Posted by:
baura
(
)
Date: April 07, 2012 05:33PM
Early after my epiphany that Mormonism was bogus back in the spring of 1978, a fellow exmo that I met made the statement that "history is anti-Mormon."
I said, "you mean Mormon history?"
"No," he replied, "history."
At the time I didn't understand what he meant but as time went on and I learned how to free my mind from the Mormon way of thinking (evidenced so strongly these days by apologists) I began to see what he meant.
So today I'm watching a lecture on a "Great Courses" course on "Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations." I'm about 17 minutes into lecture 31 when the professor says the following:
"It's very interesting to note that between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 400 elaborate mortuary cults flourished over a wide area of the eastern woodlands. They were marked by a frenzy of earthwork and burial mound construction. And it is these earthworks which caused a major controversy in the 19th century.
"When the first European settlers came over to the Appalachians and the Alleghanys and started cultivating and clearing the forests in the Ohio Valley, they came across all these earthworks, and the few Indians who still survived there had no idea who had built them. And there came into being this myth of the "mound builders"--of an ancient European civilization that had built these earthworks and had created a now-vanished, highly civilized culture in the midwest, only to be wiped out by incoming Indians.
"This racist theory was very popular in the popular literature in the 19th century and it was not effectively disproven and shown that the mounds were, in fact, built by Native Americans until the very end of the nineteenth century."
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=380In other words, the basic structural story of the Book of Mormon was a "very popular" idea running around America in the early 1800s. But it was later proven false.
This "mound-builders myth" was a clear influence on another book that gets mentioned--"View of the Hebrews." In View of the Hebrews we find:
"The probability then is this; that the ten tribes, arriving in this continent with some knowledge of the arts of civilized life; finding themselves in a vast wilderness filled with the best of game, inviting them to the chase; most of them fell into a wandering idle hunting life. Different clans parted from each other, lost each other, and formed separate tribes. Most of them formed a habit of this idle mode of living, and were pleased with it. More sensible parts of this people associated together, to improve their knowledge of the arts; and probably continued thus for ages. From these the noted relics of civilization discovered in the west and south, were furnished. But the savage tribes prevailed; and in process of time their savage jealousies and rage annihilated their more civilized brethren. And thus, as a holy vindictive Providence would have it, and according to ancient denunciations, all were left in an “outcast” savage state. This accounts for their loss of the knowledge of letters, of the art of navigation, and of the use of iron. And such a loss can no more operate against their being of the ten tribes, than against their being of any other origin. Yea, we cannot so well account for their evident degeneracy in any other way, as that it took place under a vindictive Providence, as has been noted, to accomplish divine judgments denounced against the idolatrous ten tribes of Israel.
"It is highly probable that the more civilized part of the tribes of Israel, after they settled in America, became wholly separated from the hunting and savage tribes of their brethren; that the latter lost the knowledge of their having descended from the same family with themselves; that the more civilized part continued for many centuries; that tremendous wars were frequent between them and their savage brethren, till the former became extinct."
--Ethan Smith, "View of the Hebrews" 1825 edition, p. 130.
Note that in Ethan Smith's version of the mound-builders myth the "Europeans" have become Hebrews, just as Joseph Smith was to do in his version of the mound-builders myth (The Book of Mormon) later.
This is the stuff that was "in the air" in Joseph Smith's time and place when the Book of Mormon came forth.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2012 05:36PM by baura.