Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore

Foreword

vii Foreword Elaine Thatcher It is significant that historians, whose work is to gather facts to chronicle and interpret the past, have chosen to better understand the history of Mormons in Utah by looking at their folklore, including their expressions of the supernatural. This interdisciplinary approach, combining the methods of history and folklore studies, adds a new and useful dimension to Mormon studies. Some historians might have viewed these legends as peripheral to the main story of the church and its members , but here we see that they help fill out and give form to the story. Folklore is the informal web of beliefs and practices that we learn from our parents, our friends, our coworkers, and other associates. We all have folklore. It influences how we react to, and interact with, our environment, the people we encounter, and the ideas to which we are introduced. It affects how we greet someone new to us, and how and what we choose to celebrate or revere or fear. It is integral to everyone’s behavior, whether they realize it or not, and it is an aspect of each group with which they associate. Without awareness of this informal culture that surrounds each of us, it is difficult to understand the many events affected by it. The formal history of a place or people generally depends heavily on documents— legal documents, business documents, newspapers, and others. Personal writings, such as letters and diaries, are also important sources for historians , but even these may not give a complete and accurate picture of what people are thinking when they act. The historians in this book have plumbed other resources—student collections of folk stories, online chat groups, oral histories—in addition to the more conventional ones. The ideas in these alternative sources are more ephemeral, but they have been Elaine Thatcher viii captured on paper and in audio recordings. They have thus become, as one of this volume’s authors puts it, “fossilized” oral traditions. These oral traditions and privately held beliefs support the behavior of people in communities. They teach and reinforce ways of thinking about life. We need to know of their existence and their influence in order to understand fully the activities of a group. Why, for instance, would people buy stock in a mine that has never produced anything? Why would they feel justified in the failure of their town? There is always more to the story when you explore the folklore of a situation. Beliefs in the ways supernatural powers affect people’s lives, such as the beliefs represented in this volume, have as real effects on communities as the weather or the economy. Most groups have folklore, and those that share much knowledge and experience (high context cultures) tend to have more folk traditions than those that share little (low context cultures). Utah Mormons, by way of a distinctive system of religious beliefs and because of early social isolation in the East and Midwest and geographical isolation in the Great Basin, have developed into a high context cultural group with strong, pervasive folkloric expressions. A number of years ago, I studied furniture making in Utah’s Cache Valley in the short period of settlement before the coming of the railroad , asking whether there was a typical Cache Valley Mormon style of this handmade furniture. I concluded that any such style resulted from the backgrounds of the makers and the workability and availability of the materials they used.1 The same is true with stories and beliefs. The backgrounds and beliefs of the legend tellers and the availability of legend materials—characters, places, events, beliefs, stories heard before—help determine the kind of lore that is propagated in any given setting. As the tellers, materials, and settings change, so the lore will change to reflect the evolution of culture. Folklorist Henry Glassie wrote: Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to remember, change, 1 Elaine Thatcher, “`Some Chairs for My Family’: Furniture in Nineteenth-Century Cache Valley,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 56 (Fall 1988): 331–51. Foreword ix or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore . . . is that which is at once traditional and variable.2 The supernatural stories and beliefs in this collection illustrate both the traditional...