Visions in a Seer Stone

Joseph Smith’s creation of the Book of Mormon has confounded explanation ever since its publication. How did the young man come up with a 270,000-word tome about ancient American civilizations, supposedly a translation of “gold plates” found on a hillside, over just three months in 1829? In Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon, performance studies scholar William L. Davis approaches this question from a fresh perspective, beginning with the observation that the fact that Smith orally delivered the text, which was recorded by scribes, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Davis reframes the Book of Mormon in terms of its qualities as a spoken performance to demonstrate how it received its shape and conditions of possibility from the oral cultures of the early-19^th-century United States. 

Among the various forms of orality in the early republic, Davis homes in on “sermon culture,” especially the semi-extemporaneous preaching typical of the revivals that burned through upstate New York in the 1820s. Not only would Smith have been familiar with this style of preaching; Davis argues that Smith received formal training in it as well. The evidence is supplied by one Orasmus Turner, who recalled in his 1851 local history textbook that Smith had become a “very passable exhorter in evening meetings” after “catching a spark of Methodism in a camp meeting” (36). An exhorter was the word for a layperson undergoing preparations to become a preacher. Though Smith stopped short of joining the Methodists, as an exhorter he would have attended a Methodist probational class over several months, where he would have learned to deliver religious speech, at length, without reading from a script. This was precisely the skill that served Smith in his oral performance of the Book of Mormon. 

The exhorters’ central technique was what was called “laying down heads.” The speaker would prepare and sometimes memorize a preliminary outline or set of heads, with each head referring to a topic to be covered. The exhorter would move through his outline, starting each section of speech with the head and then elaborating on it. Davis builds a convincing case for how Smith’s knowledge of this technique explains how he could have spoken the text of the Book of Mormon over three months. To wit, it was not a spontaneous performance. Though some scholars have assumed that Smith understood himself as translating the gold plates in an extemporaneous manner—as if he was giving an on-the-spot recounting of the visions he saw in his seer stone—Davis shows that it is more likely that Smith had already mentally prepared his heads and their organizational structure before the performative event of translation. The resulting text thus interweaved parts that were planned with parts that were impromptu. Smith may have worked on an outline for years leading up to the actual dictation process. He may well have understood the seer stone to have guided his fleshing out of the details. Additionally, Davis makes a plausible case that, contrary to common scholarly views on the translation process, Smith could have been consulting notes to help the story along.

In addition to marshalling evidence from cultural history, Davis equally is a close critical reader of textual evidence contained in the Book of Mormon itself. In analyzing a passage in which Mormon delivers a sermon (Mormon 7:1-48), for instance, Davis identifies a clear pattern of laying heads, specifically a classic example of the “doctrine and use pattern” common in contemporaneous sermon cultures (102). This particular textual formula was constituted by four parts: an invocation of a text or a doctrine; an elaboration on that text with gospel principles; several subtopics, each of which is discussed in turn; and finally a section that exhorts readers to apply the teachings. Davis performs similar textual analysis on several of Smith’s other orally delivered works as well, beyond just the Book of Mormon, establishing that the laying-down-heads technique recurs across Smith’s intellectual productions. The author’s nimbleness in the interpretation of different scales of evidence—from wide-angled cultural context to fine-grained textual arrangements—is particularly impressive.

Visions in a Seer Stone, the winner of the Smith-Pettit Best Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association and a finalist for the Award for Excellence in Textual Studies at the American Academy of Religion, shines new light on an elusive topic. Though there will always be more questions than definitive answers when examining evanescent occurrences like habits of thought and acts of speech, Davis provides persuasive evidence for the centrality of oral cultures in the production and shaping of the Book of Mormon. His book will be useful not only within Mormon studies, but for scholars of religion interested in early American cultures of orality, the relationship between process and text, and the mechanics of religious imagination.  

Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor of American religious history at Florida State University. 

Sonia Hazard

Date Of Review:

July 29, 2022