Lucy Mack Smith, the mother of the prophet Joseph, wrote the following in her memoirs:
Let not my reader suppose that because I shall pursue another topic for a season that we stopt our labor and went <at> trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing magic circles or sooth saying to the neglect of all kind of business we never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation but whilst we worked with our hands we endeavored to remember the service of & the welfare of our souls. (1845 preliminary edition)
This passage has been the source of much debate due to Michael Quinn and others misreading it and ignoring its context. As Larry Morris has noted:
D. Michael Quinn, for example, writes that “drawing magic circles for the treasure quest . . . was an occult tradition that Joseph Sr.’s widow, Lucy, eventually acknowledged in a passing comment while dictating her family’s history.” He later adds: “Unlike later apologists, she did not attempt to disassociate Joseph Sr. and Jr. from those occult practices. She simply acknowledged them as part of her family’s spectrum of activities, which included Bible-reading, had work on the farm, and religious dreams and vision” (Quinn, Early Magic World View, 47, 66).
Samuel Brown, on the other hand, maintains “that hers was an attempted denial is clear from both close attention to the text and to the third of the practices she listed. The third activity to which Lucy alludes makes quite clear that she was disclaiming involvement in folk rites. “Soothsaying,” a pejorative term for predicting the future . . . is not a word that a Protestant (or sectarian ex-Protestant) would use to describe her own or her family’s activities.” Further, argues Brown, “in a Bible-drenched culture” like the one Lucy lived in, “soothsaying recalled capital crimes within the Hebrew Bible . . . Had Lucy Smith been endorsing such behaviors, she would almost certainly have described them as ‘prophecy’ or ‘seerhood.’” Brown concludes: “To be clear, in Lucy’s framing, it is the visions of Joseph Smith Sr. and Joseph Smith Jr. that are the antecedent for ‘the welfare of our souls,’ not the rites from which she was trying to distance her family” (Brown, “Reconsidering Lucy Mack Smith’s Folk Magic Confession,” 4, 11n14). (A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon, comp. Larry E. Morris [New York: Oxford University Press, 2019], 507 n. 13)
For a further response to Quinn on this issue, see the (excellent) review of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (rev ed.; 1998) by Bill Hamblin:
That Old Black Magic (beginning on p. 281)
