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the light, I believe the account needs to be preserved along with those we have already found in other faiths and other lands. Evans-Wentz was intrigued by Joseph Smith's very first vision, which was not an apparition of Angel Moroni but of two entities whose names he was not privileged to learn. This took place as the fourteen-year-old Smith was praying in a wood, as related in the book The Pearl of Great Price: I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.... When the light rested on me I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all descriptions, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me. As the translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans-Wentz recognized that the role played by Smith in bringing out the Book of Mormon was similar to that of the Tertons, the "takers-out" of secreted scriptures in Tibet. However, the Book of Mormon claims to be the "sacred history of ancient America." It states that the Indians are the remnant of an Israelite tribe that settled in America six hundred years before Christ. This is a difficult statement to take seriously in the light of modern anthropology. Thus we are again confronted with a mixture of certainty and absurdity, of fact and fantasy. Were such messages deliberately given to isolate the believers from the society around them? In an article published in the April 1974 issue of Occult magazine, Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman point out that the history of Mormonism also contains many references to three mysteious beings said to be three of Christ's American Apostles, who asked to be allowed to remain on earth until his Second Coming. The three "Nephites" have been seen several times since the days of Joseph Smith and form an interesting and colorful counterpart to the Three Men in Black of modern UFO lore. These Nephites are sometimes seen singly, and they perform miracles and healings. In one of the stories quoted by Clark and Coleman, a Utah woman named Squires, who was expecting the return of her husband and had seen no one around her house while drawing water from the well 16 wa 4 oe 14 we c ood a ws a minute before, suddenly found herself confronted with a gray-haired man wearing a long white beard, who requested something to eat and soon remarked that "she was not well." When she acknowledged that indeed she was suffering from a pain under her shoulder, the unknown man replied: "God bless you, Sister. You will never want for anything again. You will always be blessed with plenty." He walked out the door, but when Mrs. Squires followed him outside he had vanished, and she could not see where he had gone. The date of the incident is given as the summer of 1874. Her health and money problems disappeared soon after, and she lived to the age of eighty-nine. In many UFO stories of the olden days, the witnesses thought they had seen angels from God and for this reason never bothered to report their experiences. Others thought they had seen devils. The difference may be small. Commenting on the childhood experiences of Edgar Cayce and Uri Geller, a British researcher named Peter Rogerson has reminded me that similar stories were common in accounts of mediums of various kinds. He wrote to me that: Andrew Jackson Davis, "The Poughkeepsie Seer," claimed to have met a mystical personage who gave him a staff in which there were little boxes which gave "cures to various diseases." The account follows the classical pattern of the evolution of the shaman. Mircea wr a t at ad 1 oan toa 1 c 1 11 a 1 Eliade in his book Shamanism records the words of various shamans and how they became aware of the shamanistic powers. Accounts are often of the nature "I was washing by the river when a great ball of fire came down from the sky, it entered me, then I knew I was to become a shaman." A Unified Theory of Apparitions