Latter Day Sinners

Hugh Nibley


Somebody said from the Bible he'd quote.
There was dust on the man in the long black coat. - Bob Dylan

While cramming on Joseph Smith the other night, I determined I need to read Fawn Brodie's 60-year old biography, No Man Knows My History. Brodie was a Mormon, and she undertook her work with the blessing of the prophets and apostles of the Latter Day Saints. The vaults of church history were open to her. Regrettably for the church, Brodie became convinced that it was founded on a lie, and threatened her with excommunication if she published her findings. She did, and she was.

In the Amazon reviews, I found that many of the Mormon faithful awarding the book a single star were recommending instead a pamphlet entitled No Ma'am, That's Not History by renowned LDS scholar Hugh Nibley. Now, I'm no consumer of Mormon scholarship, but that name I knew. I'd read about his recent death, at 94, but there was something else. I couldn't remember what.

And really, I should have known: in Leaving the Saints, his 42-year-old daughter, Martha Nibley Beck, writes that Nibley was a "pedophile who abused her as a child while chanting ancient Egyptian prayers." In February, The New York Times reported that Beck's first memory of abuse is of "being stretched out and legs spread like a frog on a dissecting table. 'My father is doing something that feels as though it's ripping me in two,' while he repeated words like "Father Abraham," "The Book of the Dead," "the prophet Joseph," "Amut the Destroyer," "the prophet Joseph Smith," and "Abrahamic sacrifice."

One day, in her late 20s, Beck writes, her brain "seemed to erupt like a volcano" and she suddenly had a memory of her father abusing her in her bed when she was 5. She subsequently remembered other abuse that she said lasted until she was 8. In an interview, she said these memories were the reason for her unhappiness and mental problems.

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"The peculiar details of my memories had at first made me doubt myself -- they were so weird -- but in the end, reinforced my conviction that I hadn't unconsciously made something up," she writes in her book.

Nibley denied the accusations before his death, and his seven other children issued a statement, posted on the web page hughnibleydefense.com, claiming their sister had invented the crimes, the memories of which returned to her 15 years before, in order to "sell books." (Or again, the rebuttal "No Ma'am, that's not history.") The page links to the False Memory Foundation "for more information."

In his confidential July 19, 1990 memorandum to the Strengthening Church Members Committee re: Ritualistic Child Abuse, LDS Bishop Glenn L Pace provided a different kind of information:

I have met with sixty victims. That number could be twice or three times as many if I did not discipline myself to only one meeting per week. I have not wanted my involvement with this issue to become a handicap in fulfilling my assigned responsibilities. On the other hand, I felt someone needed to pay the price to obtain an intellectual and spiritual conviction as to the seriousness of this problem within the Church.

Of the sixty victims with whom I have met, fifty-three are female and seven are male. Eight are children. The abuse occurred in the following places: Utah (37), Idaho (3), California (4), Mexico (2), and other places (14). Fifty-three victims are currently living in the State of Utah. All sixty individuals are members of the Church. Forty-five victims allege witnessing and/or participating in human sacrifice. The majority were abused by relatives, often their parents. All have developed psychological problems and most have been diagnosed as having multiple personality disorder or some other form of dissociative disorder.

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The memories seem to come in layers. For example, the first memory might be of incest; then they remember robes and candles; next they realize that their father or mother or both were present when they were being abused. Another layer will be the memory of seeing other people hurt and even killed. Then they remember having seen babies killed. Another layer is realizing that they participated in the sacrifices. One of the most painful memories may be that they even sacrificed their own baby. With each layer of memory comes another set of problems with which they must deal.

Some have said that the witnesses to this type of treatment cannot be trusted because of the victim's unstable condition and because practically all of them have some kind of dissociative disorder; in fact, the stories are so bizarre as to raise serious credibility questions. The irony is that one of the objectives of the occult is to create multiple personalities within the children in order to keep the "secrets." They live in society without society having any idea that something is wrong since the children and teenagers don't even realize there is another life occurring in darkness and in secret. However, when sixty witnesses testify to the same type of torture and murder, it becomes impossible for me, personally, not to believe them.