Washington Irving a witness of the period in question, wrote a study called "The Money Diggers." Narrated by Diedrich Knickerbocker. Claims to be concerned with uncovering the truth behind America's brief fascination with money digging and also divining rods. Knickerbocker's story reveals that people practiced money digging In response to a generalized state of anxiety over what they considered to be the dissolution of the social and political bonds that ought to hold Amercan communities together. This is of course the same explanation that has been given to conspiracy theories in the next century.
Divining rods figure as the center of this analogy because they assume a specific purpose behind this phenomena so Irving. Moreover, the proper use of divining rods requires the same kind of faith that persons must have In each other if their social and political ties are to remain intact. Divining rods, after all, require an almost perfectly unified relationship between the visible and the invisible world if they are to achieve their desired end the location of buried treasure.In this sense, Irving demonstrates that what appears to be occult on the surface - divining for buried treasure exactly like the normative versions of faith that are traditionally held to bind Individuals to each other and to their communities.
It is unclear when money digging first occurred on American soil, most scholars accept the claim that money digging came over with German immigrants who sailed to Pennsylvania sometime In the early eighteenth century. (1)
From there, the practice spread rapidly throughout the American Colonies. In fact, money digging was so popular in America by the end of the eighteenth century that some considered it a kind of illness or "mania." (2)
In a satire of the practice no other then Benjamin Franklin wrote:
"When a Man is once thus infatuated, he is so far fromThe result as Alan Taylor has shown, was the creation of of a "spiritual economy," that promised vast economic ends through a readily manipulated spiritual means.(4)
being discouraged by ill Success, that he is rather
animated to double his industry, and will try again and
again in a Hundred Different Places, In Hopes at last
of meeting with some lucky Hit, that shall at once
Sufficiently reward him for all his Expence of Time and Labour.(3)Success in money digging, however complex its formulatie, was held to be an indisputable sign of divine favor. To obtain this condition, money diggers had to master control of an elaborate spiritual folklore that included deflecting guardian spirits, and preparing divining rods. Money diggers, therefore, had to be adept at reading and Interpreting the proper signs of buried treasure so they could prepare against the attack of guardian spirits, and to secure the ever elusive reward.
Divining rods were believed to be so sensitive, however, that they would move only for those who enacted the requisite preparatory forms and ceremonies. Indeed, not unlike the use of quarz christal pendulums today (2003) any failure in blessing the rod, and selecting the right rod handler could ad to disastrous results.
Georgius Agrilcola, in his famous studies of divination, writes that German miners prepared their divining rods simply by offering certain prayers that blessed the rod for Success. Finding the location of the treasure was only the beginning of the problem. Treasure hunters then had to protect themselves -against curses and spells by creating "protective magic circles by scooping out a groove with a silver spoon or by dripping magic circle's blood around the digging ground."(5)
1) See Herbert Leventhal, in the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century America , 1976, 119.2) See W. R. Jones, "Hill-Diggers' and 'Hell-Raisers' Treasure Hunting and the Supernatural in Old and New England." in Peter Benes, ed. Wonders of" the invisible World: 1600-1900 Vol 17, 1992, 105-106.
3) See "The Busy-Body, No. 8, in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, 1987,114.
4) Alan Taylor, "The Early Republic's Supernatural Economy Treasure Seeking in the American North-East, American Quarter,1980 : 6-34.
5) Georgius Agrilcola. De Re Metallica. trans. Herbert Z. Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, 1950.#
Americans of Smith's time and earlier had speculated as well on Indian origins. Were the indigenous inhabitants of the land pre-Adamites and, so, outside a biblical framework? Paracelsus had argued this, and in mid seventeenth-century France the Calvinist Isaac de la Peyrere had produced the first book-length endorsement of the theory; Carolina explorer Thomas Hariot apparently shared the view, and so did Britisher Bernard Romans, whose natural history of Florida appeared in 1775. Were the Indians instead among the descendants of Noah? Early American notables such as Cotton Mather, Jedidiah Morse, and Timothy Dwight were convinced that this was the case. More explicitly, were the native people of America of Hebrew descent and perhaps from the lost tribes of Israel? The renowned Puritan Indian missionary John Eliot thought so, and likewise Roger Williams and William Penn shared the view. By 1775, James Adair had written a thoroughgoing defense of the Hebraic origin of the Indians in his History of the American Indians, and in the early nineteenth century, former congressman Elias Boudinot popularized the Israelite theory, using Adair's work to do so. Still more, were the mound builders really Indians, or did their massive and superior constructions suggest a race different from the natives encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Europeans? Jeremy Belknap, for whom Harvard University's prestigious Belknap Press is named, favored the twomigration theory, and so did Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York in 18H. The same Solomon Spalding who, before Fawn Brodie demolished the theory, was rumored to have authored the Book of Mormon also held to the two-group theory. Questions and answers such as these about the Indians spilled over into print in vernacular media like commonplace books and newspapers, with descriptions of the mounds readily available to readers in various places, including the area in which Smith was raised.33
Thus Smith and the Book of Mormon were preoccupied with the memories encrypted into the land-in its earthworks and arrowheads, in its variously answered questions and untold histories. The very title page of the Book of Mormon announced its intention "to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord had done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever." Moreover, by 1831 Smith was enjoining Mormon missionaries to marry Indian wives. But there was more. The Book of Mormon had been delivered on golden plates and its content connected the mounds to the use of metal, so that, as Vogel writes, the "Book of Mormon's righteous Jaredites and Nephites" were presented as "advanced metallurgists." Nom whence did this high metallurgical ascription come? If we look to the historical and archaeological record, metallurgy was not the particular forte of mound builders.34 In the received esotericism of Europe, however, things were different. Enoch had found a triangular plate of gold, and the Hermetic tradition had produced its hieroglyphics, even as the Urim and Thummim and the ubiquitous seer stones of the cunning could enable one to read them.
What I am suggesting, then, is that in the mind and cultural practice of Joseph Smith we have, at firsthand, a dazzling display of the kind of combinativeness that would be the preeminent feature of American metaphysical religion. In him we see, coming together in an early representation, the ingredients that would conjoin in the mature tradition. From this perspective, literary and cultural critic Harold Bloom is decidedly close to target when he points to the Mormonism of Smith's early production as a prototype for an American religion with "Gnostic, Enthusiast, and Orphic" qualities. It was, for Bloom, a "post-Christian" religion. Even if-recognizing the inherited Christianity of the Mormon theological venture - we do not accept the post-Christian label, we can acknowledge the light his general analysis sheds. What held the principles of Mormonism together, Bloom thinks, is the "American persuasion, however muted or obscured, that we are mortal gods, destined to find ourselves again in worlds as yet undiscovered."35 He could have added, destined to find ourselves by combining the pieces of many cultures in a new and distinctly American synthesis.
Beyond this, what is so interesting about the metaphysical synthesis that Smith achieved is its corporate quality. Smith's religion had begun as a family affair, had speedily become a family-and-friends affair, and then - as it grew - had emerged as a distinctly communal production. In fact, the communalism of early Mormons provided a strong reason for the fear and hatred they seemed to generate wherever they settled. Americans read Mormon separateness in political terms, and Mormons themselves did little to discourage that estimate. Smith, after all, aimed to run for president of the United States in 1844.36 As the institutional cement for communalism was developed by Smith in his elaborate organization building, it became clear that Mormon metaphysics was not something that one did alone. The mysticism of Hermetic solitudes gave way to the larger familiarism of polygamous social practice and corporate ritual practice in secret temple ceremonies. Like the Freemasons, whom in part they emulated, Mormons did religion in community. Nonetheless, the theological path that led Joseph Smith to announce American Mormon divinity had been cleared - and was being cleared - by votaries of the decidedly individualistic doctrine of universalism and by the denominational organizations that would bring this new gospel to waiting and receptive Americans.
33. Lucy Mack Smith, History ofJoseph Smith by His Mother, Lucy Mack Smith (19°1), ed. Preston Nibley (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1958), 83.
Vogel, Indian Origins, 18.34. Ibid., 24-27. On New England, see James W. Mavor Jr. and Byron E. Dix, Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England's Native Civilization (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1989).
35. Vogel, Indian Origins, 36-37, 38-42, 62-63. For Fawn Brodie's demolition of the Spalding thesis, see Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 442-56.
36. See Vogel, Indian Origins, 66, 33,29.