Missouri: A Mighty Shout of Joy

ROUGH DRAFT ONLY: PAGES STILL TO BE ADDED Around 1991 I drafted for my own "profit and learning" a number of exploratory essays about the Prophet Joseph Smith. Truman G. Madsen and Hugh Nibley both indulged me in reading what follows, a fragmentary but imaginative thematic and symbolic recapturing of the Missouri persecutions, so I now make what Brother Madsen was wont to call "a few cosmetic changes" and invite the indulgence of any who might choose to reflect on

Missouri: A Mighty Shout of Joy


For the Latter-day Saints in Missouri, the last week of October 1838 was a plunge into the vortex of darkness. Parley P. Pratt records the impatient burnings of the hours just preceding the Battle of Crooked River:

The night was dark, the distant plains far and wide were illuminated by blazing fires, immense columns of smoke were seen rising in awful majesty, as the world was on fire. The thousand meteors, blazing in the distance like the camp-fires of some war host, threw a fitful gleam of light upon the distant sky, which many might have mistaken for the Aurora Borealis. this scene, added to the silence of midnight, the rumbling sound of the tramping steeds over the hard and dried surface of the plain, the clanking of swords in their scabbards, the occasional gleam of bright armor in the flickering firelight, the gloom of surrounding darkness, and the unknown destiny of the expedition, or even of the [abducted] people who sent it forth; all combined to impress the mind with deep and solemn thoughts (Autobiography, 178).

It is a picture of elemental chaos--Missouri unreal: "The banks of Shoal creek on either side teemed with children sporting and playing. . . The weather was very pleasant, the sun shone clear, all was tranquil." On this bright afternoon of the 30th of October descended the harvest sun of Haun's Mill, with its buzzing, angry mob. Children and mothers scattered to the woods, while "the bullets cut down the bushes on all sides of us," remembered Amanda Smith. "One girl was wounded by my side, and fell over a log, and her clothes hung across the log; and they shot at them expecting they were hitting her; and our people afterwards cut out of that log twenty bullets (Amanda Smith, HC III, 323-325). Three "little boys crept under the bellows in the shop" to escape death. Upon discovery, one was killed instantly. Another, shot three times, lived for a month, while the third, eight-year old Adam Smith, wounded severely "feigned himself dead, and lay perfectly still, till he heard his mother call him after dark (III, 187). Joseph Young secreted himself "in a thicket of bushes, where I lay till eight o'clock in the evening, at which time I heard a female voice calling my name" (III, 185). The survivors clung together throughout "the painful night in deep and awful reflections" (III, 185). Thereafter, the dead "were thrown into a dry well and covered with dirt" (III, 324).

The thunderheads hit Far West a day later. Mosiah Hancock, four-and-a-half, witnessed the slaughter of an infant wrested from its mother and the multiple violations of an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl. He himself was beaten to death: "I could look upon my body, and I was far above them and was glad; for behold, I saw a personage draped in perfect white who said to me, 'Mosiah, you have got to go back to the earth, for you have a work to do'" (The Life Story of Mosiah Lyman Hancock). In one place, women and children, separated from the men, huddled in prayer in the face of a threatened attack at dawn, and looked to the heavens.

It is the faith of the mothers of Missouri that transcends the tale of persecution with a show of power:

Brother Joseph Holbrook was literally hacked to pieces [at Crooked River], and he was brought to our home about the first of April. My mother nursed him for about three months. He had to remain in the hay loft all this time until he was able to get out of the state. One evening, old Sam Bogart [the mob-king] and two other men came hunting him. He was hid in the hay loft covered with flax. . . I cannot attempt to describe my feelings as I stood on the floor in front of the fire while those three dark figures stood outside our door. I felt sure my mother would get one of them even if they killed my father. I shudder to think of these dark times (Mosiah Hancock).

*The mothers of Zion shielded "Brother Joseph," whether Joseph Smith or Joseph Holbrook, with their very lives.

The stories eerily repeat themselves: thickets and lofts, fires, the quietly calling voices of women stirring to life men feigning death, the dark figures of men and horses engulfed in the broad Missouri night. And horrible was the passage "within" that night:

When my guard conducted me to the door of this miserable cell it grated on its huge hinges and opened like the pit yawning to receive me; a volume of thick smoke issued forth and seemed to forbid my entrance; but urged in my rear by bayonets and loaded pistols in the hands of savage beings, I endeavored to enter, but war forced to retreat again outside of the door to breathe for a moment the free air. At this instant several pistols were cocked and presented at my head and breast, with terrible threats and oaths of instant death if I did not go in again. I told them to fire as soon as they pleased, for I must breathe a moment or die in the attempt. After standing a few moments, I again entered the prison and threw myself down, my face to the floor, to avoid the smoke. Here I remained for some time, partly in a state of insensibility; my heart sickened within me, and a deathlike feeling came over me, from which I did not wholly recover for several days (Autobiography, 233-234).


In Far West Joseph Smith was betrayed and taken prisoner, with several of his friends, on October 31, and sold to the justice of a mad carnival. Men daubed with red paint masqueraded savagely, and the prisoners on the road to their "mock court" were exhibited like dethroned authorities to the gaping inhabitants of Vanity Fair. The prisoners were placed in a covered wagon bound for trial and execution at Independence. Lucy Smith came to kiss her sons goodbye:

The man who led us through the crowd spoke to Hyrum, who was sitting in front, and, telling him that his mother had come to see him, requested that he should reach his hand to me. He did so, but I was not allowed to see him; the cover was of strong cloth, and nailed down so close that he could hardly get his hand through (HC III, 195).

Hyrum Smith later spoke of men, women, and children bound to trees, whipped, and left to hunger, and, then, "to gnaw the bark from the trees" (III, 404-424). Joseph and his associates, chained together in a dungeon were offered human flesh, while poison was administered to them in tea. "I escaped unhurt," said Alexander McRae, "while all who did [drink] were sorely afflicted, some being blind two or three days" (III, 258). Hyrum, who was poisoned several times, remembered the prisoners lying "two or three days in a torpid, stupid state, not even caring or wishing for life." Of the prison into which another Joseph was placed: "Ramban explains it as an underground dungeon with an overhead opening through which they lowered the prisoners and through which the prisoners had light." The word for "dungeon" was explained by Ramban as having reference to "the faint light that percolated into the dungeon."

Liberty Jail had its opening though which they lowered the prisoners. Old photographs of the jail show it to be a solid box of pain.

Another victim of the hospitality of Egypt was the hero of the Hymn of the Pearl, who was detected as a foreigner and fed "a mixture of cunning and treachery." The prince "sank into deep sleep under the heaviness of their food." "Deep sleep" is a a fair description of the long bondage during the Missouri winter of 1838-1839. Indeed, the descent into Missouri is reminiscent of much else: the widespread patterns of initiatory rites in which cabins, caves, forests, and dungeons are symbolic of death. According to Mircea Eliade, "Such ritual represents a return to the womb of earth, to the embryonic state." It is a return to the Guph--the inchoate atmosphere of the Chamber of Creation in Jewish thought--and to the preexisting night. To enter Missouri is to confront the cataclysm and to be ground inexorably to a fine dust.

Joseph, in the midst of that long Winter, calls upon the Master of the elements, the Lord of the Apocalypse: "O Lord God Almighty, Maker of heaven, earth, and seas (see Rev. 14:7). . . who controllest and subjectest the devil, and the dark and benighted dominion of Sheol." Joseph has descended through the elemental storms into Sheol, the silent house of death.

In that stillness "the voice of inspiration steals along and whispers:

and if thou shouldest be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness; and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all; if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than He?

The whisper of the Spirit increases to a violent pitch with the anaphoric if, then leads to a most surprising conclusion: the gentle rebuke of the Lord. God responds to Joseph in the Stormwind exactly as He answers Job, by showing him a picture of the natural world as an hierarchy of harsh realities. At the bottom lurks Leviathan, or "Old Pharaoh, King Devil of Mobocrats," as Joseph Smith calls this aquatic monster (WPJS 122; Book of Abraham, Facsimile 1, Figure 9). In this atmosphere of upheaval, attended by thunderings, lightnings, tempest, fire, smoke, vapor of darkness, and the opening of the earth, even the very "God of nature suffers" (1 Nephi 19:11-12).

The King of Nature, who has descended below all, challenges His disciples with an incisive question: "Are ye able to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with" (see Matthew 20:22)? The challenge resonates with the Christian imagery of baptism as tomb and womb: as both ritual extinguishment and the recovery of prenatal innocence (see Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery--the whole book). The sullen tomb into which Joseph had fallen was such a sign in imitatio Christi.

Entrance into a baptism of this type invites the revelation of sacred teachings, especially the key to the hearts of the fathers. In his Letter from Liberty Jail, Joseph laments that the "plan of the devil" has robbed him heretofore of the "opportunity to give [the saints] the plan that God has revealed to me." Nevertheless, "trials will only give us the knowledge necessary to understand the minds of the ancients. For my part, I think I never could have felt as I now do, if I had not suffered the wrongs that I have suffered." In order to obtain the knowledge of the fathers, and to understand their minds, there must be first a sum pathos--all must experience the same cup (again Matthew 20:22).

Of John Lathrop, Joseph's first American progenitor, and like Joseph, the pastor of a persecuted band, we read: "On April 29, 1632, the meetings were raided by a band of ruffians representing the Church of England, and he was imprisoned in the Old Clink Prison in Newgate, where he was held until 1634, when according to the record, he somehow escaped from Newgate prison" (E.B. Huntington; Newgate recalls the trial of Jeremiah at the Temple). From Newgate Lathrop fled to Massachusetts. We also recall John Bunyan's twelve years in prison, anguishing over the nurture of his blind daughter, his dreams of drowning, his passage to Paradise (see Jack Lindsay, John Bunyan: Maker of Myths).

Joseph clung to the consolation "that the ancients will not have whereof to boast over us in the day of judgment, as being called to pass through heavier afflictions; they we may hold an even weight in the balance with them." And in a letter to his wife, he writes, "I feel like Joseph in Egypt." (see Elder Neal A. Maxwell). Like ancient Joseph, the Prophet is strengthened by a constant flow of revelation as the dungeon is converted into "a nourishing womb in which he is engendered anew. The symbols of initiatory death and rebirth are complementary" (Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, 37).

The imagery of his dreams reveals that the experiences of Liberty clustered about Joseph to the last night of his life (HC VI, 393-394). Those dreams were informed with both horror and enlightenment:

I dreamed last night that I was swimming in a river of pure water, clear as crystal, over a shoal of fish of the largest size I ever saw. They were directly under my belly. I was astonished, and felt afraid that they might drown me or do me injury (HC V, 306).


Another nightmare presents his enemies as snakes wrapped in battle, as he rides past unharmed toward the prairie, an open and forbidding landscape:

On arriving at the prairie, I was overtaken and seized by William and Wilson Law and others, saying, 'Ah! ah! we have got you at last! We will secure you and put you in a safe place!' and, without any ceremony dragged me out of my carriage, tied my hands behind me, and threw me into a deep, dry pit. (William Law had been Joseph's Counselor in the First Presidency).

After a horrible scene of his enemies being devoured by "ferocious wild beasts" (a neat reversal of the story of Joseph, who is represented by his brothers as having been slain by a lion), Joseph is visited by his guide or guardian angel. "Joseph, Joseph," he calls, "What are you doing there? I replied, 'My enemies fell upon me, bound me and threw me in.' He then took me by the hand, and drew me out of the pit, set me free, and we went away rejoicing" (HC VI, 461-462).

The dream recalls the visitation of Adam by his angelic guide in an old Mandaean text:

I have come and will instruct thee, Adam, and release thee out of this world. Hearken and hear and be instructed, and rise up victorious to the place of light *Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, 130).

This visitation reminds one forcibly of a vision about David Patten, who was slain at Crooked River, Missouri. In the dream Elder Patten descends as an apostle of light to preach baptism and deliverance from death to the faithful ministers of Christendom and their families, men like Lathrop and Bunyan (Ann Booth, Wilford Woodruff Journals, July 2, 1840).

The idea of the rescuing message or messenger also recalls the prince in the Hymn of the Pearl, who is sent down to Egypt to recover "the one pearl, which resides there near the ravenous dragon," or serpent. Once in Egypt, he forgets his purpose until he receives an encouraging letter from home which inspires him to finish his mission.

Joseph Smith identified the pearl of great price with "the inheritance prepared for the saints" or the "place of Zion" in Missouri.

The pearl is the even shetiyah, the foundation stone of the "place of Zion," which in Jewish though is the first creation "from which the rest of the earth sprang forth." Joseph, too, represents a sure foundation, a pure stone, tested in the rivers of fire.

From jail he writes a letter to the homeless saints, whose makeshift dwellings of the Mississippi reflect a painful reversal of the festival of Succoth. This letter takes up the theme of the chaos of the elements. It speaks of the devastation of "mountain torrents" which strew the streams with filth, and which are a representation of a hell of "ignorance" and "bigotry" pouring "forth its rage like the burning lava of mount Vesuvius."

By way of contrast and of fulfillment is the mighty Missouri, which in its eternally self-purifying roll is as God Himself "moving in His majesty and power," and is an awesome reflection of the the wisdom and glory of "the Maker of Heaven, Earth, Seas, and the Fountains of Water." The Missouri moving with state in "its decreed course" represents the rule and order of God amidst the play of nature. Joseph compares its majestic flow with the "knowledge from heaven" which pours down upon the heads of the Saints from the throne of God and the Lamb. This current of revelation involves knowledge about the heavens to inform the Saints of the "bounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars--all the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all their glories, laws, and set times." The passage through the deep involves a new creation of heaven and earth, as the initiate, like a pearl sheltered from the violence of cosmic disaster, is recovered from death into light.

The Letter from Liberty Jail with its picture of "burning mountains," winter torrents, avid lightnings, and "fierce tigers" is balanced by a sense of an everlasting and on-going order. To be swept by the maelstrom into "the lowest consideration of the darkest abyss," is vital for the revelation of the root of the matter, upon which the mind may work to "considerations of eternal expanse," as in the case of Job. Nevertheless, a recurring theme in Joseph's letters from Liberty Jail is that the watery expanse must be traversed with steadiness. In this imagery one senses a longing for the buoyancy and the freedom of the sail The last stage of Joseph's flight into freedom, cloaked in disguise, was the ferry over the Mississippi.

"Who can tell what high rank should be given to man? He crosses the sea, he penetrates the heavens with his thought and understands the movement of the stars" (Nemesius; This is the "baptismal voyage," Hugo Rahner, 343). The crossing is equated with the revelation of the hierarchies of the heavenly kingdoms and the eternal possibilities of man.

Joseph Smith is Everyman and has his likeness in every nation and culture, even as he binds them into one heart and family. In India, for instance, the "fathers" celebrated the rajasuya, the enthronement ceremony which involved "the future sovereign's reversion to the embryonic state, his gestation for a year, and his mystical rebirth as Cosmoscrator, identified with Prajapati (the All God) and the Cosmos. When he is anointed he stands on the throne, arms lifted; his incarnating the cosmic axis fixed in the navel of the eartth (that is, the throne, the Center of the World) and touching the heavens. The aspersion is connected with the water that come down from the heavens. . . to fertilize the earth." So, too, the Jews, in their keen study of the trials of the Patriarchs of the race, have sketched out a path to glory. The Jewish exegetes, commenting on the semantic resemblance between "trial" nisayon and "banner" nes, have observed of the Fathers.


Joseph's Letter from Liberty contains "only hints of things which existed in the prophet's mind, [things] which are not written concerning eternal glory (see WPJS, 205. Yet the Letter packs the fullness of Nauvoo within its pages: "We are called to hold the keys of the mysteries of those things that have been kept hid from the foundation of the world until now."

The Zohar reveals Joseph in Egypt as the berith shalom, "the Covenant of Peace" and as "the Righteous Foundation," the yosid. Given this identification, the prophecy of Isaiah 54 has at its heart a direct referecne to the preparations of Joseph in the crucible of Missouri:



For the mountains shall depart, and

The Church of Jesus Christ, in its infancy, passed through two seasons of persecution in Missouri, but all this was only a preparation for the blessings of two temples
So, too, the Missouri persecutions are a dark echo of response to the brilliance of
the seal of its witness. God reveals Himself to imprisoned Joseph in the storm, and as God of Battles. This, we feel, is as essential a revelation and a witness as that of the First Vision. Indeed, the passage through Missouri deepens the contemplations of the nature of God and man, as first manifest in the Revelation of the Father and the Son. The baptism of Missouri is a mighty shout of joy:

Bathing himself, in the mysterious depths he shouts mightily for joy, for water is his nourishment. He remains one and the same, yet he comes forth strengthened out of the depths, a new sun, and shines his light upon men, having been cleansed in the water (Melito of Sardis).