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“On the way to its actual, its ancestral, home”

“On the way to its actual, its ancestral, home”

Last updated on: October 31, 2025 at 7:43 pm by Dan Peterson

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“On the way to its actual, its ancestral, home” 2025-10-31T19:43:13-06:00 Dan Peterson

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If you see this black yawning dog on Halloween, don’t even bother trying to escape. You’re doomed. And he’s too smart for you, anyway. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Happy Halloween!

and

Happy Reformation Day!

Personally, I’m hunkered down in terror. I’ve never seen such an onslaught of monsters, ghosts, and other horrors. Fortunately, I’ve been able to buy them off — thus far — with gifts of sweet things. But what will happen if I run out of offerings?

Oil painting of Hyrum Smith, Willard Richards, Joseph Smith, Orson Pratt, Parley Parker Pratt, Orson Hyde, Heber Chase Kimball, and Brigham Young. Cropped photo of painting by William Warner Major. Created summer or fall of 1845. Original canvas at LDS Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Newly posted today from Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “‘A Voice of Warning,'” written by Daniel C. Peterson

Abstract: The Restoration of the Gospel began in an atmosphere of ardent and urgent expectations of the Second Coming of Christ. We are, after all, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those expectations were shared far beyond the ranks of those who eventually joined the Church. But the early nineteenth-century men and women who did become Latter-day Saints were commanded that, having been warned, they should warn their neighbors. However, nearly two full centuries since the founding of the Church, and more than two centuries since Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the Lord’s Second Advent has still not arrived. Does that mean that this isn’t a time for warning? That the time to warn our neighbors hasn’t yet come? No, not at all. We remain under the divinely given obligation to spread the word and, yes, to warn. And there are many ways to do so.

Jewish shops in Germany under Nazi rule. In each shop window the word “Jude” (“Jew”) has been painted, in order to warn potentialnon-Jews off.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image).

This article from National Review provides a useful perspective on the former Tucker Carlson and his abominable new friend Nick Fuentes. I hope that you can access it. On the other hand, if you’re an admirer of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin, don’t bother trying. You’re already beyond redemption: “Heritage’s Shaky Foundation”

An aerial view of the German university town of Freiburg im Breisgau (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

You may have noticed that I’ve lately been reading about a curious phenomenon known in English as “terminal lucidity.” First, I read Alexander Batthyány, Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death. Next, I read Michael Nahm, Marjorie Woollacott, and Natasha Tassell-Matamua, eds., On the Banks of the River Styx: New Perspectives on Terminal Lucidity and other Near-Death Phenomena, which is partly on the same subject. I’ve now begun Michael Nahm,Wenn die Dunkelheit ein Ende findet: Terminale Geistesklarheit und andere ungewöhnliche Phänomene in Todesnähe [“When the Darkness Comes to an End: Terminal Lucidity and Other Uncommon Near-Death Phenomena”]. Dr. Nahm — who seems, by the way, to have coined the descriptor terminal lucidity [German: terminale Geistesklarheit] — is a biologist and a research associate at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health), in Freiburg, Germany.

I’ve found the book fascinating thus far. And, so, I’m going to share here a few passages (in my translations) that have struck me thus far during my reading in Wenn die Dunkelheit ein Ende findet. The first comes from one Oskar Bloch, a professor of surgery in Copenhagen, who wrote the following in 1909:

We’ve long known that mentally ill persons [Geisteskranke] can have periods in which they are completely healthy. . . When such a mentally ill person dies during his clear period, he dies exactly like a mentally healthy person. There’s nothing special about this. It is astonishing, though, when someone who has been mentally ill for years, sitting there unengaged, as if the world simply isn’t present to him, who has lived more like an animal than like a human — who, in fact, with respect to intelligence, hasn’t even stood so high as an animal — suddenly manifests signs of rationality, and this occurs shortly before he dies. One is completely justified in being amazed. [Location 52 of 5438]

To which Dr. Nahm appends the following comment:

It is, moreover, worthy of mention how broad the spectrum of organic brain illnesses is wherein terminal lucidity seems to occur. We find examples where the diagnosis has been meningitis [Hirnhautentzündung] and massive brain ulceration, abnormal filling of parts of the brain with watery or bloody fluid, strokes, brain disintegration from tumors, in cases of dementia (such as Alzheimer’s disease), but also in cases of psychic illnesses in which the organic structure of the brain remains practically unchanged (as, for example, with schizophrenia). Still, the original spirit [Geist] of the patient shines forth again in a largely comparable way shortly before his death.

But how is it that even Alzheimer’s patients who sometimes haven’t recognized their nearest family or their caregivers for months or years are again able to do so shortly before their deaths? That they can again recollect memories of their lives and understand the situation in which they find themselves? We assume that the memories of people with such illness have been irretrievably erased by the destruction of the relevant portions of the brain. Of course, the degree of confusion and recall capacity varies with dementia patients, but the degree to which this is the case precisely in the final moments of life is extremely baffling. Are such experiences perhaps an unknown bodily panic reaction to the approaching end and, therefore, biochemically predicated? Are the memories of demented persons perhaps not finally erased, but merely somehow hidden and inaccessible? Or is it actually the case that the soul gains more mental clarity to the degree that it detaches itself from the material brain that hinders it? [Location 60 of 5438]

The next passage draws on a report that was published in 1921:

Under the pseudonym “G. W. Surya,” the engineer Demeter Georgiewitz-Weitzer reported an additional astonishing case, which unfortunately contains no precise diagnosis. Nonetheless, the autopsy makes the presence of chronic meningitis [Hirnhautentzündung] very probable. Georgiewitz-Weitzer wrote that a friend of his had a brother who had required institutionalization in an asylum for many years because of complete mental derangement [völliger geistiger Umnachtung]:

“One day, he received a telegram from the director of the asylum informing him that the mentally ill man wanted to speak with him. He headed out immediately and was utterly astonished to find his brother, all of a sudden, completely normal. However, the director of the asylum told him — naturally in private, just between themselves — that this clear moment was an almost certain indicator of the imminent death of the sick man. And, indeed, that’s how it turned out. Within just a short time, the sick man died. The brother requested that he be permitted to be present at the autopsy and, exceptionally, this was allowed to him. And when the the brain of the deceased was examined. it proved to be completely septic [or ulcerated: ganz vereitert]. And the sepsis [or ulceration: Vereiterung] was of long standing. So how had this mentally ill man been able to think clearly again during the last days of his life? [Location 468 of 5438; italics in (German) original]

The last passage that I’ll share comes at the conclusion of Dr. Nahm’s “Einleitung” or “Introduction”:

The ancients [die Alten] sometimes called terminal lucidity [terminale Geistesklarheit] “the last flare-up of the soul” [das letzte Aufflackern der Seele]. But perhaps it’s something quite the opposite — the first flare-up of its most unique [ureigensten] capabilities, the first beat of its wing on the way to its actual, its ancestral, home. [Location 142 of 5438]

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