Smith translated the story on the tablets into English with the aid of magic spectaclelike instruments, also received from Moroni, and it became known as the Book of Mormon; Mormon was a N ephite prophet who had condensed the history of his people into the form in which it appeared on the tablets. Moroni, who was the last Nephite prophet, and a series of other heavenly messengers empowered Smith to restore the Gospel of Christ, to reestablish the authority of the priesthood, which had been removed from the earth after the death of the twelve original apostles, and to found the true Church of Jesus Christ. This he did on April 6, 1830. (Four years later, the phrase "of Latter-day Saints" was added.) Brodie describes Mormonism as "a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity what Christianity had been to Judaism: that is, a reform and a consummation."
     Smith was persecuted for his religious ideas, and he had to keep moving. In Hiram, Ohio, on February 16, 1832, the structure of the hereafter was revealed to him in a vision. It consisted of three levels: the Telestial, the Terrestrial, and the Celestial (a coincidence that, later in the century, would facilitate the conversion to Mormonism of the Catawba Indians, in the Carolinas, whose hereafter also happened to be three-tiered). As his church was getting started, Smith began to wonder about all the people who had lived before him: How were they going to receive the true Gospel and be savedl Searching in the Bible for direction, he found in I Corinthians 15 a verse that seemed to imply that baptism for the dead had taken place in the early church, and in I Peter 3: 18-20 he noted that Jesus, on returning from the dead, told the apostles that he had been preaching the Gospel to "spirits in prison." On April 3, 1836, now in Kirtland, Illinois, Smith reported that the prophet Elijah had visited him, fulfilling a prediction of the prophet Malachi that Elijah would come to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." He began to expound to his followers what he called the "new and strange" doctrine of baptism for the dead, which Elijah had given him: the dead could enter the Celestial Kingdom only if this sacrament, or "ordinance," was performed on their behalf, and the living could not be saved without their departed kin. Later, he divided the Celestial Kingdom into three tiers and created two more ordinances, which' he made prerequisites for admission to the highest tier, which is called Exaltation. He extended the idea of the family to include not only all one's living relatives but all one's ancestors. "It is doubtful whether Joseph sensed the truly staggering implications of his endowment system," Brodie writes. "Upon his church. . . rested the burden of freeing the billions of spirits who had never heard the law of the Lord."
     Having brought in everybody from the past, Smith considered it necessary to build up the living church membership-which continued to be heavily persecuted-as quickly as possible. After a revelation from the Lord on July 12, 1843, at his latest headquarters, in N auvoo, Illinois, he advocated "the plurality of wives" and told his followers that it was their religious obligation to procreate. The righteous, he said, would be blessed like Abraham with "seed as numerous as the sand upon the seashore." A man's posterity would constitute his kingdom and his glory in eternity, and the more children he had and the more of his dead he saved, the larger his kingdom would be. Not only that, but if a man had been righteous he would go on reproducing after death: the Lord would empower him to have "spiritual children." On April 7, 1844, at the funeral of his friend King Follett, Smith said that "the greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid on us is to seek after our dead." Two months later, Smith's "earthly dispensation" came to an end when an angry mob broke into the Hancock County jail and killed him and his brother Hyrum. They were being held on charges of destroying the printing press of the N auvoo Expositor, which had published an editorial claiming that Smith had seduced women by promising to make them his "spirit wives." 

     Bt then, Smith’s followers—there were now about twenty-six thousand of them-were already practicing polygamy and had begun to trace members of their families and to perform the ordinances for them. This "temple work" is still a central part of the religion, and each Mormon has spent hours, months, or years (depending on the depth of his commitment) tracking down his ancestors and taking their names to one of forty-one Mormon temples around the world. Gradually, the work has expanded; since 1939, w hen microfilming of American records began, the ordinances have been performed for all the dead, not just traceable relatives of living church members. Last year, ten million six hundred thousand names of the dead were "extracted" from microfilms by volunteers at eight hundred and seventeen "stakes," as the Mormon parishes are called. In addition, there were about one and a half million "patron submissions," the results of genealogical research that church members had done on their own. All these names were sent to the Genealogical Society's headquarters, in Salt Lake City, and fed into an LB.M. 3081, one of the most powerful computers on the market, to make sure that temple work had not already been done for any of them. Twelve per cent of the extracted names and twenty-two to twenty-four per cent of the patron submissions "duped out." The rest were "cleared" for temple work.
     There are about five and a half million Mormons, and those who are deemed ready and worthy are encouraged to go to a temple as often as they can and perform the proxy ordinances. The temples are where the needs of the dead are taken care of, and where private covenants with the Lord are made and renewed; the regular Sunday worship takes place in a meetinghouse in each stake. Only Mormons in good standing, who have obtained a "temple recommend" from their bishop, can enter a temple, and nobody is supposed to talk about what goes on inside. Near the door, if they have not brought along the name of an ancestor, they receive the name of somebody of their own sex who has been cleared by the computer- J ose phina Maria Ximenes, let us say, whose name was recently extracted from a parish register filmed in Coixtlahuaca, Mexico, which had recorded her marriage on August 25, 1748, to a man named Juan Garcia. Then they strip down to their "temple garment," which Brodie describes as "an un lovely and utilitarian long suit of underwear," with holes at the nipples and Masonic symbols cut into the breast. (The pious wear their garment all the time, under their street clothes. ) After donning white ceremonial robes, they proceed into the temple, whose rooms are typically decorated with murals representing the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the modern world, and the Celestial Kingdom, and perform one of the three ordinances for Josephina.
     The first to be performed is Baptism. Nobody is eligible to enter the Celestial Kingdom who has not been "born of the water and of the spirit." A living person can be baptized wherever there is water deep enough for complete immersion-in a river, even in a swimming pool-but baptism for the dead can take place only in the temple. Children who died before the age of eight do not have to be baptized; they go automatically to the Celestial Kingdom. Baptism is for the remission of sins, and children are not considered to have reached "the age of accountability" -to know right from wrong-until their eighth birthday. (The Mormons do not believe in original sin.) The second ordinance, called the Endowment, is a series of covenants that one makes with God on behalf of the dead person one is sponsoring. The rite includes the purificatory washing and anointing of one's entire body, including the "vitals," by a member of the same sex. Smith, who became a Mason of the Sublime Degree in 1842, was fascinated, according to Brodie, by Masonic ritual-its costumes, its grips, its passwords, its keys, its oaths, its "veiled phallicism." The Endowment used to run about two and a half hours, a regular templegoer told me, but "a very pleasurable movie about the Creation, with professional actors," is now shown at most temples and has cut the ceremony to about an hour and a half.
     The last ordinance is the Sealing, in which members of families are bound together "for time and all eternity"wife to husband, child to parent, generation to generation. The templegoer may seal his own ancestors or the dead provided by the computer. The work on one's family is done in bits and pieces over one's lifetime. Where there are breaks in a chain, one does research. Living couples may also be sealed in the temple. Such "celestial" marriages, which are also "for time and all eternity," are very hard to undo; the parties must petition the president of the church-the incumbent is Spencer Woolley Kimballand satisfy him that they were wrong for each other and should never have been sealed in the first place. Cancellation of a sealing is a drawn-out process. Sometimes a sealed couple may not be able to get along but neither party wants to jeopardize the status of his immortality, so they separate or get a civil divorce without cancelling the Sealing.
     Partly because what goes on in the temples is secret, a good deal of controversy surrounds the proxy ordinances, as it surrounded the church's early practice of plural marriage. Some people, angered to learn that the Mormons were meddling with their ancestors, have accused the church of "spiritual kidnapping;" but the church is careful to explain that the dead have "free agency" to accept or reject the ordinances, just as the living have the right to choose whether or not to join the church. The church is also scrupulous about observing the "rights of privacy" of next of kin. No birth records are sent out for extraction until they are a hundred and ten years old -a rule that more than complies with every country's statute of limitations regarding the privacy of such records. Records less than a hundred and ten years old may be submitted only by the person's next of kin, and nobody who has died less than a year earlier will be considered, for two reasons: to give the next of kin, who may still be in mourning, a chance to "settle into the idea of whether they want to do this," as a spokesman for the Genealogical Society recently eXplained to me; and to give the dead themselves a chance to be exposed to the Gospel in the spirit world. Mormons believe that if you were not receptive to the Gospel in life you may not be, initially, in the here after.
     Most of the names that have been cleared are listed in the International Genealogical Index, an enormous file, which is periodically updated and which currently contains about eighty eight million names, broken down by locality, alphabetized, and carded on microfiche. Entries after an individual's name, in addition to including information such as his date and place of birth, monitor the progress of his soul: when he was baptized, endowed, or sealed, and where. The Index is available to the public in the society's Genealogical Library, along with other genealogical materials the society has collected. It is also distributed to the church's five hundred and fifty branch libraries worldwide and is sold to a number of non-Mormon libraries. As a tool for genealogical research it is unrivalled. But the religious motivation has occasionally caused problems. "Once in a while, a few people get indignant when they find their ancestors in the I.G.I. and see that temple work has been done for them," Henry E. Christiansen, a longtime troubleshooter for the society, remarked in a recent conversation. "There are two kinds of objections-from people who have different religious opinions, and from people who are sensitive about the vital statistics of their immediate family being made known." In a few cases, the names of people who were born out of wedlock have been removed from the Index at the request of a descendant, although legally, as Val Greenwood, an attorney who advises the society, explained, "the dead have no rights-in a court of law the next of kin would be hard pressed to make a case. "
 
 
 
 

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