From the Narrow Desert

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation 

-- Sir Walter Raleigh, The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage

Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me

Hey, little boy, whatcha got there? 

Kind sir, it's a mollusk I've found.

Did you find it in the sandy ground? 

Does it emulate the ocean's sound? 

Yes, I found it on the ground 

Emulating the ocean's sound.

Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me.

Let's be forever, let forever be free.

Hey, little boy, come walk with me,

And bring your newfound mollusk along.

Does it speaketh of the Trinity?

Can it gaze at the Sun with its wandering eye?

Yes, it speaks of the Trinity,

Casting light at the Sun with its wandering eye.

Bring forth the mollusk, cast unto me.

Let's be forever, let forever be free.

You see, there are three things that spur the mollusk from the sand:

The waking of all creatures that live on the land.

And with just one faint glance back into the sea,

The mollusk lingers with its wandering eye.

Saint Augustine of Hippo spent over 30 years working on his treatise De Trinitate, endeavoring to conceive an intelligible explanation for the mystery of the Trinity.

He was walking by the seashore one day, contemplating and trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when he saw a small boy running back and forth from the water to a spot on the seashore. The boy was using a seashell to carry the water from the ocean and place it into a small hole in the sand.

The Bishop of Hippo approached him and asked, "Hey, little boy, whatcha got there?"

"I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole," the boy replied with a sweet smile.

"But that is impossible, my dear child. The hole cannot contain all that water," said Augustine.

The boy paused in his work, stood up, looked into the eyes of the Saint, and replied, "It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do -- comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence."

The Saint, taken aback by such a keen response from the child, turned his eyes from him for a short while. When he glanced down to ask him something else, the boy had vanished.

Every Mormon will be familiar with Tom Lovell's painting Mormon Abridging the Plates, which depicts the prophet Mormon compiling various Nephite records and creating the Book of Mormon.

The prophet sits at his desk, holding a stylus in his right hand and resting his other arm on the book of golden plates he is writing. In keeping with the then-current view that the Book of Mormon events took place in Mesoamerica, Mormon is shown sitting on a jaguar skin, with Aztec-like weaponry (a macuahuitl, a round shield, and a helmet with a crest of quetzal feathers) on the right side of the picture. Various plates and scrolls are shown on the shelves behind him -- plus a scroll on his lap, one on his desk, and -- curiously -- one under his right foot!

Since these are presumably meant to be the sacred records that are Mormon's source material, what can the artist have intended by showing the prophet stepping on one of them?

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What this painting most reminds me of is the 17th-century Saint Augustine of Philippe de Champaigne.

There are so many elements in common that I think this must have been a conscious homage on Lovell's part. The saint sits with a desk on the right side of the picture and holy records (the Bible) behind him on the left. He holds a quill in his right hand, rests his left arm on the book he is writing, and looks off to the left. He sits on a golden chair ornamented with a lion's head -- echoed by Lovell's jaguar skin -- and his chasuble is the same color as Mormon's kilt. His miter and crosier are in the background, echoed by Mormon's helmet and macuahuitl. While such symbolic elements as the flash of light labeled veritas and the flaming heart of Jesus would be out of place in Mormon art, Lovell does have a smoking lamp or censer in the place where Champaigne puts the flaming heart.

Augustine, like Mormon, is shown with a book under his right foot. This is helpfully labeled Pelagius -- a contemporary of Augustine's, denounced by him as a heretic -- and is accompanied by two other works labeled with the names of Pelagius's supporters Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum. The scroll labeled Caelestius is even in nearly the same position as the scroll Mormon is stepping on.

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In the Champaigne painting, the books underfoot make perfect sense: They represent Augustine stamping out heresy. Whose works, then, is Mormon trampling underfoot? Did Lovell simply copy this element from Champaigne without understanding what it meant, or is there some deeper meaning? (Or, keeping in mind the possibility of a Jungian slip, both?)

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Note added: I don't want to give the reader the false impression that I am so well-versed in the art of the French Counter-Reformation that I took one look at Mormon Abridging the Plates and immediately thought of Philippe de Champaigne's Saint Augustine. In fact, my training in art history is limited to a single class on Central Asian Art taken to fulfill a "diversity" requirement, and I couldn't pick Philippe de Champaigne out of a police lineup.  The similarity of the two paintings was brought to my attention by the synchronicity fairies in connection with my post Writing the Book of Thoth.

In that post, I mentioned that the Magician card painted by Bonifacio Bembo (in which the Magician appears to be writing or drawing on a golden table) made me think of Nephi and his successors writing on the golden plates. This made me look up the painting of Mormon (which I erroneously remembered as being by Arnold Friberg rather than Tom Lovell) and look at it carefully for the first time. I noticed the scroll under the prophet's foot but didn't know what to make of it.

In the same post, I mentioned that, 38 years before his more famous Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge, Oswald Wirth had written another Tarot book called Le Livre de Thot comprenant les 22 arcanes du Tarot. Trying (in vain) to find the text of Le Livre de Thot online, I ended up perusing an article (in French) by Jean-Pierre Garcia called "Oswald Wirth: Le maître à penser de Pierre Plantard," and a link from there (suggesting that Wirth's Hermit card alluded to a particular painting of St. Anthony) led me to Notre Dame de Marceille: Le tableau de Saint Antoine et son histoire, where I discovered the Champaigne painting.

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Second note added: Yesterday, apropos of nothing, I suddenly thought of the Richard S. Shaver story "The Tale of the Red Dwarf Who Writes With His Tail, by the Red Dwarf Himself" -- or, to be precise, the Fantastic Adventures cover art associated with that story. (I've never read the story itself, but the title and picture are rather memorable!) I searched for it online and ended up at a site called Pulp Covers.

After writing the present post, I got curious about who Tom Lovell was. He was not, as I had assumed, a Mormon, but was commissioned by the CJCLDS in the 1960s to paint several pictures. He was primarily a painter of pulp magazine covers, and it turns out that the Pulp Covers website has quite a number of his works.

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Yet another note added: If you do an image search for Mormon abridging the plates, the main picture that comes up, beside the Tom Lovell painting discussed in this post, is one by Jon McNaughton -- who, unlike, Lovell, is a Mormon.

In this painting, there is no scroll under Mormon's foot -- but, by one of those really weird coincidences, Jon McNaughton also does political paintings, including this one, called The Forgotten Man.

In case there was any doubt, the accompanying artist's statement makes it clear that the document being stepped on is "the U.S. Constitution beneath the foot of Barack Obama" -- the intended meaning of which is not exactly subtle.

Putting a document on the floor and stepping on it symbolizes contempt for that document. Philippe de Champaign knew it, and this other guy who painted a picture of Mormon abridging the plates knows it; Tom Lovell must have known it, too. So what does it mean? Taking into account that Lovell was not a Mormon, is it possible that the scroll represents the Bible, and that putting it under Mormon's foot was a passive-aggressive dig at the Mormon leaders who commissioned the painting?