Relics

“Relics is the second painting in the Sanctioned Blindness series. It gathers some of the folk magic objects documented in Joseph Smith’s life into a single image.
The title deliberately invokes a word the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has rarely applied to these objects. In Catholic tradition, relics are objects belonging to holy persons, displayed openly and reverently. Most of the objects in this painting have been kept from public view for much of the church’s history, held in archives or private collections, and acknowledged reluctantly. This painting calls them what they are.

Joseph Smith wears a white suit and top hat in this painting. The hat is an artistic reference to the documented accounts of Joseph Smith using a hat during the translation process. The white suit is the artist’s own interpretation.

Displayed in the air between his hands are seer stones documented as used by Joseph Smith, along with a green stone belonging to Sally Chase, a local seer in the Palmyra area who lent it to Joseph Smith during his folk magic practice. Sally Chase has been largely absent from the institutional narrative. Her stone is included here because she belongs in this story.

At his chest hangs the Jupiter talisman, enlarged so it cannot be dismissed. Historian D. Michael Quinn documents that the talisman, designed according to specifications in Francis Barrett’s grimoire The Magus, was found on Joseph Smith’s person at his death in Carthage Jail in 1844. He carried it to his death. The talisman’s presence at the end of his life is documented fact. What it meant to him is not something the historical record resolves. What it demonstrates is that the folk magic practice documented throughout his earlier life was still present at its end.

Behind him, rendered as the background of the painting, is the Jehovah parchment, one of three ceremonial magic documents containing text and symbols that passed through four generations of Smith family descendants before entering church archives. Historian D. Michael Quinn identifies it as a house amulet, an object kept in the home to provide protection against evil spirits and misfortune, its text invoking the divine name Jehovah alongside phrases from Numbers 6:24-26. “”Holiness to the Lord”” became the standard inscription on Latter-day Saint temples, with the phrase appearing on a companion parchment from the same Smith family collection.

The painting was rendered from reference material derived from the daguerreotype discovered in 2022 within a Smith family locket, identified by the historians who examined it as the only known photographic image of Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith did not abandon folk magic when he became a prophet. He brought it with him. The relics are the evidence.”