The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology by Jonathan A. Stapley (review)

The Mormon History Association recently named Jonathan A. Stapley's The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology the best Mormon Studies book of 2018. In just 128 pages, Stapley narrates two centuries of evolving Mormon practice. Women's gradual exclusion from Mormon ritual forms the central drama. The story culminates in a full chapter on magical and hermetic practice in Mormonism through the end of the nineteenth century.

More interested in folk rituals than formal liturgies, Stapley has less to say about Mormonism's high temple mysteries than about their interpretation and reception. Much of his analysis focuses on how Mormons contested the temple liturgy's inclusive concept of priesthood and transformed it in a way that excluded women.

In the first years of Mormonism's history, its founder Joseph Smith established an "ecclesiastical," bureaucratic priesthood of males ordained to priestly offices. In his later years, Smith revealed a more expansive and inclusive "cosmological" concept of priesthood through the medium of his temple rituals. The temple rituals sought to "seal" believers together in a heavenly kinship network. Without any formal ordination, the rituals pronounced each male initiate a "king and priest" and each female initiate a "queen and priestess" (12, 17, 22–23).

Unfortunately, Smith died without articulating a comprehensive theory of priesthood to unite the ecclesiastical and cosmological priesthood models (85). His successors resolved the tension in favor of the ecclesiastical. At the same time, they moved from "viewing priesthood as channeling the power of God" to "priesthood instead as the power of God," leaving little room for unordained women to access God's power except as delegated by male leaders and husbands (12, 26–29, 86). This doctrinal change, however, took over a century. In the meantime, men and women alike accessed spiritual power through both formal and folk Mormon liturgies.

Women played a particularly prominent role in rituals of religious healing. In 1842, Joseph Smith told the women of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, Illinois that, "Signs such as healing the sick, casting out devils should follow all that believe whether male or female" (79). Smith specifically refuted critics of female healing and authorized women to exercise healing power. He also promised that, soon, "the Sisters would come in possession of the priviliges & blesings & gifts of the priesthood" (84).

Stapley disagrees with feminist historians who believe Smith here expressed intent to formally ordain women to the ecclesiastical priesthood. Instead, he thinks Smith referenced a separate cosmological priesthood that required no ordination (84). Here, Stapley perhaps imposes more consistency upon Smith's thought than it possessed. The ecclesiastical and cosmological labels make a useful shorthand for contradictory impulses in Mormon thought, but to reify and separate them requires more evidence than Stapley presents.

Whether or not Smith intended to ordain women, he clearly thought they needed no ordination to participate in healing rituals. Men and women alike sealed healing blessings upon the heads of the sick and anointed them with oil that had been consecrated in the temple. Stapley notes that lay Mormons adapted nearly every aspect of the formal temple liturgy, including baptism, for use outside the temple in healing rituals. Some Mormons drank consecrated oil to heal their digestive systems, and early Mormon apostle Wilford Woodruff healed a follower by touching him with a cane made from the wood of a recycled temple prop (82–83, 121).

Men began to challenge women's participation in such healing rituals by the 1890s and completed their exclusion by the 1960s. The church's 2010 Handbook of Instruction allows only male Melchizedek priesthood holders to heal the sick (79).

Stapley devotes an entire chapter to Mormon baby blessings, which were originally performed by a child's father and mother in the family home. After the Mormons settled Utah in 1847, bishops increasingly took over the ordinance and performed...