I'm doing great. I'm very excited tonight. So am I. This was a lot of fun to watch you put together and me to add a couple little things in and for you to take us down the fun path of deception.

Deception and treasure digging and all the craziness in early Mormon history. I'll turn the time over to you my friend. It is all yours. What are you what are you thinking about tonight?

Well this is Mormonism live with Bill real and radio free Mormon tonight is March 31st 2021. It is the Wednesday of Holy Week and what's going on here is that last week last week you had picked the subject because that was kind of your week and you talked about miners hill which I had really never heard much about before he had all those great pictures and other great stories.

Yeah and I added a few things to that is I did some research into it because of your prompt and I also did some other research but it ended up being too much for that show and one of the things I decided to do when I found out that you're going to talk about treasure digging was I was going to go back and I was going to revisit a historian that I have great respect for D Michael Quinn and his book early Mormonism and the magic world view.

This came out in the 1980s but there was a second edition that was published in 1998 this is the second edition which had some editions and probably some deletions I know there were deletions like taking out the Mark often stuff which had by that point been found to be not correct but there's a lot of additions in there and there's one chapter.

It's actually chapter two that D Michael Quinn talks about the treasure digging stuff and I read this again about a year ago and I was thinking I need to do a podcast about this because there's so much that I'm learning the way he writes is so dense in the sense that there's so much factual information that he puts in his chapters and frankly about half of the book is footnotes.

So the text of the book no really the text of the book goes up to there okay this is the this is the text of the book over here over here are the pictures and then you get to the footnotes.

These are the footnotes yeah and those are very very well documented very very interesting okay so having said all of that first thing I want to talk about tonight there's three main things.

The first is not a huge bombshell second one is a much bigger bombshell at least to me third one is kaboom through the ceiling bombshell so we'll take them in that order.

First thing has to do with Lucy Max Smith talking about the the folk magic that she and her family were involved in this is her her history of her son Joseph Smith and let me find this here it is quoted in this book by D Michael Quinn.

And it's a rather famous quote at least among people who know about this kind of thing it's pages 68 and 69 so let me find that really quick and this is where she talks about the faculty of a brack.

It's kind of a famous statement because it's so odd at least two hour modern ears where in 1845 she's writing the history when you're after Joseph Smith has been killed.

Let not my reader suppose that because I shall pursue other topics for a season that we stopped our labor and when it trying to win the faculty of a brack.

Drawing magic circles or suit saying or sooth saying trying to say that three times fast so trying to win the faculty of a brack drawing magic circles or sooth saying at the neglect or to the neglect of all kinds of business.

So what you saying is yeah they did this stuff but they didn't neglect the regular business.

In order to do it they did it in moderation is the meaning of this so we have we have an idea is to what the magic circles are those have a lot to do with treasure digging because you have to draw magic circles to bind the demons or the malignant guardian spirits who want to guard the treasure and possibly heard the people who are trying to get the guardian spirits treasure.

I mean that's what they're there for us to guard the treasure so you come for the treasure you're going to get hurt unless you draw the magic circles and buy them but this faculty of a brack is very interesting so.

The Michael Quinn also has a chart here and I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I was talking about the seventh degree of Abercadabra and if you have got there's a diagram that this is referring to about this faculty of a brack.

Let me find this here there you go and this is not from her book this is from a reproduction of a book that's from like 1665 I believe.

Yeah or 1665 66 school year this is something very well known in folk magic circles and if you see there the inverted triangle at the bottom of that page that's the key where it says Abercadabra across the top.

See that there and then the next line is a little bit shorter because you drop the final a.

The next line is a little bit shorter because you drop the a and the r from the end of the word and you go all the way down until all you have is the first letter a and see it makes an a all the way down the side if you're going on the left side up.

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