Now you’re welcome to call me paranoid but I feel like the Internet (or at any rate Google and its subsidiaries like YouTube) is becoming increasingly intent on booking me with a Mormonist missionary pair (apparently watching The Chosen doesn’t count despite all the LDS money, influence, and subliminals there), but I’m thinking the following might make Alphabet Inc. (sic) regret its persistence.

In his seminal 2012 book The Angel and the Sorcerer cultural underworld (occulture?) explorer Peter Levenda (born 1950) notes that the term Moroni originally referred (and still refers) to the preeminent city of the archipelago known as the Comoro Islands (or Comoros for short, whence perhaps Cumorah as in the fabled hill) and that furthermore it was on the coast near that city of Moroni that Captain William Kidd (1654–1701) (and only he and just this one time so far as history records even though this one instance has obviously become a central plot point in many a work of “piracy” fiction such as Treasure Island [pub. 1883]) left booty buried for later reexcavation in the Month of February in the Year of Our Lord 1697 (due in this case to his ship being—let me put it this way—as wrecked as the Santa Maria on Christmas Eve of 1492, though this didn’t stop Kidd’s being hanged in London in 1701, nine years before Swedenborg would make it over there). And so the simplest explanation for much of Joseph Smith’s (1805–1844) to most of us curious mythos is that, being the dowser (occult metal detector) that he was, young Joseph naturally looked up to men who could locate gold and that he furthermore put his skills in the area of placating (not to say mesmerizing) apprehensive customers to good use by assuring crowds of simple frontier idealists that this was all on the up and up—and moreover seemed for awhile there guaranteed a martial victory over the United States establishment of the day, Freemasonry and all! (And indeed did the “Smithites” not find enough gold to break ground for Salt Lake City? So perhaps they really did each get their own planets and were right about all the overworldly things although none of the archeological or DNA or Egyptian language or other minorly inconvenient historical details such as the hazards of their unofficially continued polygyny and inbreeding [see also the State of Israel]?)

But it was what isn’t found in Levenda’s highly accessible historical overview that made this blogger wonder if there was indeed anything original at all to Joseph Smith’s “White invader’s gospel” that wasn’t just a European knockoff that could be readily marketed to a suggestible American farmer who may not have known that the original Mormo (plural Mormones) was a classical Greek goddess or that Zeus and Hades had been brothers (being both sons of Cronus [not Chronos {🕒}]) exactly as Smith claimed Jesus and Lucifer (here apparently not meant to refer to King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon as it does in the Bible) were (being both sons of the absolute dullest [Whitest?] “Elohim” this blogger has ever heard of).

And the penultimate piece to our “Smith’s voices” puzzle comes in the form of a 1700s Swedish genius-turned-mystic dubbed Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) who can claim to have penned the first book of the dead in Western culture (Dante’s [d. 1321] Divine Comedy doesn’t purport to be real) and has furthermore been called the “Buddha of the North” (compare with the later Arthur Schopenhauer [1788–1860] the “Buddha of the West”, born exactly 100 years after Swedenborg [and 17 years before Smith]). Now most search results blogger got comparing Smith to Swedenborg seemed almost monomaniacally fixated on the point of three levels of heavenly glory (kind of like people who obsess over the Smith-Mohammad parallels), which in my readings of Swedenborg had never even occurred to me, but I have since added it to the following list (thanks Google!):

👼 SMITH’S PROPHECY THAT HAD BEEN SWEDENBORG’S FIRST 👼

• The Church has been eclipsed (both “revelators” are herefore classed as restorationists).
• I’ve been chosen to ring in this new era (with an Egyptologically definitive “age-closure”).
• Accordingly I’m printing a (oddly Freemasonry- or republic-friendly) “newer testament”.
• God does all his major works in secret (or esoterically because yay secret rituals).
• In the afterlife you keep your body and you get like one opposite-sexual partner.
• You continue to have your personality including the agency to make choices.
• Angels are dead people and have physical bodies too. (And no Biblically accurate cherubim?)
• (I may be getting lots of eyebrow-raising side-action not emphasized by my followers.)
• Eternal punishments are minimal, so no graphic hellscapes for my readers for we are enlightened (even though it’s a million people taking one “revelator’s” word as gospel)!
• There are three (3) degrees of heavenly glory.
• No organizational enrollment (“church membership”) required for a good afterlife.
• I prioritize freewill (or “agency”) in the plan of salvation (no Reformational T.U.L.I.P. or solae).
• I even feature visions of peoples on other planets and moons (so like way hipper than that dumb old Bible because apparently God, while totally real, somehow can never quite manage to reveal anything concrete that transcends the human science of the day [only Hindus seem to manage this but they aren’t White and don’t wear neckties so bleh]).

Both men, being in their own respective ways worldly wise, have given heaven a makeover to make it sort of a human democratic republic rather than a divine kingdom as Jesus appears to teach (albeit perhaps all by analogy or in esoteric terms as the rather rambling but lodge-beloved Swedenborg will assert). Now one major difference is that while Joseph Smith considered Black folks (which his system classed as laymen [Biblicized Lamanites]) if not accursed then certainly in need of returning to God’s way (so they can resume their “white and delightsome” countenance), Swedenborg by contrast characterized the Sub-Saharan African groups of Homines sapientes as being the most attuned to God of the peoples of Earth, condemning missionaries as dangerously unenlightened.

Now as to the question of why Swedenborg didn’t go full Buddhist, to be fair it would be after even Joseph Smith’s time that H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891) would brave those waves for the fuller redemption of the West from its bipolar relationship to Rabbinic lore. The story of human inner development, if I may, would seem to be one of baby steps.

And to be fair “the Borg of Sweden” clearly influenced most of the movements of early USA’s Burned-over District (Shakers, Spiritualists, Socialists, and Adventists) as well as the Plymouth Brethren (related: Dispensationalism, [pre-tribulation] Rapture, “Christian Zionism”), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and even Međugorje devotees (also in the twentieth century Swedenborg’s influence on the Freemasonic lodges [which are documented to have taken root under the direction of the Swedish crown soon after Swedenborg’s death, a fact that points to a secret society {occult} as well as pop culture {esoteric} path from Swedenborg to Smith et al.] is certainly felt in the messages and especially the subtexts of those imperfect and even a just a little blasé men who are constantly thrust in our faces as some kind of secular saints [Gandhi, King, Mandela]), as well as the more proudly Swedenborg-influenced Johnny Appleseed, Helen Keller, Dr Oz, and like some romantic poets or whatever.

Finally, more elements hidden in plain sight in what would become the CJC/LDS include feudalism visible say in the storage and distribution of grain and other nonperishables (imitating the monastic manor system), in their attempt at keeping the pageant or “sacred open-air theatre” tradition going, or even in the font used in the signs for Marriott International, Inc.

And (just in case you haven’t already heard) there are whole passages in The Book of Mormon (first edition) that appear to dirty-plagiarize the King James Bible (esp. Isaiah and Corinthians): they are not only lifted word-for-word but even carry over the italicization and marginal note glyphs!

(For more “Who Said It” games see “Adolf Hitler or David Ben-Gurion?”, “Adolf Hitler or John F. Kennedy?”, “Adolf Hitler vs [deleted because I don’t want to get shot]?”!)

And if for some reason you or someone you love experiences (or once experienced) a burning in the bosom whenever they recite the “Mormon Shahada” have them try the same thing but in praise of some inanimate object. (So far as I know this has a 100% success rate!)