The Mysteria, part 10: The Angels of History

Maybe there are indeed spirits guiding civilizations, inspiring technological advance, intervening in wars. And maybe they’re not always to be listened to.

To my surprise this morning, drinking my coffee while staring out over the mist-shrouded fields outside my window, I found myself thinking about a peculiar book I really didn’t like, by an author I liked even less.

That book was Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by the speculative fiction writer, Orson Scott Card. Better known for his book, Ender’s Game, Card was quite a prolific fantasist, while being perhaps less known for his fanatic Mormonism and his particular disgust for homosexuality. Writing in 1990, Card asserted:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

I’d known nothing of Card’s religious fundamentalism until reading Pastwatch, and thus found it a very perplexing book. I’d not sought the work out; there was a copy of it lying around in the “anarchist commune” (read: dysfunctional roommate situation) in which I lived for much of my 20s and 30s, and I was always quite hungry for more books to read.

At the time I read it, I was in what we might call the zenith of my anarchist political trajectory, just before many of the ideas I’d found so fascinating to me began to reveal themselves as both unworkable and also personally destructive. Thus, those who’ve read the book can probably understand why I found the book so repulsively propagandistic that I threw it into the recycling bin when I’d finished it.

Thus, it’s quite amusing to me that the book has been in my head since waking this morning, though I also understand why. For weeks, or even months, I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor to explain a very strange process of which I’ve become increasingly convinced, yet don’t really know how to describe. And that’s what fiction is for, anyway, especially speculative fiction. In such works, we can suspend just enough of the everyday rules that govern our current understanding of the world to try out another understanding in an inconsequential way. Such fiction lets us play with other recognitions, but also allows us to put them aside — if we need — once we’ve finished with the work.

The premise of Pastwatch is admittedly brilliant, since Card himself — despite his heavy-handed moralizing in many of his works — is also quite brilliant. In a not-too-distant future, during a period of inevitable environmental and civilizational collapse, a scientist with a historical research organization — “Pastwatch” — that has found a way to directly observe past events makes an accidental discovery. Though believing the past was unalterable, and thus their technology was only capable of observation, the researcher is surprised to find that a Peruvian shaman in the past senses her presence.

The goal of the research organization was to learn precisely where it was that humanity had gone wrong, and what event precisely had triggered their current state of calamity. They become convinced that the turning point was actually a person, Christopher Columbus, and they become particularly obsessed with the moment Columbus has a vision telling him to sail west, rather than east. Observing that moment repeatedly, they notice that Columbus is interacting with figures whom they cannot see. Adjusting their technology slightly, however, they then realize — to their initial disbelief — that someone is actually speaking to him.

It turns out that this is not the first iteration of Pastwatch, nor of the future. In a previous timeline, a world even more catastrophic had unfolded. Instead of colonizing the Americas, European powers had tried to conquer the Muslim world. Failing, and left deeply weakened, Europe was then conquered by a successor empire to the Aztecs, the Tlaxcalan, resulting in blood-soaked ziggurats raised in every European city and the industrialization of human sacrifice. To change that future, the previous Pastwatch researchers had convinced Columbus to sail across the Atlantic, thus weakening the Aztecs and the Tlaxcalan. This prevented one horrible outcome, but then resulted in another.

In the end, the researchers use the same technology to create a third future, one which results both in the end of human sacrifice and also a less destructive industrial revolution, while scattering information throughout history that would explain to any third iteration of Pastwatch what they had done and why.

In crafting the book, Orson Scott Card plays with a belief core to the founding of Mormonism. Its founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have encountered an angel named Moroni, a figure who was in life a warrior from the lost tribes of Judah but became, in death, the guiding angel of the Americas. According to the Mormon cosmology, it was Moroni who buried and then later revealed to Joseph Smith the golden plates upon which the Book of Mormon was written. Later beliefs expanded Moroni’s role in history: he is said to be one of the angels John of Patmos described in the Book of the Revelation, and is also said to have guided Columbus to the Americas.

Longtime readers will note with me that this is the very first time in my more than ten years of public writing that I’ve ever even mentioned the Mormons. This surprises me as much as having Card’s book in my head this morning.

My long silence on that matter isn’t because I’ve ever considered Mormonism inconsequential. There are at least 16 million Mormons in the world, and they’ve a rather oversized effect both on American politics and also on the matter of genealogical research. On that latter effect, it’s particularly worth noting that the vast majority of online databases (such as Ancestry.com) were started by Mormons, and the Church of Latter Day Saints built and maintains the largest nuclear-safe underground vault of genealogical records in the world.

Their religious obsession with genealogy is particularly fascinating, as ancestral veneration is otherwise completely absent within Protestant Christianity. Instead, Mormons seem to take Catholic and Orthodox practices of praying for the dead to an extreme level, believing that retroactive baptism ensures an ancestor will join the believer in paradise as part of their eternal family.

More curious to me and more relevant to my work, however, are two obscure occult influences from the 16th century that I’ve yet to see anyone else take up. The first is something I discussed briefly in a previous installment of this series, that of a Portuguese rabbi’s belief that ancient Jews had dispersed throughout the world:

Menasseh Ben Israel is probably best known as Baruch Spinoza’s teacher. He was also a fanatic believer that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were likely the “lost tribes of Judah,” an idea picked up again by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.

The mythic belief about the lost tribes is tied to the medieval belief in Prester John, a Solomonic figure said to be a Christian king and priest of either India, Ethiopia, or some unidentified exotic land, depending on which version of the story was current. Said to have been a spiritual descendant of Thomas (the “doubting Apostle”) and to rule over a rich Christian kingdom, Prester John became a pastiche of myths, a container for whatever great hope European Christians most needed.

In the 16th century, flushed from the wild tales of gold and strange peoples in the Americas, Spanish and Portuguese Catholics became increasingly obsessed with the belief they’d discovered a mythic kingdom. Early accounts of the vast riches and the complex religious ceremonies of indigenous Americans inspired all manner of wild speculation. Considered in the context of bloody religious strife in Europe, with the Catholic’s power waning and the Calvinist influence increasing, it’s easy to see how the symbol of Prester John — a powerful Christian king whose lands prospered under his leadership — would have held such attraction.

The belief that the conquerors of the Americas had actually discovered the remnants (or outskirts) of Prester John’s kingdom is what then inspired Baruch Spinoza’s teacher, Menasseh Ben Israel, to conclude that the indigenous Americans were lost Jews. This happened because so much of Prester John’s myth was bound up with the mythic elements of Solomon (witness, for example, that a “King David of India” was said to be one of Prester John’s descendants). Also, Solomonic grimoires — magic books purporting to have originated with Solomon or to reproduce the magic he used — were the primary occult texts in circulation among both Jewish and Christian kabbalists at that time. In such a mythic environment, it’s not difficult to see how Ben Israel was convinced about the Jewish origins of indigenous Americans.

I elaborated on the strange relationship between Zionism, Jewish kabbalistic teachings and Calvinism in my previous essay. Calvinist belief in the “elect” and kabbalist teachings about the Jews’ special role in “repairing the world” meshed seamlessly together in Puritan fanaticism and the attempt to build a “New Jerusalem” in North America. These ideas were re-iterated by subsequent generations of Puritan and other Protestant American theologians so frequently that it would have been impossible that Joseph Smith could have not heard of them.

This, then, explains one of the two peculiar occult features of the Mormon cosmology and its founding. That’s the belief that a “lost tribe” of Jews had emigrated to the Americas and then, according to the Book of Mormon, later received the gospel from Jesus during the forty days after his resurrection but before his ascension to heaven. That is, we don’t need to postulate some other explanation for as to how this belief arose within Mormonism, since we can trace its historical origins back to Prester John and Jewish-Calvinist belief in the lost tribes.

Where things get more difficult to explain is the matter of the angel Moroni, and how it was that Joseph Smith used a Solomonic scrying method to find and then translate the Book of Mormon.