Nineteen (1824)recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to Judaism or to
Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith
directly.” (Theurgy means “divine or supernatural intervention in human affairs.”);
“‘Religious genius’ is a wonderfully apt characterization that originated with William James,
who introduced it, generically, in the first of the lecture collected in Varieties of Religious Experience. It
was borrowed by Harold Bloom some ninety years later, in his book The American Religion, as the
perfect way to describe Joseph Smith.” Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent
Faith (New York: Doubleday, 2003) 110, n.*
See also Lawrence Foster, “The Psychology of Religious Genius: Joseph Smith and the
Origins of New Religious Movements,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26.4 (1993): 1–2.
“This essay focuses on one particularly well-documented case of religious genius—that of
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, founder of a rapidly growing religious movement that now
numbers more than 8 million members worldwide.”
(^11) B. R. Merrick, “Those Damned Mormons!” Strike the Root, 21 Apr. 2008, Strike-the-Root: A
Journal of Liberty, 22 Apr. 2011 http://www.strike-the-root.com/br-merrick/those-damned-
mormons. “That Joe Smith sure was an egomaniac, wasn’t he?”
Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon
(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999) xxxviii, 225. “I would like to examine Joseph Smith as a
narcissistic personality and how he used the Book of Mormon to express those tendencies. ...Despite
narcissists’ superficial appearance of mental health, their emotional life is shallow; they live for the
admiration of others or for their own ego-massaging fantasies.”
“Uncle Dale,” “Criddle, Jockers, et al., on Book of Mormon Authorship,” Mormon Dialogue &
Discussion Board, 22 Jan. 2011, 22 Apr. 2011 http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/52951-criddle-
jockers-et-al-on-book-of-mormon-authorship/page__st__20. “Ebenezer Robinson was one such
early follower of Joseph Smith, who eventually condemned the man as a tyrant and something like
an egomaniac. Without ever spelling out all of the unhappy details, this was the consensus among the
Church of Christ (Temple Lot), the Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite), the Whitmerites, the
Rigdonites, and, of course, the Reorganized LDS.”
(^12) See ch. 7, n. 4.
(^13) JSH 1:33.