Mystery seeking is an essential part of Mormonism’s founding narratives. Part 2 of a three-part series beginning with What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory?

Speculating about the afterlife is integral to who we are as Latter-day Saints. The Church’s proselytizing program puts questions about “our Heavenly Father’s plan” in the center of its curriculum. In part 1 of this short series, I introduced Visions of Glory—a book whose protagonist, “Spencer”, depicts elaborate visions about the spirit world and the end-of-times, and is suspected to have inspired recent Mormon ne’er-do-wells.

The head-scratcher is that Spencer appears to have been heeding what he believed Church leaders were teaching—and the project got away from him.

Simply denouncing the book, however, preempts the opportunity to understand how it came to exist in the first place. In 1830, Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon introduced his followers to the first extra-biblical peek into the afterlife: .

.. there is a space between death and the resurrection of the body, and a state of the soul in happiness or in misery until the time is appointed of God… The soul shall be restored to the body, and the body to the soul… Alma 40: 21, 23.

Two years later, Joseph gave the Saints the following revelation:

I, the Lord, am merciful and gracious unto those who fear me… And to them will I reveal all mysteries, yea, all the hidden mysteries of my kingdom… Yea, even the wonders of eternity shall they know, and things to come will I show them, even the things of many generations. D&C 76: 5, 7-8

Joseph pursued these mysteries vigorously throughout his life and encouraged his followers to do likewise.

In 1844, Parley Pratt wrote and presented a short story called The Angel of the Prairies to the secretive Council of Fifty. Pratt’s story is fiction but cast in the mold of a florid vision. It tells of a young New Englander exploring the West beyond the Mississippi river. An angel appears and invites him to see the future of the frontier. Together the young man and the angel fly across the prairies; he is given a “glass” through which he’s able to see “the entire country from sea to sea”, and is shown a panoramic picture of history.

By this point, the Saints had endured a decade of religious persecution, and Joseph’s “general council” was investigating options for moving the Church outside the borders of the United States. Thus Pratt’s story reads like an early Mormon dream-come-true: his explorer watches as the “seat of empire”—the focal point of global influence—moves from ancient Egypt to Rome, then to Europe, then to the United States, and finally, rests in the West with the Saints:

I beheld an immense city, extending on all sides and thronged with myriad’s of people, apparently of all nations. In the midst of this city stood a magnificent temple, which in magnitude and splendor, exceeded everything of the kind before known upon the earth. … ‘This,’ said the Angel of the Prairies, ‘is the sanctuary of freedom, the palace of the great King, and the center of the universal government.’

Prairies is run through with Book of Mormon and Nauvoo allusions: mists of darkness, Native Americans elevated to glory, secret passwords, and a “Grand Presiding Council” holding the “keys of power to bear rule”.

One year later, Joseph’s scribe William Phelps introduced a similar work, curiously named Paracletes. Translated as “Advocate” or “Comforter”, the word “parákl?tos” is Greek and appears in the New Testament. Phelps’ story is short and ambitious—it depicts the Mormon “plan of salvation” as played out on one of the universe’s many worlds: Idumea. According to  Samuel Brown:

Essentially all of the critical [Mormon] beliefs are present in the story: a plurality of anthropomorphic Gods led by one called the ‘head’ of the Gods, divinized humans, the equivalence of angels and humans, an interconnected Chain of Being comprising planets, epochs, and godly beings without beginning or end, and a supernatural Adam who took stewardship for earth’s creation and its inhabitants in collaboration with other Gods.

As Brown suggests, the story’s title invokes a vision of a “multiplicity of kingdoms, or spheres for action”, where every individual is on a path to godhood.

So much of Mormon literature has continued to develop these themes: Added Upon, written by Nephi Anderson in 1898, was one of the earliest and most popular LDS fictions to depict our pre- and post-life existences. Anderson’s novel promotes a doctrine Mary Lightner claimed Joseph Smith taught her privately: “I was his before I came here. … I was created for him before the foundation of the Earth was laid.”[1] Joseph did not originate the notion of “spiritual affinities” or “kindred spirits”—concepts that inspired Added Upon, Saturday’s Warrior, My Turn on Earth, and many others—nor did he live long enough to formalize the doctrine in scripture.

Meanwhile, Church leaders have taught about the dangers of spiritual freestyling since the Church’s founding. In 1852, Brigham Young drove a wedge between those living the “simple, unadorned truth” and those who “desire to know a great deal of the mysteries”. He advised those straying from the “body” of the Church to “let mysteries alone”.

Ironically, in the same speech, President Young introduced the now infamous and confusing Adam-God theology: “One thing has remained a mystery in this kingdom up to this day… [Adam] is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.”

I understand standard Mormon objections: President Young has the right to talk about whatever he wants; Paracletes is just a story. But as Abinadi Pratt of the Deseret News said about Parley Pratt’s Angels:

The thrilling and interesting narrative contained in this little book, though setting up no claim to being an authentic or infallible prophecy, yet probably contains as much condensed truth and as little fiction as any work in any age…

So long as we continue to use personal revelation to understand our place in God’s plan, our Mormon doctrines—top-down and formally constituted—will remain in tension with bottom-up speculation and charismatic spiritual experiences.

(Part 3 will weigh spiritual risks and rewards and directly address the subject of revelatory guardrails.)

1. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 212