In the spring of 1830 Joseph Smith offered himself to the people of the Burned-over District as a prophet of a new dispensation. He was restoring not only the true church but the age of miracles, an age that orthodox religion assumed lay closed in the antiquity of the prophets. In this assertion, Smith not only placed himself in the same posture toward orthodoxy taken by earlier radical and hermetic sectarians but began to replicate the core of their doctrine. Mormonism powerfully rearticulated the fusion of hermetic divinization and millenarian restoration first forged in the fires of the Radical Reformation and the English Revolution.

The restoration of a miraculous connection between heaven and earth, between spirit and matter, was the most powerful attraction drawing adherents to Smith's new church. But miraculous, spiritual powers were a dangerous commodity, constantly in danger of slipping out of control. The first nine years of the history of the Mormon church brought important doctrinal developments, as Joseph Smith began to institutionalize the Mormon path to the divine mysteries.