Content area
Full Text
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. 2d ed. By D. Michael Quinn. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998, xl + 646 pp. $19.95 paper.
In 1985 three bombs exploded in Salt Lake City, Utah, one killing Kathy Sheets (the wife of a local financier, Gary Sheets, who was likely the real target) at her home, another taking the life of 31 -year-old Steven F. Christenson, a financial consultant, and the third seriously injuring Mark Hofmann, a historical-documents dealer. These explosions ended five years of controversial "discoveries" by Hofmann. After a lengthy trial Hofmann's documents were proven to be forgeries and he was sent to prison for life on a plea bargain following a spectacular trial.
During the preceding years heated debates arose surrounding the many documents Hofmann presented, two of which described Joseph Smith and others in the early Mormon church as being involved in occult practices. Though the documents were finally proven to be forgeries, Michael Quinn sensed an opportunity to write about magic in the early Mormon movement and attract a large audience. By 1987 he published the first edition, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. He judiciously argued that magic and occult had a long tradition in Western civilization and that eighteenth-century rationalism and scientific thinking only gradually and incompletely replaced it. Magic came to America with the European immigrants and was practiced widely in colonial America and...