Mormon folklore as diverse, tragic and humorous as other religions

 

A friend loaned me a book published in 1956, "Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons," by Austin and Alta Fife, that turned into a treasure over the weekend I read it.

"Saints of Sage..." is a collection of Mormon folk tales and tall tales. Anecdotes abound from diverse sources that include prophets and pioneers. The prologue essay, "A Mormon from the Cradle to the Grave," is just plain outstanding. It's folksy and witty, irreverent but never disrespectful. Latter-day Saints, warts and all, are captured in this book, but there's always an affection underneath the banter.

I'd wager that any reader who has been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for at least 40 years can recall hearing some of the folklore related in the book. One anecdote on polygamy recalls two LDS apostles on the way to Idaho to attend a church meeting passing a school with children tumbling out of the schoolhouse. A non-Mormon reverend turned to the apostle and asked him if the scene reminded him of his childhood. The apostle replied, "No, it reminds me of my father's backyard."

Long ago, when the church was more interesting (as my friend Cal Grondahl says), devils were frequently cast out of hijacked members and the Three Nephites tended not to be so publicity shy. In one anecdote, one of the Nephite trio is generous enough to show himself to an elderly lady who praised God that late in her life her prayer to see a Nephite perform a miracle had been answered. LDS folklore has it that Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois, who failed to protect the Prophet Joseph Smith, died loathsome, unpopular and in poverty. Another past anecdote involves LDS apostle and Logan Temple president Marriner W. Merrill arguing with Satan himself in his temple office, Old Scratch having visited to request that Merrill stop temple proceedings.

The LDS belief in a pre-existence is noted in the book. Allegedly the LDS Prophet Wilford Woodruff warned in his journal that there were literally trillions of Satan's army on earth doing their best to lead them astray. Woodruff's calculation of the earth holding 1 trillion people at a time seems way too high to this reviewer, though. Nevertheless, the Mormon belief in a pre-mortal existence is very personal to members, who worry that they may have lost friends and family members to Lucifer long ago. It can provide mixed emotions on how to respond to temptation of a personal nature.

No book on Mormon folklore would be any good if there wasn't a section on the legendary, cussing, LDS leader J. Golden Kimball. He has a chapter in "Saints of Sage ..." The former mule skinner once said, "Yeah, I love all of God's children, but there's some of them that I love a damn sight more than I do others."

Kimball also possessed wit: When former LDS U.S. Sen. Reed Smoot wanted to marry, he boasted to Kimball that he had just received the blessing of LDS Prophet Heber J. Grant. Kimball dead-panned, "Well now, I just don't know, Reed. I just don't know. You're a pretty old man, you know. And Sister Sheets, she's a pretty young woman. And she'll expect more from you than just the laying on of hands."

And once, during an excommunication trial for a man accused of adultery, Kimball, after hearing the man admit to being in bed with the married woman but not having sex with her, laconically said, "Brethren, I move that the brother be excommunicated. It's obvious that he doesn't have the seed of Israel in him."

The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and its aftermath, created much darker folklore. The wife of a Southern Utah Mormon, in the brief interlude where the spared young children of the slain settlers were being cared for in LDS homes, recalls a woman coming to her in her garden asking to see her child. She was led into the house. The Mormon wife followed the mysterious visitor, who disappeared the moment she reached the room where the child was.

"Saints of Sage and Saddle" is folklore history that the interested will spend hours poring over. Besides the tales, there are old LDS hymns, period photos and an index for quick reference. I choose to end this column with a song Mormons once enjoyed I encountered in this book, and once sung by Ogden's L.M. Hilton:

The Boozer
I was out upon a flicker and had had far too much liquor,
And I must admit that I was quite pie-eyed,
And my legs began to stutter, and I lay down in the gutter
And a pig arrived and lay down by my side.
As I lay there in the gutter with my heart strings all aflutter,
A lady passed and this was heard to say,
You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses.
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

 

--Doug Gibson

 

Originally published at StandardBlogs

 

Do you have your own, personal Three Nephites experience?

We Mormons have our own personal religious lore; one that tops the list is the Three Nephites. A healthy percentage of members who make it to church more often than not either have their own personal Three Nephites tale or can relate at least one that has been passed onto them.

The Three Nephites are mentioned in The Book of Mormon as disciples of Jesus Christ who ask to remain on earth until Jesus Christ returns and convert souls for him. Christ says yes, which is the same answer he gives to John the Beloved in the New Testament.

(I digress here to wonder how often the Three Nephites and John the Beloved have met the past 1,977 years or so. Do they ever get tired of each other? Do they ever squabble? I couldn’t imagine being on my best behavior waiting for a guest who won’t tell us when he’ll ever return.)

Despite my occasional skepticism, I’m one of those who can boast of his own “Three Nephites experience.” But first, some more about the LDS folklore of the Three Nephites. Besides John the Beloved, the Three Nephites have parallels to The Wandering Jew, Catholic saints and even the Prophet Elijah. Although reports of Three Nephites activity are not — for good reason — official Mormon doctrine, their calling is mentioned in Mormonism’s most unique scripture. One who claims a literal belief in the Book of Mormon must agree that the three are still hanging around somewhere. The same goes for the Bible and John the Beloved.

The first Three Nephites tale I recall hearing is about an army officer on the front in World War II who gives a lift in his jeep to three wandering civilians. When he drops them off, one of the men asks what he can do to repay the officer. The officer flippantly replies, “Tell me when this war will end?” The man gives him a date. The officer thinks nothing of the answer until the war ends, and you guessed it, on the exact date the man told him!

There’s a million of these tales. In 1949, author Hector Lee published “The Three Nephites: The Substance and Significance of the Legend in Folklore,” Albuquerque, The University of New Mexico Press. Here are a couple of accounts that Lee collected:

• The Hitchhiking “ghost” Nephite, where an old hitchhiker was picked up by couple traveling to Grand Junction, Colo. It was 1944. The old hitchhiker was a whiz on current events. At the most desolate part of their journey, the hitchhiker insisted on being let out. Naturally the couple protested. The hitchhiker told them they would soon be hauling a dead body to Grand Junction. He then told them the exact date that World War II would end. Sure enough, the couple came upon a car wreck with a fatality and hauled the dead driver to Grand Junction. The war ended on the same date as well.

I mention this tale because it’s similar to the one I heard as a child. The setting had changed and there was no dead body and there were three hitchhikers instead of one. I imagine that as “Three Nephites sightings” are passed along over and over, the tale can change significantly.

• Here’s another Three Nephites tale Lee compiled with a lot of the supernatural included. Mrs. Aylda Abbott Squires of Wa Wa Springs, in Utah, recounts an 1874 experience when she was all alone on the homestead and a lone man came by and asked for food. Mrs. Squires was frightened but provided him a meal. The man blessed her and promised her that a pain she was feeling in her liver would go away and that she would never want for basic necessities. As he turned a corner leaving she followed to see where he had gone but the man had disappeared. She returned to her table and discovered the lunch she had seen him eat and drink was untouched. Later, her mother reminded her that her Patriarchal blessing had mentioned she would see one of the Three Nephites.

I just love these tales. They’re part of what makes Mormonism so interesting and unique.

So here’s my “Three Nephites” tale. It’s got more holes in it than that once-sacred garment with the tokens cut off that grandma uses for cleaning, but here it is:

• It was 1983, in Chiclayo, Peru. My senior companion and I were in a massive slum, thousands of people living in homes without electricity or water. We were searching for the home of a referral. The potential investigator’s name was Marcos. After traipsing through the dusty dirt streets for the better part of a day, we stopped to stare at a very peculiar sight. A pig was hog-tied, presumably moments away from the slaughter. You’ve never heard screaming until you’ve heard a hog-tied pig scream. A crowd had gathered to stare at the pig. For some reason a man standing a few feet away caught our attention. One of us, I can’t recall which, asked — for the 100th time — “Do you know where Marcos lives?”

The man casually made a fist, thumb out, and glanced and pointed over his back toward an alley with a few house inward. “He lives back there,” he said.

To sum up a long story, we met Marcos, baptized him and later were baptized about 10 or 11 of his family members. Soon after we left Peru, Marcos went on his own mission. I’m glad Marcos and his family helped me to meet one of the Three Nephites.

A footnote

That same day, during our first visit with Marcos, the pig stopped screaming. When we returned to the site, there was only a dark, dank-smelling wet stain where the pig once screamed.

It took me about 10 years to realize that it would have been an impressive encore if the wandering Nephite had taken a moment to save the pig.

-- Originally published in 2010 at StandardNET.

Did an angel with a drawn sword force Joseph Smith to start polygamy?

In his biography of Joseph Smith, “Rough Stone Rolling,” author Richard Lyman Bushman relates a popular Mormon legend/history regarding the Mormon prophet and his embrace of polygamy. He writes, “By delaying plural marriage, Joseph risked provoking God’s wrath. Mary (Elizabeth) Rollins Lightner, one of his plural wives, later said Joseph told her about the pressure he was under. ‘The angel came to me three times between the year of ’34 and ’42 and said I was to obey the principle or he would [s]lay me.’ Others told the story with an additional detail: the angel held a drawn sword.”

The would-be “destroying angel” that prompted Joseph Smith to get moving on polygamy is one of those “legends” that I heard from parents and others growing up as a young Latter-day Saint. I had always assumed it was another legend, such as the White Horse Prophecy, that gets passed around so often that it achieves a false legitimacy. However, there seems to be enough persons aware of this claim that it should be placed above folklore status.

In the book, “Nauvoo Polygamy, but we called it celestial marriage,” author George D. Smith adds to Bushman’s account with one caveat. He reports that Smith’s plural wife, Rollins Lightner, also included the drawn sword in her story. From “Nauvoo Polygamy,” D. Smith repeats a statement Rollins Lightner made in 1902, claiming Joseph Smith told her he had been commanded to marry her as far back as 1834, but had resisted, until, as she related “the Angel came to him three times, the last time with a drawn Sword and threatened his life.”

Rollins Lightner, quite reasonably, relates that she asked Smith “if God told him So, why did he not come and tell me [?]” Apparently, Rollins Lightner did have what she regarded as an angelic visitation. She said, “”… and an Angel came to me, it went through me like lightning.” The pair were married in 1842.

LDS historian Brian C. Hales, who has done a lot of research into polygamy and the early Mormon Church, cites LDS Apostle Erastus Snow as a supporting source that Joseph Smith felt his life was in danger if he did not implement polygamy. Hales writes, “Erastus Snow claimed that Joseph had ‘to plead on his knees before the Angel for his Life.” (Hales’ research lists many persons who were told, either secondhand or by Smith, of the angels’ visits and displeasure. The earliest account he has is 1854.)

If, as most historians believe, Fanny Alger was Joseph Smith’s first plural wife, there was several-years time of “foot-dragging” before the Mormon prophet began to implement polygamy. As Hales and other historians note, not-surprising opposition to the practice by Smith’s lawful wife, Emma, probably was the strongest reason for Smith’s reluctance. Emma Smith had reportedly kicked servant Alger out of the Smith home. Although reports are that she attempted to understand and countenance her husband’s polygamous efforts during the Nauvoo period, she was never able to accept it. After her husband’s murder, a key reason for her refusal to follow Brigham Young with most of the Saints to the Rocky Mountains was due to polygamy.

Bushman brings up another reason that Smith may have been reluctant to embrace polygamy. It was that skeptics of new religions tended to look for dysfunctional sexual behaviors as a reason to condemn the churches or movements. Bushman writes, “From the … sixteenth century to the camp meetings of the nineteenth, critics expected sexual improprieties from religious enthusiasts. Marital experiments by contemporary radical sects increased the suspicions. … With old barriers coming down, people were on the lookout for sexual aberrations.”

Joseph Smith was certainly smart enough to realize how Mormons would be if the young church embraced polygamy. He also, it is virtually universally acknowledged by historians, loved his wife Emma deeply and was loathe to do anything that would hurt her. These conflicts must have disturbed him.

The idea that lust motivated Joseph Smith’s desire for polygamy may satisfy his most severe critics, but the historical record does not support it. A wait of several years after the failed union with Fanny Alger shows reluctance for the practice, not desire. One need not believe that Joseph Smith pleaded before an angel with a sword to acknowledge that. The doctrine of plural marriage, as Smith and other early Mormon leaders understood it, was essential to increase eternal families, and one’s glory in the after-life. It’s likely that many of Smith’s plural marriages, particularly the ones that involved plural marriages to women already married, were sexless and intended only for the afterlife.

To active Mormons, and others who read all the church’s scriptures, the God described in the Doctrine and Covenants is, at least in verbal rhetoric, similar to the God of the Old Testament. Frankly, it’s not that difficult to picture a god of that temperament sending an angel with a sword to “persuade” Joseph Smith to start polygamy.

Nevertheless, whether the angel is a part of Mormon history, or just part of Mormon lore, will always be debated. Church leaders invited that discussion in 1934, when LDS apostle Melvin J. Ballard, wrote, “The statement … concerning the angel appearing with the drawn sword is not a matter that is in our own church history. While it may be all true, the church has not pronounced it authentic nor has it contradicted it.” (Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Volume 1a)

Of course, that was during a time that the LDS Church leadership was slowly pursuing a more modern, accommodating church that would assimilate well with the rest of the world. Almost 50 years earlier, a period where the church was still embracing polygamy, Hales writes, “Future apostle Orson F. Whitney, grandson of Heber C. Kimball and son of Joseph Smith’s plural wife Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, apparently believed the story genuine. His 1888 biography of Heber C. Kimball includes this statement:

‘A grand and glorious principle had been revealed, and for years had slumbered in the breast of God’s Prophet, awaiting the time when, with safety to himself and the Church, it might be confided to the sacred keeping of a chosen few. That time had now come. An angel with a flaming sword descended from the courts of glory and, confronting the Prophet, commanded him in the name of the Lord to establish the principle so long concealed from the knowledge of the Saints and of the world — that of plural knowledge.’

I don’t know how many persons today believe in, or even know of, the alleged angel that threatened Joseph Smith to marry other women, but it clearly merits inclusion as a part of LDS Church history.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

Mormon folklore as diverse, tragic and humorous as other religions

A friend loaned me a book published in 1956, "Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons," by Austin and Alta Fife, that turned into a treasure over the weekend I read it.

"Saints of Sage..." is a collection of Mormon folk tales and tall tales. Anecdotes abound from diverse sources that include prophets and pioneers. The prologue essay, "A Mormon from the Cradle to the Grave," is just plain outstanding. It's folksy and witty, irreverent but never disrespectful. Latter-day Saints, warts and all, are captured in this book, but there's always an affection underneath the banter.

I'd wager that any reader who has been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for at least 40 years can recall hearing some of the folklore related in the book. One anecdote on polygamy recalls two LDS apostles on the way to Idaho to attend a church meeting passing a school with children tumbling out of the schoolhouse. A non-Mormon reverend turned to the apostle and asked him if the scene reminded him of his childhood. The apostle replied, "No, it reminds me of my father's backyard."

Long ago, when the church was more interesting (as my friend Cal Grondahl says), devils were frequently cast out of hijacked members and the Three Nephites tended not to be so publicity shy. In one anecdote, one of the Nephite trio is generous enough to show himself to an elderly lady who praised God that late in her life her prayer to see a Nephite perform a miracle had been answered. LDS folklore has it that Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois, who failed to protect the Prophet Joseph Smith, died loathsome, unpopular and in poverty. Another past anecdote involves LDS apostle and Logan Temple president Marriner W. Merrill arguing with Satan himself in his temple office, Old Scratch having visited to request that Merrill stop temple proceedings.

The LDS belief in a pre-existence is noted in the book. Allegedly the LDS Prophet Wilford Woodruff warned in his journal that there were literally trillions of Satan's army on earth doing their best to lead them astray. Woodruff's calculation of the earth holding 1 trillion people at a time seems way too high to this reviewer, though. Nevertheless, the Mormon belief in a pre-mortal existence is very personal to members, who worry that they may have lost friends and family members to Lucifer long ago. It can provide mixed emotions on how to respond to temptation of a personal nature.

No book on Mormon folklore would be any good if there wasn't a section on the legendary, cussing, LDS leader J. Golden Kimball. He has a chapter in "Saints of Sage ..." The former mule skinner once said, "Yeah, I love all of God's children, but there's some of them that I love a damn sight more than I do others."

Kimball also possessed wit: When former LDS U.S. Sen. Reed Smoot wanted to marry, he boasted to Kimball that he had just received the blessing of LDS Prophet Heber J. Grant. Kimball dead-panned, "Well now, I just don't know, Reed. I just don't know. You're a pretty old man, you know. And Sister Sheets, she's a pretty young woman. And she'll expect more from you than just the laying on of hands."

And once, during an excommunication trial for a man accused of adultery, Kimball, after hearing the man admit to being in bed with the married woman but not having sex with her, laconically said, "Brethren, I move that the brother be excommunicated. It's obvious that he doesn't have the seed of Israel in him."

The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and its aftermath, created much darker folklore. The wife of a Southern Utah Mormon, in the brief interlude where the spared young children of the slain settlers were being cared for in LDS homes, recalls a woman coming to her in her garden asking to see her child. She was led into the house. The Mormon wife followed the mysterious visitor, who disappeared the moment she reached the room where the child was.

"Saints of Sage and Saddle" is folklore history that the interested will spend hours poring over. Besides the tales, there are old LDS hymns, period photos and an index for quick reference. I choose to end this column with a song Mormons once enjoyed I encountered in this book, and once sung by Ogden's L.M. Hilton:

The Boozer
I was out upon a flicker and had had far too much liquor,
And I must admit that I was quite pie-eyed,
And my legs began to stutter, and I lay down in the gutter
And a pig arrived and lay down by my side.
As I lay there in the gutter with my heart strings all aflutter,
A lady passed and this was heard to say,
You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses.
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

--Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardBlogs