The Seer

The Seer

An apostle sent to the American capital to argue the church's most controversial doctrine in public — and the periodical his own leaders later disowned.

What it is

The Seer was a monthly periodical published by Orson Pratt at Washington, D.C., from January 1853 to August 1854. Pratt was an apostle, the church's most systematic theologian, and he was in Washington on assignment from Brigham Young: plural marriage had been publicly acknowledged in August 1852, and somebody had to explain it to the United States.

So The Seer is an argument, sustained over twenty numbers, aimed at an educated national readership that mostly regarded the practice as scandalous. Pratt does not hedge. He sets out celestial marriage as a requirement of exaltation, and to support it he builds out an entire theology — the pre-existence of spirits, the nature and plurality of Gods, eternal increase — at greater length and in more systematic form than almost anywhere else in nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint writing.

The repudiation

In 1865 the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve issued a formal statement repudiating several of the doctrinal positions Pratt had advanced in The Seer and in other writings. Pratt remained an apostle, and remained in good standing until his death in 1881.

That is what makes this small periodical unusually valuable. It is a documented case of an apostle publishing doctrine at length, with assignment and approval, and the institution afterwards saying in its own voice that parts of it were wrong. Most disagreements of that kind leave no such paper trail on either end.

What we hold

The complete run — 20 numbers from 1853 and 1854.