Encounters with material objects lie at the heart of Mormonism’s origin story. The story goes like this: Late one night in September 1823, an angel visited the bedside of a young Joseph Smith to tell him of one of these objects—a sacred book written on plates of gold, buried on a hillside not far from the Smith family’s farm in upstate New York. When, the next day, Smith found the gold plates as directed, the divine being reappeared with further instructions. This time, he forbade Smith from removing the plates but beckoned him to return to the site year after year. In 1827, on Smith’s fifth annual visit, the angel finally allowed him to collect the plates and take them home. Over the next several months, Smith kept them securely hidden and revealed them only to a select group of witnesses. Using a seer stone, he translated the plates’ inscriptions from their mysterious language into English. Trusted companions served as scribes. The translation revealed that the plates were created several hundred years before the birth of Christ by the angel Moroni and his father Mormon, and recorded the extraordinary history of their Nephite clan, which had migrated to the American continent from Jerusalem. In June 1829, shortly after the translation was complete, Moroni directed Smith to return the gold plates (in some accounts, by depositing them in a cave). Smith obeyed. Then Smith arranged for the publication of the manuscript in nearby Palmyra, which appeared in 1830 as the first edition of the Book of Mormon.
While there have been many nuanced interpretations of Smith’s motivations and the broader phenomenon of Mormon origins, few have considered the possibility that Smith, and other witnesses, could have physically encountered material plates at some point during the religion’s formative years. This, in spite of the fact that descriptions of the plates by Smith and other witnesses share details that suggest that they were seeing and touching ordinary material things with a consistent set of characteristics. These witness accounts, moreover, portray the plates as possessing qualities remarkably similar to those of nineteenth-century industrial printing plates, especially stereotype plates or copper plates (Figures 1 and 2). Printing plates, like Smith’s gold plates, were metallic, were covered in writings that read from right to left, were heavy when collected together, typically came in a set, and approximated the dimensions of the pages of a book. This article proposes that Smith, and potentially several witnesses, had a foundational encounter with printing plates during the 1820s. It also suggests a range of possibilities regarding the nature of that encounter. It could have been that Smith’s gold plates, which he handled and showed to his followers, were actual printing plates that he had acquired. Or, short of Smith physically obtaining this printing technology, Smith might have examined it at some point and later constructed a homemade facsimile that was informed by the details of his firsthand observations, or, at least, developed his verbal and written descriptions of the ancient Nephite relics from that prior experience with the same.
Historiography, Method, and Materiality
This view of material plates, particularly the language of “catalyzing,” may evoke a parallel between my argument and one Latter-day Saint position regarding the Book of Abraham. A scriptural text, the Book of Abraham was a sheaf of Egyptian papyri found and translated by Joseph Smith in 1835. When the extant papyri were later found to postdate the time of Abraham’s life by thousands of years, Mormon apologists developed the “catalyst theory.” On its website, the Church describes this theory (with my emphasis added): “According to this view, Joseph’s translation was not a literal rendering of the papyri as a conventional translation would be. Rather, the physical artifacts provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation. They catalyzed a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri.”
The Latter-day Saint idea of the material papyri as “catalysts” is akin to what I have in mind when I argue that that material printing plates furnished the circumstances that enabled the terms of development of Smith’s visions and his writing of the Book of Mormon (despite the cosmic difference in that Mormon apologists think the papyri were provided by God and that I think they were found naturalistically).
Conclusion
This article has posited an early Mormon assemblage that coalesced out of encounters among elements that were human and nonhuman. It has shown that thinking in terms of an assemblage supplements existing approaches that have foregrounded religious imagination, cultural and religious context, and cognitive science. It proposes an alternative understanding of the emergence of Mormonism that begins with a consideration of the contingent encounter between Joseph Smith’s imaginative mind, his surrounding culture, and the physical plates, and asks how these heterogeneous elements collaborated to extend the realm of what was possible and to catalyze change.83 […]
I do not mean to give the simplistic impression that everything that followed the encounter with the plates can be explained in terms of the qualities of those objects or the circumstances of that encounter. Nor is the aim to supplant culture and imagination with something else that would shoulder all of their same work, all by itself. To understand an early Mormon assemblage that incorporated material plates is to rely heavily on the gains of a historiography that has emphasized religious imaginations (including cognitive processes) of a creative individual and his human followers and the cultural and religious contexts that encompassed them. […]
In other words, I want to suggest that an encounter or encounters with physical plates were a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of Mormonism. It is hardly contestable that an actor like Joseph Smith imagined ideas, created things, made choices, and entered into social relationships and that his thoughts and practices were informed by a surrounding cultural and religious imaginary. Yet, Smith and his followers also interacted with material objects, hard to the touch and heavy in hand. These objects did not wholly, immediately, or readily submit to preexisting cultural categories nor spring fully formed from an individual or collective imagination. The plates were not entirely outside culture, of course. Early Mormons were equipped with at least some concepts to make sense of what they saw and touched. Still, the plates were strange and challenging and sent a ripple through the community’s cultural and ideational fabric. […]
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