The Salt Lake Temple stands like a medieval fortress in the heart of an American city. It does so awkwardly, of course: its monochrome granite spires and crenellations straddle romanesque and gothic architecture. It therefore stands between worlds, and it does so in more than one way. It is both the believer’s portal to heaven and a reminder to the modern viewer of the premodern past it announces. Clasped hands and constellations speckle its exterior. Its interior—invisible though it is—nevertheless stands out all the more to the curious tourist. The bleached, palatial monument interrupts the streamlined capitalism of the buildings surrounding it. It announces another world. Or maybe more than one, as the planets, moons, suns, and stars lining its outside walls may suggest.

The Architect Truman Angell described the constellations that appear on the building’s west center tower as “in alto relievo [high relief], Ursa Major (commonly called in this country the Dipper) with the Pointers ranging with the North Star.”^[1] Near the ground on each of its fifty buttresses, circular “earthstones” meet you, originally designed to show the planet from as many different angles. Above them a viewer will see “moonstones”: carvings that depict various phases of the lunar cycle “in its different phases.”^[2] Still higher, a tourist can crane her neck to notice, logically, “sunstones”: circles surrounded by spikes of light that depict “the full face of the Sun.” This ascent from stars through moon to sun recalls Paul’s understanding of resurrected bodies in his first epistle to the Corinthians.^[3] The sunstones also recall the “vision” of cosmic realms as depicted in section 76 of the Latter-day Saint or “Mormon” Doctrine and Covenants.^[4]

   

The stones that complete this sequence near the top of the pilaster do so less logically. Or they would have done so, since their planned designs were never implemented. In architect Truman Angell’s blueprints, on the side wall buttresses, earth stands below moon, moon stands below sun, and sun stands below Saturn. The plans below depict his phalanx of ringed planets to orbit the topmost frieze. Moreover, at the level Saturn was meant to stand on the buttresses, the towers were meant to display “clouds and descending rays of light.”

This design for these “Saturnstones,” which was never implemented, was replaced by a frieze of circles within circles. Sources differ on what to call these revised figures, but if they are Saturnstones, they are minimalist ones.

These designs frustrate easy interpretations. While the Latter-day Saint canon is characteristically focused on the heavens, at least explicitly, Saturn is absent in the religion’s revelation and liturgy. And yet here the planet stands (or would have stood) in the most prominent position on the temple’s southern facade.

It gets stranger, however. The fourfold progression from earth through moon and sun to Saturn also shows up, albeit in reverse, in Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric worldview. Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian esotericist, philosopher, social, educational, and agricultural reformer. He called the worldview he founded “Anthroposophy”. Drawing on Theosophy, but supplementing it with his own “spiritual scientific research,” Steiner would posit a reincarnating earth, an earth whose existence went through “four planetary incarnations”: its Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth phases. These names describe the earth’s past and not the solar system’s present, but Steiner chose the names to resonate and align with astronomical language.^[5] Steiner first made these observations in his 1909 work Outline of Esoteric Science, long after Joseph Smith was dead and more than thirty years after Truman Angell planned his astronomical symbolism, and so plagiarism from east to west is not at play here. Steiner also clearly could not have plagiarized the plans for an American religious building that were never implemented. A search on the Rudolf Steiner Archive for the word “Mormon” only gives one result: Steiner in a 1913 lecture satirically reading the table of contents from the text Sects of Perdition. A Warning for Protestant Christians. “Mormons—4 pages.” Theosophy was half a page.^[6] Steiner shows no awareness of Latter-day Saint ritual or theology. Its architecture–half the world away–would have been unknown to him. And yet the bizarre coincidence remains.

I posit that this bizarre parallel between Mormonism and Anthroposophy can be explained through what Steiner and Smith had in common: astrology and astronomy. In other words, the worldviews of all three of them are characterized by the use of astrological concepts in the milieu of a world that prefers astronomical ones. Both blend the two. If later Latter-day Saints ended up frowning on astrology,^[7] its founder certainly didn’t: Joseph Smith was an enthusiastic and lifelong devotee of the astrological worldview. That worldview is just as insistent, if more explicitly so, in Rudolf Steiner’s immense output of books and lectures. In this essay, I will make clear that astrology is central to the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, to the life and language of Joseph Smith, and to the texts inherited from him by Truman Angell.

I will also point out that—in specific—Saturn characterizes the cosmologies and cosmogonies of both Anthroposophy and Mormonism. Saturn is the outermost planet visible to the naked eye and therefore guards the threshold between the visible and the invisible. It symbolizes beginnings, endings, cycles, limits, and time. Both Mormonism and Anthroposophy teach about a planet at the dawn of time that initiates time. Mormons call it “Kolob,” and Anthoposophists call it “Old Saturn.” I suggest that the doctrine of these ancient planets reflects the anxiety brought about by the Kant-Lapalce nebular hypothesis. It claims that the sun and our solar system were originally a whirling stellar cloud or “nebula,” and it was commonly taught in classrooms and lecture halls throughout the nineteenth century. Kolob and Saturn—which ontologically and temporally precede the sun—reflect worldviews where the nebular darkness before the creation of the sun is a way of describing God brooding over the primordial chaos. They both integrate the traditional and secular worlds. Moreover, Truman Angell would have been very aware of the Kant-Laplace theory, since Latter-day Saint apostle Orson Pratt lectured extensively on it in 1852.

If we wanted to show that Steiner was aware of astrology, we would find it easy. He referenced it explicitly and often. Perhaps the most notable thing he ever said about astrology is the following meditation:

The Stars once spoke to man
It is World Destiny that they are silent now.
To become aware of this Silence
Can become Pain for Earthly humanity.
But in the deepening Silence
There grows and ripens what the
Human Being speaks to the stars.
To become aware of this Speaking
Can become Strength for Spirit Humanity.

Steiner, who saw modernity as a necessary loss of atavistic, instinctive clairvoyance meant to prepare us for a future, conscious participation with the higher worlds, saw the stars as a portal to higher worlds and the study of the stars as a way to connect with those higher worlds. While he asserted that most modern astrology was nonsense,^[8] he nevertheless claimed that the stars expressed a wisdom that we would do well to notice.

For him, the Zodiac functioned as a map for how unity and multiplicity expressed themselves in each other. He asserts that any truth can only be adequately grasped from no less than twelve separate standpoints or perspectives^[9] and that the unity of the physical self is fractured into twelve in higher worlds.^[10] He posits twelve senses^[11] and twelve archetypal philosophical worldviews.^[12] He names twelve consonants^[13] and links them with twelve corresponding movements in a kind of dance called Eurythmy.^[14] He identifies the biblical covenant with Abraham in Genesis of seed “which in their ordering are arranged as the number of stars in the heavens” with the twelvefold arrangement of the Zodiac.^[15] He even gave meditations for the “mood” of each astrological sign^[16] and designed mandala-esque “planetary seals” for each of the seven planets.^[17] In each case, the Zodiac (which he accurately defines as the “animal circle”^[18]) gives a model for a unity that avoids the pitfalls of uniformity. A circle of twelve perspectives linked by incremental metamorphosis along the circumference and resonance along the diameter offered, for him, “the task of acting as peacemaker among the various world-outlooks.”^[19] Moreover at least some of these schemata involved a sevenfold corollary to the planets (seven vowels^[20] corresponding to seven eurythmy movements and seven musical tones,^[21] seven world-outlook-moods,^[22] seven human life-processes^[23]).

Joseph Smith was also astrologically literate. Though he never publicly taught astrology as such, there is evidence that he believed in it explicitly. Perhaps the most glaring proof of this fact is the “Jupiter Talisman,” a stone amulet with astrological symbols, that was apparently on his body when he died. This amulet uses formulae from the 1801 text The Magus by Francis Barret, a book with instructions on ritual magic with constant reference to astrology. That text also informed a series of magical parchments the Smith family owned—each of which is littered with occult and magical symbols.^[24] Smith was born under both Jupiter and Saturn, and at least one scholar has claimed that his affinity with these planets influenced his revelatory career.^[25]

Left: Joseph Smith’s Jupiter Talisman. Right: The Smith Family Holiness to the Lord Parchment.

More implicitly, Smith’s biography demonstrates a consistent fascination with heavenly bodies and their meaning. For instance, the earliest account of his “First Vision” describes celestial bodies in sympathy with nature and—as Steiner taught in the above meditation—a chorus of voices preaching and testifying of God:

For I looked upon the sun, the glorious luminary of the earth, and also the moon, rolling in their majesty through the heavens, and also the stars shining in their courses, and the earth also upon which I stood, . . .  My heart exclaimed, “All, all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotent and omnipresent power, a being who maketh laws and decreeth and bindeth all things in their bounds, who filleth eternity, who was and is and will be from all eternity to eternity.” And I considered all these things and that that being seeketh such to worship him as worship him in spirit and in truth.^[26]

The “testimony” of the heavens, the way they (together with the earth) “bespeak” Deity, repeats the basic intuition of astrology: the stars speak. Astron-logia.^[27] Earlier in the account, Smith talked about “different denominations” that “did not adorn their profession with a holy walk and a godly conversation.”^[28] While the stars and planets—in their differences—”bear testimony” of God, the preachers and professors of religion—in their differences—condemn each other. Astrology promises (even if it fails to deliver) a solution to sectarianism.

Continual references to heavenly bodies and their cycles returns through his life. According to the account canonized by the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Angel Moroni announced Smith’s task as translator of the Book of Mormon on the fall equinox in 1824, and he instructed Smith to return to a specific spot every day on or near the fall equinox until 1827.^[29] A design on the golden plates themselves—according to three separate accounts—include a stylized sun surrounded by twenty-four miniature moon phases combined with stars.^[30] Another revelation canonized by the LDS church as the seventy-sixth chapter of the Doctrine and Covenants, called the “Vision,” speaks of the glories of the sun, moon, and stars as ways of referring to the glories of various levels of heaven.^[31]

Even Smith’s 1844 platform for the United States Presidency uses astrological imagery. He asserts that the “aspirations and expectations of a virtuous people” as embodied in the United States Constitution ought to be held with “as much sanctity, as the prayers of the saints are treated in heaven, that love, confidence and union, like the sun, moon and stars should bear witness.”^[32]

These descriptions are striking, but they are certainly not exhaustive. The most impressive revelations given by Joseph Smith in relation to astrology, however, are an 1832 revelation currently canonized as the 88th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, known as “The Olive Leaf,” and the Book of Abraham. The former speaks of Deity as the “light of truth” and insists that this light is what sustains and shines from all heavenly bodies (sun, moon, stars) and earthly bodies. It describes them as follows:

And their courses are fixed, even the courses of the heavens and the earth, which comprehend the earth and all the planets. And they give light to each other in their times and in their seasons, in their minutes, in their hours, in their days, in their weeks, in their months, in their years—all these are one year with God, but not with man. The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in their glory, in the midst of the power of God.^[33]

This language—times, seasons, sun, moon, stars, rolling, comprehending, light, days, weeks, months, and years—is very astrological. It speaks to orbit and rhythmical progression: a body is defined by its orbit. According to the 1828 Webster’s dictionary, to “comprehend” meant “to understand” or “to conceive” only by extension. Its primary meaning implies an orbital logic: “to contain, to include, to comprise.”^[34]

The revelation also includes a parable where God describes himself as “a man having a field” with twelve laborers, one with striking astrological resonances:

Behold, I will liken these kingdoms unto a man having a field, and he sent forth his servants into the field to dig in the field. And he said unto the first: Go ye and labor in the field, and in the first hour I will come unto you, and ye shall behold the joy of my countenance. And he said unto the second: Go ye also into the field, and in the second hour I will visit you with the joy of my countenance. And also unto the third, saying: I will visit you; And unto the fourth, and so on unto the twelfth. And the lord of the field went unto the first in the first hour, and tarried with him all that hour, and he was made glad with the light of the countenance of his lord. And then he withdrew from the first that he might visit the second also, and the third, and the fourth, and so on unto the twelfth. And thus they all received the light of the countenance of their lord, every man in his hour, and in his time, and in his season— Beginning at the first, and so on unto the last, and from the last unto the first, and from the first unto the last; Every man in his own order, until his hour was finished, even according as his lord had commanded him, that his lord might be glorified in him, and he in his lord, that they all might be glorified.^[35]

The progress of “The Lord of the Field” from one servant to another, the movement “hour by hour” of “the light of the countenance of his Lord” in a cycle of twelve, resonates and aligns with the basic movement of the sun through the Zodiac or the astrological houses. The sun “withdraws” from one sign or house, “tarries with it for an hour” “until its hour is finished,” and then progresses to another so that they can each “receive the light of its countenance.” This revelation, which had just referenced the reciprocal shining and glorification of sun, moon, and stars, openly invites astrological readings of the parable it contains. It is also worth noting, on this point, that the “sunstones” on the Nauvoo temple depicted the face or “countenance” of the sun.

The most important text for present purposes, however, is the Book of Abraham—a canonized text purportedly translated from a set of Egyptian papyri, one that focuses on the stars. It is controversial and often lampooned. However, it is not science-fiction Christianity. Because it depicts an order or heavenly orbits arranged hierarchically from above to below, the model is geocentric. As such, it is not astronomy. It is astrology.

It retells the events in and around Genesis 12 from the pen of the main character. It narrates Abraham’s^[36] encounter with Deity as he is liberated from his role as a sacrificial victim. In a way that mirrors Steiner’s language of the “Egypto-Chaldean Epoch” of history, it describes both Chaldeans and Egyptians.^[37] Through “the Urim and Thummim,” Abraham receives a revelation from God on the structure of the cosmos, a revelation that God shows him before his descent into Egypt.^[38] It describes a cosmology of hierarchical bodies, light, and time. Each body has a “set time” and “times of reckoning.”^[39] The words stars, planets, lights, facts, and things are used almost synonymously. The planets both govern and are governed: they transmit light and order through radiation. The light of a body’s radiation corresponds to the length of that body’s revolution. As such, a slower or longer orbit means a greater light.

God places his hands on Abraham’s eyes, and Abraham watches as these celestial bodies multiply. God connects this multiplication with the multiplication of Abraham’s seed.^[40] Upon receiving this vision, Abraham learns the stars and planets’ names: Kokob for star, Olea for moon, Shinehah for sun. Kolob is a star, is one of the “Kokaubeam,” and Abraham learns that it is closest to God.^[41] Abraham learns that the hierarchies of gods, stars, and intelligences (a word for the human spirit) all correspond to each other: that he himself is a kind of fallen star, a being from a starry world that is destined to return upward, a god with amnesia.^[42] This intuition is somewhat Platonic and resonates overwhelmingly with Steiner’s Anthroposophy. He etymologically connects the astral body–the third of four human bodies together with physical body, etheric body, and “I”—with the stars.^[43] As he describes it, the human being as an astral being from the starry world is a starry being. A more striking connection of the Book of Abraham to astrology is that both claim that the planets (Venus, Mars, Saturn, etc.) are gods and have the names of gods.

Joseph Smith and Rudolf Steiner’s worldviews were both animated by astrological assumptions. Both saw human beings and human relationships in terms of the heavens, the stars, and the planets. If we were to look for a common orientation to Saturn in their respective worldviews, we would find it. Steiner and Smith both saw a planet—somehow prior to or ontologically higher than the sun–at the beginning of time. Both saw this planet as the ultimate marker of time. Steiner writes that time only began on Old Saturn,^[44] and the Book of Abraham observes that Kolob is the planet whose revolution—like Saturn’s—is outermost and longest in terms of time and length.^[45] Steiner associated the Saturn phase with the primeval chaos in the opening verses of Genesis,^[46] and Smith asserts in his “translation” of one of the Book of Abraham facsimiles that the sun “borrow[s] its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the Grand Key.” At the time the Book of Abraham was transcribed, “medium” meant that through which bodies move^[47] and therefore would have meant something like the cosmic medium which the sun emerged as referenced in contemporary physics. Both figures, then, saw an impossibly old planetary body as the primordial origin of the Earth, preceding the Sun.

Saturn is the outermost visible planet and therefore the threshold between the visible and invisible worlds. It governs limits, rhythm, authority, and time. Saturnalia marked the end of the Roman year, and in many countries, Saturday marks the end of the week. The Roman God Saturn presided over humanity’s golden age. As a Titan who overthrew his father and was overthrown by his son, he is the archetype of the revolutionary. The famous phrase by Jacques Mallet du Pan, “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its own children,” would have had Saturn and his own revolution in mind. The word “revolution” itself—when used politically—was coined in reference to planetary revolutions.^[48]

Saturn, then, meant something like time itself, or the border between time and timelessness. Like Saturnalia marked the end of the old year and the beginning of a new year, and like Saturday tends to mark the end of one week and the beginning of a new week, Saturn seems to preside over beginnings and endings. Beginnings are, in this sense, a continual phenomenon, something that keeps happening. The beginning can return, and indeed, it must. Time in this sense was and is cyclical, and astrology is a way to keep track of the circular nature of time. In this sense, astrology is a characteristic image of the pre-scientific world, a world where time was not measured linearly but conceived in terms of days, seasons, and years. The earthly was conformed to the heavenly. Because crops depended on it, humanity depended on it.

The transition between astrology and astronomy is, in many ways, also the transition between quality and quantity. Though they were originally interchangeable, the first person to make the distinction between astrology (the speech of the stars) and astronomy (naming the stars) was the Iranian scholar Al-Biruni,^[49] a figure of the Islamic golden age who also introduced the division of the hour into sixty minutes.^[50] Astronomy, like the clock,^[51] focuses on isolated objects and less on relationships, more on things and less on meanings.^[52] It names and does not listen to the stars. It has all the myopia of someone who focuses so much on the typeface of a book that she forgets to read it.

The above passages from Steiner and Smith demonstrate that–for them–the speech of the stars was all-important. Modernity is–in many ways–the gradual silencing of nature in general and of the stars in specific. Steiner and Smiths’ cosmologies cry out for the soul of the world, and more specifically, for the soul of the starry world. As such, their worldviews speak for the stars when they insist on seeing the cosmos as ultimately human and the human as ultimately cosmic or stellar. Astrology is this union of the human and cosmic worlds.

And Saturn—in particular—is significant for any attempt to re-enchant the world. Saturn presides over endings and beginnings, and Mormonism in particular is focused on endings and beginnings. The language of “restoration” speaks to the recreation of a world that had dissolved and unraveled, the beginning again of a world that had ended. In one of the last sermons Smith ever gave, he asserts that we need “to go back to the beginning . . . in order to understand and be fully acquainted with the mind, purposes, and decrees of the Great Elohim . . . It is necessary for us to have an understanding of God himself in the beginning.” He says that “if we start right, it is easy for us to go right all the time; but if we start wrong, we may go wrong, and it be a hard matter to get right.”^[53]

To accomplish this task, Smith actually goes “back to the beginning” of the Bible, to the word “Beginning” or Berosheit.^[54] Berosheit bara elohim, traditionally translated as “In the beginning God created . . . ,” Smith reads differently. He asserts that Berosheit is best understood in terms of rosh, “the head,” where “the head,” is best understood as He who initiates creation, who “heads” it, what Smith then calls “the head God.” He translates the opening verses of Genesis, then, as “The Head God brought forth the Gods in the grand council.” “In the Beginning” becomes something like the Beginning as a proper noun for a person, a name. Elohim becomes not God but the gods. Since it’s not an event but a person, the “Beginning” seems to be a role or a tite. It refers to whatever or whoever organizes chaos, that which begins the world anew. It implies that the Beginning refers to many people and occurs at many times. These claims suggest a somewhat circular view of history: that it can and must repeat, that human beings are the agents for organizing a world that tends to fall into disorder. Human beings, then, would be agents for restoration, recreation, and resurrection.

In this sense, the Beginning describes what Saturn is for classical astrology: a rhythmic beginning and ending. Saturn is the drumbeat of reality, a twenty-nine year thrum that keeps reality in check, the end of the visible and the beginning of the invisible, the end of time and the beginning of timelessness, and vice versa. Steiner’s Old Saturn is a threshold like this at the beginning of cosmic evolution, and he claims that every phase of reality since—Old Sun, Old Moon, and the present incarnation of the earth—begins with a recapitulation of the Saturn phase.^[55] The beings who had their human phase on Saturn, interestingly, are called the Spirits of Personality, the Archai, or the Beginnings, who Steiner at least sometimes uses as synonyms of the Zeitgeist or the “spirit of the time.” Steiner and Smith, then, clearly both see history as a cycle of dissolutions and recreations, a rhythm of chaos and order, where a primeval, timeless planet stands at a beginning that happens many times.

In addition to these astrological parallels, there is also a connection between the Saturnstones and Steiner’s Outline of Esoteric Science in terms of the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis. The word “nebula” or “nebule,” which originally just meant a cloud or mist, was already in astronomical use in 1828.^[56] In fact, it was coined in its astronomical sense in 1734 by none other than Emanuel Swedenborg—seer, Christian mystic, and an arguable influence on early Mormonism—in his book Prodromus Principiorum Rerum Naturalium or On the Principles of Natural Things.^[57] In his book, Swedenborg argues that the planets had once been part of the sun and the solar system itself once resembled the luminous, cloud-like patches astronomers could discern through their telescopes. This hypothesis was elaborated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, and a specific version of it became known throughout the nineteenth century as the “Kant-Laplace theory.” Rudolf Steiner opposed the theory, and so did the early Mormon apostle, mathematician, and astronomer Orson Pratt, whose lectures on the subject would likely have been attended by Truman Angell, the architect of the Salt Lake Temple.

Pratt critiqued the Kant-Laplace system on mathematical grounds. In his 1852 series of lectures, he asserts that “The ring theory of La Place and others, to account for the origin of planets and satellites, cannot be sustained. Its impossibility can be mathematically demonstrated.”^[58] Pratt was a well-known astronomer who was noted for his mathematical skill independent of his religious associations.^[59] In these lectures—given to large audiences—he took the congregation on a tour of the solar system, its genesis, and its structure. Though he opens the series with religious language and returns to religious concerns sporadically, the language in it is far more mathematical than devotional. It requires the attention you pay to a physics course. It is quantitatively intense. His critique of the Kant-Laplace theory is not a critique of the nebular theory as such but instead one of mathematical details.

Steiner, however, critiqued the Kant-Laplace theory because it was mechanical in a self-defeating way. He often used it as a bogeyman to ridicule the abstract, decontextualized attitude of modern science. Teachers, he said, who put a drop of oil in a glass of water, pierce it with a pin, and make it rotate to create a “miniature planetary system” are “creating a grave error of thought” because they “have forgotten one thing that ordinarily it might be well to forget occasionally and this is themselves. They forget that they themselves have brought the whole thing into formation.”^[60] The system implies an outside mover but looks only inside at the closed system. He repeated this analogy in many recorded lectures.^[61]

As such, Steiner’s critique of the theory is a critique of how it makes the world abstract and depersonified at the theory’s own expense. “Had this fact [that the teacher brought the whole experiment into motion] been observed and applied logically to the cosmic system, then they would have been using complete healthy thinking.”^[62] Steiner’s goal was to integrate the scientific and the spiritual, the cosmic and the human, and for him, the Kant-Laplace theory represents a failure of science because it fails to take the spirit, the human, into account. His critique is not, therefore, about the claim that the sun had not always existed, which Steiner also taught explicitly.

Moreover, despite Pratt’s mathematicism, and despite the fact that he does not connect it to the Kant-Laplace theory as such, he shares Steiner’s emphasis on the human in the world described by science. He saw science—and astronomy in particular—as an almost personal encounter with the god who framed the stars. In the opening of the first lecture, for instance, he asserts that astronomy unveils divine power, wisdom, and goodness:

 [astronomy] is that science which lifts the veil of obscurity . . . which, above all others, is calculated to give us the most profound, sublime, and exalted views, of the power, wisdom, and goodness of that Being who formed those magnificent systems from the eternal elements, and devised laws, calculated to maintain their stability, through all their complicated and infinite variety of movements, for indefinite ages to come.^[63]

He refers to “nature’s Author”^[64] and the desire to unlock the heavenly archives.”^[65] Both Pratt and Steiner see cosmic law as an evidence of cosmic intelligence. Pratt, like Steiner, sees the fact that science can extract wisdom from nature as evidence that wisdom was implanted into it by a wise or intelligent being.^[66]

The Kant-Laplace nebular theory threatens a theocentric view of reality like this. The nebular theory asserts that the sun had an origin, that the light of the world was originally darkness, and implies that light both literal and figurative arose mechanically without purpose or intelligence. The common spiritual insight between Steiner’s Anthroposophy and Mormonism as generated by Smith and elaborated by Pratt is to see this nebular reality in terms of the first few verses of Genesis. Though the nebular hypothesis sets the sun adrift in cosmic time like Copernicus set the earth adrift in cosmic space, the Bible, too, asserts that darkness preceded light. God was there when it was dark. Perhaps the nebula, then, was this darkness. Perhaps the darkness was sacred. This insight connects theory with tradition and science with the spirit.

Moreover, the Book of Abraham—in one of at least two separate and different versions Joseph Smith gave of the Genesis creation account—boldly claims that “they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth.”^[67] Creation is then neither from nothing nor from God: the divine contribution is the form, the intelligence, or the meaning imposed on a pre-existent formless chaos. Perhaps a cosmic hand, then, did set the drops of cosmic oil in motion. This reading of Genesis—with all its deeps and darks and hovering winds—is one that stays close to the imagery of the text and aligns surprisingly well with the nebular theory. It suggests as true both that God existed at the beginning and that the light did not. It suggests a divine darkness, a world that, like Steiner’s Old Saturn, was more heat than light. Moreover, the nebula would have looked like Saturn. For Swedenborg, Kant, and Laplace, that light was preceded by a formless, swirling cloud whose periphery had not yet withdrawn into a solid central mass. It existed in both the center and the border: a center with an orbiting periphery. As such, reflection of the Book of Genesis in the context of Pratt’s lectures about solar origins would naturally lead to saturnine images. Alongside the Saturnstones, remember, were carvings of clouds (the literal meaning of “nebula”).

Truman Angell was neither an astronomer nor an astrologer. However, he likely heard Pratt speak about astronomy and the Kant-Laplace theory. At least one commentary on the symbolism of the Salt Lake Temple reads the Saturnstones in the context of Pratt’s lectures.^[68] I agree that Pratt’s astronomical vision influenced Angell’s architecture. Saturn, however, means little on its own in that lecture series: it has a section devoted to it, but so do most of the planets. It is written with scientific language and is only religious by extension. The symbolism on the temple walls seems more concerned with Pratt’s description of the solar system’s formation than it does with Saturn as such. This is especially true since Pratt mentions Saturn as a microcosmic image of the primordial nebula in the section devoted to solar system formation.

When these two antagonistic forces [centripetal and centrifugal forces] becomes too great for the adherence of the matter, the ring will be circumferentially divided into two or more rings, as is the case with that of Saturn’s. But that would take place at a very early stage of its formation, while the adherence was small.^[69]

Saturn, which is a body with rings, both a center and a periphery, mirrors the nebula at creation’s beginning.. The sun too was once like Saturn. Before order, there was chaos. Before light, there was darkness and warmth. Before the sun, there was a nebula or cloud. This cloud fails to distinguish the sun and its satellites. They are not yet distinct.

Angell’s use of Saturnstones repeats this basic intuition: that the Sun is not ultimate or primary. What adolescent atheists tend to point out in Genesis—that light existed on the first day before the sun on the fourth day—is, in a way, a confirmation of this reading. As science expanded the universe for us from our solar system to a universe of many solar systems, both Smith and Steiner believed in a God who wrought many suns. There is not one beginning, and the beginning repeats. There are many Genesises, and Genesis must recur from age to age. Old Saturn and Kolob both point to this Genesis: the moment where timelessness becomes time, what every age must repeat to begin, the Beginning itself.

Footnotes

^[1]        Truman Angell, “The Salt Lake City Temple” Millennial Star vol. 36 no. 18 (1874): 273-275.

^[2]        Ibid.

^[3]        1 Cor. 15:41.

^[4]        D&C 76:70-71, 81.

^[5]        Rudolf Steiner, Outline of Esoteric Science (Anthroposophic Press, 1997): 125-128.

^[6]        Rudolf Steiner, Truths and Errors of Spiritual Research, February 16, 1913.

^[7]        On May 6, 1865, for instance, Brigham Young said that “astrology . . . leads [its practitioners] into thousands of illusions . . . astrology and mesmerism do lead them astray.” Discourses of Brigham Young, compiled by John A. Widtsoe (Deseret Book Company, 1954), 75.

^[8]        In one lecture Steiner ridicules, for instance, “the modern astrologers who outdo materialism with their methods, simply adding ignorant superstition to materialistic ignorance.” Rudolf Steiner’s Words before the Eurythmy Presentation of the “Twelve Moods” in Dornach, August 29, 1915.

^[9]        Theoretically, an infinite number of points of view is possible, but actually, twelve are sufficient. Rudolf Steiner, The Gosepl of St. Matthew: Lecture VII, September 7, 1910.

^[10]       Rudolf Steiner, Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Lecture II, December 4, 1914.

^[11]       Rudolf Steiner, Toward Imagination: Lecture III: The Twelve Human Senses, June 20, 1916.

^[12]       Rudolf Steiner, Human and Cosmic Thought: Lecture III, January 22, 1916.

^[13]       Rudolf Steiner, Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Lecture IV, October 6, 1914.

^[14]       Rudolf Steiner, Words before “Twelve Moods”.

^[15]       Rudolf Steiner, The Ego: Lecture II, December 7, 1909.

^[16]       Rudolf Steiner, Twelve Moods.

^[17]       https://anthroposophy.eu/Planetary_seals

^[18]       Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Song, December 2, 1922.; “Zodiac” Online Etymology Dictionary.

^[19]       Steiner, Human and Cosmic Thought: Lecture III.

^[20]       Steiner,  Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Lecture IV.

^[21]       Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Singing: Lecture III, February 21, 1924.

^[22]       Steiner, Human and Cosmic Thought: Lecture III.

^[23]       Rudolf Steiner, The Riddle of Humanity: Lecture VIII, August 13, 1916.

^[24]       These include the “Holiness to the Lord Parchment,” the “Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah Parchment,” and the “St. Peter Bind Them Parchment.” See D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview (Signature Books, 1987): 111-115

^[25]       Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview, 72.

^[26]       “History, circa Summer 1832,” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/2.

^[27]       “Astrology,” Online Etymology Dictionary.

^[28]       “History, circa Summer 1832,” p. 2, The Joseph Smith Papers.

^[29]       Joseph Smith–History 1:53. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/js-h/1?lang=eng.

^[30]       Charles Anthon to William E. Vibbert, August 12, 1844.; Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement, in Dan Vogel Early Mormon Documents (Signature Books, 2000): 3:52.; Francis Gladden Bishop, An Address to the Sons and Daughters of Zion, Scattered Abroad, Through All the Earth (1851): 48.

For a discussion of these three accounts see Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages (Greg Kofford Books, 2019): 20-26.

^[31]       D&C 76: 70-98.

^[32]       “General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, circa 26 January–7 February 1844,” p. 4, The Joseph Smith Papers.

^[33]       D&C 88:43-45.

^[34]       Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828. Webster’s 1828 dictionary was contemporary with Joseph Smith and the early Mormon church and provides the closest example of what they understood the words to mean.

^[35]       D&C 88:51-60.

^[36]       The text does not reflect that, at this point in the Genesis narrative, Abraham’s name was still Abram.

^[37]       The text opens with “in the land of the Chaldeans” (1:1) and describes within a page how Abraham was to be sacrificed to the “god of the king of Egypt” (1:6).

^[38]       Abraham 3:15.

^[39]       Abraham 3:6.

^[40]       Abraham 3:15.

^[41]       Abraham 3:12-16.

^[42]       Abraham 3:23.

^[43]       No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

Rudolf Steiner, The Festivals and Their Meaning III: Ascension and Pentecost, June 4, 1924.

^[44]       It will be especially difficult for the present-day consciousness to accept the statement that with the Saturn state of heat what is called “time” first makes its appearance, for the preceding states are not at all temporal. They belong to the region that in spiritual science may be called “duration.” Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science IV: The Evolution of the Cosmos and Man.

^[45]       Abraham 3:9: And thus there shall be the reckoning of the time of one planet above another, until thou come nigh unto Kolob, which Kolob is after the reckoning of the Lord’s time; which Kolob is set nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.

^[46]       It was something the same with the Elohim, when they said to themselves: “Let us now reflect upon what arises in our souls when we recall what took place during the ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. Let us see how it looks in recollection.” What it looked like is expressed in the phrase tohu wabohu; it could be expressed by a picture such as I have given you, as streams radiating from a centre outwards into space and back again, in such a way that the elements are interwoven in this streaming of forces. Thus the Elohim could say to themselves: “At the stage to which you have so far brought things this is what they look like. This is how they are resumed.” Rudolf Steiner, Genesis: Lecture II, August 18, 1910.

^[47]       “Medium”, Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language.; John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015): 2.

^[48]       “Revolution”, Online Etymology Dictionary.

^[49]       Shlomo Pines, “The Semantic Distinction between the Terms Astronomy and Astrology according to al-Biruni”, Isis 55 (3) (September 1964): 343–349.

^[50]       Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Bīrūnī, The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-ul-Bâkiya of Albîrûnî, Or “Vestiges of the Past”, Translated and Edited by C. Edward Sachau (1879): 147–149.

^[51]       The clock, notably, is both an image of the zodiac and a representation of the sun’s movement.

^[52]       G. I. Gurdjieff seems to be referencing this fact when, in his massive, difficult, allegorical tome Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, he has Beelzebub remark “At that period on the Earth the beings occupied with such observations and studies were called ‘astrologers.’ But later, when that psychic disease of your favorites called ‘wiseacring’ was finally fixed in them, and these specialists ‘shriveled and shrank,’ becoming ‘specialists’ only in giving names to remote cosmic concentrations, they came to be called ‘astronomers’”. See chapter 23 “The fourth personal sojourn of Beelzebub on the planet Earth” in G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (Harcourt, 1950).

^[53]       Joseph Smith, “The King Follet Sermon,” History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Deseret Book Company, 1950): 6:303.

^[54]       The Hebrew word for the book of Genesis is Berosheit.

^[55]       For instance, “Man attains this higher state of consciousness in the course of Sun evolution through the fact that the etheric or life-body is now incorporated in him. But this cannot take place until the Saturn conditions have been recapitulated.” Rudolf Steiner, “Man and the Evolution of the World” in Occult Science – An Outline, or “The physical life of man passes in recapitulation through the stages of Saturn evolution, but under altogether changed conditions.”

^[56]       “Nebule” in Webster, An American Dictionary.

^[57]       Michael Mark Woolfson, “Solar System – its origin and evolution”. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 34 (1993): 1–20.

^[58]       Orson Pratt, Wonders Of The Universe: Or A Compilation Of The Astronomical Writings Of Orson Pratt, Compiled by Nels B. Lundwall (1937): 170

^[59]       Pratt, Wonders of the Universe, 2-3.

^[60]       Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life (Steiner Books, 1995): 6.

^[61]       See, for instance, Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, April 15, 1923 and Rudolf Steiner, Health and Illness, Volume I: Concerning the Soul Life in the Breathing Process, December 23, 1922.

^[62]       Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, 6.

^[63]       Pratt, Wonders of the Universe, 1.

^[64]       Ibid., 2.

^[65]       Ibid.

^[66]       Thus, when a man thinks about things he only re-thinks what is already in them. See Rudolf Steiner, Practical Training In Thought, January 18, 1909.

^[67]       Abraham 4:1.

^[68]       Matthew Brown and Paul Thomas Smith, Symbols in Stone (Covenant Communications, 2017): 153.

^[69]       Pratt, Wonders of the Universe, 168.

Works Cited

Angell, Truman “The Salt Lake City Temple” Millennial Star vol. 36 no. 18 (1874).

Anthon, Charles to William E. Vibbert, August 12, 1844.

Bīrūnī, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad, The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-ul-Bâkiya of Albîrûnî, Or “Vestiges of the Past” Translated and Edited by C. Edward Sachau (1879).

Bishop, Francis Gladden, An Address to the Sons and Daughters of Zion, Scattered Abroad, Through All the Earth (1851).

Bradley, Don, The Lost 116 Pages (Greg Kofford Books, 2019).

Brown, Matthew and Paul Thomas Smith, Symbols in Stone (Covenant Communications, 2017).

“General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, circa 26 January–7 February 1844,” p. 4, The Joseph Smith Papers.

Gurdjieff, G. I., Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (Harcourt, 1950).

Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com.

Peters, John Durham, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Pines, Shlomo, “The Semantic Distinction between the Terms Astronomy and Astrology according to al-Biruni”, Isis 55 (3) (September 1964): 343–349.

Pratt, Orson, Wonders Of The Universe: Or A Compilation Of The Astronomical Writings Of Orson Pratt, Compiled by Nels B. Lundwall (1937).

Quinn, D. Michael, Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview (Signature Books, 1987).

Smith, Joseph, “The King Follet Sermon,” History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Deseret Book Company, 1950)

Steiner, Rudolf, “An Outline of Occult Science IV: The Evolution of the Cosmos and Man.”

———, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life (Steiner Books, 1995).

———, “Eurythmy as Visible Singing: Lecture III,” February 21, 1924.

———, “Genesis: Lecture II,” August 18, 1910.

———, “Health and Illness, Volume I: Concerning the Soul Life in the Breathing Process,” December 23, 1922.

———, “Human and Cosmic Thought: Lecture III,” January 22, 1916.

———, “Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Lecture II,” December 4, 1914.

———, “Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Lecture IV,” October 6, 1914.

———, Outline of Esoteric Science (Anthroposophic Press, 1997).

———, “Speech and Song,” December 2, 1922.

———, “The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education,” April 15, 1923.

———, “The Ego: Lecture II,” December 7, 1909.

———, “The Festivals and Their Meaning III: Ascension and Pentecost,” June 4, 1924.

———, “The Riddle of Humanity: Lecture VIII,” August 13, 1916.

———, “The Gosepl of St. Matthew: Lecture VII,” September 7, 1910.

———, “Toward Imagination: Lecture III: The Twelve Human Senses,” June 20, 1916.

———, “Truths and Errors of Spiritual Research,” February 16, 1913.

———, “Steiner’s Words before the Eurythmy Presentation of the ‘Twelve Moods’ in Dornach,” August 29, 1915.

Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement, in Dan Vogel Early Mormon Documents (Signature Books, 2000): 3:52.

Webster, Noah, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828.

Woolfson, Michael Mark, “Solar System—its origin and evolution.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 34 (1993): 1–20.

Young, Brigham, Discourses of Brigham Young, compiled by John A. Widtsoe (Deseret Book Company, 1954).