Pageant of the Tablets

The hill called Cumorah, situated near Palmyra, N.Y. (22 miles southeast of Rochester), is a holy place to the 1,500,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For three nights last week, the faithful and the curious gathered there in record numbers--some 135,000 in all--for the 17th Hill Cumorah Pageant, which depicts in dramatic terms the legendary origins of the Mormon faith.

These origins are enacted in 13 major scenes by 325 volunteer actors. Scene I shows Jesus telling of his "other sheep," the Mormons. In 600 B.C., they believe, a prophet called Lehi was told by God to leave Jerusalem. He took his family to the American continent. Here the house of Lehi split into two warring nations: the good, God-fearing Nephites, begetters of white children, and the bad, idolatrous Lamanites, whose children God punished with a red skin--hence the American Indians.

Climactic Scene. Most familiar scene to non-Mormons was Christ's crucifixion --after which, according to the Mormons, he came to America and organized his true Christian church among the Nephites (Scene XIII), who flourished for centuries before falling into wicked ways themselves and being destroyed in battle by the Lamanites. Mormon was a Nephite prophet who set down this history and God's will for the future upon golden tablets and entrusted them to his son Moroni, who buried them in the Hill Cumorah.

Climactic scene of the pageant was Moroni's appearance, in the form of an angel, to Joseph Smith, 17-year-old son of an upstate farmer, which Smith reported in 1823. Moroni, he said, told him about the tablets and informed him that he had been appointed by God to lead the world back to the true church. Joseph translated the tablets (said to be about eight inches square and covered with fine writing in "reformed Egyptian") with the aid of a pair of spiritual spectacles buried with them; the spectacles consisted of two stones called Urim and Thummin set in silver bows. No one but Joseph ever actually saw the golden tablets--he explained that it was instant death for anyone else to see them, and he kept them covered with a cloth or locked in a box whose hiding place he changed frequently. He deciphered them behind a screen, from which he dictated the Book of Mormon.

Professional Polish. The 128 years since Founder Smith formally organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have witnessed a triumphant march of Mormonism through bloody persecutions (Smith himself was killed by a mob in Carthage, Ill.) to a present pinnacle of prosperity and respectable good will. Today the Mormons, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, own canneries, insurance companies, banks, number among their ruling Twelve Apostles a U.S. Cabinet officer (Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson). Members in good standing donate a tenth of their incomes to the church. Five thousand missionaries from the U.S. and 1,700 native missionaries are hard at work and there are Mormons in every country of the world.

When they stage a show, such as last week's Hill Cumorah Pageant, it is put together with the highest professional polish and the latest technical equipment. Dr. Harold I. Hanson, chairman of the speech and drama department at Brigham Young University, who organized the first pageant in 1937, has been sharpening up elaborate sound and lighting cues ever since. Example: The effect of a vision in one of last week's Biblical scenes was produced by a curtain of water shooting up from a fountain, while colored lights glistened on the spray with split-second timing. Also at work on Hill Cumorah last week: five major and 20 secondary stages, a $5,000 sound system, and a ton of electrical wiring.

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