Moroni’s Body; or, the Skins of Moroni
by Edgar Garcia
Cemetery for Non-Catholics in Rome. Photo credit: Edgar Garcia.
Moroni’s body is a problem of continuous revelation. Another way to put it: what did Moroni look like? Or, what kind of body are we asked to see when we hear the story of the messenger Moroni—an ancient inhabitant of the pre-Columbian Americas—coming as an angelic epiphany to Joseph Smith in the 1820s to direct him to the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was inscribed?
The contents of that book cue the visual problem. If Moroni is indeed a Nephite, one of those ancient tribes of Israelite exiles who had settled in the Americas (hence becoming one of indigenous peoples of the Americas, as the Book of Mormon tells) long before the arrival of the brigand from Genoa, then it would seem indeed that this messenger, Moroni, often described as an angel,[1] should not look like the commonplace angels of European Christian iconography. He shouldn’t be so white, so appropriate to a painting by Giotto or Michelangelo, should he? While not actually white, he also shouldn’t be Thomistic, that is, with a type of angelic form (one must not say body) set forth by the great doctor of angelology Thomas Aquinas: to wit, incorporeal, completely spiritual, purely intellectual, and inclined to thoughts and behavior profoundly alien to human beings.[2] Unlike these angelic types, Moroni is provocatively embodied; and what provokes about his body is its location in space, time, and history. A matter of the Americas, of indigeneity and colonialism, of racial difference and social conflict, is traced through his skin—leading to the question: as the continuous revelation of Mormon theology teaches, if this erstwhile man then angel was in fact a man of the indigenous Americas, formed in dynamic interaction with the social histories, cultural legacies, and natural ecologies of these lands, what indeed did he look like?
There were of course no racially white people here when the Europeans arrived in 1492. Moreover, the people whom the Europeans encountered in their waves of arrival had their own ideas about embodiment, gender, power, identity, kinship, historicity, space, and time. From their indigenous view of things, the idea of a cosmos based on racial order was strange. Hence, if we foreground them (the apparent kin of this messenger from the Americas), the question is stranger still: considering the social and historical location of Moroni’s body, what is this embodied revelation of the Native Americas trying to teach us?
The two books that anchor this special forum bring these questions to life in related but distinct ways. In a sense both books are about Moroni’s body. By that I mean that the books are about the normative embodiments of Mormonism from the nineteenth century (Coviello) to the post-WWII contemporary moment (Petrey). Such revisitation of forms and styles of Mormon embodiment involve problems and possibilities related to race, sex, gender, identity, and community.
In Make Yourselves Gods, Peter Coviello tells the story of how the epiphanic nuances of early Mormonism, especially its conception of an inescapably embodied divinity (i.e., Smith’s injunction to “make yourselves gods” because the matter of human flesh is formed in the self-exalting pleasure of spirit), enabled quite radical sexual and racial formations that were later regulated by a more politically cautious Mormon church. Coviello’s storytelling is masterful, his narrativization of the early Mormon archive is delightful, and the political elucidations gleaned from the stories are compelling. These elucidations come from two main sources: the intimacy of some early Mormon women with the work of continuous revelation and the encompassing intimacy of early Mormon theology and theocracy with the indigenous people of the western frontier.
Building on this historical groundwork, Coviello theorizes on the limits of the intellectual paradigm of secularization, noting its implicit racial hierarchies and gender exclusions. While I didn’t find myself in total disagreement with him there, I did find portions of this theoretical architecture less compelling—particularly where it rendered race and racism into a singular, almost inescapable category from which secularism is never released. This is particularly difficult for me to work through when, in considering race, Coviello discusses indigeneity and blackness in practically the same terms. The social histories and intellectual affordances of indigeneity and blackness are not the same (and would not have been the same for Smith), and where they overlap (the Caribbean or Central American Garifuna, for instance) they are remarkable for the tensions generated by that overlap. It may be instructive to remember that the term “indigenous” was created by the English polymath Thomas Browne in the mid-seventeenth century precisely to distinguish the people of the Americas from the black-skinned people of Africa;[3] and that this distinction was exploited to render what anthropologist Michael Taussig called, on the hand, “the Indian [who] has been recruited to the task of carrying the originary America and thus the seed of the great American story,” and, on the other hand, blackness which “has been recruited as the carrier of disturbance and fragmentation in that great American story, even threatening it with destruction.”[4] A closer consideration of this difference might have clarified what Moroni’s indigenous body brought to the radical embodiment of early Mormonism (to be clear, not just what is efficaciously indigenous—although those political considerations are an important part of the story—but also what might be actually, culturally, and intellectually indigenous), as well as helped to disentangle some of the ineluctability of Coviello’s opening “axioms” on secularism.
In Tabernacles of Clay, Taylor Petrey’s work proceeds differently. Interpreting the postwar moment as a history of the present, Petrey gives a bold, beautiful, convincing, and admirable account of how the sexual amorphism of human spirit in mid-century LDS theology has carried occluded ideas of malleability, fluidity, contingency, and even permeability in the physical manifestation of sex and gender. These ideas about the spiritual body have been occluded insofar as they have been contested in waves of interracial, homosexual, and transphobic panic—battles that have taken place in such historical flashpoints as the California Supreme Court’s decision in Perez v. Sharp (striking down the state’s ban on interracial marriage), the US Supreme Court’s related decision in Loving v. Virginia, the publication of the Kinsey report, the APA decision to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders, the proposal of the Equal Rights Amendment, the passage of Propositions 22 and 8 in California (prohibiting same-sex marriage), Mitt Romney’s presidential run, and others.
Crucially, Petrey does not track Mormon responses in these flashpoints as mere reactions in a conservative political ecology (although at times that is clearly the case). Rather, he gives a resonant account of how such cultural moments were configured in Mormon theological idioms, sometimes with surprising heterogeneity in political attitude. As far as Moroni’s body is concerned, Petrey lays bare a simultaneous torquing of attitudes around race and sex: as the intolerance of interracial unions became less viable amidst the civil rights movement (and a more racially integrated LDS church gradually emerged), the intolerance and anxiety about homosexuality was amplified to an extreme degree. Anxiety about racial difference shifted to sexual difference, implicating the LDS church in a new enterprise of legitimation based less on antiblack racism and more on homophobia and, more recently, transphobia. Upsetting as this shift is, its possibility serves to substantiate Petrey’s insights about the malleable and fluid status of bodies in Mormon theology. In half a century, the body of the outsider to mainstream Mormonism transformed in discourses that rely on continuous revelation. If, with ongoing prophecy, what seems condemnable in one instance can disappear in the next, then what seems condemnable in a later instance could again vanish in the work of ongoing prophecy. One only hopes that with such a shift the substratum of immortal mutability is carried forward into conceptions of bodies in mortal form.
Thus, the question, shaped differently now, presents itself again: what did Moroni look like? Petrey’s emphasis on the mutability of spirit in the afterlife lets us imagine that Moroni, appearing to Smith in spiritual form long after his mortal death, would have had the ability to alter his (I am tempted to write “their” here based of Petrey’s finer points, along with Coviello’s intellectual history) physical appearance, to push on the plasticity of his form, perhaps to accommodate himself to Smith’s whiteness. That’s not a satisfying idea for me because, in such allowance, a key element is lost of what I think of as Mormonism’s Americanity, that is, its emphatic contextualization in the social and natural histories of the indigenous Americas. It may be that I am inclined to think that way because I come from Los Angeles, where the first Mormon temple I visited is topped by the statue of Moroni with distinctly indigenous, specifically Mayan, physical and sartorial features.[5] It may also be because I come to this body of work as a Central American from a Latinx and Indigenous Studies intellectual formation, so I am sensitive to the Latin American, Latino, and indigenous undercurrents of Mormon theology and life (increasingly populated by Latino and Latin American converts, representing about 40 percent of the church in 2013).[6] In any case, in my mind’s eye, Moroni is irrevocably and irresistibly brown. And there is provocative rationale for my thinking that way, coming from Maya Mormons themselves, as published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1996.
In “Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as a Harbinger of the Future?,” anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy examines how the geographical situatedness of the Book of Mormon has shaped the self-understanding of K’iche’ Mayas who are also Mormons, giving them a sense of original relation to the Book of Mormon (and hence to Mormonism as a system of thought and belief), as well giving a sense of religious legitimacy to such pre-Columbian K’iche’ Mayan stories of creation as found in the Popol Vuh and the Título de Totonicapán. With the term “geographical situatedness” I refer, of course, to the question of where exactly the lands of the ancient Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites, and Mulekites are supposed to have been. The Book of Mormon specifies that there must be ocean waters to the east and west of an isthmus or narrow neck of land, which separates a drier northern land from a wetter bountiful land, which leads southward along a great river to highlands, wilderness, and then another land touched on the east and west by the sea. Travel times given in the Book preclude any consideration of a hemispheric expanse. Therefore, the isthmus must be located in some more limited area of the Americas. Although Smith found the plates in the Great Lakes region, the story cannot be set there due to the hotter, drier lands described in the Book, let alone its mention of mountainous highlands and searing heat at the start of the new year (there is, to be sure, no mention of snow or ice in the Book, which would seem impossible for a 3,500-year history in the Great Lakes). Therefore, the strongest candidate region seems to be Isthmus of Tehuantepec, separating modern Mexico in the north from Guatemala and Central America to its south, suggesting to many modern Latter-day Saints in fine that the native inhabitants of this region of Mesoamerica (i.e., K’iche’ Mayas and other indigenous groups) are or were Nephites et al. by another name.
Murphy thus describes how, building on this geographical relation, some Maya converts to Mormonism come to see themselves not as converts but indeed as the original inheritors of the Mormon faith to which their white counterparts from the North are the more recent converts. They find evidence of this original inheritance in the appearance of Mormon and biblical themes and figures in the Popol Vuh and the Título de Totonicapán, as well as in the appearance of Mayan and Mesoamerican themes and figures in the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Murphy thus points out that Guatemalan Mormons have built on the racial and temporal specificities of the Book of Mormon to prioritize Maya cultural life, including such things as the Popol Vuh, since these works are further evidence of a primordial, pre-Columbian relation to their biblical emergence. They note that there are “many similarities between the Book of Mormon and the Popol Vuh,” and they explicitly identify Jesus “with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent in the Popol Vuh.”[7] These appropriations of biblical figures into a Mayan world give Maya Mormons ownership over the past and future of Mormonism, effectively sidelining white Mormons of North America as secondary, late, and, one is tempted to say, latter-day converts to an ongoing and outlasting Maya cosmogenesis. Noting the central importance of the Popol Vuh for such claims, Murphy adds: “socially and symbolically, Guatemalans can claim something most other Mormons lack: a sacred local manuscript they believe complements the imported religious text of the Book of Mormon.”[8] According to these Guatemalan Mormons, the normative embodiments of Mormonism were set not in the 1950s or 1850s but thousands of years before that in the Mesoamerican world of Southern Mexico and Central America.
With that in mind, it is helpful to consider what it would mean to be embodied in a Mayan sense of things. A primary resource for such a consideration is the K’iche’ Mayan Popol Vuh, a book transcribed in 1702 from a now lost 1550s manuscript, which itself is predated by the stories and characters of the Popol Vuh visible in the still older hieroglyphic and iconographic record. The book’s textual history is too complex to engangle here, but it’s important to note that its authors situate world creation in historical circumstances. Rather than have a story of creation in which the gods make the world and its mortal inhabitants out of cosmic darkness, in the Popol Vuh the darkness from which the world and its inhabitants is made is colonial darkness. The story is emphatically set in colonial crisis: in the unfolding emergency of the arriving Spaniards, the Maya authors of the Popol Vuh set out to make their world anew.
Following on this tenet of critical creationism, the Popol Vuh sets up a constant blurring of the creators of the work and the creators of the world, forging a ring encircling the work of creativity in the work of Creation with a capital C. In thus making themselves gods, the Maya authors of this work tell a story, and hence set forth a world, in which identities and communities constantly loop back on themselves in such a way as to enable revision, revisitation, reconsideration, and alternative possibility (key themes of the work). Indeed the nature of necessity in this work (the necessity of the work itself and the necessity of its world—Why should there be a world? Why should there be people?) is intrinsically bound up with reversal, repetition, and potential revisal. You are never so much an entity as you are its possibility for alternation, and that alternation is always tangled up with other bodies in your midst. Hence, gods in the Popol Vuh hesitate, debate, equivocate, and think through problems, even as they create and move through the bodies of animal and human, while humans, also contradictory and creative, move through various bodies (male, female, animal, vegetal, and otherwise) in a constant reckoning with identity as an activity of relations-making, to wit, ongoing prophecy in its social reciprocity.
This relations-making carries an ethical message, which Maya anthropologist Juana Batzibal Tujal describes thus: “life itself is nothing but relations of mutual respect; the most important thing then is to destroy relations of domination, marginalization, and inequality.”[9] The takeaway is that if there is a relation, there is a responsibility to that relation and those impacted by it. Hence, if Moroni is implicated in the history of Mesoamerica, if that’s the relational world set forth in the plates revealed by the angelic messenger, then that implication comes with ethical responsibilities—responsibilities that, simply put by scholar of decoloniality Rolando Vázquez when he describes the fundamental motive of decolonial thinking, shift the spirit of relation from owning to owing, from demanding to giving, asking not what can you possess but indeed whom do you owe for that which you have.[10] Returning in this spirit to the question of Moroni’s body, putting it into the context of indigenous intellectual life in which it appears, I rephrase the problem thus: whom do you owe for its conception?
[1] Not by Joseph Smith himself, although ἄγγελος [Gr.] = messenger.
[2] Thomas Aquinas, “Question 51: The Angels in Comparison with Bodies,” in Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed., rev. ed. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920).
[3] Thomas Browne, “On the Blackness of Negroes,” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into very many received tenents, and commonly presumed truths, 4th ed. (1646; London: printed for Edward Dod, 1658), 400.
[4] Quoted in Mark Anderson, Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–2.
[5] Brian Olsen, Know Your Moroni: A Field Guide to Angel Moroni Statues, Volume 2: Charts, Graphs, Lists, References and Research, rev. 3 (2021), 61, 70.
[6] Mark L. Grover, “Mormons in Latin America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199778362.013.39.
[7] Thomas W. Murphy, “Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as a Harbinger of the Future?” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (1996): 182–183.
[8] Ibid., 183.
[9] Juana Batzibal Tujal, “Mujer Maya, rectora de nuestra Cultura,” in Identidad Rostros Sin Máscara: Reflexiones sobre Cosmovisión, Género y Etnicidad, eds. Adela Delgado Pop, Morna Macleod, and María Luisa Cabrera Pérez-armiñán (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Oxfam-Australia, 2000), 36.
[10] Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: The Mondriaan Fund, 2020).
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Garcia is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Creative Writing. In 2022, he is editor in chief of Fence Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @edgaresque.