The Spiritual Leaves the Physical
Twenty-three years after Joseph’s death, in a 1867 church conference, George A. Smith (Joseph Smith’s cousin) took up the question of the waning visionary experiences in the years following Joseph’s death and the LDS saints’ subsequent move to Utah. He addressed “the question often arisen among us,” that of why the saints did not see more angels, have more visions, and see greater manifestations of power. In his response, one can see the beginning of the shift away from the physical and illustrious visions towards the modern temperate approach to spiritual manifestations.
George then relayed the enormous physical manifestations occurring at the Kirtland temple dedication and noted that some of those who had the greatest manifestations ended up leaving the church. Where you find people who left you find those who “received great and powerful manifestations, and when the spirit came on them it seemed to distort the countenance” George told the saints. A full treatment of the decrease of use of psychedelic substances in church rituals is beyond the scope of this paper. Beyond that, there’s an important separation being made in this talk that will become prominent in LDS culture.
In this talk, George Smith is minimizing the role of visions and physical manifestations in favor of small, subtle “inspiration” driven revelation. George spoke of faithful converts, who received the knowledge of the things of God by the power of his spirit, and sought not after signs and wonders, and “when the spirit rested upon them seemed to produce no visible demonstration.” The greater context of this talk is giving an overview of the history of the church with the undertones of defending Joseph against criticisms and distancing him from those who had left the church (including many of the early leaders of the church). In the 1860s there were many members of the church who had been converted after Joseph was killed and had never been privy to the visions he facilitated. Their present experience of the church was different from their predecessors. And George Smith was reinforcing the idea that they did not need visions to remain members. It became a virtue to believe without ever desiring to see.
With this normative claim, those without visions were stronger in the faith than those who had them, the church leaders were effectively doing away with both physical and communal manifestations of the spiritual.
“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”
History Became Legend, Legend Became Myth
The normative claims regarding how one experiences the divine laid out by George Smith in 1867 is largely the approach taken in the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has been internalized by its members with very few even recognizing its visionary past—and potential.[44]
Experiences of the sacred are just that, sacred, or rather secret. The retelling of these experiences is largely frowned upon in the contemporary Mormon culture. For all you know, the fellow sitting at the other end of the pew on Sunday may have spoken to Jesus last night.
Despite this, there exists a once-a-month fast and testimony meeting where members are encouraged to stand up and bare their testimony to the congregation. In a sense, at its best, it functions as a large integration circle where the barer can process their feelings towards an experience they might have had. At its norm though, it functions more as a place to share tangential stories of family happenings and rehashing the importance of faith or prayer in one’s life. This isn’t to say those aren’t valid or important experiences, but rather the stark contrast between early Mormonism’s communal visions and experiences where they had a shared experience to explore and understand together and the same formulaic stories being told every month to a crowd of people, most of whom are asleep or otherwise occupied on their phones, is clearly apparent.[45]
The doctrines of God’s love, the plan of salvation as laid out in the Doctrine and Covenants, and of the witness of the Holy Spirit were meant to be experienced in all their grandeur, in an embodied context through the ritual use of psychedelics. These doctrines were meant to be experienced, not just talked about. The entire development of LDS theology was based around shared psychedelic, visionary experiences. They were communal. The development of Joseph’s grand visions of using the Law of Consecration to facilitate Zion on earth were a product of communal experiences.[46] They were meant to save the entire body of the church, including their dead ancestors (many of whom were communed with!).
Joseph Smith was a ritual genius. He knew how to weave together strands of the occult, masonic, and Native American practices to create a powerful ritual which was meant to be a container to understand the psychedelic experience he would provide them. This experience gave members the embodied and direct experience of the God they worshiped and the doctrines of which they believed in. After Joseph’s death, over time, the substances producing these experiences were removed and slowly the esoteric meaning behind the rituals became unclear and unobtainable, and today it is only whispered that the top echelons of the church have experiences of this caliber now (meaning a direct visionary, embodied experience of God and the LDS doctrines).
The shift has even been noted by those outside of the church. The literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, “If there is any spiritual continuity between [Joseph Smith] and Gordon B. Hinkley, I am unable to see it. No disrespect is intended by that observation.”[47]
In a time where young people are flocking from religion and the number of people who are spiritual but not religious is steadily increasing, it makes clear that the religions of the day, including the LDS Church, are missing something. They are missing the sacred objects and tools utilized to facilitate a connection to the divine.
Psychedelics as Sacred Objects
Joseph Smith’s seer stones and the Urim and Thummim are just stones, but they are also something more than stones—they are hierophanies. As Mircea Eliade writes, “by manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself. . .a sacred stone remains a stone.”[48] While the stone remains just a stone to an outsider, the stone reveals itself as sacred to the individual. Such is the case with these psychedelic plants. To those for whom it reveals the sacred, they are sacred. To those on the outside, they are simply profane, hallucinogenic plants. There’s a reason why all of the indigenous tribes who have utilized these substances for thousands of years treat them with respect and sacrality. Through these plants, they manifest the sacred.
The modern world, according to Eliade, has difficulty and unease towards many manifestations of the sacred. They find it difficult to accept that for many human beings the sacred can manifest in stones, trees, the sky, etc. They find it absurd that the primitive people “venerate a stone”, a plant, a tree, or anything else. But, what the profane world and the outsider misunderstands is that the sacred plant, the sacred stone are not worshiped qua stone or tree, they are worshiped because they are hierophanies, they manifest the sacred, hence why they are treated reverently. Along similar lines, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes that language is ontologically weak and “cannot but disappear in the thing it names.”[49] If we focused on the form in which language came in it would lead us away from the knowledge of the thing it brings. The sacred object itself is ontologically weak, it is meant to bring us into the sacred.
The bread and water of the sacrament are, to use Eliade’s terminology, profane. They are simply bread and water.[50] A church or temple is just a building. But they are revered because through them, the sacred is manifest. God is manifest. They are the means through which he is manifest. The means, however, can become idolatrous. And, in limiting the means through which God can work is similarly idolatrous on Jean-Luc Marion’s definition of idolatry.
We can get stuck on or lost in the thing as Jean-Luc Marion warns. An idol, he says, is a veridical vision of God but this vision of God stops there. Our gaze in this instance, is filled completely by this particular vision of God, and, he argues, becomes a mirror. We are no longer authentically viewing the divine, we are just showing our own conception of God back to ourselves, we are limiting the divine within the confines of our own Dasein. The icon provokes a vision but, instead of stopping the gaze, allows the gaze to travel through. It goes beyond just acting as a lens for the gaze, in fact, it allows for the return of the gaze, from the Other! The icon is never fixed on a specific image and is not in our control (as the idol is in both cases).[51]
The philosopher and mystic Henry Corbin provides a parallel vision of what it means to be an idol:
Idolatry consists in immobilizing oneself before an idol because one sees it as opaque, because one is incapable of discerning in it the hidden invitation that it offers to go beyond it. Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols. . . it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it. In short, it means transmuting the idol into an icon.[52]
Rending the idol transparent is releasing the infinite from the bounds our finite mind places on it. Anything can become an idol—a physical object, a concept, a specific trait, the idea of a prophet or the idea of God—even something that initially functioned as an icon. The idol places a limit on the divine within the confines of our own being, our own understanding. However, it takes two to tango, and it takes two for a revelatory or mystical experience to occur.
Revelation, and encounters with the sacred, as the Jewish philosopher and mystic Shlomo Giora Shoham argues, are fundamentally creative in nature. God is not the sui genesis of revelation. “Mythoempirically, man was from the outset an integration of spirit and matter” which Shoham later argues that revelation is likewise an integration of spirit [God] and matter [man].[53] The faculty through which this occurs externally is called the Spirit or Holy Ghost. When discussed in the Mormon context it is referred to as our “spirit.” Corbin, in addition to the psychologist Carl Jung, instead called this Active Imagination. The function, however, is the same.
The Active Imagination is what guides our sensory perception, “which is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs.” For Moses to perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice coming from within, for there to be an authentic theophany, requires that the correct sensory organ, the Active Imagination, is activated.[54] The ancients, and Joseph Smith, had this sensory organ well tuned and utilized it. Psychedelics could be considered a vitamin, or a supplement, “to strengthen and nourish our body,” well, our spiritual organ at least.
Henry Corbin notes that “a metaphysics that includes the Active Imagination [spirit] is required” and that “both the validity of visionary accounts that perceive and relate ‘events in Heaven’ and the validity of dreams, symbolic rituals . . . of visions, cosmogonies, and theogonies, and thus . . . the truth of the spiritual sense perceived in the data of prophetic revelations . . . depends on the Active Imagination completely.”[55] He further mentions that the exploration of the spirit realm requires a participation between the human and divine and is at once both discovery and creation. All of this depends on our ability to use our active imagination, to see God’s hand, as the brother of Jared did, touching the stones in our lives. God gave the brother of Jared the choice as to the means through which God would answer his prayer. God asked a man for a solution to this man’s need for a theophany. And the brother of Jared, rather than constraining and limiting what God could do said:
And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; . . . Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of men.[56]
The brother of Jared’s God was an icon, not an idol. Shlomo Giora Shoham suggests, following Martin Buber, that “precisely because of man’s theurgic abilities, he has a major role in inducing God either to open his flow of grace or to avert his face from his creatures.” And, by concretizing God, and rendering him unchangeable (by placing him in our neat little box), we break a relationship with him and petrify that relationship to him as an I-It transformation, which Shoham notes, like Jean-Luc Marion, is the essence of Idolatry.[57] The God of Joseph Smith was changeable, individual, and provided a means for visions for his followers.
The God of the early Mormons, the God described in the Book of Mormon who gave Nephi the blueprints to build a ship but expected him to complete the task, who gave Nephi the sealing power and placed him in charge of the famine in the land, who asked the Brother of Jared how he should light his ships was a God who gave man the tools to create his own theophany. Joseph Smith’s interactions with God were mediated on Joseph’s terms as well as God’s. They were involved in a co-creative relationship.
Contemporaneous Uses of Sacred Objects: The Divine Assembly
A growing number of progressive and ex-Mormons are using psychedelics, sacred objects, to either heal religious trauma or to take control of their own spirituality and theophanies, to facilitate visions for themselves.
The Divine Assembly is a recent church founded in Utah by Steve and Sara Urquhart and is host to a growing number of ex-Mormons. The church utilizes psilocybin mushrooms as a part of its sacrament and its one tenet is “Each individual can commune directly with the Divine and receive guidance.”[58] While some might see this church simply as an excuse to “legally” do mushrooms, the Urquharts and other members have made it much more than that. Within its meetings there are integration circles, resources for care and healing, and many open individuals. They are grappling with the hard questions of how to promote safe use, train people to be able to guide and hold space effectively even if they are not a licensed therapist, how to connect those in need with those who can help, and even developing a psychedelic chaplaincy and out-reach program (not based on giving out psilocybin but on using the experiences had under psychedelics as a means to hold space for those in need, sit with them, and share love with them).
In a sense, these marginal members are reclaiming Joseph’s intentions of a communal, co-creative revelatory process. They are taking what most consider to be a profane object and making it sacred. A key emphasis in The Divine Assembly, and among the underground Mormon psychedelic users is that there is no dogma. The divine is open and accessible to all on their own terms.
The Mormon Dogma and the Forest Form
A key criticism of the contemporary LDS church is the emphasis on the letter of the law, on the rigidity of the beliefs and the sense of self, as well as the lack of room for doubting the dogma. To some, the very nature of psychedelics’ introduction of an alternative sense of self, God, and place in the universe would preclude it from use by members.
For example, in a critique of a paper exploring the entheogenic origins of Mormonism, historian Brian Hales cites a 2019 study[59] which reports that psychedelic users felt a stronger connection with what they called “ultimate reality” rather than a specific monotheistic God, which for him is evidence that Joseph Smith did not utilize psychedelics.[60] However, this suggests that the user’s conception of God was expanded beyond the dogmatic descriptors of the current Abrahamic churches’ descriptions of God and that at present, ultimate reality better described their experience of God than the dogmatic conception of “God”. These dogmatic conceptions obscure the scriptural descriptions of God which align closer to the psychedelic insight regarding God through phrases such as “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,” “Endless is my name,” or “God is love” (compared to the psychedelic refrain “everything is love”). If everything is love and God is love, then God is everything, or God is ultimate reality.
Additionally, Hales reinforces the dogmatic emphasis on the letter of the law arguing that “interactions with the divine are sacred and occur according to personal worthiness and to God’s timetable” and that the only control mortals have over an experience with God is by being obedient to the laws. He additionally argues that, as is frequent in contemporary LDS teachings, that our bodies are naturally subject to the devil and we must overcome our natural bodily instincts. However, as has been previously shown, Joseph specifically gave the elders the experience of a supposed demonic possession via psychedelic substances so that they would be able to recognize the difference.
In addition to the perceived threats of psychedelics to Mormon dogma by Hales, they also remain a threat to the rigid individualism that has become the dominant framework within Mormonism.[61] However, it is this rigid individualism and sense of self that has aided in both the religious and planetary crises facing us today. Within this rigid identity of the self there remains little room to morph, experience an expanded sense of self, or grow. Somehow members are expected to become one with Christ without shedding their existing identity. Thus when contradictions arise, the shelf of inconsistencies and difficulties grows and grows until it reaches the edges of the container and shatters. The rigidity of other members’ views keeps them boxed in.
However, the psychedelic process as described by Edward Kohn offers a model that Mormonism culturally explicitly rejects, although might aid in the retention of members. Kohn notes that “ayahuasca is medicinal insofar as it is toxic to the self that we think we are. . . [psychedelics] consume this self to allow another, larger one to emerge. . . Psychedelics allow the dissolution of a specific kind of self in order to strengthen a carefully delimited but larger emergent one.”[62] As one leaves a religion, there is a deconstruction of the identity that was once central to the sense of self. And while Kohn’s reference behind the following statement is different, the statement itself remains applicable to those experiences: “With the human self thus dissolved, we are seemingly left adrift. We are no longer able to find guidance, to orient our telos in any human-made system of meaning.”[63]
The problem after one rethinks their relationship to a particular religion is that there is not always a reconstruction of that sense of self. The self becomes a binary of “I used to believe this but now I don’t” and anger, or dissatisfaction becomes a default way of relating to themselves, their former beliefs, and the world at large. However, psychedelics allow for the possibility of deconstructing that limiting sense of self and as Kohn notes “By paying attention to the larger self we can see the fragments of our lives as a larger whole,” as something larger than the rigid container in which we’ve been placed.
In fact, just as Kohn describes how “Each of the selves take part in a psychedelic dynamic in relation to the world-called-forest that they are both made and unmade by that forest at the same time as they remake it anew,”[64] the process is similar for those who seek to become new creatures in Christ. Given one of the central tenets of Mormonism is that of personal revelation and one’s own personal relationship with the divine, psychedelics offer a potent route of achieving that revelation. And the psychedelic process which Kohn describes applies equally to those seeking to be remade by their revelation. The fragmentation of their former worldview can unmake them at the same time as they, and it, are remade from being an idol to an icon.
The above would be the role of a Mormon psychedelic chaplaincy or guides. They would essentially step into the role of the founder, Joseph Smith, and guide people’s psychedelic and visionary experiences within the framework of their beliefs, functioning as icons. They would hold space for the doubts and the death that would be experienced and make room for the rebirth of the new self, the new being in Christ, a theme which is central within the Book of Mormon. They can help us “find direction from the larger self of which we are a part,”[65] the body of Christ, the church, and even from the world-called-forest, given that one forgotten foundational aspect of Mormon beliefs is that all things contain spirit and are alive including the plants, animals, the earth itself, the moon, and everything else within the universe. In a similar manner, psychedelics might offer a chance to promote finding meaning in the larger self of the community we find ourselves in. The early church was fundamentally communal, Zionistic, and believed that they would be saved as a whole, hence Joseph’s emphasis on the human Great Chain of Being.[66]
The use of psychedelics by Mormon individuals also returns the embodied facet of the visionary experience apparent in early Mormon members. Instead of neglecting the body and viewing it as a barrier to the spiritual that needs to be overcome, the body becomes the site of the divine. And while a common phrase repeated among the LDS church today is that “the body is a temple” it is hardly treated as such.[67] This is in part because the body is no longer the place where spiritual experiences are had beyond the tingling of the skin. Instead the experience resides in “the heart and mind”, of the individual.[68] It does not extend to the entire body. Nor does it extend beyond the body into a larger self or a larger community.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that psychedelics are the religious tool or the key to receiving revelation, rather, I would argue that they should be given a place as a means for spiritual experiences and have a place within the confines of Mormon spiritual exploration. They fit within Joseph Smith’s framework of a physical means whereby to receive revelation and access the sacred and were utilized by he and other early Mormons to facilitate a connection to the divine. Joseph understood he and other members’ early visions to be larger than just their individual selves. They were something to be shared communally, guided, and utilized to develop an embodied understanding of the theological tenets of the community.
Joseph stepped into the visions of his father and transformed those visions into a framework to understand theological concepts. He further developed a ritual framework surrounding the use of psychedelic substances in order to guide and structure others’ visions. While the framework he built remained after his death, the sacred tools used to render the visions were slowly discontinued until the use of the substances and their results were disavowed in 1867.
This disavowal of the embodied facets of the visionary experience continues through to the present LDS church, instead focusing on the subtle signs of the spiritual. However, as the religion stagnates, new tools or means are needed to facilitate the spiritual. Luckily, the very sacred tools needed are found in the origin of the LDS church.
Central to being able to make sense of the psychedelic experience is the container by which it is framed. If approached from a Mormon perspective, in a Mormon theological context, the content of the psychedelic experience can be mediated and understood through that lens. It can also perhaps help deepen the faith of the members that use these substances allowing them to have visionary experiences, have embodied experiences of their theology, and possibly promote an expanded sense of self, one that is oriented to the community which they are a part of.[69]
There is an ethical case to be made for the adoption of psychedelics by the LDS church as well. The current stance of the majority of the LDS church members towards psychedelics actively does harm to those who might be seeking God or utilizing psychedelics to get closer to him. The current attitude and disdain for those who use these substances drives them to seek answers to their questions elsewhere, to churches and theologies that are more open to exploration and working through theological issues that these experiences might facilitate. This is why more exploration of the role and place of psychedelics within Mormon theology and the development of a psychedelic Mormon chaplaincy is needed—to continue the work that Joseph Smith started.
Footnotes
[44] Former LDS apostle Boyd Packer describes spiritual communications as “very delicate, fine spiritual communications.” Boyd K. Packer, “How Does the Spirit Speak to Us?,” New Era, Feb. 2010, 3. He also noted that the only control individuals have over whether the spirit is in their lives is if they are being obedient: “While we may invite this communication, it can never be forced! If we try to force it, we may be deceived.” Boyd Packer, “Reverence Invites Revelation,” Ensign, Nov. 1991, 21. Another current LDS apostle similarly reinforces the quietness: “the Spirit of the Lord usually communicates with us in ways that are quiet, delicate, and subtle.” David Bednar, “How to Always Have the Spirit to Be with Us,” New Era Feb. 2013, 48. The spirit also frequently is given a moral association as many church leaders describe it as our conscience but not quite our conscience, telling us right from wrong. See Henry Eyring, “The Holy Ghost as Your Companion,” Liahona, Nov. 2015, 104 and Russel Nelson, “Hear Him,” in the April 2020 General Conference.
[45] A previous Mormon president is reported to have been asked what he does when faced with a boring sacrament. His response was “I don’t know. I’ve never been in one.” From a Church Educational System meeting, June 30, 1989; quoted in Gene R. Cook, Teaching by the Spirit (2000), 140.
[46] See the forthcoming paper by Alex Criddle, Christopher Smith, and Don Bradley, “‘An Hundred Fold’:
The Law of the Church and the Kirtland Economy, 1831–1834.”
[47] Harold Bloom, “Perspectivism and Joseph Smith,” Sunstone Magazine 145 (2007): 18-19. https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/145-18-19.pdf
[48] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, (Hartcourt, Inc., 1959), 12. Italics in original.
[49] Giorgio Agamben, “Experimentum Vocis” in What is Philosophy? (Stanford University Press, 2018), 9-10.
[50] According to D&C 27:2 “it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory.”
[51] Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being trans. Thomas A. Carlson, (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7-24, 28-32; Christina Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2013), 109-110.
[52] Henry Corbin, “Theophanies and Mirrors: Idols or Icons?” trans. Jane Pratt and A. K. Donohue, Spring 1983: 2.
[53] Shlomo Giora Shoham, The Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism: Triumph of the Vanquished (Sussex Academic Press, 2003), 164-168.
[54] Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University Press, 1997): 13.
[55] Corbin, Alone with the Alone, 80.
[56] Ether 3:4-5.
[57] Shoham, The Mytho-Empiricism of Gnosticism, 46-47.
Another interesting avenue for further exploration beyond the scope of this paper is the function of the faculty of consciousness known as imagination (not in the fantasy or fake sense of the word) in revelatory or visionary experiences. According to philosopher and religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal, the faculty of imagination is key in mediating or synthesizing the material and immaterial as well as objective reality (i.e. God) and subjective reality (i.e. our perspective of God). Likewise, the Inkling and philosopher Owen Barfield argues that the capacity for imagination, and understanding it correctly, is the key to saving the religious mode of consciousness from idolatry. Given the visionary and imaginal nature of the psychedelic experience, they will be indispensable tools for working with and understanding this relationship. See Jeffrey Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019), 133-165 and Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Wesleyan University Press, 1965).
[58] https://www.thedivineassembly.org/who-we-are
[59] Roland R. Griffiths et al, “Survey of subjective “God Encounter Experiences”: Comparisons Among Naturally Occurring Experiences and Those Occasioned by the Classic Psychedelics Psilocybin, LSD, Ayahuasca, or DMT,” PLoS ONE 14, no. 4 (2019).
[60] Brian C. Hales, “Visions, Mushrooms, Fungi, Cacti, and Toads: Joseph Smith’s Reported Use of Entheogens,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 38 (2020): 307-354, 352-353.
[61] A common refrain is the phrase “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith” by LDS leader Dieter Uchtdorf in his October 2013 conference address titled “Come, Join with Us.” Unfortunately, the well-meant phrase has turned into a response to any information, even factual, that does not support the traditional narratives given by the culture.
[62] Kohn, “Forest Forms and Ethical Life,” 409.
[63] Kohn, “Forest Forms and Ethical Life,” 417.
[64] Kohn, “Forest Forms and Ethical Life,” 409.
[65] Kohn, “Forest Forms and Ethical Life,” 417.
[66] For a solid treatment on Joseph’s conception of the Great Chain of Being see Samuel M. Brown, In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012) 248-278.
[67] See for example Jana Reiss’s article “Most US Mormons are failing the Word of Wisdom, nurse says” Religion News Service (March 29, 2023), https://religionnews.com/2023/03/29/most-us-mormons-are-failing-the-word-of-wisdom-nurse-says/ and Philip B. Mason, et al. “The Risk of Overweight and Obesity Among Latter-Day Saints.” Review of Religious Research 55, no. 1, (2013): pp. 131–47.
The temple is a place for sacred things to be, such as psychedelics.
[68] D&C 8:2. Like the ancient Egyptians the LDS church places an emphasis on the heart over other parts of the body.
[69] In other words, it would help with the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
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