Joseph Smith And The Galactic Order

Extraterrestrials in American religion

Celestial spaceship brings the prophet Joseph Smith to visit ancient Egypt: AI

Within the cosmology of literalist Latter Day Saints, “Heaven or the Celestial Kingdom is seen as a real place which exists in time and space,” Lynn M. Hilton writes.¹ “It consists of gigantic stars, (kolob plus others) at the center, each radiating with great energy and power” at the center of our galaxy. This “celestial zone,” a sphere at the center of our galaxy, is occluded from direct visual observation by a “veil” of interstellar dust. Our living goddess earth, which “has a spirit, can talk and can keep God’s commandments and will finally be exalted in the Celestial Kingdom,” was spun free from the kobol star at the center of this celestial zone hundreds of thousands of years ago. Earth then passed through the telestial zone, across another obscuring band of interstellar dust, into the terrestrial zone, where we abide today. Each of these three zones has its own associated heavenly realm. Outside the galaxy is the frozen hell of planets where evildoers are punished by devils for the sins they committed in terrestrial life.

The Kolob Theorem: A Mormon’s View of the Starry Universe does not mention Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist-turned-prophet whose voluminous works prefigured the three-tiered heaven of Joseph Smith. Swedenborg is nevertheless present in Hilton’s text. Knowingly or unknowingly, he restates Swedenborg’s Doctrine of Correspondences: “Things on this earth are patterned after, or even descended from, heavenly originals, and we can understand heaven in part by studying this earth,” Hilton explains. Swedenborg was in turn restating the motto of modern Hermeticism: “as below, so above, as above, so below.” Hilton, like the legendary Johnny ‘Appleseed’ Chapman before him, is an earnest believer in Christ who is wholly unconcious that he is transmitting ideas originating in occultism.

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“There never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds and when men were not passing through the same ordeals that we are now passing through,” Brigham Young asserted in the Deseret News during 1859. By then, the New Church had declined, but the new American religions were using revised visions of Swedenborg’s ‘modern heaven,’ which was filled with peoples living on planets. Hilton nevertheless ascribes the origin of this cosmology to a unique, divine inspiration. “The Prophet Joseph Smith had a clear understanding of God’s Universe. He described it in astonishing detail in the 1840s AD,” Hilton believes. During 1832, Smith and Sidney Rigdon, his principle scribe, “asked the Lord the meaning of John 5:29, concerning the resurrection of the just and unjust. The answer from the Lord is now recorded in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76, as the vision of the three degrees of glory,” i.e. the three different heavens and associated afterlives.

However, Mormon historian Lucy Mack Smith has established that Rigdon was exposed to Swedenborg before he ever met Joseph Smith. Historian Michael Quinn has likewise established that Swedenborg’s translated books and pamphlets were widely available around Palmyra, New York, where Smith lived when he received his first revelation. Smith was known to fraternize with other followers of Swedenbrog who converted to his new faith. Smith even directly mentioned Swedenborg in an 1839 conversation with Edward Hunter at his National Seminary in Philadelphia. The doctrines of Swedenborg’s ‘New Church’, including his idea that people live on other planets, were therefore already as American as apple pie. Like any prophet, Smith simply drew from the cultural material around him at the time, a spiritual phenomenon called bricolage. His American audience had expectations to fulfill if he was to succeed as a prophet.