Origins of Ritual Abuse and Mormon Organization and Theology, Pt. 1

A Small Skirmish Lights the Way

In 1994, a clinician and amateur historian named Lance S. Owens published an article entitled “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection” in Dialogue, and that article catapulted Owens to the forefront of Mormon historical consciousness.¹ The Smith family’s involvement in the occult via folk magic was hardly a new idea; Owens went further by connecting the Smiths to higher level of occult thinking such as hermeticism and Kabbalah. His article won the Mormon History Association’s award for best article in 1995, solidifying Owens’s reputation as the avant-garde of revolutionary Mormon history.

Joseph Smith was anything but traditional in his approach, as historian Paul M. Edwards notes in his article “The Irony of Mormon History,” yet those who research Smith are often staid traditionalists who frequently clash with upstarts who seek “an epistemological methodology revolutionary enough to deal with the paradox of [Mormonism].² Owens was set for a clash with the traditionalists of Mormon history due to his bold thesis and its implications for Joseph Smith’s history; moreover, the traditionalists were incensed by Owens because he bypassed their scholarship on the way to his conclusions.

As D. Michael Quinn points out in his book Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, the distinctions between “lifeless and living things, between organic and inorganic” disappears in a magic world view, as does the distinction between symbols and what they signify, with no event being accidental or random, “but each has its chain or causation in which Power, or its lack, was the decisive agency.”³ For Joseph Smith-and his modern day disciples- this “is emotionally satisfying and rational for those sharing such perceptions,” even as it gives rise to flashpoints between revolutionaries and traditionalists over the exact origins of Smith’s epistemology, theosophy, and belief. After all, today’s conservatives are yesterday’s revolutionaries, zealously promoting a settled narrative over origins and foundations that is central to the credibility of their truth.

The problem for traditionalists in a revolutionary paradoxical belief system such as Mormonism is this: revelation is ongoing, and never settled, and today’s prophets in such as a system bear no allegiance or obligation to conform current revelation to past doctrine. God is not static in such a paradigm; He is continually evolving and changing. The Mormon god is not eternal, fixed, and unchanging as the god of orthodox Christian doctrine; the god of Latter Day Saints, Heavenly Father, was once a man, and men grow and change over eternities in such a theosophy. The question of who controls the measure of revelation’s credibility-and its historical underpinnings-is a dividing line between traditionalists and revolutionaries who fight over the evolution of their shared faith and its history. After all, as Apostle Boyd K. Packer once said, “Some things that are true are not very useful.”⁴

The precise reason traditionalist Mormon historians want revolutionaries to cite their work is because their work is useful in affirming the Church as true. The purpose of the truth in the hands of the traditionalist is to affirm the validity of tradition, regardless of how traditions may not align with historical accuracy. There should be no distinction between Church “from its beginning till now” and “the hand of the Lord,” which is exactly what Quinn described in his characterization of a magic world view; the Church is true because it is established by God, and because the distinction between the Church and God is obliterated. The Church is God, as God has appointed apostles on earth to act as His seers, prophets, and revelatory to the laity.

Historically accurate scholarship that does not affirm the Church, which potentially undermines the laity’s faith in the Church as the sole organ of truth on the earth, is not useful at all. It is a threat to the Church’s position, and Lance S. Owens, newly minted darling of the church’s fringe revolutionaries, was about to find out as much when he was the target of William J. Hamblin’s counterattack in FARMS. In his 1996 article ““Everything is Everything”: Was Joseph Smith Influenced by Kabbalah?”, Hamblin excoriated Owens on multiple fronts.⁵

To understand why this is relevant to ritual abuse, one must take a look at Hamblin’s familial lineage.

William J. Hamblin: A Genealogy

Wiliam James Hamblin’s 2nd great grandfather was Oscar Hamblin, the 2nd great grandfather of David Lee Hamblin. His father William Kenneth Hamblin obtained his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1957, while Robert Lee Hamblin-father of David Lee Hamblin-completed his dissertation for a doctorate in sociology in 1955 from the same university.⁶ LIke his father, William James Hamblin obtained his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1985.⁷⁸ William Kenneth’s father William Haynes Hamblin is the second great granduncle of David Lee Hamblin, which would render William James a distant cousin of David Lee Hamblin.

Michigan is also the institution where alleged CS member Ellen Walker’s father Dr. Richard B. Nicholson received his doctorate, and his dissertation.⁹ With the Nicholson family being Unitarian Universalist, Ellen Nicholson attended Utah State University on scholarship.¹⁰ The Michigan link, like the repeated links to the University of California, Berkeley that appear for Hamblin’s ex-in laws the Andersons. and the de Jongs, are likely not coincidental.

The Hamblin family rose from a simple farming family to a family of academics who bolstered their church wherever they went. They were prominent Mormons of accomplishment who married into lineages such as the Adams-Booth lineage, combining intellectual accomplishment with vast wealth and political power. The church upheld its accomplished members, protecting them as it would protect its own image, and the Hamblin family returned the favor.

They held callings befitting their station, serving in bishoprics and stake presidencies and as Sunday School Superintendents while performing their academic duties. If the Hamblin sisters are telling the truth, their grandfather Robert Lee taught his sons David and Steven the ways of ritual abuse throughout their upbringing. The sisters explicitly allege that David and Steven Hamblin were taught how to ritually abuse during their upbringing by their father Robert Lee, a sociology professor at Iowa State College, Washington University, and the University of Arizona.

William J. Hamblin was a faculty member at BYU whose father had also served as a BYU professor, and in writing a rebuttal to Lance Owens, Hamblin was fulfilling his duty as a faithful, traditionalist Latter Day Saint for whom the church did not signify Christ and His truth so much as it embodied that truth. In the magic world view that dominates Mormon thinking and action, there are no coincidences, only events where power or its lack are the deciding factors, as D. Michael Quinn wrote.

Power is deployed by the church against those who challenge its narratives; two years after Owens published his article in Dialogue, Hamblin published his rebuttal in FARMS.

The Battle Between Revolution and Tradition

“Through his associations with ceremonial magic as a young treasure seer, [Joseph ] Smith contacted symbo;s and lore taken directly from Kabbalah. In his prophetic translation of sacred writ, his hermeneutic method was in nature Kabbalistic. With his initiation into Masonry, he entered a tradition born of the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. These associations culminated in Nauvoo, the period of his most important doctrinal and ritual innovations. During these last years, he enjoyed friendship with a European Jew [Alexander Neibaur] well-versed in the standard Kabbalistic works and possibly possessing in Nauvoo an unusual collection of Kabbalistic books and manuscripts. By 1844 Smith not only was cognizant of Kabbalah, but enlisted theosophic concepts taken directly from its principal text in his most important doctrinal sermon, the King Follett Discourse.”¹¹

There is little doubt that ceremonial folk magic was ubiquitous in the upbringing of Joseph Smith, Jr., given the exhaustive review of his family history undertaken by historian D. Michael Quinn in his Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. Quinn effectively documented his position that “the first generation of Mormons included people with a magic world view that predated Mormonism,” showing that “Joseph Smith’s family, the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, nearly half of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and some of the earliest converts from New York and New England” were all significantly immersed in ceremonial folk magic and the experiential religious fervor that led to the christening of Smith’s native region as “The Burned-Over District” by Charles Grandison Finney.¹² ¹³

Smith was far from burned-out by the repetitious evangelism and revival that swept through his world; his inquisitive nature demanded that he engage and experience religious fervor to the point of angelic contact. The genesis of such an experiential religious connection with the divine originated in Smith’s familial connection with ceremonial magic, whereby ordinary people of humble circumstances could interact with spiritual forces that had implications for the material world. This was done for a variety of reasons; Smith’s family interacted with the supernatural primarily for material gain in the form of treasure hunting, for which Smith was charged with being a disorderly person three times-twice in 1830 and once in 1826. ¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

From the traditionalist perspective, Smith was arrested due to religious bigotry; his charges originated from the resentment of Protestant members who wanted to suppress the nascent church Smith had founded before it could grow further.¹⁹²⁰

Protestant clergymen and other antagonists in the area viewed JS as a charlatan and sought to impede converts from joining the Church of Christ. Their tactics included destroying the dam that JS and others had constructed in a nearby stream to perform baptisms, abducting potential converts, and accusing JS of violating New York’s disorderly persons statute based on his previous use of seer stones in the area.²¹

What is clear is that Smith never found treasure. His interactions with the supernatural did not bear fruit in the form of riches for those who retained his services to hunt for treasure with a seer stone, and while Smith made good money selling his purported skills with a seer stone, those skills never delivered the desired result. The traditionalist view that Smith was persecuted by those opposed to his nascent religious movement ignores the obvious: Smith had dammed up a stream that others used, and he had done so without legal justification at the expense of others who utilized the water from that stream.

Mormons have always viewed Smith as a victim; this is a curious feature of their hagiographic exaltation of Smith which often comes at the expense of the facts. Smith was a defendant in twenty-one cases by the Church’s own historical records. Smith’s own actions, which included destroying the Nauvoo Expositor after the government body he controlled as mayor declared the Expositor a nuisance, are always set against the backdrop of religious persecution and bigotry. The reality that Smith was a self-styled theocrat with little regard for the rights of his detractors to express their point of view is lost on traditionalist historians.²²

For traditionalists, Smith was a prophet, and a law unto himself in cities like Nauvoo where Smith’s followers had established a political majority sufficient to enact his fiat as law. He was following a higher law; therefore, whatever Smith declared which was sustained by his followers in civil authority was warranted. Christianity has always been a curious and peculiar belief system; on the one hand, its followers set themselves in opposition to the prevailing beliefs and practices of their day, on the other hand, those same followers continued that Christianity is fully compatible with civil authority.²³

The tension between these two positions has produced a belief system that is conducive to both conformity and sedition where civil authority is concerned, depending on the context. This tension has also sown the seeds for any number of self-styled prophets to claim the mantle of a higher law that supersedes civil authority when that authority conflicts with their revelation and prophecy. Joseph Smith was the latest in a historical lineage of religious figures whose authority as a prophet or leader conflicted with the laws and customs of the society in which he existed. From the perspective of Mormon traditionalists, Smith was unfairly persecuted for his positions; the alternative position was that Smith attempted to establish theocratic power exempting him from the laws that governed everyone else.

The resulting resentments lead to an explosion of lawless conduct on the part of Mormons and non-Mormons alike, with flashpoints like the Expositor’s destruction and various physical confrontations between Mormons and their neighbors illustrating just how extreme the escalations of sectarian resentments could be in 19th century America. In the magic world view that defined early Mormon belief and practice, distinctions had disappeared: Joseph Smith was not merely a symbol of God’s providence in restoring His Church, he was the sole vessel through which the restoration could occur and did occur.

Smiths’ words carried the weight of law as prophetic truth and the expression of Divine Will and Authority for his followers. For his detractors, those words carried the weight of heresy. What Smith’s detractors did not understand because they could not understand was that coincidence had disappeared for Smith’s followers: no event, as D. Michael Quinn put in his analysis of magic world views, was accidental, it was merely the extension of a chain of events in which power or the lack thereof was the defining characteristic.