“A Halo of Brightness Indescribable.”

A recurrent motif in accounts of near-death experiences is the peculiar light that many people have encountered in them, which they often describe as exceptionally bright, as intense but not harsh, and as somehow suffused with love and with an indescribable warmth.  With such accounts in mind, I’m struck by analogous references from the early days of the Restoration.  Two examples will suffice:

“I saw,” says Joseph Smith in describing his First Vision, “a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.”  (Joseph Smith-History 1:16)

David Whitmer said that the experience of the Three Witnesses occurred in broad daylight, at about eleven in the morning.[1] “We were overshadowed by a light,” he told Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith in 1878. “It was not like the light of the sun, nor like that of a fire, but more glorious and beautiful.”[2] James H. Moyle later recalled an 1885 interview in which Whitmer “indicated that there was something of a haze or peculiarity about the atmosphere that surrounded them but nothing that would prevent his having a clear vision and knowledge of all that took place.”[3] To Nathan Tanner Jr., in 1886, Whitmer spoke of “a halo of brightness indescribable.”[4] “All of a sudden,” summarized the Omaha Herald that same year,

he beheld a dazzlingly brilliant light that surpassed in brightness even the sun at noonday and which seemed to envelope the woods for a considerable distance around. Simultaneous with the light came a strange entrancing influence which permeated him so powerfully that he felt chained to the spot, while he also experienced a sensation of joy absolutely indescribable.[5]

[1] See, for example, Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 10, 11, 15, 19; compare the account given by James H. Moyle at page 166 and the Chicago Tribune’s account given on page 175.

[2] Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 25-26; compare page 40.

[3] Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 163; compare pages 166-167.

[4] Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 188.

[5] Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 197-98.

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It being Friday, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture has published a new article:

“‘How long can rolling waters remain impure?’: Literary Aspects of the Doctrine and Covenants”

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