A Joseph Smith near-death experience

Or, perhaps more accurately, an out-of-body experience.

I had long known about the time, in late March 1832, when a mob of nearly forty men dragged Joseph Smith from his home in the middle of the night, beat him, tarred and feathered him, and attempted to poison him with a vial of nitric acid.  He bore the scars for the rest of his life and, because of a tooth that broke when they were trying to force that vial into his mouth, spoke with a hissing “s” for many years (apparently until the German-born Jewish convert Alexander Neibaur, a dentist, fixed the tooth in Nauvoo).

But I hadn’t been aware of this aspect of the story:

The full extent of Joseph’s injuries that night is shown by a little-known account recorded by Joseph III, who must have heard the details from one or both of his parents.  Joseph was so near dying that he had a near-death experience.  He was “beaten into insensibility . . . and left for dead.”  Joseph III related that Joseph’s “spirit seemed to leave his body, and that during the period of insensibility he consciously stood over his own body, feeling no pain, but seeing and hearing all that transpired.”

Karl Ricks Anderson, The Savior in Kirtland: Personal Accounts of Divine Manifestations (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012), 78-79, citing Joseph Smith III, in Recollections of the Pioneers of Lee Country (Illinois) (Dixon, IL: Inez A. Kennedy, 1893), 98.

Such out-of-body experiences have been extensively documented in recent decades.  I’m struck by this one as an early specimen, but absolutely a textbook case.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia