Ep73: Pt 4: Is Magic The Key to Unlocking The Mysterious Characters of Reformed Egyptian?

In Episode 4 of Mormonish Podcast’s series with Dr. John Lundwall, Dr. Lundwall examines the "Caractors Document" with symbols allegedly written from the gold plates, as well as other examples of glyphs from both the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham.
Lundwall recounts the testimony of Charles Anthon and compares the writing from the gold plates to magical seals from the Western esoteric tradition; textual density problems are soon resolved when one considers the magic worldview and how Joseph Smith imagined ancient writing systems.
Dr. Lundwall ends the episode by comparing the Caractors Document with every known writing system and examines the iconographic features of the symbols to determine that the script has to be logo-syllabic, but then shows problematic issues with the symbols, especially in the proper names that are being represented by them. Once again, this episode will leave you saying, “How did I never think of this..”
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[@claytongardinier5179]

The stylus that you need for writing this small would require a very sharp fine point. This makes the wear issue even worse.

[@maxinekennedy5888]

This series with Dr Lundwall has been outstanding and, Book of Mormon aside, so interesting. Please thank him and thank you!

[@blueridding]

So when did this world view fade out of the church? Did early American converts share this world view? Did Brigham Young? Did the wave of English converts? Did John Taylor?

[@TheSaintelias]

Roman writing began around 250 BC. only off by 400 years. Almost old enough…like 14 year olds to JS.

[@TroyLeavitt]

Lundwall delivers!

[@claytongardinier5179]

The harder the plate, the harder the stylus has to be or it will wear faster. What evidence is there for hard materials other then gold, brass, bronze, or copper. These materials are not that hard. One needs a technology that I don't think they had at that time nor is there any evidence for high technology. Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.

[@aredesuyo]

The only way it could work is if the person engraving the plates had to use the interpreter stone to find out how to draw each character so as to encode the desired meaning, and then the translator had to use the interpreter stone to decode each character. It's a sort of spiritual/magic data compression system. Naturally it would be unintelligible to anyone else, and either somehow true or an elaborate fraud. Always so convenient for whoever is in control of the narrative.

[@charlesmendeley9823]

It's funny how many hoops the apologists have to jump through to fit the text of the BoM onto the plates, only to have Nephi duplicate chapter after chapter of Isaiah with no significant changes, which was available to both the Nephites and to us latter day Christians. 😅

[@MrBlasz]

Man you guys need to get Dr. Sledge from esoterica channel on to talk about the magic texts around j.s. time. That would be a cool team up

[@JC-vq2cs]

"The narrative is falsifiable" - mic drop. So many other religious claims are too. Falseness matters.

[@Yutakafrog]

Yeah, I also learned Japanese on my mission, and I kind of laughed because a lot of what Rebecca kept saying was blowing her mind, was something that was already intuitively obvious to me as someone who learned two syllabaries and some of a logosyllabary as a second language. Most Japanese missionaries only ever learned a handful of kanji (the logosyllabary). A few hundred, and most of those are the fairly easy ones, that you see all the time, and/or that actually look like the thing that they represent. (A door is just a square in kanji, it's a picture of a door). I'd say in my mission over two years working with something like 400 total co-missionaries, there were probably single-digit number of people who learned more than 500 characters. They have a subset of "all kanji" called the jouyou kanji, which is a set of 2,136 characters that are kind of the "literary baseline", this is "I can read a newspaper by time I graduate high school." Twelve rigorous years to learn 2k characters. If the characters on the Caractors document is logosyllabic, remember that it's not just "hard" to learn, it requires actual infrastructure. You have to have an educational system that regularly produces scholars who are able to read and write this system of information, and society is structured so that they have the time, space, practice materials, food, housing, etc., that they need to be able to do this. If King Benjamin had his talk written down and copies of the text given to everyone who couldn't hear, implying that a majority of the culture is literate, they would have to have been way beyond just trying to survive in terms of technological achievement. Their GDP (measured with any arbitrary measure of collective productivity) would have had to rival that of modern post-renaissance industrial society to be able to collectively bear that burden.

[@VictorRigoleFineArt]

Love the Mormonish podcast/videos. You are my favorite podcast/KZbin videos on post-mormon and "moronish" topics! This series with Dr. John Lundwall is awesome! Thanks for doing these!

[@clcole5655]

This is my 3rd time listening to this series -BRILLIANT

[@RebeccaRaven]

I know what I'm listening to tonight!

[@RebeccaRaven]

Wow! I listened and was amazed!

[@r.l.5964]

Names don't have to be spelled out. For example, Mitsubishi, a Japanese surname, means 3 diamonds; instead of spelling it out in 10 Roman characters or 4 syllabary characters, they use the Chinese character for 3 and the Chinese character for diamond.

[@barryrichins]

Hey, John, nice to see you again.

[@blueridding]

This was amazing! It all just fits and makes sense.

[@markbutler6196]

I have thoroughly enjoyed this series. Thank you for these. Learned some Chinese on my mission to Taiwan. Such a different writing system. The puzzle pieces are fitting together for the first time for me too. I was always confused by these "Caracters" it makes much more sense now. Can't wait for the next episode! I have always been fascinated by John Dee as well. The magical world view makes perfect sense. Excellent episode; I am learning so much. A free University level course. ❤🧡💛💚💙💜🤎

[@patrickofco3059]

Amazing analysis! I think the magic angle does explain a lot.