The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844

ISBN-13: 9780521565646 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 444 str.

John L. Brooke

Opis

Mormon religious belief has long been a mystery to outsiders, either dismissed as anomalous to the American religious tradition or extolled as the most genuine creation of the American imagination. The Refiner's Fire presents a new and comprehensive understanding of the roots of Mormon religion, whose theology promises the faithful that they will become "gods" through the restoration of ancient mysteries and regain the divine powers of Adam lost in the fall from Paradise. Professor Brooke contends that the origins of Mormonism lie in the fusion of radical religion with occult ideas, and organizes his book around the two problems of demonstrating the survival of these ideas into the nineteenth century and explaining how they were manifested in Mormon doctrine. In the concluding chapter, the author provides an outline of how Mormonism since the 1850s gradually moved toward traditional Protestant Christianity. As well as religion, the book explores magic, witchcraft, alchemy, Freemasonry, counterfeiting, and state-formation. John L. Brooke is professor of history at Tufts University and the acclaimed author of The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (CUP, 1989), which has won, among other prizes, the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History and the National Historical Society Book Prize for American History.

Recenzje

"The Refiner's Fire is an important and daring work for which Brooke has received the Bancroft Prize in American history....Combining intellectual and demographic history with rare skill, Brooke sheds great light on transatlantic subcultures that have not been labeled "occult" (read "hidden") for nothing." Religious Studies Review

Spis treści

List of illustrations; List of maps; Preface; Part I. A Prepared People: 1. Dreams of the primal Adam; 2. The true spiritual seed; 3. Something of our ancestors; Part II. Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger: 4. A Urim spiritual; 5. Alchymical experiments; 6. I was born in Sharon; Part III. The Mormon Dispensation: 7. Secret combinations and slippery treasures in the land of Zarahemla; 8. The mysteries defined; 9. Temples, wives, bogus-making and war; 10. The keys to the kingdom; 11. A tangle of strings and the kingdom of God; 12. Let mysteries alone; Appendix: the sectarian and hermetic circumstances of Mormon origins in Vermont and New York; Abbreviations used in notes; Notes; Index.