For behold, in my name are they
called; and if they know me they shall come forth, and shall have a place
eternally at my right hand. (Mosiah 26:24)
Translation: The imagery of the right hand comes from the
ancient conceptions of the right hand as good and the left hand as evil. The Latin
word for “left” is sinistera, which was adopted into English with an
obviously pejorative character. Thus, it is a blessing to be on Yahweh’s right
hand. This conceptual division between the left and the right is well known
from the Old World, but less so from the New World.
There is little literature on the
meaning of the left hand in Mesoamerica, but there are hints that it was not
considered evil, but that it may have been a sign of a connection to the powers
of the other world. For example, the left-handed warriors of the Mexica were
considered the most fearful, most likely because their left-handedness gave
them a military advantage. The name of the Mexica tribal deity was Huitzilopochtli,
meaning “hummingbird on/of the left.” This context is positive for the Mexica.
A fascinating possibility comes from an analysis of the various stelae at the
site of Izapa, a much later description of the underworld from the Codices
Matritenses, and the Mesoamerican fascination with mirrors.
In Izapa, a preponderance of actions
are performed with the left hand. Either the Izapans were statistically
left-handed more than any other known population, or the depiction of actions
by the left hand had a distinctive significance. The Codices Matritenses describe
the underworld as a place of reversals from the real world. (Bernardino se
Sahagún, “Codices Matritenses,” 1540-85, holograph Fol. 84r/v, Library, Royal
Palace of the Academy of History, Madrid, Spain. Microfilm in my possession)
And finally, the Mesoamerican mirror of polished obsidian or hematite has
symbolic connections to the primordial waters and the underworld. The mirror
effect is so well known that we understand a “mirror image” to transform right
to left and left to right. In this context, the left hand may be a representation
of a connection to the otherworld.
What would these possibilities for
this passage? I hypothesize that Joseph translated the concept, using an image
that was familiar to him, though not necessarily the wording of Mesoamerica, it
seems unlikely that the Old World imagery of “right is good/left is bad” would
have survived long enough to be recorded in this time period. (Brant A.
Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of
Mormon, 6 vols. [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007], 3:437)