Hee hee.

I agree that Joseph believed it. I will however, call a spade a spade.

1. AoD was God according to most Protestants. Various mystical thinkers speculated about who he might be; he is central to Daniel’s Apocalypse, the main OT competitor with Revelation for millenarian imagination. Smith was well outside the mainstream on this point, but not alone.

2. He was not thereby transitively making Adam God. He WAS establishing Adam as the first human father and the grand patriarch of the whole human family. In his eschatology Adam was the father of humanity and would preside at the council of humanity ready to meet Jesus at the parousia. In this model, Adam was like a “father” and God was thus the “grandfather” even though God was the “Father.” This is importantly different from later Adam-God but is recognizable as the source of the later Youngian speculations.

3. MiH did not originate with Eliza RS Smith. Stapley is afraid of the truth. Once I get time to attack the question in a more rigorous way, will demonstrate that Stapley is unduly timid about the Smithian provenance of MiH. Phelps, Smith’s ghostwriter and primary assistant on the Egyptian work (which is concerned with immortalized queens, a ready antecedent for MiH), quite clearly invoked MiH five months after Smith died, in a venue reviewed by all of Smith’s closest advisors and family. This is a truly first-hand witness from someone intimately involved in Smith’s mystical eschatology/divine anthropology.
3a. Eliza did associate MiH with Adam-God, but it was really part of the much bigger package of the divine anthropology and the familialization of God. MiH can easily stand without AG for ERSS, though she would have protested their separation.

4. I feel that the best evidence strongly supports (distinct from “unequivocally proves”) the origination of MiH with Joseph Smith. The best source on this should be a chapter in my death book, which I hope to have out to academic publishers by Summer 2008. In one sentence, Joseph Smith familialized Deity.

I should say, we get the most important of these witnesses second hand, so it is not quite as good as I make it sound above.

It is true we don’t have a contemporary teaching of Joseph Smith on the matter; I can appreciate your care in making this clear. It is important to note that the earliest mentions of MiH come within the first year following the death of Joseph, so they are very early and from multiple people in the inner circle. We also have the testimony of a couple of those people who mentioned it early on that they learned it from Joseph Smith. I don’t think these evidences are accurately described as “circumstantial inference.” It is more like “testimony given after the death of Joseph from first hand witnesses.”

BiV,

was the Divine Feminine inextricably linked in her writings with Adam-God?

You will find no mention of Adam-God in “O My Father,” so it is certainly extricable.

today’s feminist is disturbed by the ringing silence coming from the Heavens on her role and lack of interaction with her children.

That is true, but it doesn’t seem to get any better if we throw the idea of MiH out wholesale. So, even if it is not enough to satisfy modern feminism I think it is better than having nothing to say at all. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people disturbed by the ringing silence coming from either gender in the Heavens, so reasons to be disturbed abound.

– The interpretation of the Ancient of Days as Adam/Michael is well attested in Joseph’s sermonizing and Church periodicals as early as 1835.

– This interpretation was not an association of Adam with God the Father.

– Eliza was not the first to publicly mention Mother in Heaven. That would be Phelps. Woodruff’s odd categorization of Eliza’s hymn as a revelation, could mean that he simply believed the words were inspired, or that he forgot about Phelps, or that he didn’t remember Joseph teaching it, or something else entirely.

– MiH did not originate with Adam-God, but most of the twentieth-century perspectives on MiH are the remnants of Adam-God.

– We have no extant contemporary teachings of Joseph Smith on the matter (e.g., the famous Zina quote was actually written by Susa Young Gates in the early twentieth-century). Any argument that Joseph believed in Mother in Heaven is therefor based on circumstantial and logical inference.

I agree that what to do with the Divine Feminine is a complicated issue for modern LDS. Catherine Albanese has analyzed this from a dyadic perspective as a non-Mormon observer of Eliza Snow and crew. A Sunstone paper 20yrs ago maybe and her recent Republic of Mind and Spirit.