Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, reprinted in Gnosis ^ | Fall 1994 | Lance S. Owens

[NorthernCrunchyCon]

This work was originally published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 27, No. 3, Fall 1994, pp. 117-194. The paper received considerable notice, and in 1995 the Mormon History Association recognized Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection with its annual award for the best article in Mormon studies. [snip]

The one thing about which we might all agree concerning Joseph Smith is that he was not the usual sort of person. He did not approach life itself--or his religious commitment--in a usual way. Yet the character of our historical investigation of Joseph Smith and his times has been primarily traditional, unimaginative, and lacking in any effort to find or create an epistemological methodology revolutionary enough to deal with the paradox of our movement. The irony of our position is that many of our methods and interpretations have become so traditional that they can only reinforce the fears of yesterday rather than nurture the seeds of tomorrow's dreams.1

More than two decades have passed since those words were penned, years marked by a veritable explosion in Mormon studies, and yet Edward's challenge "to find or create an epistemological methodology revolutionary enough to deal with the paradox" of Joseph Smith remains a summons largely unanswered. Revolutions are painful processes, in measure both destructive and creative. The imaginative revisioning of Joseph Smith's "unusual approach" to life and religion, demands a careful--though perhaps still difficult and destructive--hewing away of an hundred years of encrusting vilifications and thick layerings of iconographic pigments, masks ultimately false to his lively cast. Smith eschewed orthodoxy, and so eventually must his historians. To that end, there is considerable value in turning full attention to the revolutionary view of Joseph Smith provided by Harold Bloom in his critique of The American Religion.

[UCANSEE2]

I think I messed up my sentence

No. I assumed too much from what you did say.

[UCANSEE2]

Celestial marriage has them running their own worlds as gods.

This would imply that some soul is running our planet, would it not?

I’m content to let God be the only God

You covered that. (Regardless what we as sons of Gods will be rewarded with, we will never, ever be on a level with the One True God, His Son and the Holy Spirit.)

and dwell in Heaven as a servant-peasant in the New Jerusalem where the streets are made of gold (IOW, used like concrete, only much more beautiful).

As you said, we will never be on the level with GOD, so even if you are the 'seed of creation and life' (that which dictates the pattern and form of life and the will to survive), you are still a servant-peasant, and the Universe is the New Jerusalem and you can pave the streets of your planet with anything you want.

What I am trying to say is that material existence will be gone, and spiritual existence is a totally different thing. How the 'spirit' or 'soul' would 'view' it's 'surroundings' is really a matter of endless speculation. The only objection I have to the Mormon concept is that it would tie one to the material plane (one planet).

One thing I know for sure... I don't know what will happen .

[UCANSEE2]

I’m ready to snooze.

Thank you for the enlightening conversation.
Perhaps we can continue tomorrow.