Joseph Smith and the Inverted Pentagram

The year is 2218. Modern society as we know it has crumbled and alien overlords have taken control of the ruined remains of America. In the rubble, a discovery is made. An issue of the conspiracy tabloid National Enquirer. What valuable insight into the world of 200 years ago could this document provide? This issue becomes a prized artifact because of the information it provides about the world as it once existed. The only problem is that none of it is true.

In 1844, disgruntled excommunicated Mormons created the Nauvoo Expositor. This anti-Mormon newspaper only ran one issue in which polygamy and Joseph Smith were condemned in very strong terms. It was one of many papers of the era that ran articles targeting the Mormons and Joseph Smith for their doctrine and practices. The publisher, William Law, disingenuously founded his own church based on the LDS church in an attempt to have his cake and eat it too. He then began a smear campaign in which he likened the Mormons to the Spanish Inquisition and said that Joseph Smith was following Lucifer. The LDS church was building the Nauvoo temple and increasing missionary work at this time and was still in a fragile state. Taking a page out of the book of the mobs that terrorized them, the Mormons carried out an act of 1800s frontier vigilantism on orders from the prophet. The press was destroyed but nobody was injured.

Ten years later and across the Atlantic, a former Catholic by the name of Eliphas Levi wrote a book entitled Transcendental Magic in which now common occult symbols were depicted and discussed. The inverted cross, the inverted pentagram, the goat head woman thing, and other symbols were published in this book in order to disseminate Levi’s beliefs on the occult. 

Back to the Mormons. A common fallacy in anti-Mormon rhetoric is that anything published about Joseph Smith by his contemporaries is inherently true as long as they didn’t agree with him. Forget that Brigham Young’s word can be pitted against that of William Law or Wilford Woodruff’s against Ezra Booth’s. To anti-Mormons it is not a case of his word against mine, anti-Mormon literature is just inherently true (truer than pro-Mormon literature) if it comes from that era of history. I think this is because we feel special, smart, and all fuzzy inside when we read primary sources. Something about them validates our own beliefs more than a contemporary article could. Just look at how people back to the Constitution during political debates. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but the argument of “this is really old so it’s got to be true” is just plain stupid. I don’t know what fantasy world we’re living in now that we just take everybody’s word for it when we read these things, but the people that inflamed the public against Joseph Smith could have been lying. Or even just bending the truth. What a crazy concept.

In 1968 Anton LaVey, the founder of Satanism, brought Eliphas Levi’s work to the forefront by taking the symbols he’d written about and making them the official symbols of his devilish religion. Levi was the first person to suggest that the inverted pentagram (or upside-down star) was a satanic symbol. Christians had used it for generations as a symbol of Christ. Many older Catholic and Lutheran churches feature the inverted pentagram. And then Levi came along and changed it out of bitterness toward Christianity. Without LaVey, this symbol may have only been known to the few that followed Levi’s work, but it is now universally recognized as a satanic symbol. Levi had no authority to do this, but by 1968 the requisite time had passed for the “it’s old therefore it’s true” bias to set in.

Joseph Smith constructed a temple in Nauvoo which featured inverted pentagrams. About a decade after, that symbol would be desecrated but of course, Joseph Smith would not ever see that day. The destruction of the Expositor and the inflammatory letters and articles being written about him led a group of dozens of cowards to gun him down in an indefensible jail cell. Another act of frontier vigilantism, but this one ended in bloodshed. Character assassination gave way to actual assassination. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but bullets did to Joseph Smith what no article had done to him yet. Joseph died along with his ability to defend himself against the scholars and historians that have derided him constantly ever since. And of course, they turn to the Expositor and other anti-Mormon primary sources as their information for the kind of man Joseph Smith was.

With this information are we getting the real deal or the Eliphas Levi version? Would we find the Nauvoo Expositor on the conspiracy tabloid rack if it were printed today or am I being unfair to it? Would you want to be represented solely by one side of an argument in two-hundred years? Next time you see an inverted pentagram remember that Joseph Smith knew the true meaning of that symbol and ask yourself how much you can truly know about something when the information you get about it is from the side that hates it most?

Question what you read. Thanks for reading.