When Antoine Lavoisier articulated his theory of combustion, the entire intellectual apparatus of phlogiston theory was resolved into a tissue of misguided falsehood overnight. Likewise, it is the present writer's contention that the (re-)discovery of rigorous symbology eradicates the distinction between these two modes, or rather, that it subsumes them both within a larger circumscription of general nonsense and sophistry. these terms represent epiphenomenal deviations whose significance is only self-evident from the deluded perspective of the modern subject and whose essence...consists solely in this, that each is solely through the other, and what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it is the other."
Indeed. The words of another famous Continental are apropos here as well: Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked in his little-known and now out-of-print Autour du Vrai Symbologie, "The ubiquitous and reverberating occurrence of these very simple transformations [transformations tout simple] cannot but provoke us to listen for the insistent voice of a singler, simpler voice which speaks to us in the language of unity through the hallucination of diversity." [auth. trans.]
I enthusiastically second However, like Lavoisier, we must first properly situate the the profusion of discourse which has arisen in the modern era in order to approach the proper object of symbology.
Therefore, the present writer intends two brief interventions here: first, to illustrate the interdigitated incoherence of etic and emic readings of The Book of Abraham, one of Smith's mature works; second, to demonstrate that the text resolves itself, without any interpretation, as a symbological masterpiece in the absence of this intellectual agon.
The Book of Abraham is a component of the Pearl of Great Price which Joseph Smith described as "a translation of some ancient records, which have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt". These "records" were a series of papyri Smith purchased from a travelling exhibitionist in 1835. The Book itself consists of three "fascimiles", reproductions of papyrus paintings, and a "translation" of the text of the papyri. The fascimiles are reproduced below, although they will not be treated extensively in the following analysis since it is considered that their interpretation is self-evident.
Academic Egyptologists and historians of religion have criticized the work on the grounds that no conventionally possible reading of the papyri is compatible with Joseph Smith's translation; that it is reliably datable to the Ptolemaic period, (1400 years after the death of its alleged author,); and that it is easily and obviously comparable in every particular to a well-studied genre of funerary document, to which it clearly belongs.
Mormon academics counter that the book contains themes derived from extra-biblical sources contemporary with Abraham of which Smith could not have been aware, and that the fragments of the papyri which remain are partial, and seize on differences in the surviving papyrus fragments from other, similar Egyptian documents for which no revelatory provenance is claimed.
It should be immediately obvious at this point that both schools of recrimination proceed from the same premise, i.e. that Joseph Smith set out to produce a translation, (conventionally understood,) of a document in a foreign language in addition to a referential description of some associated imagery. The only difference is that one side claims he failed through ignorance and the other that he succeeded through divine inspiration.
There is little substantiation in Smith's life or work, however, for either view. Smith never claimed to be producing the kind of translation for which his champions laud and his detractors villify him. He may have used words like "translation" and "alphabet", but his explicitly and repeatedly described method of textual production was direct intuition by means of magical objects - initially a stone in a hat, and subsequently the famous "Urim and Thummim", generally understood to consist of a breastplate with an attached pair of spectacles.Symbology, simply stated, is the intuition of primal meanings associated with definite referents through synchronic speculation. Symbols are bound to one another by distinct and immutable associations, inherent in their remotest history, which in turn are absolutely faithful to their referents, which are single, definite and physical. Chains of symbols are unidirectional, and lead only to broad statements of primal wisdom which are entirely immanent in the symbologist; they are merely articulated by symbolosis, and their articulation is always rendered superfluous by their immanence and profundity. All symbology is anamnesis. Symbology is therefore constitutively (and solely) productive of what I have elsewhere called "strong irrelevance", and others have termed, less flatteringly, "The Flagrant Cop-Out".
Viewed in this context, the Book of Abraham is quite obviously a work of symbological propaedeusis.
It is symbological because, in terms both of form and content, it is exclusively constructed using elements which have already been identified as essential features of symbology, both in the précis above and elsewhere. In the interests of brevity, a few illustrations of this are offered, although many more suggest themselves.1) The slippage to the referent: this is clearly embodied in 1:31.
But the records of the fathers, even the patriarchs, concerning the right of the Priesthood, the Lord my God preserved in mine own hadns; therefore a knowledge of the beginning of the creation, and also of the planets, and of the stars, as they were made known unto the fathers, have I kept unto this day.
The slippage to the referent is likewise clearly represented in 3:6-9, where the Lord describes the amplification of "reckonings of time" from that of the earth, which is the most ephemeral, to that of Kolob, the star closest to God, where it is tantamount to or at least asymptotically approaches eternity. It is also unmistakeable in the genealogy of Ham (it has already been shown elsewhere that the symbological emphasis on genealogy generally and royal bloodlines in particular is merely an anthropic tendency of the slippage to the referent) described in 1:21-24, which explains why the "race of Ham preserved the curse in the land".
2) Repetition: viz. "And it came to pass", “The god of Elkenah, and the god of Libnah, and the god of Mahmackrah, and the god of Korash, and the god of Pharoah, king of Egypt”, and the insistent repetition of “I, Abraham”, (all passim.) Smith is often crudely lambasted for his use of this core feature of symbological narrative. As Langdon says, however, "If one pentacle is good, two is better." (DVC 63).
3) Epistemological homogeneity: None of the knowledge imparted to Abraham is of an even remotely subversive character with respect to his prior epistemological position. This is the necessary character of symbolosis, since it refers by means of univalent relations to symbols which sufficiently represent existent (although often "lost") physical referents. This is most clearly demonstrated in the celestial vocabulary lesson he receives in 3:13:
This is Shinehah, which is the sun. And he said unto me: Olea, which is the moon. And he said unto me: Kokaubeam, which signifies stars, or all the great lights, which were in the firmament of heaven.
This is simply a list of synonyms which apparently enjoy one-to-one correspondence.
4) Orthognosis = transparent intuition + antiquity: Abraham is only able to interpret the above mentioned "Records of the fathers" by means of the Urim and Thummim. That is to say, he stands in exactly the same synchronic and unmediated relationship to absolutely primal knowledge as Smith does to his text. They are coeval and interchangeable qua intuitors.
The Book of Abraham is propaedeutic, as, one might argue, are all works of symbology, because of its strong irrelevance. If we examine its content, the ostensible symbolic meat of the work, what do we find? Smith offers us a briefly novel biographical vignette about Abraham which is essentially a re-phrasing of the story of Isaac. This is followed by a description of the progression of orders of time and intelligence towards the godhead, which is clearly, as has already been pointed out, a formal demonstration of the slippage to the referent. The work then concludes with a recitation of the Hexaemeron, which is faithful to that narrated in the King James Bible except in that the deity is described in the plural - which, as has been widely pointed out, it is in the original Hebrew text. The revelations received, therefore, give the illusion of travelling down a chain of esoteric signification which simply ends in an unregenerate recapitulation of the basic cosmological data already well-known to Smith's (or any Western) audience. By this turn to strong irrelevance, Smith indicates that behind the veil of tacit antique wisdom lie the comfortable fundaments of the symbologist's original position. The Book of Moses, then, constitutes a chrestomathy of techniques for symbological orthognosis.
This observation is formally applicable to Smith's entire ouevre, which is best interpreted as on the whole a set of heuristics for the maintenance of orthognosis. This brief reflection has left much ground un-tilled, which represents fertile soil for future research; for instance, the LDS' obsession with genealogy and the dogged insistence by Mormon ancient historians, in the face of near-universal derision and approbation, on a rigorously unreflective archaeology.
Two conclusions, however, seem to spring naturally from this limited study.
First, the protracted and acrimonious debate between LDS historians and historians of the LDS movement must be abandoned immediately by both sides in favor of a close re-reading of the Book of Abraham at least and probably the entire corpus of LDS scripture in the light of The Da Vinci Code, The Gaudi Key, Pyramid, and possibly Kingdom, in addition to the secondary work already produced by contributors to this forum. Second, anyone looking to better their material and spiritual lot in this world should undoubtedly throw their full financial and intellectual weight solidly behind BYU's archaeology department, and buy stock in Central American tourism companies.
Dr. Benway is a pseudonym of Convivia Cohen-Bar Shepsut, SLG. Sister Cohen-Bar Shepsut is a Visiting Reader in Applied Inorganic Symbology at the University of Tunbridge Wells (llc), and chairs the Concerned Englishwomen's Committee for the Restitution of Pharaonic Rule in the Nile Delta.
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