The Inca Priest on the Mormon Stage
A Native American melodrama and a new American religion
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
IV.
Jacksonian Indian melodrama and Masonic ritual are two contexts for understanding Brigham Young’s performance in Pizarro. But what of the Incas themselves? An Enlightenment revival of Hispanic scholarship had made English-speaking readers familiar with the Inca Empire as a profoundly alien society, yet one that was in many ways admirable. The Inca, according to much of this literature, were authoritarian in their politics but that authoritarianism produced admirable order and happiness. The success of Sheridan’s Pizarro in 1799 created a new wave of interest in the Incas among English speakers. The next year saw the publication of a children’s dialogue about the Incas, with lines such as: "Excellent people! Who can avoid respecting them?" But the most influential Enlightenment account of the Incas was contained in William Robertson’s History of America (1777), reprinted many times over the following decades in England and America.
Fig. 5. The Temple of Nauvoo (New York, 1904). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
If he read this account, Brigham Young might have recognized similarities to his own Mormon people. Robertson’s History portrayed the Inca Empire as a uniquely authoritarian, communitarian, and yet well-ordered society. "In Peru," he wrote, "the whole system of policy was founded on religion. The Inca appeared not only as a legislator, but as the messenger of Heaven." The divine commands channeled by the Inca emperor extended to practical as well as spiritual matters, and the management of land was "regulated by public authority in proportion to the exigencies of the community."
Robertson might have been describing the Mormon Church. The Bostonian Josiah Quincy, visiting Nauvoo in 1844, had this to say of Joseph Smith’s theocracy: "No association with the sacred phrases of Scripture could keep the inspirations of this man from getting down upon the hard pan of practical affairs. ‘Verily I say unto you, let my servant, Sidney Gilbert, plant himself in this place and establish a store.’ So had run one of [Smith’s] revelations."
Aspects of Mormon religion were mirrored in accounts of the Incas. Writers had long celebrated the Incas’ dignified and rational cult of the sun, enacted by the high priest in Sheridan’s play. An American edition of the play shows Edwin Forrest as Rolla wearing an image of the sun on his chest. The enigmatically smiling face of the sun was likewise visible on the capstone of Nauvoo’s Mormon temple, reflecting the same Enlightenment (and Masonic) traditions of esotericism and natural religion that made the Incas so attractive. In addition to worshiping the sun, the Incas believed that their emperors were gods as well as men. And as scholar Nola Diane Smith has pointed out, it was just a few weeks before the staging of Pizarro that Joseph Smith, in Nauvoo, preached his famous doctrine that our God was once a man, and that we may one day be gods of our own worlds.
While this notion struck most American Christians as heretical, the most infamous Mormon doctrine promoted polygamy. Outrage against polygamy was soon to lead to Joseph Smith’s murder, and would cause half a century of conflict between the Mormons and the society around them. Their enemies referred to it as a "relic of barbarism." This was one more practice the Mormons shared with the barbaric Inca Empire, where the emperor (like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young) married dozens of wives.
Enlightenment histories of the Incas portrayed a society that was fundamentally alien to Anglo-American norms but was nevertheless happy and well ruled. When Brigham Young took the stage in the role of the Inca priest, he made a statement that he could not have made by playing one of the other Native American dramatic heroes. His casting created an inevitable association between the hated Mormons and the admired Incas. It invoked a literary tradition that praised precisely those deviations from Anglo-American norms for which the Mormons themselves were most reviled.
It is far from certain that any such calculation was in Brigham Young’s mind when he mounted the stage as the Inca high priest. But there is evidence that Mormons, like other North Americans, were aware of the Incas’ claims to sympathy. In 1850, the Mormon newspaper printed a letter ostensibly from a descendent of the last Inca emperor, calling upon the president of the United States to invade Peru and reinstate the Incas "in their ancient splendor."
The selection of Pizarro to open up the Mormons’ very first theater, in Nauvoo in 1842, was not an anomaly; as we have seen, the play became a Mormon tradition. Years later, the man who had directed the play boasted that he had been the first to cast Brigham Young as the high priest, adding, "[H]e’s been playing the character with great success ever since!"
Further Reading:
A wonderful introduction to the history of Mormon theater is Howard R. Lamar, The Theater in Mormon Life and Culture, Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series 4 (Logan, Ut., 1999); this essay began in conversations with Professor Lamar and is dedicated to him. I am also very much indebted to Nola Diane Smith’s "Reading across the Lines: Mormon Theatrical Formations in Nineteenth Century Nauvoo, Illinois" (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 2001), although our interpretations are different.
On the play Pizarro, see Myron Matlaw, "‘This is Tragedy!!!’ The History of Pizarro," Quarterly Journal of Speech 43 (1957): 288-94. On the tragic Indian theme in American theater, see B. Donald Grose, "Edwin Forrest, Metamora, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830," Transcendental Journal (May 1985). On "playing Indian," see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998). On Mormon religious ritual, see David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship (San Francisco, 1994). On fraternal ritualism, see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989). On Enlightenment images of the Incas, see Fernanda Macchi, "Imágenes delos Incas en el Siglo XVIII" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2003).
Primary source quotations not fully identified in the text are drawn from: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro: A Play in Five Acts, ed. Epes Sargent (New York, 1846), v.; Joachim Heinrich Campe, Pizarro; or, The conquest of Peru, trans. Elizabeth Helme (Boston, n.d.), 92; William Robertson, The History of America, 14th ed., 3 vols. (London, 1821), 3: 49, 57; William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen, eds., Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (New York, 1958), 135, 137; Salt Lake City Deseret News, June 22, 1850; John S. Lindsay, The Mormons and the Theatre; or The History of Theatricals in Utah (Salt Lake City, 1905), 7.
