On February 16, 1832, in Hiram, Ohio, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon reported receiving a vision together while working on a revision of the Bible, prompted, according to Smith's own account, by a question that arose while they were reading John 5:29 about a resurrection to life and a resurrection to damnation. What they described afterward, recorded as Doctrine and Covenants section 76 and often simply called the Vision, expanded a two-part afterlife into a graded structure of three kingdoms of glory, each compared in the text's own language to a different heavenly body: the Celestial to the sun, the Terrestrial to the moon, and the Telestial to the stars, echoing a comparison Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 15 without spelling out three named destinations the way the revelation does.
The Celestial Kingdom, in this account, receives those who accept the fulness of the gospel, are baptized by proper priesthood authority, and continue faithful, becoming, in the revelation's language, gods themselves, sons and daughters of God with all that the Father has. It was a striking departure from the era's more common Protestant framework of a single heaven and hell, and Smith later described the vision itself, along with a companion 1836 vision recorded in section 137 concerning who would ultimately be saved, as having reshaped his own understanding of the scope of salvation available to different kinds of people, including those who die without ever hearing the gospel preached.