Last night I listened to a Zion Media video about the Mentinah Archives, a.k.a. Nemenhah Papers, which I guess would be classified as channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha. That made me think of the channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha my own circle is into -- Daymon Smith's Words books -- so I searched YouTube with various keywords to see if his books had any footprint on that platform. Apparently not, or not the channeled books, anyway. Putting in a broader search for book of mormon tolkien, I found this Ganesh Cherian video, released on May 26:
I'm familiar with Ganesh, who mostly comes to boring anti-Mormon conclusions but notices some interesting facts along the way. His work prompted my January 2025 post "The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10," for example. So I gave it a listen. This part caught my attention:
Alma 37 also talks about the directors that Joseph is using, including a seer stone called Galezem, which Joseph uses later as a code word to refer to himself in Doctrine and Covenants revelations.
It really is a pity that we don't have the lost manuscript. It would tell us so much about the development of Joseph and his world view and this mythical world that he is creating in the moment. But we are fortunate to have the Hobbit which tells us a lot about Tolken's early adventurous spirit and the ways that he expanded that then on into the Lord of the Rings series.
One of the cute similarities between the Lord of the Rings and the Book of Mormon is the idea of quests and the fact that there are four usually young men sent out to perform some kind of incredible task. In the Lord of the Rings, these four young men are Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and they're sent on this grand quest by none other than Gandalf the Gray, who's this great wizard who during the process elevates into Gandalf the White with his increased knowledge and understanding. In the Book of Mormon, it starts off with Lehi as a visionary prophet who sends his four sons, Nephi, Sam, Laman, and Lemuel, to retrieve the records of his people. And this is repeated again when King Mosiah sends his sons Aaron, Ammon, Omner, and Himni off to the Lammonites to preach to them and to recover them to the true nature of the gospel. And then with the Jaredites in the book of Ether, there are four sons of Jared, who's kind of the founder of this new world, and his sons' names are Jacom, Gilgah, Mahah, and Orihah. The idea of a wise seer sending out four companions to find treasure, to uncover something special, or to inhabit a land is a really interesting idea that permeates the Lord of the Rings and throughout the Book of Mormon,
The sons of Lehi and the sons of Mosiah both work as groups of four men sent on some sort of mission or quest -- but the four sons of Jared? Except for Orihah, who goes on to become a king, they literally don't do anything at all in the Book of Mormon. They list the four names, and that's it. Seeing this as a parallel to Tolkien is pretty weird. In Daymon Smith's work, though -- which is what occasioned the search that led me to this video -- the four sons of Jared are much more substantial characters, particularly Jacom.
The other thing I've bolded in the transcript above is the error Galezem. In fact the word is Gazelem in the Book of Mormon, and Gazelam in the Doctrine and Covenants. The specific error Ganesh makes here -- putting z in the place of l and vice versa -- is also an indirect link to Daymon's channeled work. When I started posting about William Alizio on this blog, Bill mentioned that he kept misremembering the name as Azilio. It turns out that this error was caused by his familiarity with Daymon's work, as Daymon twice uses the word azilio in the writing-in-tongues portion of his first Words book.
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