In a booklet dedicated to downplaying the prophetic nature of D&C 87, one critic appealed to the “prophetic” nature of a poem attributed to Mother Shipton:
Mother Shipton's prophecy
beats Jose Smith's away out of sight. It reads:
"Carriages without
horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world
with woe;
Around the world through
shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye;
Water shall yet wonders do,
Now strange but yet they
shall be true;
The world upside down shall
be,
And gold be found at the
root of a tree:
Through the hill man shall
ride,
And horse nor ass be at this
side;
Underwater men shall walk,
Shall ride, shall sleep,
shall talk;
in the air shall men be
seen,
In white, in blue, in green;
Iron in the water shall
float
As easy as a wooden boat;
Gold shall be found and
shown
IN land that's now not
known;
Fire and water shall wonders
do;
England shall at last admit
a Jew;
The end of the world shall
come
In eighteen hundred and
eighty-one."
Whether Mother Shipton wrote
this prophecy or some one else, it is a wonderful collection of the improbables
and impossibles, as people then thought. Mother Shipton did not claim divine
inspiration for it. It was written as a joke–just as much as "Mother goose
when she wanted to wander–rode through the air on a very fine gander." The
joke consisted in putting all the impossible things together and predicting the
materialization as an accomplished fact in future years.
These lines date back to
Charles the First. Mother Shipton speaks of England yet to admit a Jew. Well,
the Jews were at one time banished from England, and were not allowed to return
until Cromwell's time. So, the prophecy must have been written prior to
Cromwell's time. Anyway, it dates back several centuries, and as near as I can
figure it out it was not far from the time of Charles the First.
(1) Here is predicted the
automobile,
(2) Many accidents
(3) The electric wire around
the world
(4) Hydraulic pressure
perfected
(5) Unrest of the
"world–upside down"
(6) Buried gold "at the
root of a tree"
(7) Railroad trains through
the hills
(8) The submarine
(9) The airplane
(10) The iron clad boat
(11) Gold in California and
Alaska
(12) fire and steam applied
(13) Jews return to England
(14) The only failure–the
end of the world in 1881.
Here are thirteen points in
Mother Shipton's prophecy that all came true, and she failed on only one. She
put that so far ahead that she did not live to be jeered at for the one
failure.
But Joe Smith's prophecy on
the rebellion was plagiarized from politicians and divine inspiration claimed
for it.
Mormonism, with such a
leader, was founded on lies from beginning to end, and perpetrated by fraud and
deception. (Bates Morris, Joe Smith's Prophecy on the Rebellion: Examined
and Found Wanting [Bates Morris, 1927], 27-29)
For Morris, the “prophetic” poem came from either Shipton
or a contemporary, and “predicts” many events and inventions, with 13/14 (or ~92%)
accuracy. However, this prophecy is an invention, not by a contemporary of Shipton,
but from Charles Hindley, and dates to 1862.
The following appeared in Macon Weekly Telegraph (Georgia)
(July 30, 1880):
“In 1862, Mr. Charles Hindley
of Brighton, England, issued what purported to be an exact reprint of “A Chap-book
Version of Mother Shipton’s Prophecies, from the Edition of 1448.” In this, for
the first time, there were pith and point, and special application. All modern discoveries
were plainly described, and one prophecy which began,
“Carries without horses
shall go,”
and set forth the railroads, telegraphs, steamers, and other modern inventions,
wound up with
“The world unto an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-one.”
This, of course, quite startled
the public. In all other important events of the nineteenth century had been so
aptly described, why should not the last prediction be fulfilled? (source)
However, Hindley would admit his fraud. William H.
Harrison, in his 1881 monograph on Shipton, provided the following details:
The following is the most
largely circulated form of one of Mother Shipton’s reputed prophecies, which of
late years has been exercising the public mind. I quote it from p 450 of Notes
and Queries, December 7th, 1872, but since as well as before then, its
circulation has been extensive.
“ANCIENT
PREDICTION,
“(Entitled by popular tradition ‘Mother Shipton’s Prophecy,’)
“Published in 1448,
republished in 1641.
[RB: Poem is recounted, same
as above as provided by Morris]
. . .
The three earliest records
in the British Museum Library, in relation to Mother Shipton, agree closely with
each other, and none of them contain the lines printed on page 13, in my first
Chapter, ending with the too celebrated couplet:--
“The world to an end shall
come,
in eighteen hundred and eighty one.”
The lines in question and
the notorious prophecy about the end of the world were fabricated about twenty
years ago by Mr. Charles Hindley. The editor of Notes and Queries says, in
the issue of the journal dated April 26th 1873:--
“Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton,
in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy
quoted at page 450 of our last volume, with some ten others included in his reprint
of a chap-book version, published in 1862.” (William H. Harrison, Mother
Shipton Investigated: The Result of Critical Examination in the British Museum
Library, of The Literature Relating to the Yorkshire Sibyl [London: W. H.
Harrison, 1881], 12-13, 42-43)
Needless to say, many of the discoveries/inventions "predicted" in the poem were discovered/invented prior to 1862. The first submarine was designed and built by Cornelis Drebbel in 1620, while the principle of hydraulic pressure was discovered by Blaise Pascal in the 1640s.
The attempt to parallel the poem, falsely attributed to
Shipton, with Joseph Smith’s prophecies (plural), as contained in D&C 87,
is fallacious. There is probably a reason why I have only found this in Morris' 1927 booklet.
Further Reading:
Resources
on Joseph Smith’s Prophecies
To Support this Blog:
Email for Amazon Gift card: ScripturalMormonism@gmail.com
Email for Logos.com Gift Card: IrishLDS87@gmail.com
