Fallible Memories and Prophetic Succession

Our memories are surprisingly unreliable. I say surprisingly because they seem so real and concrete. Of course they are accurate enough for us to get by without major disruption, and most of the time there is no way to prove them wrong anyway. But sometimes they can be wrong in a big way.

Discover Magazine has an article titled "How Much of Your Memory Is True?" that discusses how our understanding of memory is changing. Part of it deals with false memories.

Even harrowing memories—the so-called flashbulb memories that feel as if they have been permanently seared into the brain—are not as accurate as we think. Less than a year after a cargo plane crashed into an Amsterdam apartment building in 1992, 55 percent of the Dutch population said they had watched the plane hit the building on TV. Many of them recalled specifics of the crash, such as the angle of descent, and could report whether or not the plane was on fire before it hit. But the event had not been caught on video. The “memory” shared by the majority was a hallucination, a convincing fiction pieced together out of descriptions and pictures of the event.

Reading this reminded me of the famous story in LDS history of the passing of the prophetic mantle from Joseph Smith to Brigham Young. After Joseph was killed it was unclear who should be in charge. A meeting was held on August 8, 1844 where both Sidney Rigdon (counselor in the First Presidency) and Brigham Young (president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles) addressed the congregation and explained why they were entitled to lead the Saints. Many people (including one of my own ancestors) said that while Brigham Young spoke he seemed to sound and/or look like Joseph, and this was taken as evidence of divine approval of Brigham Young. Unfortunately, there are no known contemporaneous written accounts of this manifestation. Even Wilford Woodruff failed to mention anything miraculous in his lengthy journal entry for the day.

Of special interest here are Apostle Orson Hyde and John D. Lee (of Mountain Meadows fame), both of whom left retrospective accounts of their experience. Elder Hyde's accounts are pretty detailed. For example, in 1869 he said,

We went among the congregation and President Young went on the stand. Well, he spoke, and his words went through me like electricity. "Am I mistaken?" said I, "or is it really the voice of Joseph Smith?" This is my testimony; it was not only the voice of Joseph, but there were the features, the gestures and even the stature of Joseph before us in the person of Brigham. And though it may be said that President Young is a complete mimic, and can mimic anybody, I would like to see the man who can mimic another in stature who was about four or five inches higher than himself. Every one in the congregation-every one who was inspired by the Spirit of the Lord-felt it. They knew it. They realized it.

I sat myself down in, the midst of the congregation, with my two wives, whom Joseph had given and sealed to me. When President Young began to speak, one of them said, "It is the voice of Joseph! It is Joseph Smith!" The exclamation of the other was, "I do not see him, where is he?"

The problem is that Wilford Woodruff's journal says that Orson Hyde arrived in Nauvoo on August 13 (he is also missing in History of the Church 7:231) and John D. Lee's own diary says that he arrived August 20--five and twelve days, respectively, after the meeting occurred.

If the written journals are correct, it appears that Hyde and Lee unconsciously created memories of the passing of the mantle based on the stories of others. Or giving them more benefit of the doubt, perhaps they transposed a later spiritual experience onto a false memory of attending the August 8 meeting. Whether the other accounts are of a similar nature is the kind of question historians worry about. My own opinion is that there was at least a core group of people who genuinely had the described experience. They wouldn't be the only ones; decades later several people reported a similar experience when Heber J. Grant followed Joseph F. Smith as Church president.

Nevertheless, the examples of Orson Hyde and John D. Lee (and maybe even Wilford Woodruff) raise questions about the nature of religious testimony and witness. Can we be confident, for example, that the scriptures do not contain any false memories? Whatever the case, these examples suggest that the line between truth and fiction can be blurry. That, and if you have a miraculous experience you should write it down quickly.


[Related post: A Case of First Presidency Amnesia.]


References:

Lynne W. Jorgensen and BYU Studies Staff, The Mantle of the Prophet Joseph Passes to Brother Brigham: A Collective Spiritual Witness. BYU Studies 36, no. 4. (1996-1997)

Richard Van Wagoner, The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, vol. 28 no. 4. (1995)

Reid L. Harper, The Mantle of Joseph: Creation of a Mormon Miracle. Journal of Mormon History vol. 22 issue 2. (1996)

Thomas Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, p. 117

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