Mormonism
The Latter Day Saint movement was founded in 1827 by New Yorker Joseph Smith, Jr. In the early 1820s, Smith was paid to (mostly unsuccessfully) attempt to find lost items and buried treasures by peering into stones and finding the necessary information contained in the stone's reflections. Smith said that an angel visited him in 1823 and told him of a set of inscribed golden plates buried in a hill near his home in Western New York, which he unearthed in 1827. Smith transcribed them as the Book of Mormon before returning them to the angel. To translate the inscriptions, which were written in 400 AD by a pre-Columbian prophet in a language Smith called Reformed Egyptian, he used two stones bound by silver bows which he found along with the plates. He would place the stones in his hat, bury his face in the hat, and dictate the text to his wife. Meanwhile the plates themselves lay wrapped in linen, sometimes in another room. Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. According to the book, Israelite tribes traveled by boat to America before the birth of Jesus, and Native Americans are actually descendants of Israelites. They brought horses and steel and other things not known to exist in the Americas at that time. After the death and resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus came to America to repeat his teachings to the lost tribes of Israel and to establish a peaceful society (which didn't last). God lives on a planet called Kolob, where a day lasts a thousand years (according to transcriptions Smith made of Egyptian scrolls that came through his town in an 1835 traveling mummy exhibition). Mormons who have participated in a special temple ceremony to prepare themselves to be "kings and priests" or "queens and priestesses" in the afterlife wear sacred knee-high undergarments under their clothes at all times. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has over 13 million members worldwide. There exists some criticism of the Mormon movement.
