Sunday 26 March 2023

an account written by the hand of mormon upon the plates taken from the plates of nephi (10. 636)

First published on this day in Palmyra, New York on the tenth anniversary of Joseph Smith’s first series of prophetic visions in 1820, the foundational gospel of the Latter Day Saint movement is a chronology of God’s dealings with the ancient, pre-Colombian contact of the inhabitants of the ancient Americas through roughly a millennium of guidance from 600 BC to 421 AD. Recorded originally in unknown but intuitable characters called “reformed Egyptian” (the stele of the Rosetta Stone was first transcribed in French in 1822), Smith was called by an angel either to translate the scriptures or at least take dictation for this other Christian testament. Despite anachronisms and its freighted association with works like Pilgrims’ Progress and ancient aliens theories, the composition is a present and self-aware text that stands as a compelling saga on its owns and in the context of the time that extends and inculcates social justices and reforms to indigenous and non-white people left out of the narrative with both emphasis on universal salvation and personal revelation.