Description

The Refiner's Fire presents a new and comprehensive understanding of the roots of the Mormon religion, a religion which proposes that the faithful will become gods. The book's central thesis is that the origins of Mormonism lie in the fusion that occurred during the Reformation and English Revolution of radical religion and magical ideas about recovering the divine powers of Adam lost in the fall from Paradise (the hermetic philosophy). The book is organized around the two problems of demonstrating the survival of these ideas into the nineteenth century and of how they were manifested in Mormon doctrine. The final chapter outlines how Mormonism has gradually moved since the 1850's toward traditional Protestant Christianity. [From back cover.]

Table of Contents

Part I: A Prepared People

1. Dreams of the Primal Adam
2. The True Spiritual Seed
3. Something of Our Ancestors

Part II: Hermetic Purity and Hermetic Danger

4. A Urim Spiritual
5. Alchymical Experiments
6. I Was Born in Sharon

Part III: The Mormon Dispensation

7. Secret Combinations and Slippery Treasures in the Land of Zarahemla
8. The Mysteries Defined
9. Temples, Wives, Bogus-Making, and War
10. The Keys to the Kingdom
11. A Tangle of Strings and the Kingdom of God
12. Let Mysteries Alone

Appendix: The Sectarian and Hermetic Circumstances of Mormon Origins in Vermont and New York