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Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection
by Lance S. Owens

http://www.gnosis.org/jskabb1.htm

Excerpt:
"Through his associations with ceremonial magic as a young treasure seer, Smith contacted symbols and lore taken directly from Kabbalah. In his prophetic translation of sacred writ, his hermeneutic method was in nature Kabbalistic. With his initiation into Masonry, he entered a tradition born of the Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. These associations culminated in Nauvoo, the period of his most important doctrinal and ritual innovations. During these last years, he enjoyed friendship with a European Jew well-versed in the standard Kabbalistic works and possibly possessing in Nauvoo an extraordinary collection of Kabbalistic books and manuscripts. By 1844 Smith not only was cognizant of Kabbalah, but enlisted theosophic concepts taken directly from its principal text in his most important doctrinal sermon, the 'King Follett Discourse.'

Smith's concepts of God's plurality, his vision of God as anthropos, and his possession by the issue of sacred marriage, all might have been cross-fertilized by this intercourse with Kabbalistic theosophy--an occult relationship climaxing in Nauvoo. This is a complex thesis; its understanding requires exploration of an occult religious tradition spanning more that a millennium of Western history, an investigation that begins naturally with Kabbalah."

Default Settings:
I've set all current users to the following settings:

Public comments: On
Comment notifications: On
File storage: 1 byte (effectively disabling the system except for administrators)
User icons: 20

These settings are being done manually until Matt can set it up as a blanket rule. Since we've only got ~130 registered users right now, it didn't take long.

If you wish to change your comment settings, click "Account Settings" at the top right in the gray bar. You will also find, at the bottom of that page, where to set your blog editor (wysiwyg by default; this can be turned off).

If you have questions or comments, leave a comment at this post.

Premier accounts

I'm considering what to grant Premier account holders who use their blogs regularly. I'm thinking, so far, that anyone with a full profile by the middle of the year 2008 who also regularly uses their blogs for six months following sign-up (posting at least once a week), will be granted 100 user icons permanently, along with any other paid account options we offer within a set period (to be determined), all free. The Premier account will only be offered to the first 500 users who meet the criteria. The terms of this offer may evolve, particularly the mid-2008 time limit if the site doesn't take off very fast.

- Sheta

As is no doubt obvious by the time you see this, we've implemented the new blogs, based on the Elgg blogging platform. We're still working out the kinks as well as various little things we don't care for (such as link text). Right now, for instance, we're working on keeping the system from compressing the profile images if images are kept within a certain parameter, but we're between tweaks, so the images are liable to look pretty strange for a bit. We have successfully prevented the platform from squishing user icons in the sidebar (which I thought was a stupid idea to begin with - it's not like they're big anyway). If your computer's resolution is less than 1024 x 768, you may see some page distortion or scrollbars in the sidebars. Feel free to complain to webmaster@rendingtheveil.com if it's intolerable. You might also consider tweaking your resolution enough to split the difference.

I'm sure we'll be adjusting the details for a while, so you have time to get your suggestions or bug reports in. We aspire to finishing the worst of it by official launch on October 31, but that may be optimistic. ;-) We'll see.

Thanks so much for joining us!  I hope you'll like it here as much as I think you will.

- Sheta Kaey
RTV Managing Editor