Ripples from a (Seer) Stone: Religious, Technological, and Magical Modalities

Abstract

The problem, this time, was a stone (depicted in Figure 1). A worn, enchanted relic, used for scrying and prophecy. Or alternately a piece of technology, programmed to decode an ancient tongue. Or, perhaps, a religious object, the option which was in some ways the most disturbing possibility of them all. Before the stone, there had been other problems: race, or samesex marriage, or women’s priesthood. But what happened this time was a stone. The stone was in the possession of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. But then that stone had long been in the Church’s possession, or at times in the personal custody of Church leaders, since sometime roughly around 1877. It was rather the unveiling of the stone in the summer of 2015 that was the precipitating incident. The image of the stone was included as a part of a twovolume facsimile and transcription of the printer’s manuscript for the Book of Mormon. The stone wasn’t much, brown and worn smooth banded jasper, about 5.5 by 3.5 by 4 cm; many of the photographs showed it alongside an equally small pouch, a worn leather container with a drawstring. This stone was one of the seer stones that belonged to the treasure hunter and selfconfessed prophet Joseph Smith; among other things, these stones were