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Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Early Mormonism and the Magic World View
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About this work
Author: D. Michael Quinn
- ...writers are certainly "dishonest or bad historians" if they fail to acknowledge the existence of even one piece of evidence they know challenges or contradicts the rest of their evidence. If this omission of relevant evidence is inadvertent, the author is careless. If the omission is an intentional effort to conceal or avoid presenting the reader with evidence that contradicts the preferred view of the writer, that is fraud, whether by a scholar or non-scholar, historian or other specialist. If authors write in scholarly style, they are equally dishonest if they fail to acknowledge any significant work whose interpretations differ from their own.
— D. Michael Quinn, "Editor's Introduction," in The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), xiii, n. 5
- I have not checked every reference in Quinn's book, but every reference that I have checked has been inaccurate in some way. In some cases Quinn has misinterpreted the source. In some cases he proof texts the quotation, and a fuller reading of the text undermines his case. And sometimes he is just plain wrong.
- — John Gee, "Review of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, revised and enlarged edition, by D. Michael Quinn," FARMS Review of Books 12/2 (2000): 185–224. [{{{url}}} off-site] (footnote 23)
Quote mining, selective quotation and distortion
Many critics who write about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not content to portray the Church and its doctrines fairly. Some critics mine their sources by extracting quotes from their context in order to make the statement imply something other that what it was originally intended to mean. Other critics make statements that are self-contradictions—instances in which a critic says or writes one thing, and then makes another statement elsewhere that flatly contradicts their first statement.
These examples do not prove that these critics' arguments are without merit; they do suggest caution is warranted before accepting these authors or their works as reliable witnesses when they speak of their own experiences connected with "Mormonism." In particular, one should also be cautious about accepting their interpretation of primary sources without double-checking the original sources themselves.
| The claim... | The facts... |
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| Encyclopedia of Mormonism "was an official product of the LDS Church" |
The Encyclopedia of Mormonism was not an official production of the LDS Church as the Church News noted:
This is indicated in the introduction to the Encyclopedia:
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Commentary
- Quinn wants to make the Encyclopedia of Mormonism an 'official' work, when the book, its editor, its authors, and publisher all assert that it is not.
| The claim... | The facts... |
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| ...how extensively Barrett's Magus circulated in the United States during the early nineteenth century is unknown." | "... Barrett's Magus "created an immediate sensation. . . . Barrett's book and teachings were also widely available to Smith's generation [in America]." |
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Commentary
- Quinn provides no new citations or data between editions. Yet, he alters his claim—without evidence, and despite his cited sources—to suit his thesis.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "Disorderly Persons" "all jugglers [conjurors], and all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover lost goods." (italics added, the amendation of "conjurors" is Quinn's) |
...all persons who threaten to run away and leave their wives or children to the city or town, . . . and also all persons who not having wherewith to maintain themselves, live idle without employment, and also all persons who go about from door to door, or place themselves in the streets, highways or passages, to beg in the cities or towns where they respectively dwell, and all jugglers, and all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found; and all persons who run away and leave their wives or children . . . ; and all persons wandering abroad . . . and not giving a good account of themselves, and all persons wandering abroad and begging, and all idle persons not having visible means of livelihood, and all common prostitutes shall be deemed and adjudged disorderly persons. (italics added) |
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Commentary
- Quinn wants the reader to read "juggler" as "conjurer," i.e. as a practitioner of magic. In context, it is clear that those referred to are those who attempt to extract money from others by deceit, not the practice of 'magic.' Quinn also alters the citation as noted.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| Quinn claims that the cost of books described in the advertisements in upstate New York in the 1820s ranged from "44 cents to a dollar each" (p. 182). |
“The total cost of all these books is $81.62, which, divided by the seventy books on the list, provides an average cost of $1.17 per book. Thus, rather than finding a real average price, Quinn attempts to use the range of prices for books ("44 cents to a dollar each"), thereby substantially underestimating the actual costs, since there are far more books costing a dollar or more than there are costing under a dollar.” Furthermore: Quinn did not provide the prices for any of the rare magic books he claims Joseph read, even though such information was readily available in at least one important case. When originally published in England in 1801, Barrett's The Magus which Quinn repeatedly cites as a source that influenced Joseph cost one pound, seven shillings for the standard edition and one pound, thirteen shillings for the leatherbound edition. In the early nineteenth century, the official rate of exchange was $4.44 to the pound, while the actual rate of exchange was closer to $4.87. Thus in contemporary American currency Barrett's book would cost from $6.57 for the inexpensive edition to $8.04 for the expensive edition, to which would be added shipping costs from Europe. Thus, far from costing between "44 cents to a dollar" (p. 182) as Quinn implies, one of the most important magic books in Quinn's argument would have cost between six and a half and eight dollars. In terms of Joseph's daily wage of fifty cents, this book would represent two to three weeks' work. At the modern minimum wage, this would equate to between $400 and $600 for a single book. Or, to put it another way, to purchase Barrett's The Magus would have cost the Smiths nearly the value of one month's mortgage on their farm and house. |
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Commentary
- Quinn grossly underestimates the cost of books in Joseph Smith's world, especially the esoteric and occult books which he claims were an influence.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "The British Museum's library has never had a 3-to-1 ratio of books to London's population, yet that was the book-resident ratio of a bookstore in rural New York state in 1815." |
"In 1976, when the population of London proper was 2,700,000, the British Museum Library contained approximately eight million volumes, with a ratio of 2.96-to-1. But, is Quinn seriously claiming that frontier New York had a greater book-to-person ratio than contemporary London? Or that education, book reading, and scholarship were higher in Palmyra than London? Can anyone take this assertion seriously?" |
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Commentary
- Quinn again exaggerates the availability of the occult books he insists—without evidence—were available to Joseph Smith in the early 1800s.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "...it is reasonable to estimate that this one peddler was selling about 25,000 books to farmers each year...by the early 1800's there were thousands of peddlers." |
Quinn seriously misrepresents his sources. First, he does not inform us of the semantic shift from book peddlers to peddlers of all types. It is true that there were thousands of peddlers in the United States during the early nineteenth century, but book peddlers were only a small portion of this number...Quinn's source for the claim that "one peddler was selling about 25,000 books to farmers each year" (p. 21) is an article by James Purcell. Here is what Purcell actually wrote: "During the years 1809 and 1810 he [Weems, a book peddler] sold $24,000 worth of books for him [publisher Mathew Carey] in the South." Note how the two years' worth of sales clearly described in Purcell's article is transformed by Quinn into a single year's sales: "selling about 25,000 books to farmers each year." Quinn thus magically doubles the actual book sales." |
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Commentary
- Quinn miscites his source, doubles the cited figure, and conflates book peddlers with all peddlers.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| Quinn then asserts that Weems was selling these volumes "door-to-door in the rural areas of the South" to individual "farmers" |
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Does Quinn really think that a single peddler, working door-to-door with nineteenth-century transportation, could carry and deliver 25,000 books to backwoods farmers in a single year? This would require selling nearly 2,100 books a month, or carrying and selling almost seventy books a day by a single salesman going door-to-door in rural farm country. In reality, in modern terminology Weems was a regional sales representative for Philadelphia bookseller Mathew Carey and others. His itinerary largely focused on selling to local booksellers." |
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Commentary
- Quinn attempts to portray a wholesaler supplying multiple bookstores as representative of one of thousands of wandering book peddlers. He again seeks to bolster his absurd claim that multiple occult texts were easily available in New England in the 1800s.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "...some [book] peddlers also stocked clandestine works'" and therefore, "if local stores would not supply occult publications to American farmers, book peddlers were there to fill the need." |
Is there any indication of what Gilmore (the author Quinn quotes) meant by the term clandestine? Indeed there is. He meant illegal pornography, as is made quite clear in his article. Nowhere in Gilmore's article is there a single mention of a peddler selling occult books. |
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Commentary
- Quinn again distorts his source—there was a market for pornography, which is hardly surprising. This does not mean that there was a market for expensive occult books.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| Quinn repeatedly claims, citing Francis King, that Barrett's The Magus "played an important part in the English revival of magic." |
But what "revival of magic" is King discussing? The revival of the late, not the early, nineteenth century. This is clear from the fact that the only specific example of Barrett's influence on a magic revival that King discusses is Frederick Hockley, who reprinted Barrett's book in 1870. |
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Commentary
- Quinn cites a work referring to an occult book that was not republished in England until fifty years after the publication of the Book of Mormon, yet does not inform the reader that this citation can have absolutely nothing to do with "early Mormonism."
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| Quinn further claims that "Antoine Faivre has also emphasized Barrett's book in the general European revival of magic during the first decades of the 1800s." |
In reality, rather than emphasizing it, Faivre mentions Barrett's book in one sentence, in passing: "a compilation destined to be a great success heralds the occult literature to come: The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett." |
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Commentary
- Quinn distorts his source, and neglects to mention that the influence of The Magus would come well after Joseph Smith's early years in New England.
Resources
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "Moshe Idel wrote that the Zohar 'is manifestly anthropomorphic'." |
"The latter [the lower sefirot] is an obvious anthropomorphic symbol, which in the Zohar refers to the second and lower divine head, that consisting of the Sefirah of Tiferet alone or of the Sefirot between Hokhmah and Yesod, whereas in the works of R. David [ben Yehudah he-Hasid, late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries] it includes ten Sefirot or, as in the diagram, nine. In other contexts of R. David's thought, this configuration [of the diagram] is manifestly anthropomorphic; the fact that the concept appearing in the diagram differs from that of the Zohar does not obliterate its anthropomorphic character. . . . The process of [the mystical] visualization [of God] includes not only divine names, colors, and a circle or circles but also an anthropomorphic configuration symbolizing an aspect of the divine realm." |
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Commentary
- Quinn wants to attribute Joseph's idea of God having a physical human form (anthropomorphism) to the Jewish mystics who practiced Kabbalah. But, Quinn twists and distorts his source, which clearly states that the anthropomorphism of God is only allegorical in Kabbalah.
| Quote used... | The rest of the story... |
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| "Gershom Scholem wrote of the Cabala's 'almost provocatively conspicuous anthropomorphism'" |
Scholem notes that mystical descriptions of the body of God "[do] not imply that God in Himself possesses a physical form, but only that a form of this kind may be ascribed to 'the Glory.'” And: "Adam Kadmon in the form of concentric circles" that "rearranged themselves as a line, in the form of a man and his limbs, though of course this must be understood in the purely spiritual sense of the incorporeal supernal lights." |
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Commentary
- Quinn again twists his source to make it appear as if Kabbalah has a literal, rather than allegorical, conception of God in a human form.
Further reading
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| {{To learn more box:responses to: 8: The Mormon Proposition}} | To learn more box:responses to: 8: The Mormon Proposition | edit |
| {{To learn more box:''Under the Banner of Heaven''}} | To learn more about responses to: Under the Banner of Heaven | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Robert Price}} | To learn more about responses to: Robert Price | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Ankerberg and Weldon}} | To learn more about responses to: Ankerberg and Weldon | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Ashamed of Joseph}} | To learn more about responses to: Ashamed of Joseph | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Beckwith and Moser}} | To learn more about responses to: Beckwith and Moser | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Beckwith and Parrish}} | To learn more about responses to: Beckwith and Parrish | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Benjamin Park}} | To learn more about responses to: Benjamin Park | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Bible versus Joseph Smith}} | To learn more about responses to: Bible versus Joseph Smith | edit |
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