Daylilies with Mormon Names

For this month?s discussion of material culture I want to contribute an example of a (presumed) Mormon giving Book-of-Mormon names to flowers. Daylilies are a common (at least the in US) landscaping flower that can be hybridized to create cultivars with a wide variety of colors and shapes. The American Hemerocallis Society?s Online Daylily Database has 75,000 entries, a few dozen of which come from RJ (Jack) Roberson. About thirty of Roberson?s cultivars have Mormon names. [1] 

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Mormon-themed Aphrodisiacs, Part 1 of 4: Damiana (Possibly NSFW)

Note: this post discusses sexual activity in general and erectile dysfunction in particular, though mostly with nineteenth-century language. It also contains an image of a female nude as printed on the packaging and advertising for a late-nineteenth-century aphrodisiac pill.

Two weeks back Christopher had a socks-rocking post (with great comments) on the alleged pharmacoactive properties and Mormon uses of ?Mormon Tea.? At the moment I don?t have anything to add to the discussion of Mormon Tea, but I think there are some related, interesting things to say about damiana (see image at right), which also grows in the American Southwest, also affects human physiology, and was also allegedly part of the Mormon materia medica.

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Jared Farmer’s Mormon Image Collections

Jared Farmer has made available, for free download, two self-published digital collections of Mormon-related images. This is not really a review—it’s an endorsement.  

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The Beast of Almería and Mormon Lampreys, Mermaids, and Leviathans

Earlier this week an unidentified four-meter-long animal washed up on a beach at Almería, Spain (ht Kristine Haglund; see image below).

In some of the photos it seems that the animal has  horns, though subsequent reports are that the ?horns? are actually displaced bones protruding from the rotting carcass. I can?t think of any particular ?Mormon angle? for this particular beast, but since we?re in the neighborhood? there are a few things to be said, briefly, about figurative language, Mormons, and sea creatures of uncertain taxonomy.

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The Mormon Cancer, 2 of 2: Republican Virtue and the Civil War

Last week I wrote about ?the Mormon cancer? in connection with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This week I want to look at how the metaphor fared from the 1870s to the 1920s. The take-home message is mostly the same: Mormons, with good reason, interpreted the metaphor as a call for violence against them.

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The Mormon Cancer, 1 of 2: Mountain Meadows Massacre

Over the past few months I have posted on figures of speech involving Mormonism. To the Mormon Octopus, Robot, Hydra, and Upas Tree I now add ?the Mormon cancer.? [1] Like so many of the negative characterizations of Mormonism, we begin our tour of Mormon cancers with John C Bennett, who, in 1842 wrote:

Nothing short of an excision of the cancer of Mormonism will effect a cure of that absorbing delusion, and the strong arm of military power must perform the operation at the edge of the sword, point of the bayonet, and mouth of the cannon. [2]

Bennett uses a fully-developed surgical metaphor: Mormonism is a ?cancer? in the present-day sense of a malignant tumor and the surgical ?operation? to remove it is military action. The ?cure? part of the metaphor is, I think, the most important for interpreting the Mormon reaction to cancer metaphors. As I will suggest below and next week, into the 1900s Mormons—not without cause—understood cancer metaphors as calls for organized violence against them. 

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Things I Did Not Know: Dinosaurs in the Manti Temple (Edit: New Images, ht Mina)

A few weeks ago, I worshipped in the Manti Utah Temple for the first time. My parents were endowed, married, and sealed there, so it is a special place to me. Amidst my devotions and pondering, I was somewhat taken aback to find paintings of Mesozoic reptiles on the wall of the Creation Room. [1]

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Mormon Hydra 2 of 2

As the examples in the first post showed, a Hydra could represent an individual (Joseph Smith), an institution (the Church), or a concept. The concept-as-Hydra was probably most common, implicating ideas like violence or fraud, usually with some specific incident(s) under discussion as an individual head (or heads) of the larger monster (for non-Mormon-related examples, see images below). [1]

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Mormon Hydra 1 of 2

The Hydra, or more specifically, the Lernaean Hydra, was a poly-cephalic reptilian killed by Heracles/Hercules in Greek mythology. It had, depending on the source, nine or fifty heads; if one were cut off, two grew to replace it; its breath and blood were poisonous. [1] Both pro- and anti-Mormon writers and orators used Hydra rhetoric in their contests.

The hydra was a common polemic image applied to various groups and ideas on both sides of the Atlantic from at least the 1700s on. [2] A particularly prominent instance in the US arose in connection with the 1830s ?Bank War? in which President Andrew Jackson railed against the (Second) Bank of the United States as a ?hydra of corruption? (see images below). [3]

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Cephalopods 4 of 4: The Nineteenth-Century Octopus

The octopus metaphor persists to the present but the cultural milieu has changed. [1] For example, last week I wrote about the image at right. My sense is that most 2013 observers would describe it as ?quaint,? maybe even ?cute.? A century earlier it was an ?inky-black demon? with a ?big black body lying flat, disgustingly spread? or ?a horrible octopus? with ?fiendish goggle eyes? and ?treacherous succer-like tenticles reaching out.? [2] In this post I will try to account for the difference—I will summarize something of what late-nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans thought and felt about octopuses. [3] (Spoiler alert: it casts Mormonism as very bad.)

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