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Of particular interest is Albanese’s attention to the hermetic background of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other founding figures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The idea of buried plates of revelation requiring magic to be discovered and understood is derived, she believes, from Native American beliefs, and other key Mormon teachings are heavily indebted to the strains that flowed into the tradition of Hermes, notably the enormous influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century Swede of Lutheran background who impressively joined undoubted scientific learning to prodigious flights of metaphysical imagination. Mormon concepts such as the coequality of matter and spirit, the eternal covenant of celestial marriage, and the ultimate destiny of human godhood, she suggests, are all drawn from the fusion of Hermes and Christianity going back to the Italian Renaissance.

There is no doubt, she contends, that Joseph Smith and others in the nineteenth-century religious world of upstate New York were intimately familiar with, and engaged by, this centuries-long history of hermeticism. “Swedenborg, in effect, had articulated in one form or another a number of the major tenets of Mormon theology as Joseph Smith put it forward through his revelations.” Joseph Smith’s heavenly realm “was inhabited by a God suspiciously similar to Swedenborg’s Divine Human and to the Hermetic vision in general.”

Mormonism was of a piece, says Albanese, with other movements that were not so much post-Christian as moving Christianity in strange directions. Universalism, for instance, “evoked the mystical boundary where Christianity touched Hermeticism and where, in its 19th century embodiment, a progressivist Romantic vision came to dominate numbers of American spiritual quests. The God who loved humans and sought to ‘happify’ them was also the God who beckoned along a road to ever-increasing perfection and so ever-greater spiritual power.”