Comments on: “Concocted in Some Corner”: A Bogus “Vision” Surfaces Again … and Again … and Again

By: john f.

john f. — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 20:19:22 +0000

Thanks for this Ardis and thanks to the various commenters as well.

This vision surfaces all the time. I think it’s in the book of “Unpublished Revelations” and is of course circulated as a photocopy and on the internet constantly. I don’t think that it will ever go away, despite such admirable debunking as this post. After all, even direct renunciations by Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith were to no avail, and it’s largely to the latter that we can thank the anti-evolutionary strain in the Church. So even Church members who zealously defend anti-evolutionary apologetics by reference to the authority of Joseph Fielding Smith as if his opinion on that topic were written in stone are somehow able and willing to disregard his forceful denunciation of this “prophecy”. This means that there is little hope of it ever going away. We just love it too much.

By: Ben S

Ben S — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:29:18 +0000

Just saw this. Excellent work, Ardis (and others).

By: Amy T

Amy T — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:35:35 +0000

That's impressive, J. Even a dead end can be meaningful. I ran across some of Bate's work recently, the book The Joseph Sylvester Family Letters, 1882-1989. It's a well-done collection, and it's about the family we met in the story The Fire and Light Was Always Free. Bate has done some very good family history work.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:06:07 +0000

It has been a bit. But I thought I would comment with an update. I haven’t personally examined the holograph, but I just read a detailed transcript of a copy of this vision in the hand of John Steele. The transcript was created by a reliable historian. The document is titled “A vision Received by an [sic] Seventy in Salt Lake” and is dated December 1877. Steele was, however, in Britain on a mission during this period. Steele kept copies of several visions (e.g., Newman Bulkley’s vision) that weren’t his own. So that was a dead end.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 21:27:43 +0000

I just checked Kerry William Bate’s UHQ article on John Steele, and it didn’t mention the vision. Bate had more access to the Steele material than anyone, I think (having collected it from the family). It would surprise me if he were aware of the vision and didn’t say anything. I guess the only lead is Quinn’s reference to Woodruff’s incoming correspondence (but then why not include the author in the diary transcript – odd).

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 21:11:35 +0000

Coming late to this as well. I love John Steele. Going through his papers at BYU is on my short list of things to do. One of his journals at the CHL is, I think, one of the best American grimoires. Really fascinating. As I remember, though, those papers at BYU were donated by Bates in the mid-1990s so Quinn would not have got his info from them.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:36:43 +0000

I’m coming a bit late to this, and don’t have much to add, other than to confirm that I spent 4 or 5 months in 2008-09 trying to track down the author of this vision for a paper Richard Holzapfel and I were working on looking at John Taylor’s revelations (later published in John Taylor: Champion of Liberty) to no avail. It appears that Fred Collier can be thanked for popularizing the notion that this was Taylor’s (based on nothing more than the fact that he spoke French); he included it in one of his compilations.

By: Jendoop

Jendoop — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:39:55 +0000

Thank you for sharing this. Apparently word has not gotten around because 20 years ago my seminary teacher taught this. I remember because he printed out copies of certain paragraphs for us to tape into the D&C. I’ll go rips those out now. It didn’t make sense to me, but it was one of those issues I had set aside to find resolution on later. Thanks for being a part of that resolution!

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:23:55 +0000

If Steele sent a copy of this to Woodruff, telling Woodruff in language plain enough for Quinn to “actually” know that Steele was its author rather than just someone merely sending a curious story that was circulating in his neighborhood, then why didn’t Woodruff know that Steele was its author? And of all the labels I could use to characterize John Steele, with whom I am very familiar, “astrologer” wouldn’t be one of the top 20.

This is another one of an ever-growing list of cases where I have to remain unwilling to accept Quinn’s assertions as authoritative, pending further evidence.

By: Amy T

Amy T — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:13:15 +0000

Wow, Mina. Thanks for the additional information and links. As I look at the register of the John Steele Papers, I see that I’ve come across him in the past couple of weeks. Now if I could remember where and why.

I see that due to his Toquerville connections he is responsible for recording some vital Parkinson/Stapley family history that would otherwise have been lost to history, he has deep connections to St. George, and he’s related to the Northern Arizona Fish family, but he must have shown up in relation to the history of Cyrus Wheelock, since that’s what I’ve been doing recently.

Hopefully there’s someone who can take a look at that collection; I’ll put it on a list of sources to look at next time I’m in Utah, but that could be awhile. (And I was in New Haven recently, but looking at the Quinn papers would have been the last thing on my mind that day.)