Church History

A short while ago, a small group of us traveled back to Mendon, New York, to film scenes for the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming series of short documentaries, “Becoming Brigham.”  We worked outside, in a snowstorm.  By mid-morning, the wind chill factor was nine degrees above zero.  It was . . . unpleasant.  But it increased my appreciation for Brigham Young, who, during a snowstorm on almost the same date in 1832, had walked two miles to be baptized a few hundred yards away.  Immediately thereafter, at the water’s edge, he was confirmed and ordained an elder.  He had investigated the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for two years before joining it.  Once he had reached his decision, though, he never wavered.  The circumstances of his baptism powerfully foreshadow his lifelong commitment.

Filming in Mendon also reminded me of a curious story from the earliest days of the Restoration.  I had written about it in one of the first articles I ever published—and my wife has never quite forgotten that I finished writing it during our honeymoon.  The article is very difficult to access these days, so I thought that I would revisit the strange story that it tells:

During the night of 22 September 1827, near Mendon, Heber C. Kimball—a future apostle and counselor in the First Presidency who, at this point, had heard nothing about the Restoration—was awakened by shouting.  John P. Greene, his neighbor, wanted him to come and see something in the sky.  Heber ran outside with his wife and with Brigham Young’s sister, Fanny, who was living with the Kimballs at the time.  He later recounted what he saw:

It was one of the most beautiful starlit nights, so clear that we could see to pick up a pin. We looked to the eastern horizon, and beheld a white smoke arise toward the heavens; as it ascended it formed itself into a belt and made a noise like the sound of a mighty wind, and continued southwest, forming a regular bow dipping in the western horizon. After the bow had formed, it began to widen out and grow clear and transparent, of a bluish cast; it grew wide enough to contain twelve men abreast.

In this bow an army moved, commencing from the east and marching to the west; they continued marching until they reached the western horizon. They moved in platoons, and walked so close that the rear ranks trod in the steps of their file leaders, until the whole bow was literally crowded with soldiers. We could distinctly see the muskets, bayonets and knapsacks of the men, who wore caps and feathers like those used by the American soldiers in the last war with Britain; and also saw their officers with their swords and equipage, and the clashing and jingling of their implements of war, and could discover the forms and features of the men. The most profound order existed throughout the entire army; when the foremost man stepped, every man stepped at the same time; I could hear the steps.

When the front rank reached the western horizon a battle ensued, as we could distinctly hear the report of arms and the rush. No man could judge of my feelings when I beheld that army of men, as plainly as ever I saw armies of men in the flesh; it seemed as though every hair of my head was alive. This scenery we gazed upon for hours, until it began to disappear. After I became acquainted with Mormonism, I learned that this took place the same evening that Joseph Smith received the records of the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni, who had held those records in his possession. John Young, Sen., and John P. Greene’s wife, Rhoda, were also witnesses. . . .  The next night similar scenery was beheld in the west by the neighbors, representing armies of men who were engaged in battle.

Commenting on the incident years later, Heber C. Kimball’s biographer Orson F. Whitney—the son of Helen Mar Kimball and, thus, Heber’s grandson, as well as a future apostle himself—called it “a wonderful foreshadowing, truly, of the warfare to be waged between the powers of good and evil.”

Yet Heber C. Kimball’s experience was not without parallels among early Latter-day Saints. For example, Wilford Woodruff may have witnessed something similar on 21 February 1838. Elder Woodruff reported that he saw a light in the heavens that spread from the northeast to the west, then rolled overhead and to the south and culminated in a thirty-minute display of fire, blood, and smoke.  In his mind, what he witnessed “at times resembled contending armies.” “This,” he wrote in his journal, “is one of the signs in the heavens in the last days spoken of by the ancient as well as modern Prophets.”  On another occasion, Elder Woodruff reported seeing a stream of light in the southwestern sky “in the form of a broad sword with the hilt downward and the blade raised.” The sword appeared again on several succeeding evenings.

When he was just a small boy in England, the future third president of the Church, John Taylor, saw a vision of an angel in the heavens.  That angel, he said, was holding a trumpet to its mouth, sounding a message to the nations. Taylor said that he didn’t understand the meaning of this vision until later in life. And other early Latter-day Saints experienced analogous visions.  During his voyage from Beirut to Jaffa in late 1841, Elder Orson Hyde saw clearly in the sky “a very bright glittering sword . . .with a beautiful hilt, as plain and complete as any cut you ever saw. And, what is still more remarkable, an arm, with a perfect hand, stretched itself out and took hold of the hilt of the sword. The appearance really made my hair rise, and the flesh, as it were, to crawl on my bones. The Arabs made a wonderful outcry at the sight: ‘O, Allah, Allah, Allah!’ was their exclamation all over the vessel.”

Parley Pratt saw great significance in aerial phenomena. In his “Autobiography,” he offers a detailed description of a mysterious symbol in the sky and of its various shapes, which he thought intelligible “to the wise.” At another time, having recorded an impressive meteor shower that was viewed by many of the Saints, he noted that “every heart was filled with joy at this majestic display of signs and wonders, showing the near approach of the coming of the Son of God.” Later, Elder Pratt sat watching great waves of light traverse the skies for hours without ceasing.

So, were such visionary experiences peculiar to Latter-day Saints?  Hardly.  The justly famous novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis was aware of phenomena very like what Heber C. Kimball and others saw in Mendon.  In fact, he coined the term “aerial combat” for it, writing in his “Preface to Paradise Lost” that “I have never seen it, but in the sixteenth century, nearly everyone seems to have done so.”  And he was speaking as an expert: His academic specialty at Oxford and then at Cambridge was medieval and Renaissance literature.

However, although it was common in the sixteenth century, there are earlier examples still. Perhaps the oldest is found in the “Aeneid” (lines 8520-8540) of the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.). It points back even further, though, to the very foundation of Rome itself: Venus gives a sign from a cloudless sky, portending war. Lightning flashes and thunder crashes. Everything shakes, as if in an earthquake. Aeneas and his little band look up as an Etruscan horn pierces the heavens. The huge crash resounds again and again. “They saw weapons glowing bright red through the clouds in a clear part of the sky; these rattled as if they had been struck.”

Heavenly portents also preceded the assassination of Julius Caesar. As portrayed by Shakespeare (in “Julius Caesar” 2:2:19-22; compare “Hamlet” 1:1:113-120), his wife, Calpurnia, implores him not to go to the forum on that fatal day, relating what she had seen:  “Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds, In ranks and squadrons and right form of war, Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol; The noise of battle hurtled in the air.” And Shakespeare’s descriptions almost certainly derive from ancient sources. “Such portents,” asserted George Lyman Kittredge, “are handed down by history and tradition in abundance.”

S. Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, for example, appeared first in 1567, and frequently thereafter, and was almost certainly available to Shakespeare. In the “Metamorphoses” (15:783-784, 788), Golding’s Ovid speaks of the time of Julius Caesar: “For battels feyghting in the cloudes with crashing armour flew, And dreadful trumpets sownded in the ayre, and hornes eeke blew.” A few lines later, he notes that “It often rayned droppes of blood.” Another near-contemporary witness in the first century is the Spaniard Lucan. “From the depths of pathless forests,” he records, “the clash of arms sounded, as did the screams of soldiers and the chaotic roar of ghostly armies coming to grips. The serenity of a moonless, windless night was destroyed by the blaring of trumpets and the roar of embattled armies” (“Pharsalia” 1:578-580).

Another important early example of aerial combat was recorded by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. In his description of the events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., Josephus relates that “on the twenty-first of the month Artemesium, there appeared a miraculous phenomenon, passing belief. Indeed, what I am about to recount would, I imagine, have been deemed a fable, were it not for the narratives of eyewitnesses and for the subsequent calamities which deserved to be so signalized. For before sunset throughout all parts of the country chariots were seen in the air and armed battalions hurtling through the clouds and encompassing the cities” (“Jewish War” 6:296-300). “Contending hosts,” agrees the Roman historian Tacitus, “were seen meeting in the skies, arms flashed, and suddenly the temple was illuminated with fire from the clouds. Of a sudden, the doors of the shrine opened and a superhuman voice cried, ‘The gods are departing'” (“Histories” 513).

Such phenomena were commonly reported in the ancient world. ln Livy, for instance, among the things usually listed at the close of a year were the omens that had been reported during that year. “No mob,” complained Thomas DeQuincey, “could be more abjectly servile than was that of Rome to the superstition of portents, prodigies, and omens.”

Centuries later, even the skeptical Machiavelli acknowledged in his “Discourses” (1:56) that “both ancient and modern instances prove that no great events ever occur in any city or country that have not been predicted by soothsayers, revelations, or by portents and other celestial signs. And not to go from home in proof of this,” Machiavelli notes that, at the descent of France’s King Charles VIII into Italy, “it was said throughout Italy that at Arezzo there had been seen and heard in the air armed men fighting together. . . .  To explain these things a man should have knowledge of things natural and supernatural, which I have not. It may be, however, as certain philosophers maintain, that the air is peopled with spirits, who by their superior intelligence foresee future events, and out of pity for mankind warn them by such signs, so that they may prepare against the coming evils.”

John Milton uses the medieval tripartite division of the atmosphere to explain the phenomenon. In contrast to Machiavelli’s beneficent spirits, Milton’s are clearly evil, for it is the demons who “rul’d the middle Air their highest Heav’n.” So well-known to Milton’s audience was the phenomenon of aerial combat that he could use it as one of the metaphors in “Paradise Lost” (see 516-517, 2533-2538):

“As when to warn proud Cities war appears Wag’d in the troubl’d Sky, and Armies rush To battle in the Clouds, before each Van Prick forth the Airy Knights, and couch their spears Till thickest Legions close; with feats of Arms From either end of Heav’n the welkin burns.”  .

Aerial combat was also familiar to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614-1687), who wrote, “The appearance of armed men fighting and encountering one another in the sky is most notorious” (“Antidote against Atheism” 3:12:7). Indeed the phenomenon must have been familiar to More’s contemporaries, for he devotes a substantial portion of his “Antidote against Atheism” to a treatise on “Field-fights and Sea-fights seen in the Aire.” More is concerned with exposing “the Atheists Evasions against Apparitions,” and a sampling of his chapter headings is most instructive: he speaks of “Their fond conceit, That the Skirmishings in the Aire are from the exuvious Effluxes of things; with a confutation thereof.” After a lengthy rebuttal of the seemingly widely-held theory that aerial combats were simply mirrored images of conflicts on the ground, More concludes with a chapter entitled, “whence at least some of these Aereal battels cannot be Reflexions from the Earth.”

Aerial combat was also viewed in America from an early date. Among the most impressive visions was one allegedly seen by George Washington in Valley Forge during the winter of 1777. A mysterious angel addressed Washington as “‘Son of the Republic’ and opened to him heavenly scenes, which are given in part here: Then my eyes beheld a fearful scene: From each of these countries arose thick, black clouds that were soon joined into one. And throughout this mass there gleamed a dark red light by which I saw hordes of armed men, who moved with the cloud, marching by land and sailing by sea to America, which country was enveloped in the volume of the cloud. And I dimly saw these vast armies devastate the whole country and burn the villages, towns and cities that I had beheld springing up. As my ears listened to the thundering of the cannon, clashing of swords and shouts and cries of millions in mortal combat, I again heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ When the voice had ceased the dark shadowy angel placed his trumpet once more to his mouth and blew a long and fearful blast. Instantly a light as of a thousand suns shone down from above me, and pierced and broke into fragments the dark cloud which enveloped America. At the same moment the angel upon whose head still shone the word ‘Union,’ and who bore our national flag in one hand and a sword in the other, descended from heaven attended by legions of bright spirits. These immediately joined the inhabitants of America, who, I perceived, were wellnigh overcome, but who, immediately taking courage again, closed up their broken ranks and renewed the battle. Again, amid the fearful noise of the conflict, I heard the mysterious voice saying, ‘Son of the Republic, look and learn.’ As the voice ceased, the shadowy angel for the last time dipped water from the ocean and sprinkled it upon America. Instantly the dark cloud rolled back, together with the armies it had brought, leaving the inhabitants of the land victorious.”

Plainly, although early Latter-day Saints reported a variety of heavenly scenes—an angel with a trumpet, a sword and arm, a sword and light, meteor showers, great waves of light, marching armies, armies in battle, and so on—the overall content of their reports didn’t differ appreciably from non-Latter-day Saint experiences. Even the details were often consistent. The armies, for example, were viewed in Heber C. Kimball’s, George Washington’s, and Shakespeare’s accounts as being armed with gear appropriate to their time and as being marshalled in the “right form of war.” In fact, the celestial battles so accurately mirrored terrestrial technology that some of Henry More’s contemporaries thought them to be mere reflections. In the examples of Kimball, Virgil, both ancient versions of Caesar’s death, and the more recent portrayal by Shakespeare, the fighting was not only seen but heard. Indeed, Ovid (and Shakespeare following him) recorded blood actually falling from the sky. Viewers’ interpretations, however, differed according to their individual perspectives or frames of reference. Though Latter-day Saints saw signs of the last days, non-Latter-day Saint explanations suggested that they were signs given to refute the claims of atheists, reflections of actual conflicts on the ground, messages from spirits in the air who foresee events and seek to warn humankind, portents of tragedy, omens or reminders of yearly changes, or threats and confoundments from evil spirits. Explanations of the meaning of the heavenly signs may vary, but the fact remains that such phenomena have been reported over many centuries.