Drawing upon Mesoamerican history and some intricate details that can be drawn from the Book of Mormon, Brant Gardner explores Mormon’s treatment of secret combinations and some ties to actual places and times. The great city of Teotihuacan may have been the physical source of the corrupt militaristic schemes driven by secret societies that led to the final destruction of the Nephites. Fascinating thesis. See “The Gadianton Robbers in Mormon’s Theological History: Their Structural Role and Plausible Identification” by Brant Gardner.
An important contribution of this paper is considering Mormon’s objectives in his careful editing and how that impacted his description and editorial choices regarding the Gadianton’s and their 4th century (foreign?) successors.
The next step beyond understanding secret societies in Mesoamerica is the extremely difficult one of understanding them in our day. Follow the money – and the power. War could also be an indicator.
I just listened to an awesome YouTube series by him explaining his background as an anthropologist and his assessment of archaeological findings in Mesoamerica. He used a picture of a inkblots where you can see a dog if you look for more than a few moments, and he points out that once you “see the dog” you can’t unsee it. Throughout the rest of the comments he keeps saying “I can’t unsee the dog.” It was a neat explanation of evidence for the Book of Mormon that’s being compiled by various sources.
The first video is here. Also, my wife suggested I email you my latest post and I may, if you prefer not to have an unrelated comment like this on here. I look foward to checking out the information on this post.
It really disgusts me all the talk amongst both parties about going to war with Iran. Despite NATO investigators reporting that Iran is not breaking any international laws with its exploration of nuclear programs. Pakistan, India and so many other countries in the region have Nukes, why doesn’t anyone talk about them.
Anyone think WWIII will be a likely effort to pull us out of the coming depression?
does anyone else see the following pattern in history??
Economic excess
Economic recession/depression
War
And the scale of war seems to be determined by the scale of economic excess and recession.
On the subject of secret combinations, I find it frustrating that Mormon/Moroni give us such direct warnings about secret combinations in our days that seek to overthrow the liberty of all nations and enslave the world yet provide no apparent direction or advice on how to combat them. Spreading righteous living and reinforcing the principles of liberty are certainly the strongest grass-roots measures, but how do you fight an enemy that lurks in the shadows? The Nephites and Lamanites were able to discover members of the secret combinations within their societies and eliminate them…
If, by “economic excess,” you mean inflation, you have a good point.
On another topic, it seems a few people have taken to using extraneous trackbacks to exploit your readership, Jeff.
If you mean WWIII is like WWII in that we didn’t want to get involved. So we let most of Europe be taken by the Nazis‘? We didn’t care about anyone’s freedom but ours? Or Japan attacked us because they didn’t think we would do anything; because we hadn’t? You probably mean we get ourselves into trouble by not doing what we should until it is too late. One day maybe to our destruction.
Japan attacked “us” because “we” provoked them.
by economic excess, I mean economic booms. some booms are caused by real growth, others by false growth through speculation and debt…like the last 2 economic booms. so the cycle seems to be:
Boom
Bust
War
secret combinations? isn’t that said to be rightwing ideology? yeah, but only because it is true does the media bother to quote people calling it a “theory” and we who know about it “kooks.”
We don’t need Moroni to tell us how to recognize them. Jesus loves us enough to have had a modern prophet, President Ezra Taft Benson, tell us about them in one of his books, “An Enemy Hath Done This.”
I learned about “an enemy” from others. Do the following search “America’s Independent Party” and you’ll find the strongest, newest effort to date.
excuse me, the above “may be” the strongest, newest effort “for resisting, undoing”