Burning Cellophane at the Gates of the Immaterial

Author: N. E. Davis (Neal E. Davis), on Romanticon, May 6, 2026. Subtitle: A Reenchantment through the Deseret Alphabet. URL: https://romanticon.substack.com/p/burning-cellophane-at-the-gates-of One-line: The Deseret Alphabet failed as a phonetic reform of English, but came back to life as a sigil — and that afterlife is a small case study in how the modern world gets reenchanted.

Davis is co-author, with Ryan Shosted, of The Deseret Alphabet (A Fixed and Unalterable Sound, University of Illinois Press, 2026); the essay closes by noting the book is out June 30.

Key claims

• The Madoc legend set the stage. The medieval story of the Welsh prince Madoc sailing west around 1170 was used by John Dee to justify English claims on America, and later colonists hunted for “Welsh Indians” — the Mandan, then the Pueblo peoples. Brigham Young, persuaded by the Welsh convert and missionary Dan Jones, expected a “white and civilized” people near the Colorado River and sent a Welsh interpreter with the first Mormon mission to the Moqui (Hopi) in 1858.
• Early Mormonism was fixated on divine languages. Joseph Smith worked with Reformed Egyptian and the “pure language” of Adam; Saints spoke in tongues, sometimes interpreted as Indian languages; and one of Smith’s last sermons was an exegesis of the first six words of the Hebrew Bible. Davis wonders whether the strange words in the LDS corpus (“Adam-ondi-Ahman”, “Olaha Shinehah”) are recorded glossolalia.
• The alphabet has a forger in its ancestry. In 1853 Young charged the University of Deseret regents to devise a new script. The regents drew on J. Roberts’s Druidical Remains and Antiquities of the Ancient Britons (1842), which carried the “bardic alphabet” (Coelbren y Beirdd) of Iolo Morganwg — a Welsh antiquary later judged to have forged much of his life’s work.
• It was tried on the Hopi. Missionaries Marion Shelton and Thales Haskell hoped the letters would spark an ancestral recognition. Shelton reported the Hopi could write the Deseret letters “without being showed how”. The 1859 mission left a 486-word Hopi vocabulary in the Deseret Alphabet — apparently the first time Hopi was written down at all. In 1863 Welsh speakers in Salt Lake reported a visiting Hopi delegation could pronounce Welsh with ease, after which the story fades.
• It belongs to the long search for a perfect language. Davis places it in the lineage Umberto Eco traced: Adam’s naming of the animals, Llull’s Ars Magna, Dee and Kelley’s “Adamical”, Wilkins’s “real character”, Leibniz’s characteristica universalis, and on through Hilbert, Gödel and Turing into computing.
• Alphabets are immanent, not transcendent. Letters stand for sound, so they are material. A script chosen for something other than utility — like calligraphy — brings back an illegibility that “the authoritarian high modernist mind recoils” from, and that illegibility is where enchantment gets back in.
• It was revived as an icon, not as a phonetic system. Abandoned by 1875, the alphabet “desecularized” by becoming an inside joke, a faux typeface and a sigil (the outsider art of Utah artist Bob Moss is the example). It mattered again “because of what it was rather than what it said.”
• Charles Taylor is the frame. Davis uses Taylor’s Cosmic Connections (2024) and A Secular Age — language as something that constitutes and discloses the world, not just labels it — to read the Deseret as “an ember in Taylor’s cosmos”.

Notable quotes

“America sometimes is dismissed as a young country, but it is older than Europe supposed.”

“Prince Madoc had prefigured the Mormons in a westward exodus off the edge of the map.”

“Choosing a script other than the bare utilitarian path of least resistance is like calligraphy, a deliberate beautification and act of enchantment, inscription.”

“It found its way home, to perhaps a new home, because of what it was rather than what it said.”

“The deepest magic of a letter, of course, is its invisibility.”

Connections

• The Deseret Alphabet — the book this essay previews; already on the anti-library.
• Adamic Language, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young — the Mormon side of the story.
• Charles Taylor and A Secular Age — the reenchantment frame.
• Umberto Eco — The Search for the Perfect Language is the source for the perfect-language lineage.