Jon; the cousin is sealed to her parents and grandparents; that line of sealing extends down the extended family to my in-laws (Jon’s mother is my father-in-law’s first cousin). Draw all the lines and my kids are sealed to his kids, their friends in years of Primary and YM/YW activities. Pretty cool, when you think about it.
Seems to me that Richard Bushman talked about the spiritualism aspect, although only briefly. It’s certainly consistent with JS’s other innovations being influenced by other spiritual movements.
One dimension of the Godbeite movement was spiritualism. Here’s a link to the Utah Education Network. http://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/g/GODBEITES.html. To quote in part “Spiritualism was almost a perfect solution for the Godbeite doubters. Its parallels with Mormonism eased the pain involved in their transfer of commitment. Both movements affirmed the eternal nature of the individual and taught the validity of spiritual experience.”
Tessa:
Correction not needed.
Average generation of 25 years. Go back 10 generations, 250 years. You will have two to the tenth power or 1024 ancestors. Go back 10 more generations, 500 years (round 1024 down to 1000) and you will have 1000 x 1000 or over 1 million ancestors. Another 250 year iteration gives you 1 billion ancestors and yet another 250 year iteration gives you 1 trillion ancestors. That would only be back about 40 generations to 1000 AD. When the Vikings were raiding.
Shared ancestors greatly reduces these numbers. But take a country like England. All people living there 1000 year ago fall into two categories, those with living descendants and those without. And if you have any ancestors from England you are descended from all of those living 1000 years ago in the first category. For families like mine with generations of genealogy zealots, we tie back to the British royal families (so does every other family with English ancestery) and also in the same way to the Scandinavian royal families and thence from them to the Norse Gods. The British royal family is tied legitimately to Charlemagne and from there medieval folk genealogies go back as far as Joseph and Mary in the New Testament. Biblical genealogies carry it on back to Adam.
One of the less-popular and not-required boy scout merit badges, the genealogy merit badge has a requirement to trace your lineage as far back as you can (easily). So my son shows up to his non-LDS merit badge counselor with his lineage of about 300 generations that extends back to Adam. The counselor was aghast, he was accustomed to something more like our 4 generation sheet.
500 generations would be something like 12,500 years ago or at the dawn of the agricultural revolution when the stone-age started to end.
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Other Thoughts on Human Connectedness
Human population bottle neck theories have been proposed but are controversial. The Toba catastrophy of about 70,000 years ago is thought to have reduced the human population to under 10,000 and possibly under 1000 in some models, with near extinction. All of us would have the same set of common ancestors from them if this theory is correct. Many other hominoid species did go extinct at various times, including our closest cousins the Neaderthals.
The change from Australopithecas to Homo erectus about 2 million years is thought by some to be the result of a severe genetic bottle neck, with mass extinctions of several related hominoid species. This was the crucial change from creatures that looked like small humans from the neck down but had heads more like apes than humans, to a creature that would probably not be considered too unusual if placed in a suit and tie on a New York subway (or a Mormon mission for some wags). Homo erectus has the record for greatest longevity of hominoid species so far, almost 2 million years. They left our African homeland for the first time to reach most continents, created many useful tools and mastered fire. They might have had primitive religions, languages or possibly music.They treated their women at all times with dignity, equality and respect, maybe not.