In a sense both books are about Moroni’s body. The two books that anchor this special forum bring these questions to life in related but distinct ways. Hence, if we foreground them (the apparent kin of this messenger from the Americas), the question is stranger still: considering the social and historical location of Moroni’s body, what is this embodied revelation of the Native Americas trying to teach us? From their indigenous view of things, the idea of a cosmos based on racial order was strange. Moreover, the people whom the Europeans encountered in their waves of arrival had their own ideas about embodiment, gender, power, identity, kinship, historicity, space, and time. There were of course no racially white people here when the Europeans arrived in 1492. A matter of the Americas, of indigeneity and colonialism, of racial difference and social conflict, is traced through his skin-leading to the question: as the continuous revelation of Mormon theology teaches, if this erstwhile man then angel was in fact a man of the indigenous Americas, formed in dynamic interaction with the social histories, cultural legacies, and natural ecologies of these lands, what indeed did he look like? Unlike these angelic types, Moroni is provocatively embodied and what provokes about his body is its location in space, time, and history. He shouldn’t be so white, so appropriate to a painting by Giotto or Michelangelo, should he? While not actually white, he also shouldn’t be Thomistic, that is, with a type of angelic form (one must not say body) set forth by the great doctor of angelology Thomas Aquinas: to wit, incorporeal, completely spiritual, purely intellectual, and inclined to thoughts and behavior profoundly alien to human beings. If Moroni is indeed a Nephite, one of those ancient tribes of Israelite exiles who had settled in the Americas (hence becoming one of indigenous peoples of the Americas, as the Book of Mormon tells) long before the arrival of the brigand from Genoa, then it would seem indeed that this messenger, Moroni, often described as an angel, should not look like the commonplace angels of European Christian iconography. The contents of that book cue the visual problem. Another way to put it: what did Moroni look like? Or, what kind of body are we asked to see when we hear the story of the messenger Moroni-an ancient inhabitant of the pre-Columbian Americas-coming as an angelic epiphany to Joseph Smith in the 1820s to direct him to the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was inscribed? Moroni’s body is a problem of continuous revelation.
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