Work took me across the sea to London in 2014. I had lived in big Asian cities and driven through American metropolises. But this was my first Old World capital. I had a whole week of wandering around Shoreditch with Pokémon Go as my only tour guide where I took in the Calvinist Chapel and Kings Cross Station. I ate hand pies for breakfast and doner at midnight. I had a new job and a new relationship. London was a clean break. The last day was set aside for sightseeing, so I took the Tube to Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and finished at the British Museum. One stone among the many pilfered artifacts yanked me back to the past. A solitary stela about the same height as me was covered with three different scripts: Greek, Demotic, and Hieroglyphic. I had found myself in front of the Rosetta Stone, and I began to cry.
Despite repeated efforts from societies ancient and modern, scholars could not translate the scripts that were common on documents stuffed into sarcophagi or painted on temple walls. Adventurers traveling to Egypt brought mummies back home where some were ground up for pigment. Some were ground up for ingestion in quack medicine. And some survived to go on display. One of these came through Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839, and Joseph Smith, the frontier prophet of the growing Mormon church, bought them and the funerary documents that were found alongside for display in his hotel cum manor. These he claimed he could translate by the gift and power of God, and he pulled a tale of Abraham in Egypt from the papyrus like a rabbit out of a hat.
Growing up Mormon means you already have a complicated relationship with the word "translation". Joseph Smith claimed The Book of Mormon was revealed to him in glowing script using a rock in a hat in a remote-viewing style dictation. He corrected the King James version of the Bible for his Joseph Smith Translation. And now he translated his Egyptian papers into a tale of stars and planets and the throne of God. Of course it was all bunk.
Scholars were beginning to demystify the ancient world for real. Discovered in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was assisting in the deciphering of Demotic and Heiroglyphics by Champollion in 1822. So before Joseph Smith spun his tales of a Abraham placed on the seat of Pharaoh, we had workable translations of every Egyptian document in his possession, and a clear picture of actual Egyptian culture. Academia would classify the Joseph Smith papyri as common funerary documents guaranteeing the resident of the sarcophagus
or tomb an audience in heaven. But to Joseph, the hieroglyphs were full of mysterious multi-layered glyphs that we could only properly understand through his divine inspiration. He even worked in American racism, claiming figures drawn all in black were slaves of the court and not their real identity: gods attendant to Pharaoh and the deceased.
Joseph Smith died at the hands of a mob after it was revealed he assaulted the wives and teenage daughters of his followers. It should have been widely known by then that he just made it all up. His banner of fraud was taken up and moved to Salt Lake City under the guidance of Brigham Young. It persisted in my family even after one of my great-great-great-grandparents kicked her husband out when he brought home an additional wife. And it resurfaced even after my grandparents moved to Las Vegas in the 1960s to work at the Nevada Test Site. As the city expanded, they hosted cocktail parties and took up smoking. It seems this belief was a hard habit to break.
By the time I stood in front of the Rosetta Stone, I was still a few years away from formally cutting ties with the church through resignation. I was still mourning a loss of community that many Exmormons feel. My upbringing provided no solace in that moment, and a cult is a group you cannot leave with your dignity intact. I felt cheated. The worst part of extricating yourself from a church you've been in since birth is that you are trained not to blame the leadership or the people in the past that lead you to that point. You are taught to be blind to faults in the institution. And you have to fight to even want to see the truth.
Standing there, I reflected on the past of the stone and myself. Incomplete information let bad men exploit my ancestors. Any of Joseph Smith's translations are a transparent fraud under even the most passing scrutiny. But someone on the inside is taught not to see, and they extract faith-saving salt from the sea of doubt, so the fraud continues. I am of the mind that you need to be ready to leave or all outside efforts to make you do so will only result in retrenchment. For this reason, I will ask friends and family that are still in the church and ask me why I left, "If the church was not true [to its Word], would you want to know?" Because there are no magic words that can undo the conditioning.
It was a slow drip of water that wore down my barriers. I had experiences in childhood of an abusive mom and step-mom enabled by their partners and ignored by clergy when we asked for help. I saw friends and family abused by the church for missionary work which turned out to be a tool of personal indoctrination at the expense of others health and safety. And my time at BYU was further damaging to my faith in the church looking out for the well-being of members. There was no epiphany on the road to Damascus. I stayed home from church to help deal with newborn child care, and my first week back after 6 months away was a revelation. The people making excuses for Joseph Smith were aliens. I was done, and I couldn't get back in the grooves of the wagon trail anymore.
You see the issues more clearly once you step away, but you are automatically suspect by those still inside if they speak to you at all. You are treated as a Cassandra at best and a Judas at worst. You lose your community of built in friends. You lose family closeness if your parents or siblings are church members. And the self doubt that drove you to question the church turns toward you. Leaving doesn't magically make everything OK. Knowing the truth doesn't make your life perfect.
So I stood there in front of that ancient stone and felt. What was on it was of little import these days. Old laws and decrees. But what it meant was loss and waste, and also rebirth and truth. It represented every could-have-been stretching back through time to people who were not ready to listen. Every choice that pulled me further in took another equally protracted period to step out. The stone waited after being written as the languages on it died. It chilled in the field waiting for Napoleon's troops. And it waited for the secrets of its inscriptions to unlock an ancient world. And a modern life like mine.
In The Message, Ta Nehisi Coates recalls his visit to Goree Island and being moved by it even though he knows its true significance is wildly overstated. I know the the Rosetta Stone is not a religious object, but, as I stood in front of it, it embodied my journey. I hold it as a symbol of healing and informing and freeing. And so I cried in the old city around stolen artifacts and portraits and empire. I cried and knew that I had deciphered this piece of my history. I mourned what I could no longer change while celebrating the life that I would now live.
