Radio Free Mormon: Magic and the Book of Mormon (We Need Dan Vogel's Help!)

[_Shulem]

The HAT trick may very well have had a trick to it such as an opening on the side or top wherein a slit was made where it could flap open and then close back using a simple hidden clip. If there was a secret trap door in the hat it would provide all the light Smith would ever need, plus a means to remove script and replace it with fresh material to carry on with his story.

Bear in mind, the stone was merely a prop, a means to distract his scribes. The HAT was the trick and with a little ingenuity Smith could have loaded his hat with a previously written version of the Book of Mormon, subject to change and modifications according to his own pleasure.

[_Shulem]

I think there are more options. The evidence that Oliver arriving changes the pace of production is too compelling for me to accept he was being duped. Having listened to the podcast it seems like an interesting explanation for what others were observing when shown the game of translation. But once we reinsert the other evidence such as the witness testimonies and, again, how engaged and activated the enterprise became with Oliver's involvement suggests to me Oliver and the Whitmer family were participants rather than dupes. Using the magic example, they seem to all be in on the trick to explain all of the evidence. Harris was the mark.

That's certainly a possibility. Leave no stone unturned! We will unravel the mystery of Smith's magic trick. It could be that Smith fully utilized his hat trick with Harris being his stooge. Harris was the superstitious sort and was gullible enough to fall for Smith's con. The loss of the 114 pages of the Book of Lehi required a new game plan and that included Oliver. So, was Oliver a confederate, a total conman like Smith? Wow, that requires some further investigation.

We will get to the bottom of this. Hey, this is Mormon DISCUSSIONS -- the sty!

-- Hey, Daniel F Peterson, you're stoopid! You're a flunk.

[_Kishkumen]

In general it seems to me that one should be pretty agnostic about reconstructing tricks and illusions from the past. Taking any reconstructed trick too seriously may play into the Mormon apologists' hand by accepting the burden of demonstrating exactly how Smith could have faked everything. The point I see in theories like this translucent white hat trick is not to be sure that we've pinned down how Smith faked things, but just to show another one of the many ways the things could have been faked.

I appreciate the fact that RFM has focused on a strategy for examining the problem, instead of claiming that he has definitely solved the problem. Often in history one must rely on a model when one does not have all the evidence necessary to know, in precise details, exactly what happened. RFM's strategy for interpreting this material, in this instance, might be called "the magician model." The question is not whether he has definitively proven that Joseph Smith was a magician. The question is whether the model fits the evidence we have. If the model illuminates the extant evidence in ways that other explanations and models do not, then it is a useful model.

The apologists are always going to insist that we must go strictly by what Joseph Smith said and what the witnesses attest to. To limit ourselves to those statements, however, is to ignore all of the evidence and the possibility that what people at the time believe to be the case is not necessarily accurate. Any good historian will not just take the sources at face value. She or he will look at the motivations, rhetoric, and biases of the source. She or he will look at the larger context. Apologists insist on a very narrow treatment of the evidence because they are perpetuating the original narrative of the deception. As RFM points out, eyewitnesses to a magic trick can be some of the worst sources for what happened.

With that said, it would indeed be pretty suspicious if the hat with the seer stone should turn out to have been white. A white hat can work a bit like a one-way mirror or mirror sunglasses. From outside the material seems to be obviously opaque because you can't see into it at all, if the room is bright; but that's just because it reflects much more light from the bright outside than it allows through from the dark inside. If you sit with a light in a dark room and cover the light with a white hat, though, you see how brightly the light will glow through the hat. That much light will also come into the hat from outside . . .

All great stuff. Thanks for posting that!

I think if I myself were using a translucent hat to conceal the fact that I was consulting written notes, I would not try to read my whole story word-for-word from the notes. Instead I would only use jotted point-form notes to remind myself of the outline of my story, and make up the precise wording on the fly. The outline notes would allow me to reel off a tale that was long and complicated enough to be impressive for an improvised yarn, while the improvised wording would allow me to produce much more text than I could possibly read without it being obvious that I was reading from pages of text.

Indeed! As I noted above:

But it may have been a small manuscript bearing a shorthand outline. An outline, in other words, written in a code or symbolic mnemonic device. This could be where we get the "caractors." So Reformed Egyptian is nothing more or less than Smith's shorthand system used to write an outline of the content of the Book of Mormon. He can fill in the details from memory. This is why the end product reads so much like an oral composition. To a large extent it was, but the amazing structure was worked out in advance, and it was committed to paper in chunks to keep Smith on track.

[_Chap]

I would not try to read my whole story word-for-word from the notes. Instead I would only use jotted point-form notes to remind myself of the outline of my story, and make up the precise wording on the fly.

One of the features of the Book of Mormon text that has always suggested to me that Smith was, at least part of the time, dictating on the fly from at most a rough outline rather than reading a prepared text are the passages where 'in other words' occur, of which this is a typical example:

1 Nephi 19:

7 For the things which some men esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God of Israel do men trample under their feet; I say, trample under their feet but I would speak in other words—they set him at naught, and hearken not to the voice of his counsels.

Smith has got a bit carried away, and spoken of God being 'trample[d] under their feet' which (after having said it) he realises sounds bizarre. He can't say 'Oh sorry, scratch that, I got it wrong', because he wants his scribe, or at least the bystanders, to think he is dictating from a miraculous translation appearing in shining letters on a seer stone in the hat. So he quickly corrects it into something more appropriate with the 'in other words' link.

We may note that no similar phrase occurs anywhere in the KJV Old or New Testament - which were of course not dictated by someone pretending to read from a miraculous translation appearing on a stone in a hat.

[_Kishkumen]

Excellent example, Chap. That one really sticks out.

[_Physics Guy]

It may have been a small manuscript bearing a shorthand outline. An outline, in other words, written in a code or symbolic mnemonic device. This could be where we get the "caractors." So Reformed Egyptian is nothing more or less than Smith's shorthand system used to write an outline of the content of the Book of Mormon.

I overlooked that; thanks for the reminder. Heh. It would indeed be cute if Smith had used made-up glyphs as his mnemonics instead of notes in English. It would have been a wise move, because if anyone had happened to find English crib notes for the Book of Mormon in Smith's hat, it would have been hard to explain, but if they only found some alien characters then that might actually make Smith's story look better.

I'm not sure that I'd want to use such odd little glyphs for my notes, though. Maybe it would work, but maybe by the time I was peering around in the hat two hours later I'd forget exactly what I'd had in mind with that little squiggle. On the other hand Smith's official explanation of how he "translated" the Book of Abraham is precisely the kind of massively expanded text based on associations from a single glyph that one could have used very well to tell an improvised story from very compact notes.

There's a sense of appropriateness—am I hearing the ring of truth or just a snort from Smith's ghost?—in the possibility that Smith's later presentation of the Caractors, as well as his translation of the Book of Abraham, were both just ironical admissions of exactly what Smith had really been doing all along. Those really were the characters from which he translated the Book of Mormon! That really was how he made up whole stories by riffing off a few glyphs!

He wasn't a prophet instead of a con man—he was a prophet by being a con man! See, it makes sense, it's all true, even though it's all fake.

That's the sort of way I can imagine a con man starting to think, anyway, after he'd had enough success with his prophet gig that he'd begun to really like the role of prophet and want to keep playing it even when he wasn't on stage.

[_Stem]

The episode was very enjoyable. Just a couple of thoughts that came to me.

Joseph complained about his eyes being sore. I suppose if you are a scribe writing, breaks would come when the dictator needed breaks. Peering in a hat trying to see words, perhaps, sitting at the bottom would get tiring. It also gives Joseph good excuse to stop at the end of his notes, being able to pick up where he left off, or as they went out to throw rocks, as Martin once suggested, giving him a chance to switch out notes.

This does open up some more possibilities of what was going on. I think it is wise to be a little cautious about it explaining what really happened. And pieces do seem to fit nicely with the theory. With that said, it would be very hard for Joseph to pull this off without someone catching something. It makes you wonder about anyone else being in on it. IT also provides a good excuse to re-examine where the text came from. I don't know if I can swallow the Carmack points about Early Modern English, but bringing that in it's perhaps culled from a long lost text or maybe Spalding's lost manuscript. The options here get really difficult to uncover though. Joseph writing it seems most reasonable, but with so much effort to say he couldn't have possibly done it, it remains, I think, a pretty high wall to climb over.

Absolutely peer genius to point out the props and how they could very well be used as diversions. The Church has at least one of Joseph's magic stones to this day, but that hat, likely disappeared just after the last words of the Book of Mormon were dictated. There's exactly zero chance we'll ever see someone examine it.

[_Dr Moore]

Very interesting parallels between the props used in magic tricks and those used in translation!

At one point I did the time and motion analysis for the speaking and writing steps of translation. I will look that up and post the numbers again here. As I recall, the conclusion was that approx 75% of translation process consisted of the scribe writing while Joseph sat in silence.

[_Shulem]

Okay, I just listened to Radio Free Mormon: Magic and the Book of Mormon Part 2, AGAIN, and it really came to life the second time around.

RFM, you have Razzle Dazzled me!

Thanks for exposing the aported magic ring trick. It really put things in proper perspective. And I love the laugh!!

[_Shulem]

One of the features of the Book of Mormon text that has always suggested to me that Smith was, at least part of the time, dictating on the fly from at most a rough outline rather than reading a prepared text are the passages where 'in other words' occur, of which this is a typical example:

1 Nephi 19:

7 For the things which some men esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God of Israel do men trample under their feet; I say, trample under their feet but I would speak in other words—they set him at naught, and hearken not to the voice of his counsels.

Smith has got a bit carried away, and spoken of God being 'trample[d] under their feet' which (after having said it) he realises sounds bizarre. He can't say 'Oh sorry, scratch that, I got it wrong', because he wants his scribe, or at least the bystanders, to think he is dictating from a miraculous translation appearing in shining letters on a seer stone in the hat. So he quickly corrects it into something more appropriate with the 'in other words' link.

If memory serves, there are several places in the Book of Mormon where this type of instance occurs. It's like Smith corrected himself after making the mistake of saying something he didn't quite mean to say. This however, flies in the face of the "HOLY" Spirit influencing the original Book of Mormon prophet who is supposed to be etching sacred scripture into fine leaves of gold plates. You'd think the writer and the Spirit would have said the correct thing the first time around. But it goes to show that the writer was sloppy and the Spirit was out to lunch. So who made the original mistake: Ancient prophet or modern translator?



Joe did.

Just another example to show that the Book of Mormon was written by modern man.