The Olive Tree's Secret

To read the opening verses of Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree, as reported in Jacob 5, is to be plunged into a crisis of disease. Because of its great age, the olive tree to which Zenos likens the house of Israel has begun to decay and to perish. When its main branches wither, the master of the vineyard instructs his servant to “cast them into the fire that they may be burned” (Jacob 5:7). Olive wood is a valuable, fine-grained lumber used anciently alongside or in place of other hard, durable woods like ebony and cedar, so the branches would not have been burned unless they were thought to be diseased.¹ The allegory begins, then, with a fear of infection.

During a nationwide smallpox outbreak at the turn of the twentieth century, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had to decide where to seek protection from and treatment for a disease that still killed 15–20 percent of those who contracted it. Public officials encouraged vaccination or inoculation, but many Church members regarded this advice with suspicion, distrusting the motives and methodologies of religious outsiders often pejoratively identified as Gentiles. Instead, they sought advice from within the faith community. Ben Cater reports that “church circulars criticized vaccination while advising Mormons about botanical and faith healing, and dietary health. Churchgoers were counseled to receive the anointing of oil, and priestly blessings by church elders. The Deseret News published information about folk therapeutics, including dried onions, rumored to be a prophylactic, as well as tea made of sheep droppings.” So confident were they in the efficacy of priesthood blessings, and so wary of ideas originating outside the faith, that they were willing to place their trust in fecal teas rather than modern medicine, limiting their search for solutions to the confines of their own congregations.