The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844

by John L. Brooke

• ISBN13: 9780521565646
• ISBN10: 0521565642
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-05-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book presents an alternative and comprehensive understanding of the roots of Mormon religion, which proposes that the faithful will become gods. The book's central thesis is that the origins of Mormonism lie in the fusion of radical religion with magical ideas about recovering the divine powers of Adam lost in the fall from Paradise (ideas known as the hermetic philosophy) that occurred during the Reformation and the English Revolution. The book is organised around the two problems of demonstrating the survival of these ideas into the nineteenth century and of how they were manifested in Mormon doctrine. A final chapter outlines how Mormonism gradually has moved toward traditional Protestant Christianity since the 1850s. Besides religion, this book deals with magic, witchcraft, alchemy, Freemasonry, counterfeiting, and state-formation.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations and maps

Preface

Part I. A Prepared People: 1. Dreams of the primal Adam

2. The true spiritual seed

3. Something of our ancestors

Part II. Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger: 4. A Urim spiritual

5. Alchymical experiments

6. I was born in Sharon

PART III. The Mormon Dispensation: 7. Secret combinations and slippery treasures in the land of Zarahemla

8. The mysteries defined

9. Temples, wives, bogus-making, and war

10. The keys to the kingdom

11. A tangle of strings and the kingdom of God

12. Let mysteries alone

Appendix: The sectarian and hermetic circumstances of Mormon origins in Vermont and New York

Index.