jns, I think people underappreciate the extent to which antebellum culture was death obsessed, although there are several good scholarly treatments in the last 20yrs addressing this point. a common term for magic in general was “necromancy” in that period, the treasure hunters quiver was filled with charms to hide from ghosts, treasure guardians were the dead attached to a point in soil, treasure in an important sense was a relic of the dead, the adena-hopewell mounds were intimately tied into the treasure quest, the cave traditions smack of royal tombs. the list goes on. I think this emphasis on the continuity of the treasure hunt neglects the continuity of the death conquest, frankly. personally i’m happy with JSJ as village seer, i like/respect him all the same, but I feel like the evidence has been pushing me toward a much greater continuity within geonecromancy than in our current views of antebellum American folk magic.

I’m afraid I’ve been like that elder before, probably on more occasions than I’d like to admit or would even be aware of at present. At least I’m in good company.

However, the middle part of the Amenemope passage is, as you note, more important. There you have the ground swallowing up ill-gotten gains. (Note that, between the Book of Mormon text, the Amenemope passage, and New England treasure culture, we have a three-way parallel in the emphasis on ill-gotten wealth. The Lindow article on Swedish treasure hunting that I cited above shows that this motif is exceedingly common in many different treasure cultures.) That makes an undeniable parallel with the Book of Mormon; the ground acts to remove ill-gotten wealth.

On the other hand, the Amenemope — Book of Mormon parallel is somewhat weaker than the Book of Mormon — New England parallel. In the Amenemope text, treasure is swallowed into the earth, and we don’t know if it subsequently moves around underground. In the Book of Mormon, treasure is deliberately buried and then starts to slip around underground to thwart someone trying to dig it up. The same is, of course, true in New England.

This isn’t a case where a definitive answer is available; as Rosalynde noted above, such parallels can be coincidental. But it’s helpful to keep in mind both options when interpreting these Book of Mormon passages: the fascinating and plausible ancient parallels that Kevin proposes, and the relatively stronger but still not definitive New England parallels.

smb, thanks for your comments. I look forward to reading your full treatment on this subject. In the meanwhile, however, let me respond to your brief summary here. I think your ideas about Joseph’s motivation to recover the voices of the dead is quite helpful, especially in thinking about the Book of Mormon project and the Kirtland period. However, it strikes me as a bit anachronistic if projected back to his pre-Book of Mormon activities as a seer. In searching for lost neighborhood property, Spanish silver mines, salt mines, and buried chests of coins, there’s little opportunity to recover lost words. Instead, the emphasis is squarely on wealth. Joseph’s self-reported initial approach to the Book of Mormon was also to emphasize the chance that it represented to get rich; the turn from the early, materialistic focus toward a focus on recovering words and ideas would seem to be a major discontinuity between Joseph’s treasure-seer period and his prophetic period proper. Your remarks suggest that you plan to deemphasize this discontinuity, which strikes me as a possible interpretive mistake.

Annegb, I agree; we’re necessarily caught up in our own cultures.

I’ll have to look forward to your book, smb. I typically follow your connections and agree with them, but here, I don’t see the adolescent Joseph conquering death, but fullfilling expectation and later searching for a measure of apotheosis or at least his exaltatation into the angelic pantheon. I really look forward to Susan Stakers treatment (but who nows when that will be done?).

I argue in my MHA 2006 presentation (and in book chapters of which the presentation was a brief summary) that in fact the treasure dig, particularly as JSJ participated in it, reflects a spirituo-cultural phenomenon I have opted to label geonecromancy, a belief in spiritual communications that are mediated by the dead, their relics, and the ground that contains them. In this view, JSJ’s primary interest all along was in recovering the voices of the dead (the BoM is fantastically explicit about this), and seerstones (which he never actually repudiated–just think about the earth purged of the dead being transformed/translated/resurrected into a giant seerstone), the treasure quest (what greater treasure/relic than the gold plates, rivalled only by the Chandler-Lebolo funeral papyri?), and the quest for the civilizations that stood behind the Indian burial mounds are all part of his passionate desire to understand and then conquer death.

This project, focused on the spiritual/human meaning underlying these activities, has for me at least been a wonderful experience of connection with JSJ and has helped me feel that I understand him better. In addition my tender affection for him has increased substantially.

I’m no psychologist, but I have felt that polemics, apologia, and feuding casuistry (though they definitely fill a role) can distract us from understanding the psychic (not in the “paranormal” sense) meaning of these experiences for the people involved.

By way of self-promotion, and with due apologies to the Blogdom, I hope to have the book manuscript done by Christmas, and I look forward to discussions about the merits of the geonecromantic perspective on early Mormonism.

On the BoM passages, I am open to JNS’s third “expansion” option, but another possibility is that the idea of slippery treasures that sink into the earth is authentically ancient. See a little piece I wrote on this subject, here.

This is not, however, to say that New England treasure hunting is irrelevant to your experience in the sandbox. Just that cultural transmissions are often polymorphous and diffuse, with many routes winding through the narrative, historical and technological wildernesses.

An interesting point. I agree that buried treasure does in fact exist on occasion. There are even laws about how to deal with it when it is found (and, for the most part, the laws seem to assign the treasure to the government).

On the other hand, with respect to early New England treasure digging, it’s not the mere act of looking for treasure that I find most interesting. Instead, it’s the mode of looking, and the circumstances surrounding the failure to locate treasure. I’m unaware of a single documented (non-fraudulent) instance in which buried treasure was actually discovered using a dowsing rod, seer stones, or visions from treasure spirits. In accounting for these practices, as well as the beliefs about how treasures moving through the earth, how they develop or are preserved underground, etc., connections with alchemical and hermetic philosophy would seem a rather more promising explanation than actual, occasional windfalls.