MORMONISM IS OCCULT IN ITS ORIGINS AND IN ITS CURRENT PRACTICE

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the fastest growing Church in the world. It traces its origins back to 1830 when a young man called Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York, founded the Church of Christ based on the Book of Mormon which he said he translated from golden plates that he found in a hill by the guidance of an angel called Moroni. The book was translated with magic glasses and firstly three witnesses saw the plates and later eight more were granted the privilege. Smith called out what he saw on the glasses to his secretary who wrote what he dictated down. The Book of Mormon was supposed to have been written in Reformed Egyptian.

 

Smith proclaimed himself to be a Prophet and he brought out several revelations before his assassination by a mob in 1844. He had claimed that the Father and the Son appeared to him in 1820 when he prayed about what Church to join. They told him to join none for they were all abominations and the disciples of these Churches were all corrupt. There is so much religious fraud going on that one or two frauds have to strike it lucky and get away with it. The founders of Christianity and Mormonism struck it very lucky indeed.

 

It is known that Smith at the time he declared finding the book was a glass looker. He claimed to be able to divine where treasure could be found. He was committed to occult beliefs. He carried a Jupiter charm.

 

The Christian Church says that God and morality are somehow inherently the same entity. The Church argues that you cannot really understand what justice and love are unless there is a God. The Church says that the problem of evil and babies suffering unfairly cannot disprove God for without God you cannot believe in fairness in the first place.

 

Mormons do not believe in this kind of God. For them, God was not always God. He became God by living a righteous life. For Mormons, there are many Gods. They deny that God dwells in your heart. The Mormon God is just a pagan God who seems decent. But how decent is he when he lets people die and babies suffer? Mormons have no hope of solving the problem of evil and they adore a bystander man god who lets terrible things happen and who kills people making him a murderer. Their god is just the devil if there is one. He is not a god but a man with magical powers. He cannot be distinguished from a wizard. He is progressing in power and wisdom and glory and thus does not know all things. Thus the notion, "evil happens for it results in a greater good which is why God puts up with it" does not really agree with the Mormon deity. He cannot know enough to have the right to let babies starve to death.

 

The Book of Mormon gives us the Christian God who is everywhere. Theologians say that God hearing us and protecting us is not magic for God by his nature, his presence, is everywhere. If you can move a pot on the cooker because you are there that is normal. If you can move a pot on earth while you are on the moon that is magic. Mormonism now teaches that God is a man of flesh and bone and exists only in one small space. He is not everywhere for he is a resurrected man. Thus when he hears prayers and does you a favour that is magic. Mormonism is an occult religion. It redefines Christian terms such as God. When it talks about man's spirit or soul it means that spirit or soul is a bodily entity - its a body that cannot be detected. Spirit and soul are understood in a materialistic way. Spiritualism does the same thing. The medium will tell you that Uncle Tom is enjoying his pipe in the afterlife and had boiled eggs this morning. Mormonism is firmly occult.

 

The Temple Ceremony is full of occultism and depends heavily on Masonic ideas and rituals. There are magic handclasps and magic words given by which you can enter Heaven. The oaths used to be bloodcurdling and malevolent and invoked supernatural forces to cut ones throat and spill ones guts should the secrets of the Temple be revealed. Oaths and prayers taken from occult rituals have been identified in the ritual. Plus Adam prays to God in the ceremony and Satan answers! The ceremony shows just how flawed and limited the Mormon "God" is. He is like the weak god of the witches who has to get power from the witches before he can do anything magical.

 

DRUG USE?

 

Hearts Made Glad by Lamar Petersen explains that Joseph Smith and his early Church associates were using intoxicants. Drug use is common in the occult world to get people to think they have had credible other-worldly experiences. Otherwise the rites would bore people to death and people would see through the trickery. 

 

There is evidence that they were using medicated communion wine to fabricate wonders and visions. This is consistent with the use of psychedelic plants that Smith and others would have known about. Mushrooms and forms of cactus could have been depoyele . However it was done, it is just another example of a religion using entheogens. Entheogen is anything used by person to try and induce a mystical vision or spiritual ecstasy or high.

 

They can cause out of body experiences.

 

We think of Shamans and all that but their use is far from exclusive to Shamans.

 

Smith had extreme highs that can be accounted for as drug induced delusions of grandeour.

 

At his temple in Kirtland, there were so many visions during a meeting that it was as clear as day that drugs were involved.

 

Michael Winkelman writes,

 

Vision-inducing plants ("hallucinogens") are important in many societies, evoking powerful emotional, psychological, cognitive, religious, spiritual, therapeutic and political reactions. These substances' psychophysiological properties shape cross- cultural similarities in patterns of use and experiences, while political factors shape their cultural desirability. Neurological studies illustrate that common effects are based in intervention in serotonergic neurotransmission. Effects upon neural, sensory, emotional, and cognitive processes stimulate integrative information processing, justifying a new term-"psychointegrators."

 

Psychointegrators disinhibit sensory and emotional processes. They stimulate systemic integration of brain information-processing functions, enhancing integration of limbic system self and emotional dynamics with neocortical processes. Their therapeutic applications are reviewed from perspectives of cross-cultural and clinical studies. (Abstract from: Psychointegrators: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Therapeutic Effects of Hallucinogens, Michael Winkelman. Arizona State University Tempe, AZ)

 

Just how legitimate are visions and raptures occasioned by entheogens?

 

Religious historian Huston Smith wrote that the use of entheogenic material is able to occasion an “experience that is indistinguishable from, if not identical with” those of religious mystics. 

 

For instance, in an article published in Life Magazine May 13th 1957, R. Gordon Wasson, the “father of ethnomycology”, reported the discovery of a divine mushroom that could easily occasion visions and ecstasies.

 

Wasson wrote, On the night of June 29, 1955… I shared with a family of Indians a celebration of "holy communion" where "divine" mushrooms where first adored and then consumed. Wasson then reports, Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes … vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even to know God.

 

John Heinerman has demonstrated Joseph Smith’s interest in Thomsonian herbal medicine.

 

Reports that Smith was intoxicated when confecting the Book of Mormon are credible.

 

Lu B. Cake says, Joseph Smith was intoxicated during his "vision of Moroni" dated September 21, 1823. This was when the "angel" came to announce the existence of the Book of Mormon gold plates.

 

Our source says,

 

Intoxication can explain Joseph Smith's visionary experiences but not intoxication with alcohol.

 

Having worked in an Emergency Department for over 30 years, I have never seen an intoxicated patient who was actively hallucinating unless there was pre-existing alcohol induced central nervous system damage. If we accept that Joseph Smith was intoxicated and link that intoxication to visions, the only intoxicant class capable of doing that is psychedelics such as Amanita Muscaria mushroom, Datura and Mescaline containing cactus.

 

After witnessing several sacrament meetings in Kirtland Ohio, Jesse Moss “became fully satisfied the wine was medicated” and one night attempted to steal a bottle but was caught. Immediately after his attempt was discovered, Moss made a public statement about how with drugged wine “angels could be manufactured & strange wonders made to appear in the night”.

 

A member of the Church by the last name of McWhithey was reportedly present during the 1836 Kirtland temple dedication week. Obviously disgruntled, McWhitney complained that the wine consumed was actually "mixed liquor” and that “the Mormon leaders intended to get the audience under [its] influence” so that visions experienced were believed to be of “the Lord's doings.”

 

The connection of wine with fits of psychotic thinking and strange physical manifestations attending heavenly visions and spiritual raptures argues strongly in favor of the covert inclusion of the visionary Datura plant in the sacramental meal and anointing oil administered by Joseph Smith.

 

A writer “has theorized that the main origin and ongoing wellspring of Joseph’s spiritual power was his skilled utilization of the visionary Datura plant, the sacred Amanita muscaria mushroom and the revered peyote cactus. These natural chemical disinhibited the unconscious mind and by excluding light, revelations of mythic quality were generated. In the administration of these entheogens, it is hypothesized that Joseph Smith (using ritual i.e. set, setting, substance, support) was able to gift his followers with access to God and spiritual dimensions without the years of fasting, isolation, and self-torture employed by other mystic and spiritual leaders.”