Smith’s ‘seer stone’
Church offers new revelations about Mormonism’s past
At a news conference in Salt Lake City on 4 August, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormons) publicised the handwritten “printer’s manuscript” of the Book of Mormon and photos of the “seer stone”, a dark brown, egg-size polished rock that church founder Joseph Smith (1805-44) claimed to have used to produce the faith’s sacred scripture. Both items are included in the just-released Revelations and Translations: Volume 3, the 11th publication in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, as part of an effort to be “more transparent” about Mormonism’s past. The photographs show different views of the dark brown stone with lighter brown swirls. They also show a weathered leather pouch where the stone was stored, believed to have been made by Emma, one of Joseph Smith’s wives.
Smith said that on 22 September 1823 the Angel Moroni showed him the burial place of a set of gold plates on a hill in present-day Wayne County, New York State. Exactly four years later, he was allowed to take the plates and was directed to translate them into English. They recorded the history of ancient American civilisations (2200 BC to AD 421) and Christ’s visit to the American continent shortly after His resurrection. The Mormon prophet said he was able to “translate” the “reformed Egyptian” language, using spiritual tools, including his “seer stone”. He
dictated the narrative to various scribes, including schoolteacher Oliver Cowdery, who took down the LDS leader’s words in longhand. Cowdery then painstakingly copied the original manuscript for the printer to set in type.
The Book of Mormon was published in March 1830. More than 70 per cent of that original document has suffered water damage; the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City has most of what’s left. The “printer’s copy”, however, remained with Smith’s followers who stayed in the Midwest rather than trekking to Utah, and, in 1903, it was purchased by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), now called the Community of Christ, with headquarters in Independence, Missouri. Through the years, tensions simmered between those two wings of Mormonism, but during the past couple of decades historians have built scholarly bridges between the Community of Christ and the much larger, Utah-based Church.
In a recent essay, the LDS Church explained how Smith, according to some accounts, used the seer stone. He peered into a hat to block out exterior light, and “read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument.” The essay states: “As a young man during the 1820s, Joseph Smith, like others in his day, used a seer stone to look for lost objects and buried treasure. As Joseph grew to understand his prophetic calling, he learned that he could use this stone for the higher purpose of translating scripture.” Smith also used two bound stones – known as the Urim and Thummim – as “interpreters”. “Some accounts indicate that Joseph studied the characters on the plates,” the essay added. “Most of the accounts speak of Joseph’s use of the Urim and Thummim (either the interpreters or the seer stone).” When Smith had finished, he returned the gold plates to Moroni. The church’s official magazine, The Ensign, had an article about the seer stone in 1974, but hardly anyone had seen an actual photo of it until now. [AP] Salt Lake Tribune, 4 Aug; Guardian, 5 Aug 2015.