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Show Page 100 CHAPTER V THE GAUGE OF PHILOSOPHY The Nauvoo newspaper Times and Seasons began in March 1842 a serialization of Joseph Smith's translation of the Kirtland papyri. It told a strange, apocryphal story of Abraham, the philosopher, "reasoning upon the principles of astronomy," - and of Abraham, the exile, fleeing from the holocaust of Pharaoh's temple-observatory. Burned out of his Zion home and having passed a test of Abrahamic severity, Orson Pratt perhaps began to realize that the pattern of God's suffering servant of the Bible would be repeated over and over again in his own life. Orson was fascinated with the new translation and its cryptic astronomy - starmaps with annotated "keys" and Semitic-sounding designations for the "grand governing"bodies of space. The Prophet's new Book of Abraham now measured the heavens themselves in Mormon terms, locating God as the source of material organization, describing a whole celestial mechanics in which time was declared relative and the universe governed by a great central sphere called "Kolob." Orson now became obsessed with the connection between science and his theology, between the signs in the heavens and the registration and mensuration of celestial phenomena. One icy March morning he was captivated by the appearance of great haloes in the sky and proceed to record and publish an explanation of the "parhelia" in the Times and Seasons: |
