Mercury wrote:mentalgymnast wrote:Mercury wrote:Who do you think "told" him where the buried treasure was? Demons, that's who.
Depends on who you read.
Regards,
MG
In reading the literature howto's on treasure digging available at the time Demons "defended" treasure. It was the job of the demon to bring the treasure down into the earth when people like joe came digging. Magic circles, salt spread on the ground etc. Demons watched over the buried treasure in that worldview.
That's rather simplistic. A good place to start in trying to understand Joseph Smith's world view would be a comment that Parley P. Pratt made. In an 1853 sermon, LDS elder Parley P. Pratt stated that Mormonism is founded on a previous infrastructure involving the practice of necromancy, and that the spiritualist movement of the Nineteenth Century, which had begun only five years earlier, actually aided the cause of the LDS church:
Who communicated with our great Prophet, and revealed through him as a medium, the ancient history of a hemisphere, and the records of the ancient dead? Moroni, who had lived upon the earth 1400 years before....
Who revealed to him the plan of redemption, and of exaltation for the dead who had died without the Gospel and the keys and preparations necessary for holy and perpetual converse with Jesus Christ, and with the spirits of just men made perfect?... Those from the dead!...
Shall we, then, deny the principle, the philosophy, the fact of communication between worlds? No! verily no!
Editors, statesmen, philosophers, priests, and lawyers, as well as the common people, began to advocate the principle of converse with the dead, by visions, divination, clairvoyance, knocking, and writing mediums, etc., etc. This spiritual philosophy of converse with the dead, once established by the labors, toils, sufferings, and martyrdom of its modern founders, and now embraced by a large portion of the learned world, show a triumph more rapid and complete — a victory more extensive, than has ever been achieved in the same length of time in our world.
An important point is gained, a victory won, and a countless host of opposing powers vanquished, on one of the leading or fundamental truths of "Mormon" philosophy, viz. — "that the living may hear from the dead."
The Smith's believed that the living could hear from the dead. Important, no?
There's much that could be debated, and has been, on the world view that the Smith family and others at the time took as being reality. A topic for another thread maybe? This thread keeps going off kilter and no one seems to actually have anything much to say except talking about obese women.
The point that I attempted to make to Mrs. Chalmers' prize pupil is that I'd just as well stick with the fruits of Mormonism than the fruits of his spiritual wanderings. But that's me. To each his/her own.
Regards,
MG