Shabbat shalom,
A wonky one this week…
Ellen and James White’s meeting with Joseph Bates was a formative event for the movement that would become the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It’s a brief read and deserves a comparative reading to other visionaries.
Bates, a former seaman and then-revivalist preacher, was convinced of William Miller’s predictions and took to the Bible to explain why Jesus did not return. He convinced the Whites of the seventh-day Sabbath and would ultimately provide the apocalyptic theology that would inform Ellen’s Great Controversy.
Bates was initially a skeptic of Ellen’s visions and would question her about her experiences. It was ultimately an astronomical vision that compelled Bates that Ellen was a true Christian visionary he wanted to support. From the linked source above:
Mrs. White, while in vision, began to talk about the stars, giving a glowing description of rosy-tinted belts which she saw across the surface of some planet, and added, “I see four moons.”
“Oh,” said Elder Bates, “she is viewing Jupiter!”
Then having made motions as though traveling through space, she began giving a description of belts and rings in their ever-varying beauty, and said, “I see seven moons.”
Elder Bates exclaimed, “She is describing Saturn.”
Next she said, “I see six moons,” and at once began a description of Uranus, with its six moons; then a wonderful description of the “opening heavens,” with its glory, calling it an opening into a region more enlightened. Elder Bates said that her description far surpassed any account of the opening heavens he had ever read from any author.
Bates was so surprised that Ellen had no astronomical education or even much interest in the subject. Her vision of cosmic flight compelled him and generations of adventists to follow. She would go on to recount several other visions of her travels to other worlds. This isn’t a cornerstone of her authority, but her astral visions, if believed in at all, are used to substantiate her theology an authenticity as a visionary.
The only thing is… it’s wrong.
Jupiter has more than 95 moons in addition to the four Galileo first observed. Saturn has 195, 63 are named, with many moonlets in its rings. Uranus has 13 inner moons, 5 major moons, and 9 irregular moons. I’m not saying Ellen’s information has to match ours 100%, but one would hope a prophet might anticipate new information.
The veracity of her vision seems suspect when you realize all the information she needed in order to garner Bates’ support was present in the Webster’s 1828 Dictionary entry for satellite:
A secondary planet or moon; a small planet revolving round another. In the solar system, eighteen satellites have been discovered. The earth has one, called the moon, Jupiter four, Saturn seven, and Herschel [Uranus] six.
Seems pretty damning, no? But here’s where it gets weird.
While the rings of Saturn were first observed by Galileo in 1610, the rings of Jupiter weren’t discovered until the Voyager 1 space probe in 1979. In visible and near-infrared light, they are reddish in color.
So as far as I can gather, Ellen’s numeration of moons seems dishonest as she provides the exact numbers that were commonly known at the time and available to anyone who had access to a dictionary. But at the same time, the most inconsequential detail of her vision, the “rosy-tinted belts”, was more accurate than anyone could have anticipated for the next century. (Unless there’s another source I’m unaware of.)
How, then, could we make sense of this pairing of all-too-convenient opportunity for trickery and seemingly prophetic vision of the solar system? We could ask if Ellen is the first Christian visionary to explore our neighboring worlds?
While we have previously contextualized Ellen’s visionary experiences with mesmerism and methodism, an astral flight could be contextualized alongside early Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature, the visions of heavens recorded in the Books of Enoch, and—more uncomfortably ancient—shamanic flights into spirit worlds.
While those comparisons may be daunting literatures to explore, allow me to share two specific visionaries whose Wikipedia pages are more navigable than the religious history of the ancient world.
Ingo Swann (1933-2013) was a psychic who participated in remote-viewing research with the Stanford Research Institute, funded by the CIA. In 1973, Ingo and another remote-viewer, Harold Sherman, psychically probed Jupiter to see what information they could gather to compare to the data from Pioneer 10, on its way to the gaseous giant. Sherman noted being shown the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with, “life forms lesser or equivalent to our own.” Many of their impressions were verified, although they didn’t note rosy rings.
(In the above linked document, Sherman describes his technique for psychically probing beyond the atmosphere. He describes it as a focusing of attention and wonder. Sherman considers, “Who knows if the science fiction writers who have been imaginatively creative as they think. Fantastic ideas of other planets and civilizations, past, present or future, may instead have been psychically tuning in on actual conditions from some higher source or sources, coloring them somewhat with their own creativity...”)
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish inventor and scientist from a successful mining family. His father was a Lutheran Pietist which was considered a heretical position at the time. For most of his life, Swedenborg was a successful assessor of mines who also wrote scientific periodicals of inventions and studied philosophy. He wrote a three-volume work on philosophy and metallurgy and sought to follow up with a book on the soul from an anatomical perspective. This research was interrupted by a series of dreams that directed him to write a biblical commentary.
He wrote about his many visions and visits to Heaven and Hell that many Adventists describe as the origin of spiritualism. While part of the spiritualist movement resonated with Swedenborg’s experiences, so too does the adventist movement if it considers Ellen’s astral visions to be authentic. Swedenborg wrote an account, Other Planets, of his visitations and discussions with the spirits from each then-known planet in the solar system.
I haven’t read it all and can’t yet comprehensively compare it to Ellen’s experiences, but in the introduction is an interesting view of Christianity on an interplanetary scale:
I have talked with spirits about the fact that if people consider how incredibly vast the starry heaven is and how incalculably huge the number of stars in it is—and each star is a sun in its own realm, has its own solar system, and is much like our sun, though it may vary from it in magnitude—they can come to believe there is more than one inhabited world in the universe. Anyone who ponders this in the right way will conclude that all this immensity must be a means of achieving the ultimate purpose of creation, which is a heavenly kingdom in which the Divine can dwell with angels and with people [still in the physical world]. The whole visible universe, the sky studded with stars beyond number, each and every one of which is a sun, is just a means of producing planets with people on them, people who are the source of that heavenly kingdom…
As for the worship of God by the inhabitants of other planets, generally speaking any who are not idolaters acknowledge the Lord as the only God. That is, they worship the Divine not as a God who cannot be seen but as a God who can be seen, because the Divine, when appearing to them, appears in a human form, a form like that seen long ago by Abraham and others on this planet; and everyone who worships the Divine in human form is accepted by the Lord.
While that second paragraph may seem blasphemous to most adventists—that inhabitants of other planets perceive the divine in human form—that is exactly what Ellen recounts as she celebrates a faithfully observed sabbath on another planet, seeing Jesus join them.
How does one observe the sabbath on a planet with a different relationship to time? Do other planets have seven day weeks? Or do our weeks relate to the movements of celestial bodies? The seven day week is older than the Bible, an inheritance that the authors of Genesis 1 are likely trying to obfuscate. How can our worldview become a cosmovision?
I’d like to close this long post with Swedenborg’s description of making contact with spirits from Mercury:
As soon as they reached me, they searched my memory to see what I knew. This is something spirits can do most skillfully, because when they come close to an individual they can see what is in that individual’s memory in detail.
If we take beings on other planets to be real personalities with whom we can, in some visionary or imaginal capacity, interact— If we assume that there is some affinity in their engagement with the Divine and our own— If we assume our prophets have engaged with these otherworldly beings— If we are called to prophesy— And if the capacity to prophesy via an imaginal capacity inherent to every human (albeit perhaps unevenly distributed)— then is it not our evangelical duty to venture onto mission trips to our brothers and sisters in Christ who are beyond the atmosphere?
Psalm 19:1-4—
The heavens tell God’s glory,
and His handiwork sky declares.Day to day breathes utterance
and night to night pronounces knowledge.There is no utterance and there are no words, their voice is never heard.
Through all the earth their voice goes out, to the world’s edge, their words…
Thanks for reading.
This week on GUIDES:
Elias and the Mystery of the Fifth Suit— the second installment of the mysterious goings-on of a contraband trading card ring in an adventist elementary school.