Uncle Dale wrote:The Book of Mormon's liahona was derived from several different sources -- by a writer who understood that in Lehi's day and age, there were no magnetic mariners' compasses. But the liahona is more than just a mechanical direction-finder.
It is delivered to the sleeping Lehites in their camp, and is thus discovered as a miraculous divine gift -- to be shared by a wandering party of migrants, which has already broken into two opposing factions.
This scenario appears in Clavigerio's re-telling of the Aztec wanderings from Aztlan to the promised land in the Valley of Mexico. Montezuma supposedly related this episode to Cortez. The Aztec wanderers do not receive a liahona, but the story is so similar to the Book of Mormon narrative that at least one LDS apologist has tried to argue that the Aztecs preserved a distorted tradition of the divine gift of the liahona.
The murder of Laban certainly has parallels with the Enoch lore in Masonry, but it also shares parallels with stories in the Old Testament and its apocrypha. Whoever scripted the Laban murder, he was familiar with both Masonry and a wide range of biblical/classical lore.
Teancum's sneaking into the camp of the sleeping Lamanite enemy at night, to commit an assassination, shares story elements with Homer's epic and the with biblical King David narrative. But is is more clearly based upon an episode in one of the "Poems of Ossian," by James Macpherson. Since Ossian was fabricated ancient history, the Book of Mormon writer may have been implanting a subtle clue, as to the fictional nature of Teancum's stratagem. Solomon Spalding also copied his parallel fictional account from Macpherson. The Teancum episode probably also overlaps some arcane Masonic lore -- but I've not looked into that.
We see, from what I quoted from 1723 -- that the basic story of Enoch's hidden text, was already a part of the Masonic tradition, well before Royal Arch Masonry was concocted. So, a writer like Solomon Spalding (who stole from the Masonic lore for his own fictional discover of a hidden ancient text, in an underground repository) need not have known all the Royal Arch material regarding Enoch.
That legend was greatly elaborated and Christianized by the Royal Arch promoters -- but -- I think Spalding and the Book of Mormon writer(s) knew the later Enoch lore.
UD
Enoch and the Enochian language of angels were also a specialty of Doctor John Dee and Edward Kelley. I think Joseph Smith's fascination with Enoch was probably a major inspiration for his growing theology. The liahona has some resemblance to a scrying stone, which Dee was known to use. Joseph Smith's treasure-seeking scrying has never been fully explored in its sources and implications.