Automatic writing, trance and dissociation

Whether the dictation belongs with channeled and trance-produced texts, in which sincere people produce long works they experience as coming from outside themselves.

What the Church claims

No known psychological process could produce a text like the Book of Mormon; the only alternative to revelation is conscious fraud.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. Strong as a demonstration that sincere, rapid, draftless religious dictation is a known human phenomenon; weak as a stand-alone mechanism, and a poor fit to the witnesses' description of an alert Joseph. Best seen as a complement to oral composition.

The record

  • Scott C. Dunn proposed that the dictation resembles automatic writing, in which writers reproduce in altered states material they have absorbed from reading, conversation and preaching without remembering the source; Hales summarizes Dunn's argument in Dialogue 52:2 (2019).
  • Hales tabulates sixteen such texts, including Pearl Curran's 'The Sorry Tale' (1915-17), 'Oahspe' (1880-82), 'The Urantia Book', 'A Course in Miracles' (1965-72) and the Seth material, with their authors' education, word counts and claimed sources.
  • Hales concedes the similarities: comparable dictation speed for 'The Sorry Tale', scribes who did not need to read back, no research, outline or revision, and book-length output. He rejects the explanation because studies show hypnosis impairs rather than enhances memory and unconscious processes cannot carry complex cognition, and calls the comparison 'clustering', not explanation.
  • Ann Taves ('Revelatory Events', Princeton, 2016) studies Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles together and argues that in each the sense of a guiding presence emerged from the interaction of a founder 'with unusual mental abilities' and a small group of collaborators.
  • Taves's account of the plates, as summarized by Tanner McAlister, is that Joseph may have regarded a made object as a vehicle through which something sacred became really present, on the analogy of the consecrated Eucharist; this lets her treat Joseph as sincere without positing ancient plates. McAlister prefers Sonia Hazard's material approach and adds the Tibetan treasure-text (gter ma) tradition as a further parallel.
  • Andrew Jackson Davis's 'Principles of Nature' was dictated in mesmeric trance, blindfolded, phrase by phrase to a clergyman scribe, with unfamiliar terms spelled out: the closest procedural match to the 1829 dictation yet identified.
  • The 1829 witnesses do not describe a trance. Emma describes Joseph dictating hour after hour, breaking for meals and resuming where he left off; Whitmer describes a checking routine with the scribe.

The moving target

The Church has never addressed automatic writing, spirit dictation or any comparable model of the Book of Mormon's production. The theory has been argued between independent apologists and independent scholars for decades with no official participation, and the Church's own account of the dictation — that Joseph translated by the gift and power of God — has not changed in response to it.

The exchange

Brian C. Hales, Dialogue 52:2 (2019) and Interpreter 31 (2019)

Automatic writing explains nothing: the unconscious cannot organize 269,000 words with hundreds of names and places, hypnosis degrades memory, and no experiment has shown automatic writing producing such a text.

The answer: Hales attacks a strong version (a hypnotized person with enhanced memory) that modern proponents such as Taves do not hold. The relevant phenomenon is documented rather than hypothetical: people with no literary training have produced long, coherent, stylistically distinct texts at speed while experiencing them as given. Whether one calls the mechanism dissociation, absorption or skilled imagination, the existence proof stands, and Hales's own table supplies it. Demanding a prospective laboratory demonstration is a standard the revelatory explanation cannot meet either.

What they get right: Hales is right that 'automatic writing' is a label for a family of cases and not a worked mechanism, and right that 1829 witnesses describe an alert, conversational Joseph rather than a medium in trance.

Brian C. Hales; FAIR, citing Emma Smith (1879) and David Whitmer (1887)

Emma Smith and David Whitmer both described dictation with no notes, no manuscript in front of Joseph and no review of what had come before. No naturalistic composition model has ever been demonstrated under those conditions.

The answer: Both statements are late and both were made in the middle of a dispute. Emma spoke in 1879, fifty years after the fact, in an interview arranged to support her son's church, and David Whitmer in 1887, defending his own separation from the Utah church; neither was present for most of the dictation. The original manuscript records what the memories do not: corrections made in the act of writing, restarts at the phrase level, and scribes catching errors as they went. The claim under test is also stronger than anyone's evidence supports. 'No known psychological process' is an assertion about everything not yet known, and it is doing the work revelation is supposed to do.

What they get right: Hales is right that the published automatic-writing comparisons are weak, and skeptics who reach for them as a finished explanation overclaim as badly as the apologists do.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The value of this family of theories is that it dissolves the dilemma 'prophet or conscious fraud'. The historical record contains many sincere people who produced long religious texts at dictation speed, without drafts, and experienced the words as arriving from elsewhere; some had little schooling. That is an existence proof for the general kind of event the 1829 witnesses describe, and it explains Joseph's evident sincerity without requiring ancient plates. It also combines naturally with oral composition: years of rehearsed material delivered in a focused, stone-gazing state that Joseph had practiced as a village seer.

The apologetic case

None of the comparison texts is much like the Book of Mormon. They are discursive or devotional, not histories with a thousand years of interlocking plot. Nobody in 1829 saw a trance. Psychological research does not support the idea that dissociated states improve performance on complex tasks. And naming a category that contains the Book of Mormon does not tell us where its words came from.

What would change this

Evidence that Joseph was in an altered state (or plainly was not) during dictation; or controlled studies showing that practiced individuals can or cannot produce structured long-form narrative in dissociative states.

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.