From the Narrow Desert: Moroni

Showing posts with label Moroni. Show all posts

Monday, July 15, 2024

Visions "open" and "close"; mental images and real experiences don't

Continuing from my last post, "Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life":

In Joseph Smith's account of the visit of Moroni, I think we can see a distinction between the visitation of the angel, which was an actual experience, and a vision which occurred during that visitation. Here is how the arrival of Moroni is described:

While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor (JS—H v. 30).

There is pretty clearly described as something taking place in Smith's actual room; and the initial change, from a dark room to one "lighter than at noonday," is a progressive one with no discontinuities indicating a transition to a dreaming or visionary state. The sudden appearance of the personage is a discontinuity, I suppose, but on the whole I would say the text suggests that the angel (or perhaps a projection or recording of the angel) was actually present in the bedroom, and that this was not a vision.

As the angel tells Smith about the Golden Plates, though, he does experience a vision, beginning with the characteristic "opening" sensation:

While he was conversing with me about the plates, the vision was opened to my mind that I could see the place where the plates were deposited, and that so clearly and distinctly that I knew the place again when I visited it (v. 42).

This is clearly a vision; Smith is still physically in his bedroom, not at the hill where the plates are deposited.

After this vision, the angelic visitation ends. It does not "close" or dissolve like a vision; rather, the scene changes by continuous steps back to an ordinary condition:

After this communication, I saw the light in the room begin to gather immediately around the person of him who had been speaking to me, and it continued to do so until the room was again left dark, except just around him; when, instantly I saw, as it were, a conduit open right up into heaven, and he ascended till he entirely disappeared, and the room was left as it had been before this heavenly light had made its appearance (p. 43).

From now on, I'm going to be paying close attention to such distinctions in the reported experiences of Joseph Smith.

Sunday, July 31, 2022

NPH 421 and spontaneous human combustion

On July 28, 2022, I was stopped at a red light when I noticed the text on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me. It was written in the style of an eye chart, and it said: "Stay with me boy. See the world through the eyes of Mickey. Don't stop looking." I assume this was some sort of mutant Disney knockoff, but in the current synchronistic context I figured "Mickey" (a nickname for Michael) was more likely to be a hawk-eyed archangel than a mouse. Anyway, I took it as an injunction to keep my eyes and mind open.

At the next light, my eyes were drawn as if by magnetism to a license plate that read NPH 421. That means Nephi, of course, an important name in the Book of Mormon, so my first thought was that the numbers were giving chapter and verse. There are four books of Nephi, and none of them has 42 chapters, so I looked up 4:21 in each of the first three books of Nephi. Fourth Nephi is very short and isn't divided into chapters, so I checked 4 Ne. 21. Of the four verses I checked, only one of them struck me as in any way noteworthy:

He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh (2 Ne. 4:21).

I thought that was an odd turn of phrase. In the Bible, the "consuming of flesh" is always associated with burnt offerings, destruction by fire, and horrible plagues. The verse from Nephi made me think of Paul's equally strange statement that "though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. 13:3). Paul's other examples of things that are worthless without charity include prophesying, having great faith, feeding the poor, and the like; how did "giving my body to be burned" make it onto that list of good works? How is that even a good work at all? I thought it might be a reference to submitting to fiery martyrdom of the type pioneered by Nero and taken up centuries later by the Inquisition, but 1 Corinthians was written before Nero's accession to the throne, and I don't think "being burned" would have been an understandable reference to martyrdom at that time.

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Then I had the thought that 421 was a year, not a scripture reference. AD 421 is, after all, the very last date in the Book of Mormon chronology, the year in which Moroni, the last surviving Nephite (NPH), finished the book -- an abridgment of the Plates of Nephi, with additions by Mormon and Moroni -- and buried it in the earth.

Then I remembered that in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream" had prominently featured Moroni (both the Nephite and the city in the Comoros) and even mentioned that the "golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah."

In the opening paragraph of that post, I had written that "when I think Moby-Dick, I think 'The Whiteness of the Whale' and I think 'Loomings.'" Then at the end of the post, I noted seeing the number 142 and feeling it was significant, not knowing why until eventually I "realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph."

But I had actually begun the post by mentioning first "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42) and then "Loomings" (Chapter 1) -- not 142, but 421. Then in the same post I had gone on to mention, for reasons entirely unrelated to Moby-Dick, Moroni's burying the golden plates -- which is supposed to have occurred in AD 421. Not until now, a year later, did I make the connection.

Moroni, the last survivor of his people, passed on their history to future generations. This is precisely the role played in Moby-Dick by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. The epilogue begins with an epigram from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

One of the comments on my "In the sync stream" post began: "Interesting. The license plate post was also good."

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So satisfying was that interpretation of NPH 421 -- the last Nephite in the year 421 -- that I dismissed my earlier attempts at chapter-and-verse interpretations as barking up the wrong tree. Then I noticed my July 30 post "And then the message said, 'End of message," which ends with what I admit is a completely unrelated reference to spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion -- doesn't that very obviously sync with "He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh" (2 Ne. 4:21)? Also it's a little known fact that the name Nephi is not original to the Book of Mormon but appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible -- as the name not of a person but of a flammable liquid (2 Macc. 1:36). Nephi is the King James rendering; most modern translations have naphtha.

Why does my July 30 post have the title it has? I was posting about how I had just finished reading a book called The Messengers, so "end of message" seemed appropriate. The precise wording, though, is from one of Joe Biden's teleprompter gaffes.

In my December 2020 post "American politician spontaneously combusts!" I describe my absurd but persistent premonition about the spontaneous combustion of Joe Biden (without mentioning Biden by name). Later, in September 2021, I had a dream in which reference was repeatedly made to "Joe Biden, the Human Torch"; days later, Biden suddenly acquired the nickname Brandon, which is French for "firebrand."

My 2020 post quoted an excerpt from Unsong in which George W. Bush bursts into flames after someone hacks his teleprompter and makes him utter a magic word that has that effect. One of the comments to that post said:

After reading the George Bush excerpt, I think 'spontaneous human combustion' might be a metaphor for a politician 'melting down' during a public appearance. Justly or unjustly, Biden is particularly singled out among politicians as someone who relies on a teleprompter to keep on track.

Then, yesterday, without consciously making the connection at all, I published a post with a Biden teleprompter gaffe as a title, and although it is primarily a post about Mike Clelland's book on owls, I included a reference to Unsong and then one to spontaneous human combustion.

Sunday, July 18, 2021

In the sync stream

Composing an email to a family member in America, I mentioned my persistent premonition that Something Big is about to happen and said that I could best sum it up by pinching a chapter title from Herman Melville: “Loomings.” Then I thought to myself that when I think Moby-Dick, I think “The Whiteness of the Whale” and I think “Loomings” — that those two chapter titles are among the novel’s most memorable features.

(While I was catching up on email, my wife was shopping online for fitted sheets. She kept forgetting, and asking me, the dimensions of our beds. “Our bed is six by seven, the guest bed is five by six,” I kept saying.)

I mentioned in my email that the government kept extending the birdemic restrictions by two weeks and two more weeks and two more weeks. This made me think of a line from Macbeth, and, abandoning the half-written email, I started link-surfing Wikipedia instead. I went from “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” to “Soliloquy” to “To be or not to be” to “Cultural references to Hamlet” to “Roderick Alleyn” to “Gentleman detective” to “Gentleman thief” to “Carmen Sandiego.” (I probably could have skipped a few of those steps, since apparently there was a movie called Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal released last year.) The illustration accompanying this last article didn’t match my memory, so I ran an image search on carmen sandiego 1985, and that brought up a DOS game screenshot featuring the city of Moroni, Comoros.

Perfume, made from -- perfume plants!

Wondering what the building in the picture was, I searched for moroni comoros building. Apparently there’s only one building of note there, since every result was the Grand Mosque du Vendredi.

I thought it looked a bit like the Nauvoo Temple — which, it so happens, was the first Mormon temple to be topped with the figure of the angel Moroni.

I thought of how the angel Moroni was occupying the place that would traditionally be given to the cross, which made me think of the Coleridge line “instead of the cross, the albatross.” And this brought me back to Melville: Ishmael’s recollection of the first albatross he ever saw, which he repeatedly likens to an angelic being. “Its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark” — “flew to join the wing-folding, the evoking, the adoring cherubim” — “as Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.” This last is an allusion to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Joseph Smith's golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah, and various attempts have been made to connect these names with Moroni in the Comoros -- proposing either than Smith pinched the names from a world map (which in his day often called the country Camorah) or from the memoirs of Captain Cook, or that the Comoros were settled by Austronesian Nephites who brought the names with them. I have long wanted to write something about homosexuality and Mormonism, to be titled "Sodom and Cumorah," but so far I have nothing interesting to say on that subject and so, like the essay on Lehi's dream to be spooneristically titled "Rods and Mockers," it remains unwritten.

Looking up Ishmael's rhapsody on the albatross to make sure I had quoted it correctly (I had), I found that it comes from "The Whiteness of the Whale" -- Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick. That number seemed significant, and it took me a second to remember why.

Earlier in the day, before attempting to write an email while repeating bed measurements, I had taught on online English class. The text we were discussing included this sentence: "According to psychologists, children have to repeat certain tasks, like multiplication or division, over and over again until they can do them automatically." In the course of explaining it, I said, "So now if I say 'six times seven' you immediately think '42.' If I say 'seven times eight,' you don't even have to think; you immediately know it's 56." I realized that these two equations I had randomly chosen as examples mapped to the dimensions of the two beds: 42 is literally "six by seven," and 56 is in a different sense a five "by" (adjacent to) a six.

(Bed dimensions are also a link to the Cities of the Plain. If I remember correctly, an aggadah compiled in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews takes the story more normally associated with the name of Procrustes and relocates it to Sodom, saying that it was the men of Sodom who had the custom of placing strangers on a bed and making them fit it by either stretching or amputating their legs.)

Someone sent me a link to a page (in Chinese) about a local temple I might be interested in visiting. As I idly scrolled through photos of the place, I started thinking about a different Chinese temple we had visited a year or so ago. Outside the temple was a paved area in the shape of a large circle divided radially into what I at first took to be 56 segments, each labeled with I Ching terms. I found this to be interesting because of the potential Tarot connection, and I actually walked around the circumference of the thing counting the segments as I went: yes, 56. I found this puzzling -- shouldn't it be 64 for the 64 hexagrams? -- and tried to work out the system behind the labels. Finally, I ended up circumnavigating it again, more slowly, and counting all the segments once more, and this time I did indeed get 64. Apparently both my gestalt impression that it "looked like 56" and my initial miscount had simply been errors.

As I kept scrolling though temple photos, I found that one of them -- included without explanation and for no obvious reason -- was a photo of the number 560 chalked onto a stone surface.

Just before I posted this, my wife was watching Thor: Ragnarok on television, and the number 142 popped up a few times in obvious look-an-Easter-egg fashion. I didn't bother to look up what it might mean to the guys who made the movie, but I thought, "142 -- doesn't that mean something to me?" I couldn't put my finger on it, though, until I returned to this unfinished post and realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph.

Why Moby-Dick should be on my mind is anyone's guess. I've only read the book once, and that was back in 2006. It made a big impression at the time, but I've sort of been afraid to reread it.

Friday, February 12, 2021

Moroni: trump, sword, banner

An angel blowing a trumpet is a universally recognized symbol of Mormonism, appearing atop the spires of most Mormon temples.

Mormons believe that angels are men -- that "there are no angels who minister to this earth but those who do belong or have belonged to it" (D&C 130:5) -- and this angel represents Moroni. Moroni was the son of Mormon, author of the original Book of Mormon, and added some writings of his own to that book after his father's death. Later, as a resurrected angel, he appeared to Joseph Smith, beginning the process that led to the English Book of Mormon we have today.

(This is described in Extracts from the History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet. If you are ignorant of this document, you are ignorant. Go read it right now. It's less than 8,000 words. Why are you reading this sentence? I said right now.)

Why the trumpet? The "old spirit" who appeared to Joseph Smith had no such instrument. I have been told it's an allusion to Revelation 14:6 -- "And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" -- but that angel is not described as having a trumpet, either. Many of the angels in Revelation do have trumpets, though, so perhaps this one ended up being depicted with one by association. Anyway, whatever the reason, the trumpet is now an essential item in the Angel Moroni's accoutrements.

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On January 26, "G" of the Junior Ganymede blog wrote that his wife had "dreamed the Church announced it was taking down all the angel Moronis on the temples to replace the trumpet with a sword."

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Moroni was the son of Mormon. Mormon was named for the Waters of Mormon, where, centuries before his time, 204 converts had been baptized by a fugitive priest who preached in the wilderness to escape the vengeful eye of the wicked king he had once served. As Mormon himself wrote when recounting the story,

And now it came to pass that all this was done in Mormon, yea, by the waters of Mormon, in the forest that was near the waters of Mormon; yea, the place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer; yea, and how blessed are they, for they shall sing to his praise forever. And these things were done in the borders of the land, that they might not come to the knowledge of the king (Mosiah 18:30-31).

So the name Mormon would have had connotations similar to those of Jordan. Alas that there is no longer any Mormon Church to carry on the legacy of that name!

Mormon named his son Moroni, after the great Nephite military hero Captain Moroni, of whom Mormon had written,

And Moroni was a strong and a mighty man; he was a man of a perfect understanding; yea, a man that did not delight in bloodshed; a man whose soul did joy in the liberty and the freedom of his country, and his brethren from bondage and slavery;

Yea, a man whose heart did swell with thanksgiving to his God, for the many privileges and blessings which he bestowed upon his people; a man who did labor exceedingly for the welfare and safety of his people.

Yea, and he was a man who was firm in the faith of Christ, and he had sworn with an oath to defend his people, his rights, and his country, and his religion, even to the loss of his blood.

. . . and this was the faith of Moroni, and his heart did glory in it; not in the shedding of blood but in doing good, in preserving his people, yea, in keeping the commandments of God, yea, and resisting iniquity.

Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men (Alma 48:11-17).

Like Joan of Arc centuries later, Captain Moroni was known for his distinctive banner, called the Title of Liberty. This banner was flown in the war against Amalickiah, a pretender to the position of King of the Nephites, who would later swear an oath that he would drink Moroni's blood.

And now it came to pass that when Moroni, who was the chief commander of the armies of the Nephites, had heard of these dissensions, he was angry with Amalickiah.

And it came to pass that he rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children—and he fastened it upon the end of a pole.

And he fastened on his head-plate, and his breastplate, and his shields, and girded on his armor about his loins; and he took the pole, which had on the end thereof his rent coat, (and he called it the title of liberty) and he bowed himself to the earth, and he prayed mightily unto his God for the blessings of liberty to rest upon his brethren, so long as there should a band of Christians remain to possess the land . . .

And it came to pass that when he had poured out his soul to God, he named all the land which was south of the land Desolation, yea, and in fine, all the land, both on the north and on the south—A chosen land, and the land of liberty.

And he said: "Surely God shall not suffer that we, who are despised because we take upon us the name of Christ, shall be trodden down and destroyed, until we bring it upon us by our own transgressions."

And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent part of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had written upon the rent part, and crying with a loud voice, saying: "Behold, whosoever will maintain this title upon the land, let them come forth in the strength of the Lord, and enter into a covenant that they will maintain their rights, and their religion, that the Lord God may bless them."

And it came to pass that when Moroni had proclaimed these words, behold, the people came running together with their armor girded about their loins, rending their garments in token, or as a covenant, that they would not forsake the Lord their God; or, in other words, if they should transgress the commandments of God, or fall into transgression, and be ashamed to take upon them the name of Christ, the Lord should rend them even as they had rent their garments (Alma 46:11-21).

Moroni's banner was spotted, and filmed, at the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

My sister Kat Valentine, whose portrait of Joan of Arc has already appeared on this blog, also did one of Captain Moroni. When she first showed it to me, I thought he looked saintly but insufficiently martial. However, it's rather grown on me since then.